Weregamer's Game Musings

The latest backer update went into some detail about the way character generation is handled in-game. I like this approach, and it sounds like they're doing it right. But the tone of the post really annoyed me. The writer acted as if they were inventing all of this stuff new, when in fact what they describe is exactly what pretty much all the Elder Scrolls games have done starting with Morrowind, and is also evolutionarily related to the "fortune teller" character generation used in several Ultimas (though that actually devolved over time; by Ultima 7 it was very perfunctory). I find it hard to believe that the senior folks at Obsidian are ignorant of two major families of CRPG. I find it more likely that the marketer who wrote the piece was less than fully engaged in gaming. Either way, it's a huge mar on the face of a team and product that I'm eagerly awaiting. Doing something right, yay. Acting as if nobody had done it before, boo.

The elemental series has (with the exception of the totally broken War of Magic) been a series of "great almosts". Each game in the series has gotten more finely tuned in gameplay and balance, but they've just never gotten the UX elements to the point that the game stopped being annoying to play. I bought Sorcerer King (with the loyalty discount for having tried all the others) expecting that the fresh take on the 4X genre would be worth playing, even if the long term replayability was still a mess. I was thus very happily surprised to discover that this time around, the game is as playable and engaging as it is conceptually interesting and balanced. There are several elements to this, but the one I'm astonished by is how much finally cleaning up the graphical appearance of the game world mattered. This is the first game in the series where figuring out what something is on the map - be it a wandering enemy, a visitable location, or a mountain (!) no longer require