Enough with The Cake already!

Well last weekend, I finally had enough time to finish up Portal, and what a fantastic ending. It was surprising to me that a game so focused on puzzles could have a solid storyline, and a great soundtrack(specifically referring to the song within the end credits). I cannot stress enough how enjoyable this game was, I cannot wait to get the time to play through the bonus levels, and I simply cannot imagine that the community will not come up with some great maps.

And while the fall quarter at school is ramping up, and I'm swamped with work as usual, my roommate just had to go and purchase Bioshock. Now toward the end of the summer I played a little bit at a friends house, but never really got to the meat of the game(past level two). But now that I've been able to really sit down and play, I've fallen in love with it(that scary kind of love, like you aren't sure if some crazy lunatic isn't going to pop up behind you when the lights are off, that kind of love). I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys spooky first person shooters, and crazy twisted metal golems with spider eyes.




In other news, yesterday I finally received my official FanFaire 2007 t-shirt, and in my size! When I attended FanFaire over the summer, they did not have my size, and asked me to fill out a form, include my email address, and size. I almost thought they had forgotten about me until three weeks ago when I received an email from SOE telling me that they had received a new shipment, and were going to send it to me. It is a little thing, I know, but it just made me feel good, knowing that I hadn't been left in the dust.

Of course with "The Orange Box", not only was Portal included, but also the revamp of the classic Team Fortress, aptly named Team Fortress2. Oh what fun it is! My friends and I have had a fantastic time blowing each others heads off, over and over again. The graphics are fantastic, and very in the spirit of The Incredibles. Again if you haven't, and you have the means, you should check out "The Orange Box", it is an incredible value. Also my Steam user name is "Chestone", if you see me on send me an invite, I love playing with new people. Well it is now time to finish this paper I've been procrastinating with so badly.

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Cheston

YAFFP(Yet Another FanFaire Post): Vanguard

Note: This was after my limited appearance at this years FanFaire, just some notes I took and thoughts after the "Game Design" panel for Vanguard. I have to say I am really excited about all of the new developments in VG. Anyways I'll post my FF recap tomorrow, so as not to inundate you guys with posts.


Well I just got out of the Vanguard "Game Design" panel, it was very interesting. There are a ton of updates coming with regard to diplomacy that frankly make me want to reinstall. They are introducing diplomacy bosses who have incredibly long dialogs going up to 50 lines, the first diplomacy boss Eldor will have a huge loot table and be repeatable which will be interesting. There are many other diplo bosses in the works as well.
One thing I found particularly interesting is "Animacy" the future feature that will allow players to resurrect recently killed NPCs and engage in diplomacy with them. This sounds incredibly bad ass and the crowd seemed impressed, also mentioned is the possibility of newbies to follow around other groups and perform Animacy on their recently killed mobs, it will be interesting to see how they handle this and what possibilities it will present.

A quest designer went through basically the anatomy of a quest, and how from start to finish quests are designed, using the Unicorn mount quest as an example. This was quite interesting to see, but not wholly surprising in any way.

One of the reward(loot) creators was also demoing some new tier 5 weapons with new tints and other cool stuff. There were some awesome new items and armor sets that will be introduced in future updates, including a new direction w/ armor including "warcrafty" like pauldrens, though they don't get too nuts as WoW has.

I have to say if this game continues to improve as it has I can easily see switching as soon as I can get a beastly machine to play it on. What I see as a large part of the problem is that there is a lot of legacy material that the devs are working with, often the original designer no longer works there and they are having to deal with their problems and their design. I can see this being a huge problem for the first year for VG, and as EQ2 has seen, can plauge them in the future. But once this hurdle is mostly cleared I can see VG becoming a real feature complete, straight up awesome game. And I for one can't wait for it.

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Cheston

FanFaire Post: Anatomy of an Update

Note: This post was written right after attending the "Anatomy of and Update" Panel at FanFaire 2007. I'll have a FanFaire recap soon(I know I'm late but you are already I'm sure inundated with "FanFaire Recap" posts, so check mine out later.

So I finally got to FanFaire after much delay, hit up the "Anatomy of an Update" EQ2 panel. Which was quite good, Scott Hartsman is just as nice and personable as people have said. The panel overall was informative and really gave an in detail idea of how the update cycle works and how the fallout is handled bugwise. The panel rooms are much smaller than I thought, though it does give the participants a very close/personal feeling. I tried to get into the "EQ2: Into the Future" panel but it was packed, fortunetly though they will be breaking the panel into three 45 minute sessions for those that could not attend the previous. So I am looking forward to that along with a VG panel on game design, after that though it seems like it is already over! I have to say I really wish FanFaire were a bit longer, as it is only two days and DefCon is three. I have to say though they content of the panels seems pretty impressive, and I wish I had the chance to just do FanFaire instead of having to split my time between the two.

One cool thing that came out of the "Anatomy of an Update" panel was the revelation that there will most likely be another zone added before RoK is released(I missed the RoK panel and for that I am quite sad). Which is great, Scott and the group also gave insight into how these zones are created and I was surprised as the words "quality of the content" came up, it really gave me the feeling that quality was paramount, if a particular zone did not meet the benchmarks it is scrapped and either dumped or redone entirely. This kind of embodies the new EQ2 attitude, where broken content doesn't make it, adopting Blizzard's "when its ready" stance on content(though I can't say they are even close to perfection with regard to that statement(especially with regard to high end raid bosses)).

Also the panel talked a bit about the new and for coming "persistent instances" and how they work in terms of saving an instance and players being booted from instances. Basically the big thing is that players in a raid can be spread out amongst physical boxes and if one box goes down only those players will be booted and the players on the other box will remain in the instance. Also with that the instance is hard saved every time a "noteable mob" is killed, which means if a crash occurs you will most likely have to re-clear trash, which isn't the end of the world except if you are currently engaging a boss and the whole thing blows up, that wouldn't be a fun night. But still it is a decent system for such a complex environment, I have yet to have any real experience in these new zones so I can't comment from personal experience about it but I can assume raid leaders can force a save, or that before you leave the zone it saves the current progress.

Anyways great talk, time to go walk around!

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Cheston

Vegastastic!

Just got into Vegas airport and am waiting on some friends to arrive playing "spot the hacker/gamer" and it is pretty entertaining, there was an emo band on the flight with me, though they had right to be emo, it was coach and we were packed in like sardines, AND the movie was Spiderman 3 which I really didn't care for much at all(especially on these tiny ~12" screens that I believe were from the era of The Macarana. Anyways enough of that my friends are here, see you all at Fan Faire!

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Cheston

Viva Las Vegas!

Only days away is SOE's annual Fan Faire and I've pretty much settled on trying to attend both Defcon and Fan Faire, which will certainly be difficult but I'll see if I can't make it work, as I'd really like to attend talks at both events and I just can't settle for recaps or powerpoint slides. Anyways I'm getting in Thursday afternoon and staying until Monday so if anyone is around drop a comment and maybe we'll run into each other. Anyways I have much business to attend to(EQ2), see ya at Fan Faire!(I'll make a post before I leave as I've been meaning to.

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Cheston

Fan Faire!

I have always wanted to attend a SOE's FanFaire ever since I was an EQ junkie, and I might actually have the chance this year. The thing is, I'm going to be in town for a conference(Defcon) on the exact same weekend, this presents a serious dilemma for me, as FanFaire is appealing but Defcon is a yearly event for myself and a bunch of college friends from RIT. The thing that would really seal the deal is if I had someone to hang out with or at least meet up with at FanFaire, so if any of my legions of readers are attending maybe we could have a drink or whatever, so leave a comment if you are attending, and hopefully I'll see you there.

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Cheston