From questions in the comments section I realized I didn't do a very good job to explain what Card Hunter is to all those not in the closed beta. When people hear that it is a mix between a turn-based tactical board game and a trading card game, they think of games they know which have that sort of elements. So lets go back a bit in history, to Magic the Gathering, the original trading card game. In MtG the two opponents play cards, each one on his side of the table. Many cards stay on the table, especially the creatures that then attack the opponent. In Magic it doesn't matter where exactly on the table you put your card, there is no such thing as location. Apart from spells or effects that prevent blocking, any creature on your side can block any attacking creature from the opponent. Newer trading card games, especially computer versions thereof like Kings & Legends, Summoner Wars, or Scrolls, add a board to this trading card game. Thus now it matters where you play your card, there is usually something like 5 lanes, and attacks and blocking only happens between creatures on the same lane.

Card Hunter does not work like that at all. While it has trading card elements, it is not really a direct descendant of Magic the Gathering or similar games. It is far more akin to tactical roleplaying games like Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, or Disgaea. In Card Hunter you never play creatures. The characters you control, and your enemies are on the board from the start, and none are added during battle. The board isn't just lanes, but depicts some fantasy environment like a kobold's cave or lizard men temple. There is terrain affecting movement and line of sight, and sometimes even victory locations. So at the core Card Hunter is a game about moving your characters over this battle map and engaging in tactical combat with the monsters in PvE or the other player in PvP. Just like in a roleplaying game, at the end of an adventure you get experience points and loot, maybe go up a level, sell your trash to a vendor, and equip better gear you found or bought.

In most other tactical turn-based games what actions your characters can perform during combat depends on some sort of action points. In Card Hunter it is here where the trading card element kicks in. Every turn every one of your characters draws one movement card and two random cards from a deck of usually 36 cards (you start out with less cards in the deck to make things easier at lower levels). Thus whether you can do an attack, at what range, and how much damage it does depends not on some action points, but on whether you drew an attack card, and which one, from your deck. Besides movement cards and attack cards there are also armor cards and block cards that can prevent damage to you (usually on a dice roll), as well as a few other effects like healing spells or traits.

So how do you build your deck? Again Card Hunter is very different from typical trading card games, as you don't in fact get single cards. What you get is equipment, and equipment has a fixed number of cards in it. Every boot in the game has 3 cards in it, every weapon has 6. If you choose not to equip any item in a slot, the default in that slot has the same number of cards, so you can't make your deck any slimmer by that. What you can do is gather more equipment, having different cards. And higher level and rarer equipment has somewhat better cards than lower level and more common equipment. The game is called Card Hunter because the more precise "Hunter of Gear with Cards in it" doesn't flow of the tongue so well. :)

To the best of my knowledge Card Hunter is unique, the only game which works like this. There are plenty of trading card games with and without boards, and there are a good number of turn-based tactical games (albeit not so many on the PC). But I know of no other turn-based tactical game which uses trading cards for actions in combat.

I was in a shop this weekend, holding a "Nintendo 3DS with Fire Emblem Awakening Pre-Installed" in my hands, but ended up not buying it. I am pretty sure that I would enjoy playing Fire Emblem. But as I don't have the 3DS handheld console, buying the game would mean buying the console. And at €220 for the bundle that is a lot of money for a single game. There were a few other games that looked interesting as well, like some Zelda game, but nothing except Fire Emblem which was really must-have for me. And when looking at the demo 3DS on display in the shop, I couldn't help but think I was looking at a type of machine that was already outdated.

I used to take a handheld console (a PSP) with me during summer holidays. Easier to transport than a laptop, easier to play in a comfortable sofa chair. But when I'm planning what to take on this year's summer holiday, the handheld console is staying home. I'll take the iPad instead. The iPad is larger, but thinner, and the charger is much lighter, so overall it isn't any more difficult to stow into a holiday suitcase than the PSP. I have a lot more iPad games than PSP games, as the iPad games are much cheaper. The screen is much bigger, offering more elaborate games. Touch controls are often less fiddly than console controls. And for other applications than games, like reading e-mail or surfing the web, the iPad is so much superior to the PSP that there isn't really a contest.

So as much as I regret missing out on some games which are exclusive to handheld consoles, I don't think I will buy any new handheld consoles any more. Neither a Nintendo 3DS, nor a PS Vita, nor anything similar. For me tablets have made those handheld consoles somewhat obsolete. And some of the games I used to play on the PSP, like Final Fantasy Tactics, have since been released on the iPad. So maybe one day I can get Fire Emblem on the iPad.

I love Card Hunter, currently in closed beta. So much that I gave them more money than I considered necessary to play comfortably, just because I wanted to vote with my wallet for the game. You see, I'm a bit worried about the financial success of a game like Card Hunter: While the art style reminiscent of old school D&D looks great to me, and a combination of trading card mechanics with turn-based tactical combat is pretty close to my dream game, I am very well aware that these aren't mass market trends. Card Hunter is a game which is difficult because it forces you to think, and most people don't like having to think while playing games, and would rather mash buttons.

But maybe I underestimated the size of the market for a game like Card Hunter. A recent discussion on the beta forums (they are public) about the number of people trying to get a beta key had a developer reveal that they are already sending out 1,000 beta keys PER DAY, and in spite of that the waiting list was getting longer, because more people than that were signing up every day for the beta.

One factor here is certainly demographics. The people who played D&D in the 80's and/or Magic the Gathering in the 90's are now adults, having maybe less time to get a pen & paper game going, but more disposable income. In a way they are a far more attractive target audience for a Free2Play game than kids and teenagers are. For $50 you can buy pretty much everything you need in Card Hunter for months, including a 3-month subscription to get more loot and access to all the extra adventures; for anybody who used to spend money on Magic the Gathering cards that would seem dirt cheap today.

The other factor is probably positive word of mouth. There is no other game comparable to Card Hunter, and the closed beta already has rather impressive polish and amount of content. Anybody interested enough in that type of game to sign up for the beta is probably going to enjoy it. No NDA means that nothing stops Card Hunter from "going viral", with everybody getting in recommending the game to his friends.

On the cost side, I am not an expert, but presumably it is cheaper to program and run an online turn-based "board" game without character animations than a MMORPG. This isn't a game where you'd be worried about how many milliseconds your ping is, in fact there was a recent discussion from the developers talking about a 2-minute time limit per turn in multiplayer. I don't think there is a huge amount of data being exchanged between server and client.

So if the cost per player is low, and the average revenue per user is high, Card Hunter could in fact be quite profitable, even if it doesn't attract millions of players. Here's hoping, because I'd love this game to stick around and be developed further.

Keen is reviewing the PS4 vs. XBox One, and says "Always online, 24-hour check-ins, no used games, etc just don’t bother me. Computer game DRM never seemed to cause any problems for me despite the outcry it gets. My consoles are always connected to the internet anyway, and I rarely ever buy and sell used games. Obviously I’m in the minority on these issues." And that made me stop and wonder whether he actually *is* in the minority. To be more precise, I am not sure that he is in the minority of actual customers in not having a problem with DRM. Somebody who *does* have a problem tends to be far more vocal about it than somebody who doesn't, so just looking at what people say on the internet isn't going to give us actual numbers.

Unfortunately actual numbers are hard to come by. I found different numbers on used games sales, but as they are expressed in terms of money, and a used game costs less than a new game, it is hard to compare used game sales with new game sales to see what percentage of players resells their used games and would thus be bothered by a system that prevents that. It is even harder to find out what percentage of players doesn't have internet at least once every 24 hours.

I do believe there is a large number of people whose reaction is exactly like Keen's: They look at what games are available first, the price difference second, and the DRM issue barely or not at all. I wouldn't be surprised if I read news around Christmas that the XBone is sold out. That is as close as I think we can get to having numbers on how bothered people really are.

Syp is pondering the age of console MMOs, but says: "As a non-console player, I’m only excited about this in a detached, historical sense.". I don't share that detachment. For me the question is not one of platform, but whether future MMORPGs are going to be "lean-forward" or "lean-backward" games. Due to the obvious interest of cross-platform games, we might end up having our PC MMORPGs turned into lean-backward console-like games.

While people successfully tried to play World of Warcraft with a gamepad, it is obvious that you can't get the full experience of WoW like that. A typical character has more hotkeys than a gamepad offers, and even if you manage that somehow, you still won't be able to chat. But consider this year's Neverwinter, and the controls are already simplified to be quite viable on a gamepad. Play solo without chatting, or use voice chat for group content, and you get a lean-backward game which you can play perfectly well on your TV, lying on a sofa.

So for me the real question is not whether future MMORPGs will run on a console. The question for me is how making those games compatible with the control scheme of consoles will affect game design. I'm not looking forward to a generation of action-MMORPGs with simple control schemes and little social interaction. Voice chat isn't suitable for talking to strangers you meet, and being designed as games that don't need a keyboard could further push the move towards "massively single-player online" games where people play in parallel, but not together, unless it is for organized group content.

So Microsoft replied to their perceived defeat at E3 by stating: "We're trying to do something pretty big in terms of moving the industry forward for console gaming into the digital world. We believe the digital world is the future, and we believe digital is better.". I find that a somewhat unfortunate phrase. The last analog media were tape decks and LPs, every CD, DVD, and Blue-ray disc is digital, so the PS4 isn't any less digital than the XBone. While I had a ZX81 in 1981 that used an analog tape-deck for storing games, I am pretty certain that consoles have always been digital from the start.

I think what Microsoft means is that the future world will be virtual, as opposed to physical. I agree with CNN saying that Sony "won" E3 by "basically doing nothing", that is by saying that the PS4 discs would work pretty much exactly like PS1 discs. That is comforting for customers wary of any change, but hardly innovative. Most people never understood the difference between owning a physical copy of a book or disc and owning the contents of that book or disc. Even the law on reselling media depends on those media being physical. Any move towards a virtual future will leave existing laws and ways of thinking about intellectual property behind, and that will be scary for some people.

That is not to say that any change is necessarily bad. For example I am pretty certain that game companies currently "price in" the lost sales due to used games and piracy into the price of their games. A future in which media a virtual and can't be pirated or resold could thus result in lower prices. Many people (including commenters on this blog) have a very confused opinion about what constitutes a monopoly, and believe that Microsoft would keep prices high because they control who can make XBox games. That totally fails to take into account the competition from other consoles, PC games, and mobile gaming platforms. Apple has the same control about what games are published on the iOS than Microsoft has over the XBox, and iOS games are dirt cheap.

In fact when Microsoft dreams of a future without physical media, something like an iPad must be very much on their mind. Apple is doing quite well without physical media, and so are its customers. And I think this is exactly where Microsoft went wrong: They didn't go far enough with their XBone. They got stuck half-way between the physical and the virtual world, trying to please everybody and ending up pleasing nobody. The XBox Two (or whatever the next generation will be called) will presumably not have a disc drive at all, only a hard disc and an internet connection. If Microsoft wanted to be a visionary of the virtual future, they should have made the XBone virtual only, with no physical discs. That would have left Sony looking like dinosaurs with a 20 year old disc system compared to Microsoft's and Apple's disc-less system. By doing things by half, and still having discs but tethering them to the virtual world, Microsoft ended up with the worst of both worlds. They even could have beat Sony on price if they had gone with a much smaller console without disc drive. And nobody would have asked questions about privacy and DRM, just like nobody asks these questions to Apple.

As it is, people who prefer discs to online downloads will probably buy a PS4. Not that the average customer is very concerned about privacy (just look at his Facebook page) or DRM (just look at his App Store purchases and Steam library). The average customer's first concern will be what games he can play, and with so many multi-platform games out there the secondary concern of the $100 price difference will probably carry the day for Sony. As games availability is the first criterion of choice, the XBone will probably outsell the Wii U. And given past history it is not unlikely that come Christmas 2013 both the PS4 and the XBone will be sold out, which makes sales more a function of production capacity than anything else.

Christmas 2020 there will be new consoles, and none of them will have a disc drive. Microsoft's vision might well come true, they just bungled the execution of it in this console generation.

People who study fun in games, gamification, and how to motivate people have written a lot about the concept of intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards. The idea is that something which is inherently more fun is more motivating than having to do a boring activity for a reward later. Of course that is more of a theoretical concept, because whether an activity is fun in itself or not is not so easy to determine. I think that for most people the activities in their first MMORPG were inherently fun, but became less so with hundreds or thousands of hours of repetition, until the only motivation left was the extrinsic "epic" rewards at the end.

So it was somewhat interesting how Card Hunter worked nearly in reverse for me: Extrinsic rewards were more important at the start, and after a month their importance pretty much disappeared and I only play for the intrinsic rewards. The reason for that are the diminishing returns of games which are about building decks from trading cards: At the start any new card is a great addition to your collection which improves your options. Once you have a big collection, a lot of the cards you find are ones you already have, or are just minor upgrades. So if Card Hunter was all about extrinsic rewards, I would have grown bored by now.

But fortunately Card Hunter is a much better game, with much better replayability due to the intrinsic rewards of the tactical turn-based combat system. After finishing the campaign you get the option of doing adventures again with some handicap. And you can always hire new characters (currently either level 1 or level 10, with different cost). So I am currently playing an all-dwarf party from level 1 up. Dwarves are slow, but have high hit points, so I developed a strategy which goes well with that: I loaded the wizard up with Firestorm cards, which hit everything on the board regardless of location, including yourself. Due to high hit points, armor, and self-healing, my dwarves can survive that. But large hordes of small enemies are extremely vulnerable to that tactic. That leaves only the bigger mobs as problem, and they are much less of an issue for a dwarven party than the more agile and faster small mobs.

Even in the closed beta version I am currently playing, Card Hunter has a huge amount of content. Many different adventures, using different boards and different enemies. The AI is generally quite good, so that mobs with different abilities also act differently as a function of that: For example mobs with lots of range 2 spear type attacks will always try to stay at 2 squares distance from you. There is a lot more variety between two Card Hunter battles than between two combats in a typical MMORPG. Playing another battle is fun not because it promises another reward, but because it will be different, and maybe your current deck isn't good for the new challenge and you need to twiddle with it again. The intrinsic rewards go hand in hand with replayability. That feels a lot less like work than a game you end up continuing only for some extrinsic rewards.

Interesting article in Time about XBone vs. PS4: The author speculates that while Sony's policies on disc based DRM might make them popular now, it could backfire in the long run. On a PS4 the disc with the game on is the principal mode of distribution, and all the advantages of being able to sell used games or play them at a friend's house only apply to discs. Thus people will gravitate towards buying PS4 games on discs.

On the XBone on the other hand, a disc is basically an inconvenience, a crutch for people with a slow internet connection, having all the disadvantages of a physical object without having the advantages of trading or transporting, as those are removed through the online account lock. Thus as long as you have a fast enough internet connection, you'd be better off to buy your XBone game online. Why bother with a disc if it doesn't offer any advantages?

The possible (but far from inevitable) consequence could be the XBone ending up with a much better online store than the PS4. And online DRM hasn't exactly hurt Steam on the PC. Thus if we believe in a future where most games are sold and downloaded online, and physical discs become an artifact of the past, the currently less popular Microsoft policies might actually be the cleverer thing to do.

Not saying that this is necessarily how it will play out, but as I haven't bought a game on a disc in a box for my PC for a long time, I can't discount that possibility. And the PlayStation Network for the PS3 has caused me more trouble than it was worth.

There are a lot of gaming publications declaring Sony's PS4 "having won" E3 against Microsoft's XBone. The PS4 is cheaper, has no phone-home-once-per-day DRM (but it does have disc-based DRM!), and no always-on camera watching you. But I think that it is a gross oversimplification to declare winners based on DRM issues. In my experience DRM causes a lot of noise, and very little actual impact on sales. For example the Wii U also has no internet-based DRM for games you buy on a disc, but was still a flop. People base their buying decision a lot more on what games are available for a console.

Now this is kind of lucky for me, because the PS4 appears (like previous generations) to have more of the games I like to play, for example role-playing games. From what you see announced for the XBone, you might be excused for thinking that the thing only can play shooters. In reality games like Final Fantasy 15 aren't Playstation exclusives any more, and many of the games shown for the PS4 will also run on the XBone; but the focus of the presentation seemed different.

So I would be careful to declare a winner until we know how many millions of consoles of each type sold let's say in 2014. My prediction is that the $100 price difference will do more for Sony than the DRM issue, but that a lot of shooter fans still will buy an XBone because of exclusive games like Halo or Titanfall.

Quite often when I start an internet browser I want to search for some information. Thus I set my homepage everywhere to be iGoogle, which gives me direct access to the Google search engine, plus all sorts of configurable news: News stories, weather, stock ticker, whatever you need. That works perfectly well, but Google is shutting the service down in November, which is kind of annoying.

Now at first they seemed to suggest that people should use Google+ instead. I'm on Google+ as +Tobold Stoutfoot , and out of Facebook habits I add everybody to my circles that adds me to his. So I can go to Google+ and have some sort of start page with some sort of news on it. But it is absolutely not what I am looking for: Not only is there no Google search box, but the nature of the news on offer is so very different from what I want; like a Facebook wall the "news" consist of the random thoughts of the people I am connected to, things like funny cat photos and whatever else is popular on the internet at the moment.

This sort of "social news" is what social networks are built on: Know what your friends are currently doing, what they are currently thinking or talking about. I am not saying that this has no interest, but it is far away from the less personal, more general news items on an iGoogle page. If you want to know what weather there will be tomorrow, or how your shares stand, you don't want to wait until one of your friends is discussing the subject. You want some gadget giving you that sort of public news, not social news.

The latest development on the subject is that Google plans to bring the Android app "Google Now" on the PC to replace iGoogle, including Siri-like voice search functionality and "cards" for stuff like weather or stocks. As I don't have an Android device I can't say yet how well that will work compared to iGoogle. And there is a risk that this will only be available on Google Chrome, unlike iGoogle which works on any browser.

Anybody know a good personalized homepage website which offers a similar functionality as iGoogle, and works from anywhere with any browser and device without installation?

In the previous session the players had entered the dungeon below Castle Ravenloft in search of the crypt of vampire lord Count Strahd von Zarovich. Having had two fights already, they started this session somewhat exhausted, and planning to rest. But the rogue first wanted to loot the vampires they had shot through iron bars, and proceeded to open the door. Behind the vampires he found an open door leading to the guard room from where the vampire guards had come. And in that room there was a staircase leading up, and a cell with a man imprisoned inside. The man introduced himself as Bogdan, and claimed to be imprisoned because he was part of a resistance movement against Count Strahd.

Now previously the group had been fooled by a vampire disguised as a maid, so they were somewhat distrustful and tried to find out whether Bogdan was a vampire, for example by casting turn undead right next to him. But Bogdan showed no sign of being undead, ate the food he was offered, and when the cleric gave him a bottle of holy water (presumably for protection, but without explaining what it was), Bogdan just drank the holy water with no ill effect. Nevertheless the group decided to leave him in his cell until they had rested, and Bogdan told them that the staircase led to a secret door to the chapel, where they could rest in safety. That turned out to be true, so the next morning they freed Bogdan, armed him with a sword and crossbow from the vampires, and continued further into the dungeon.

The next room was a huge catacombs with 13 small crypts and an exit door opposite from where the players had entered. Now the rogue would have liked to loot those crypts, but the wizard was vehemently opposed and the majority voted to continue to search for Strahd's crypt. They only read the epitaphs on the crypts, finding that they housed several deceased members of the von Zarovich family, as well as assorted nobles, and even one crypt with their dogs. Passing by the crypts, the wizard cast a mage's hand spell to open the door leaving the catacombs, revealing an apparently empty room with a bricked up exit at the other end.

The rogue was the first to approach that door, but when he passed between the crypts in front of it, the other  characters saw him "transformed" into a wight. The wight proceeded to attack them, and when the dwarven fighter stepped between the crypts to strike at the wight, he was transformed into a wight as well. In reality that was a teleportation trap: The rogue got teleported into a crypt, wearing nothing but a burial shroud, with another wight on the slab next to him, dressed in the same kind of shroud. So the rogue ran out of the crypt, through the door, and tried to hold that door closed. The fighter of course was switched by the teleport trap with the other wight, found himself alone in a crypt with a door being held shut from the other side, and started pulling at that door. That predictably ended with the stronger fighter pulling the door open and finding the rogue on the other side. The whole thing worked out to be funnier than I had thought.

Meanwhile the other four group members were not only fighting the two wights, but also Bogdan, who had turned out to be a werewolf (and thus really not an undead). The fighter and the rogue ran back to join their comrades, but of course their weapons and equipment were still on the wights. The wight who got teleported into the fighters armor had dropped his axe on the ground, the axe being an holy artifact, and the fighter managed to recover it without stepping into the teleport trap again. The wight in the rogue's armor was carrying the rogue's daggers in his belt, and with a successful pick pocket skill check the rogue managed to pull out those two daggers and in an epic move continued to hit the wight with those daggers. Overall the fight was interesting due to the teleport trap, and the added surprise from the werewolf, but not overly hard. The heroes managed to dispatch the three enemies after a few rounds with only minor scratches, albeit with two characters infected by the werewolf's moon frenzy disease.

As there were only two wights in the crypt against which the fighter and rogue had been exchanged by the teleport trap, the players wondered whether the trap was still active. The cleric dared to try it out, and found the trap wasn't doing anything anymore. So the group advanced into the next room, with the brick wall on the other side. That corresponded to information about Strahd having sealed his tomb. But of course nothing is more suspicious than an empty room in a dungeon, and the group took great care to search the room high and low for traps. Thus they noticed that in the 8 squares long room there were over the last 4 squares long gaps from wall to wall in the ceiling, as if something could drop from there. They tried to crack the brick wall from a distance with a throwing hammer tied to a rope, but didn't make much progress.

So they started thinking about blocking the trap somehow, at first moving tables from the kitchen under the trap, but then concluding that if something heavy like a portcullis would drop from there, the tables might be too flimsy to stop it. So their next idea was using a stack of doors to stop such a portcullis. But where would they get all those doors? Well, from the 13 crypts they had up to now avoided. Thus the session ended with the amusing notion that the party might loot those crypts not for the potential treasure inside, but for their doors. :)

Blizzard sent me a promotional offer where they are offering everybody services like character transfers to other servers for half price. And that got me wondering where this is going. Fact is that World of Warcraft is shrinking. While the news of the death of WoW might be premature, and estimated extrapolation of the speed of shrinking vary wildly, the general overall direction is undisputedly downwards. And if it is downwards overall a long history of other games has shown that there are only two possible things that can happen: Either each individual server is getting less and less population, or the number of servers has to shrink. Usually it is first the former, followed by the latter.

Thus it is not inconceivable to think of a progression where server transfers are first half-price, then they become free, and ultimately when that led to some servers becoming significantly underpopulated, those servers might shut down and there would be some sort of forced migration.

Of course this is not inevitable. Shrinking server populations have consequences mostly for the parts of the game where people interact with each other, be that in collaborative PvE, in PvP, or in the economy. And Blizzard has a history of solving underpopulation problems by doing cross-server zones. Thus it would presumably be possible to organize all multiplayer activities as cross-server, including cross-server guilds, raiding, and the auction house. The only consequence of an underpopulated server would be you rarely meeting anybody while questing, and I know a lot of people who would consider that as a benefit rather than as a problem.

So what do you think? Are server mergers coming to World of Warcraft, of will Blizzard do without?