Redwolf's Journal (continued)

So, little bits of the next Star Wars... Cultural diversity Stormtroopers? I'm all for it. That's either a character in disguise or a sign that the Empire ran out of clones at some point, the later being a theory I always subscribed to anyway. The scene itself of one person popping up over a desertscape, however, looks... low-budget? Hovery, roller-ball droid? Uhh... that seems highly impractical and just not right to me. Stormtroopers readying for assault? This looks just a little too shiny and slick somehow. Overly blocky desert speeder thingie? Not fond of the design, but the feel of the clip harkens back to the speeder bikes, at least. X-wings look decent. Dark-clad dude with a red saber that has... mini-saber cross bars? Argh! Why, oh why do people keep feeling compelled to "outdo" what is already a frickin' laser sword? Lightsabers > new colors > dual-wielding > double-sabers... Blarghle. This creation is almost as impractical as a light

Just kinda bleh. Still need to pull an evening shift at work, though holiday-ish days like today are often really quiet at the office.

Well, I took a look at storytelling , so why not look at combat in the MMOs I've played? WoW : This is the first MMO I really picked up, so I may be biased. It's sort of the baseline in my mind. It's not perfect, but it works well. Bottom line in my book is that it works. I rarely had any trouble targeting what I wanted to target. Abilities and auto-attacks hit your active target or specified area. Facing is important (especially as a shield-user). AI aggro mechanics are mostly pretty basic, straightfoward, and built-in with tanks having specific aggro-boosting abilities. With rare exception, abilities both have a cooldown and are limited by a global cooldown. There's some difference between classes with a secondary resource - mana, rage, focus, etc. And there are a lot of abilities. I had... 4 bars? Six? Eight? It sure felt like a lot, though some of those were regularly-used non-combat things like mount summoning. Boss fights, however, got interesting. "Tank

I played DA: Origins and generally liked it, though had a few issues here and there. I skipped DA2, mostly because I heard of largely repetitive environments (which had annoyed me in Mass Effect 2). I did pick up DA: Inquisition on release this week, though. It seems to have a pretty grand scale in mind. It looks pretty good. The controls have taken some getting used to. I can't render anything approaching a final verdict yet, but so far, so good. And after putting in a handful of hours the first few days, in a game that some have said really kicks into main gear at around the 10-hour mark and lasts upwards of closer to 80, I restarted the game. I found playing a warrior to be sort of dull and went to melee rogue instead. That feels a bit more fun in actual combat, and compliments the initial group better. Plus stealth is useful for getting around some areas. We'll see how that goes.

I had some discussion about story and presentation, having just done Arah in GW2 this weekend for a couple people. So here are some sort of general thoughts... Now, it should be acknowledged that telling a player-driven story in an MMO and offering real choice may be a Sisyphean task. Offering real choice means more development time in making branches of the story. Making any story that centers on the PC involves some slight-of-hand in a multiplayer environment to be even remotely believable. And on top of that, opinions vary on what the best way really is. WoW : The game always kind of skirts the issue of player involvement. Big bad bosses are taken down by "heroes" or NPCs. Questgivers occasionally show recognition for the PC, but it's pretty trivial and interchangeable. With major bits of story "told" through raids, it's pretty easy to miss out on some things, too - though Blizzard has been more inclusive with LFR instances and such. Ultimately, I so

Well, it was either that or Interstellar today, and I felt like going with the option that looked more fun. And it's good. The only down side I can really see to the movie is the lack of surprise. There are plot twists, but they're all pretty predictable. Otherwise, it's got fun, it's got cute, it's got a sense of adventure, it's got some solid emotional arcs, and it's science/smarts-empowering while still being somewhat cautionary. Solid movie for kids or adults, so far as I can see. Oh, and awesome little cameo after the credits.

Alas, it is that accursed time of year when sunlight is waning and there doesn't feel like enough hours in the day. Of course, it doesn't help that I usually get home with about the mental energy and focus to... just sort of collapse for a while. No matter how much I think I might want to get done at home, actually doing it rarely works out. This week, work's been peppered with training meetings for a new system being installed along with the usual random issues and looming mega projects. I feel I've made progress on a few things this week, which is good, but I've also dealt with a lot of issues that I am not able to fix. We've got one person, who's supposed to be leaving the company soon, setting up a new preflighting and page processing system. While it isn't true across the entire department, I haven't even seen this stuff first-hand and haven't been given access to it, so my hands are pretty tied in how I make use of it. There's defini