Ruts vs. Battlespire: …and Your Questions

By Rutskarn Posted Thursday Nov 10, 2016

Filed under: Lets Play 48 comments

Roger Hà¥gensen

How scared shitless were you that you'd run into a game breaking bug that either hosed your save game (and would you take the time to replay it all again?), or worse the game just hate your PC and refuse to go further (which you'd realize on your 2nd playthrough with new savegames). Did you have a backup plan? (like get saves from the net that where hopefully past that point? Or just throw up your hands and give up?

Up until the halfway mark, any serious showstopping glitch I ran into would have meant the end of the series. No hesitation. That’s an explicit decision I came to in the setup phase. That said, when I came to the elevator glitch on level one, I already had enough investment in the series to spend an hour or two goofing around trying to cheese my way down.

At the halfway mark, once I really started committing to the game, I started making save backups. If necessary, I was prepared to install the game on a roommate’s machine and play it there, or start over again from the beginning. After that, I was out of ideas.

Da Mage

Is it possible to point to one, just one, design flaw that caused the most grief in your playthrough, and explain why you think it was that way (aka broken), and how you would have designed it differently.

Obviously looking for game design problems, not technical ones.

Nope. I just don’t think they made a very fun game. The combat’s too industrial and the loot is too opaque to be rewarding, there’s not a lot of interesting leveling options, the puzzles never really connect, and the plot’s too amorphous and distant to provide a meaningful context. I’m not sure the bulk of this game can be redeemed; if you stripped all the bugs out and communicated the player’s goals better, I’d rate it a solid six or seven.

That said, this game does have a cult following. I’m not part of it, but I acknowledge it without rancor. I think it comes down to the idea that back when this game came out, there weren’t a lot of first-person survival-based dungeon crawlers, particularly not with this unique a setting.

Narkis

What kept you going in the long, tortured, glitchy nights you have endured?

Same thought that keeps me going through actual problems. If this wasn’t happening, what would I have to joke about?

Neko

If you were brought in to lead this project, saw it in its current state, and had six months before it had to be released, how would you fix it? Or how would you mitigate the worst bits?

Let’s be real, here: if I was stuck onto this project, and it had six months before release, the team would know what to do to make the game better a lot more than I would. The only change I’d lobby for is overhauling the combat. The click-and-drag method is for the birds; even in that day and age, the conventional wisdom was solidly in favor of clicking once to fire an attack and restricting “special moves” to some alternate fire key.

With the benefit of contemporary wisdom, I think I’d also have artists work build-up frames into attacks and implement a blocking system. Anything to add a little depth and variety to combat.

Stormthehouse

Do you think if this game was made recently, nothing changed at all, that you would feel less kindly towards the game because many of it's problems should have been non-existent with modern methods and tech, or more kindly since it would be something even more genuine in what it wanted to be?

We live in a charmed age. If this game came out today, and I’d heard of it, it would have been pieced together in a fever by three Swedish teenagers living in a hollowed-out tree using stolen cable and MAXI checkout computers and it would be fucking sick. The combat would feel like greased love and the puzzles would be clever and the story would be this understated terrifying brush with pagan divinities who all feel distinct and capriciously alien. They would have arrived at all these notes with such grace and perfection because they studied thousands of other games that did it correctly.

It’s not that they don’t make games at Battlespire‘s level of making-it-up-from-scratch anymore. They do. It’s just that today, they’re made as hobby projects and rotting on page sixteen of First-Person RPG Dungeon Crawler Sort By Price on Steam. I give Battlespire most of its credit specifically because it came in an age of comparatively scarce iteration and intercourse between developers.

Chauzuvoy

What's your take on the goal they had for Battlespire? Is trying to make a computer RPG fun in the same way as a tabletop RPG possible and worthwhile?

Let me clarify my specific take on Battlespire, because it’s not quite that the development team were trying to make a direct copy of their campagins. No, they were proper videogame developers; they understood the limits and strengths of their medium and capitalized on them. Battlespire is simply inspired by their tabletop games, and while the influence is clear enough that you can imagine their tables pretty vividly, it’s not trying to be fun in precisely the same way–it approaches combat and platforming in a way that wouldn’t work well with dice and paper. It’s just trying to apply these mechanics towards producing the same tone. Survival against objective odds, sussing out alien mechanisms and equipment, keeping up with a power struggle you have nothing to do with but nevertheless must endure. This is how taking inspiration is supposed to work: you figure out how to use a different medium to produce a similar feeling. It’s perfectly worthwhile.

As for emulating their particular kind of tabletop game…

Amazon_warrior

Which bits did you enjoy? Is there anything to take from Battlespire other than, “This is how NOT to do it.”?

 

Melfina the Blue

If you had to remake this game into one that's fun and not an ant colony of bugs, what would you keep from the original? (Normally I'd ask what you'd remove, but I suspect with this one, the keep list is shorter.)

 

Ander

What happened in those minutes you enjoyed? Chargen?

These aren’t the same question, but I’ll take them together.

There’s a sense of humor in early games that didn’t really survive the early aughts. I don’t mean that games used to be funnier, I mean that there is an extremely specific kind of humor that was quietly phased out. Games used to trade heavily on what I like to call Uncle Humor: jokes that tended to be more energetic or bombastic than they were, strictly speaking, funny. If I was feeling negative I’d say it’s what you get when you set out to write something funny and aren’t totally sure how to get there. Stuff like an NPC responding to, “See ya,” with “Not if I see you first!”

Games that were trying and failing to be funny would be full of this. Games that actually were funny were full of it, too, except quite a few of the jokes sincerely would be good. I think voice acting is the main thing that killed this, actually–cheesy jokes are easier to get through when you can click through them as fast as you can read, and don’t really hold up when delivered at painful length and with creaky timing in an equally cheesy fashion.

Battlespire puts most of the humor into your dialogue responses, which aren’t voice acted, and it sort of works. Your choices have the precise tone of a D&D player who’s basically making an effort, but doesn’t quite have the confidence to take their character and the setting seriously all the time, and occasionally slips into laid-back anachronistic wisecracking. It’s an interesting experience and probably worth revisiting–maybe to a slightly funnier effect.

On another note, I’d like to point out that the story and setting are unique. I had trouble interfacing with them, but I think this could have been done again, better, and been really interesting.

Raygereio

Any thoughts about Battlespire's multiplayer?

Nope. Can’t get it to work.

The Right Trousers

How will you torture yourself publicly for our amusement and enlightenment next?

Wait and see.

 


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48 thoughts on “Ruts vs. Battlespire: …and Your Questions

  1. Steve C says:

    Did you know that a new blog entry here causes the forum to hang for a little bit? That’s right– Battlespire managed to cause yet another new interesting glitch. There’s a kind of beauty to that.

  2. bhleb says:

    I think it has a cult following because it is so obstuse to work with, I’m guessing it’s difficulty and obscurity are one of its charms, like how the bugs in the 3d fallout games are charming

  3. Gilfareth says:

    Your choices have the precise tone of a D&D player who's basically making an effort, but doesn't quite have the confidence to take their character and the setting seriously all the time, and occasionally slips into laid-back anachronistic wisecracking.

    Dang, seen right through. And I always worry at the table that people will notice I’m not quite there yet.

    To offer other examples of this sort of thing, early edutainment games like How Many Bugs In a Box? absolutely adored having lots of isolated non sequitors, gags, punchlines and other attempted jokes for every interactable object and littered said objects all over every screen. I suppose the intent was to keep small children busy without impeding their progress?

  4. Daemian Lucifer says:

    if you stripped all the bugs out and communicated the player's goals better, I'd rate it a solid six or seven.

    A seven?Yeah,I get how you would rate this one that low.But what is this “six” you are talking about?Ive never seen such a thing in my life.

    1. Cybron says:

      BRING ME THE FORBIDDEN NUMBERS

  5. Andy_Panthro says:

    REDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARDREDGUARD

    Thanks for an enjoyable read, Rutskarn!

    1. Benjamin Hilton says:

      Either this or the rest of the crew really did help Ruts to acquire N-gage emulations.

  6. MrGuy says:

    I’m not sure why this post specifically made me think of it, but your comments about building a different combat system sort of set off an idea I’ve tossed around for a while. Would it be possible/desirable for a game to have multiple different selectable systems for certain actions?

    For example, in a shooter, we could have a skill-based shooting system, or a stat-based shooting system.

    The skill-based system is more like a modern twitch-based FPS – whether you score a successful hit depends on how accurately you can put the targeting reticule on the right pixel of the bad guy’s face. It’s more dependent on the PLAYER’s skill than their character’s skill. The character’s stats are less important, except they might introduce some targeting sway.

    The stat-based system would be different. Rather than care so much about “is the sight perfectly lined up?” the game would use the sights more as a guide for “I’m shooting at this guy, roughly in the head,” and then roll some dice based on skill to determine hit or miss. My character who’s a dead-eye sharpshooter can pull off headshots perfectly even if I’m not 100% on target.

    You could maybe do something similar with stealth mechanics. You could be highly realistic in a “skill based” system where your stats won’t save you if you take a bad path, and you-the-player need to keep track of all the guards and their patterns to succeed. Or have more a “stat based” system where, OK, it’s not super realistic that I was able to duck walk in front of that guard’s face without being detected, but I DO have 100% stealth so hey.

    The idea would be you’d be able to switch between systems based on “how I enjoy playing videogames” in the startup, to make the game fun for how YOU play.

    1. Christopher says:

      What’s the advantage in trying to do two different systems rather than making two different games? Or play two different games, rather.

      1. Matt Downie says:

        Well, if you’re spending tens of millions making a ton of content for a game, it would be nice to be able to sell it to two kinds of people instead of shooter-fans only, or RPG-fans only.

        1. Loonyyy says:

          You won’t though. It’s not a unique idea, it’s one that’s been mined dry over the last decade, bringing RPG fans into the fold on shooters and the like, and trying to get other people into RPGs. Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3->, Alpha Protocol, Deus Ex etc. It seems like a default now that things have a broken RPG system attached. Obviously, your real-time play doesn’t have to be shooting, but this isn’t new, and I’m not sure we can say it’s worked.

          The easy thing to do is think you’re bringing in double the crowd, but you probably aren’t. If you want to expand your audience, you still need a game that feels good, and can compete with other games for the audience’s time, and for that, you need to maximise the utility of your time and money. You may not be talking quite doubling the amount of money involved, but that’s the neighbourhood you’re sitting in, and you are not going to do more than double the audience, so the choice won’t justify itself. And if you really think you’re going to sell to twice the audience, you’re also going to have to spend more on marketting. It’s a classic case of feature creep. “What if I had another entire combat system with different fundamentals in here?” And if you’re really looking at audience, something like Fallout 4, or a straight shooter, would be the best if you’re looking for a big potential audience. Ask the thousand pretenders to the throne of shooter from trying to run up against Call of Duty and Battlefield how that turned out. A lot of those big markets are already heavily dominated and hard to break into.

          Because not every shooter or RPG fan is going to buy it. They’re going to compare your game against the games in their genre they’re interested in. The shooter guy is looking at it going “Huh, this has no competitive multiplayer” and the RPG guy is going “Huh, this game is only 7 hours long” and they’re looking at the other games they’re interested in. The RPG fan will remember how disappointed Fallout 4 made him about how those games had gotten. The shooter guy will remember how uninteresting enemies that gradually grew spongey were to shoot, where progression wasn’t designed around skill mastery, but levelling, and he’ll remember his disinterest with that, and the fact that levelling limited the amount of guns you could be really good with, as well as accelerating the spongeyness of enemies forcing him to use endgame weaponry. Your game still needs identity and to beat out other games, and the design decision literally makes that harder to do, your main objective. You are better aiming for an underserved niche, or making a really polished title that works on mechanics in a novel way, so that you have an audience of any kind who is really excited about what your game does. You can try to appeal to absolutely everyone, but you’ll probably excite absolutely nobody in doing so.

          You’d be better off making a real decision about the mechanics and trying to polish a really good game out of it. Something like say, Divinity: Original Sin, or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

      2. LCF says:

        Playing the same story / in the same universe, and doing it the way you’d prefer.
        Let’s say I love Arcanum and want to fight in turn-based mode. If there were no turn-based mode and only real-time mode, I’d either have to put up with something I’m clumsy with, or not play it at all. That would be a shame, now, wouldn’t it?

        1. Nimrandir says:

          Ooh — that’s another good example that eluded me when I was thinking about Too Human.

        2. ehlijen says:

          True, but slightly hampered by the fact that you’re spending time on two separate game balance systems and, assuming good QA, quite a lot more time playtesting. This means larger teams or more time spent making the game, both of which cost more.

          It wouldn’t double your costs, not by far, but I’m also not convinced it would double your target audience. A lot of people are happy or willing to try new genres for cool looking games.

          Would it be worth it? No clue. I don’t think anyone really did any market research this way, did they?

        3. That’s why the minute I see an isometric game that includes real-time-with-pause, I immediately look elsewhere, since I dislike that mechanic due to being kind of terrible with it.

          1. Sartharina says:

            Meanwhile – I’m the opposite. For comparison, I absolutely love the art and theme and world of Age of Wonders 3, but find the turn-based combat system way too ponderous.

    2. Ninety-Three says:

      The modern Fallout games do exactly that with FPS gameplay (although the system is such that optimal play necessarily involves combining both playstyles), and Transistor lets you play it as either an actiony hack-n-slash or what is effectively a turn-based strategy mode.

      Notably, you don’t choose your mode when you start the game, instead you get to switch on the fly, and most players end up using both to some degree throughout a playthrough.

      1. Matt Downie says:

        Is it even possible to play Fallout 4 VATS-only? It never occurred to me to try. I quite like the metagame of deciding whether to use VATS or not. If my target is moving fast, I’m more accurate using VATS, but if he’s a long way away, I’m much better off shooting him manually.

        1. krellen says:

          No, it is not possible to play VATS-only. AP does not recharge fast enough, and the real-time mechanics don’t reflect “turns” very well.

          1. Ninety-Three says:

            Yes it is possible, because I did it on max difficulty.

            AP recharges as a percentage of total AP so boosting max AP is also boosting AP regen. The trick is to realize that endurance is a dump stat so you can put everything into PER-AGI-LUK, and put a rush on acquiring the +20% acc companion perk. With that plus a perception in the low teens, VATS becomes more accurate than anything but a scoped sniper rifle.

            Sometimes the game throws a Deathclaw with a million HP and you’re forced to shoot in manual mode because otherwise you’ll be there all day waiting for recharge, but patience issues aside, it works fine. As long as you make them come to you and are willing to fall back, you shouldn’t be getting overrun.

            1. Nimrandir says:

              Thanks for the analysis. I don’t currently have a machine that can play Fallout 4, but my aim is sufficiently crap that I was hoping VATS gunplay would be more reliable than what I saw in the Spoiler Warning series.

              1. Zagzag says:

                Or you can do what I did and play through the game using almost nothing but VATS because you don’t have a machine that can play Fallout 4.

                1. Nimrandir says:

                  Perhaps I should have elaborated that ‘machine’ meant ‘console’ for me. My PC will pretty much always be a GOG portal.

        2. Mormegil says:

          Ninja + sneak + pickman’s blade + big leagues + blitz = a VATS build so powerful I got bored and uninstalled the game.

      2. MrGuy says:

        Right. Most games are “somewhere in between.” I do think the recent Bethesda games do a decent job making both your innate skill and stats “matter.”

        But it’s still a fixed balance. The idea I wanted to explore is…what if it wasn’t? Some people might consider it BS to have their shot miss even through the lined it up perfectly, just because their stats aren’t high enough. Others just don’t play tons of shooters and want their character to help out. I was wondering if, within a single logical game, there would be a way to “tune” this to whatever balance I personally find fun.

    3. Nimrandir says:

      Too Human tried to do something like this. After the first level, you made a decision that shifted your combat build into either flow-based (with an Arkham-like combo meter) or loot-focused (skewing things in a statistical direction). I can’t say that I noticed that big a difference, but an effort was made in that direction.

      1. I really wish that game had a PC version, if only so I could see that particular dumpster fire without spending a few hundred on a console.

        1. Nimrandir says:

          It’s definitely flawed, but I wish it had succeeded enough for its combat system to get a shot at refinement. I think that a fixed isometric viewpoint might have been enough to make its dual-stick approach work.

          We also would have had to spend a small fortune constantly casting alter self on Denis Dyack, too.

    4. Syal says:

      Apart from the new Fallouts, I’d say Dark Souls has a hybrid stat/skill system kind of like that. Any RPG with a manual dodge has that somewhat I think.

      Apart from needing to playtest two different control schemes to make sure they’re both viable, a system like that would struggle to have a PvP mode; the skill players would complain they’re being beaten by noobs with high stats and the stat players would complain they’re being beaten by low-leveled players with high skill. Not necessarily a bad thing to lose PvP, but you’re increasing your work load to limit your options.

    5. Loonyyy says:

      No advantage, and you’d never ship. Each one would require a complete redo of the AI, the system programming, some would require new animations, each would require independant QA, and you’d multiply the game to check for errors by several times, but you wouldn’t actually add new content, so players would get bored, and because your game has so many playstyles, you get to pick whether your game has a lot of that content you expect them to repeat, and your combat systems take the hit on development time, or whether they’re explored in depth, and your game is short.

      Just implementing a rock/paper/scissors magic/melee/ranged style system already makes things difficult. Look at Dark Souls and The Elder Scrolls. Do the skills scale the same way throughout? Magic outright breaks Dark Souls 1, and can still be pretty broken in the sequels, ranged is a little better, but still can break encounters. The Elder Scrolls is infamous for shoddy balancing.

      If you just want to fudge the numbers on your switch between stat based and play based, so that bad play is rewarded by your stats, you could probably make an incredibly unsatisfying game, but your stealth game would get panned in favour of Deus Ex and even Alpha Protocol. If you interact in fundamentally the same way, then you’ve massively oversimulated for a stat based system, and it’ll feel dumb. And if the AI don’t behave interestingly enough, taking cover etc, then they’ll be shitty shooter enemies, which means that you have to program that in, or the skill based player will be bored and return your game. Which means you may end up having to switch between animation, pathing and AI on switching mode to get the best out of each playstyle, which means that you’ve literally introduced assets that you’re not using and that a player might never see, for core gameplay, it’s not a secret area or a reward, a player might play the game and never see an animation because they’re in the other mode. That animation cost you money. If you didn’t balance those styles well, there’s a chance that a majority will play one way, one way being easier or more enjoyable, and you may have completely wasted your money on that decision.

      Basically, each style of design has it’s own advantages and trade-offs. You can’t just dodge that choice, you need to pick the best, and most interesting one based on what you want to make, and then focus on it. You have limited time and money, and every branch you add into the process exponentially increases the amount of potential bugs. At best, you’re talking doubling the amount of playtesting and QA to implement a system that will feel forced and like you’re playing the wrong game, no matter what you do. You either animate, at costly amounts today, enemies making aiming animations, taking cover, running and moving into cover, in numerous ways so players don’t notice, which is worthless for your stat system, or you have enemies that just stand around while you shoot them in the head, which is kind of what Morrowind did, and that wasn’t the positive aspect of that play design, a lot of criticism has been levelled at the fact that the stat basis there means many attacks miss, despite the player having to aim right, which is frustrating and unsatisfying, and the stat basis massively dwarfs the skill one. As someone who liked that game, I want to see mechanics explored in depth, not half-done. The other thing you run the risk of is having the stat basis feel unnecessary to the game as whole, which is what a lot of modern games with tacked on RPG levelling feel like. If both playstyles are valid, and I’m just better at games than some people, then what’s to say that my ability doesn’t break the game and make the levelling obselete? The best way to avoid these problems is with carefully designed play that maximises the advantages of the playstyles, and is scrupulously balanced. All of these things get harder when you design everything twice, and on a management side, having two pipelines for core gameplay isn’t going to be fun either.

      Christopher is right. You’d be better off with two different games.

  7. I’m voting for Rutskarn to play Alpha Protocol (assuming screenshots are possible).

    1. Knowing the troubles with that game, it’d probably take someone who can actually get past the hacking minigame, like myself. :P

      1. Andy_Panthro says:

        I played the game (on PC, at launch) with a 360 controller and the hacking minigames were absolutely fine. I think it was only the mouse/keyboard controls that were terrible (and general bugginess of which I was thankfully not affected).

        Since I’d pre-ordered and enjoyed it, I didn’t even realise so many people had problems with it until later. Which is a real shame, because there were so many interesting things they tried to do with that game.

        1. I’ve managed to get the M&K controls for the hacking down (for the most part) which probably puts me fairly high up on that game’s food chain.

          I also kind of want to do a Veteran non-lethal playthrough just for laughs. :P

    2. That would be awesome! I played Alpha Protocol only very recently (it’s been sitting in my Steam library for *yonks*) and mostly really enjoyed it despite its best efforts. I had heard about the weird-ass controls and the bugginess, but luckily I turned out to be one of those freaks of nature who could do the hacking mini-game with M+KB once I worked out what it was they wanted me to do, and I didn’t get hit by any really bad bugs other than the occasional early level being oddly devoid of enemies after re-load. It’s a game I would certainly consider replaying with different choices. I will say this for Obsidian – they really get players.

  8. ” jokes are easier to get through when you can click through them as fast as you can read”

    Yeah, especially if to characters are speaking.
    It’s bad enough even when it’s not jokes, like this for example.

    Character 1: “Why would you”…
    (2-3 second long audio pause)
    Character 2: “Do not question me.”

    Amazingly that still happens even in modern AAA games. It’s almost like voices share the same audio channel and they can’t mix/cross fade for some odd reason.

    Now if that is not voiced the pause would be “exactly right” in your own head, same with comedic timing.

    1. ehlijen says:

      I suspect the clip files are kept separate and the computers have to spend a little time loading them, producing gaps.

      For the most part, this makes some sense in multiple choice conversations (and I have observed the phenomenon there more often than in no-choice cutscenes). Voice clips have to be able to be played following more than one possible predecessor, and dividing them by complete lines from one character makes sense in an organisational way.
      But if interruptions are scripted, they should really be one voice file, assuming that it’s always the same characters in that scene speaking.

      1. Even if two characters are te only ones speaking you may still need their voices separate, if character B is the only one doing variants then it would be a waste to also include character A in that.

        If the build process is automated then some backend software could do this automatically though.

        Also regarding loading. Not an issue or at least should not.
        If there is a dialog choice (letting the player respond) there is a pause anyway.

        But if there is no player dialog interaction then there is no reason why there should be a pause. As someone who do programming and audio editing this just seems weird to me.
        If crossfade or similar is an issue then simply store cuepoints.

        Also many seems to cut of at “Character 1: “Why would you”…”
        but in real life it would be Character 1: “Why would you do th”…
        nobody stops talking at the instant somebody else talks.
        I’d start the fade out at the end of “you” and end the fadeout (and clip) at the end of “th”.
        While the other clip would be started with no fade in as it’s “interrupting”.

        1. Loonyyy says:

          You could even store the fades, or render them on the spot. Rendering a crossfade on audio isn’t particularly computationally expensive, it’s never slowed down my video editing, it seems every audio player I have offers to do it for me now. It should be possible for a game to render the crossfade when it happens, and change the camera. When Character 2 speaks, presumably because the player has selected an interrupt, they can cut. Alternatively, storing the fades and overlaps will cost you a little more in space, but not much, because we’re talking snippets. But the problem gets worse, like Roger said, because even when they don’t have the excuse of running off player input, the characters still manage to be stilted, paused, and deliver lines that are convincingly recorded unconvincingly. If anything, it’s worse there.

          I find that Roger’s problem is particularly pronounced in games with ingame set piece conversations etc. In general, prerendered cutscenes, today at least, are better. But I still see some NPCs having that exact sort of conversation, particularly in Bethesda games. Just two NPCs, having the most boring script read ever.

          I’m guessing they don’t do this because the animations and motion capture are expensive, and they want to make the most of it and show it. I don’t agree that that’s a good decision, but I do think that’s why it was made. The other element may be that a lot of the voice acting is expensive and done seperately to the animation, particularly going back a couple of years, and that’s why the models do very little acting. And getting unique animation for a single conversation is going to be hard to justify. And any changes often had to be hacked out of recorded audio, and things got worse if you stunt-casted the voice actors, which is remarkably common. These people are expensive, and they have full schedules, not to mention many actors aren’t great voice actors. Don’t cast Peter Dinklage in your Destiny, because he’ll be poorly directed and kind of flat, and then his schedule will make it too hard for him to do VA for DLC, and you’ll have to rerecord all his dialogue with someone else.

          Like, look at Dishonored. They cast Susan Sarandon, Lena Headey, Carrie Fisher, Michael Madsen, Chloe Grace Moretz and Brad Dourif. Those are just the ones I recognise in the cast list, not that I recognised them in game, because the VA direction in that game is awful. Pretty hard to justify editing or cutting any of their dialogue when they cost you as much as they must have, and when you’re hoping their performance gives you critical acclaim or attracts commercial attention. Not a good choice in my mind, understand, but I think that may be where they’re coming from.

  9. Hector says:

    I would be quite interested in seeing an Ultima Underworld series, along the same lines. Video or screenshot would work for me.

    1. Andy_Panthro says:

      I’d like to see that too, but I’d also love it if it included some of the other Ultima titles (I would say from Ultima IV, but that might be a bit too old for some).

      1. Armagrodden says:

        You have lost an eighth!
        You have lost an eighth!
        You have lost an eighth!

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Simpsons did it!….Err,I mean,Spoony did it!

        1. Huh, I expected the one I clicked on to have been using Blip instead of YT as the video source. :O

  10. Retsam says:

    If necessary, I was prepared to install the game on a roommate's machine and play it there, or start over again from the beginning.

    I’m pretty sure installing Battlespire on someone else’s computer can be considered destruction of property, and punishable by law.

    1. galacticplumber says:

      Only if he didn’t get permission first.

      1. Supah Ewok says:

        In that case it would be considered a public menace.

  11. Loonyyy says:

    I would love to see you do Alpha Protocol or VTM: Bloodlines. Particularly with your narrative style, I love the stories in those games, and I’d be interested to see what angle you came at them from. And the gameplay there can get broken in thousands of ways too, because I know how much you love glitches.

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You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

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