Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I've been reading some posts by one of the people behind Ultimate Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Most are about development of the latter. I've said before and I'll say again that I find looks behind the curtain in such endeavors to be fascinating. Getting insights into the creative ideas behind a major project like that, and seeing how they intersect with practicality, is educational. Sometimes it's also a bit heartbreaking. SWG has a reputation as being pretty unique among MMOs, love it or hate it. I never played, so I can't render an informed opinion. But there was so much ambition behind the design, that I am impressed by it. Hearing how much of that got scaled back or cut because of things like legalities, development timelines, or simple hardware constraints is something anyone even considering game design should see. And even those of us who only play the games can benefit from it by seeing how complicated things truly can be.

I think I broke myself. Just a little. I'll often feel just a little bit down after finishing a book, leaving a story and characters behind. The latest of my reading hit me for slightly different reasons too. Mindtouch seems to have been written by a "furry" author who used to post snippets of an ongoing story on Livejournal that I would see occasionally through the friend page of a friend. I never really got into that, and I didn't really look for anything about this book directly. Heck, if anything, I tend to veer away from slice-of-life type stories because my own life is plenty mundane without filling my entertainment time with people just going to work and school and such. But through some happenstance, I found the book and it seemed just interesting enough to pick up. 'tis the story of two esper xenopsychology students in an advanced, multi-racial society. Vasih'th is of a genetically engineered species (though I can't imagine why anyone would d

Tired. It also feels like it should be Friday. On the up side, I had some degree of success yesterday afternoon, so I'm not as grumpy and frustrated about work as I was in the morning (even if things that should have been done last night weren't). The Leaden Key in Pillars of Eternity has finally been revealed as eeeevil in my playthrough, though I still say that narratively takes far too long. WoW Tokens are out - which can be purchased for $20, sold in-game for gold at a somewhat market-determined rate (originally 30k, but closer to 20k last I looked), and redeemed for a month of subscription time. It's an interesting addition, offering some alternative to third party gold purchasing and a potential way to play without paying real money. I'm curious to see how things develop. Another police shooting? Good grief. There are so very many factors at work, but one that comes to mind is one I've used in discussions about the Jedi - what makes a good soldier is n

... occasionally aren't. In my periodic casting about for distractions, I picked up Pillars of Eternity , a crowdfunded computer RPG in the vein of the old Baldur's Gate games. There's a lot of nostalgic value that really takes me back and technical improvement. It's definitely higher resolution than those games, though you still don't often have reason to zoom in and portaits are used for conversations. There's more voice, I think. It's also an original fantasy world rather than licensed D&D, so there are interesting things to discover. On the down side, the format does not lend itself to getting caught up in the story as easily as some others. Perhaps my attention span was longer back in the day, or I didn't have the alternatives, but it's easier to put this game down for a few days than 1) I remember or 2) newer, more active games. Also, the drawbacks of crowdfunding bonuses are a distraction - there are backer-submitted visions and tombsto