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Character Contemplations 1: Frosta (Ice Blast/Devices Blaster)

In Case of Emergency, Call FrostaMy first level-capped hero was Frosta. It is the same character I made in beta, when my wife said I should name her after a She-Ra character. (I am far enough away from the namesake to be safe.) After playing a War Mace Tanker for a while, it was nice to have some real damage. At the time, I was in a supergroup with an Earth Controller named Heaven’s Hold, and I usually had someone keeping the enemies pacified. That makes it much easier to freeze the Hellions.

I played carefully to see as much content as possible. Whenever possible, Frosta completed every story arc available. I was quite bitter about the arcs that were bugged, but Issue 11’s Ouroboros will let me get back to them. This meant a fair amount of time soloing, which let me get through all the arcs without out-leveling them running others’ missions in teams. Conveniently, almost everyone from that original supergroup quit a couple of months in, leaving me lots of solo time.

Continue reading Character Contemplations 1: Frosta (Ice Blast/Devices Blaster)

Bridge over uncanny valley

If you’re (still) unfamiliar with the uncanny valley theory, you can get familiar here.

With that out of the way, now you can take a look at Trusim and see the stuff they got going over there. Very, very neat. As it was pointed out to me while discussing it elsewhere, this is not very much new tech, but rather a very good amalgamation of a few existing techs that are out there now, along with very good tools to get the juice out of those techs.

Still, it’s a little glimpse at the kind of thing we’re gonna be seeing in the years to come in many of our games. Which, yet again every time one of these little leaps comes along, will reopen the whole uncanny valley debate.

Brief thoughts follow.

Continue reading Bridge over uncanny valley

Marginally On-Topic Music

At any given time, my wife has a musical addiction of the month. I will get a contact buzz or more, then try to figure out how to work it into a gaming-related post. I often give up, but this month’s is Rilo Kiley. Perfect: the lead singer is the girl from The Wizard, so keep your power gloves off her. (I was going to link to a song here, but the Portions For Foxes video distracts from the song a bit. That is the song my wife recommends, and you can play it at the Rilo Kiley link above.)

: Zubon

Residual self-image

An old WoW partner of mine was thinking about getting back into the game, and soon we were talking about playing together again. We both had level 49 Night Elves on Dark Iron which we naturally figured we’d take out of retirement. This 49 is the most advanced character I have. My main had recently been a level 25 Blood Elf on Sargeras. (I couldn’t transfer the 49 over since he’s Alliance, and my Sargeras crew was Horde.)

Now, my life has been crazy for the past several weeks, with lots of travel, an unexpected move out-of-state, and my computer out of commission for a week to boot. With free time being scarce, and my ambitions about actually experincing the endgame one of these days, I was really looking forward to the 24-level boost.

So last week, we brought out the old guns — our 49’s. I logged in and materialized in Ironforge, which I hadn’t seen in years. Spent a while re-speccing our talent trees and re-organizing our action bars, since we hadn’t logged in since the talent wipe. Then it was a quick griffin ride to Burning Steppes, and there we were, ready to go.

We picked a quest and started marching across the map, dodging elementals and worgs on our way. And after about a minute, something strange happened.
Continue reading Residual self-image

Two Hard Drive Notes

Today’s Nobel Prize in Physics is for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance. This was discovered less than twenty years ago, and now you use it in your iPod. Less than twenty years from unknown to ubiquitous: The Singularity is Near. On that Nobel Prize link, note that the page 1 graph is logarithmic. That is a >100x improvement in a decade.

If you have an iPod and still have some money to toss around, why not convert your computer entirely to flash memory? Hard drives with moving parts are so unreliable, and that 320GB drive will cost a little less than $10,000.

: Zubon

Lord of the Homes

Female-Gamer has recently put up maps to the housing zones coming soon to Lord of the Rings Online. Here is a link to the Breeland homesteads and also the Falathlorn homesteads (I’ll add the link for the Dwarf and Hobbit homesteads when I see them up). Take note that you may click on the map for a screenshot of each particular home. Nice work! Here is a link to some videos of the neighborhoods and the insides of some of the houses. Pricing has been rumored to be 1 gold for a standard home, 7 gold for a deluxe home and 17 gold for the kinship hall with all three having some upkeep fees.

The way they appear to handle availability is still of a concern to me. They claim to be spawning copies of these homesteads as needed. But what if people only want deluxe homes? Will there be a bunch of empty houses because nobody is buying standard homes? The same goes for kinship halls, how can you insure there are enough for every kinship that wants one, without having too many neighborhoods? We will find out soon.

I am looking forward to this, as having a place to call home is a big deal to me. It appears we will be able to decorate the inside and outside as well as adding ambient music to set a background mood. The additional storage will be nice, and being able to recall to my home and the kinship hall will be helpful for getting around.

– Ethic

Rims

I saw a car with rims today. I hate those. Why would you sacrifice function and safety for appearance? Oh, that is probably why my characters look like that.

: Zubon

They also look dumb. Dating for gamers note: do not advertise that you have poor taste and make poor money decisions.

NC Soft’s Carbine Studios: Not New, Not News

Uh, okaaay. NC Soft announces Carbine Studios, and it is heralded in the press as a “new studio”, “acquisition”, “new team”, “unveiled”, etc. Someone has their wires crossed or NCSoft is trying to drum up some press to get past the tepid industry response to the Tabula Rasa open beta.

Carbine Studios “was founded in 2005 as a division of NCsoft North America by ten former members of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft core development team.”

First, why wasn’t this news two years ago, and second, how the hell many people worked on World of Warcraft? Everytime I turn around, there is another new studio founded by former members of World of Warcraft (like Red5 for example). Even more curious, they all seem to be leading or key members of Blizzard’s dev team. Who the heck is left at Blizzard? Is this why Burning Crusade was more like “warm lint crusade” than something really hot? How is this an acquisition or a new studio?

[“This is a dev team made in heaven,” said Robert Garriott, CEO for NCsoft’s North American business. “This group is as experienced as they come in the area of computer role playing and multiplayer game design. Making successful games is second nature to them. They are a very welcome addition to the NCsoft family. The gaming community should be excited to see what great things come out of Carbine Studios in the coming years.”]

You have GOT to be kidding me. I mean honestly, I don’t mind a little hype in a press release, but “a dev team made in heaven” that is “as experienced as they come”? Then why is it, two years later, they need an “unveiling” and we still don’t know what they are working on?

[Details are scarce, but NCsoft said that Carbine is currently working on an unannounced project that “promises to break new ground in massively multiplayer gaming.”]

Ok, this line really makes me ill. Didn’t Garriot say this about Tabula Rasa (I have yet to rant on this, it is coming, I promise). There should be a law that says you can’t say something like this without qualifying it with some facts and examples. When someone like Garriot says stuff, people listen…he isn’t doing the industry any favors by fluffing up his own games or NCSoft “new” studios, particularly when there isn’t anything worth fluffing. Fine, say your game is great, awesome, or whatever, but don’t call it evolutionary (that’s my line by the way), “the most anticipated game ever”, or “ground-breaking”.

The bar must be getting really low these days…