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Time to resurrect this thread. Just finished The Accidental War by Walter Jon Williams. He's one of the veterans of the genre... of all kind of genres (he does milfi, he does "real SF", he does fantasy. Everything and well). After a couple novellas that are not entirely necessary (but still...

You can pick The World of Warcraft Diary by John Staats for reference on the development process of a real game (bonus points for their first cinematic, where the "director" couldn't figure out who was piloting which character on screen since nameplates were turned off, so they were firing off...

I haven't read a book in French for at least 15 years or so. I'm highly anglophile (despite being French) and the only thing I read in French are internet news/newspapers.

Public transportation for the win. Gives me a minimum of 1h45 every day to read. Novels are usually quick reads; serious books take a few weeks or a month at least. I also tend to have 4 or 5 books "currently reading" at the same time. My goodreads challenge for this year is 130 books, and I'm...

You all have phones, right? https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/blizzcon-2019-tickets-revolve-around-invasive-poorly-reviewed-smartphone-app/

"The first female Captain Marvel", it says. And that's technically true. Carol "Captain Marvel" Danvers is last version, not early version.

And they have about six months to have a mostly showable demo for Blizzcon where they'll announce it. Producing episodic content is hard unless you have specifically organized your production pipeline around it. Asheron's Call did it, but they had a world designed for it. By now, retrofitting...

WoW succeeded (commercially) by applying a single player RPG over the MMO part. It still had to fill the parts beyond the RPG (when you've finished leveling and exhausted your quests), which it did more or less adequately. The big problem is that it applied a game paradigm to a different game...

I'm skipping the non-fiction, since it has less of a broad interest than SFF. Currently reading Arrian - The Campaigns of Alexander the Great and finishing When Baghdad ruled the Muslim World. Next is finally reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now!

And that's why I'm mostly against quests as a main mechanic for leveling/gearing. Fact is, it costs a lot to make interesting quests, so the quests become disguised mob grinding. Except you have a very specific amount to grind, not one more, not one less (ok, slightly variable when it's "bring...

That one's not the problem. The problem is that the quest has become the required path to advance. 1) The quests reward you a disproportionate amount of XP at every step 2) The game is balanced so that you have a minimum amount of gear at each level, and the main source of gear is quest...

Fixed for you.

Ahhh, the original eRepublik. Good times.

Good launch, and absolutely awesome infrared view of the landing. When you think they couldn't innovate in the "show", they drop that new one.

If I remember right from streams, there's a card that basically rewrites your creature into a 1/1 with no abilities. Then you kill it and it's gone.

I thought I could rate my various Dungeon Core series. There's a lot of them, meaning a lot of bleh/copycat/not too good ones, and a few good ones. (if you wonder what's Dungeon Core stories, it's stories where the main character is a Dungeon Keeper in the style of the old Bullfrog Game) -...

That was before I visited more of the litrpg genre. Then, you start to appreciate more some of the gems you have. Be very, very wary of russian stuff. Biggest litrpg saga so far I liked is Viridian Gate Online, by James Hunter. Setup is simple: asteroid coming and is going to wipe the entire...

Looks like it's scrubbed.

This is why I said at one time that the real next generation of PVE-based MMO will have to figure out tech for procedural generation of content. And if you want stories, this is the hardest part. Outdoor worlds are probably done. Generating an interesting outdoor world is not that hard. The...

Half of the ship's refugees had managed to escape. After that, Thanos flunkies killed the rest.

Ring events break one of the basic game design lessons, which is that your players should be empowered to guide/control their experience. Timed events are impossible to control. Thus, players hate them. Same thing for raids. People like a lot more encounters in which you control when the boss...

Everyone expects Secret Wars. That's the easiest way you get to make an ensemble cast at the end of a movie arc. They just need not to be greedy and take their time setting things up.

Those worked because they were not instanced. They offered choices, which might or might not be available because of other players already present. That's why BRD didn't work out in WoW: you had a dungeon designed for multiple groups, but you were the only one that could be there. While you'd...

What does that says? Because it's one of those sites where, unless you enable 36+ valid scripts, you can't pass the "oh, we're using cookies" page.

My guess? They saw how Detective Pikachu was coming out and said "how hard can it be, right?"

It's spotted where the uncanny valley is, and tried to do as many laps across it could.

It's mostly about how to figure out how to play. When I started, you had like 5 keyword abilities (ok, plus xxxxwalk so +5), and a couple of special weirds abilities. Today, it looks like there's 25 keywords, plus two dozen abilities, and I have zero idea how they work or are useful...

It is... hideous.

I also have the itch to restart MtG. I came to MtG as they were starting; you had Unlimited and could often find a black-bordered Beta in decks, and Arabian Nights had just released (although almost no stores in France had imported any). I got quickly into it big time, up to having a full base...

And then, you have Predestination (2014) - IMDb and Primer (2004) - IMDb who do it perfectly.

Of course she's redpilled. That's why her character is dead (except for the last scheduled movie).

Half of his class got dusted (on average). So he's walking back to a school where half of his class is missing... the ones who already graduated.

Although now with alt-Gamora in play, we can have a kind of interesting GotG3 where the crew has to track/face Gamorra+Warlock (need a Pip somewhere to make it a perfect callback)

It's Unity. In theory, it should take them a day at most to make a build on Mac, iOS or Android. The thing that will probably prevent them from doing an iOS version is the store policies of Apple: any microtransaction within the iOS version of MTGA would have to be thru the apple store, with...

It's a classic psych microtransaction move. If you have "some" premium currency remaining, it's easier to break out the CC to buy the "remaining" ones to get your item than if you just purchase the item.

When he said "I'll never ever do SF again since my movie with my son was such a flop." Then the bills started to hit and he needed money again.

He doesn't. He litterally makes Wakanda, so no African is ever exported to the USA. Making acceptable "copies" of his family is what really takes lots of tries. Don't overthink it. The various endings are litterally not consistent with each other regarding rules of remaking history.

No one's advocating this. But if your game can only be played hardcore, then it will only have a hardcore population, and that means a crash and burn type game. 250000 subscribers on the first month, 10000 the next. You do need something that you feel is worthwhile to play if you cannot commit...

Fun bit, I was just reading an io9 non-spoiler review: Captain Marvel, savior the universe indeed.