Month: January 2018

The Rejuvenation Pit

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The magical doodad in this one involves age reversal. You can pick up some penalties if you sacrifice too many people to the pit and get yourself bumped down to fifteen years old. This immediately begs the question: Why can’t you get stat bonuses for going from 30s or 40s back to your 20s? How come there’s penalties for messing up, but no benefits for actually using the pit correctly? The answer is that characters who are already in their 20s would be unable to get those bonuses, which would be unfairly penalizing them, because it’s not like they got more characteristics at chargen or anything.

Additionally, I expect few parties will end up stumbling into the penalties, whereas many parties would figure out how to get themselves the bonuses. This means that characteristic bonuses could be had for the low price of snuffing a few Chaos sorcerers, which would benefit people who rely on those characteristics a lot (like melee builds) while being barely noticeable to people who don’t tend to use them in the first place (like ranged builds, face builds, psyker builds – anyone for whom being in melee means something has gone horribly wrong, and 5 extra points of Toughness and Strength won’t change that). It’s not like it’s a short-lived bonus, or one that requires a lot of effort to acquire.

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This Would Be A New Low In Advertising If It Weren’t For Evony

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Google likes to serve me up ads for mobile games, since I do occasionally play them, usually just to have something to keep my hands busy while I listen to podcasts. This is how I ended up playing and subsequently hating Galaxy of Heroes. That’s not nearly as bad as this can get, though. Today I saw an ad for a game called “Galaxy War” (or maybe “Galactic War,” it’s hard to tell since the name is so generic that it’s buried in the store, thank God) that’s almost literally an asset flip of Unity’s free Space Shooter Tutorial. Now, it’s not quite an asset flip, since it does include some online leaderboard stuff that isn’t in the original tutorial, but the actual assets and gameplay are identical. They added some bells and whistles (probably Skinner box in nature) and called it a day.

Asset flipping isn’t new, but I got served up a video ad for this one while playing another (unrelated) mobile game. Usually this level of amateur hour sham shows don’t have an advertising budget. Like, Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire is just a Game of War clone (which is, itself, only slightly modified from Evony, which has been blighting the internet for nearly a decade now), but it’s at least got new assets. It might be copying Canadian Devil-grade fun-free mechanics that profit exclusively off of gambling addicts and advertising itself with a tower defense ad “demo” despite having no such gameplay in the actual game, but at least on the surface it appears to be an actual game of some kind. They don’t actually advertise the fact that their game is brazen theft.

I Hate EA So Much

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In 2015 Electronic Arts, the sole licensees for Star Wars video games, released a Star Wars game that was completely crippled by insultingly expensive loot box mechanics to unlock your favorite characters. As an example: unlocking Darth Vader, while theoretically possible in normal gameplay, would require an enormous investment of time, or alternatively you could buy a couple of loot boxes and hope he pops out. The game I’m referring to is, of course, Galaxy of Heroes, because Battlefront II 2017 was released in 2017.

Side note: Why couldn’t they just keep up the numbering on the Battlefront games? It’s not like there’s an evolving plot to stay on top of. Calling Battlefront 2015 just “Battlefront” (we had to append the year ourselves) rather than Battlefront III didn’t signal a reboot of the franchise or anything. There’s nothing to reboot. You’re either a rebel soldier or a storm trooper, you fight battles on different planets, go. Every release is going to cover the same plot in the same eras, with possibly the exception of newer games including Resistance vs. First Order in addition to Rebel Alliance vs. Empire and Republic vs. Confederacy. Maybe you add some new units or game modes, but there’s not an ongoing story to reboot. Every single one of the games is already its own retelling of the Star Wars octilogy (and counting).

Whining aside (note from ed: this is a filthy lie, whining will remain front and center for the duration of the post), Galaxy of Heroes bugs me because it seems like it might actually be a well made game with a reasonably fun (if blatantly pandering) premise, but then it does the usual mobile game thing where actually playing the game at a reasonable pace requires blatantly extortionate amounts of money.

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Worldbuilding: Climate and Culture

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Talking about how to worldbuild properly is a thing that people like to do. I approve of the general idea of putting as many writing processes out there as possible, because you never know what’s going to work for any specific writer, which means all you can really do is toss out as many possibilities as you can and hope one sticks. To boil worldbuilding down to its most critical elements, though, the one thing you need to accomplish regardless of what else you’re doing is to make elements of the setting affect one another. This is something that can get lost in the weeds when you’re filling in one of those worldbuilding template dealies that people like, whether that’s doing what I do and filling in some kind of encyclopedia style multi-sectioned textbook entry on the setting or answering a long list of questions about the world or whatever. My encyclopedia-style entry, for example, is divided into climate/geography, culture/religion, economy, government/law, history, magic, and military, and I have little notes about how each of those should work, and I’m going to post them in a bit, because they work for me and maybe they will work for you, too.

The important thing to remember, however, is that only the first entry filled in or the first question answered or the first detail added is fully under your control. Everything else after that must acknowledge the existence of everything that came before. If you establish that your setting is almost entirely water with only occasional islands and your inhabitants are regular old land-dwelling, air-breathing humans, you cannot then write about how an empire rose to military hegemony because of their unstoppable heavy cavalry derived from their knightly houses, because in an island-based setting any military power needs a strong navy first and foremost and there is hardly any land for cavalry to outmaneuver enemies on to begin with.

That out of the way, let’s talk about specific facets of worldbuilding.

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Osea the Invincible

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Osea is one of the major powers of the Ace Combat setting of Strangereal. Once Ace Combat 7 releases, it will have fought a total of three major wars in just 35 years. That’s a generation and a half, and in that span Osea has fought the Belkan War in 1995, the Circum-Pacific War of 2010, and the Osea-Erusea War starting in 2019. I can’t decide if it’s ridiculous that Osea has fought so many massive, continent-scale wars without any sign of long term damage to its industry or economy or if this is just a natural side effect of all Strangereal wars being decided in about two dozen sorties and thus lasting like six months.

Not to mention that Strangereal is a world where fighter pilots either fly perfectly uneventful patrols or else just sit around the airbase playing video games all day until there’s a major battle to fight. No one ever seems to fly a perfectly ordinary air patrol and actually encounter something. This is true even though it’s standard in the first mission to dogfight a small number of enemy fighters in order to get anyone new to the series used to the basic controls. That would seem like the perfect situation to be on a totally random patrol when you find an enemy patrol and they engage, but it’s usually “enemy bombers are going to blow up our airbase and finish us off completely, Player One, you’re our last hope for survival!”