Awesome. The guy from Talisman Island put together a real expansion along with Fantasy Flight. This is a must buy. Deals with having Pandora’s box in the middle if you all remember that from 2nd edition (the ending where you draw spells and adventure cards and cast them on other players until they die).
I noticed reading the Talisman Island posts that 2013 marks the 30th year of Talisman’s existence. Woah. I wish I had started playing this in the 80’s, but it was always just sitting there on the shelf (next to Dungeon Quest) and I never bought it, then of course college happened and it ended up nearly ALL we played for a couple years there.
I’ve made some kickstarter mistakes before and will do so in the future, no doubt. Planetary Annihilation, from the alpha access, has been one of the poster children for me of a Kickstarter that offered almost too much potential for awesomeness that there was no real way they could deliver. So far they didn’t (which shouldn’t be expected in this early stage of dev) and likely they won’t. RTS games are very difficult to make. Even in the genre’s heyday there were very few contenders for the best and a few experienced developers that made horrific stinkers. While Total Annihilation was great, it turned out to be a fluke as TA: Kingdoms was awful and Supreme Commander didn’t capture the magic that TA did at all. It’s no wonder Planetary Annihilation’s alpha was so bad (and should never have been released to the public). Their decision now to use the famous id Software phrase “When it’s done” in regards to the game’s release I applaud, but I really think after what the alpha shows, there is no hope for this game to be any more than a minor blip in the history of RTS games, and certainly not worth playing for more than a couple days at most. Unique concept, poorly executed from a design standpoint is the crux of what the reviews will be.
Look at the tone change in the latest Kickstarter update:
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That means Planetary Annihilation will launch when we feel confident about its level of polish and the amount of awesome we can jam into it. We don’t have a hard date moving forward. However, we do expect it to be feature-complete in early 2014.
“We are extremely happy at what we’ve been able to accomplish with the game so far, but we want to take some additional time to make sure we are releasing the best game we can,” said Jon Mavor CTO of Uber Entertainment.
“I want to thank everyone who kickstarted and pre-ordered the game again because without you this game wouldn’t have became a reality.”
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Look what’s happening above. Typically you have a kickstarter message coming from a team member speaking directly to the kickstarter group– a direct communication without it being a press release sent out to gaming or business publications to publish AS THEIR OWN MESSAGE. What UBER did above was make it SEEM like it was from a team member, but then they quoted another team member within the same message like an official press release–this is a very very strange level of professional PR work for a kickstarter. Why not have the message direct from Jon Mavor? It’s as if at this point instead of the actual developers that we ‘paid’ to make the game speaking to us, the kickstarter people, we now have some sort of PR intermediary that is going around capturing quotes (or writing them for approval) within Uber to create what amounts to a professional press release–not to game mags, but to US. If the releases started off that way, I guess that would be normal, but the message above makes me think something changed very drastically at Uber in terms of what they want the kickstarter people to know. And I think that’s the realization that the game they are making currently sucks and “will never match their teaser videos.”
This is case in point of being wary of big, lauded kickstarters– they make so much money sometimes over what they are asking that something must happen to the developers and designers– that they think their game IDEA (since at the kickstarter time for most of these it’s not a reality) is goldplated by virtue of the amount of dollars they got– and this is indicative of what the final product will be. Grant you the idea for PA is great, but the execution and design decisions will have to be flawless to compete even with Company of Heroes 2 let alone Starcraft 2.
Lastly, I think the developers of this game bowed to pressure to put SOMETHING out after the kickstarter– and I believe kickstarter people exert a lot of pressure on studios to show stuff LONG before they are ready for it, and long before they SHOULD show it when they are starting from scratch, which is what PA’s team is doing. The studios focus their attention on pleasing the kickstarter people with shiny stuff when they need to be hidden away in a cave making a good game. I honestly believe they cast some design decisions in stone FAR to early when they should have been extremely willing to leave them on the cutting room floor if the game’s quality required it. While it’s because of us that this game is being made, it may be because of us that this game is impossible now to make well..hence we get the PR talk now instead of direct team communication.
We didn’t get the simutaneous rules quite right (at all) but it worked out in the end and was a great time. We ranged around 20 minutes per turn except for a couple turns, which for this many players + combats, is really great. I’d like to see ANY other 4X space board game with 7 players get it done with this level of satisfaction in such a short time.
One thing I guess I would like to see in Eclipse is some better diplomacy, different game objectives– like you don’t know what the game’s objective is when you start whether it’s kill ancients, take other people’s home worlds, etc. VP cards based on actions would be cool– and it would not be a crazy extension from the VP tokens they have (that you really only spend resources for at this point). Again, this would sort of merge in some of the great stuff from NEXUS OPS.
Looking forward to the next game of this, as always.
I had a busy busy couple of weeks and didn’t get much gaming in, but in my idle moments I have been trying (actually trying) to win FTL: Faster than Light and have failed again and again, which is the point I guess. It feels like an SNK fighting game. You get the hang of it and can beat the computer opponents with relative ease– and then you hit the boss and you are fucked forever (see Samurai Shodown 2 or King of Fighters 97 as examples). I’m waiting to see if anyone I know that has it has actually won it– because on easy– well, it ain’t. While the AAA titles can be awesome, FTL is case in point that almost all the PC gaming gold resides almost solely in the camp of the indy developer.
That said, I’ve finally uninstalled Rome Total War 2 (my box has my games on a small SSD so I have to free up space), because it just crashed too much– blue screens, other crashes and I just really do not like the direction they’ve gone with the fights. Even the biggest battles are over in 5-7 minutes and it all just turns into a big mob. It has some great things about it and the graphics look really good but I just ended up going back to the Napoleon expansion to Empire Total War, which if you haven’t played, is fantastic. I expected to be playing Rome Total War 2 for months and months, but that was not to be unfortunately.
Sure BF4 looks really good, but I just didn’t end up buying it. I feel like just playing Bad Company 2 would scratch that itch just fine (and it’s on Steam).
Talisman. Maurice!Bastard gifted me Talisman on Steam and I got in a game last night. It was– interesting. I think it’s a completely viable means of playing the game, and interface wise they did a fine job, but is Talisman the type of game that you want to play on the computer rather than face to face? I really don’t. I’d rather just bust out the boards and cards and go to town. Even if we only play once or twice a year that way, it’s OK.
The bad things about the game are that it’s a computer version of Talisman first of all, and second the art is terrible. Given that the 4th edition art was not great in the first place (I would be great if Fantasy Flight put out a new base set with new art so it could match the quality of their later expansions), the computer version is even WORSE in some areas– some of the pieces look like they took a photo of an employee and ran some photoshop filters on him and slapped it in the game. Pure garbage. Overall I’m going to give it a go. Since I’ve played hundreds of times, the base set is really not that exciting. If they get some expansions, that may be cooking with gas– but of course that will lengthen the game.
One thing that came up last night to haunt me is that I drew the Monk and the bastard asked me what I would do to fix it in 4th edition. Here I go to great length about it, but short version is that since the new version of Talisman allows players to collect CRAFT trophies as well as Strength (2nd edition allowed only Strength trophies to be collected and traded), there is no way to fix the Monk as he was originally– he would simply be the most powerful character in the game. So what did FF end up on? A guy who can’t use weapons and armor and adds +3 to his rolls in combat. Really you have a 5 STR character who can have a spell early on. Granted they tried to make up for this character’s weakness by piling on the FATE counters, he’s still one of the craptacular characters in the game (like the Elf and Dwarf).
On the day of the Playstation 4, this release is likely far more of interest to the mraaknerds because it heralds a (possible) new dawn to a much-missed franchise: Alpha Centauri. While the base game was excellent, AC with the expansion was up their with the best strategy games ever made (I spent most of the period that AC was out playing Emperor of the Fading Suns though). Though we’ve gotten Civ after Civ (which are also excellent), there’s been no return yet to Alpha Centauri land by Sid and the gang.
Seeing a gap in gamer’s desires, Slitherine, creators of new versions and games in the Close Combat series (like Panthers in the Fog) and Battle Academy for the iPad, has released PANDORA: a 4X land-based sci fi strategy game that has been dubbed (likely by them) as the spiritual successor to the Alpha Centauri series. It looks at first blush really polished.
I figured I wouldn’t look at ANY other strategy games until 2015 or so, but with Rome Total War 2’s constant ability to frustrate and crash so much I uninstalled it– this is welcome news!
Oh yeah. September gave us the announcement of a new Mount & Blade (and one without fucking guns in it) — and it’s an update to the Warbands version, which is going to be open-ass awesome. It still amazes me that a game made by just a couple guys has turned into such an exemplary series (except for the one with guns that is).
I hopped on both the Fate Core 3 and Cortex Hackers Guide kickstarters earlier in the year with no regrets and while this is NOT a review or discussion of the systems included in these books, nor the layout, nor the art or anything content wise by any means, I don’t like either of them and here’s why: they are generic RPG books and little did I know– I can’t fucking stand them! There’s really nothing more boring than a system without a reason to use it and while I really like both Cortex and FATE, the ownership of these books is fundamentally useless to me– and I can’t even get through reading them….at all. Imagine trying to learn Advanced Squad Leader or Mystic Realm (both very difficult games to learn) without having a strong affinity to the gaming theme they represent. Could you get through such rules? I thought I could, but I can’t. Not ever.
Let’s take Lamentations of the Flame Princess as an example of a similar game to the of the books above in that it still presents a sort of generic system for running Fantasy RPG’s first off. Lamentations uses the most generic and nearly universally familiar OD&D system (Moldavy Basic essentially), changes a couple of things (like only fighters get +1 to hit at levels) and then tells you how to run a Fantasy game with it. There is a (very strange) adventure in the back, but other than that there is no description of the Lamentation’s world at all– just about what survival Fantasy Horror gaming should be like. Yet, while the system is one most of us are intimately familiar with (being the basis of all D20 play ever anon), Lamentations, while not including much in the way of a world, has a very clear Swords and Sorcery /Survival Horror focus for the game, the art and writing; a setting that makes what you are getting into with the game extremely clear. It is not a base rule set for any genre it is a base rule set for Swords and Sorcery. Of course we know from the years gone by that D20 has been used for everything under the sun with some incredibly weighty systems (Pathfinder, 3.5, etc.), but that’s not what Lamentations is doing. Instead it’s laying out a well-known set of rules within a specific paradigm even WITHOUT a massive world-spanning gazetter included in the base package. I love Lamentations and it will be my go-to D&D game if I ever give that a whirl again, and who can deny modules like The God the Crawls or FUCK FOR SATAN to boot? Most importantly, I was able to get through the text of the rules, the GM advice (which is amazing and goes far beyond anything I’ve ever read for running an actual group of players) and the supplemental materials. Why?
Let’s talk about Cortex and Fate– both excellent rule-sets. At the moment I prefer Cortex a bit more because, those of us that love Exalted want to play high powered crazy fights in less than 8 hours a piece. While I really enjoy exploring a new RPG system, what I don’t like, and this is a recent discovery, are these tool-kit only rulebooks. While clearly laying out what can be done with the system and the system itself (in the case of FATE 3), there’s absolutely no hook at all saying to me as a GM, i.e.: the person that will have to put all the work into the game for the most part, that I should try to make stories for this. It’s more like saying: ok you as a person should make an RPG out of this– and if you have time for that type of thing you are in a completely different demographic. Even the awesome Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, whose setting I really have no interest in at all (apart from Guardians of the Galaxy) gave myself and my players some framework to WANT to play. When I pick up FATE 3 and peruse the Hackers Guide for Cortex… I fall asleep, LITERALLY. There’s just nothing there but laying out an RPG system which, while incredibly important that it’s not pure shit (I’m looking at you Twilight 2000), it’s extremely boring when extracted from any sort of genre framework to spark the imaginations. It’s like one side of the brain is satisfied while the other one just sits there, bored off it’s ass.
Then, there’s Exalted.
Dresden Files (FATE 2), while not that fun to play as any sort of Wizard, are essential books for my RPG library as a basis around how to create that TYPE of game (modern Wizardry) with FATE. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (CORTEX), again while not a specific world I am interested in playing in was yet another awakening to what is possible for handling high powered, superheroic RPG’s. Even very difficult systems like Legends of Wuilin (which will likely never see print) Strange Fate (FATE 2 on crack) are extremely interesting books because they weave the stories you are going to tell in with the system it’s presenting. While you are reading the SYSTEM you are also beginning to create the stories that you will tell together with your group–and I think this is absolutely key. Sure some people that want to make a FATE or CORTEX game may love the generic system books, but for me, it’s just a waste.
