We have this at times, we go back in time to remember the party we were at, the party we gave. There is a reason for it. It can be sentiment, lust, desire, achievement there are hundreds of reasons why a party remains in memory forever. A party is for most the easiest to see, and there is a second reason. It is a setting where the crowd remembers you, the crowd was part of it, you either distinguished yourself, or you were distinguished by others. It is the crowd that is an essential element in all this. It is part of the multiplayer appeal, or at least that is what I believe is the case. I play single for myself, for my own needs, for my need for joy. I am not a racer of routes, not a shortcut maker of cleverness. I walked through Oblivion and Skyrim for hours, enjoying the perfection that Bethesda created. I see solution after solution that is all about feigned perfection. It is about showing a crowd how perfect you are, but is that a truth? A reality? To present ones self as clever is not a presentation, it is deception. That is the side that I going wrong in too many games. Whilst I focussed on giving the gamer a good time, others are setting the dressing to pretend the gamer is much better than he or she actually is. I have been brooding on this, you see it is the game Elden Ring that brings the real gamers to the surface. I am a real gamer, but I was never that great in action games, I learned that the hard way in Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3. I still have these games. They are beautiful, but for me not something I can hope to conquer. I feel no shame, I have my own speciality and I have achieved plenty of game completions over the 40 years I have truly enjoyed gaming. From the VIC20, the CBM64, the Atari ST, the CBM Amiga, N64, CD32, SEGA Megadrive, Playstation, Xbox, SEGA Dreamcast, the PS2, Gamecube, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and the PS5. I have seen and enjoyed gaming to the largest extent, but when the Xbox360 came things changed. This is not the fault of Microsoft, in this they are innocent. There was a push for achievements and to get them any way possible and I was the same. I wanted (for the most) all the achievements, I was not an online gamer, so I missed out on several achievements. I think it is what ‘saved’ me and even the Sony group has that issue. You are not a gamer until you get the platinum achievement. There is something wrong with that notion. It is like a new dimension of workforce adhering to the Wall Street stage of ‘Greed is good’, it is not, it really is not. I think the stage of Nintendo Switch to do away with achievements was wise, a lot more wise than most of us realise. Ask yourself the question, are you driven by achievements or to have fun? Do you enjoy walking in the world you play in? These questions have been bugging me for some time now. The Bethesda games brought it to the surface and to some degree the Ubisoft games too. Guerrilla pushed it into overdrive with the Horizon games. It matters, it really does because the wrong setting here could break streaming games. In the games I designed for streaming I think about rewards, not achievements. The Luna keys were part of that. Silver keys to the game you get them in and gold keys to unlock something in 5 games that you have at that point. Rewards are more satisfying, rewards are a token of achievement, a point where we all will get, but not having it on every profile matters. It stops the wannabe’s, it heralds those who are and it gives to those who attempt and overcome. We want to be the gamer that has it all, but why? You see there is so much to gain from replayability, there is so much to get when some options are only there for the arcane, for the shadow dancers, for the brawlers and it is possible we will not become all of those to the degree of perfection, but the inner feeling of what we get done is overwhelming and I believe that achievements undermine that. Now, this is nothing against Microsoft (I slapped them often enough), Microsoft brought achievements and it is a great idea, but game makers and others seem to have subverted the concept, that is how I see it and it took me a while to see the Nintendo Switch step as the great step it was. Yet I understand that achievements are important to some, so how to embrace the idea and make it better? The keys are part of an optional solution, but only in part. So to look at the party of what was is also a way to see the side of what might be. I have no idea if I will solve it, it might be up to someone else to do that, but it needs to be done. We need to go back to the old days to when gaming was pure it was about the gamer getting to places, not others judging the gamer on how he got there, how fast and in what way. We lost something there and we need to find it again. The streaming stage will push gaming further, but it will also push weaknesses and corruption of the gaming mind further. Gaming is about checks and balances and we seemingly ignored the balancing act. I have done that as well and now my mind is making up the consideration and the tally of balances missed. How it will fare? I cannot tell at present.
Tag Archives: Bethesda
First tally of thoughts
After yesterday’s article, I started to make a tally of what the game ‘has’. In the first there was the article ‘Recap to the intro’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/09/25/recap-to-the-intro/) which had a run down of a lot. But that rundown was not enough. There was the search ‘Lawlordtobe + RPG’ which gave me a lot more of what I wrote (and weirdly enough at least one story I forgot about). The basics are covered. In the basics there is the map, the character and the story. In the deeper run, the map is also covering the environment, the economy and the map itself (which is an environment, challenges and spiking of the map).
Spiking
Spiking is an early term I had. Like in places like Skyrim and Oblivion, there is a lack of caves, ruins and other places. So we spike the map to have these places. Yet the maps to some degree have an approach to caves (and some look really good) but as I personally see them unnatural. There are two problems with my train of thought. Caves are set in stone (literally so), as such they are part of the permanent map. Some places have way too many ruins and these ruins are a weird form of small. But the idea of some ruins are a good thing, yet how to employ them?
Brush and thickets, Fallen trees, Hollow trees, Evergreen trees, Rock formations, Rock overhangs, Caves, Low landforms and high landforms. Some are for single opponents, some are for groups. Ruins are a side here. They tend to be a good place for groups. But the setting needs to be natural (or as close as natural as possible). If there is a ruin, there was a reason that the building was there before it was a ruin. And not always is it a castle or a keep. But spiking is a dangerous setting. There is a danger of making it a place of convenience, and that is dangerous for the game.
As we look into the economy I saw the dangers of ‘loot’ in the game. In some game we enter an old (really old) place, but it has the most modern of ‘loot’. So we redefine what loot is. broken swords, daggers, broken shields, old coins, chains. Elements that can be reforged into metals, old coins (copper, silver, gold) that can be set into metals. Yes there will be chests with actual new(er) stuff. Like groups of brigands, they have bounty, they have conquered stuff (that needs liberating). It will not be about wealth. In one RPG I had 300K, so in what living form of delusional would an adventurer have this much money? Too many RPG seem to value credits as an indication of achievement. That too needs to change.
I took examples from classical masters, from stories (the non-Robin Hood kind) and from historical events, but they need to evolve in RPG gaming. In the economy that side is merely a cog, but a cog that could evolve. Yet the station of evolution is a larger problem that I have not solved yet. I did like the nemesis system that we see in the Shadow of Mordor, but that was THEIR system, I need a similar but different system. This is to stop grinding, the stage where there will be spawning (one man’s ruin) is the next persons envy. But if the previous group was defeated, the next group will have better defences, and optionally one or two more brigands. There are shelters for singular people and those people are sly a lot more like cutthroats, so no warning. All sides we see very little of in current RPG’s. All sides that are new in the RPG.
Stories
I gave more than one story start and that is central in any RPG, yet there is also the additional stage. You see there is no stage where we can do it all, play it all, live it all (the latter is a matter of debate). But the stories cannot be around you, around the player. The main quests yes, but the side quests need a larger setting than we are used to. There is a side that takes me back to Robert Ludlum’s Scarlatti Inheritance (I think), a local village event and a burial that is part of the story. So to set a side quest needs the seeding of a story all by itself that has several connections. There needs to be an intelligent part in this, so that stories can be written en mass and spread in the game, so that some side quests are not part of every game (another way to prevent grinding) and there we see that we need 50-150 side quests. That can intervene to a larger degree to the character that you play at that time. So far we see the foundation of an RPG that can be played on console or streamer.
Then we get to the cogs of the economy, I spoke about them but I considered one additional set of cogs for each part. About that in the next story which will happen during my weekend.
IP intoxication
Yup, this just happened to me. I will try to be as clear as possible, yet I cannot say too much. It all started as I was contemplating new RPG IP, not entirely new, it was to be added to the RPG game that I have been giving visibility to on this blog. As I was considering parts in the economy to interact with the play world my thoughts skipped to Brendan Fraser. I was rethinking some parts of Encino Man (with Sean Astin aka Rudy), as well as The Mummy (with Rachel Weisz as Evelyn Carnahan). At some point the mint was drawing a line and even as additional IP came to mind, I ignored it as this would be Ubisoft territory. But the line became and as such my mind saw an interaction that has NEVER EVER been done in RPG gaming before. It would be optionally the stage for Sony, but it seems that streamers (Amazon Luna) had a much better grasp of the option. To get this added in a game would imply that the game would require module of machine learning and deeper learning. Now that is not so odd. A multitude of RPG games have some kind of NPC AI in play (to coin a phrase), but to add this to the character as a side setting has to my knowledge never been done before and the added options would give it more traction towards gamers. There are a few more sides, I discussed that in part in ‘Mummy and Daddy’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/03/19/mummy-and-daddy/), so well over a year ago (March 19th 2021). There I made mention of “it is basically, to some degree the end of the linear quest person, it is a stage never seen before and I believe that whomever makes that game to the degree we see will make that developer a nice future stage as a new larger development house, and as Micro$oft learns that they lost out again, perhaps they will take the word of gamers against that of business analyst claiming to be gamers.” Additional sides that connect and in this not only has it never been done before, it seems that whomever adds this to their RPG will have additional sides that Bethesda (the company that Microsoft paid $7,500,000,000 for) comes up short on. It feels intoxicating. To have several options in a game that none of the others ever did or contemplated. And now I see that there is more to it all. There is in part a side that touches towards IP Bundle 3 I have, something that could bring Amazon billions (but with a small amount of risk). Yet I never considered it as a side of a game, well to some degree. So as the mind is connecting idea to idea, evolve IP into IP+ and a multitude of IP’s I merely wonder why the others (Google and Amazon) are not on this page already. Google seems to driven to advertise its nest security, Amazon is doing whatever (clothing stores and trying to buy EA), but as I watch the news, and the deeper news that the news will not give us, I see an absence of true innovation in games. In a sense I wonder what is wrong with me, you see I have never been this ahead of any envelope before.
I tried to explain it in the past. You see there is a side where gaming is, most games are in that ‘light’ circle and the bar is set to the edge. Now there is an area outside the gaming area and that is the area of what is possible, this is where innovation is. the really good games (like Horizon: Forbidden West) are in part there, and they are not alone. The real AAA games are in part there, they are coding there now because it is what will be possible tomorrow, the darker circle is what future games will see as ‘current technology’ that is how games have evolved and that has not changed. I went a step beyond that, I went where tomorrow games are currently not and I set out a slice of gaming heaven and decided to add this to the upcoming technology. There are two dangers. The first is that it has a danger of being delusional. The second is that not all technology can get there. The second one is simple. I see the streamers as a stepping stone to what will be possible in for example the PlayStation 6. A (for the lack of a better term) a hybrid streamer. A fat client client/server application in gaming. One that needs a real power player, but that is not possible UNTIL there is a national deployed 5G network. I believe Amazon Luna and Google Stadia need to get to that point, it is what is required in the evolution of gaming. So there are these two dangers, but is the first danger mine? I do not believe that to be as my mind can clearly see the parts required, but that is the hidden danger of a delusional mind. In my defence I have been involved in gaming since 1984 (connections to Mirrorsoft and Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Virgin Games at the time), so I have been around since the very beginning of games. My mind has seen a mountain of true innovator and innovations. As such I feel I am awake and on top of it. But the hidden trap is there and as such, one can never stop to question your own abilities to avoid falling into the first trap.
But for now I feel intoxicated, and not a drop of alcohol in me, innovation can be that overwhelming. This is why the previous article remains under construction. It has a lot to do with Texas, the ATF and the NRA. I wrote about that before as well and interesting enough the media seems to avoid that side to a much larger degree, with the one or two exceptions I mentioned in a previous article. I wonder why that is. Do you not? Well time to sign off, snore like a sawmill and get ready for the new day which is already here.
Residual seeking
Yes, what is it? Well it connects to the game I am designing. You see, Any RPG has its sides and it needs to change, it needs to be a lot less Bethesda (their games are not bad), yet I seek originality and this all connects to ‘The stage of commerce’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/02/25/the-stage-of-commerce/) where I give a lot more and in previous articles (seek and thee shall find) where I give more of all this. Yet there is a side I forgot about. You see, we all expect coin, we all expect funds. But what happens when money had no value in a place where they have no lemonade caps? Well, we will have to make a gander towards older times. In this we need to set steady steps towards other parts, but what if the few gold coins we find have more value by making it into something else? Gold and silver have their uses, especially in the arcane, but when do we see that in gaming? That is the 10th (might be 14th) altering thing that other RPG games are not giving you. So what happens when the chest holds a broken sword? Pieces of chain and two coins? There is a need for nearly anything, you just need to adjust your view and lets be honest, what was the last RPG game you played where it was not about gold, credits, or caps? Any place can grow on commerce, but the driving force of commerce is not always gold based. Many places had other means, even in ancient roman times, the soldiers were paid in salt. Salt was more valuable than coins in some places and a return to that opens a whole new set of gaming parameters. Then we have the fact that the broken sword can be remade as a knife, or could be melted into iron and iron (if enough is obtained) gets you a plough, which means more land and more food for a town. All settings to adjust the view of the gamer and to be honest, I cannot find one game offering this alternative view.
As I wrote in that previous article “because of the random factors the rainbow tables are dynamic and that creates a whole new environment. One where the game can live without you and you become a contributor, not the driving force of anything.” This is important as your play style changes, the dynamic setting remains to some degree and that can push you in other directions. A stage where you optionally have an island that is an evolving stage as we start the island at 18,040 km2 (Halmahera), but there is nothing stopping us to upgrade the island down the track to 138,794 km2 (Java), there is something awfully satisfying to that. It evolves playing and makes it about the game you play, not WHERE you are. And lets be honest, if you could play a game again a year later and that place is 600% larger? Not go from one island to the other, but end up in a similar island a lot bigger and in that setting when you play the generations, what more can you find? It might not be needed as 18,040 km2 is huge, but the option opens a new frontier for RPG gaming and that is what we want, new frontiers and in that only streaming systems would be able to do this, and as I stated very recently, the streamers differentiate themselves or they will become trivialised. There is nothing interesting in playing the same Ubisoft game on these two systems. Yet what happens when AC Brotherhood suddenly has Spain and France added to the game? It becomes a different game, you as a gamer would have to make choices, because you could never see it all. You see, replayability becomes infinitely more important for streaming systems, and as such to prepare the next level of RPG games for such a setting is becoming more and more important. It was one of the truths I realised when I designed Elder Scrolls VII: Restoration. Evolution is where gaming is and the current makers are too much about selling the same cookie to all the other systems, all whilst some can only store cookies, the others are capable of storing a whole apple pie. And when you can have the apple pie, are you really looking out the window for the next cookie dealer? Fair enough if you are hoping for Shannon Elizabeth in a girl scout outfit, but what are the chances?
Consider how far the Stadia and Luna can take you and then look at the failures of Ubisoft, what are you waiting for? Now, in their case I will make an exception for AC Origin and some might like to play the others again, I get that, but do you really want a Ferrari to get your groceries, or do you want to see what is 2365 km of your current location? How will you get there? You might never see it all, and that is fine too. A game that still has more to offer is a game you will play for a much longer time and there is also the rub. Ubisoft and others have made us completionists, yet how much of your own nation have you ACTUALLY seen? Are you really that driven in gaming, or can you see that the story is bigger than you. Can you see that beyond the main story, beyond all the quests there is just more and we will never see it all? That is perhaps the only real flaw that Bethesda has in its games and we all fell for it. In previous systems it was a natural flow of what a system could hold and we get that, but the newest consoles (PS5) and streamers have broken that limit, so we need to use the new settings to offer more gaming, different gaming and we need to throw repetition out of the window. That is merely my view on the matter, and it starts by creating a new mould, one based on historic parts, but still offers more than we have gamed before. It is possible, it is out there. Grab it and make it yours.
Pushing cogs
Yes, for me that was the setting. In the previous articles (several) I set the boundaries for a new RPG game, freeware for all Amazon Luna and Sony developers (just to piss off Microsoft). And if we are going to take a chunk of the marketshare of Bethesda, we need to offer more and we need to offer different. In this I set the player as merely one of many people. Making sure that the world does not revolve around him (or her). So the towns need an economy, It needs a stage to grow and it needs to be in a trend that causes the need for replayability. I always believed in replayability. It is lovely that we all have a house in EVERY town, but reality is not like that. So even if we are going into that stage, I needed to set a larger premise towards WHAT the stage was. The tavern sets productivity in villages and towns. So does the Blacksmith and so does the general store, bookshop, butcher and grocer. Yet in this we see internal economy, the parts that feed the town (Butcher, baker, grocer, tavern) there are the shops that feed an external economy (Blacksmith) and there are the shops that feed both (herbalist, general store) and there is the luxury shop (bookshop). So as these shops are doing better, they could upgrade, they could grow the town. The external shops call in adventurers and more money into a town. And if a town grows to lets state 3 stars, the infrastructure upgrades (lights, guards) This cannot be merely tables that ‘satisfy’ the needs of the game. Each town gets his stage of cogs, one gear feeding another and that need is there. You cannot get a dynamic town in place merely letting the adventurer set the speed of growth. There also needs a risk setting. For example if you fed the tavern too much, and it gets to 5 stars, whilst the town is a 3 star place, the tavern gets sold, and you get to start anew there. Luxury shops (bookshop, tailor) are there when the town reaches its 4th star. This upgrade the overall look of the town, wealthier people come into town and that calls more adventurers and more charlatan’s. To set this all in cogs is nearly impossible, but such an attempt is required to create a dynamic playing world. Consider Bethesda’s Oblivion (2006), we see Chorrel, Cheydenhal, Bravil and Skingrad. They all stay the same, but what happens when you set the game where we see Chorrel doing better and Cheydenhal recedes towards another Bravil? To set such a gaming stage was not possible in 2006, but now with streaming servers and the PS5, that setting becomes achievable. And when you return to a town after weeks, it might look very different. And that is what we are trying to aim for, because the $200,000,000,000 gaming revenue (expected 2023 numbers) does not go to those doing the same again and again. It goes to the people who offers what others do not, or cannot. I do hope that Horizons: Forbidden West showed you that much (as did Elden ring). To give the world a new a really new creation will be rewarding beyond expectations. So here you go and you are welcome. Oh and none of this links to my optional additional stage of selling 50,000,000 Amazon Luna consoles, so there is that too (it sucks to be Microsoft in 2022).
Foreplay or forplay?
Yup, we all go there at some point. My ex once wanted me to watch a movie on foreplay so that she could get a better night of sex and I did not mind. To be honest, once I skipped the boring bits at the start the movie they gave me a few excellent ideas as well. In gaming this situation exists as well. But in gaming what is foreplay? Some state that it is the intro of the game. That tends to differ per game. In Horizon Zero Dawn it could be the part where Eloy is a little girl (when she finds the focus) in TombRaider it was the mansion level, in Oblivion it is the escape from prison and many games have their own way of staging the introduction. And now the joke I started with starts making sense. Weirdly enough it was not a direct stage that assaulted my senses. I had been contemplating and considering additional parts to my 5G devices when it hit me. I was so ‘obsessed’ to hand more functionality to the customers that it hit me. There needs to be a larger stage of introducing more to the customer, educating them as it were. Just like the video, we need more extensive foreplay. You see the age of dumping a device in the lap of customers, whether they are consumers or retailers. That stage is gone and too many rely on word of mouth, the internet and other means for people to figure it out. Consider the TV below.
It drains your account by $11,500 dollars and I had to use this example as I am a huge Sony fan. But consider the fact that the startup guide is two pages and the reference guide is 8 pages, which also gives us “For more information on troubleshooting, refer to the Help Guide”, which is a button on the remote. Now there is nothing really wrong with that, but if someone courts me for that amount, it better comes with breakfast and a final blowjob after a night of super great sex.
Devices have been pushed as almost literally a push and seek on the internet stage. Now for a $49 Google ChromeCast that makes sense. But for a $499 Bose bluetooth speaker? Not even a manual that explains what one port on the speaker does? That is a failure and gaming tends to go in that direction as well. A stage where too much is auto assumed. To be honest, Ubisoft and Bethesda actually has a decent grasp on that especially in their latest games. There are more than a few games out there that fails its consumers. There are quotes like ‘The internet is full of help’, or the demeaning “Your friends do not seem to have that same problem” And when Meta is fully deployed especially when hybrid comes to life there will be all kinds of hiatus. Now there is nothing wrong with setting up the internet to help out, but ask yourself “How many supplier set up a decent amount of white papers to help you out?” The answer will scare you. They all skipped the boring bits of the foreplay video and went straight for ‘orgasmic revenue’. And here is the stage where I found the interesting part of forplay (not a typo) “Foreplay is the fun, flirty, arousing goings on right before actually having sex. It’s an act that sexually excites a person. In forplay some people use icing, chocolate sauce, whatever..” And this applies here too. In hardware the ‘chocolate sauce’ are the accessories you can buy, or DLC’s in gaming (a ‘for play’ joke). The extra yummy parts are not in the real game, they come later (that has been Ubisoft as well). It worries me because it implies that the consumer is not the person who buys the game, but the person who buys the game and all the other bits and that is disappointing. It is disappointing in gaming, it is disappointing in hardware, software and concepts. It is like companies are too much abut the sales pipeline in some fire and forget setting, and no one (or too few) people care what happens to their customers afterwards and it offends me. I was in Customer service since 1992 and it was for a long time a great stage yet in too many places it became about cost reduction and cutting corners whilst the consumers where not properly taken care off too often and for too long. There are exceptions the most striking one is either Norton or Adobe customer service versus Microsoft customer service, or try dialling your internet provider. Try setting a care line there (a line that show they actually care for you), the results might scare you and that is where I found myself. Educating the customer on the boring bits of 5G, as well the boring bits of added 5G because that field is MASSIVE and I am hopefully a player in that stage in the not so far distant future, so it matters to me to get that part right too. And for the size of what I am talking about, see below
Gift for militant wench
OK, not my finest hour in diplomacy, but it was the only way to give the path to people thinking ‘another Amazon story’. I woke up this morning with a new IP, an IP based on Google technology, but they do not create software, so their loss. And this is freeware only for Sony and Amazon products, just another way for me to say to Microsoft “Screw you!” So in my sleep I was racing through the street, there were paths, obstacles and my mind was making sense of it all (which took a few seconds) and I was seeing the brilliance of that Nintendo kart game that can take place in your home. A good idea, but I gave it steroids and turned it into something serious. You see, there are the F1 people, who love the F1, want to race on their tracks, want to be an F1 driver and this is not for them, There are good products and they are happy there. No, this is for the people who want to race in the real world. So consider a setting where the game has 10 circuits. They can give their address, or one they wished to live and the system will design a racetrack from 2500 metres up to 5500 metres (for now) based on real Google Map data. So you get a game that will soon have thousands of tracks, and the nice part is that there is racing (just the street) and challenge where the system adds obstacles, ramps (looking like it was fake and inserted) to give that goofy feeling for when you go all out. As far as I can tell, it has NEVER been done before and there Amazon gets the inside track, because as you race what is, the system with Machine learning and deeper machine learning will try to make you a map you requested based on the area, or location you gave and adds the track for you personally to your account. A setting where a game can grown into a massive behemoth of racing fun. A setting where you can race where you always desired to race, your hometown (wherever that is), Tokyo streets, Monte Carlo (every racer wants to be there one day), London, Berlin, Amsterdam and the list just grows. I am actually amazed no one in Google was that alert, but there you have it. So I say (still lacking diplomacy) “Militant wench, have at it”, we could include boat racing, but I reckon that a place like Rotterdam will give Amazon all kinds of problems.
A simple idea boosted to a real challenge, and should you wonder why Microsoft cannot come up with it. Well that is simple, they can buy creativity, they merely lack the ability to create something. For that they have Mojang, Bethesda and Blizzard. Those who buy are limited to their knowledge of Excel (or so they say).
Enjoy this midweek! The weekend will be 68 hours away for some.
daemonis more
Yes, from one we go to the other and it is time to look towards the setting of protection. Armour if you want. You see the games all have their take on it, and so do I. We have cloth, leather and…..
Yes, you are roaring to name dozens of armour, all from other games, Blizzard and Bethesda did their work, yet I believe we need to go back to the basics. You can have 60-200 forms of armour, but what does it serve? The basics are what some call undergarments, the armour and the cloak. Yet be not deceived, the undergarments can be fur, cloth, thin leather or chainmail. Each their protection, each their weakness. Try walking through the winter scape of Scandinavia or Canada and try doing that wearing chainmail UNDER your vest, you soon will learn that col travels and Chainmail holds onto the freezing cold like nothing you have ever experienced. Yet chainmail has properties that we need. So we could go chainmail coated fur. You see, each benefit will have a drawback and it becomes a much larger puzzle when you imbue the armour with magical properties. I do not believe that there are only upsides. Like magnets, what pulls on one side, pushes on another. Any natural product is like a small balance, upside and downside go hand in hand, but overall the larger benefit is found. The cloak might have stealth magic, yet the iron armour imbued with strength or poison magic will negatively impact stealth. It is not completely set in stone yet, but I believe that a lot more can be done on balance instead of merely adding percentages here or there.
And as armour is stronger, it tends to be less stealthy, still stealth will have a side that benefits all, it will have options making it worth having and so begins a new water table of balance.
As I personally see it, we get a lot more puzzles and joy by having the three elements of armour in the personal screen and work our way from there. Three elements in stead of a combination of 8. Three elements and each having its options instead of X*Y*Z armour settings you have to program ahead of release. There is of course more to be done, but I just handed three separate sides (including the previous two articles) to get you going and become a new and competing Blizzard. Let’s not forget that there are several systems where Microsoft is not welcome, so you have options in the long run and this was handed to you without charge so you can design your version of a slicer and dicer on Sony and Amazon systems at no charge. When was the last time you had an offer like that? You still have to do your dues and your perseverance in making the game, but you have a head start now. I will try to add a few more sides to this all giving you more to work with and let us remember that we want a better set of options for gamers in total. You see Microsoft is about removing choice, they have the largest companies and you get to play those games as long as it is on a Microsoft system. An inferior system that betrayed its gamers (as I personally see it) more than once. Do you really want to be part of that, or do you want to be the new wave of game designers in a setting where the gamer gets to choose and they choose you? Now they will choose Microsoft because there is no other system that has it, how is that freedom for gamers?
And freedom is where it is at, so I design the IP for you all so you can oppose a Microsoft dictatorship for gamers. It is merely my way of fighting that technology usurper. At least that is how I personally see it.
So feel free to agree or disagree, yet those who disagree when choices fall away, you better realise that you were part of that limitation of choice.
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