After a good chunk of time in which I didn’t play (and thus didn’t paint) due to time and financial constraints, I’ve restructured my personal calendar to afford additional time at home during the week AND took advantage of a brief but no less pleasant small pile of available personal cash to make some acquisitions and to re-connect with the local 2 or 3 dudes who actually play semi-regularly.
As such, I’ve added to the Orboros pile:
1 base unit of Tharn Ravagers (4), plus the Shaman UA
1 Druid Overseer to hang with my Druids of Orboros
Daliah/Skarath
1 base unit of Blood Trackers plus a PIP of extras for a total of 8 of the beauties
1 Gorax
Last night was the 3rd game I’ve played since I’ve been back, at the rate of about 1 game/week. Given the difficulties I’ve had with Kaya I’ve been running Krueger (non-epic) to try out more beat-stick modes of play with a little less subtlety (which seems to be Kaya’s method). My characterization may be wrong there but between tendrils, wind storm, and a woldwarden there’s a lot more straight up beat down, at least to my perception, than there is with Kaya - particularly when it comes to infantry, something I never did get much confidence at annihilating.
So to wit, last night’s bout with destiny was:
Krueger
Gorax
Warpwolf
Woldwarden
Woldwyrd
Blackclad Wayfarer
Druids of Orboros + UA
Gudrun (on loan)
Sentry Stone
Swamp Gobbers
Tharn Ravagers (4) + UA
Totem Hunter
The opponent ran a Epic Stryker Cygnar army. I forget all the details, but he had a unit of melee fearless sword dudes, two different units of ranged things (one of which was a ranger of some type, iirc), 2 chain gun weapon crews, one big fat warjack, the centurion perhaps, a lancer, and some goblin fellas who can repair jacks, . . the solo that throws grenades at stuff, another small jack, another solo, and . . I think one other thing. I suppose I should start documenting my opponents better. I found the iBodger app for my iPod which makes it a breeze to track armies.
In any event Gudrun rolled like crap but still managed to take out a solo and choke up his ranged infantry long enough to get my druids and warden into position for a little fun with the Devouring. Between that and Krueger’s feat I mopped up the infantry and the two weapon crews fairly easily. Totem Hunter single handedly (in two turns, of course), took out the entire 6 model unit of fearless sword dudes - fortunately, TH got 3 attacks on both his turns, and my opponent rolled poorly enough to miss me on his two chances.
On the left side of the board the ravagers + blackclad + lightning tendrils had some fun with the lancer. Took longer than it should have but I killed it, even with it surrounded by little healer manz. Blackclad’s storm beacon gave me a nice long distance charge - between that and the tendrils a 15“ threat range plus +2 on the attack made me realize this is a damned useful unit ‘o’ dudes. Not QUITE as awesome as the gatormen (I tried those last time, jeesh, I need a set of those), but still pretty handy.
However, by this time it was starting to get late and I started screwing up. Key features of my eventual defeat was that no, the warpwolf doesn’t have pathfinder and no, don’t put Primal on something if you aren’t certain there will be enemies around for it to be useful against. I killed my own woldwarden, and that’s never fun. Finally I wasn’t careful enough with Krueger and left him in range of Stryker’s absurd threat range who promptly wandered over and killed him. The store was closing in 7 minutes, the game had gone on for almost 4 hours, I think I can be forgiven for a little sloppy placement with so little time left to play and so much fatigue hitting my eyes.
I take nothing but positives from this match up however. My opponent indicated that my tactics were generally sound, and this was one of those games where I felt like a) I had plans and could execute them and b) I was actually capable of removing some of the enemy models off the board.
The sentry stone continues to impress the shit out of me for its point cost. I want to field 2 of these soon (altho, to be reasonable, one has felt like enough in a 750 pt game).
And Gudrun may be my next high priority acquisition.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
City of Heroes/Villians
So I have taken the plunge into another MMORPG, having been out of World of Warcraft for some time now and wanting to try something else, since, hey, I did get 3 years of fun out of that other product.
The differences between these games is pretty large, and after about 3 weeks of playing I’m pretty happy with what I am seeing.
I’ll start off by taking a crack at my main issues with WoW and discussing how those issues still apply, or don’t apply, to CoX - keeping in mind of course my highest level character at this point is 21, with a level 50 cap - so I’ve seen not all that much of the game at this point.
And . . large moment of panic because I had thought I misplaced my post of my issues with WoW. It appears it never made it to this gaming journal since I started it AFTER I wrote the post, and LiveJournal just got another nail in its coffin since it has no option to allow you to search your own posts I had to sift manually through all my drivel. For the curious, here’s the post in full -> http://winkytoonz.livejournal.com/23020.html
But in any case:
1) Lack of Permanence. CoX has some improvements in this area. Number 1: your “guild” has a home. A place to put shit, storage racks for members, dumping grounds for unneeded things that others could use, etc. Including portals to major areas, dramatically simplifying traveling. Plus you design your own base, put in tables and chairs, whatever you like. There’s even an access point for the bank.
Furthermore, on the character front, similar to the new WoW achievements you earn badges - badges for all sorts of shit, ranging from killing x of y to having spent enough time logged out at certain locations. I have played very little compared to my WoW time and I already have 30+ badges. And badges are viewable by anyone who cares to look - along with your character bio, which gives you room to RP a little if that is your bag.
However, we do have the mob respawning issue still, and other than your personal badge list and your supergroup base, no changes to any environments are possible. That said - they are adding a Mission Creator in the next update that will allow players to craft missions and supports 1000+ maps to choose from and tweak, which should prove interesting.
One thing to note - in CoX almost all quests are instanced - as in you rarely find yourself competing for spawns.
2) Skill. I can’t judge on this one yet. My suspicion is that it boils down to gear to a certain extent, but the powersets available to characters is significantly broader than in WoW. Then again most solo mission work seems to boil down to “shoot mob, make it run to you by hiding around a corner, kill mob, repeat”, with flavor variances based on class and playstyle. So I’m not seeing any indication of “skill” being a significant factor as yet - but at least, thank god, you can shoot at shit while you are flying, so tactics at the very least take a larger role in this game.
3) Variety. omgomgomg, was my first reaction. There is no “uniform” - you have, instead, the fact that how you physically look in game has zero impact on how much oomph your character has. There are 3 “genders” (male/female/giant male), with a great number of options as far as appearance - I’d hazard you could create several hundred unique looking characters just from the costume pieces and skin tones alone. Thus far I have yet to see two characters that looked exactly alike. Furthermore, since there is a large color palette to choose from besides, you just don’t run into folks who look alike. On top of that, as you progress you earn more costume sets which allow you to change your appearance on the fly to potentially a completely different look.
Absurdly rare items, while they exist - are not always a costume piece, either. Sometimes they are only visible to those looking at how you have enhanced your powers.
So while there is a “uniform” of sorts, it’s largely invisible - and has more to do with how much you wish to minmax your stats via enhancements, which in turn plug into powers on your powers screen, than to do with your physical appearance in game.
4) Problem Solving: thus far there have been zero puzzles. No victory here, just mindless explore/kill/get treasure.
So based on those issues, CoX is a definite improvement over Wow in some areas, and breaks even in others.
That said: there are some gameplay elements that are light years beyond the annoyance of Warcraft:
1) inventory management: while you do have to worry about it to some extent, you can go off and do quite a few missions before ever having to bother stopping off at a vendor or the Market to sell off stuff you don’t need. Much less inventory downtime
2) looting: you don’t have to. If that mob had something on him - it just appears in your inventory, with a little animated “Blah Blah FOUND” drifting contentedly across your screen. Almost all mobs give you both money and xp, as well.
3) “potions”, or inspirations, as they are called in CoX: these are oneshot things like health, mana, bonus defense for a short time, etc. ALL of them are available from vendors. You don’t have to farm them, and they can’t be created, so there is no market for them either. And they drop often and heavily besides.
4) Traveling: instead of needing to go to specific places and fly specific routes, all characters have the opportunity to choose a travel power. This in turn means you can get from place to place entirely on your own. Toss in portals inside your supergroup base, and you don’t even need that, just portal around from zone to zone (although some form of personal travel does make it easier for in zone travel). On top of that, there are a variety of temporary travel powers available - a personal favorite thus far is a rocket pack that will last a total of 2 hours. As in two hours of use. This world isn’t that big. Two hours is quite a bit, and the pack itself is way pricey for a level 5 but is dirt cheap for a level 25. So to get somewhere, there is a much greater sense of immediacy - and portals are immediate. There is no 5 minute flight or standing around waiting on a boat.
The down side of this is at level 20, having been running around with higher level friends, I haven’t seen much. Most of my maps are explored in little lines that run from portal to portal and I haven’t looked past them.
5) Leveling: leveling does NOT feel like a chore. In fact, they have added in a system that makes it fly by if you have a friend or two. In one form, the lower level character is promoted to a higher one, so that the lowbee can adventure with the higher leveled person. But - xp earned is earned as if you were your same old level. So you just scoot right along. In the other form, a higher leveled person can voluntarily lower their effective level to do low level missions with you - thus making it easier to do - and in this mode the person at an artificial lower level gains orders of magnitude more cash as they go. So you get more xp, they get more cash. Everyone wins.
That’ll do me for now, for my first impressions of CoX. Ta ta!
The differences between these games is pretty large, and after about 3 weeks of playing I’m pretty happy with what I am seeing.
I’ll start off by taking a crack at my main issues with WoW and discussing how those issues still apply, or don’t apply, to CoX - keeping in mind of course my highest level character at this point is 21, with a level 50 cap - so I’ve seen not all that much of the game at this point.
And . . large moment of panic because I had thought I misplaced my post of my issues with WoW. It appears it never made it to this gaming journal since I started it AFTER I wrote the post, and LiveJournal just got another nail in its coffin since it has no option to allow you to search your own posts I had to sift manually through all my drivel. For the curious, here’s the post in full -> http://winkytoonz.livejournal.com/23020.html
But in any case:
1) Lack of Permanence. CoX has some improvements in this area. Number 1: your “guild” has a home. A place to put shit, storage racks for members, dumping grounds for unneeded things that others could use, etc. Including portals to major areas, dramatically simplifying traveling. Plus you design your own base, put in tables and chairs, whatever you like. There’s even an access point for the bank.
Furthermore, on the character front, similar to the new WoW achievements you earn badges - badges for all sorts of shit, ranging from killing x of y to having spent enough time logged out at certain locations. I have played very little compared to my WoW time and I already have 30+ badges. And badges are viewable by anyone who cares to look - along with your character bio, which gives you room to RP a little if that is your bag.
However, we do have the mob respawning issue still, and other than your personal badge list and your supergroup base, no changes to any environments are possible. That said - they are adding a Mission Creator in the next update that will allow players to craft missions and supports 1000+ maps to choose from and tweak, which should prove interesting.
One thing to note - in CoX almost all quests are instanced - as in you rarely find yourself competing for spawns.
2) Skill. I can’t judge on this one yet. My suspicion is that it boils down to gear to a certain extent, but the powersets available to characters is significantly broader than in WoW. Then again most solo mission work seems to boil down to “shoot mob, make it run to you by hiding around a corner, kill mob, repeat”, with flavor variances based on class and playstyle. So I’m not seeing any indication of “skill” being a significant factor as yet - but at least, thank god, you can shoot at shit while you are flying, so tactics at the very least take a larger role in this game.
3) Variety. omgomgomg, was my first reaction. There is no “uniform” - you have, instead, the fact that how you physically look in game has zero impact on how much oomph your character has. There are 3 “genders” (male/female/giant male), with a great number of options as far as appearance - I’d hazard you could create several hundred unique looking characters just from the costume pieces and skin tones alone. Thus far I have yet to see two characters that looked exactly alike. Furthermore, since there is a large color palette to choose from besides, you just don’t run into folks who look alike. On top of that, as you progress you earn more costume sets which allow you to change your appearance on the fly to potentially a completely different look.
Absurdly rare items, while they exist - are not always a costume piece, either. Sometimes they are only visible to those looking at how you have enhanced your powers.
So while there is a “uniform” of sorts, it’s largely invisible - and has more to do with how much you wish to minmax your stats via enhancements, which in turn plug into powers on your powers screen, than to do with your physical appearance in game.
4) Problem Solving: thus far there have been zero puzzles. No victory here, just mindless explore/kill/get treasure.
So based on those issues, CoX is a definite improvement over Wow in some areas, and breaks even in others.
That said: there are some gameplay elements that are light years beyond the annoyance of Warcraft:
1) inventory management: while you do have to worry about it to some extent, you can go off and do quite a few missions before ever having to bother stopping off at a vendor or the Market to sell off stuff you don’t need. Much less inventory downtime
2) looting: you don’t have to. If that mob had something on him - it just appears in your inventory, with a little animated “Blah Blah FOUND” drifting contentedly across your screen. Almost all mobs give you both money and xp, as well.
3) “potions”, or inspirations, as they are called in CoX: these are oneshot things like health, mana, bonus defense for a short time, etc. ALL of them are available from vendors. You don’t have to farm them, and they can’t be created, so there is no market for them either. And they drop often and heavily besides.
4) Traveling: instead of needing to go to specific places and fly specific routes, all characters have the opportunity to choose a travel power. This in turn means you can get from place to place entirely on your own. Toss in portals inside your supergroup base, and you don’t even need that, just portal around from zone to zone (although some form of personal travel does make it easier for in zone travel). On top of that, there are a variety of temporary travel powers available - a personal favorite thus far is a rocket pack that will last a total of 2 hours. As in two hours of use. This world isn’t that big. Two hours is quite a bit, and the pack itself is way pricey for a level 5 but is dirt cheap for a level 25. So to get somewhere, there is a much greater sense of immediacy - and portals are immediate. There is no 5 minute flight or standing around waiting on a boat.
The down side of this is at level 20, having been running around with higher level friends, I haven’t seen much. Most of my maps are explored in little lines that run from portal to portal and I haven’t looked past them.
5) Leveling: leveling does NOT feel like a chore. In fact, they have added in a system that makes it fly by if you have a friend or two. In one form, the lower level character is promoted to a higher one, so that the lowbee can adventure with the higher leveled person. But - xp earned is earned as if you were your same old level. So you just scoot right along. In the other form, a higher leveled person can voluntarily lower their effective level to do low level missions with you - thus making it easier to do - and in this mode the person at an artificial lower level gains orders of magnitude more cash as they go. So you get more xp, they get more cash. Everyone wins.
That’ll do me for now, for my first impressions of CoX. Ta ta!
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
GHWT, Fallout 3
GHWT
This game is some srs good times.
I got sucked in due to my desire to get as many songs as possible unlocked in quick play, so friends and so forth can assemble set lists they like and we can all drink and pretend to be musicians together. Thus, last Thursday I beat it on guitar career, medium difficulty, and over the weekend I completed all songs (3 of the gigs have to be purchased with your winnings) on medium. I have a few without five stars, but by and large it appears my leet skillz from GHIII carried over - I cleared every song the first time, over 90% of that with 5 stars.
Next up is hard. I tried the Jane’s Addiction song on the first gig on hard the other day. At first I thought I’d screwed up as there were no orange notes at all . . . until the end. Still, cleared it, with five stars, unbelievably.
So I tried it on expert. Whereupon I was booed off the stage at 18%.
I’m likely going to start a drum career next, which will be much, much, MUCH harder for a rhythmless white guy like me.
Fallout 3
I’m making slow but steady progress. I’m not interested in finishing the game rapidly, so I explore everything. I don’t even want to go on the main quest line yet but instead am spending my time exploring everything else I come across. In fact I skipped a step in the main quest line because I hadn’t made it to the GNR radio station before I made it to Rivet City - turns out I was supposed to go to River City after GNR, so I got credit for the Rivet City step having never been to GNR.
Last night, at level 11, I made it to the Tepid Sewers, a place I’m gathering from the internets most folks have done well before that. This was the first time I’ve done anything across the river. Dum dum duummmmmm. A full Tepid Sewers clear took me just over 2 hours, between the sneaking, the ammo conserving, the computer hacking, and the final bouts of schlepping all the crap back home for eventual sale. My locker in the house is full of at least half a dozen of most weapons “just in case”. This game is not the sort of game that will force a pack rat to change his ways. I think I’ve amassed something like 80 stimpacks to boot. And I never, never sell ammo. But with 100+ locations to explore, and me taking one to two hours each if it’s a building or dungeony like place, I’ve got a loooong way to go.
Blazing through the game on easy difficulty when I run through as an evil character who will be markedly less subtle than my current lock pick/sneaking/sniper guy should be quite the romp. For now I appreciate the depth of the challenge.
This game is some srs good times.
I got sucked in due to my desire to get as many songs as possible unlocked in quick play, so friends and so forth can assemble set lists they like and we can all drink and pretend to be musicians together. Thus, last Thursday I beat it on guitar career, medium difficulty, and over the weekend I completed all songs (3 of the gigs have to be purchased with your winnings) on medium. I have a few without five stars, but by and large it appears my leet skillz from GHIII carried over - I cleared every song the first time, over 90% of that with 5 stars.
Next up is hard. I tried the Jane’s Addiction song on the first gig on hard the other day. At first I thought I’d screwed up as there were no orange notes at all . . . until the end. Still, cleared it, with five stars, unbelievably.
So I tried it on expert. Whereupon I was booed off the stage at 18%.
I’m likely going to start a drum career next, which will be much, much, MUCH harder for a rhythmless white guy like me.
Fallout 3
I’m making slow but steady progress. I’m not interested in finishing the game rapidly, so I explore everything. I don’t even want to go on the main quest line yet but instead am spending my time exploring everything else I come across. In fact I skipped a step in the main quest line because I hadn’t made it to the GNR radio station before I made it to Rivet City - turns out I was supposed to go to River City after GNR, so I got credit for the Rivet City step having never been to GNR.
Last night, at level 11, I made it to the Tepid Sewers, a place I’m gathering from the internets most folks have done well before that. This was the first time I’ve done anything across the river. Dum dum duummmmmm. A full Tepid Sewers clear took me just over 2 hours, between the sneaking, the ammo conserving, the computer hacking, and the final bouts of schlepping all the crap back home for eventual sale. My locker in the house is full of at least half a dozen of most weapons “just in case”. This game is not the sort of game that will force a pack rat to change his ways. I think I’ve amassed something like 80 stimpacks to boot. And I never, never sell ammo. But with 100+ locations to explore, and me taking one to two hours each if it’s a building or dungeony like place, I’ve got a loooong way to go.
Blazing through the game on easy difficulty when I run through as an evil character who will be markedly less subtle than my current lock pick/sneaking/sniper guy should be quite the romp. For now I appreciate the depth of the challenge.
EVE
So I’ve not logged into my EVE online account in, probably some 3-4 months at this point. All that wasted time that could have been spent leveling up a new skill . ..
Except that the game itself has failed to pull me in, not even enough to pop in every 2 or 3 days and update skills. There are a combination of factors that I think have contributed to this:
1) Wars. I’m not a PVP guy, really. Particularly in a game where PVP skills equate to getting to your ideal radius before the other guy does - there’s very little twitch in EVE, by and large the result of the combat is already known ahead of time - not necessarily to the combatants, but logic and probability govern the fighting more than skill - at least in a one on one situation. I was not able to experience fleet combat - but I’d expect that to require a great deal of coordination and team play, and that is a big bucket of skill right there.
However - as I said I’m not a PVP guy. It’s fun to dabble in, but when I’m a lowbee broke ass puttering around in a poorly equipped cruiser, I don’t really look forward to leaving the station when the corporation I am in is likely in one war or another somewhere else - thus making me a sitting duck. In Warcraft, at least, you had a choice. In EVE, you do not. While this does create a bit more tense and interesting game play - somedays, I’m just not in the mood.
2) Environment. There are perhaps as many as a couple dozen “backdrops”. These are the images you see in any given solar system as you fly about outside of hyperspace. Different races have differently shaped space stations and jump gates.
That’s it. That’s all there is to look at. Asteroids all look alike, planets are great amorphous green/gray spheres that you can’t land on. You can’t get out of your ship to wander around the space station. You are in your tin can 100% of the time, except when you get blown up by somebody. To sum up: the game is visually monotonous (sexy missile and rocket explosions are a notable exception). While this is, of course, SPACE, the fact that you are limited to just viewing space, and never physically exploring planets, or looking at the chain of idiots dancing around in the space station, and so forth, coupled with the fact that all of your personal contacts, quest givers, etc, end up being little 1“ square static pictures, and the sense of immersion, at least for me, was highly lacking.
3) Crafting. There are blueprints out there for all sorts of things, from missile ammo to high end top of the line massive battleships. However - if it’s a high end item, you can only make it once. The blueprint is consumed/destroyed/exceeds its copyright limit, whatever you want to abstract it as, in the process. There are a few exceptions - but these special blue prints were apparently handed out in some sort of lottery to the big corporations at the time, and no one else will get one, ever. So that’s a bit of a bummer, as someone who likes crafting is basically relegated to the same boring shit as everyone else no matter how much time they spend on finding things.
4) Exploring. I had hoped I might find a Star Trek like niche in running some big ship out to all sorts of places. Well, the exploring ”mini game“ as it were is very realistic, and thus, very, very boring. Launch probes in a system. Fly to the probe that finds something. Launch more probes around that one. Fly to the probe that finds something. Continue in this way until you are using your shortest range probe, and if it finds something you can actually fly there.
Whereupon you will immediately be set upon by powerful NPC pirates who will kill you.
Thus, to explore, you need at least one buddy to come help you beat shit up so you can find this amazing artifact they were guarding . . . that will likely contain some research to allow you to (eventually) create one of those shiny blueprints.
That you can use only once.
Except that the game itself has failed to pull me in, not even enough to pop in every 2 or 3 days and update skills. There are a combination of factors that I think have contributed to this:
1) Wars. I’m not a PVP guy, really. Particularly in a game where PVP skills equate to getting to your ideal radius before the other guy does - there’s very little twitch in EVE, by and large the result of the combat is already known ahead of time - not necessarily to the combatants, but logic and probability govern the fighting more than skill - at least in a one on one situation. I was not able to experience fleet combat - but I’d expect that to require a great deal of coordination and team play, and that is a big bucket of skill right there.
However - as I said I’m not a PVP guy. It’s fun to dabble in, but when I’m a lowbee broke ass puttering around in a poorly equipped cruiser, I don’t really look forward to leaving the station when the corporation I am in is likely in one war or another somewhere else - thus making me a sitting duck. In Warcraft, at least, you had a choice. In EVE, you do not. While this does create a bit more tense and interesting game play - somedays, I’m just not in the mood.
2) Environment. There are perhaps as many as a couple dozen “backdrops”. These are the images you see in any given solar system as you fly about outside of hyperspace. Different races have differently shaped space stations and jump gates.
That’s it. That’s all there is to look at. Asteroids all look alike, planets are great amorphous green/gray spheres that you can’t land on. You can’t get out of your ship to wander around the space station. You are in your tin can 100% of the time, except when you get blown up by somebody. To sum up: the game is visually monotonous (sexy missile and rocket explosions are a notable exception). While this is, of course, SPACE, the fact that you are limited to just viewing space, and never physically exploring planets, or looking at the chain of idiots dancing around in the space station, and so forth, coupled with the fact that all of your personal contacts, quest givers, etc, end up being little 1“ square static pictures, and the sense of immersion, at least for me, was highly lacking.
3) Crafting. There are blueprints out there for all sorts of things, from missile ammo to high end top of the line massive battleships. However - if it’s a high end item, you can only make it once. The blueprint is consumed/destroyed/exceeds its copyright limit, whatever you want to abstract it as, in the process. There are a few exceptions - but these special blue prints were apparently handed out in some sort of lottery to the big corporations at the time, and no one else will get one, ever. So that’s a bit of a bummer, as someone who likes crafting is basically relegated to the same boring shit as everyone else no matter how much time they spend on finding things.
4) Exploring. I had hoped I might find a Star Trek like niche in running some big ship out to all sorts of places. Well, the exploring ”mini game“ as it were is very realistic, and thus, very, very boring. Launch probes in a system. Fly to the probe that finds something. Launch more probes around that one. Fly to the probe that finds something. Continue in this way until you are using your shortest range probe, and if it finds something you can actually fly there.
Whereupon you will immediately be set upon by powerful NPC pirates who will kill you.
Thus, to explore, you need at least one buddy to come help you beat shit up so you can find this amazing artifact they were guarding . . . that will likely contain some research to allow you to (eventually) create one of those shiny blueprints.
That you can use only once.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Thoughts on economies (EVE vs. Warcraft), oh, and bias.
I have been doing a little musing on the subject of in game economies - and while I’m not prepared to publish a white paper or anything like that on this topic, I did have some observations that leapt out at me when I juxtaposed the World of Warcraft auction house vs. the EVE Online market.
Unfortunately, any discussion of this type will necessarily be colored by the fact that the auction house in WoW is entirely closed - there is no information you can reliably glean regarding volume of sales, average prices, etc - unless you spend the time to obtain a 3rd party add-on, and then manually scan the AH perhaps once an hour for a month - that would give you a semblance of the amount of information necessary to track average prices and so forth. EVE on the other hand features a running 3 month window of average price, daily median price, and quantity sold for every item in the game - with one caveat:
Unlike WoW, there are actually several distinct markets with “auction houses”. Each region of space (and I don’t know how many there are, other than “several”. Based on the map I just downloaded, it would look to be on the order of 50). Thus there are 50 distinct markets, as opposed to the two you find on a WoW server (one horde, one alliance). Thus, unless you get jiggy with various online databases and player side modifications, you cannot know a priori what the market value of a given item is in one of the other regions.
Similar to WoW, there’s a sort of “auction house linking”. In Warcraft you can hit the ‘house in Elf lands, Dwarf lands, whatever - and the item on sale that someone put up for sale in one place will be purchasable in another - and when you buy it goes straight to your mailbox, which you can run over to and snag as it’s usually all of 20 feet from the auction house.
But in EVE, it’s not your mailbox it goes into - it goes into your hangar - at the station it was put up for sale at. There is no “magical transport”.
Thus, if you are sitting in Todaki and see a nice ship you’d like to buy but it’s over in Karakela, well, you can buy it - but then you’ve got to fly over to Karakela to pick it up.
So the buying of goods carries with it an inherent opportunity cost, and sometimes a practical cost. Opportunity cost stems from the time you have to spend to get from Point A to Point B to collect whatever it was that caught your fancy, and a practical cost that comes from two vectors: a) you may get shot at and blown up, which costs money, and b) if you are buying a ship, you either have to be prepared to leave your current ship at the destination or you have to buy a shuttle so you can leave the shuttle there.
Shuttles, fortunately, are ass cheap. I recently realized I would need to start just buying shuttles particularly when it comes to new ship acquisition - but I can earn enough money for two or three shuttles in about 5-10 minutes, so it’s not that big of a deal.
The market itself has a different set of forces that act on it as well:
Warcraft:
1) Completely player driven. If nobody sells anything, there’s nothing to buy.
2) Commodities market: the lower level commodities (linen, wool, copper, strange dust, etc) are “worthless” in game terms - the market for these items only exists because players are either rolling a new character or swapping professions and are power leveling up the new profession.
3) There are no “mandatory costs”, at all. You never have to fly on a griffon, you don’t have to buy a mount, and you can wear only dropped armor. Your overall game efficiency will drop, but you can still complete most quests and be a part of the world (although your ability to contribute to a dungeon run is reduced of course). You don’t even have to repair your armor, just let it break and replace it with some other low quality stuff you find somewhere.
4) Some items are “soul bound”, such that once they are picked up or put on, they cannot ever be given or sold to anyone else in the game, including your own alts. They can be destroyed for raw materials for one of the professions, or sold for chump change to a vendor. Once ‘outgrown’ as it were, the item is pretty much worthless trash.
5) Death is largely free. The most you lose is about 5 to 10 minutes running back to your corpse, and a trivial amount of money to repair your armor (while higher quality armor costs more to repair - if you’re playing cheaply then you have crap gear on which is very cheap to repair). Thus, other than annoyance, there is no financial disincentive to perishing - at worst case, you lose 7 minutes of mining opportunity.
6) The only way to gain experience and thus add to your character’s skill set (“advance your character”) is to physically sit at the keyboard and kill things, or do quests.
EVE:
1) Mostly player driven. There are NPC sellers and buyers as well. I am not clear on how the buyers work. I have seen the sellers though - generally NPC corporations or related selling, among other things, skill books so that you can learn new skills. These are not common, but they do exist - albeit with limited stock of very specific items only.
2) Commodities: never become worthless. The lowest quality ore is refined into a mineral called Tritanium. Tritanium, in turn, is used in building almost EVERYTHING - including the big huge multi-billion isk (equivalent of “gold piece”) capital ships - which require millions of pieces of tritanium to construct. Even with the fact that asteroids “respawn” almost daily, there is still enough demand out there to keep the price of the raw ore high enough to make it worth mining for a good while. While I suspect that after a longer career in the game the amount of money made mining this low ore is trivial - the ore itself still serves a function beyond someone power leveling blacksmithing. Furthermore since the ore itself is useful folks always need it to build new ships, replacement ships, etc.
3) There exist certain mandatory costs which put the player in the mode of actually needing money to function in the game. While it is absolutely free to travel, you must have a ship. The starter ship is crap, of course, but at least it’s free. However, as soon as you buy a ship, you really ought to insure it - if you do not, and it gets blown up, you’ll be back in the free starter ship until such time as you earn enough money to a) replace the ship you lost and b) replace all the weapons and modules on it you lost. If you don’t do this, and ever let your money get to zero - you are completely stuck, and someone will have to loan you some cash so you can buy a mining laser so you can go mine again.
Of course every ship needs a pilot - you. If you die, and you didn’t buy yourself a clone, you are immediately reverted to the lowest possible level of clone. Which will mean loss of skills that have to be re-learned. And clones cost money.
Running out of money is a very bad thing.
4) Nothing is soul bound. If you are done with something, you can box it up and sell it on the market, give it to a friend, or one of your alts. Or just leave it - one other aside is the phrase “unlimited bank slots”.
5) As you might expect from #3, death is far from free. You lose:
a) the difference in cost between your insurance policy and the replacement cost of the ship + all modifications and weapons
b) the cost of your clone - since you will want to buy another one
c) the time spent repurchasing a comparable ship and equipping it
‘b’ only applies if you are actually fully killed by a player or NPC mob, but if your ship blows up you’ve got ‘a’ and ‘c’ to deal with. In either case you’ve still got time spent on getting to whatever station you want to get to besides. And if you were dumb, and didn’t have the right size clone, you are going to lose skill points too.
6) Advancing your character (gaining new skills, or improving old ones) does not require you to be present, at all. In fact, generally, if you’re at keys you’re either off PVPing, making money, or doing missions (which not only make you money and give you stuff, but raise your standing/faction with various NPC corporations, which in turn gives you access to various upgrades and potentially access to research - which is how you create new recipes/blueprints for things from nearly thin air). The only thing you do have to worry about, if you wish to be efficient, is keep track of when skills will be “complete” (skills are learned in the background, whether or not you are online) so you can bounce in and start the next skill training. This takes approximately 1 minute. While I have managed to annoy my wife with this sort of thing, from a gameplay perspective it sure is nice. My character gets better and all I have to do is hop in for a minute or two once or twice a day - eventually less, since as you grow skills start taking days to complete.
The only reason to play is to make money, really. That you do have to be online for - at least until you run some massively powerful corporation that has a player owned station - once set up they also make money for you, whether or not you’re online.
While I apologize for bias that crept in there from time to time, in general I just wanted to keep this to market discussions, at least in the above set of paragraphs.
Now for the bias hardcore: I prefer the style of this MMORPG to Warcraft. In warcraft, to be competitive in the PVP arena or to participate in high end raids, you MUST play. You must farm money, you must buy consumables, you must gain reputation with factions, you must harvest gear from dungeons that you must do over and over and over again - just so that you can have the “fun” a couple days a week - and after that, you can only reach the higher end stuff if you have a sufficient amount of friends. A loner in WoW will never get a nice set of top end gear - it’s largely impossible, really.
In EVE, I have to make enough money to make ends meet. That’s it. Once that’s out of the way (thus far, this takes me approximately 20 minutes a week at most), all that’s left is the fun. Running missions, following story lines, PVPing. Granted, group work is nice too - but I’ve not gotten a chance at that as yet. But since everything, and I do mean everything, is available on the open market, if you have enough money you can buy whatever you want. You don’t have to do shit outside of the cash factor - which, while huge, is sufficiently easy to do that you can watch TV or read a book while you do it. Not having to farm for experience points is a huge benefit - all your game time can be directed at things that interest you more than grinding out the next level.
Now, what is still out there for me to determine: are the “must” parts of EVE more or less tedious than the “must” parts of WoW, and are the “fun” parts of EVE more fun than the “fun” parts of WoW. Just because they have a lower cost in terms of time and tedium does not necessarily mean they are “more fun”, after all.
Unfortunately, any discussion of this type will necessarily be colored by the fact that the auction house in WoW is entirely closed - there is no information you can reliably glean regarding volume of sales, average prices, etc - unless you spend the time to obtain a 3rd party add-on, and then manually scan the AH perhaps once an hour for a month - that would give you a semblance of the amount of information necessary to track average prices and so forth. EVE on the other hand features a running 3 month window of average price, daily median price, and quantity sold for every item in the game - with one caveat:
Unlike WoW, there are actually several distinct markets with “auction houses”. Each region of space (and I don’t know how many there are, other than “several”. Based on the map I just downloaded, it would look to be on the order of 50). Thus there are 50 distinct markets, as opposed to the two you find on a WoW server (one horde, one alliance). Thus, unless you get jiggy with various online databases and player side modifications, you cannot know a priori what the market value of a given item is in one of the other regions.
Similar to WoW, there’s a sort of “auction house linking”. In Warcraft you can hit the ‘house in Elf lands, Dwarf lands, whatever - and the item on sale that someone put up for sale in one place will be purchasable in another - and when you buy it goes straight to your mailbox, which you can run over to and snag as it’s usually all of 20 feet from the auction house.
But in EVE, it’s not your mailbox it goes into - it goes into your hangar - at the station it was put up for sale at. There is no “magical transport”.
Thus, if you are sitting in Todaki and see a nice ship you’d like to buy but it’s over in Karakela, well, you can buy it - but then you’ve got to fly over to Karakela to pick it up.
So the buying of goods carries with it an inherent opportunity cost, and sometimes a practical cost. Opportunity cost stems from the time you have to spend to get from Point A to Point B to collect whatever it was that caught your fancy, and a practical cost that comes from two vectors: a) you may get shot at and blown up, which costs money, and b) if you are buying a ship, you either have to be prepared to leave your current ship at the destination or you have to buy a shuttle so you can leave the shuttle there.
Shuttles, fortunately, are ass cheap. I recently realized I would need to start just buying shuttles particularly when it comes to new ship acquisition - but I can earn enough money for two or three shuttles in about 5-10 minutes, so it’s not that big of a deal.
The market itself has a different set of forces that act on it as well:
Warcraft:
1) Completely player driven. If nobody sells anything, there’s nothing to buy.
2) Commodities market: the lower level commodities (linen, wool, copper, strange dust, etc) are “worthless” in game terms - the market for these items only exists because players are either rolling a new character or swapping professions and are power leveling up the new profession.
3) There are no “mandatory costs”, at all. You never have to fly on a griffon, you don’t have to buy a mount, and you can wear only dropped armor. Your overall game efficiency will drop, but you can still complete most quests and be a part of the world (although your ability to contribute to a dungeon run is reduced of course). You don’t even have to repair your armor, just let it break and replace it with some other low quality stuff you find somewhere.
4) Some items are “soul bound”, such that once they are picked up or put on, they cannot ever be given or sold to anyone else in the game, including your own alts. They can be destroyed for raw materials for one of the professions, or sold for chump change to a vendor. Once ‘outgrown’ as it were, the item is pretty much worthless trash.
5) Death is largely free. The most you lose is about 5 to 10 minutes running back to your corpse, and a trivial amount of money to repair your armor (while higher quality armor costs more to repair - if you’re playing cheaply then you have crap gear on which is very cheap to repair). Thus, other than annoyance, there is no financial disincentive to perishing - at worst case, you lose 7 minutes of mining opportunity.
6) The only way to gain experience and thus add to your character’s skill set (“advance your character”) is to physically sit at the keyboard and kill things, or do quests.
EVE:
1) Mostly player driven. There are NPC sellers and buyers as well. I am not clear on how the buyers work. I have seen the sellers though - generally NPC corporations or related selling, among other things, skill books so that you can learn new skills. These are not common, but they do exist - albeit with limited stock of very specific items only.
2) Commodities: never become worthless. The lowest quality ore is refined into a mineral called Tritanium. Tritanium, in turn, is used in building almost EVERYTHING - including the big huge multi-billion isk (equivalent of “gold piece”) capital ships - which require millions of pieces of tritanium to construct. Even with the fact that asteroids “respawn” almost daily, there is still enough demand out there to keep the price of the raw ore high enough to make it worth mining for a good while. While I suspect that after a longer career in the game the amount of money made mining this low ore is trivial - the ore itself still serves a function beyond someone power leveling blacksmithing. Furthermore since the ore itself is useful folks always need it to build new ships, replacement ships, etc.
3) There exist certain mandatory costs which put the player in the mode of actually needing money to function in the game. While it is absolutely free to travel, you must have a ship. The starter ship is crap, of course, but at least it’s free. However, as soon as you buy a ship, you really ought to insure it - if you do not, and it gets blown up, you’ll be back in the free starter ship until such time as you earn enough money to a) replace the ship you lost and b) replace all the weapons and modules on it you lost. If you don’t do this, and ever let your money get to zero - you are completely stuck, and someone will have to loan you some cash so you can buy a mining laser so you can go mine again.
Of course every ship needs a pilot - you. If you die, and you didn’t buy yourself a clone, you are immediately reverted to the lowest possible level of clone. Which will mean loss of skills that have to be re-learned. And clones cost money.
Running out of money is a very bad thing.
4) Nothing is soul bound. If you are done with something, you can box it up and sell it on the market, give it to a friend, or one of your alts. Or just leave it - one other aside is the phrase “unlimited bank slots”.
5) As you might expect from #3, death is far from free. You lose:
a) the difference in cost between your insurance policy and the replacement cost of the ship + all modifications and weapons
b) the cost of your clone - since you will want to buy another one
c) the time spent repurchasing a comparable ship and equipping it
‘b’ only applies if you are actually fully killed by a player or NPC mob, but if your ship blows up you’ve got ‘a’ and ‘c’ to deal with. In either case you’ve still got time spent on getting to whatever station you want to get to besides. And if you were dumb, and didn’t have the right size clone, you are going to lose skill points too.
6) Advancing your character (gaining new skills, or improving old ones) does not require you to be present, at all. In fact, generally, if you’re at keys you’re either off PVPing, making money, or doing missions (which not only make you money and give you stuff, but raise your standing/faction with various NPC corporations, which in turn gives you access to various upgrades and potentially access to research - which is how you create new recipes/blueprints for things from nearly thin air). The only thing you do have to worry about, if you wish to be efficient, is keep track of when skills will be “complete” (skills are learned in the background, whether or not you are online) so you can bounce in and start the next skill training. This takes approximately 1 minute. While I have managed to annoy my wife with this sort of thing, from a gameplay perspective it sure is nice. My character gets better and all I have to do is hop in for a minute or two once or twice a day - eventually less, since as you grow skills start taking days to complete.
The only reason to play is to make money, really. That you do have to be online for - at least until you run some massively powerful corporation that has a player owned station - once set up they also make money for you, whether or not you’re online.
While I apologize for bias that crept in there from time to time, in general I just wanted to keep this to market discussions, at least in the above set of paragraphs.
Now for the bias hardcore: I prefer the style of this MMORPG to Warcraft. In warcraft, to be competitive in the PVP arena or to participate in high end raids, you MUST play. You must farm money, you must buy consumables, you must gain reputation with factions, you must harvest gear from dungeons that you must do over and over and over again - just so that you can have the “fun” a couple days a week - and after that, you can only reach the higher end stuff if you have a sufficient amount of friends. A loner in WoW will never get a nice set of top end gear - it’s largely impossible, really.
In EVE, I have to make enough money to make ends meet. That’s it. Once that’s out of the way (thus far, this takes me approximately 20 minutes a week at most), all that’s left is the fun. Running missions, following story lines, PVPing. Granted, group work is nice too - but I’ve not gotten a chance at that as yet. But since everything, and I do mean everything, is available on the open market, if you have enough money you can buy whatever you want. You don’t have to do shit outside of the cash factor - which, while huge, is sufficiently easy to do that you can watch TV or read a book while you do it. Not having to farm for experience points is a huge benefit - all your game time can be directed at things that interest you more than grinding out the next level.
Now, what is still out there for me to determine: are the “must” parts of EVE more or less tedious than the “must” parts of WoW, and are the “fun” parts of EVE more fun than the “fun” parts of WoW. Just because they have a lower cost in terms of time and tedium does not necessarily mean they are “more fun”, after all.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
First Day (night, really) in EVE
I say “Night” because I have to play on my daughter’s computer since she has the only Intel Mac in the house - so in order to not take away her things while she’s conscious, I’m in the 9pm-bedtime timeframe for exploration ;) So, I was up till 4 . ..
I've played about 7 hours thus far:
My initial thoughts are cautiously positive - the basic game play is still boiling down to "go do the same thing a bunch, then profit", but the community is radically different, and there are a tremendous amount of variables to worry about. Nevertheless, in some ways the game has already been "solved", at least presently, due to the existence of skill planning applications and suggested training paths to maximize your character potential - or at least minimize the time it takes you to reach that maximum.
On the other hand, there is no 'class role'. Everyone can learn everything - but doing so takes a tremendously long amount of time (which, even though you can still learn your skills while not logged in, we're looking at years worth of real time to learn it all) so you still end up picking a set of things that interest you, broken down into the axes of corporate control (setting up trades, alliances, contracts, etc), business (playing the auction house equivalent with the added complexity of moving between place to place without getting your ass shot off from under you), or industry (either harvesting raw materials and refining them, or producing blue prints and/or the products made thereby).
Combat is not twitch based, but does require you to swap targets as you fight and adjust your orbit radius to increase weapon efficiency. Thus, there at least initially appears some set of real time tactics that will need to be employed, although likely it will end up being pretty bare bones. There are various minmaxing paths ahead of me with respect to ship energy management, damage control, and damage output, as well as mining and refining efficiency.
The look and feel of the game is fantastic - highly detailed, gorgeous graphics, and a vast wealth of information available via an ingame web browser that links to all the help files online.
From what I understand, you can reach the point of creating your own space station, which satisfies the Brian "gee, what can I DO that will last forever (or at least until someone blows it up)" question - but doing so apparently takes a crapton of time and friends.
Things are not as immediately obvious as they are in Wow - I was confused quite a bit off and on while trying to figure out how to find asteroids that can be mined for a specific mineral, for example, and I still don't know how to set up a custom filter list for the map - so that delta is still a little daunting. There's just so much I don't know how to do as yet, but I expect things will clear up as I keep fiddling. There is also built in voice chat, which I haven't actually bothered to look at yet. In game chat is a windowed IM-client like affair, similar to what Wow provides, but with much greater control on private channel access. Overall seems a very polished product with an appropriately sci-fi look and feel.
I'm currently about 3/4 of the way done with a "storyline" quest sequence that has featured a combination of running around, mining, shooting, refining, and building - basically a raw summary of the sorts of things you can do in the game. For my first character I went "less aggressive", choosing the path of a scientist/engineer type, because the thought of researching blueprints and making things appealed to me.
On that note - and this is based off of very high level understanding at this point - while you can make things like ships and weapons and ship upgrades, there are two limitations: 1) the blueprints you make them from can only be used a set number of times before you have to create a new blueprint, and 2) you cannot "create" anything new - the list of possible blueprints you can research or find is deterministic. So I see that as a negative.
I haven't delved into the forums much yet, nor explored the reaches of the online community built up around the game. I am immediately impressed however with some technology they've incorporated - there's a published API protocol for application developers to write programs that directly access your characters. For example I have a widget on my dashboard now that provides a running clock of when my currently training skill will be done. Authentication is handled by a pseudorandom user id/API key pair (I do not have the details as yet on what level of security their algorithm provides) and the player has a choice of just choosing a "limited access" key that allows access to the wallet and currently training skills, or a "full access" key that lets you see everything. You can regenerate a new UID/Key pair whenever you like, for the paranoid.
One nice enhancement I'd like to see added is the ability to train skills without having to even log in - but I suppose that would sort of defeat the purpose of it being a MMORPG at that point.
I've played about 7 hours thus far:
My initial thoughts are cautiously positive - the basic game play is still boiling down to "go do the same thing a bunch, then profit", but the community is radically different, and there are a tremendous amount of variables to worry about. Nevertheless, in some ways the game has already been "solved", at least presently, due to the existence of skill planning applications and suggested training paths to maximize your character potential - or at least minimize the time it takes you to reach that maximum.
On the other hand, there is no 'class role'. Everyone can learn everything - but doing so takes a tremendously long amount of time (which, even though you can still learn your skills while not logged in, we're looking at years worth of real time to learn it all) so you still end up picking a set of things that interest you, broken down into the axes of corporate control (setting up trades, alliances, contracts, etc), business (playing the auction house equivalent with the added complexity of moving between place to place without getting your ass shot off from under you), or industry (either harvesting raw materials and refining them, or producing blue prints and/or the products made thereby).
Combat is not twitch based, but does require you to swap targets as you fight and adjust your orbit radius to increase weapon efficiency. Thus, there at least initially appears some set of real time tactics that will need to be employed, although likely it will end up being pretty bare bones. There are various minmaxing paths ahead of me with respect to ship energy management, damage control, and damage output, as well as mining and refining efficiency.
The look and feel of the game is fantastic - highly detailed, gorgeous graphics, and a vast wealth of information available via an ingame web browser that links to all the help files online.
From what I understand, you can reach the point of creating your own space station, which satisfies the Brian "gee, what can I DO that will last forever (or at least until someone blows it up)" question - but doing so apparently takes a crapton of time and friends.
Things are not as immediately obvious as they are in Wow - I was confused quite a bit off and on while trying to figure out how to find asteroids that can be mined for a specific mineral, for example, and I still don't know how to set up a custom filter list for the map - so that delta is still a little daunting. There's just so much I don't know how to do as yet, but I expect things will clear up as I keep fiddling. There is also built in voice chat, which I haven't actually bothered to look at yet. In game chat is a windowed IM-client like affair, similar to what Wow provides, but with much greater control on private channel access. Overall seems a very polished product with an appropriately sci-fi look and feel.
I'm currently about 3/4 of the way done with a "storyline" quest sequence that has featured a combination of running around, mining, shooting, refining, and building - basically a raw summary of the sorts of things you can do in the game. For my first character I went "less aggressive", choosing the path of a scientist/engineer type, because the thought of researching blueprints and making things appealed to me.
On that note - and this is based off of very high level understanding at this point - while you can make things like ships and weapons and ship upgrades, there are two limitations: 1) the blueprints you make them from can only be used a set number of times before you have to create a new blueprint, and 2) you cannot "create" anything new - the list of possible blueprints you can research or find is deterministic. So I see that as a negative.
I haven't delved into the forums much yet, nor explored the reaches of the online community built up around the game. I am immediately impressed however with some technology they've incorporated - there's a published API protocol for application developers to write programs that directly access your characters. For example I have a widget on my dashboard now that provides a running clock of when my currently training skill will be done. Authentication is handled by a pseudorandom user id/API key pair (I do not have the details as yet on what level of security their algorithm provides) and the player has a choice of just choosing a "limited access" key that allows access to the wallet and currently training skills, or a "full access" key that lets you see everything. You can regenerate a new UID/Key pair whenever you like, for the paranoid.
One nice enhancement I'd like to see added is the ability to train skills without having to even log in - but I suppose that would sort of defeat the purpose of it being a MMORPG at that point.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Various Bits
Video Games:
Well I have completed Metroid Prime 3 (a week or two ago). This was a title, being a fan of Metroid and all, that I was quite eagerly awaiting to get ahold of, and in a fit of overwhelming generosity my wife gave me (along with Endless Ocean) for Father’s Day.
I’ve been a fan of Metroid ever since I first played one of the titles - tho to be fair I got my Metroid wings a little late - I didn’t start until Metroid Prime on the Gamecube. At this point I’ve completed that title, along with the two Metroid titles for the GBA, did most of Metroid Prime 2 (that one got shelved because I got sucked into World of Warcraft - and 3 years later I don’t have the motivation to go back and figure out where I left off), and have dabbled in some of the earlier releases. Overall a fantastic series - and the control setup on the Wii is top notch. Finally a more intuitive and sensitive way to shoot things than a tiny joystick :) Parts of the game were frustratingly “hard” - and by hard I mean “random shit you have no control over fucking up your plans”, but these areas (only one comes to mind, really) were refreshingly rare. I played through on Normal difficultly - and having done so I feel like I sort of cheated myself. The game was astonishingly easy, either because of my FPS experience in general or past Metroid titles in particular I don’t know.
On the flip side I can replay the game again on the hardest difficulty now - and I think all my scans remain associated with my save file, so I don’t have to run around with the scan visor on constantly and can instead enjoy the visuals :)
However I have three other titles sitting in front of me - Halo 2 (yes it’s old - but I didn’t get an XBox until very recently), Metal Gear Solid 4 (never played any of the others, but I’m told the plot is easy to catch up on, and the game itself is more a bunch of movies than anything), and Fallout 3, which I pre-orderd sight unseen because the first two were so awesome. Also I still debate constantly between buying GRID now and Gran Turismo 5 later, or just waiting for GT5 (no interest here in forking out $40 for a glorified demo via GT5 Prologue. I mean puhLEEZE.) Meanwhile Guitar Hero IV looms on the horizon.
Plus I want several other titles. So many games, so little time :) More recently I snagged Blast Factor via PS3 download just to have a nice shooter hanging around. Pure mindless entertainment. It’s important to have such things :) It was a toss up between that and Super Stardust HD, but Blast Factor looks a little better on my currently non-HD TV. Once we get the new TV I’ll probably end up with both of these games.
AND FINALLY: Much happiness ensued: STAR CONTROL 2. This game is bloody ancient - but man, it was fucking awesome back in the day. This game and its predecessor was a huge deal when I was a freshman - I recall walking down the hall one day and no less than seven dorm rooms had this thing going at the same time. This is old school beat the crap out of your buddy stuff - both folks playing ON THE SAME KEYBOARD, yessir, this is back before that fancy schmancy internet crap, might have even pre-dated the granddaddy of PC gaming networking, IPX. You could smell the sweat of your opponent as you crushed his fragile ego (hell, I remember doing exactly that - I was regarded as one of the better to best players on the floor at one point, and this upstart guy was touted as a contender. We went 3 games in a row with a huge audience, him dripping with confidence, me just looking for a challenge. I schooled the fuck out of him. Not only did I win all three games, I believe in the third one he was so frustrated he made stupid choices and I think I didn’t even lose a ship. Ah, the halcyon days of me being good at something). Well, now it’s been released in open source, there’s a Mac version, and I’m just a little happy retro gamer guy at the moment. They even added network support.
I miss Star Control 3 as well, but that one apparently is regarded as a bastard step child. Eh.
Hordes/Warmachine:
Between a 2 week family vacation and a shit pile of overtime at the office, I have managed to miss every single play night at the LGS for going on 6 weeks now, so I hope to hell I can make it this week.
I may have found some more opponents tho, which is good :) First, my daughter expressed interest in learning, and while it’s hard to judge as yet if she just wanted more Father/Daughter time or if she actually enjoys this particular hobby, she has been painting up my old miniatures like mad (I used to just paint, but not play, and I’ve had a pile of metal laying around for going on 12 years now) and said she really wanted to play the actual game.
So in the interest of testing that desire without blowing another $50 on a starter box, I bought some bases of various sizes and we played a game where she proxied a starter and we had at. She surprised me - retained focus for over half of the 3 hour game and even had a base strategy she was going for - run me to the edge of the table and then throw me off. I was rather impressed - she’s only 11, after all. So at this point we’ve played once, and we’re on again today to try again. If she maintains interest, while we can’t exactly afford to cover TWO of us playing this expensive hobby, we’ll look at getting her some initial pieces. On the convenient as all fuck front, she’s also interested in Circle Orboros - which means we can trade minis back and forth ad nauseum since that’s all I’m collecting for now.
Now that I have bases, I may also get another friend of mine lured in at least to try it - he doesn’t have the cash to buy his own models right now, but we can proxy him in with bases and copies of my cards, at least. As I pointed out, once PP releases a deck of Horde’s cards he could conceivably just proxy a whole frickin army on cheap ass bases. And then a bud down in San Antonio, I discovered, also plays! Has a huge retired Cygnar army to boot - he played for several years until the game became unfun when one of their group went crazy and bought everything - so that any game turned into which counter he was going to bring to the table instead of playing something comparable.
On the army front - last purchase was a copy of Hordes Evolution and a Blackclad Wayfarer. Plus a metal base to mount him to since he’s so blasted top heavy. He will be the first mini I assemble AFTER painting, since his huge staff thing will be a bit of an issue to paint behind, so that should serve as some useful experience. Next month comes the Woldwarden and then I’ll have my scrappy 500pt army.
After some 15+ hours I’m finally happy with my Shifting Stones paint job, so now they just need a coat of protective finish and I will have my first Hordes models completed. I had some trouble in places with these, but I learned some good things so I made the right choice as to first mini’s - with such an overall simple construction I could focus on technique more than coordination, in a sense, and hey, they’re just rocks so if they aren’t spot on awesome that’s ok. I tried to get fancy with the coloration of the glowing bits in the middle - one yellow, one orange, one red - and that ended up being a fine idea but difficult to implement consistently. I also was pleased to discover that I do actually have the coordination to paint AROUND the tiny little glowing runes, so my thoughts of having to dry brush in those flat parts and dealing with the time and luck of that turned out to be unnecessary. I watered down the paint a bit to paint the runes themselves, and did that first in the lighter color (of the “glow”), so that any smudges around the outside could just be covered up with the darker color. Creating a “glow” effect I sort of failed at, even with looking at the sample ones online, but hey, live and learn. I’m still pretty pleased with how they turned out - I even went back over the raised carvings on the surface of the stones with metallic silver, which created a nice subtle effect since it mostly blends in with the gray until you look at it from certain angles, when BAM the carvings just pop out at you.
If I get a chance this evening I think I’ll do the Argus’ next. I’m still debating painting them the same color, or different. I’m also going to try my hand at some shading on the musculature. We’ll see how that goes :)
Well I have completed Metroid Prime 3 (a week or two ago). This was a title, being a fan of Metroid and all, that I was quite eagerly awaiting to get ahold of, and in a fit of overwhelming generosity my wife gave me (along with Endless Ocean) for Father’s Day.
I’ve been a fan of Metroid ever since I first played one of the titles - tho to be fair I got my Metroid wings a little late - I didn’t start until Metroid Prime on the Gamecube. At this point I’ve completed that title, along with the two Metroid titles for the GBA, did most of Metroid Prime 2 (that one got shelved because I got sucked into World of Warcraft - and 3 years later I don’t have the motivation to go back and figure out where I left off), and have dabbled in some of the earlier releases. Overall a fantastic series - and the control setup on the Wii is top notch. Finally a more intuitive and sensitive way to shoot things than a tiny joystick :) Parts of the game were frustratingly “hard” - and by hard I mean “random shit you have no control over fucking up your plans”, but these areas (only one comes to mind, really) were refreshingly rare. I played through on Normal difficultly - and having done so I feel like I sort of cheated myself. The game was astonishingly easy, either because of my FPS experience in general or past Metroid titles in particular I don’t know.
On the flip side I can replay the game again on the hardest difficulty now - and I think all my scans remain associated with my save file, so I don’t have to run around with the scan visor on constantly and can instead enjoy the visuals :)
However I have three other titles sitting in front of me - Halo 2 (yes it’s old - but I didn’t get an XBox until very recently), Metal Gear Solid 4 (never played any of the others, but I’m told the plot is easy to catch up on, and the game itself is more a bunch of movies than anything), and Fallout 3, which I pre-orderd sight unseen because the first two were so awesome. Also I still debate constantly between buying GRID now and Gran Turismo 5 later, or just waiting for GT5 (no interest here in forking out $40 for a glorified demo via GT5 Prologue. I mean puhLEEZE.) Meanwhile Guitar Hero IV looms on the horizon.
Plus I want several other titles. So many games, so little time :) More recently I snagged Blast Factor via PS3 download just to have a nice shooter hanging around. Pure mindless entertainment. It’s important to have such things :) It was a toss up between that and Super Stardust HD, but Blast Factor looks a little better on my currently non-HD TV. Once we get the new TV I’ll probably end up with both of these games.
AND FINALLY: Much happiness ensued: STAR CONTROL 2. This game is bloody ancient - but man, it was fucking awesome back in the day. This game and its predecessor was a huge deal when I was a freshman - I recall walking down the hall one day and no less than seven dorm rooms had this thing going at the same time. This is old school beat the crap out of your buddy stuff - both folks playing ON THE SAME KEYBOARD, yessir, this is back before that fancy schmancy internet crap, might have even pre-dated the granddaddy of PC gaming networking, IPX. You could smell the sweat of your opponent as you crushed his fragile ego (hell, I remember doing exactly that - I was regarded as one of the better to best players on the floor at one point, and this upstart guy was touted as a contender. We went 3 games in a row with a huge audience, him dripping with confidence, me just looking for a challenge. I schooled the fuck out of him. Not only did I win all three games, I believe in the third one he was so frustrated he made stupid choices and I think I didn’t even lose a ship. Ah, the halcyon days of me being good at something). Well, now it’s been released in open source, there’s a Mac version, and I’m just a little happy retro gamer guy at the moment. They even added network support.
I miss Star Control 3 as well, but that one apparently is regarded as a bastard step child. Eh.
Hordes/Warmachine:
Between a 2 week family vacation and a shit pile of overtime at the office, I have managed to miss every single play night at the LGS for going on 6 weeks now, so I hope to hell I can make it this week.
I may have found some more opponents tho, which is good :) First, my daughter expressed interest in learning, and while it’s hard to judge as yet if she just wanted more Father/Daughter time or if she actually enjoys this particular hobby, she has been painting up my old miniatures like mad (I used to just paint, but not play, and I’ve had a pile of metal laying around for going on 12 years now) and said she really wanted to play the actual game.
So in the interest of testing that desire without blowing another $50 on a starter box, I bought some bases of various sizes and we played a game where she proxied a starter and we had at. She surprised me - retained focus for over half of the 3 hour game and even had a base strategy she was going for - run me to the edge of the table and then throw me off. I was rather impressed - she’s only 11, after all. So at this point we’ve played once, and we’re on again today to try again. If she maintains interest, while we can’t exactly afford to cover TWO of us playing this expensive hobby, we’ll look at getting her some initial pieces. On the convenient as all fuck front, she’s also interested in Circle Orboros - which means we can trade minis back and forth ad nauseum since that’s all I’m collecting for now.
Now that I have bases, I may also get another friend of mine lured in at least to try it - he doesn’t have the cash to buy his own models right now, but we can proxy him in with bases and copies of my cards, at least. As I pointed out, once PP releases a deck of Horde’s cards he could conceivably just proxy a whole frickin army on cheap ass bases. And then a bud down in San Antonio, I discovered, also plays! Has a huge retired Cygnar army to boot - he played for several years until the game became unfun when one of their group went crazy and bought everything - so that any game turned into which counter he was going to bring to the table instead of playing something comparable.
On the army front - last purchase was a copy of Hordes Evolution and a Blackclad Wayfarer. Plus a metal base to mount him to since he’s so blasted top heavy. He will be the first mini I assemble AFTER painting, since his huge staff thing will be a bit of an issue to paint behind, so that should serve as some useful experience. Next month comes the Woldwarden and then I’ll have my scrappy 500pt army.
After some 15+ hours I’m finally happy with my Shifting Stones paint job, so now they just need a coat of protective finish and I will have my first Hordes models completed. I had some trouble in places with these, but I learned some good things so I made the right choice as to first mini’s - with such an overall simple construction I could focus on technique more than coordination, in a sense, and hey, they’re just rocks so if they aren’t spot on awesome that’s ok. I tried to get fancy with the coloration of the glowing bits in the middle - one yellow, one orange, one red - and that ended up being a fine idea but difficult to implement consistently. I also was pleased to discover that I do actually have the coordination to paint AROUND the tiny little glowing runes, so my thoughts of having to dry brush in those flat parts and dealing with the time and luck of that turned out to be unnecessary. I watered down the paint a bit to paint the runes themselves, and did that first in the lighter color (of the “glow”), so that any smudges around the outside could just be covered up with the darker color. Creating a “glow” effect I sort of failed at, even with looking at the sample ones online, but hey, live and learn. I’m still pretty pleased with how they turned out - I even went back over the raised carvings on the surface of the stones with metallic silver, which created a nice subtle effect since it mostly blends in with the gray until you look at it from certain angles, when BAM the carvings just pop out at you.
If I get a chance this evening I think I’ll do the Argus’ next. I’m still debating painting them the same color, or different. I’m also going to try my hand at some shading on the musculature. We’ll see how that goes :)
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