You know, I wonder just how many of the people of the so-called Alliance to Preserve the Expanded Universe actually intersect in a Venn Diagram of GamerGate people....
Hmm.... Maybe "love" is not a strong enough word; more like "addicted to Mario Kart 8".
Some people, when they get off work, will come home and have a drink. Others will turn on the news. Still others will watch a game*, catch up on social media, or curl up in a corner and take a nap.
My wife comes home and plays Mario Kart for stress relief.
This is actually fairly close to the setup that I use when playing as Rosalina. From gameasylum.com.
I now have a hard time remembering when she hadn't played Mario Kart online, and when I was ever concerned about how well she'd handle it. Those days are long past; she now has gotten to the point that she recognizes different online players by their names, and surely with a name like "Mom" she's recognizable too.
Due to her love of Mario Kart, I've often wondered whether she'd go for any other online games --yes, MMOs too-- but I'm realistic in that Mario Kart is pretty easy to handle. I think that some games, such as the LEGO games, she'd find interesting, but I've yet to discover a video game she loves as much as Mario Kart.
The reason why I bring this up is because I've been tossing around this idea in my head about gamers, and whether they fall into one of two major groups: those who tend to play a few games all the time, and those who like to try out lots of different games. The border area between the two groups is a bit hazy, but the overall grouping is what I'm looking at. I'll break the two groups down, so you get a feel for where I'm coming from.
***
The Tried and True
When I think of the gamer who sticks to a few games, I think of my dad. Okay, he's not a gamer, but if you get him interested in playing something, he'll pull out the chessboard.
And that's pretty much it.
We've tried to interest him in different games, even simpler strategy games than chess**, but he always returns to the chessboard.
Play chess in the morning, defeat an alien invasion force in the evening. From the movie Independence Day.
My wife is cut from a similar mold: she plays Mario Kart 8, she plays Settlers of Catan and a few other board games, and that's about it. We get new games every so often, but the learning process with her can be pretty painful; she frequently gets frustrated by my and our friends' explanations on how to play a new game, and she'll just say "let's just play it and we'll figure it out!" And you can imagine just how THAT ends up...
The youngest mini-Red seems to have a knack to explain new games to her mom, but even then my wife prefers to stick to a few regular games without much deviation.
***
On the other side of the aisle are those that play a lot of different games.
Like the mini-Reds.
They play a lot --and I do mean a lot-- of games. While they don't have the money or resources to amass thousands of games like some collectors do***, they do play a lot of a different variety of games. From Star Wars d20 to Pathfinder to Savage Worlds to Magic: The Gathering to LEGO The Hobbit to LOTRO to Hyrule Warriors, they do get around.
There, but for the love of God (and a lack of money), go I. From a pic of Game Haus Cafe.
They've got a bit of me in them, as I would prefer to try a lot more games than I currently can play. I do have a few stalwarts, but if I'd my choice I'd like to play more games out of my collection.
But a multi-thousand collector of games? No, not me. I may collect games, but not anything close to that many. I'll occasionally get a "we should prune these games" request from my wife, but once I move some titles around to make them fit.... Well... It works out.
***
If there's one true weakness I have, it's for a well written splatbook.
What's a splatbook? It's an RPG book that's not really part of the core ruleset. You'll find them as extras or additions to the current rules, setting books, or extra gear/equipment/races/vehicles/mounts for a game.
For the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars ruleset. Rules, gear, specializations, and starships for those who want to channel their inner Han Solo. From fantasyflightgames.com.
Remember Baldur's Gate? Yep, the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms lives on in D&D 5th Edition. From enworld.org.
Some are even books about how to play a particular RPG, basically taking the core rules and breaking them down into bite sized chunks.
Yes, Pathfinder has so many splatbooks that they created one so that you can figure out how to play the character you want to play. From paizo.com.
I've been known to collect adventure modules, which are premade adventures that you can either run as-is or drop into an ongoing campaign. For the GM who is busy in real life, modules are a godsend.
Ah, my old friend. In my first time playing this module, our party died due to a massive avalanche. Really brilliant, I know. From Wikipedia.
Still, my love of splatbooks probably stems from my love of add-ons to SF&F series/universes. Items such as the Atlas of Middle-earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad, or the Star Trek Technical Manual (original series) brought these settings to life in a way that I hadn't considered before. You can find manuals on how to speak Quenya or Sindarin (two Elvish languages that Tolkien invented for Middle-earth), a "Haynes Guide" to the Millenium Falcon, or an Atlas of Pern.
This was what my copy looked like. From memory-beta.wikia.com.
A lot of these books grew out of fans' desire for them, and publishers and other assorted third parties were more than happy to satisfy the demand. Today, this sort of book seems quaint, but I still love it.
***
Still, I find that I do have some things in common with my brethren who love to play only a few games. We both play games, and we enjoy what we're doing. I may never quite understand why they need to stick with only a few games year in and year out, but I can appreciate the fact that they do love playing games.
Even if it means I know that a blue shell is headed in my direction.
*Particularly during college basketball season; there's always a game on that's interesting.
**We've tried Risk, Rail Baron, Facts in Five, Waterworks, etc. but to no avail. And no, I'm not trying Diplomacy on him; I would kind of like to remain on speaking terms with him.
***Don't believe me? Check out some of the comments on this list from BoardGameGeek.
The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday has come and gone, and I am still alive.
Frankly, I'm kind of surprised about that.
But for a change, there were no political "discussions" during the family get togethers*, so there was little chance that the gathering was going to turn into a shouting match. Not zero, mind you, but a lot less than the average Thanksgiving holiday.
Since my spouse works in retail, she had a very very busy Thanksgiving weekend. And as a consequence, I did as well; I shuttled her back and forth from her employer, so she didn't have to try to find a parking spot or worry about falling asleep driving to or from work.
However, this being our household, there were MMO related activities as well.
***
The Mini-Reds began their server transfer after one last concert in Bree, where the band and others gathered agreed to transfer over to the Gladden server. If the Mini-Reds ever thought that their attendance at the concerts went unnoticed, they were hailed by people when they made it over to Gladden.
My son had a silly grin on his face when he related the story to me, and I couldn't help but smile in return.
Things like this little acknowledgment show some of the best that MMOs have to offer.
***
I advanced a bit further into Wildstar, and continue to be impressed with the game and the stories. I've found that I can put the Texas aspect of the game almost completely in the rear view mirror, but there are times when I just wish that the game would tone it down a bit.
And as far as SWTOR is concerned, I've decided I'm going to make the jump into the coffee expac over the upcoming Christmas holidays. I'll have some time off, so if I do something stupid and stay up until 4 AM playing the game I won't pay the price at work the next day.
Until then, however, I'm going to noodle around Wildstar when I can, and I think I'm going to see if I can push a bit farther into the slog that mid-50s Age of Conan is right now. I've not really touched the game much over the past few months, and I have that old itch that needs scratching.
I've found myself strangely reluctant to make that leap and take a character into the new SWTOR expac.
Whenever I get on the servers, I putter around with checking out the companion stories I never completed, goof off in the fleet, and buzz around Taris and Hoth.
I can't really explain it, since there's no good reason why I couldn't take my Inquisitor into Knights of the Fallen Empire; she'd completed all of the questlines up through Shadow of Revan, and I wasn't doing much of anything with her.*
The auto-leveling that goes on now in the low level zones means that while I can go there, I can't just zoom on by like before. And yes, I do approve of the auto-leveling for low level zones, but I will have to pay more attention when clowning around in Tatooine, for example.
It could be my concern that keeps me from reading novels these days: I won't know when to quit. I have that problem when reading a good book; I'll be reading in the evening, and I'll finally start to get tired, look around and.... It's 4:30 AM.
Whoops.
I could see myself doing that with Knights (and Dragon Age, if I'm being honest). After all, I did it with regular class stories in SWTOR, the WoW leveling experiece, and in other games (such as Age of Conan or Star Trek Online). Hell, I've done it with Civ IV, and that doesn't exactly have an externally defined story at all.
My problem is that I'm no longer a spring chicken, and being up most of the night, consumed in a book or game, will take a much harder toll on me now.
***
While I dither about SWTOR, I've continued to play Wildstar.
I've finally grown to a kind of mental truce about the post-apocalyptic cartoon sexy style that is the toon character design. Part of that is because the questlines and the overarching story don't make a mention of the semi-skimpy nature of the toon and clothing designs, and part of it is because I've actually grown fond of the absolutely goofy design. Right now, my Stalker's headgear makes him look like The Tick's weird younger brother, and so I have this running commentary in my head when he's jumping around: "SPOOOOOON!!!!!"
As far as the World Story goes, hmm..... I'm up past the third World Story part, and I will freely admit that I wasn't expecting Wildstar's world story to move in the direction it did. It now seems more conventional than at first glance**, but right now it wouldn't shock me if the story took another sharp turn towards the unknown. I do like what I see so far, and I'm still hooked, but I'm still on the fence as far as the story goes.***
***
And to nobody's surprise, I've not progressed much at all in NaNoWriMo, and the youngest Mini-Red has already far outstripped my word output.
One of these years I'm going to get into a situation where I can take a couple of days off in early/mid November and spend it just writing.
Okay, who am I kidding? That's not gonna happen.
*I don't even do anything with housing with her, because a) I haven't bothered getting a place on Dromund Kaas and b) I tend to be a lousy decorator. I know beauty when I see it, but actually creating a beautiful environment? Well, I don't have that touch.
**If you play WoW, think of some of the things associated with Twilight's Hammer and a lot of the Old Gods type of stuff and you've got the idea.
***See? I could talk about something like this without spoilers!
I've caught up a bit on the news out of BlizzCon, and it seems that Blizz has made a couple of announcements:
Legion, the new WoW expac, will drop in "Summer 2016". The placeholder is "on or before September 21, 2016".*
Activision Blizzard will no longer release subscriber numbers as part of financial quarterly statements.**
The former isn't exactly a surprise to me. For all their talk about speeding up releases, Blizzard remains incapable of pushing the release cycle beyond the (roughly) 2 year mark. And this was even when Blizz decided to not wait until BlizzCon and release the name of the new expac at Gamescom. Blizz also stopped major content patches for Warlords significantly earlier than in prior expacs, with the unspoken promise of a quicker release cycle for the next expac.
As for the latter, I'm not surprised. At all.
WoW's subscriber numbers were stable from June 2015 (5.6 million) to September 2015 (5.5 million), but Blizzard's announcement of Legion came in August. Speculation ran rampant on various message boards that Blizz was going to release significantly earlier than they had in previous expacs --maybe even as soon as BlizzCon itself-- and I'm sure that kept people subscribed through the latest quarterly ending.
But with Legion's release sometime in Summer (people will hope for June, but will likely see an August or September release), you can expect subs to plummet.
The subscriber number problem has become an albatross for Activision Blizzard, so they are now attempting to jettison it entirely.*** The thing is, Activision Blizzard loved to trumpet their WoW subscriber numbers when it was a positive, so its absence will be interpreted by analysts as a potentially major problem facing the studio. The corporate finance people can talk all they want about better metrics for the health of the game, but they set the standard for years by talking about subscriber numbers, and you can't simply sweep that under the rug.
That said, a reduction in subscriber numbers is going to have an impact on development of the game. WoW has long been a cash cow for Blizzard, and a reduction in that cash flow means that they've got tighter financial constraints on future projects.
***
What does this mean long term?
Blizzard is likely to depend more on Overwatch, Hearthstone, and HotS to provide income where WoW is no longer able to. I believe it a very shrewd business decision that Activision Blizzard is opening it's own television/movie studio, and its first project is the wildly popular Skylanders property. Not WoW, not StarCraft, not Diablo, but Skylanders.
That's where the money is these days, and Activision Blizzard is chasing that money.****
Oh, and one more thing: without subscriber numbers, Blizzard is now free to experiment with F2P models in WoW. Sure, they've always said they'll never go F2P, but with the cash shop and the WoW Token they've currently sidled up right to that F2P line. If Bobby Kotick says "go F2P since I can't justify the staff for WoW", WoW will go F2P.
*There's a very interesting discussion on this over at Blizzard Watch as the Breakfast Topic.
**Word of this came out a few days before BlizzCon itself. Here's the eurogamer.net article on this.
***I'm deliberately saying Activision Blizzard versus Blizzard, because this is more a corporate business decision, not one made in the development house itself.
****Money is in mobile games too, and the purchase of King Digital is expected to bolster that area.
It's BlizzCon, which means that this got viewed and released into the wild:
The oldest Mini-Red was confused. "World of Warcraft?" she asked. "They really improved the CGI on their expac trailers."
"No," I replied. "It's for the movie."
"There's a movie?"
"Yeah. Been in development for a decade or so."
"Looks pretty good," the youngest mini-Red added.
"True, but the dialogue is a bit clunky."
(I decided not to point out the obvious Moses references to Thrall in the trailer. I presume a helluva lot more of those will be in the movie.)
***
Seeing a full trailer, I'm wondering whether this is one of those movies where the best parts are all in the trailers. (I'm thinking the same thing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens as well, so it's not just Warcraft.)
Why? Well, trailers have now been honed to an art form, making even bad movies look good.
Like, oh, this one:
But in terms of Warcraft, I'm really thinking of this:
In a pre-LOTR special effects environment, it's really a pretty good trailer. And the characters didn't sound that bad in their acting, either. But if you actually watch the Dungeons and Dragons movie, you realize pretty quickly how lousy it is: clunky dialogue, confusing plot, metagaming*, and bad acting.
Looking at the trailer for Warcraft, I honestly rolled my eyes at the Thrall parts. I know the story, but the Green Jesus criticism that is often lobbed in Thrall's direction is going to haunt this movie. And he's not even a main character.
For the sake of the MMO genre, I hope it doesn't suck, but I've a bad feeling that some of the worst parts of the Warcraft storyline are going to bite this movie in the ass.
***
Oh, and continuing the tradition of the Warcraft movie being upstaged by Star Wars, the Star Wars: The Force Awakens international trailer was released:
Yes, it has Japanese subtitles, but it shouldn't detract from the trailer experience.
All of the extra scenes not in the US trailer make the movie's secrecy all the more interesting.
Will it succeed? I think that's more on J.J. Abrams than anyone else.
***
While digging up the D&D Movie's trailer, I started punching in some old trailers from movies that I liked when I was a kid. These movies were much older than me, and I used to watch them on television when there were a lot of independent television stations and they would show old 50's and 60's era movies during the day.
Like, say, this one:
Yes, that's really Ernest Borgnine. And yes, they really butchered Viking society in this flick.
Or this one:
Yeah, that's Pat Boone.
*There's even a scene where one character accuses the other of being just low level. I mean, who actually wrote this script, anyway? Was it a riff on a D&D campaign?
EtA: Clarified when I was talking about the D&D movie trailer versus the movie itself.
I'm pretty sure that King Digital is going to be part of their own little mobile empire, and that they'll likely keep their Blizzard owned mobile initiatives separate. Outside of that, however, I'm not sure what synergies they'd have going forward. It would almost seem that they want King Digital to teach the old dog --Activision Blizzard-- some new tricks. But corporate mergers tend to be tricky things; if the merge is performed at the cost of destroying the old corporate culture, the result isn't exactly a good one all around.
"It wasn't a good fit" is corporate speak for "We messed up and tried to hammer a round peg into a square hole."
Not that this will impact MMO space directly, but it does signal even more of a shift of Activision Blizzard's priorities away from PCs and consoles and into mobile space. Rather than hire a bunch of new employees and continue building from the ground up, they just bought a mature company (if you can call a company that's been around 12 years "mature") to do their mobile for them.
Just watch out for that Forsaken level in Candy Crush; those Apothecaries are murder.
*You have to say it in Foghorn Leghorn's voice to get it to work.
