tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55845782024-03-28T03:28:52.231+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.comBlogger6402125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-20240041477125881232024-03-26T09:01:00.000+01:002024-03-26T09:01:41.215+01:00Microtransactions and modsDragon's Dogma 2, an otherwise decent action RPG, caused a lot of negative reactions by having "DLC" in the Steam shop that are essentially microtransactions. You can buy a currency, or items like fast travel stones or resurrection items for cash. While most of the things you could buy for real money were also available in game, these microtransactions for a single-player game weren't popular. So there was much rejoicing on the news that modders had found a way to give out these <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/dragons-dogma-2-mods-undercut-capcoms-controversial-microtransactions-dish-out-infinite-save-slots" target="_blank">cash shop items for free</a>. I wasn't feeling the joy. In fact, I am kind of worried.<div><br /></div><div>I like mods. There have been numerous cases where I wasn't happy with a game design decision, e.g. the standard size of the inventory in Starfield, and then used a mod to change it more to my liking. I couldn't have played Elden Ring without a mod that made it easier for a slow person like me to play. I even wrote and published my own mod in Age of Wonders 4, because I wasn't happy with the geography of the "land" type of random map generation. Yes, ideally a game has settings for different difficulties and features, but often it hasn't, and then a mod can be extremely useful.</div><div><br /></div><div>In many cases, game companies either support mods (I couldn't have written the AoW4 mod if Paradox hadn't provided a mod editor with the game), or simply ignore them. There are only a few cases in which a mod causes bad publicity, e.g. the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)" target="_blank">Hot Coffee mod for GTA</a>. But what is called a mod in a single-player game is called a cheat in a multi-player game, and there are various kinds of "anti-cheat software" and ways to make it more difficult or even impossible to modify a game.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't think we have seen the end of microtransactions in single-player games. And if mods give you items for free that the game company had planned to sell you, the game company is going to go after those mods. We might very well end up with single-player games that have some sort of protection against mods and cheat software. And that would most likely not be limited to mods that circumvent microtransactions, but make all modding more difficult. I think that would be bad. Sometimes game designers have really bad game design ideas, like Dragon's Dogma 2 not having a "new game" option. Mods can make a game more fun to play, or make it accessible to people who couldn't otherwise play. If we would lose mods by companies defending their microtransactions, games would change for the worse.</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-51329942452961015282024-03-25T10:10:00.004+01:002024-03-25T10:10:55.985+01:00An evolution in brands and IPImagine you are a huge fan of Baldur's Gate 3. It is 2028, and you see two new games advertised: A game called Baldur's Gate 4, licensed by Hasbro to a new game developing studio you don't know, and a game with a completely new name, made by Larian Studios. Which one do you buy?<div><br /></div><div>This scenario has been getting more likely after Larian announced they wouldn't do DLCs for BG3 or a BG4 game. But one has to do a little bit of reading between the lines here. Big companies in the general business of entertainment, whether that is movies or games or something else, put a lot of emphasis on intellectual property rights, IP. Thus when Hasbro talks to its investors, it will claim that the success of BG3 has a lot to do with the strength of the Dungeons & Dragons brand, and the "Baldur's Gate" IP. That claim is debatable. On the one hand, it is possible that the exactly same game would have sold a lot less if it had been called Divinity Original Sin 3. On the other hand BG3 is clearly a completely different game than Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and not really a linear evolution of these previous games, but rather an evolution of Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2. Larian Studios is betting that they can make a game as good or better that is in some way an evolution of BG3, but won't be called that. The D&D / Baldur's Gate IP, and the owner of that IP, are considered more of an obstacle to make the next game great, rather than a condition for success.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let's look at a very different example. In November of last year, The Escapist got into a fight with the employees that did their Youtube videos. The Escapist fired an editor-in-chief, and the rest of the employees in his team basically said "If he goes, I'll go". While The Escapist held the IP rights to a lot of the popular video series brands these people made, like Zero Punctuation, they didn't own the people behind those brands. So the same old team simply created a new brand, somewhat sarcastically called Second Wind, and continued to make the same sort of videos under new names. There is now a video series called Fully Ramblomatic, which is basically just a reskinned, rebranded Zero Punctuation. And it turns out that viewers just care more about Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw reviewing games in his peculiar style than they care about the "Escapist" or "Zero Punctuation" brand or IP. The Youtube channel of The Escapist is basically dead, while Second Wind is doing fine.</div><div><br /></div><div>Third example, and much discussed of course this year, is Palworld. A game studio that didn't hold any IP rights to Pokemon basically made a Pokemon game that people liked a lot more than the Pokemon games of the company that did hold the IP rights. And because IP rights are actually a lot more limited than many people imagine, beyond lots of spilled ink and a "we will look into it" press release from Nintendo, absolutely nothing happened.</div><div><br /></div><div>And there are a lot of other examples, maybe less prominent. Ubisoft ran "The Settlers" brand into the ground, and people previously working on that series now launched Pioneers of Pagonia in early access, a game that if sold by Ubisoft would be a "The Settlers" game. And some of the "sequels" released recently are from games that are over a decade old; are people buying Outcast because they liked the 1999 prequel, or do they simply not care how the game is called? How important is Dragon's Dogma from 2012 for the success of Dragon's Dogma 2? It didn't shield the game from review bombing when players were disappointed by bad performance, questionable game design decisions, and greedy microtransactions.</div><div><br /></div><div>Warner Brothers made one of the best-selling games of 2023 with single-player Hogwart's Legacy, and one of the worst flops of 2024 with live-service Suicide Squad. Their <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/03/06/wb-thinks-hogwarts-legacy-2-should-be-a-live-service/" target="_blank">conclusion</a>? Harry Potter is simply the better IP than Suicide Squad, and they should make a live-service Harry Potter game. The alternative explanation is simply that players care a bit less about IP than big companies think, and instead care more about the actual quality of games. Between Steam user ratings and refund options, Metacritic, and video streaming sometimes even before release, it has become increasingly easy for players to judge how good a game actually is. We don't have to rely on the name of the game to give us a rough estimate of the quality of the game. We learned that sequels can be a lot better, a lot worse, or totally different than previous games of the same name, and therefore lost trust in these names. I don't think that brands and IP have no importance, or will go away; but there seems to be an evolution that makes them somewhat less important today, and it seems that some managers of big companies haven't gotten the memo yet.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com/">Tobold's Blog</a></div>Toboldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04354082945218389596noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5584578.post-85067968012435047562024-03-23T10:14:00.000+01:002024-03-23T10:14:07.616+01:00Not a "fan" fanI have already written a bit about Millennia, and I will certainly write more after the game releases and I can play the full version. I am very much looking forward to playing this, as the complex economic system is something I was missing in other 4X games. So you could say that I am a fan of Millennia. But I hesitate to use the term, as there is a connotation to "fan" that I don't subscribe to.<div><br /></div><div>Buying a computer game usually requires a bit of money, and playing it requires some time. That is an investment. In some "fans" of a game, the money/time investment leads to a sort of emotional investment as well. It is as if they had made a life choice, and they need confirmation that this was the right life choice. Thus they get angry if somebody criticizes the game, or there are bad news about the game, as that would criticize their life choice. I don't tend to get that emotionally attached, and I am certainly not "rooting" for Millennia.</div><div><br /></div><div>While there are many things that I look forward to in playing Millennia, I am very well aware that this is a deeply flawed game. It is lacking game balance, and the user interface is sometimes so user-unfriendly as to make me cringe. It is also not a very pretty game, with the combat animation (especially naval combat) looking almost ridiculous for a game of this price category released in 2024. And then there is a problem which would still apply if a miracle patch fixed all the balance, UI, and graphics problems: Fundamentally Millennia is a more complex and less accessible game than its competitors, like Civilization 6, Humankind, or Old World.</div><div><br /></div><div>Civilization 6 was released over 7 years ago, and there are still over 60k players every day at peak that play it. While that is down from an all-time high of 160k, the longevity of Civ6 is extraordinary. Humankind on Steam peaked at 55k and is down to 1k after less than 3 years. Old World has even less players (also because it was only available on Epic for the first year). I would honestly be surprised if Millennia even beats Humankind at Steam peak concurrent users. The people who think that Millennia is a "Civ Killer" are deluded or smoking something. Millennia is a cross of different game genres, none of which is exactly mass market suitable. It lacks the cartoon character appeal of Civ6. The fact that you see the bad graphics and UI flaws immediately, but need many hours before the advantages of Millennia in game depth become apparent won't help either. The bad habit of Paradox Interactive to release not quite finished games and then make them better with patches and DLCs later won't help. I would consider it extremely likely that in a week the Steam concurrent user numbers and user ratings of Millennia can only be described as "disappointing". That doesn't make Millennia a bad game, it only makes it a game that is niche, and needs improvement. I buy it at release because I like the depth, I can live with the current flaws, and I have confidence in Paradox to make the game better over time, based on previous form.</div><div><br /></div><div>I do somewhat hope that Millennia isn't doing so bad as to be unsalvageable. It does happen that a game releases flawed, but with potential, and then never develops that potential due to lack of financial success. But I am not a "fan" sort of fan of Millennia, who will get extremely angry if other people criticize the game or simply don't buy it. I didn't even say "recommended" about Millennia on any of my posts about it, because it isn't a game that I would recommend to everybody. If you read my very long previous post about Millennia with interest, you are probably an exception, and this might be the game for you. But if you are not a hardcore fan of 4X and/or Paradox grand strategy games, chances are that Millennia won't appeal to you.</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-30415415679037207092024-03-22T11:54:00.000+01:002024-03-22T11:54:09.802+01:00Pre-launch game tips on MillenniaI find myself in the curious situation to already know a lot of details about a game that hasn't even released yet. Millennia will come out Tuesday, but I have already played the demo repeatedly, and watched many hours of streamers playing on YouTube and Twitch. Some of those content creators were well prepared and rather good at the game, allowing me to learn things. Others just tried to play blind, which then made me realize where the pitfalls for the average player might be. So I thought I write this post with some advice for people who would like to start playing Tuesday, but don't have as much time as I do to watch videos about it.<div><br /></div><div>Starting with the basics, Millennia is a "Civ-like", that is to say a 4X game that takes you from the stone age to modernity. It is less pretty than Civ6 or Humankind or Old World, but makes up for that by being a lot deeper and more complex. Many of the game systems are introduced over time, so the early game is still relatively easy. But at some point Millennia gets as complex as other games from Paradox, which leads to you having to make a choice: You could try to understand every single aspect of the game and minmax the heck out of it; or you could go on a journey of discovery / role-playing and don't worry about optimas. I would recommend the latter approach, as Millennia is particularly suited for that: Millennia is *not* perfectly balanced, and too much optimization can easily "break" the game, by making it trivial. Sometimes it is better to just go with the flow, and choose for example natural spirits or government forms that seem fun or appropriate at the moment, without worrying too much about efficiency. The replay value of the game comes from making different choices and possibly experiencing alternative timeline ages in every new run.</div><div><br /></div><div>A first advice on game setup is about a minor problem, one that is shared with a bunch of other 4X games: If you take the default "continents" map type and play well, you are likely to reach a point where you have conquered the continent you started on. And somewhere else, unreachable with early game technology, is another continent, that by the time you can get there is fully settled by the remaining AI opponents. The AI isn't clever enough to send big armies to your continent. So you need to send armies there and conquer, which is a slow process, and not much fun if you are already the strongest power. I'll play on a single landmass instead. I think the default AI difficulty is fine for the first couple of games. As usual for 4X games, at higher AI difficulties the AI isn't necessarily getting a lot more clever, but simply cheats more, which isn't necessarily fun.</div><div><br /></div><div>You start Millennia with a city and the six hexes around that city. As you can't choose your starting location (a feature that is apparently planned for a future DLC), this starting location will have a *huge* impact on the rest of the game. My advice would be to go scouting with your starting units, but if a few turns in you discover that there is not a lot of flat terrain around your city (grassland, bushland), I would consider restarting the game until you get a better starting location. Some water, some hills, and some forest is useful, but if the majority of spaces in the first and second ring of hexes around your starting city is this, or worse, unusable mountains, then I'd just restart. Once you know the game much better, you can go for a starting location in the deepest forest, or go for an early seafaring nation. But for your first few "regular" games, you will need tons of flat space to build improvements.</div><div><br /></div><div>One easy mistake in the early game is to lose track of the various points you accumulate. Some of the points are localized to the city you produce them in, like food (and all later goods that fulfil city needs), or the influence points that let your city take over adjoining hexes over time. Others, like government points or improvement points can be used in different ways and at different locations. The game doesn't stop you from advancing into the next turn just because you have unused points of that sort. As there is a lot of interesting stuff happening elsewhere, it is easy to forget about the points and then realize that you should have build a settler with government points five turns later, or that you could have build a plantation long ago. My advice is to plan ahead, and use the CTRL-left click function to set a reminder on whatever improvement you plan on doing. If you have one reminder for every sort of point, you'll never forget anything.</div><div><br /></div><div>Speaking of settlers, building a new city with settlers or conquering a city or taking over a neutral city with an envoy results in that city only becoming a vassal, not a fully controlled city. A vassal will accumulate integration points, and when that meter is full, you can spend government points to integrate that city. Only at that point do you fully control it. But there is a serious downside: Integrating a city decreases culture, and increases unrest, with the penalties becoming bigger, the more cities you integrate. You really need to choose wisely which cities to integrate, with an eye on them having the space to grow. You can't raze your own vassal cities, and curiously you can raze a city on conquest only if that city is neutral. Which means that the only way to get rid of a conquered enemy city is to leave it undefended and hope that barbarians take it, after which you can raze it on reconquest. If you have a vassal city that you want to integrate later, you might already want to use culture to add a town, or to use engineering points to build outposts around it, in order to reserve the space and prevent other nations from building too close.</div><div><br /></div><div>Land-grabbing is important in Millennia, and the AI often does it aggressively. Very early in the game you will get your first culture power (these always happen when your culture meter runs full). You will probably want to use the culture power to build a first town around your starting city. Note that while you technically can build that town on terrain you already own, it is a lot cleverer to build it adjacent, as it thus grabs more land. The space you build the town on is used for the town, so you will want to build the town *next to* the spaces you actually want, not on them. Later in the game you can grab single spaces by spending exploration points. As a clever trick, you can combine that with the rule that a new town needs to be adjacent to your territory, by first buying that extra space in one direction, and then building the town one space further away from the city center than otherwise possible. Note that the outposts built by pioneers don't have that adjacency rule, and can be built anywhere, but they need to share a border with your city if you want to integrate them into the city region later.</div><div><br /></div><div>Besides towns, culture powers early in the game can be used to gain research points with the Eureka power, or use the Local Reform power to increase the output of a city by 50% for 5 turns. One good tip is to first check how much research your starting city is currently producing. It is totally possible that even early in the game your starting city produces enough research that 50% more times 5 is actually the same or more research than what Eureka gives you. And as Local Reform also increases all other outputs by 50%, Local Reform can be ultimately the much better choice, with the only drawback being that you don't get all the research points immediately.</div><div><br /></div><div>Millennia is divided into ages, and each age has a selection of technologies to research. For example the age of stone has farming, tribal elders, defenses, scouting, and workers as the 5 possible technologies to research. You need to research 3 of those 5 to be able to advance into the age of bronze. You *can* research more or even all technologies before advancing. But you can also research just the minimum number, advance to the next age, and then get back to research old technologies later. Technologies get cheaper to research when you have already advanced into a later age, plus you get 10% rebate for every other nation that has already researched the technology. That makes picking up old tech rather cheap and fast. Which techs are the best depends a bit on your situation, e.g. if you have a lot of food from fish, but no farmable resources, farming is less useful. But in general you will want to pick up scouting and farming early. You need to think what you actually want to do with the tech you researched: Scouting is generally useful, but if for example you research tribal elders and get access to the Council building that produces research, this only really makes sense if you then actually build that Council in your city. If your city is busy building other stuff, you might have been better off with another technology, like workers.</div><div><br /></div><div>Compared to other Civ games, in Millennia in the early game you will meet a *lot* of barbarians. While of course early on you have very few units and will want to move them one by one to explore the maximum, you will rather early want to stack your units. An early game "full stack" with two warbands and an archer not only quickly deals with all roaming barbarians, but will also usually take out a barbarian village in two attacks. Note that scouts aren't completely helpless in Millennia, and stacking several scouts into one scout army is a good way to avoid the scouts dying. Barbarians are highly aggressive, so standing on terrain with a defensive bonus and letting them attack you usually works better than attacking them. In spite of the danger from barbarians, early scouting is extremely valuable; not only for getting the lay of the land, but also for reaching tribal camps and landmarks before the AI players. Also attacking barbarian villages early is very useful. Both tribal camps and conquering barbarian villages gives you a choice between two random rewards, for example 10 government points or 10 improvement points. As in the early game you are probably earning just 1 or 2 of these points each every round, getting 10 points of something is usually a nice boost. Of course some points are more valuable than others, but you'll quickly learn that, and to some extent it depends on your situation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Somewhere around turn 20 you will reach the age of bronze. This allows you to choose your first national spirit (with other national spirits being unlocked in ages IV, VI, and VIII). If you are the first to reach the age of bronze, you can pick any one you want, and you'll get 5 bonus points of the type of point that this national spirit is using. If you are not the first one, picking the same national spirit than somebody else gives you no bonus points, but picking one that hasn't been chosen yet gives you more bonus points. The later you come, the more bonus points you could get for the few remaining national spirits, but of course they might not be the ones you wanted. Note that national spirits can massively change the way you play: The most powerful choice is probably raiders, but only if you are okay with a very aggressive style of play and constant warfare. Raiders are a good choice if you wanted to try out the first alternative timeline "crisis age" of age of blood, but this will result in a development that will be very, very different from a more peaceful approach. Which is good, because having meaningful choices is good.</div><div><br /></div><div>Note that many national spirits give some bonus that lets your cities expand into specific terrain faster. Thus which national spirit would be good for you depends on the terrain around you. Most obviously you don't want to take ancient seafarers in a landlocked location. But if you didn't follow my advice on restarting on difficult terrain, for example a location with lots of forests could be made more playable by choosing the naturalists national spirit. Wild hunters like brushland, the god-king dynasty wants hills, and the mound builders grassland. I am looking forward to playing many different games of Millennia with many different choices of national spirits. They are easy to underestimate until you played them, for example I at first considered the olympian national spirit of diplomacy a bit weak, until I discovered that envoys can grab neutral cities as vassals for free, and that holding the olympic games as a culture power event gives you a huge amount of different points. Again, different national spirit results in a different playstyle, but if the situation is right, that different playstyle might actually be stronger than you thought.</div><div><br /></div><div>The age of bronze is also the age in which chains of goods become more prominent. After doing the corresponding research, improvement points can be used to build building on your hexes that take existing resources and turn them into more valuable things. You might have already built a farm that creates wheat, but wheat can be turned into flour, and flour into bread, each time improving the amount of food you get. You can turn wool into textiles, grapes into wine, olives into oil, wood into lumber, and so on. Sometimes you get different options, like either turning flax into textiles or into oil. Later in the game you can import goods from other nations, or send them from one of your cities to another domestically. This adds a huge "city building" aspect to Millennia that other 4X games don't have. One tip here is that there are buildings that can convert several resources at once, e.g. a saw mill can turn 3 wood into 3 lumber, but you don't *need* 3 wood for this to work. If you have only 2 wood, it will only produce 2 lumber, but that might be a perfectly fine choice. You'll import the third wood later, or grab another forest hex. I personally consider chains of goods that create production points or improvement points as more interesting than those that create for example wealth, but that of course depends on your current finances.</div><div><br /></div><div>Population growth in Millennia is interesting. You need to fulfil different needs, with every 5 population introducing another need. Totally ignoring a need often leads to a crisis age (which might be what you want), for example ignoring the need for hygiene in the age of iron leads to an age of plague. On the other side the fulfilment of needs is capped at 200%: If your city needs 5 food, providing more than 10 doesn't grow the city any faster. This makes the goods chain system and domestic exports even more interesting, as you could conceivably have a mining city that doesn't produce much food, but create some high food value item elsewhere and then send it over.</div><div><br /></div><div>Trying to plan for a run with ages you haven't seen yet is difficult. Some crisis ages are easy enough to get the conditions for, but it is the player who first reaches an age who determines the age for every other player. At higher (and thus cheating) AI levels, it will usually be an AI player who is ahead of you in research and thus it becomes very hard to be the one who determines what the next age will be. I also found that some variant ages have conditions that you can't control at all: The first one possible, the age of heroes, requires your scouts to have found 3 landmarks. Even if you manage to push both scouting and research faster than any AI player, you'll not necessarily discover 3 landmarks. Again my advice would be to go with the flow, and sometimes you'll just have the opportunity to reach an age you don't know yet. Between the different national spirit choices and the different ages, I see good replayability, although I can't say yet whether that holds true for the late game. I am very much looking forward to Tuesday, when Millennia is released.</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-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.com3tag: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.com5tag: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.com19tag: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.com6tag: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.com15tag: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.com1