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Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 3

April 2, 2015 by Belghast

Over the last several days I have been rattling off a series of studios and game teams that I appreciate. Today will mark my final day of this process, but I am hoping that it has inspired some of you out there to make your own posts about the developers you appreciate. The person I really appreciate is Scarybooster for getting this thing started back in I believe 2010? Scary has a way of coming up with these great ideas, like he is the person who decided the Alliance of Awesome needed to happen as well. Unfortunately he no longer updates his blogs, and has deleted more of them in the past than I can count. So if you know Scary tell him he needs to stop doing that shit and keep coming up with interesting and awesome ideas.

Blizzard – Heroes of the Storm Team

I talked about League of Legends yesterday, and there is no denying it’s market domination in the MOBA arena. The problem is League is far more complicated of a game than I care to play. I get frustrated trying to figure out what I should build when, and then Blizzard comes along and creates an MOBA for someone like me. This game does what Blizzard does best, boil a genre down to its most basic essence and polish it until it shines. This is precisely how I feel about HoTS and its impact on the MOBA genre. Through a series of quick this or that choices you can build out your character and get right back into the action without constantly being afraid that you built the wrong thing. While friends have pointed out that this greatly limits what you can do with any given champion… I am fine with this and in fact welcome it. As much as I enjoy a “Tanky Darius” I would rather just have some clear messaging on what the intent of every champion was, and Heroes of the Storm gives this to me. On top of this the map design is awesome, and each one feels equally enjoyable with its own specific mechanics. I think the entire world is tired of playing Summoner’s Rift.

SOE/Daybreak – Landmark Team

Every time I talk about the company formerly known as Sony Online Entertainment, I do so with a little bit of heartbreak. Daybreak is not the same company, but I feel like the people that are still there are trying their damnedest to make this situation work. There is a lot of negative press that I could be talking about on my blog, about the poor decisions of the company managing Daybreak but for the most part I have tried not to. I feel like there is plenty of negativity out there already on this subject, and that the people who are still there need our support now more than ever. With that said this post goes out to everyone who has ever been a part of the Landmark game. While I am not playing it right now, I still think it is an extremely cool concept and I keep meaning on jumping right back in. Landmark is essentially the ultimate building game in every possible way, and the amount of stuff that the community has been able to create because of the excellent toolset developed by this team is phenomenal. This game blew me away, and I am still constantly amazed by the sort of things I am seeing built. So bravo to the folks who are no longer with the team, and bravo to the folks still there fighting to keep the ship going forward.

Undead Labs – All of the Them

For most of these I have singled out an entire team to talk about, but this time I am breaking that trend and instead talking about an entire studio. I love Undead Labs. I love their spirit, and I love their dedication… and quite honestly I love the way they interact with the public. I remember when State of Decay was about to release on the XBox 360 I was completely pumped for it. I went home that night played the game for several hours and then wrote a pretty gushy blog post the very next day. Within moments of posting the blog I had it being retweeted by Annie Strain the wife of Undead Labs Founder Jeff Strain, who then proceeded to engage with me in a back and forth about my blog post and the game in general. That sort of genuine interaction is just so damned refreshing, and it seems to extend to every single team member. I was lucky enough to get to hang out and talk to several of them during Pax South, and they all had this infectious joy over the games they had created and were creating. While I still desperately want a multiplayer version of State of Decay, I have faith that sooner or later the team will give me something akin to that experience. In the meantime they just seem like a really damned cool studio, and I look forward to watching as their latest game Moonrise progresses to launch. Additionally I feel like I am probably buying yet another copy of State of Decay as the special Year One edition should be landing shortly.

Motiga – Gigantic Team

This is another tale of me just really liking a game studio. I went to Pax South knowing next to nothing about this game other than the fact that it existed, had a cartoony art style and used a teal and orange color scheme it all of its marketing. I walked away from Pax South being both a fan of the game and of the team behind it. I was lucky enough to participate in several plays of the game, and got some time to talk to several members of the development and community staff. They all seem just as amped about this game as the players did, and it was awesome to be coached by the folks who built the game… or have them marvel when I apparently found a bug that nobody had actually found yet. The game is just really damned fun, and that seems to be the focus on making sure the various champion interactions are enjoyable. I have no clue what the timeframe for this games launch is but I look forward to it anxiously. Playing it with two other members of the AggroChat crew against a minor YouTube celebrity, and defeating him… was pretty much the highlight of my Pax South experience. So keep up the awesome work and I look forward to playing this game with my friends when it releases.

Every Single Game Developer

While I have singled out a handful of individuals for specific games that I really love playing… I feel like for this final day of my #DAW2015 love fest… I want to change things up a bit. Basically this goes out to every single game developer out there, regardless of what you are working on or for what company. You guys are living the dream of so many of us who did not choose to chase it. While there are absolutely days I’m thankful I am not in that industry, especially as another studio decimates its staff to realign for this or that reason, there are other days where I pine over the path not taken. You folks are my rockstars, and even if you are making a game that no one will ever play… you are being awesome. Games bring me so much joy, and there is a cast of often nameless and faceless people who struggled through crunch time to get that product into my hands. As I talk about the games I talk about, I try my best to always be aware of the folks behind the scenes that made it happen. So to all the game developers out there… keep making awesome stuff and I will keep playing it. Thank you all.

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 1

March 31, 2015March 31, 2015 by Belghast

A few days ago my good friend Rowanblaze tagged me in his post about Developer Appreciation Week 2015. To the best of my knowledge this event was actually started by Scarybooster, but I cannot for the life of me remember if I actually got a post in while it was going on. If not then this is something I absolutely need to remedy. This morning as a result my post is going to be a little contorted but I really enjoyed the format from Ravanel of Ravalation… so I am rolling with that. Thus begins my super contorted and rambling Developer Appreciation Week post.

Funcom Games – The Secret World Team

This game is absolutely phenomenal. I was lucky enough to get on board early and do one of the lifetime subscriptions and I have to say I have never once questioned that investment. Knowing that it is always waiting there for me to return to the world of the Templars and the Illuminati… makes me happy inside. While there are a lot of interesting things about the game, the part that always floors me is just how well written the quests are in this game, and how well the whole cinematic feel of them works. I greatly prefer silent protagonist games, because they allow me to substitute my own inner dialog into the scenes. What is awesome about TSW is they manage to do this is a way so that the silence feels like an answer. I desperately need to poke my head back in and try out the new combat changes, because the nightmare level content was ultimately what crushed the hopes of my group. From what I hear a lot of these rough spots have been ironed out.

Square Enix – Final Fantasy XIV Team

I am constantly amazed at just how damned good this game really is. Every detail of the game has a loving care applied to it. Once again it is the storyline that first sold me on the game. It gave me a series of characters that felt like my party in a traditional Final Fantasy game… and then made me care about each and every one of them.. yes even Thancred. What has kept me coming back however is just how good their content is, and how frequent their updates are. I’ve heard that the team is only around fifteen people… and that they are doing both the live patches and expansion development at the same time. I am floored that they can manage to crank out a new patch every month, and major patch every few months… all the while working on a brand new expansion? The way they manage to make content remain relevant to the players is pure magic, because I really enjoy running low level content with friends… and making it feel like it matters again. Last night they patched in the 2.55 content… and I am completely amped to log in and play it.

Turbine – Lord of the Rings Online Team

If there was a list of games that I wish I played more of, Lord of the Rings Online would be near the top. There is so much for me to enjoy in the game, even not factoring in the fact that I love the franchise behind it. The gameplay is a bit of a throwback to an earlier era, and more than anything it has always reminded me a bit of a modern updated Dark Age of Camelot. That said the part that has always stood out for me is just how well they have managed to create the world of Middle Earth… everything is how I had imagined it while reading the novels. There are so many moments like the above picture where I reach some fabled destination and I have to just stop and sit in awe that I am in this or that place. Another strange thing that I love about this game are the horses. They have the absolute best horse movement of any game. As you are moving around the horse feels right, which adds so much to the feeling that you are in a living breathing world… and not just a themepark.

Trion Worlds – Rift Team

This was the game that finally came along and successfully dislodged me after playing seven years of World of Warcraft, and that in itself is no small feat. What makes me love the game however is its class system. I love being able to mix and match bits and pieces of class trees to make something unique that does exactly what I want it to do. Especially from a tanking front, this game will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first game to give me both charge and deathgrip in the same build. The raid content was absolutely insane, and I greatly enjoyed the times I was able to experience it. This is one of those games that I boot up every few weeks to poke my head in, especially now that it is free to play. I’ve spent a lot of its four year history with an active subscription, and there is just something about the world that keeps me coming back. With the impending release of the new Wardrobe system I am looking forward to popping back in and playing some more. Trion was the first team to make me believe that a company could keep a monthly content release schedule, and through it all they have created some very impressive work.

SOE/Daybreak – Everquest II Team

Everquest II for me is a tale of the path not taken. With EQ2 and WoW releasing at the same time, some of my friends went to EQ2, and I and the majority of my friends went to WoW. That said this has been one of those games that I keep coming back to so that I can re-experience this ball of nostalgia that is Norrath. This game has hands down the best world building of any game on the market. I love the world of Norrath 2.0 with all its detail and quirkyness. Sure it is not exactly how I remember it from the original Everquest, but that is part of the charm for me. Every now and then you will be knee deep in a dungeon, and you will see some little call back that makes you realize “oh my god this is that place” that you recall from your memory, changed over time and presented in so much higher fidelity. While I have issues with the combat system and likely always will… this is a game that I cannot seem to keep myself away from for long. Even today EQ2 is a sort of comfort food for me… where I will hang out inside and vege out on the couch dusting off my Shadow Knight and exploring Norrath with new eyes.

To Be Continued…

I feel like I have so many developers that I want to show my appreciation for… that I had to break these up into multiple posts. Tune in tomorrow as I talk about several more developers. Hopefully this will cause your own upwelling of nostalgia and end up with you posting your own thoughts in blog form. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to use my comment space for that same mission. There is so much negativity out there, that I believe completely in this notion of the Developer Appreciation Week. Reach out and show your appreciation to those games you love.

Moggle Mog Extreme

March 30, 2015 by Belghast

Bowling Aftermath

It feels like I have been on this sequence of strange posts lately, so this morning I am trying to get back to the normal swing of things. This weekend was spent mostly recovering from Friday night, and not in the way that you might think. We had a “team bonding” outing with my co-workers to go bowling, and it had been about a decade since I had last attempted to hurl a large marble down a wooden plank. We bowled three games, and it feels like that was one too many for me. The biggest issue I had was the fact that the shoes were absolutely awful. At some point they changed from what I knew as the standard bowling shoes to these strange velcro things that I never could get to fit well at all. I have a size 13 shoe, but my foot is not all that terribly wide at least not anymore.

I am not sure if they handed me a wide width or if they just make them insanely wide to accommodate lots of different feet but in any case my foot was sliding around like crazy in them. Normally I would be able to fiddle with the laces to get it tight enough to work for me. However the hook and eye velcro strap mess just would not synch terribly tightly. Leaving my foot sliding around in the shoe most of the night. At the end of the evening I had what felt like a stone bruise and it still hurts to flex my toes. Other than that the evening was rather enjoyable, apart from the fact that I have zero skill at bowling these days. The absolute best game for me was around 100, and I am not sure if I got any strikes. The thing I did learn is that I apparently throw the ball exceptionally hard. The lanes had a miles per hour readout saying how hard you threw each ball, and most of my coworkers were in the sedate range of 10-13 mph. The hardest I saw from me was 22.5 mph, and the slowest about 18 mph… apparently I was angry at the lanes.

Moggle Mog Extreme

From an accomplishment standpoint, the highlight of my weekend is definitely Saturday night before the podcast when we pulled together a raid. One of the fights that we held in almost a state of reverence is Good King Moggle Mog Extreme. It seemed like the pinnacle of difficult fights because it was so different from the normal version. Anytime we brought the fight up, it was quickly ushered away as being too much of a pain in the ass for us to try. Maybe it is the progress in turn 9, or maybe it is something else… but when it was brought up this weekend there was more of a chorus of “might as well” than anything. What makes Moggle Mog extreme so difficult is that you have a very limited window to perform the fight. At roughly 90% Mog stops taking damage from player attacks. Instead when any member of his “court” of Moggles dies, he saps his own life healing all Moggles to full health.

From a functional standpoint this means that you need to drop the health of every single Moggle before finally finishing one off. Two make this more complicated there is a tank swap mechanic, and at certain points during the fight the White and Black Mages will cast a spell that needs to be interrupted by dealing a damage to them. You get three rounds to lower Mog’s health, before he starts channeling Ultima, which will wipe the entire raid if it casts. Mog is also immune to any damage while any member of his Moogle court is alive. This means that on the final turn you have to make sure every single Moogle is down low enough to be able to finish them off in a few hits, and jump straight on the boss and burn like hell. I am not sure if it was on our third or fourth attempt but we managed to get everything to work just right and finished the fight. It feels extremely good to have beaten a fight that all of us had declared was “complete bullshit”.

Appleanche

I spent most of the rest of my in game time alternating between two activities… World of Darkness and Botany. In World of Darkness I have once again had zero luck in getting one of the two pieces of Dragoon loot that I need to drop. Right now I am down to the boots that drop from the very first boss, and the chestpiece that drops from the second boss. This makes for some demoralizing gameplay late in the instance when I know I have zero hope of getting anything cool apart from maybe a puff of darkness minion. Sunday is a notoriously bad day for running raids in any game, but it seems like this is doubly the case in Final Fantasy XIV. The worst was a dungeon where we ended up having to fight the Cloud of Darkness boss five times before we finally did things well enough to win and get our loot. That run was fraught with other issues however so it was not a huge surprise that we were failing at the end of the raid. I spent more than my fair amount of time tanking adds a a Dragoon. Hopefully I can get in tonight and maybe just maybe pick up a chest piece before the raid.

Saturday during the podcast and last night during the 90 minute season finale for The Walking Dead I worked on leveling Botany. My goal with trade skills thus far has been to brute force my way to 25 without the assistance of leves, while I have my recruit a friend helm experience bonus. Once I hit 25 I start working on leves allowing me to shoot up quickly from that point on. During the podcast I managed to hit 25, and then last night I started working on leves in the South Shroud area. Botany has one of the best named leves I have encountered called Appleanche where you are asked to pick a bunch of Sprite Apples from this grove within a set amount of time. Not sure why but that quest just makes me happy, and overall there is something amazingly calming about harvesting flowers and chopping down trees in this game. After a few hours of Botany I found it rather easy to get to sleep last night, so maybe that is something I should indulge at the tail end of the night every night.

The Patreon Thing

March 29, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 50 – Game Club 2 – Trine 2

Last night we recorded our 50th episode of AggroChat and I have to say that is a bit staggering now that I think about it. We’ve almost recorded a full year of AggroChat, and we only “missed” a single week. In fact now that I think about it two weeks from now will actually be our one year anniversary show. It is insane how an entire year of recording gets away from you like that. Things are going to be a bit strange over the next few weeks as Kodra has accepted a new job and is moving out to Seattle to join Tam and some of our other friends there. Everyone is joking that they are trying to recruit everyone to Seattle, but honestly the cost of living difference would be horrible coming from Tulsa. Besides according to the New York Times we are apparently this up and coming hipster hub. It is shocking the number of smaller game conventions that are happening in this area.

In any case this week we talked about Trine 2, an exceptionally beautiful game about a Gluttonous Warrior, a Grumpy Wizard and a Larcenous Rogue. Honestly this is one of the shortest shows we have recorded in a long while because there just wasn’t a whole lot to talk about in regards to Trine. We came down on multiple sides of the game with some of us enjoying it, others not feeling much of anything about it, and still others disliking it immensely. From that aspect I feel like the first round robin title was a success. From the aspect of giving us a lot of material to talk about, maybe not quite so much. We also announced our third game club title, which would be one of my picks: Darkest Dungeon. Since that is a game about dungeons… and mental illness I have a feeling like it is going to create a lot of stories as a result.

The Paetron Thing

Yesterday I wrote a strange piece, and among many things that folks got out of it, at least one person thought I was talking at least in some part about the current Patreon trend. I honestly didn’t mean it to come across like that, but it is proof that we can all read the same post but take vastly different messages from it. Patreon and I have this odd relationship, where I think it is both really awesome… and worrisome at the same time. The awesome part is it gives people who are creating a lot of really awesome content a way to actually do that as a living, providing them a semi-regular source of income from the creation of “stuff”. The troublesome aspect is that I seem to see people who are NOT creating much content, throwing up Patreons left and right because it seems to be the latest way to get something for nothing. Internet celebrity is apparently now a thing worth funding? In the case of full disclosure I back a couple of different Patreons because the people involved are creating a regular stream of content that I value, so I don’t want it to sound like I am against the concept.

Where I end up wrestling with myself is that there are times I think “man it would be nice to have my costs offset”. Within a few seconds a little voice inside me pipes up and says that if I did advertising or a patreon or any other way of offsetting my expenses that it would somehow “cheapen” the process. I’ve always considered my blog a labor of love, and this whole getting up every morning to write something new is something I do… because I enjoy it, not because I am trying to profit from it. All of that said there are some very real and concrete expenses to keep it all up, and if I did not have a good paying job I would have to stop doing pretty much everything that I do. I added up some details this morning and for hosting and domain registration alone I am paying the equivalent of a little more than $60 a month once you factor in everything. Then you tack onto that another $150 a month for really fast internet, and various game subscriptions and you quickly get into some real money. So while part of me thinks that I should be creating a Patreon as a sort of Tip Jar, there is another part of me that says “don’t”.

Limited Funding

Patreon is an amazing thing for those who are creating the content and actually needing the money to keep the process going. The problem is… I don’t need the money in the strictest sense. My fear is that as people start popping these accounts up for the fun of it, that they will dilute the money away from the people that actually need it. The blogging and the podcasting and the occasional streaming… are all part of my larger hobby of “gaming” and I just view all of these costs as being part of that bigger habit. If I were to lose my job or something drastic like that, I would actually have a real need for it. I feel like setting up a Patreon now would be akin to “crying wolf”, and asking for the goodwill of my readers and listeners before I in the strictest since needed to. Maybe I am odd in my point of view, in that I view this relationship between reader and writer as some sort of a social contract. I provide for you, and you give me a reason to keep making content. But like all relationships I feel like there is always the problem that one side might end up taking advantage of the other.

Setting up a Patreon page, because it is seems to be the popular thing to do… feels like taking advantage of that relationship. Because honestly I know there will be people out there who do donate because they want me to feel loved and appreciated. I have an exceptionally warm group of readers and listeners. I appreciate every single one of you out there, and that is a big part of the reason why I have turned down every single person wanting to place advertisements on my blog. I don’t want to cheapen that relationship, and I don’t want to tarnish our friendship. That is not to say that at some point the expenses of my sites will grow to a point where I simply cannot weather the entire burden myself. But that time is not now. Until it reaches that point then I will continue avoiding trying to “monetize” what I do for my own personal enjoyment. I will continue also suggesting people show support for the Patreons that DO need the funding, and are providing a wealth of content as a result.