Valkyrie @ Eve Vegas

Details here. Nothing momentous though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/valkyrie/comments/3pznq9/eve_vegas_valkyrie_presentation_notes/

A game dev talks about the Free2Play model

Game designer Jeff Hamilton did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, and was asked about payment models:

Welp, this is a big question. I want to make absolutely clear that when I’m answering this question, it’s both well-written and to-the-point. So I’m going to write you up a response at lunch, probably, and post it then.

The full response is quite long, so I’ll just provide the links:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Check it out.

I’ll leave you with another quote of his:

That’s why I liked League so much when I first played it – money = cosmetics only, not mechanical power. All mechanical power (runes, masteries) is earned by playing the game.

It made me realize that the competitive integrity of the game is not intrinsically tied to the business model. The business model just creates strong incentives to damage the game’s competitive integrity. Careful process to protect game design can allow a game-as-business to succeed as best as possible, while allowing game-as-art to thrive as well.

Just something to think about when considering the business models of Dust, Valkyrie and Legion.

Fanfest 2014

So, Fanfest was last weekend and there were quite a few revelations and bombshells, so I thought I’d leave the topic lie for a day or so, to let the dust settle. Ahem.

I’ll break up my thoughts based on the games they belong to, in order of keynote.

First up is Valkyrie.

TMDC has a good writeup which I won’t duplicate. I will note that it looks like it’s shaping up to be a great game, but I wish there was a single-player campaign as well (note that this kind of campaign is very theme park esque, but hey, so are the epic mission arcs and everyone loves them)

Next up was Dust 514.

Wow.

The keynote was an example of a communication failure.

The first failure was of CCP not listening to the CPM and CSM when they raised the obvious and most important issues (‘what’s the transition plan?’, ‘will it come back to console?’, ‘what will happen to Dust?’).

The second failure was waiting until fan fest to make the announcement. FF is a toxic environment for Dust players for a variety of reasons, which further set the existing player base off-side. Whether intentional or not, it was an insensitive way to tell the player base that their favourite game was being EOL’d, in direct contravention of David Reid’s ‘there will never be a Dust 2’ comment less than six months earlier.

What’s sad is that I think Legion is a good idea, both from the technical side (unreal engine (4?) + PC) and from the thematic side (Eve + DayZ, no fixed match size, just open world), but the presentation was just handled terribly.

Please improve.

Onto Eve.

The keynote went over a lot of industry changes released a week beforehand, so there were few surprises there. The Mordus Legion and Exploration ships were a welcome addition, the change to six-weekly agile iterations should improve delivery, and the hull rigs, transport ship and unspecified freighter changes sound promising. As a vaguely industry-focused player, it’s shaping up to be a good next few months.

The CCP Presents keynote was suitably visionary. The prospect of Eve/Legion/Valkyrie single sign on is quite nice, as was the impressive trailer, including a sick reference to Eve lore.

Finally, congratulations to CSM9, and thanks to everyone who voted this year. Fly safe.