Zero Punctuation: Broken Age

Basement Cat

Keeping the Peace is Relaxing
Jul 26, 2012
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I'd like to hear an entire episode about Kickstarters, though maybe Yahtzee's covered that in written form.

EDIT: Um...I'm 'First'? What the heck?!?

Oh, I was thinking that this was Thursday. [small]...I'm having a Twin Peaks kind of day...[/small]
 

PunkRex

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Feb 19, 2010
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I'd rather eat two Octopi taped together than a bloody kebab...

Hey DoubleFine, why you no make platformers? I get that adventure games are the stuff all those stuffy gits demand you make but i'm a 90's man raised on platformers, original ideas of which are becoming all to sparse these days.
 

Alterego-X

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Nov 22, 2009
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It seems to me the first half with the generic rant about kickstarters is entirely self-contradictory.

On one hand, Yahtzee is chastising the people for blindly throwing their money at Schafer and letting him build anything he wants, at the same time chastising the system for only producing games that people know they want in advance.

If anything, the former negates the latter. In a traditional transaction, people only buy what they expect to like in advance, but with crowdfunding, there is a chance that if they pay based solely on trusting a publisher's track reckord, it might surprise them with something unexpected.
 

josemlopes

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Jun 9, 2008
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I do like the more dynamic storytelling of modern adventure games but they really end up lacking in the gameplay area even when comparing to older adventure games that also didnt had all that much gameplay.

Old adventure games felt stiff as fuck, almost as if time stopped and you were wondering around a static world where nothing but the player did anything at all, but they did had more options and content.

Basicly they should just avoid spoon-feeding the players like in that robot example.
 

Something Amyss

Aswyng and Amyss
Dec 3, 2008
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"That's the joke" is generally one of the worst defenses one can muster.

Copper Zen said:
[small]...I'm having a Twin Peaks kind of day...[/small]
I thought the owls seemed rather strange today....
 

Auggey

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Jan 8, 2014
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Alterego-X said:
It seems to me the first half with the generic rant about kickstarters is entirely self-contradictory.

On one hand, Yahtzee is chastising the people for blindly throwing their money at Schafer and letting him build anything he wants, at the same time chastising the system for only producing games that people know they want in advance.

If anything, the former negates the latter. In a traditional transaction, people only buy what they expect to like in advance, but with crowdfunding, there is a chance that if they pay based solely on trusting a publisher's track reckord, it might surprise them with something unexpected.
That doesn't make any sense. You're saying people should trust a developer based on what they have made before to make something new, but that's not what people are gonna want if they fund it. They're gonna want more of what they already love about the developer.

What if Double Fine wanted to make an experimental free-roaming, third-person shooter where you switch from character to character randomly and also there are no humans or something ridiculous to that nature? No one would have given them any money because they weren't doing what they are famous for.
 

themilo504

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May 9, 2010
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I like kickstarter because it provides a alternative to publishers, it?s not perfect but neither are most other methods for funding a game.

Broken age seems interesting but I still have some other point and click games I want to finish before buying a new one.
 

Clovus

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Mar 3, 2011
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canadamus_prime said:
So it sounds to me like this game is kinda broken. ...I'll go now.
Funny, but it does bring up something interesting about the game. It's surprisingly not broke. For awhile it was going to be an "Early Access" game, but they decided agianst it since the first part is pretty much done. Say what you will about the gameplay and stuff, but I didn't hit any bugs or see much (besides a couple eyes) that should be fixed. It's nice to play a game before it was even released that actually works.
 

Clovus

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Mar 3, 2011
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T3nno said:
all that money would have been better used for a psychonauts 2
Schafer claims that Psychonauts 2 would have cost at least $13 million to make. He only thought Broken Age would cost a few hundred thousand and ended up spending, what, like $8 million? So, I don't think he was over-estimating when he said that.

There was a whole thing a few years ago about that when Notch said he would fund the developement of it, but he changed his mind when he heard how much it would cost.
 

Flatfrog

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Dec 29, 2010
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Oh my fucking Christ, that last gag would have had me spitting coffee, if I drank coffee and happened to have had some in my mouth at the time. It was very funny, is my point here.

All in all, best ZP for a while now.
 

Canadamus Prime

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Jun 17, 2009
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Clovus said:
canadamus_prime said:
So it sounds to me like this game is kinda broken. ...I'll go now.
Funny, but it does bring up something interesting about the game. It's surprisingly not broke. For awhile it was going to be an "Early Access" game, but they decided agianst it since the first part is pretty much done. Say what you will about the gameplay and stuff, but I didn't hit any bugs or see much (besides a couple eyes) that should be fixed. It's nice to play a game before it was even released that actually works.
Well I was just making a very bad pun, it does still sound broken in the sense that Yahtzee describes the girl's story as a mess and it doesn't seem to have any connection to the guy's story. I don't know I haven't played it.
 

Alterego-X

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Nov 22, 2009
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Auggey said:
What if Double Fine wanted to make an experimental free-roaming, third-person shooter where you switch from character to character randomly and also there are no humans or something ridiculous to that nature? No one would have given them any money because they weren't doing what they are famous for.
Then they would have pitched that, instead of the point-and-click adventure game that they did.

It's not that Kickstarter projects are utterly divorced from audience expectations, only that it is nonsensical to blame them for limiting innovation MORE than traditional publishing.

I'm not saying that people "should trust" a developer, only that they evidently do trust it if they buy a game based on a basic genre description and vague inspiration references, instead of specific trailers, reviews and demos, so it's quite confusing to blame them BOTH for pandering to nostalgia and not being nostalgic enough.
 

DarkhoIlow

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Dec 31, 2009
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Angry Canadian Gamer said:
I'm getting ads and no actual ZP video. Is something borked?
I was just about to write up the same thing. The 45second video ad keeps going on loop and I can't see the video at all.
 

T3hSource

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Mar 5, 2012
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Angry Canadian Gamer said:
I'm getting ads and no actual ZP video. Is something borked?
Aye, I'm getting the promotional video of the Escapist shows, not the actual episode, no matter how much I refresh.