Category Archives: Gaming

November 21, 2021 · 18:22

Going through the motions

I have been playing Skyrim yet again. I saw an old glitch returning and two new glitches I had never seen before. Hilarious (to some degree). But it also gave me pause to rethink parts of the RPG game I discussed over time in this place. You see, those who played the game might identify that the cupboard in Breezehome has 143 ingots of metals, 15 wolf skins, 4 goat skins, 8 pieces of armour, 12 necromancer robes, a few great-swords, swords, a dozen daggers and a dew more items. This cupboard is twice the size of a night stand. So do you guess that it will all fit? Then I remember the way it was done in Neverwinter nights and my mind went to town on designing a new system. 

Part 1
Int eh first part lets take a turn back to the middle ages. Cupboards were not discarded and new ones bought. Cupboards in those days were a sign of wealth, they were upgraded, they got new functions and taking that in mind. I thought of setting a new premise. 

Any cupboard has a size and use, yet when the wood sort changes, the maximum load also changes. The same can be applied to ‘runing’ the furniture. In this I used a Raetic approach (it makes sense when you know more on the game), We can upgrade any furniture UNTIL you apply Raetic sigils. When you do that this piece of furniture can no longer be adjusted. So as we have furniture, we can add sigils to add space in the cupboard. So if standard a cupboard can keep 6*10 squares. A rune could add (2-5)*6*10.
Sofa’s and chairs can be given sigils to improve regeneration, rest, healing and other matters. It changes the game. Apart from the rest required, regenerate mana is a lot longer process, we think in Bethesda and other terms towards mana, but what happens when that too changes? What if the recuperation is depending on rest and sustenance? 

Part 2 

We seem to feel that the IKEA approach in these games is OK, but is it? We have become so attached to consumerism and that approach needs to change. Also the cost of what we have in our houses. It is like the Pokemon rage. We have to have it all, and that is wrong. I saw that coming a mile away, so the replay factor is diminished. The learning curve changes. And the need for furniture shops, sigil deployers for wood, stone and metal are a larger stage to add to any game. 

In all this we need to set that part and it gave me the idea of an old concept, the bard!

Part 3
Who remembers the comic books of Asterix? Remember Cacofonix? So what happens when we add a bard to the village we live in? The type of bard we find and the type of bard we invite could change the way the village harmony runs. Some bard are good ay creating a fighting atmosphere, se are for feasts and parties, some instil horror (in the invaders). All parts of a game where we have no real control, but the impact is still seen and felt in the game as a whole. Why have we forgotten the second tier influences in games and in gaming?

So as I am going through the motions I see a whole range of changes and updates that Bethesda does not have at present, and with the choices that Microsoft made for them, there are a few more items that could be added to a system like the Amazon Luna, slipping the Microsoft solution further to the back and as optionally Sony and Amazon pair up, there could be a much larger gain for some, more than the additional 50,000,000 consoles sold that Amazon could have at their horizon. There would be a much larger gain and in this fight these two could get a much larger slice of the $200,000,000,000 gaming revenue that is predicted to be at the end of 2023. Personally seen, if Microsoft only gets 10% of that, I would be cool with that. Anything to make them pay the price of short sightedness. 

I is just a stage, but consider what I designed over the last two days alone. Microsoft may make all the claims they have, but I am pushing it out here (as it is not 5G). And all this is optional freeware for Sony and Amazon consoles. So there!

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November 17, 2021 · 01:49

Imagination is king

Yup, I had been busy brooding over a new story. In this case the foundation is an eco warrior who is sick and tired of his government. He is sick, dead sick and he is willing to share his disease with the rest of the world, all the world. 

To get there there needs to be the way to get there and that is the rough path, you see a story is dismissed too often because the setting is just too far fetched. So I had to grasp at history. And there I found an interesting story. In the original setting the story is a sort of cyano salt. All cyano salts are extremely poisonous. The trick is that treatment needs to start IMMEDIATELY. So doctors do have the immediate questions like do you have rat poison in the house, if yes there is a clear path, but if not the test takes too long for treatment, but if the disease is slow that path is often to easily fixed. So I came up with a DNA solution, a portable genetic disorder. A disease caused in whole or in part by a change in the DNA sequence away from the normal sequence. So I started to tinker and I found an interesting setting. It would cause the same stage, it could not be immediately detected and when it does it would be too late. I touched on the subject on September 5th 2021 in the story ‘Eradication’. The story (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/09/05/eradication/), the story had some of the parts, but I was nitpicking it now, see if I could find flaws in the stage, you see, the lie (the story) is so much easier to swallow when people believe it to be an option, or perhaps Mary Poppins said it better with “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down”, and that setting matters. A good story has the elements that drive the persons mind. For a lot if minds it tends to be sex (but those stories already exist), so I had to go into other corners and the eco warrior did the trick, but how to set the stage when we have had so many delusional minds bend on destroying what is around them? And as the young tend to be driven to do the right thing, no matter how wrong it is, as long as they believe that they are doing the right thing they will not care, until it is much too late and there in that setting I had the actual solution. He spread the story that he had found a new way to stop pollution, which he had to test, so he headed of to India and then to China. The larger industrials saw it as a cheap solution to get what they wanted so they pushed officials to apprehend them. A stage was created where he was in India, the Indian government trying to stop people getting to him (allowing him to infect more) and when they got to close to him, he raced off to China where he repeated the stage and then he allowed himself to be captured and raced to the US where he completed the circle. Three hotspot areas where the population pressure would do the work for him. A stage where the initial dangers are not seem, but when you realise the stupid people with the covid setting, the stage becomes believable. Like a chess board where the first square has one rice grain and it doubles every square onwards. So you get one, two, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768. After that it spirals out of control fast and consider the healthcare options that India and China have. Now consider that these are the infected, how many will they infect? A chess board has 8 rows, so in the second row we have 32768 and there are 6 more rows to go, by the end of row 5 you surpassed the population off the planet. It also reminded me of a image I saw yesterday. It might be the push I needed. The image gave me a chalkboard that stated “I guess we have to retire the expression ‘avoid it like the plague’ given how little effort people put in avoiding an actual plague” I do believe it gave me the idea to let things rise to the surface and now that the elements are at the surface we need to set the second story on how efforts are thwarted into capturing the person as the greed driven industrials want the ‘invention’ before the government can get their fingers on it. Greed tends to be a great motivator, if you doubt that see the lobbyists at COP26. 

A disease that is man made also has a few other parts to it, it calls for all kinds of taboos to be brought to the surface and that too allows for other sides. There needs to be a ‘flaw’ but what if that is an intentional side? What if the original pure people have a dormant immunity? Like all Native Americans, all pure Hindu’s and so on, what if the multi cultural side allows that disease to flourish? That idea is not out of the blue. 

I thought on this when I was brooding over peanut allergies. You see, when I was young (long long ago) I had never heard of it and I also never heard anyone at school have it. It came over time. So what if the allergy comes from multi racial, multi cultural parts? I reckon most people in Indonesia are immune (their peanut sauce is the best in the world) so what when we combine thoughts and see how quickly the medical world goes insane with fear? You see, if they believe it could be done the story will catch on and catch on a bit quicker. 

Imagination is a fearful thing. It allowed me to create new 5G, it gave me the idea to set a new concept stage in television. A direction optionally never thought of before. Not by Sony and not by DARPA (I think). It allowed me to create stories for TV series, mini series and movies (see the other stories I wrote), it gave me the insight in creating sequels to games and I create a new RPG game to piss of Microsoft as I made it free to anyone making a Sony or Amazon exclusive and I set the stage where the Amazon Luna could optionally sell 50 million consoles more. Yup, it is not merely the imagination, it needs a realistic foundation and that is gained by being able to see in a direction and from an angle others are not considering. Now if I can just find the right angle to another story which I have not put online yet (as I am still mulling things over) I feel that I will have had a productive life, plenty of people never get to this stage and now I have another story on ending mankind and optionally save the dolphins, perhaps they will tell me on my deathbed (somewhere in the future) the same thing they told Douglas Adams: “So long and thanks for all the fish!”

Not the worst epitaph to consider.

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November 15, 2021 · 19:03

Pricing of choice

There is always a counter side. It does not mater how good anything is, it does not matter how large the win is, there is an opposite it is the price we pay, the price we accept, because on the whole the deal is actually rather good. There is no opposition, this has been a given truth for decades. At time you need to be ruthless, at times you can be compassionate, at times you have to cut the deadlines, at times you can extent deliveries. They are choices, there are always choices. Some good, some less so. It is the way it has always been

The price of lame
It is a side we see and often ignore. In many situations it means crappy, I would say it merely means crappy but that would be wrong. In this example we look at Bethesda and their latest iteration of Skyrim. Some will say ‘Lame’, ‘more exploitation’, and ‘more of the same’. I say when a game is this perfect you would want to have it as you move on. I have played the game on Xbox360, PS3, Xbox One, PS4, and PS5. The game is so large and so near perfect I would want to keep it and there is an upside. The PS5 is free as download if you have the PS4 version. There was alas no physical version. We can state it is lame, it is less, but this is a game that millions have enjoyed for 10 years. So yes, parts are a set A$80, yet the game gives you a lot more, the free edition gives you less new stuff, but I have seen my share of free parts already, after 4 days I see that the game is renewed, it has more and it feels great getting these achievements again. In 10 years the game never disappointed. The price of lame is perhaps a lack of innovation, the opposite is that the players want this game, not another game, it is a tough balancing line and so far Bethesda has done OK, apart from selling their soul to Microsoft (for $8,500,000,000).

The price of tame
Weirdly enough it is Google who gets that part. On the one side they have shown great innovation, they have shown massive strides in many areas, from searching to advertisements, they were there, they were first and they keep on rocking, on the other side their console (Google Stadia) is tame, they are not developing software, they are relying on Ubisoft to push that crate (and it will cost them). The other side is that two innovations will pass them by, the innovation I worked out (and are now meant for Amazon Luna) could bring Amazon an additional 50,000,000 consoles to the market. I know, even with shortages it will be a stretch, but that is the setting of tame, you can be non-aspiring, to be non-exciting yet that too comes at a price and in this setting Amazon would be in second place (temporarily overtaking Nintendo). On the upside, it makes Microsoft the wooden spoon contender, with the most powerful console in the world they end up in 4th position and I like that. Microsoft needed to be taught a lesson and I intend to bring it (If Amazon accepts). And that is not a high number, it is massively conservative, because this has never been done before so I have no data to rely on, the numbers could end up being decently higher. And that is merely the first wave, the second wave relies on another player, so I cannot say at present, but that could end up pushing the Luna even more, but I have no idea how much more. What is a certainty that gaming will alter and in the first stage many players ant a piece of that, not all, but plenty.

The price of game
It is not easy to look at people as game, but these anti-vaxxers are taking their toll. We can be as social as we like to be, we are unable to properly set up taxation, but we will tax the health system to the max. We see people dying of heart conditions in ambulances, because the ICU’s are filled with anti-vaxxers who now have covid and they are crying like little children. I say that unvaccinated people are not eligible for ICU unless they pay upfront, the reckless endangerment of life is not a cause for healthcare, it needs to become private care. The umbers are staggering. Of all the hospital admissions 80%-90% is unvaccinated. This evidence is ignored too much by too many. There is a slight difference per nation, yet that is understandable. We can treat these people like kids, but then they claim they have rights. OK, you do and with that you get the right to pay for it yourself. 

We see three examples where we price choice, price is not always monetary, but often it is, yet the opposite of that coin is often not monetary. It tends to be quality, quantity or quest like. There is no clear formula either, it is not a neat package, yet there tends to be some red line forming in the sand. The underlying part is that some accept the cost of doing business, others are in denial and they want it all, and guess what. You cannot have it all, there is no way. It is like the old equation of a house. Price, Quality and speed. You can only select two of the three, the third will go in another direction. A sales division will state that you can have all three and then they task their marketing department to set the premise of the third to expectations. Yet that is a figment in their imaginations, and when the data comes forward we get some ‘miss communication’ excuse. 

All neatly wrapped up, yet when we dig we get to see the price more clearly and we often see a party in denial, but what happens when it is YOU who pays that price? What happens when YOU need to make a choice, can you? Choosing is often hard, especially when the price is clear. But what do you do when it is not? It happens and not always intentionally, how can you decide the price then? 

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November 12, 2021 · 04:40

Epic downfall

This happens, I saw it coming and today as the BBC gives me (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59234961) ‘Apple v Epic: Court denies delay on App Store changes’ we have come to a point. A point where Epic Games will lose billions, not millions, billions. You see, the larger issue is not the fee, it is that too many ApplePay options are not completely secure, as such the moment we see the first few issues go sour, when people are dented by credit card fees and scams that started with Epic, that is the moment the class actions come calling and they will come calling in a huge way. There will be no defence for Epic Games. There will not be some ‘I know nothing’ approach. It will be on Epic Games. They wanted to cut costs and they did, but the costs in hind-fall will outrank all revenue they would hope to make.

And all this is beside the issues (source: Eurogamer) “Epic Games is also facing a class-action lawsuit following a data breach which exposed personal information from millions of users’ accounts. The data breach occurred back in January this year, when hackers found a flaw in Fortnite’s login system, allowing them to impersonate players and purchase V-Bucks with the bank information attached to their accounts” and the issue outside of Fortnite will escalate a lot faster than they feared it could. I reckon that first issues will emerge within 3 months of the alternative to ApplePay path and it will not take long until lawyers will suit up for class actions all worth billions. Epic will need a lot more lawyers soon enough and it will cost them. It could constitute the dangers (for Epic) that 2021 started the downfall that could have been avoided, a setting they caused themselves and the greedy hackers saw a clear new target, Epic Games with a bullseye. A bullseye that will be painted on their CEO and CFO, what a wild web we tend to weave.

A setting that they could have and should have avoided. An optional first in the dangers of greed. What a lovely day this could become.

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November 11, 2021 · 10:08

The hesitant choice

It is a stage we try to deny, but it is there, we all face it at some point. You see, there is (especially in business) a danger to go ‘gung ho’. There is benefit in awaiting the right moment. Yet what to do when that is in a vacuum? This happens. There is an option to make a decent amount of coins, but it relies on others making a move, or not to make one. But no matter how you slice it, you are in a vacuum until that happens. 

You see, what I predicted is close to coming to pass. The console wars will be settled and the outcome will be  

  1. Sony
  2. Nintendo
  3. Amazon
  4. Microsoft
  5. Google

Google ended last because it is not creating games, it is relying on Ubisoft and indie developers to get there. Microsoft screwed the pooch a little too often and with my help I will gladly push the suckers to 4th, I preferred them at 5th but Google made that impossible. Third is Amazon and that is because the solution I see will fit the Amazon Luna, more importantly in the setting at present they might get to 2nd, but only temporary and with conservative numbers Nintendo will catch up again. Sony will not be surpassed and what they have going for them will keep them in charge there. I do find it funny that the most powerful console in the world (as Microsoft seems to remind us) will be a system at a mere 4th position. The weakest console defeated them and the Luna has the option to do the same.

All because stupid people will not learn. The greed driven will be all about pushing Azure whilst they cannot play the blues. A sad setting that gets Microsoft exactly what they deserve (answer: zip, zilch, nada).

So why is this a hesitant choice? Well in the first I still have time and I do hope to get my share of well over $400,000,000. Would you not do the same? Only when I see that the battle is over, I will make it public domain allowing indie developers make a bitch out of Microsoft. 

What surprises me is that the makers still do not see what is out in the open. It is not rocket science, the clever people should see what I noticed well over a month ago, it was then that I decided to crunch a few ideas and what I see represents well over 50,000,000 consoles. Am I delusional? I will let you figure that out when I set the bar and the visibility of the solution to all. I will of course use the same method to 4chan and a few other open places. You see, the longer Microsoft and Ubisoft are unaware, the better the chances for the indie developers. In a rat race these two will win and I feel a little better if they lose, I am wired that way.

What if others figure out what I saw? That’s OK. If they did it by themselves they earned what is coming for them and I still believe in my 5G solutions to give me the pennies (read: bag of gold) I deserve and there is only so much a person needs. I see greed as an underestimated delimiting factor on creativity, and I do not like delimiters, except in data files. They are essential there.

So whilst you are enjoying coffee, oh no, that would be me and coffee is almost ready. Enjoy the day!

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October 25, 2021 · 22:20

Inventing the economy

Yes, this sounds bigger than it is (and it is). This is the economy for an RPG. A few places had idea’s, one was particularly helpful. Yet in the stage of the game I designed here, I decided to take a different route. You can barter all you want, yet in the end it is the economy around you that needs to flourish as well. If you do not take that route, you get either a ghost town, or a passively silent one, one that can only move when you are there. It is that approach that is reluctant to me. You cannot create your story, become your story on a blank page where everything is depending on you. That has been the case sine before I was born (in the age of Black and White TV’s). 

So as I was mulling over what I personally believe to be a shortcoming on the Elder Scrolls. I turned in another direction and saw the glitch in Fable 2, but the stage was good, so I decided to take a larger gander and set up my own premise. On September 25th I wrote ‘Recap to the intro’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/09/25/recap-to-the-intro/) which gives the list of most articles linked to this game.  I will now add:

Behold the economy
(OK, that was way too ego driven) yet the stage remains true, you cannot live or play in a vacuum, so as I wrote ‘An almost ordinary generation quest’, I set out the stage of stamping out the economy, there needed to be a stage where you can grow and optionally through you the town could grow. In t6his we need to take notice that a city takes decades to grow (if not centuries), so the town can only grow to some degree. If we consider the baker, the butcher, the fisherman, the blacksmith, the bookshop, the tailor, the potter and the leather shop we see that these people have average skills (2 or 3 out of 5), we need to see how to grow the town. In one stage I talked about the potter part, it will be a growth stage, so to grow the economy, when you gain skills (in your travels) on any of this, when you return home you can teach the shops the skills you learned, it gives you some income, but the larger stage becomes that a town gets X amount of people travelling through it. More important, when a shop becomes more important, more people will come, so there is a benefit to teaching them, because what they sell, benefits you too. And more importantly, when these shops grow into 4 star places, I needed to add a risk as well. You see, some people are depending on ‘non change’ I insist on change, so there is a small percentage of a chance that when the get to that level there is a small chance that they will pack up and leave for ‘the big city’, in addition to it that risk increases by a factor when they become 5 star places. It creates momentum and it creates a larger stage of movement and turmoil. You or your kids can teach the shop again, or they can move themselves. 

A stage of fluidity that we haven’t seen before in RPG gaming, and I wonder why not. I can not be the first one to come up with this, could I? A stage of increased growth and economic values will also hit the city, when the city grows, the shops have less reason to move (they are revenue driven too). It sets a new stage, instead of having 15 axes, 23 swords, 7 mauls and 2 halberts, we get a stage where we can sell that as scrap to the blacksmith who will create new ingots and create new weapons. That only works when he becomes 4 star or more location. The herbalist has a need for resources, you bring he has no need to move, or to seek out danger. And in this all shops are almost the same, there are shops that will not need ‘feeding’, but their skills too are related to the ranking they have and as you teach them, their value increases and the village grows another step. 

And so we create a new stage, not merely collecting weapons and armour, but a stage where the shops grow what they have and to that respect also the scrap they receive from NPC’s and the new goods that come with that.

I feel happy, I created the foundation of an entire economy in a game, there are a few unmentioned parts and there are a few parts not here, but I am still mulling them over. In the meantime, anyone who wants to create an Amazon Luna and Sony Playstation exclusive RPG, feel free to use these ideas (free of charge) and let’s give Bethesda a run for their money, whilst pissing off Microsoft at the same time (slugging two for the price of one tends to be more satisfactory).  

Have a great day

P.S. WordPress still haven’t fixed colouring, their CEO might be colourblind

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October 24, 2021 · 19:07

The racing brain

It happens to some of us, the brain shifts into overdrive and will not stop. For me it happened this morning as I was contemplating a few things I saw on YouTube. There are so many expectations, so many people heckling non released products that I wonder where they are coning from. Is their expectation of games that low? I heckled Ubisoft (for good reason) but I also gave them credit when credit was due (and they did several good things). So as we see the next batch of comic book heroes games, I wonder what happened to the old classics. Now I am not stating that they need to be remastered but they could be revamped into a new coat. So let’s take a gander on some of these

1. Commandos
This game was awesome, especially 1 and 2. But instead of doing the same thing again, we could consider redoing the game based on Miss Peregrine’s home for peculiar children (by Ransom Riggs) and make the game more accessible for the younger players. Maps where you can release the birds that create the time loops and those you can visit to gain more peculiar children. 

2. Suspended
Basing an existing game in a new jacket on a book is not new, it has been done before. Does that make it a bad idea? I do not believe it to be the case, yet how many games are based on a game? When I grasp back to my first week with the CBM-64, I ended up buying three games. The Microsoft Flight Simulator, the very first one with 4 maps and a manual that looked like a novel ($199), the second game was Loderunner (I never stopped loving the original) and the third is todays discussion ‘Suspended’ by Infocom. It was one of the hardest games I ever played in those days and I was unaware that it was one of the hardest games to do, even by Infocom standards. But the setting is actually decently unique, so what happens when you control Iris, Whiz, Waldo, Auda, Poet, and Sensa? What happens when you see what they see? What happens when you take control of a global management system? What happens when the earthquake comes and you have to get things back to some level of normal? Not an easy task is it? 

3. Knights of the Sky
There has been an avid following of Flight Simulators, there is no denying this and those who want to go up against Microsoft, good luck. One does not cross near perfection, yet that does not mean that there aren’t stages where we can become active. In 1990 Microprose did a swell job of introducing WW1 to the gamers and there was a stage where we would welcome the simplicity of a Sopwith Camel. The game also allowed you to choice either the Germans or one of the Allies, a setting that was pretty unheard of and I do get it, there is nothing novel about the resolution of the CBM-Amiga, yet this on a PS5 would be a lot different, that and the fact that the PS5 disc could contain the entire WW1 map from France to Germany as well as have the updates in place for every year of that war. 

We are so overwhelmed by console shooters of mach speed vehicles, we forgot the reality of WW1 where the maximum speed was no more than 180km/hour. It is not specifically the game and stage, it is the realisation that we look at making things fast, we forget that there is still a load of thrill and suspense in a stage where things were not as fast as they could be. In this there is a whole league of Flight Simulators out there that are often forgotten. Yet, we should avoid to redo the same wheel. Knights of the Sky is 30 years old, so it feels that the stage can now be shown more like it was. There are some remakes and some of them are finding their way into the Apple store, we can now get arcade precision and even better graphics on a tablet and it is a great idea, the more people and game developers are exposed to those titles, the larger the chance of an actual new and innovative game will be set upon us all. Even as games like Midwinter are now surpassed by what Ubisoft offers in Far Cry 3+, 

4. Manhunter New York
Even if the location is not important and should consist of a new location, the game spoke to the imagination of gamers, even now in Abandonware the game scores 4.9/5, high praise and the stage of the story has options. One of the games that Sierra on Line would produce in the 80’s and the ten years that followed it. King’s Quest, Space Quest, Manhunter, Police Quest, and Leisure suit Larry, all games that spoke to the imagination of the gamers and what is important here? The story, the story pulled the gamer in and even as we not have more graphic games, more direct control and several other active elements, the stories were often not equalled and that is a shame, the stories were good (for the era), so why do we see a lack of stories in too many games? 

I mentioned before that one of my very first games was Suspended (Infocom), they also made Starcrossed that I saw much later in my gaming days. It would be surpassed by ‘Rendez Vouz with Rama’ and that made sense, the CBM-64 is no match for a decent PC with a CDROM drive. And now? That is beside the point that games like Wishbringer (1985) are seemingly forgotten. This is important, because we all (me included) seem to steer to the games that tickle us, but there is a whole generation behind us that is forgotten, a stage of gaming younglings that  seem to get pushed into the Epic foundations of Fortnite, why is that? There are decades of games out there that could see a new coat, a new interface a graphic world and a stage that parents have no issues with for the gaming not blood driven youthful masses. It matters because it is the one place that is almost completely owned by Nintendo, kids go there because there is no alternative and it seems to me that Sony (Amazon too) need to wake up to that small gemstone of information. 

The stage is filled with options that are ignored, forgotten and discarded, but there were real treasures there and the makers need to consider that these abandoned IP could use a new paint, some additional bells and whistles and it will fuel the imagination of the gamers of tomorrow. Most of them are at present getting trained to become the Navy Seal graduating class of 2029. There is more to life (yes, I will admit to this). 

And this is all based on forgotten and/or discarded IP. And whilst I am typing this, I wonder what happens when we add to the stage with new IP? IP set to younger players, and a stage is given where the player is given their chance towards immortality. To do this the player will have to set traps in tombs (a cross between Infocom: Infidel and Dungeon keeper), the longer the sarcophagus is not transgressed upon, the larger the time reward gets to be. So consider a stage where you get to ‘design’ traps in graves and pyramids and the longer they stay out, the more power you get and the larger the reward ends up being. The stage is not that simple. You see, you design the traps in the time they are build, yet over time technology advances, so you need to go old school there. And every time you redo this, you get the chance to improve on what was and create a new level of protection, just an idea that popped into my head. 

You see that new IP is easily created, but to make it worthy for a game is not stated here, it requires the creative soul to design it. And am I wrong? Consider that Magnetic Scrolls is releasing remastered versions of their games 30 years after initial release. I reckon that they are seeing what I was seeing as well. There is a $135,000,000,000 spending on games on an annual foundation. Why should you not gain some from that granary? It is open season and when you are in lockdown you can stare at the ceiling or find a way to grab some of that cash, it is up to you.

Enjoy Sunday!

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October 24, 2021 · 03:25

What should be done

This is a personal view. This is based on personal experience and on personal feelings and believes to create a great game, a great RPG. There is plenty to not agree about and you might be right. It is merely my personal view on the matter. It all started a few hours ago when several Hogwarts legacy videos passed by, I looked at one of them, and soon thereafter turned it off. For the most so that I will not be hit by optional spoilers. I also saw a few headlines on how it might be bad, how some people claim to be experts. I am not one of them, I merely give my view and it is not connected to any part of the Hogwarts or the Hogwarts storyline.

Part 1
In part one we need to set the ground rules. As an RPG, I believe that the largest power is replayability. So when we use the HP movies as a backdrop the game will need 20 main story lines. 4 houses, each house has its storyline, with 4 intersecting stories. As such if you start as Hufflepuff, you get the Hufflepuff story and the three non-house stories and one generic story. That makes 20, also each house will have 25 side quests (could be 50). As such we end up with 100-200 side quests in total. Finally there is a red wire and I personally think that JK Rowlings should do that. 4 small books of 50 pages each, every storyline will have 50 hidden pages, it is about (for example) the origins of the house makers, Godric Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, Rowena Ravenclaw, and Salazar Slytherin. The story is only revealed when all 50 pages are found and then a small booklet will unlock on the system that the gamer can readSo after 4 play throughs all 4 books are available to the player.

In that setting when one game is completed a new Game+ is selected and you go from the beginning, yet in the second game any of the three minus the one you already played becomes available. Now we have a game people will run to the shop for.

Part 2
All what I write would still be possible in the game no matter how it is staged, not even the storyline is messed with, that can still be there. As such the four generic stories will be connected to the house, but will not be connected to it. As for the side quests no more than 10% can be replicated to other houses, so it will be a large stage. It also comes with limitations (I love those). Side quests on potions are only available to Slytherin players (as the potions master was Slytherin), Gryffindor and Ravenclaw will get magical creatures quests and so on. 

As the screen shows, each house has quests that link to a non house, so if you had Gryffindor in game one and Ravenclaw in game two, the second game will offer a rerun of the Magical Creatures side quest, but none of the others. 

I believe that in such a way a massive wave of replayability is offered whilst at the same time offering a large fountain of playability. It would create a direct dent in what Bethesda offered in its games, it would be close to unparalleled. And let’s not forget the number one rule, it is merely my take on the matter.

It is merely a small part, and this took me less than an hour to think through, more? Yes, naturally, please ask the makers of Hogwarts Legacy and if they want to use what I just wrote, it is for them and to at their discretion to use, a simple equation.

And I leave you with the small stage. This took an hour (at the most), so why can’t Ubisoft come up with this stuff? They are the multi billion dollar corporation, so what is taking them so long? 

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October 21, 2021 · 12:47

The mobile reward

We love the words ‘free’ and ‘rewards’. In this I am no different. This setting all started when I was taking a look at some version of ‘merge life’ iPad game. The game starts nice enough, challenging enough and I saw the warning ‘absurd amount of advertisements’ yet initially when I started that was not really the case. So after 10-15 minutes I had reached stage 2 and the game was oddly satisfying. It was then that the advertisement wave hit me. Close to one advertisement EVERY 30 SECONDS. Yes, that was absurd and after 2 advertisements I deleted the game. But the mind took a wander and I remembered something from the AC Brotherhood time. Yes Ubisoft did do good things, even innovative things. But the idea got twisted in my mind to something more. I wrote in a previous article about games for Amazon Luna, not sure if I did this (I have written over 2000 articles). There are two stages in this.

Stage One
Board games. Most forgot about the power of board games. They are simple games, but a setting we always return to. We do not need to kill everyone (I mostly do). There is tranquility in a game of chess, a game of checkers, a game of Monopoly, a game of Backgammon, a game of Shogun (and so on). But what w forget is that most people prefer to play alone. Now, there is some need to connect to like minded people, people who just want to play a game. For them there are three options. Set up the Luna to facilitate for 2-4 players, connect to up to 3 online players and play alone with computer managed NPC’s. The powers behind consoles and streamers forgot about that, didn’t they? Now the optional connected IP is separate and for another day.

Stage Two
When it comes to rewards, Ubisoft forgot a side (it was fair enough) but when we have mobile games they could lead to a lot more visibility. For the example I will use the Fable Pub games. You play the games and you get the rewards. In the mobile game it might be about money, yet the goal is to get to the 5 star (might have been 4 star) point. When you get there you will get 2 rewards. So each game there (Keystone, Fortune’s Tower and Spinnerbox) will result in a direct reward, a weapon, or an outfit that is linked to Fable in Amazon Luna (just as an example), the second reward is a Luna Key. Each board game will get a Luna Key, so if you play 4 games, each of the 4 games will get a key. And the Luna key will open a special option. So in the examples given Chess will give you a new board and a new chess set, Backgammon will give you a new board and stones (there are Indian, Egyptian boards and stones), Monopoly will give you an NHL, NFL or other city board, Shogun has additional colours and Japanese family crests and so on. Additional rewards that can grow the interest in other games and that is beside the setting that could be offered. All stages forgotten or ignored and why? Is the setting of a Luna Key so complex? Is the setting of offering the player something more not enticing? I would think that with all the bugs Ubisoft introduced they might go overboard pleasing the customers they so often disappointed. 

The stage of giving a player more is important (and growing in need), especially now. There are the bugs the glitches, yet when you add the congestion it comes down to the choice of limiting yourself to urban players, or give rural players options to play when there are too little. There is also the need to feed the beast (the players), they need to go to work, they need to be somewhere else and setting a stage where the player can optionally play a fitting mobile game (like Ubisoft did for AC Brotherhood) where the player can play to get a new unique 5 star blade, pistol, outfit or whatever. A stage that adds to the game, not replace it, or circumvent thresholds. Offer more, offer unique and they will love the brands they embrace even more. Machiavelli stated (in some form) “There is such a gap between how people actually live and how they ought to live that anyone who declines to behave as people do is schooling himself for catastrophe” it gives the setting for leaders to adhere to needs, but there is a hidden side here. “There is such a gap between how people expect rewards and how they should see them that anyone who declines to lead as people expects them to do is schooling himself for massive setbacks” It comes down to the stage of what exactly is a reward, if it needs to be earned (not paid for) it will grow in value, and gamers are all about earning showing that they had the goods to play the game. As an example CDPR (makers of Witcher III) created an in-game game named Gwent, we got to play for extra’s and it became a separate game too, now that game makes well over a million dollars annually. People got into the game and now it is a separate game that is leading gamers to more and the gamer has become willing to pay. The setting is that it is free and as people get into it they will spend the few dollars they need to get more cards and expansions. For streamers it is not that easy. The enticement of a monthly fee needs to be there, so as games add more value, the threshold for gaming THERE lowers and people become more eager to play and will play for all the free rewards, which is an oxymoron. As gamers get more by playing, they will play more and call other people to their cause. Yet we must not forget that at times the player needs a solitary moment and as systems accomodate that, the gaming borrow will become ever more comfortable. Consider the board game Man, don’t get angry (Indian: Pachisi). A 1914 game that so far has sold more than 70,000,000 copies. Yes most in an era that is pre IBM PC XT, yet we have always returned to places of comfort, for nostalgic reasons, for the simplicity of play and for the stage of pure randomness. You see too many games are all about changing the setting of what the dice do, too many are seemingly less random than we think and within ourselves we see that, even if the brain is not detecting it yet. You think it is chance that you are one square away from winning when the ‘computer adversarial pig’ throws double six? We automatically feel that it is bad luck because we see ‘dice’ but we forget it is a computer animation and that setting is starting to bite more and more, so the power of real randomness, of a real chance to win is becoming more and more important. In this as Amazon is developing games and Google is not, they have the advantage (I do not know where Netflix stands at present). And it is up to Amazon to create the most comfortable burrow (read: man cave) we can have before the competitors catch up. For now they are all about ‘Let Ubisoft do the cool stuff’ (glitches included), it is about comfort levels, especially in gaming. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote about this in 1513 (yes over 500 years ago). The greed driven seem to ignore it, the lesson was quite clear and whilst the greed driven come up with more versions of some form of Antón Castillo we can just investigate the list and see that games like Call of Duty did make $20 billion, but it is a mere 20% of what Pokemon made and Pokemon for the most is Nintendo only. There is an upside to tailoring to fun, it is what the people want and it is a lesson Microsoft (Sony too) have forgotten to much, too easily and too completely and it makes Nintendo the real threat to Sony, Amazon could go a similar route and surpass Microsoft more easily than they think (the fact that Microsoft is often in denial helps too). 

As I see it the consoles (streaming or not) is one, yet the ability to correctly connect a mobile or tablet has a lot more going for it than most realise and as that link is more and more visible the connected system (console or streamer) will reap additional rewards as well.

Just a thought, enjoy the day.

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October 18, 2021 · 03:47

As fiction becomes real

Who remembers George A Romero’s Dawn of the dead (1978)? I remember seeing it in the cinema. And the idea stuck with me. Dreams of having an entire shopping mall to myself. The idea stuck for a long time and even as games entered our lives, the setting was never close enough. The idea that we had an entire City centre to ourselves, preferably without the zombies. Not some game where the enemies spawn again, but a stage where there is a city centre, complete with 35000 zombies, a finite number and as we secure our place, grow our place, we renew the settings of security, safety and goods. And I voiced it before and now we seemingly have the game ‘The day before’ a game that seemingly is close enough to my dreams to make it a reality. The game can be played single player (a must for me). And the idea that the game will grow appeals to me. Consider that the mechanics, once they are ready allows for the game to seek us in other ways too. An alien invasion (Skyline, 2010), a pandemic (Contagion, 2011) and the list goes on. Now, I have no idea on how The Day before is set or how it works, but I saw a small play video and my old thoughts of Day of the Dead returned. The idea that you need to stamp out your safe space. Get goods, get sustenance, get ammo, find weapons and so on is very appealing. You wonder how far you get, how long you will last and none of that respawn shit. One life, and between 35,000 and 350,000 opponents. How will you fare? I wonder how far I will get. And for the makers of that game it offers a new kind of DLC/Expansion. We might have 3-5 locations to start, but the appeal to see how far you get in London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Munich, Paris, Moscow and so on, the chance for the makers of The Day before (Fntastic) are close to endless and it does not stop there. The setting of a real final number is appealing on several levels. The idea to redo Day of the dead in Harrods London will be appealing to thousands if not millions of gamers. Setting up the New York City Police Department – 5th Precinct as your own fortress (Assault On Precinct 13 anyone?) is close to intoxicating. And from there the world of us getting close to the movies we watched will be enticing and I reckon for a large audience. In previous years it was merely a ruse, now with the PS5, it becomes an achievable reality. And as I see it 2022-2025 could optionally become great gaming years. 

And when the survival part in us is quenched we can return to our normal daily routine of being a sniper (Ghost warrior), or perhaps a racer (Gran Turismo) some will prefer their daily life as pilots (MS Flight simulator), no matter to what life we return, we do so knowing that more and better games are coming our way, preferably less glitchy then Ubisoft is making out to be. 

P.S. WordPress still has not fixed colours.

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