Oh, no argument. I'm just warning people who might take this stuff more seriously than I do. :)

(I'm sad that he and Kim are Mostly Done With YouTube, mainly for the entirely selfish reason that I deeply dislike the user experience on Twitch, but I can't blame them given the colossal fuckovers Google seems to have performed on YouTube's backend and high-volume YouTubers generally over the past year or so. I've seen some people chalk YT up as another casualty of 2016, which is probably overstating the point somewhat, but I can see where the sentiment comes from.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That's a general problem with playing while doing commentary. I doubt Scott Manley makes anywhere near as many staging errors when he is just playing KSP for himself and not doing a video series.

("Check Yo' Staging" has become the unofficial motto of his current series.)

In much the same way that the repeated crashes in MoonQuest caused the motto on the patch for JAFFA (Yogscast's Minecraft-series space agency) to be, "Hold Space to Slow Down".

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Huh. I haven't had any trouble with it. The graphics engine isn't hugely well-optimized, but it no longer has the hilarious draw distance you can see in the early Sips videos. Everything else seems to be fine... shrug.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

He started before the 1.0 release by two months and change, but MOST things were in when he started.

... although you will see more generally competent play than you'll find on, for instance, Sips's Twitch channel over the last few days. :)

Mind you, he isn't helped by the fact that the voice of the computer in Subnautica seems to have been recorded using the same text-to-speech voice that he has reading his Twitch donations, which has led some of his viewers to donate specifically to have her give him spurious in-game warnings. As is often the case with user interactions on Twitch, that was funny the first time someone did it...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

------
Oh God, it was me. I was the grognard all along.

One of the things I like about watching Capt. Shack's and W4stedspace's streams is that the Armco crowd tends to use the superchat for either game advice, comments which are actually funny or honest "love the stream, have coffee/beer/dinner/etc. on me," messages.

Yeah, unfortunately, his community is... well, it's not toxic, it's not the blistered wasteland that is YouTube comments, but it does tend to be really annoying. I think a lot of them are probably really young. (Also, he encourages them.)

Mind you, he's made an effort to reduce the amount by which he makes the subs-and-donations thing worse. He used to have the most horrendous sound effects set to go off before the text-to-speech part, so that even the users who didn't post their doctoral dissertations along with their donations caused the casual viewer (i.e., me) to want to start ripping people's ears off. (Check out the vods of his Farming Simulator streams from a year or two ago. O God.)

I find the Twitch user experience bemusing because of these features—it's deeply weird for me to live in a world where you're supposed to interrupt people while they're performing and you have to touch the screen—but I admit I do like the interactivity when it's managed well. On the Lewis & Ben Save the World streams, for instance, they have (reasonably discreet) donation and sub notification graphics, but no loud sounds or TTS, and they pause to read through and acknowledge their messages at strategic points in the gameplay rather than be constantly interrupted in real time. I think that's a nice balance. It probably wouldn't work with every game, though. Old-school X-COM has convenient places to pause for that kind of thing, particularly with two players; one of them can read out the donations while the other one plays the Spreadsheet Simulator 1994 portin of the game. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

He did a nice bit of Twitch start-all-over the other day, too. And managed to be THOROUGHLY Jingles, in that he found an island, he picked up a bunch of seeds, he brought them back to the base-to-be....and ate them. Yeah. There's a good thing.
...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

That is annoyingly easy to do in Subnautica's interface. Many has been the time I've opened up the ol' bioreactor to put in a fuel item, and then stuffed it in my face instead.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Indeed not; it appears to be $24.99 (in the US) now. Personally, I think that's still a very reasonable price for a game this good. Even if I do think they still need to tweak the requirement/availability curve on a few of the resources a little.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

-----
Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn!

"Rock on, shale outcrop! Now I can—crap. It's just gold."

--G.
what, look, I really need lithium, all right?
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"Duct tape?! That's a different game!"

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

One of the things I don't get about Subnautica, and none of the streams I have examined has made clear, is a question.

Are you on a hidden timer all game long?

I know there some timed events you cannot intervene in. The Aurora exploding for instance. (In fact, supplementary question, can you rush the Aurora and get caught in the explosion?)

I think I know that if you put off going to the Aurora long enough the radiation level will give you a game over.

Is there yet another, better make progress or else, timer in the other progression?

It does not appear so. The progression is keyed to story points as you arrive at them; if you don't get around to them, it seems there are no consequences. (Sort of like putting off all of those flavor-texted-as-if-time-critical errands in Elder Scrolls games in order to fart around with side quests.)

There's even sort of an oblique, implied in-game explanation for this, if you squint hard enough at some of the revelations you come across in the course of operations.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

there is one timer in the game, but it's triggered by story, and it's something that I'm pretty certain is impossible to intervene in, because it doesn't give you enough time to do the considerably amount of work to do so. The timer is basically just to get you into position to see what happens.

I believe the "story" triggers are actually that of progression. Once you've done X, picked up or scanned Y, built Z, things happen around you. I suppose theoretically you could just dick around in god mode through use of a trainer to keep your food and water up indefinitely so long as you didn't DO anything.

Or just turn off hunger and thirst. There's a legit mode for that.

Also: man alive, Cyclops doesn't handle so good in town.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

(I haven't played the game, I lack a compy capable of it. All I have is a laptop that came preinstalled with Vista(!) and a little netbook that's even less capable)

I think to change mode on the fly, you do have to use the console (as for instance in Minecraft), but the modes themselves are legit game states, unlike, say, turning off aggression or using the unlimited oxygen code.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Oh, foo. Sure, it's a bit busy, but when you live in a controlled environment, you have to maximize the use of space. And a little color never hurts.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

(on the other hand, as a friend put it when I showed him the picture, "The Sims under water?")

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Rude!

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.