My Thoughts on Mists of Pandaria

After watching a quick recap video about Mists of Pandaria, here are my impressions of the real new features of Mists of Pandaria -- not what they're advertising.

Unnamed Publishers Trying to Exploit Kickstarter

I'm taking a break of my coverage leading into Cthulhu 7.  Per Feargus Uquhart, CEO of Obsidian Studios, a publisher decided to offer boxed copies of Project Eternity in exchange for the IP, the profit, and the glory.

Breaking Character Creation

After looking at skills and sanity checks, it should be fairly apparent that Cthulhu's system isn't particularly balanced for party play in the same way that other games aspire to be.  Character Creation, the very thing that determines all of these, is also easily exploitable.  We continue our look at Cthulhu as we move forward into 7th Edition.

Kickstarter: Horror on the Orient Express

I've been ramping up for the 7th edition of Call of Cthulhu, as you've seen for the past week in my analysis articles.  I've got a handful more before I'm done, but I did want to highlight that Chaosium is creating a Cthulhu boxed campaign for 7th, out of their old module, Horror on the Orient Express.

Breaking Minds

After Monday's post working out the statistics of abusing skill checks in Call of Cthulhu, I moved on to crunching statistics on Sanity when working through scenarios -- specifically, the odds of not going either temporarily or permanently insane during a scenario.  While Education is the most important stat at generation, Power seems to be the most helpful statistic afterward.

Breaking Cthulhu's Skill System

Call of Cthulhu (and Delta Green) has a rather unique skill system. While d% challenges are fairly common among role-playing games, Cthulhu has a unique system of skill improvement. Each time you succeed at a check, you mark a box next to the skill name, and have a chance of improving that skill by rolling over your skill value on a d%. If you succeed, you get a die roll to determine how far your skill improves. As someone running a game, I like to learn how to break a system in order to let me better design scenarios to keep things balanced. Here's how Cthulhu 6th is ruined.

Reacting to the Market

Over the past few years, Games Workshop has struggled as two major phenomena have undermined their business model.  Both have spawned from the fact that Games Workshop does not provide all options for a kit in the kit itself, and does not provide models for everything in their rich background or even in the codices.  They've slowly maneuvered themselves to lessen the impact of both, but will it be quick enough?

Replaying X-Com

The next title I'm excited about isn't coming around for another month -- XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN. While I wait, I've been fiddling with playing the original (called XCOM: UFO DEFENSE in America). Thanks to a clever post on the Steam forums, I was quickly on my way, with a number of tweaks and improvements that I wish had made it into the original game.

How to Spot a Botter

Over the past two weeks, I've noticed specific repetitive patterns of peculiar players in Guild Wars that aren't particularly involved in the game world.  Because GW2 bots are not particularly advanced at this point, they're rather easy to notice.  Here's how.

MMO 2.0: Part 2

After my analysis of what defines a generation of MMO, the question still remains: are we on the cusp of a new generation? Have the first titles of a new generation been released, or have they yet to be conceptualized?

MMO 2.0

In passing conversation, a friend recently remarked that he felt we were on the cusp of a new generation of MMO, referring to this as the beginning of MMO 2.0, beginning with Secret World and following through with Guild Wars 2. I was a bit surprised, and then I thought about it -- was he right? To define this further, we need to look at the history of the MMO.

Labor Day

It's Labor Day, and I'm stuck at work.  Here are a few things you can look forward to in the near future.  Enjoy a few games on your day off.

 
In the meantime, say goodbye to City of Heroes/Villains. Paragon studios is closing.  CoX continues to provide the best character variety and creation in the MMO biz.  I'm sad to see it shuttering.