GenCon Day Three

Today didn’t zip by quite as fast as yesterday but it was still a very good day. I took the morning off from GenCon to follow my usual Saturday morning routine of taking my sons’ for their swimming lessons, so I didn’t head downtown until about 11:30. That meant there was zero parking in any of the usual places and I ended up walking a half dozen more blocks than usual. My feet weren’t too pleased about that, although my wallet was happy since it was half as expensive as either or the previous two days.

IMG_20140816_124830I spent the first couple of hours in the Exhibit Hall, which I’d barely seen much of before then. I scouted out a few children’s games so I knew where to take my son tomorrow.

I got to see a prototype of the app version of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game being developed by Obsidian. The prototype itself was very good looking. I was slightly disappointed but not surprised that they’re current initial target platform is just iOS but it is being developed in Unity so an Android version shouldn’t be more effort. It’s relatively early in the development process for them so that could easily change between now and the release sometime next year.

After cruising the Exhibit Hall, I played some more Golem Arcana, which was a lot of fun even though I lost the match, before heading out to dinner with friends.

I got to wrap up the evening by seeing a writer’s session on storytelling in new media (mostly games) which had Christine Thompson, aka Kestrel, the lead writer for Star Trek Online on it. Afterwards she hung around for a bit with her husband, Frost from STO’s QA team, to chat with me and two other STO players. She was nice enough to sign the Path to 2409 appendix in my copy of Needs of the Many, and gave out Delta Rising t-shirts and Holo Leeta codes to the three of us. Made my night.

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Day 16 of Blaugust

GenCon Day Two

You know you’re having fun when the time jumps from 10 am to 5 pm in the blink of an eye. What turned out, I thought, to be a mostly free day to cruise the exhibit hall got surprisingly busy. I only managed to demo one game, Sentinels Tactics, which was a ton of fun and was an opportunity to have someone teach me a game I already own and avoid reading the rule book. But I also got to play a prototype that my friend Todd’s been working on and I’ve been playtesting off and on, which was a blast to see the progress that he’s made.

I also watched two writing panels that had Jim Butcher on them, one on adapting story series to games and the other on how to write long running series. Both panels covered topics I was interested in but it was also great getting a chance to see Jim talk live. Ed Greenwood, of Elminster and Forgotten Realms fame, and Bill Willingham, Fables comic series, were also on the second panel and very entertaining.

I’m having a great time at GenCon, but I’m really going to pay (already am paying) with my feet and legs all next week I think.

Day 15 of Blaugust

GenCon Day One

I’m hanging out in a playhall late on day one of GenCon watching a board game while I wait for the Shadowrun: Crossfire event, blogging from my phone. Like just about every instance in the past all of the social anxiety I’ve been feeling was unfounded. Today was a lot of fun, and busy.

I had a little adventure finding a parking space in the morning, followed by a massive line at will call to pick up my event tickets. I figured I’d be smart and spend an hour in the dealer hall so the line would go down only to have it get even longer. It ended up being about 40 minutes to get through which left me some time before my first event. Conventions are an odd mix of fun and waiting.

Playing some Star Realms and Golem Arcana was great but the highlight so far was getting to have beers with friends at dinner.

My gaming budget for the con is already busted too, I think. I’ll try to avoid paying attention to that until Monday.

Day 14 of Blaugust

Shadow Realms

Shadow Realms was announced at Gamescom and looks interesting but I have some concerns. I really like that they’re trying to bring computer RPGs back closer to their pen and paper roots. I think the idea of 4v1 PvP could work, but the execution is going to be tricky to get right. BioWare is hitting all of the right notes in their descriptions of the game at least, emphasizing episodic story content with fast-paced tactical combat and deep customization. It reminds me quite a bit of the Secret World, only fortunately there’s no mention so far of zombies, which I’m beyond sick of.

Initially I thought  the hero classes were a bit too standard: warrior, assassin (thief in any MMO), wizard, cleric, ranger (nature pet class), warlock (demonic pet class). But after giving it more thought, I think it makes sense to help with the accessibility of the game. There’s room in that setup to innovate on the classic trinity without confusing prospective players. The Shadowlord class will be the big draw for people looking for something novel.

The producer letter from Dallas Dickinson promise transparency and changes based on player feedback and gameplay metrics. I was especially interested to see them directing people to a new subreddit /r/ShadowRealms. Using an open platform like that for the initial community is an odd contrast to the EA/Origins prompt that greeted me when I signed up for the alpha, which I assume means Origins will be the launcher for the game when it’s released.

I’m still a little skeptical about the game, but I really like this quote from the Lead Designer James Ohlen and I would love to see  BioWare pull it off:

Shadow Realms isn’t just hearkening back to those early BioWare PC games—it’s finally bringing the magic of tabletop RPGs to the digital realm.

Day 13 of Blaugust

Starships and Capes

Astrometrics Report

Cryptic released a little more background on the Delta Rising expansion. It looks like the content will focus on the volume of space from the Nekrit Expanse towards the Alpha Quadrant. Very few of the species in Voyager are ones I’m interested in except for the Voth which we’ve already seen. But the article touches on the Borg Cooperative, which is from the Voyager episode Unity, which I’d totally forgotten about. I’ll definitely be interested in seeing how they’ve gotten on in the last 30-something years.

Silver Hunter Returns?

I was surprised to see a big article on Champions Online on Massively today. It looks like they’re making a big content update in September. The new areas sound interesting. The new mission arc I’m curious about but in the past their arcs have always seemed to have frustrating vertical difficulty curves near the tail end (at least for a non-min/maxed hero playing solo).

Cryptic’s Champions team is also taking a page from their old City of Heroes incarnation with a new archetype that only unlocks once a player gets a max level character, just like the Kheldian Peacebringer and Warshade classes from CoH. I’m pretty skeptical of how well that will go over. The strength of Champions, to me anyway, over City of Heroes was that I wasn’t limited to a specific set of powers. Or at least not as long as I was subscribing, and I bought a lifetime sub way back so for me that’s a permanent feature of the game.

Regardless of how well the new archetype goes over, I hope the new content gives the game a boost. I’d love an excuse to dust of the Silver Hunter and return to Millennium City for a while.

Day 12 of Blaugust

Space Engineers

space_engineers_square_1024If you love Minecraft and space, you need to check out Space Engineers. Two things I want to warn you about before you do though. One, it’s an early-access game on Steam so this is a more like a pre-Mojang Minecraft experience, and two, it will suck you in. Seriously my Steam client shows 171 hours played.

Space Engineers is a game by Keen Software House about building ships, bases, and anything else you can imagine (for instance an AT-AT that walks) using armor blocks, thrusters, pistons, wheels, etc. It’s been integrated with Steam’s Workshop for a while for sharing maps with custom build, and just released full mod support on Thursday. The SE community has hit the ground running with 260 mod entries already. To me the most impressive thing about the game is how Keen has managed to keep up an insane schedule of releasing an update every Thursday with fixes and new features.

Not being an insane building genius, I’ve been enjoying playing in survival mode. This involved spawning into a single player map with a default ship, finding an asteroid to set up ship in, and then progress from manually mining ores to building a series of small ships for mining and constructing larger ships. All in the safe shadow of the asteroid I picked as I have meteors turned on, which means periodically a storm of rocks comes hurling from the sunward side of the map. On the bright side, meteors leave behind all kinds of nice deposits.

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Day 11 of Blaugust

Zen Cardboard

With GenCon coming up this week I’ve been thinking a bit about why I play both board games and computer games. The obvious difference is of course with board games you’re sitting across the table from people you’re playing with, but that’s been changing in recent years. Solitaire gaming has been popular for a while and is starting to become more accepted. Some games include solo variants in the box, like the re-release of Merchants of Venus, but there are also lots of games with good player made variants on BoardGameGeek. The rise in popularity of cooperative board games has helped a lot with this as well.

So why play a board game by yourself? Why not just sit down at the computer? For one it means instead of gaming in my office, I’m sitting at the kitchen table. More importantly board gaming is a zen experience for me. Putting decks of cards together and getting things shuffled well. Setting up the board. Not just thinking about strategy during the game but keeping track of rules, trying to make sure I don’t make any mistakes. The experience tends to be quite a bit like reading as part of my brain usually starts making up a story about what’s happening in the game. I do that a bit in MMOs as well but I tend to get more vivid pictures from board games because there’s no other visual or auditory input.

Board games don’t have to be something you only get into if you have the time to dedicate to getting together with friends once or twice a month to play.

Day 10 of Blaugust

Serendipity in the Internet Age

I love the Internet!

Okay, maybe that’s too obvious coming from a blogger and MMO gamer. It’s even more obvious if you know that I’m a web developer professionally (programming not design as you can tell by this blog). But this week ended with a really nice happy accident.

I follow Wil Wheaton on Twitter, who happens to be a big fan of Soul Coughing as am I, and I see him mention on Twitter several months back that Mike Doughty (the singer and songwriter for Soul Coughing) is crowdfunding a re-imagining of Soul Coughing songs on PledgeMusic. That album turned out great and I loved that he did a series of short videos documenting the recording process.

More recently, Mike sends out an update that he’s crowdfunding a new album, and like the first one he’s doing short videos of the recording process. In one of the recent ones he has some interesting guys that come in and play saxophones for some tracks. These guys are a band named Moon Hooch and the video was interesting enough that I checked out their bandcamp site and fell in love with their music. This was cool enough but I sent Mike a thank you for introducing me to a new band and got an email that he favorited it, which made my Friday.

Getting that email Friday reminded me how much of a catalyst the Internet is for connecting people based on similar interests regardless of geography.

Day 9 of Blaugust

Scattered Thoughts

Babylon 5b?

There’s an article on  Ars Technica today about Babylon 5 likely getting a reboot as a “big-budget film.” Apparently J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) is going to work on a script soon and then start production in 2016. I love the TV series. Like most science fiction series it took a few seasons to real get comfortable with itself but once it got rolling it was really great. Interesting story lines, amazing characters, and cool special effects (for the early 90’s, I haven’t watched any recently but I don’t think it has aged well).

I’m trying to decide how I feel about this news. Babylon 5 getting a reboot is cool. Having JMS handling the reboot is very cool and gives me confidence that it will be done well. But a movie? I don’t see it translating as well. Even focusing on just the primary arc of the show I think would make a better trilogy than a single movie.

Delta Rising

I was surprised to see a news post from Cryptic today since the big announce post was just released yesterday. After reading it though it’s not a dev blog like I initially assumed, but instead a message from the Executive Producer Stephen D’Angelo talking about the new Tier 6 ships. More specifically it’s about what happens to Tier 5 ships in the expansion, which makes me wonder if there’s more drama on the forums than usual (I don’t get paid enough to wade in and find out) or they’ve seen a plunge in C-store purchases while people wait and see what the plans are.

Unfortunately I don’t see it helping since the post just reiterates the information already circulating. Which Cryptic does’t want, or intend, for players to have to ditch their Tier 5 ships if they don’t want to, and they do have a plan but they’re not ready to share it yet. All of which the community knows already and apparently isn’t satisfied with. I’m so glad I’m a corporate software developer and not a game developer.

Broken Age, Part One

I backed Broken Age on Kickstarter half because I wanted to play a new adventure game and half because I loved 2 Player Productions documentary on Minecraft and wanted to see more. It only took me about four hours to play start to finish, but it was a wonderful four hours. Even if Part Two wasn’t coming out, I’d still be totally happy with the money I kicked in. Actually I’d have been happy even if a game hadn’t come out as the documentary episodes have been excellent.

The art in the game is amazing, it’s like playing in a painting. The story is just as excellent, the dialogue, the voice acting, and the humor are all pitch perfect to me. I’ve heard some complaints that the puzzles were to easy, but for me they were about right. I think having Part One skew toward the beginner end of the puzzle spectrum is good, hopefully it has brought some new fans to an old genre.

I got nothing. Day 8 of Blaugust

Delta Quadrant Bound

05311098887bcda9712b9209e89c445d1407361503Cryptic and Perfect World formally announced the second expansion for Star Trek Online today, Delta Rising. I say formally because the initial announcement was made at the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas last weekend, a video of which is linked in the announcement.

Voyager is not my favorite series, I found several of the characters either bland or annoying. That said, I was very impressed with Tim Russ’ reprising Tuvok for the Season 9 update so I was pleased that Garrett Wang is being brought on to voice Ensign Kim. Except he’s finally been promoted to Captain. Even cooler is Garrett only the first Voyager cast member to be announced, there’ll be  more in the coming weeks. I’m really hope that Robert Picardo is figuratively waiting in the wings.

Game-wise the biggest feature, in my opinion, is the level cap increase from 50 to 60. I don’t think I’ve played any MMO that’s gone four years without a level cap bump. A new level cap means new story content which is sorely needed.

Cryptic is also adding a new post 50 infinite progression system as well as a new tier of starships. I’m skeptical about how infinite this new progression system will be. I imagine that either means it will be a massive grind to achieve anything or it will offer diminishing returns on improvement. The new tier of starships sound interesting as there’ll be something new with bridge officers among other hinted at features. Unfortunately with so little real information yet the forum warriors have already begun beating their war drums over concern that their current min/maxed Tier 5 ships suddenly won’t be as godlike as they are now.

Personally, I’m looking forward to more content regardless of any other changes. In the absence of a regular TV show, this is the Star Trek franchise for me.

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations Day 7 of Blaugust