tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55845782024-03-18T04:04:07.609+01:00Tobold's BlogA blog with my thoughts regarding games I am playing and other stuff in life. Please read my <a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/11/tobolds-mmorpg-blog-terms-of-service.html">Terms of Service</a>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.comBlogger6398125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-77533844046201133322024-03-17T10:59:00.001+01:002024-03-17T10:59:06.449+01:00Influenced by ParadoxThe typical games of Paradox Interactive are not for everybody. They are typically (grand) strategy games, and usually rather deep, which makes them not easily accessible for the casual gamer. There are probably a lot of people out there who tried one of these games, but ended up scratching their head, not having fun, and ultimately giving up on it. There are some which are a bit more accessible, like Age of Wonders 4, and some which are a bit less so, like Europa Universalis 4 (which therefore I haven't played yet). But I wouldn't be surprised, nor would I judge anyone, if a number of my readers just weren't interested in these games.<div><br /></div><div>Whatever one thinks of their games, one has to admit that Paradox Interactive is good at modern influencer marketing. That probably shouldn't come as a surprise, because niche games are best marketed directly to a niche audience, while mass media advertising would work a lot less well. As I am following on Twitch a number of streamers that play exactly this sort of game, I was inundated this weekend with content about Millennia. This weekend content creators were allowed to play the game until the 6th age, and next weekend they'll be allowed to play until the end, with the game then releasing on the 26th.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now I played the Millennia demo at the Steam Next Fest in February, and came away with mixed feelings. It took me some time to overcome my dislike of the ugly graphics and user interface, but the game obviously had a lot of depth and potential. On the surface Millennia is "Civ-like", but there is a complex wealth of resource-management and city-building game systems in addition to the usual fare of the genre. The demo wasn't great in as far as it was limited to 60 turns, which didn't get you really far into the deeper game elements. But I played it several times and got quite fascinated by it in the end. The game definitely has flaws, but it also has the potential for many hours of fun.</div><div><br /></div><div>So after seeing more of the game beyond turn 60 this weekend on Twitch, I cracked and pre-ordered the game, even going for the $60 premium edition, which includes an expansion pass. Between having played the demo and seen the streams I felt that I knew enough about the game to be certain that I do want to play this on release.</div><div><br /></div><div>What helped was my recent game of Victoria 3, which made me realize that even if a grand strategy game isn't terribly well balanced, it can be fun as a toy, to play around with all the different game systems and see what works and what doesn't. As long as I play single-player, I can just decide to *not* play the unbalanced and overpowered choice, I am not bound by the "meta game". For Millennia the toy approach might work well, choosing to play against an AI not set to a very high level: All AI in all 4X games cheats at high level, and in Millennia that results in the AI being faster than you in unlocking ages, which negates one of the Unique Selling Propositions of the game.</div><div><br /></div><div>The main problem with being influenced to pre-order 10 days before release, is that I now need to wait for the game to actually release. I'll have to play something else in the meantime.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-22706674731569430602024-03-16T18:47:00.000+01:002024-03-16T18:47:42.586+01:00Victoria 3 - No DLCI finished my most successful run in Victoria 3 ever. I played Belgium for a full century, reaching great power status, the highest GDP per person in the world, the highest living standard, and with pretty much everybody in my lands being happy. And that in spite of playing as a colonialist, with a huge African empire reaching from the Congo to South Africa.<div><br /></div><div>I also controlled Romania, which is actually a point of criticism. The latter part of the tech tree requires oil, and relatively few places in the world have oil. At one point I got so frustrated with that, that I decided to invade Romania, which had tons of possible oil rigs, but didn't build them. It was either that, or accept my GDP growth to stall completely.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now currently Steam has their Spring Sale ongoing. And thus I considered whether I wanted to buy DLCs or an expansion pass for Victoria 3 at a nice discount. In the end I decided against it: None of the DLCs already released or announced, actually addresses my issues with the game. I can see me playing the game again, for example playing the USA (they do have oil). But not anytime soon, because right now the constant repetition of always the same events and the same economic and political problems, regardless of what country you are playing, would get on my nerves too much. The runs are too long, this last run took me 32 hours. I did have the impression that the patches improved the game compared to my previous 2 runs, but they didn't fix all the problems.</div><div><br /></div><div>So instead I backed the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gildeddestiny/gilded-destiny-a-grand-strategy-game" target="_blank">crowdfunding for Gilded Destiny</a>, in a faint hope that I'll get a similar Victorian Age grand strategy / economic game, with hopefully a bit better game flow. Which was cheaper than the discounted Victoria 3 expansion pass.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-70572087127972291952024-03-14T10:17:00.005+01:002024-03-14T10:17:44.465+01:00Grand strategy toysStrategy games have some fundamental game design rules to make them work: For example they should be balanced, so that the winner isn't already determined by choosing the starting side. And while some randomness can spice things up, in general the player should be able to make decisions that predictably move the game in his desired direction, albeit against obstacles in the way. I started to play Victoria 3 again, having heard good things about the latest patch 1.6, but all my previous games were problematic: Victoria 3 simply doesn't conform to the above basic game design rules. It is obvious that if you play as Belgium you will have a much smaller impact on the world than if you play the British Empire. And my previous games often got completely derailed by unpredictable random events, making me feel as if I wasn't in control at all.<div><br /></div><div>After watching Victoria 3 videos from different sources, a realization finally hit me: Victoria 3 isn't supposed to be a game at all! If you play it "as a game", with some sort of optimization strategy, it will either end up in complete failure or in you breaking the game through exponential growth. What you are supposed to do is to play Victoria 3 as a toy: Choose a country, set yourself some goals, and enjoy the emergent storytelling caused by the random events. You can vary the difficulty and historical accuracy with your choices: The goal of taking over North America from coast to coast is easier and more historically accurate when playing the United States, but if you want you can do it as Mexico.</div><div><br /></div><div>I can live with that. But it does require a degree of open-mindedness that is getting rare in this world. While that might be stunning and triggering news for the young generation, it turns out that the 19th century didn't exactly conform to 21st century progressive values. To play Victoria 3, you need to deal with unpleasant subjects like slavery, colonization, racism, child labor, worker exploitation, sexism, and many more. You can strive to make your country better than it started, or a paragon in comparison with the other countries, but you will have to deal with the events that reflect 19th century reality. If that makes you squirm, Victoria 3 is probably not a good choice for you. I think there are good opportunities for learning experiences in here, making you understand why the world got more progressive over time, but slowly.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you are open to how the world was in the 19th century, and willing to entertain a degree of alternative history, there is some fun to be had in Victoria 3 as a toy, once you abandoned the idea of "winning the game". I am currently in a game where I play Belgium as a colonizer, but concentrate on South Africa rather than the Congo, in order to exploit the gold mines there. I had a lot of fun doing various exploration missions through Africa, like discovering the source of the Nile. And while random events made it impossible for me to pursue a secondary goal of forming the United Netherlands, I just decided to pursue other goals instead. In 1893 I reached "great power" status, which is some sort of a win in a game without a win condition.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-87766368077203206362024-03-12T14:22:00.000+01:002024-03-12T14:22:09.323+01:00D&D and the state of my tabletop gamingJean-François commented that he would like to see more D&D posts from me. Bad news: I am not currently playing Dungeons & Dragons anymore. A few years ago I had two groups: One fell apart during the pandemic and never recovered, the other moved from playing around a table to a virtual tabletop software called Roll20. Unfortunately the second group last year also fell apart, due to players not having the time anymore. And I haven't found a new group yet. I used to be part of a roleplaying club, but I moved and now live hours away from there, so that isn't a viable method to get back into D&D either. I would need somehow to find people to play with where I live now.<div><br /></div><div>I started the year with the resolution to find new people and play. I started looking in the most obvious place: The largest local store selling role-playing games, board games, and card games. Like everywhere else, all the surviving shops of this kind lean heavily into collectible card gaming, and having played Magic the Gathering earlier in life I don't want to get back into that financial trap. The shop doesn't run any roleplaying game events. But once a week there is a board game night, and that is what I am now visiting nearly every week to sit around a table and play.</div><div><br /></div><div>Technically most board games don't have a "Dungeon Master" role. At least not one that is described in the rulebook. But in practical terms, in order for something to happen at a board game night, somebody needs to bring a game (or at least know one of the games that are available there), set it up, and explain the rules to everybody else. And as I have a large board game collection without people to play with, it is often me who studies the game in advance, brings it to the board game night, and teaches it to the other players. Which ends up consuming about the same amount of time as preparing a D&D game as a DM. As this keeps me busy, I haven't looked further for an actual D&D table elsewhere.</div><div><br /></div><div>In Fall of this year, "One D&D", the not quite next edition of Dungeons & Dragons comes out. Which then should be accompanied later, probably 2025, by "D&D Digital", an official virtual tabletop to play Dungeons & Dragon on. Now WotC is notoriously bad at releasing software, so I'm taking all this with a grain of salt. But theoretically there should be a huge new platform full of potential players somewhere in the digital future of D&D, and I am planning to participate. But this year is mostly going to be board games, not role-playing games.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-75270093424939367192024-03-09T10:32:00.000+01:002024-03-09T10:32:47.973+01:00The electric car experienceMy wife bought a fully electric car, and I wanted to write about our experience with it. Due to differences in national and regional conditions and regulations, not all of our experiences are relevant to other people. There are still a lot of first-world problems here that one might consider trivial in the global context. But there are also a bunch of more fundamental issues behind all this, which then translate to problems with the path towards general electric mobility as a significant piece of the puzzle towards climate neutrality.<div><br /></div><div>The first issue here is price. A fully electric car is more expensive than the same car with the same options and an internal combustion engine. By how much? Now this is where the problem might become critical: The difference is huge for small cars, and small for big luxury cars. My wife bought a "supermini", which is a relatively small car, for €45,000. She could have gotten the same car with a combustion engine for around €10,000 less. And compared to her previous car the electric car was actually twice the price, with part of the motivation for getting a bigger car having to do with bigger cars having room for bigger batteries. She would have been fine with a smaller petrol car.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, do you get that added initial investment back because the higher energy efficiency of an electric motor compared to an internal combustion engine? Not really, and it turns out that the cost of filling your electric car is a whole chapter of problems by itself. Where we live the cost of petrol for driving a small petrol car 100 km is around €10. So if you drive around 10,000 km per year, you end up paying €1,000 per year in cost of petrol. So even if you had access to free electricity, it would take 10 years to recover the €10,000 higher cost of the car.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now on paper our new electric car consumes 14 kWh per 100 km. If you would charge it at home at the current electricity price here of € 0.12 per kWh, that is still a relatively cheap €1.68 per 100 km, a sixth of the price of petrol. However, the price changes significantly if you start charging it at a public charging station. Prices for electricity at charging stations are all over the place, depending on the charging speed and whether you have a subscription with a particular provider. If you roll up to a charging station in an unfamiliar location, you might pay over € 0.80 per kWh from a provider foreign to you at a fast charging point. Which would make the cost per 100 km actually *higher* than petrol. If you are able to look around for a cheaper alternative and a medium speed charging speed (which would take over 2 hours to fill up our car from empty to 80%) you still pay around half of the cost of petrol.</div><div><br /></div><div>In practical terms, charging on the road is highly annoying. Adding a payment system that accepts bank cards and credit cards is highly expensive, so only around 5% of charging stations have that option. The majority of others need a specific different system: An RFID card of a "mobility provider". You pay by simply holding your card up to the reader in the charging station, and the mobility provider handles the financial transaction between you and the owner of the charging station. For a fee, of course. If you don't have such an RFID card, you simply can't charge your car in most places. We are still in the process of finding the best mobility provider, but for Europe a good option seems to be Chargemap, a French company. You can get RFID cards from companies you know for running petrol stations, but independent companies like Chargemap tend to have a much bigger network, due to having contracts with more different electricity providers. The other annoying part of charging on the road is that not every charging station provides a cable, you might have to bring your own (imagine a petrol station requiring you to bring your own hose). Which is related to the problem of different electric cars having different connectors.</div><div><br /></div><div>The bigger issue related to charging your car is how far you can get with a full battery. That is expressed by a WLTP range, which stands for Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure. That is basically a scam committed by the electric automobile industry which got that passed by heavy lobbying. The range is determined in a laboratory under ideal conditions, and it is technically impossible for any electric vehicle to reach it on a real road. Problems with the test procedure include it being mostly performed at low speeds around 50 km/h, with electric vehicles using a lot more energy at highway speed. And the laboratory test is performed at 23°C, while actual temperatures in Europe during most of the year are lower. Lower temperatures lower range in two ways: Lower battery performance, and added electricity consumption from heating. While car electronics and lights also use some battery power, that is generally a lot less than the power needed for heating or air conditioning.</div><div><br /></div><div>The overall result is that under ideal real conditions you are lucky to reach 80% of the WTLP range of your car. In an European winter your range might be just 50% of the WTLP. In our personal experience in February in Western Europe, we have a real range of 250 km (consumption of nearly 20 kWh/100km at 55 kWh battery size), compared to the 400 km WTLP sticker range. That got aggravated by electric cars being programmed to warn the owner of the potential problem of running out of power: We did one trip of 110 km, which used 40% of our battery, but when asking the GPS to calculate the way back, it told us that we wouldn't make it without charging. Of course we neither had the RFID card, nor the cable with us, so the way home was extremely stressful, even if the warning was overblown and we arrived with 19% left.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that is where we are: We don't use the electric car for trips to places over 100 km away anymore, as we have a second car running on petrol for that. Our plans to one day eliminate the second car are currently on ice, until there are major developments in the availability, speed and ease of charging on the road. Of course we do a lot of small trips for shopping and the like, and for that the electric car is fine. We charge our electric car with excess electricity from our solar panels, which is probably the lowest cost you can have. But we probably won't ever recover the additional cost of the electric vehicle. That makes the electric car one of those things that rich people with a progressive conscience do, and not something which is really feasible for the general population. Which is why electric car sales are currently stalling globally. Solving global warming with electric vehicles seems still utopic.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-58236713256983447692024-03-05T10:58:00.000+01:002024-03-05T10:58:34.588+01:00Paradox spring offensiveIt is easy to believe, albeit fanciful, that a company that mainly makes grand strategy titles does have some grand strategy in mind with their marketing and game releases. At least for Paradox Interactive it currently feels as if they are in the middle of launching a spring offensive. Between February 27 and March 6 new DLC with accompanying large patches are released for Age of Wonders 4 (Primal Fury), Crusader Kings 3 (Legends of the Dead), and Victoria 3 (Sphere of Influence). Where does one find the time?<div><br /></div><div>I am currently playing the Primal Fury DLC for Age of Wonders 4, having bought the expansion pass. Age of Wonders 4 is definitely my favorite Paradox game, and the addition of a new culture with 7 sub-cultures is adding a lot of new variety to the game. I never bought Crusader Kings 3, but played it on PC Game Pass, and it is still available there, but obviously without any DLC. There is a sale on Steam, but buying CK3 with all DLC (including 2 upcoming ones) costs around $100; I simply didn't like the base game that much, and I have my doubts that the DLCs change that: My suspicion is that Crusader Kings 3 is in reality a weird dynastic role-playing game that only masquerades as a strategy game.</div><div><br /></div><div>Victoria 3 I am still on the edge on. I bought the base game, but never the DLCs. Victoria 3 is a deeply flawed game, which is extremely frustrating because of a myriad of complicate interactions that often you can't see, or can't properly influence. What I find especially annoying is the system of revolutions, where it is easily possible that you get two competing interest groups radicalized, and both options of whether to enact a law or not will lead to revolution. And political unrest is always handled in the form of a civil war, where part of the country splits of to form a new country and wages war against the other half. That certainly represents a historical reality of the American Civil War, but the revolutions of 1848 in Europe didn't really work that way. [Sidebar: This is also why we should be careful with predictions of what will happen in the USA after the November elections: A "civil war" like the one from a century and a half ago is extremely unlikely, due to the opposing sides not being geographically well separated. Other forms of political violence, like the January 6 2020 insurrection are much more likely. The one thing that is unlikely is that the losing side, whichever one that might be, will just accept the democratic will of the majority.] Victoria 3 doesn't really do political unrest very well, which is a shame in a game where domestic policy is such a big part.</div><div><br /></div><div>For both Victoria 3 and Crusader Kings 3 for me it might be more fun to watch other people play the game, especially if they bring some historical knowledge and/or roleplaying to the game. Playing these games myself is more likely to disappoint or frustrate me, although I will probably give Victoria 3 another go after the 1.6 patch.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-19576277091295033632024-03-03T09:43:00.003+01:002024-03-03T09:43:59.168+01:00Is there an advantage to be large in the video game business?In October 2023 a small board game company released a card game called <a href="https://lookout-spiele.de/en/games/forrestshuffle.html" target="_blank">Forest Shuffle</a> (or "Mischwald" in German). This turned out to be a rather good game, and thus became rather popular. As a consequence, I can't buy an English language copy anywhere, and the original German language version is likewise sold out. Small company means small production runs, and even if the game is a hit, it takes quite a while to produce another batch. Even if an initial print run sells out fast, it doesn't make the small company directly rich, and so probably even a second print run will be limited in size and might sell out equally fast. There is little economy of scale here.<div><br /></div><div>The video game business is very, very different. Video games aren't sold on disks anymore, and there is no limit to how many copies can be sold of a game online. Thus if a game like Palworld is unexpectedly popular, it can sell 19 million copies without running into print run or production problems. The only possible limitation is when a game like Helldivers 2 needs servers to run, and the game is so popular that the servers are full. But even that is <a href="https://fandomwire.com/helldivers-2-gets-an-uninterrupted-weekend-of-play/" target="_blank">a lot faster to solve</a> than the production of a physical game.</div><div><br /></div><div>A person walking into a board game store with the intention of buying Forest Shuffle is going to be told that the game won't be available for a while. So they might well end up buying a game that has the advantage of being available. And bigger companies can afford bigger print runs and have an advantage in the physical availability of their games in stores. Bigger video game companies don't have that advantage. 2024 is shaping up with games like Palworld and Helldivers 2 from small companies selling extremely well, while games that were much more expensive to produce like Suicide Squad or Skull and Bones sell rather badly and fail to break even.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course big companies have other advantages, but these advantages seem to be less prominent in the video game business. There seems to be some sort of inverse correlation between the size of a video game company and the quality of the games it produces. Smaller companies making passion projects appear to often do well. Large corporate entities under pressure from shareholders can make stupid mistakes under that pressure. That also affects longevity of game studios. Making a good and successful game can make a studio larger, and then end up producing much worse games: Just look at CD Projekt Red going from Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk 2077, or the perceived downfall of Blizzard. Embracer Group buying up 129 video game studios and trying to become a giant in the video game industry didn't exactly work out well.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the movie industry the $100+ million movie has arguably taken over the market to the detriment of smaller companies and smaller budget movies, even if that model is also showing its problems. In the games industry it seems to be a lot harder for the $100+ million games to dominate the market.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-34201734736175308132024-02-26T12:05:00.003+01:002024-02-26T12:05:22.500+01:00Moving house in NightingaleI followed the tutorial and main story in Nightingale, as it gives you a sense of purpose. So at one point you have to choose between a forest, desert, or swamp "abeyance" realm. Abeyance basically being the lowest difficulty level, having the lowest resource tier, and this is thus designated as the realm where you build your base in. You actually can't build a respite (home teleport) point anywhere but in an abeyance realm. So I built my base, and continued with the story, unlocking the next level of realms, the antiquarian ones. There I found the fae tower, where I got the item that allowed me to build my own realm portals.<div><br /></div><div>With my own portal in my base, I started to experiment with realms and portals. You can make paper out of wood easily, and ink out of berries or mushrooms. So creating cards for realms is cheap. Now normally, every combination of two realm cards exists only once. If you made a forest antiquarian realm and then use another portal with the same forest antiquarian combination, you end up in the same place. Everything you built there will be there, and everything you collected there will be gone. However, you can specify that instead of reopening a portal to that forest antiquarian realm, you want to create a fresh one. That erases the previous version, including everything you built there, but gives you a fresh slate for exploring and looting points of interest again.</div><div><br /></div><div>At this point in the game, you need a lot of T1 essences to upgrade your gear. And I had noticed that the fae tower gives a good amount of essences, plus the item you need to build a portal. So I decided to farm T1 essences by farming fae towers: From my home base and portal I reset the forest antiquarian realm, went to the fae tower in the fresh realm, looted everything there, teleported back home, and then started the same process over. So now I have hundreds of T1 essences, and materials to build half a dozen portals.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then I became dissatisfied with my home base. The forest abeyance realm in which I had built it had the points of interest far from each other. And I had built too far from anything, and in a location that wasn't all that great. Demolishing everything and moving a few hundred meters away seemed a lot of work, until I realized that I could use my learnings from resetting realms. It was easier to make a fresh forest abeyance realm than to move in the one I already had.</div><div><br /></div><div>The process still took some time: I created a nice forest antiquarian realm and built a bunch of storage crates right next to the portal there. Then I moves all my materials from my home base to that temporary storage. I demolished all my crafting stations and the house, and moved those materials as well. Then, from the forest antiquarian realm I used the portal to reset the forest abeyance realm, erasing my old home realm in the process. In the new forest abeyance realm I found a nice location close to the portal and built a new house there, now a lot bigger and with a slated roof. Then I built storage crates in the house, and moved all the materials from the temporary storage in the forest antiquarian base there using fast travel. Now I have a nice new home base in a better location and am well set up to continue exploring this game.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-51499464284338279882024-02-25T08:22:00.001+01:002024-02-25T08:22:21.878+01:00Solium InfernumSolium Infernum is Latin for "the throne of hell", and that is exactly what you are fighting for in this game. Solium Infernum is a 4X game that just released for $40 (-15% discount now) on Steam. You play as a devil, an archfiend, on a relatively small hex map in a relatively short game, with "relatively" being in comparison to other 4X games like Civilization. The main reason this is so, is that you are limited each turn to just a small number of orders, only 2 at the start of the game, and later potentially going up to 6. With tons of possible options, selecting the best orders for this turn is quite a challenge, and completely fulfills Sid Meier's condition that good games are a series of interesting decisions.<div><br /></div><div>Things work differently in hell, you can't just attack your neighbor when you want to. Instead you need to start with a diplomatic play, like sending him a demand for tribute. If he pays up, good for you! If he doesn't pay up, even better, as that now gives you the opportunity to attack him. But even then wars are limited, you set a goal for limited objectives, and the war automatically ends if you fulfill those. Because the overall goal of Solium Infernum is gaining the most prestige, with prestige wagers on wars just being one of many possible ways to gain it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Solium Infernum is great fun, as there is a lot of treachery and backstabbing going on, and other players can play events that completely mess up your careful plans. It actually works a lot better in multiplayer than the typical 4X game, because there is a lot more player interaction, and players can take their turns simultaneously, with all of them then being resolved at the same time. It reminds me a bit of the board game <i>Diplomacy</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>The one downside of that is that if you play this game solo, the AI is only mediocre. It can make good moves, but lacks the ability to plan ahead and coordinate several actions into a greater whole. There also is only one level of AI, and once you understood the game mechanics completely, you should be able to reliably beat the AI in a standard game. To help out with that problem, there is a series of scenarios, which get you to play all the different archfiends, getting increasingly harder due to unfavorable starting conditions. Like in the very first scenario your one legion starts with only a single hit point, giving the other players time to conquer stuff while you heal up.</div><div><br /></div><div>Solium Infernum is not an early access game, but a full release, based on a previous game from 2009 with the same name. The current version is a lot prettier, and somewhat improved in other ways as well. There are still a few bugs left, but hotfixes are already incoming, and there seems to be a plan for continued support. It might be something of a sleeper hit, as there was very little marketing for this game, and as a result the game is a lot better than the player numbers would suggest. Solium Infernum is a lot more solid and balanced than Millenia, but Millenia had the huge marketing of publisher Paradox behind it, while Solium Infernum is self-published. As we are still in the oversupply phase of the video games <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle" target="_blank">pork cycle</a>, Solium Infernum risks being overlooked in the flood of new game releases. Which would be a pity, because it sure has a lot of interesting concepts and fun to offer.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-85496106771754833822024-02-23T13:46:00.001+01:002024-02-23T13:46:17.156+01:00Agemonia receivedIn September 2021 <a href="https://tobolds.blogspot.com/2021/09/agemonia.html" target="_blank">I backed the Agemonia board game</a> on Kickstarter. At the time, the estimated delivery date was December 2022. Today, in February 2024, the game actually arrived, "only" 14 months late. In that post of 2021 I listed 8 games I had crowdfunded; I now received 6 of these, and am still waiting on Arydia and 7th Citadel. I got a shipping notification for 7th Citadel, while Arydia (also originally estimated delivery in December 2022) is now not expected before "Fall 2024". Yeah, 2 years late can happen in crowdfunding of board games. But I still didn't have a single game that didn't eventually deliver.<div><br /></div><div>On the positive side, I paid €99 for Agemonia back in 2021, while today <a href="https://en.lautapelit.fi/product/36830/" target="_blank">the game on the website of the developers is €179</a>. Somewhere in that parcel is a microcosmos of everything that happened in the last 3 years. :)<div><br /></div><div>What wasn't immediately obvious from the crowdfunding page at the time is how huge the box is. It weighs 12 kg, and is bigger in every dimension than the already huge box of Gloomhaven. On the one side that is good, it feels as if I got my money's worth in game materials. On the other hand I have now started more often to play outside my home, for example at the weekly board game night of my friendly local games store, or at friends. This is far too heavy to lug around for such an occasion.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>I have started to buy and crowdfund smaller and shorter board games than before. At the board game night in the games shop, you need to be able to set up the game, explain it, and play it within a time window of three-and-a-half hours. That eliminates a lot of the large campaign games like Agemonia, weight aside. There is no way around it, I need to adjust my board game preferences to the other people I need to play them with.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-38808490522516415582024-02-22T14:49:00.001+01:002024-02-22T14:49:50.186+01:00Some comments on NightingaleHow's your internet? It turns out that this might substantially influence your enjoyment of Nightingale. I am lucky, and I have 1 Gbps fiber internet. That turns out to not only be good for big downloads, but also for <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-latency-of-fiber-optic-DSL-and-cable" target="_blank">ping and latency</a>. In Nightingale I get below 40 ms of ping consistently, which means that I don't run into some of the problems that other people are complaining about. So, since the servers came back up yesterday afternoon, I was able to play for a while and didn't encounter any technical problems other than long loading times at the start of the game and when using a portal, presumably server-side slowness.<div><br /></div><div>Having said that, Nightingale is visibly still an early access game, with some of the quality of life features still missing, and some of the user interface still a bit rough. But it definitely has potential. Judging from what I could see up to now from the number of different crafting stations and recipes, the tech tree is pretty deep and involved. I like that, although I have seen reviews from people who particularly disliked that aspect. I also like that at the lowest difficulty setting, combat isn't hard at all, I even killed the first boss mob at the end of the first non-tutorial realm without difficulty.</div><div><br /></div><div>Although that might have been a bit easier for me due to Twitch drops. Twitch drops are in-game items you can get for some games after watching streams about that game for a number of hours. And curiously the gear you get from Twitch drops has gear level 58. Which is substantial in a game where you start the tutorial with gear level 6, and the first boss mob requires gear level 20. Okay, the Twitch drops are only for some of the armor slots and don't include weapons, but I was at gear level 20 due to following the quest, and the Twitch drops increased that to an overall average gear score of 30. I don't mind, and the Twitch gear is sure a lot prettier than the crude gear you can craft at the start. But from a progression point of view I find this a bit weird.</div><div><br /></div><div>Compared to Palworld, I am building better houses in Nightingale. Well, in Palworld the houses only got you into trouble with pal pathfinding, and you really only needed one foundation, one wall, one roof, and a bed under it. In Nightingale I have a wooden house with four walls, roof, windows and a door. And there is a system in place where I get bonuses for my crafting stations for them being on a solid foundation, sheltered from the elements, warm, and well-lit. Still, I mainly build for gameplay reasons, so the possibility to build in different styles doesn't really excite me. I could have built a stone house instead of a wooden house, but as far as I know there wouldn't have been a gameplay difference, only visuals. Wood was easier to construct, so I stuck with that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Once you learn how to build a base, you can always quickly fast travel to there from anywhere. But that is a one-way thing. Fortunately I just got to the point where I can build by own portal in my base, which means at least I don't have to run from my base to the local portal all the time anymore. I should have built my first base closer to the portal, but I was trying to find a larger flat area, which turned out to be not wholly necessary.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am playing Nightingale in third-person view. That, plus turning camera shaking and motion blur off, and increasing the field of view (FOV), results in me not having any problems with video game motion sickness. Although the third-person view is labeled as "experimental" in the settings, it works well enough, except for some minor targeting problems when skinning animals.</div><div><br /></div><div>Overall I don't regret having paid $30 for Nightingale. The game is fun enough, I do like the graphical style, and the card-based realm / portal system is original and fun enough. Each created realm is relatively small, about the size of one landing zone in Starfield, but considerably prettier and with more stuff to find and explore. I don't think I will stick around for much longer than I did in Palworld, but I can see the potential of the game in adding more different biomes and cards in the future. Having said that, Palworld a month after release still has 10 times more players than Nightingale. There is a bit of a glut of survival crafting games right now.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-1867736457325130942024-02-21T12:44:00.001+01:002024-02-21T12:44:19.844+01:00Nightingale errorI spent the release day of Nightingale yesterday watching Twitch streams to get a better idea of the game. My main concern was the combat system, as I would hate to be stuck somewhere because I am too slow to vanquish some boss mob gating the content behind. But it turns out that you can play the game at different difficulty levels, and the easiest one seems very doable. Many people actually complain about combat being too easy, mostly because the AI of the mobs isn't great. So today I bought the game, and started the tutorial. So far, so good.<div><br /></div><div>I am not playing right now, because the servers are down, which results in an "error getting shards for client" error message. One of the main problems people have with the game is the design decision to run Nightingale on centralized servers, which leads to all the well-known problems we had with MMORPGs for decades: Servers being down, servers being overloaded at peak hours, slow ping, rubber-banding in game, etc., etc.</div><div><br /></div><div>While that sort of server architecture is necessary for MMORPGs, it seems somewhat unnecessary for a game with a maximum of 6 players on one shard, and many players playing solo. And I am surprised that after decades of experience, game companies still can't manage to get servers stable on release.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-45153402085913644102024-02-20T12:40:00.000+01:002024-02-20T12:40:58.873+01:00A change in game-buying strategyI have been on Steam for 16 years, since 2008. And I have frequently bought games that had not been released recently. It seemed like a no-brainer: Wait some time, and you get the same game for cheaper in a Steam sale or Humble Bundle. You save money, and chances are that the game has already gotten a few patches and is actually in a better state than on release. Last year, I began more and more to deviate from that pattern and bought more games on release. And yes, I probably paid a bit more, and had more problems with bugs or unfinished content. But I did realize that buying on release has other advantages.<div><br /></div><div>Buying games later, for example at a Steam sale, dissociates the act of buying a game from the moment where I actually want to play the game. A game has been on my wishlist for a while, I buy it because it is 50% off, but plan to play it "sometimes", because right now I am playing something else, or am not in the mood for that particular game or genre. My large library of unplayed Steam games shows the fundamental flaw of that plan: If I don't want to play that game *now*, then maybe I never will.</div><div><br /></div><div>I used to work a 50+ hours per week job, *and* write a blog, *and* play games, including real time-eaters like World of Warcraft. The more obvious consequence of early retirement is that I have a lot more time now than before. But any plans I had to use that time to tackle the unplayed games in my Steam library didn't really work out. I'm still not spending much more time actually playing games than before. Instead I spend the additional time in game-related activities, like watching Twitch streams or YouTube videos about games. And of course those content creators are frequently playing the latest games. Which is great, because watching a game played is the best kind of review you can get. But of course it leads to "oh, I want to play this" moments, and by that I mean I want to play the game *now*, not in half a year at a discount. Plus I have the impression that Steam sales discounts are less generous than they used to be, it is hard to get more than 30% off the original price these days.</div><div><br /></div><div>The big advantage of this "buy now" strategy is that I only buy games which I then immediately play. I'm not adding to my library of unplayed games anymore. Also, by buying and playing a game right after having watched a streamer play it, I also directly get a video tutorial on how to play. I recently bought Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, which is outside my usual zone of comfort for game genres. I never played Vampire Survivors. But after seeing the game played, it looked a lot of fun, and at $10 it is rather cheap. Even a bullet hell game turns out to have some strategy, and isn't totally mindless. Nice game for shorter gaming sessions.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think I will buy fewer games at sales in the future. In the end, paying a bit more for a game I actually play right then is the better deal.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-75239314905649344982024-02-17T09:41:00.001+01:002024-02-17T09:41:08.025+01:00Survival is cheapNightingale is a survival / crafting game that will be released on February 20th. It will be $29.99 on Steam, with some variations due to regional pricing. This is the third major survival game this year, in under two months (note that Enshrouded had the expected half-life of three weeks and is down to 69k players from 160k). And both Palworld and Enshrouded also cost $30. While Valheim from three years ago is even only $20. Why are survival games so much cheaper than games in for example the shooter genre?<div><br></div><div>This is especially interesting if you consider that, like in Palworld, there will be shooting in Nightingale. And in Skull and Bones you also do a bit of survival activities, like logging trees or cooking food. So what exactly justifies that Skull and Bones is twice as expensive, premium smuggler pass monthly payment not included? Obviously Ubisoft would say that their game is of higher quality, having already called it “quardruple-A”. But if we consider Palworld, Enshrouded, and Nightingale as only double-A games, then how would a triple-A survival game look like, and why aren’t there any? Given that Palworld is likely to be the best-selling game of 2024, which is an extraordinary thing to say 7 weeks into the year, it would be hard to argue that the survival / crafting / building genre is niche compared to other genres.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-13200024173102741832024-02-15T10:41:00.001+01:002024-02-15T10:41:30.629+01:00Half-LifeSorry, I'm not talking about the game Half-Life in this post. Rather I will be talking about the half-life *of* games. This is something that hasn't really been defined yet, which is why we get a lot of misleading headlines in game journalism. These typically look like this: <i>"Popular game is dying - Loses 80% of players in 6 months"</i>. The game I have chosen for my example headline is an extreme case: Baldur's Gate 3; it is extreme because it *only* lost 80% of players in 6 months. Most games lose over 90% of players in under 3 months. Which is great for unimaginative video game journalists, because you can squeeze another clickbait headline out of a game that is already yesterday's news. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/02/12/palworld-has-lost-two-thirds-of-its-players-in-two-weeks/" target="_blank">Palworld has lost two-thirds of its players in two weeks</a>. <a href="https://www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/player-decline" target="_blank">Starfield has lost 97% of players in under six months</a>. You can lazily write that article for any game that has been out for some weeks or months, and Steam will happily provide you the data for that.<div><br /></div><div>Now player number graphs are not a mathematically simple line. There are peaks and valleys already over a 24-hour period, with the peak usually occurring at a time which corresponds to late afternoon / early evening in Europe, which simultaneously is morning in the USA. The valleys are when Europeans are already in bed, and the Asians haven't gotten up yet. And then there are seasonal effects, like Baldur's Gate 3 player numbers having gone up visibly in the holiday period after Christmas until early January. But if you remove those daily or seasonal fluctuations, the large majority of games ends up having a curve that reminds me (as a scientist) of a radioactive decay curve. Which is to say that we could, and should, be describing that curve by the time it takes to drop to half the value, the half-life.</div><div><br /></div><div>And the reality of the half-life value of a typical game is sobering: For most games the half-life is less than a month. Hogwarts Legacy, the best-selling game of 2023, peaked at 527k players shortly after release, but was down to 204k a month later, 59k another month later, and 27k three months after release, which calculates to a half-life of about 3 weeks. Yay, another headline, 95% down in 3 months! But apart from a very small handful of "forever games" like Counter-Strike 2, a half-life time of about 3 weeks, leading to 95% down in 3 months is actually a pretty average value. It is a value that probably tells you more about the typical attention span of the typical modern gamer, rather than anything about the game.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course the amount of non-repetitive content affects half-life. Baldur's Gate 3 is doing relatively well because it has an unusually high amount of content. Palworld has a shorter half-life than most games because it is an early access game with a much smaller budget and thus content running out a lot faster, and some of its players at peak were probably just there for the hype. Starfield has a pretty normal 3 week half-time, because the "1,000 planets" are not actually non-repetitive content.</div><div><br /></div><div>That brings us to another type of games: Live-service games. A game like Destiny 2 showed a relatively good half-life of about 5 to 6 weeks. But more importantly, it got back up to nearly the same number of players in February 2023 as it had on release in October 2019. Which of course corresponds to the release date of the Lightfall expansion. Not all expansions of Destiny 2 had this sort of success, and each expansion keeps player numbers up for only a month or two. And Lightfall has "mostly negative" ratings on Steam. But it shows the link between half-life and players running out of content that a re-injection of content can get the player numbers back up. These days it is extremely rare that a game grows beyond its initial peak, even when a good expansion or DLC is released.</div><div><br /></div><div>Whether a live-service game is financially viable of course depends more on the absolute numbers than on the half-life of those numbers. Destiny 2 peaked at 316k players, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League peaked at 13k (and had a half-life of under a week). Are Rocksteady Studios / Warner Brothers going to make an expansion for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League if they can only hope to gain those 13k players back? As for Skull and Bones, we will probably never know, as the game isn't on Steam. But my guess is that initial player numbers will be disappointing for Ubisoft, and I didn't see anything in the beta which would suggest that the game would have a half-life longer than the typical 3 weeks.</div><div><br /></div><div>I actually hope that live-service games are yesterday's hype, and the live-service games we get in 2024 are just the tail of that hype, caused by delays in development. I don't think that if you went to your investors today and told them that live-service games are a great money-maker, these investors would still be listening. The fundamental truth is that players only have a limited amount of disposable time every week. The opportunity cost of playing one game every day is all the other games that you then don't have time for. The MMORPG market showed that there is space in the market for only a handful of successful life-style games, and live-service looter-shooter games have exactly the same constraint.</div><div><br /></div><div>Want to know a safe money-making bet in today's videogame market? It's a DLC for Baldur's Gate 3. Make it the size of one existing act, price it at $30, and it's a near guaranteed $300 million for 10 million sales. As you could make that DLC for less than $50 million while retaining the same quality as the original game, the return on investment is pretty spectacular. If your game studio is making a new game, it is a lot better to concentrate on making a game that is great on release, and decide on bringing out DLCs later. Designing a game as a live-service game carries a much bigger risk of the content getting diluted by the "forever" plans, and the game thus not being as successful on release, making the whole "forever" plan collapse. Count on losing half of your players in three weeks, and 95% in three months, because nearly everybody does. It doesn't matter, as the financial result depends more on how many copies you sold than on player retention. And in our highly connected social media world, if you release a good game, word will get around.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-51130983754081056962024-02-14T08:54:00.000+01:002024-02-14T08:54:27.349+01:00Sorry for comment problemsI don't do much comment moderation on this blog. I do have a setting that any comment on a post that is older than 2 weeks has to be approved by me, but that is only because it is the older posts that are primary targets for spam comments wanting to advertise something. If you comment on an older post, and the comment is not spam, I'll generally approve that and the comment will become visible within a day. There is no problem, because I get an email, and I am the kind of person who reads his email more than once per day.<div><br /></div><div>I also get an email for every comment on more recent post, but without me having to approve the comment for it to become visible. There is just one problem with that: Sometimes Blogger decides on its own that the comment is spam, and doesn't publish the comment, pushing it into a spam folder instead. But it doesn't tell me that in the email it sent me about the comment being made. And I only look at that spam folder rarely. So yesterday I checked it, and found 3 completely valid comments having been marked as spam and not published over the last 2 weeks. They all were from the same person, so maybe Google for some crazy reason erroneously thinks that person is a spammer. But with me reading comments in the emails, and not on the blog, I simply didn't notice that the comments hadn't been published.</div><div><br /></div><div>While I think this is a bad system, and I should receive better notification when Blogger thinks I got spam, the only thing I can do is check that spam folder more often. But be assured that if you wrote a comment and it didn't appear on my blog, it probably was a mistaken spam filter rather than me trying to censor you. I didn't even censor the crazy conspiracy theorist this week.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-33712290956192862472024-02-13T06:30:00.108+01:002024-02-13T07:32:53.832+01:00Quadruple UbisoftToday buyers of the premium edition of Skull and Bones (€90) can start playing, while buyers of the standard edition (€60) will have to wait until Friday. While I would generally say that the subscription service Ubisoft+ is a bad deal for €18 per month (Game Pass has more games for less money), you do get access to Skull and Bones with that today as well, so if you plan to play the game for less than 5 months, it might be the cheaper option. My plan? None of the above. I played the open beta for a few hours, and decided to skip this game.<div><br /></div><div>Now I do believe that Assassin's Creed: Black Flag is probably the best Assassin's Creed game in the long series (I say "probably", because I haven't played all of them). But other than the ship combat, Skull and Bones is no Black Flag. Skull and Bones is a live service game, and thus ultimately resembles a game like The Division more than it resembles a single-player Assassin's Creed game. Now Ubisoft drew some ridicule by claiming Skull and Bones was a quadruple-A game, as in better than a triple-A game. But what it really is, is a quadruple Ubisoft game: If AI technology could be fed with gameplay from all Ubisoft open world and live service games, and be prompted to "create me a pirate game", the result would probably look a lot like Skull and Bones. Now if you want a live service game, and you want to sail a ship and shoot instead of running around and shoot, this might be the game for you. But I don't especially like live service games, and for me Skull and Bones doesn't have enough depth.</div><div><br /></div><div>The basic game loop of Skull and Bones is easy to understand: You sail around with a ship, and can do a range of activities from collecting resources, doing quests, and sinking other ships. That gives you infamy, which gives you higher pirate levels, and that allows you to unlock bigger ships and cannons, which you can then pay for with the resources you collected. Beyond that, there isn't much, although a bit more is presumably added in the release version through seasons and the related monetization options, like battle passes. Sid Meier's Pirates!, from 2004, has more story than Skull and Bones. Surprisingly Pirates! also has more hand-to-hand combat than Skull and Bones, as this aspect is completely missing. You only control your character in the hubs to visit merchants or talk to quest NPCs, there is no cutlass combat. When you use the boarding function in Skull and Bones, there is no resulting combat, you immediately get to loot the boarded ship.</div><div><br /></div><div>To me, Skull and Bones isn't really a special game in any way. It is exactly the quality and gameplay that I would expect when being told that it is a Ubisoft live service pirate game (minus the melee combat). I might have played it free to play and bought a battle pass for a month, but I'm not going to pay €60 or €90 for it. Sailing around with a ship and doing arcade-like cannon shooting combat only kept me entertained for a few hours. The more interesting encounters like ghost ships and sea monsters necessitate playing for longer to get a much bigger ship, and then playing together with other players.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-2030834461475663472024-02-12T10:07:00.000+01:002024-02-12T10:07:48.625+01:00Thoughts on the videogame influencer businessAs I am watching a lot of streams and videos about videogames on Twitch and Youtube these days, and they certainly "influence" my buying behavior, I was thinking about the state of this business. On the one side we all heard how game companies overextended during the pandemic, and are now cutting cost and firing people. I would image that cost cutting also includes advertising budgets. The other pillar of income for a videogame influencer is direct contributions from the audience, be that via subscriptions or various forms of direct donations. Now I have absolutely no data on these, but would think that these are discretionary spending, and that a difficult economic situation and cost of living crisis would negatively affect those as well.<div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, the <a href="https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/influencer-marketing-market-size" target="_blank">influencer marketing market size</a> is growing rapidly, as a consequence of other marketing channels like print media or TV shrinking rapidly. The more time we, as consumers, spend our time increasingly on social media rather than watching cable TV, the more valuable these new media become for advertisers. That is diminished somewhat by an <a href="https://www.thedrum.com/news/2023/06/06/nearly-90-consumers-no-longer-trust-influencers-new-study-finds" target="_blank">erosion of trust</a>: We are more aware these days that if we watch for example a young woman journaling her lifestyle on a social media platform, she is making money by talking about some eyeliner, and she isn't really just talking about a great product she found by serendipity.</div><div><br /></div><div>But in all this, videogame influencing is somewhat different from other kinds of influencing. That starts with the platforms: Videogames have a specific platform in Twitch that is dominated by this videogame content, with "Just chatting" and "Hot tubs" being popular, but less important. And much of the "just chatting" content is also about videogames. On the other side, while there is certainly videogame content on Tiktok, the short format is more suitable for doing meme stuff in games that everyone already knows, rather than for introducing new games.</div><div><br /></div><div>More importantly, videogame influencing is less of a bait & switch model. The person watching that lifestyle influencer is there because of the person, and doesn't even know in advance that she is going to try to push that eyeliner in that video. The Twitch stream or Youtube video of the videogame streamer is always saying what game is being played. I totally ignore even my favorite streamers when they play a game I am not at all interested in, and I discover new streamers because they play a game I am interested in. Even if I know that the streamer is being paid for playing that particular game, the whole thing appears somewhat more honest: The streamer isn't just saying that the game is great and I need to believe him, he is playing that game live, and I can see much of it for myself. And most streamers honestly say what they dislike about a game, presumably because streams often go on for several hours, and it is hard to fake enthusiasm for that long. You can't pretend that a game has great graphics, when in reality it hasn't and your audience can see that.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the advertising agency, videogame influencer marketing has a big advantage: The viewer has much higher buying intent. The person watching the lifestyle influencer maybe doesn't want to buy an eyeliner at all. The person watching a stream of several hours about a given game probably wouldn't do that if he wasn't at least somewhat interested in the game or genre, and is thus a lot closer to a possible buying decision. This form of advertising, that is targeted better, thus ends up being a lot cheaper per view and per customer actually persuaded. I don't know how much the big streamers make in a sponsorship deal, but it is probably a lot cheaper than a TV ad. And you can in parallel also get a lot of streamers to play your game for free, if you just give them a free copy of the game, and maybe the permission to stream the game a few days before the release already. I have bought video games that I saw being played on Twitch, where the streamer bought the game himself, which is basically advertising at negative cost.</div><div><br /></div><div>The downside for the game company and the advertising agency is the inherent honesty of advertising via actual play streams. If your game sucks, the viral word-of-mouth message that will go around is hurting your sales. However, that somewhat depends on what exactly the flaw is. Some games, let's say Suicide Squad or Skull and Bones as recent examples, look good on a stream for a few hours, because the problem is more in the long-term motivation.</div><div><br /></div><div>A theoretical possibility, and I am not sure in how much that is actually done, is that you can use the feedback you get from the streamer and his audience when you show a game demo or early access version. Some of my favorite games, like Against the Storm, reached excellency by listening to early access player feedback. Game developers do pop up in Twitch streams or comments on Youtube videos. I would very much hope that an event like the Steam Next Fext (ending today) does not only serve to show games to the audience, but to actually improve those games based on what the streamers that played the demos were saying about them.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-54361510638240676032024-02-10T10:49:00.002+01:002024-02-10T10:49:49.968+01:00General vs. specific AIEven intelligent people rarely say intelligent things. In our day-to-day interactions with others, the level of intelligence required is extremely low. This is because we rarely debate complicated stuff in private conversations. We are more likely to do small talk, or stick to practical communications like "pass me the milk, please!". This is why we can chat with a generative chatbot like ChatGPT and come away thinking that this AI is intelligent, because it sounds much like a human that we do small talk with. We overestimate our capability of getting information over another person's intelligence by talking with him, which is why companies hire people based on interviews, and only later find out that the person they hired isn't in fact suitable for the job at all.<div><br /></div><div>In a widely published case last year, a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/" target="_blank">lawyer used ChatGPT to write a legal brief</a>. The document *looked* like a legal brief, but in fact the case citations in it were simply made up by the artificial intelligence. ChatGPT is a general AI, which is good at *sounding* real. But it isn't a specific AI, and has no specific knowledge. It doesn't have a legal case citation database, or understanding what case to cite as a reference to what legal opinion. It just put together words that looked like case citations. And while 2023 was a year in which AI was much talked about, and much progress was shown, this was all about general AI. Machines sounding human, without actual knowledge behind their words.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was reminded on how much specific AI is lagging behind by watching some video content from people who had been given a beta version of Millennia. They were allowed to play the game beyond turn 60, where the public demo stops, although still restricted to the third age. But the further beyond the 60 turns you play, the more two things become obvious: Millennia is a very interesting game, with some very interesting deep game mechanics and complex options; and the specific AI playing your opponents in the game is dumb as a brick, and doesn't even manage relatively simple tasks very well.</div><div><br /></div><div>That has been a problem with 4X and grand strategy games for decades. These are games which take a rather large number of hours for one game, which makes them hard to set up for multiplayer. So a lot of people play a lot of games against AI opponents, and these generally aren't very good, in spite of being specifically designed for just one game. They generally get by with a mixture of plain cheating and hiding stupidity from the player through fog of war. Age of Wonders 4 got lauded for much improving their AI in a patch last year, when all that patch did was increase the priority of AI units attacking already wounded units, thus leading to some basic focus fire. Actually losing units to an AI in a pitched battle was a noticeable step up.</div><div><br /></div><div>I really wished game developers would put more manpower into the development of the specific AI that plays the opponents. The bar is relatively low. Specific AI to play chess at grandmaster level exists, but we neither need nor want that in our AI opponents. In most 4X and strategy games I played, I would already be extremely happy if an AI opponent that declared war on me would be able to coordinate an attack against me with several separate armies. An AI that could play as well as a totally mediocre human would be a quantum leap in specific strategy game AI.</div><div><br /></div><div>The good news for half the working population is that general AI will not be able in the foreseeable future to take your job if your job requires specific knowledge. Even a lowly paralegal would have done a better job with that legal brief than ChatGPT. There is no way ChatGPT could repair your car or fix your sink. Only if your current job consists mostly of spouting general phrases, you are much more in danger of your job being replaced by a general AI bot. Journalists, customer service representatives, and politicians, beware!</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-22867138051058053732024-02-08T11:45:00.001+01:002024-02-08T17:32:20.955+01:00A threshold theory on game graphicsBeauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is said. In video games there is definitively a choice made by developers on the art style. If you like for example a manga art style very much, and want to play a CRPG, Persona 3 Reloaded might be a good choice. If you dislike manga, the same game with the same mechanics will probably appeal a lot less to you. Having said that, imagine you had a series of collages, each of which shows a selection of typical screenshots from the hottest video games of the year, for each of the years from the 70's to today. You would definitely be able to see an evolution in *technical* graphics quality. Resolutions got higher, user interfaces got more user friendly, and when going beyond screenshots, animations got more realistic. You can't confuse Baldur's Gate 1 from 1998 with Baldur's Gate 3 from 2023. In Civilization I from 1991, units and cities were 2-dimensional squares, while in Civilization VI from 2016 the graphics are a lot more detailed for every unit and building.<div><br /></div><div>If you were given that series of collages I described above from the years 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020, you would be able without actually knowing the games to sort them in the right chronological order. Standards evolve over time, which is why so many game developers flipped out last year when Baldur's Gate 3 threatened to raise the standards by a lot, making their jobs a lot more difficult. Different people are more or less sensitive to graphical standards, and different genres of video games are more or less susceptible to these standards. Some people like games with 8-bit pixel graphics, although I would argue that even those have gotten prettier over the decades. We give indie games more leeway with graphics than we would give a triple-A game, and a turn-based strategy game doesn't have to be as pretty as a first-person shooter.</div><div><br /></div><div>Having said all that, I do think that people individually and collectively develop a certain threshold for graphical quality. If a game's graphics fall below the expected threshold, players and reviewers are going to make remarks about that. A typical example were the faces in Starfield, with their blank stares, which didn't meet the general threshold of expectation for a 2023 role-playing game. This week I observed a heated discussion between various reviewers and fans about Millennia, where especially the combat animations fall well below the general threshold of what people expect, even in a less demanding genre like 4X strategy games. Basically, if you want to make a historical 4X game that wants to compete with the already not-so-fresh-anymore Civilization VI, you can't use unit graphics that are more reminiscent of Civilization III.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not saying that this is necessarily a good thing. If you have an extremely low threshold for graphical quality, you obviously will be able to enjoy a lot more games. For example my threshold is keeping me from playing Dominions 6, although by all accounts the gameplay is excellent. For Millennia I was able to overcome my threshold and see that there is some real depth in the gameplay, but it takes over 2 hours to get to that point. An ugly game always risks that a part of their customers have refunded the game before getting that far. We might bemoan that as another sign of the times, where superficial looks are more important than deeper values; but it is something that game developers and publishers need to be mindful of: If you produce a game under the generally acceptable graphical threshold, you won't be selling that many copies.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-6872583744300755152024-02-07T12:45:00.002+01:002024-02-08T17:46:44.769+01:00Steam Next FestI just realized that if you click on the Steam Next Fest banner, you'll get among other suggestions a list of the demos for the games that you wishlisted. That realization might be two days late, but I spent those two days mostly playing Millennia, and I don't regret having gained a much deeper understanding of that game now. I kept it on my wishlist for the time being, even if the game is still somewhat flawed in the current version.<div><br /></div><div>Anyway, I'm now downloading 4 more demos: Crown Wars: The Black Prince, Pathless Woods, Small Kingdoms, and Zoria: Age of Shattering. Worst case scenario is that I'll prune my Steam wishlist a bit more. I just did some of that pruning based on some other criteria: Sorting the wishlist by "date added", and removing the games that have been on the list for years, if there isn't any recent developer update. And sorting the wishlist by review score, and reading what other players think is wrong for games that don't even make it to "mostly positive". For example I just kicked out Arms Trade Tycoon: Tanks, because so many people are unhappy with the slow pace of development. Having a good idea for a game is great, but not everybody has the project management skills and resources necessary to turn an idea into an actually good game.</div><div><br /></div><div>I do like the idea of Steam Next Fest, and there generally being more demos on the platform these days. Playing a demo is the only thing that is even better than watching somebody else play the game in order to understand its strengths and weaknesses. It reminds me a be of the olden days of Shareware, when you could get a demo of a game sent by mail on a tape or floppy disk, play the start of the game for free, and then had the choice of buying a key to unlock the rest of the game. At the very least, a demo to me is a sign that the devs believe in their game. I've seen some triple-A games lately, buy before you try, which in contrast to that seem to be designed to keep you busy just long enough that you passed the two hours refund limit before you find out the game sucks.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-24371361694171926392024-02-06T10:10:00.001+01:002024-02-08T17:32:01.759+01:00Doubts about MillenniaMillennia is a historic 4X game, similar to Civilization, Humankind, or Old World. It is currently available as a demo during the Steam Next Fest, and has a release date of "coming soon". The game is made by C Prompt Games, a relatively unknown studio, but published by Paradox Interactive. And as the game was listed in several "upcoming strategy games of 2024" videos, I decided to take a look.<div><br /></div><div>At first Millennia looks very much like a Civilization game: You start with a city and a warrior, and you can either build units or city buildings to boost your economy. When exploring you meet other civilizations, neutral cities, and barbarians. So far, so good. Where it becomes interesting is that you can stack your units, at the start up to 3. That allows for a bit more unit concentrations than the one unit per hex of some other games. Unfortunately you don't control anything in combat, which makes the combat replay popup window not very interesting. It also is one of the ugliest parts of the game, in a game that already is graphically behind many of its competitors. The animations of your warriors and archers attacking some barbarians behind a palisade will hurt your eyes.</div><div><br /></div><div>But what makes me doubt that this will be a huge success is the fact that Millennia is needlessly complex. Over the course of the 60-turn demo, many different currencies are introduced. Your cities have food and production, but you also produce knowledge points for research, culture points, government points, improvement points, warfare points, exploration points, engineering points, diplomacy points, and so on. My list might not be complete, as you don't get the points displayed until you earn the first point. Each of these points can be used to buy stuff at different thresholds. That quickly gets very confusing, as you can use different types of points to do the same thing, e.g. buying a new warrior unit. Except for research the game also doesn't stop you from moving on to the next turn although you could have spent some type of points for something. If something interesting is happening on the map and you advance turns quickly, you'll notice far too late that you should have spend those points several turns ago.</div><div><br /></div><div>The unique selling point of Millennia is that after researching three technologies, you can advance your civilization into the next age. At first you don't get a choice, but to move from the Stone Age to the Age of Bronze. But afterwards you can either move to the Age of Iron, or the Age of Blood, or the Age of Heroes, and these ages play a bit differently. Age of Iron is the default, and you need to fulfil certain conditions to choose one of the other two, like having discovered 3 landmarks to unlock the Age of Heroes. That sounds interesting, but there is a major problem with the concept: The first civilization to get to finish one age determines which of the ages the world enters, and everybody else is locked to that age and doesn't get a choice. Unless you play a rather low difficulty level, it will be one of the AI-controlled civilization that makes this choice, which isn't half a much fun.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you like games like Civilization, I'd recommend trying the free Millennia demo, which is available only until Monday. I did have fun trying it out. But unless there are some rather massive improvements to the game, I doubt that it will be the next big thing in the genre. I think some people were misled into thinking this is a Paradox game, but Paradox is only the publisher. Millennia isn't a triple A game, and it shows.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-83881377073305967382024-02-03T12:42:00.000+01:002024-02-03T12:42:42.898+01:00Equity vs. Equality in game difficultyIf you follow the history of the progressive movement over the last century, you will find that at some point there was a shift of focus. For a long time the progressive movement had been a fight for equality, demanding that everybody had equal chances. Thus Martin Luther King's speech, <i>"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."</i>. During the celebration of the 60th anniversary of that speech, it was rather obvious that this line was deliberately not mentioned, and that progressives when asked about it said that MLK hadn't meant it that way. Because the progressive movement now was *against* equality, and for equity, demanding that the outcome for everybody should be the same. Thus progressives these days want very much that little children will be judged by the color of their skin, and be given a leg up with "affirmative action" based on that. In social matters, like education, equity instead of equality is heavily disputed; it can lead to other minorities, like Asian Americans, being discriminated against, and some people (some of which black) argue that you don't actually help a black kid if you give it college degree with lowered standards.<div><br /></div><div>I was thinking of that when my previous post lead to a discussion of whether a game should have a fixed difficulty, or whether difficulty should be variable and possible to be individually set by the player. Do we want each player to have equal conditions to succeed in a game, or do we want equal outcomes?</div><div><br /></div><div>I think the key here is to consider the consequences. I can understand the argument in the case of education that if you abandon standards, the outcome might be more satisfying for the teacher ("all my students passed the grade") than for the pupil ("but I still can't spell right"). Having some sort of paper saying that you "passed" this or that school only gets you so far; at some point in a job your actual skills are being tested by reality, and if you can't meet certain real world standards, you aren't going to be very successful in that job or in life. But the very definition of "playing" and "games" is that it is an activity without consequences. Whether you are able or not to beat a certain game doesn't have much influence on your success in life or your job. In fact I have seen some video game content creators and video game journalists, where watching footage of them playing a game revealed that they weren't actually very good at it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Many of our ideas of "fairness" in games comes in fact from sports. Which is somewhat misleading, because in my opinion the Olympic Games aren't "games" at all. Sports generally are based on equality rather than equity. In a race, everybody starts at the same time from the same starting line. The predictable consequence is that the age distribution at the Olympics and other athletics events is rather narrow. Too young, and your body hasn't fully developed enough to be able to compete, too old, and your body is already past its prime. Of course that depends on how much the particular sport depends on athlete fitness, there are older Olympians for example in equestrian disciplines. But even in chess age plays a role, and cognitive decline results in most grandmasters peaking in their 30's.</div><div><br /></div><div>Video games can be "sports", thus the existence of esports and competitive multiplayer games. But many video games are either single-player, or offer both single- and multi-player options. They aren't necessarily designed to be competitive. They are designed as an entertainment product. One commenter mentioned the common experience created by two players playing the same video game at the same difficulty level. But I would question whether that is true. Wouldn't a grandma who tried Elden Ring as her first video game have a very, very different experience with the game than her grandkid who already played all other Souls games? The only games where everybody would have a common experience is rather linear games, walking simulators without much challenge. As soon as you introduce challenge into a game, you get a very different experience based on ability. That might be cognitive, a typical problem of Paradox games that are too complex for many players, or based on reaction time. There has been a large amount of scientific literature showing that a) reaction time of different people is different, and b) reaction time declines with age. The time a video game gives you to make a jump or react to an attack is somewhat arbitrary, but for some people it will be well within their capabilities, and for other people it will be not.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have seen games, I think it was from the Call of Duty series, in which your reaction time and performance was tested in some sort of tutorial, and the game then suggested a difficulty level to you based on that performance. The idea here is clearly that people would be more likely to have a common experience and enjoyment of a game when they would be challenged to the same degree. Because if you are too slow to ever kill Margit, your experience of Elden Ring will definitely not be the common experience of the people who have faster reaction times. Now I used cheat codes to play Elden Ring, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to see most of that game. But cheat codes, and even difficulty settings designed by the game developers, tend to be just a crutch. I have yet to see a game difficulty setting or cheat code which would just directly make the game some percent slower, so as to directly compensate slower reaction time. So this isn't a perfect solution either.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, at the end of all of these considerations, I would say that many modern video games have some sort of story arc, or series of challenges. They are fundamentally somewhere between a game and a movie or book. And while not everybody chooses to play a game until the end, there is an argument to be made that everybody *should* at least be able to reach the end of a game. Thus many games today have "story mode" difficulty settings, that are easy enough for nobody to be excluded from progressing to the end of the story by some arbitrary challenge. Which still comes closer to a common experience of the game than some person playing it to the end, and another being prevented from progressing past a certain point due to a lack of ability. In games, as an entertainment product, equal outcomes might be better than equal opportunities.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-69782679949944912382024-02-02T10:01:00.000+01:002024-02-02T10:01:00.009+01:00Game design decisions and game settingsOnce upon a time, in a forgotten age before World of Warcraft, I was playing the original Everquest. The designers of Everquest wanted the players to feel that their world was a dangerous place. Thus they made a game design decision that when you died, you lost some xp, and woke up naked at your bind point. Your equipment was left on your corpse. Now neither binding nor fast traveling were easy in Everquest, and many character classes actually needed the help of another player to do these things. Thus your bind point wasn't necessarily very close to the location you died at, and getting from there to your corpse without repeatedly dying again was often very difficult. Like any game design decision, the reality of naked corpse runs in Everquest influenced the behavior of players. Notably exploration was discouraged, and people preferred to stay in easy to reach locations, grinding the same monsters repeatedly. Unless you had a strong guild that would help you, you wouldn't even enter a dungeon, as the risk of losing all your gear was just too great. I never liked naked corpse runs, and I always felt that they took away from the game by limiting exploration. I saw a lot more of the world in WoW than in Everquest, because WoW didn't discourage exploration like that.<div><br /></div><div>If you play Palworld on normal difficulty, when you die you respawn naked, while your gear remains on your corpse. This is already a lot less difficult than Everquest: You chose your respawn location after you died, and fast travel in Palworld is significantly easier than it was in Everquest. But there is also an interesting twist to it: In the world settings you can change what happens on death. You can make the death penalty harsher, dropping your pals as well as your gear, or you can make it easier. If you, like me, don't like naked corpse runs, you can just turn them off in the settings and respawn basically without a death penalty. Which comes in really handy when you got stuck in a wall and respawning is the only way to get out. But of course you can also abuse that and just use the respawn function to kill yourself and fast travel where you want.</div><div><br /></div><div>The game settings of Palworld are very interesting for being much more user-friendly than in any other game. Major game design decisions, which in other games are decided by the developers, are left for you to decide. You don't like that every few days a horde of pals is trying to raid your base? Turn the raids off! Obviously that has big consequences, because without raids you don't need walls and other defensive structures in your base anymore. But I find it great that the devs leave that decision to you. They also let you decide many other of the things that are fixed in other games: How fast you gain xp, how many resources there are around, how much damage you deal, how much damage pals deal, how many pals are in a group, and so on. The world settings have more options than cheat mods in some other games! Of course I would advise anybody to first play the game on normal for a while before fiddling with those settings. But before you for example abandon the game because you think you gain xp too slowly, it is better to just make xp gain much faster in the settings, if that is really the only thing that stops you from enjoying the game.</div><div><br /></div><div>I do find the attitude of the developers of Palworld refreshing. Far too many Western game developers believe themselves to be superior to their players, and think they know better than the players what is good game design and what is fun. The makers of Palworld have been strongly criticized for a lack of originality, but their focus never was on originality. It was on giving the players what they wanted. And despite all the snobbery from other game developers and video game journalists, the success of Palworld shows that there is something to that formula. There are too many game developers who shove game design down our throats, whether we like it or not, and that includes horrible stuff like monetization and live service games, or game design elements that people just don't like. Palworld is the equivalent of a Michael Bay movie, reviewed negatively by critics, but topping the box office charts. For 30 bucks with no subsequent monetization getting a game that is designed to cater to what you want is a crazy good deal, which explains the success. While not all games should be like that, we definitely need some games that just cater to what the players want. And giving the players far more options in the difficulty settings of a game is just the logical consequence of that.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-30310404200977832532024-02-01T10:11:00.002+01:002024-02-01T10:14:19.951+01:00Dungeons & Dragons becomes Chinese?It seems that Hasbro, current owners of Dungeons & Dragons, are not doing very well at the moment. Games and toys are a very cyclical business; that is especially true for long-running franchises, where customers might well decide that when money is short, they don't need the latest D&D book or Magic the Gathering expansion, but can just continue playing with what they already bought before. Just before Christmas, Hasbro fired 1,900 employees. And as that didn't solve their financial problems, they are now <a href="https://pandaily.com/hasbro-seeks-to-sell-ip-dnd-and-has-had-preliminary-contact-with-tencent/" target="_blank">considering selling Dungeons & Dragons</a>.<div><br /></div><div>Curiously they first asked Larian Studios whether they wanted to buy D&D. Larian has obviously made a nice pile of money with Baldur's Gate 3, which is a D&D licensed product. But as a software studio they aren't ideally placed to handle the pen & paper side of Dungeons & Dragons. And the price tag apparently was too rich for them. So Larian passed on the offer to their minority shareholder, Tencent. Which of course is a much bigger and much more diverse company, which could much easier afford and handle Dungeons & Dragons.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nobody knows whether that deal will happen, but Chinese companies frequently have problems to get access to popular Western IP rights. Tencent is a company that is about 100 times bigger than Hasbro, by market capitalization, so they could well afford an IP which is popular with customers, but according to Hasbro <a href="https://gamerant.com/wizards-of-the-coast-dungeons-and-dragons-under-monetized/" target="_blank">under-monetized</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course some fans will protest loudly against Dungeons & Dragons becoming Chinese. But I would say that it has both advantages and disadvantages. Hasbro, and it's subsidiary Wizards of the Coast, are planning to move into the virtual tabletop space. And the track record of D&D digital tools over the last 4 decades is pretty bad. A more video-game oriented parent company might actually be better placed to carry Dungeons & Dragons into the digital age. Will Tencent dilute the IP with a bunch of cheaply produced mobile games? Probably. But who cares? Tencent owning D&D would make it a lot easier for their business partner Larian to make Baldur's Gate 4 or another D&D-based PC game.</div><div><br /></div><div>Dungeons & Dragons has over 40 years of history of being a badly run business, from TSR, to WoTC, to Hasbro. I say, let's give Tencent a chance to do better than that. If we don't like what they do, we can still play older editions of D&D. Hasbro might also not sell off D&D completely, but just the rights to make D&D video games. We will see how all of this works out.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com4