The Force was strong this time

 

This week saw some absolutely huge news for the world of gaming!

Lucasarts, i.e. Disney released a statement that they are not renewing their Star Wars exclusivity license with EA in 2023!

This means that in two years time, anyone can make a Star Wars game. Well, technically anyone. It is also a good idea to point out that this doesn't mean EA won't be making any Star Wars games in the future. They can if they want to, just like the other studios.

This piece of news was met with joy from all corners of the internet, as fans have been disappointed with EA to say the least. In all the years they have held the license, EA has released only four Star Wars games; Battlefront, Battlefront 2, Jedi Fallen Order and Squadrons.

The first two games do have their fans, but it was Battlefront 2 that almost made Star Wars synonymous with gambling for children, prompting Disney to call EA and ask what the hell they were doing. It was also Battlefront 2 that really kicked off governments across the world taking a look at lootboxes and micro-transactions. So, not exactly beloved titles.

Jedi Fallen Order is by most accounts a really good game, holding a Very Positive ranking on Steam.

Likewise, Squadrons has a Very Positive rating, but it sort of flew under the radar, and I haven't heard very many people talking about it. Maybe that's on me though.

That's it. That is all EA has done with one of the biggest, if not the biggest IP in the world. Four measly games, and nothing more. This is in large part due to EA not really even wanting the license as they can't control it.

When you make a Star Wars game, you follow the rules and lore set down by Lucasarts, or you are in a world of hurt. The House of Mouse has some very mean lawyers. This will hold true going forward as they are keen to make sure all future games stick to the canon.

So what does this mean going forward? As always time will tell, but two games have already been announced.

Massive, the studio behind The Division 2 has announced an open world Star Wars game to be published under Ubisoft, and Machinehead the people behind the new Wolfenstein games is making an Indiana Jones game under Bethesda Game Studios.

Considering how long it takes to make games, they should be good to go just as the timer ticks down on the license going free.

Ultimately this has to be a good thing. There are so many cool things that can be made within Star Wars and now they can finally be made. RPG's, racing games, strategy games, action games, you name it.

Maybe we can finally get a new Jedi Knight game after seventeen years! Maybe some bounty hunting or smuggling games. Who knows?

I'm not the biggest Star Wars fan out there, but this announcement really made me happy. As always I maintain that cautious optimism is the way to go, but I look forward to seeing what is going to happen.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, be safe and have a great week!

Time for Fun

We had a bit of a heat spike over the weekend and it kind of melted my brain a bit, so I'm taking it easy today. I have some ace comedy for you today, and with all that is still happening in the world we can all need a bit of a laugh.

Now there is a small chance that I have posted this before, but since this blog has existed since 2012 it is getting a bit tricky to keep tabs on things like this. I expect that I'm going to accidentally re-post some stuff from time to time.

Anyway, first up we have some Norwegian comedy, which is in English so don't worry. Then we have a few select clips from Star Wars, Darth Vader to be specific, but you won't hear James Earl Jones. Instead another prominent African American actor with a more colorful vocabulary.

Join me again next time for more Eccentric Spheres, and have yourself a great and safe week! 

Norwegian Comedy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eng5rJm9X7w 

Star Wars Comedy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_n8FRILoYE

 

Star Wars gambling, Destiny 2 and all the rest

Well, it just keeps going.

Last week I talked about AAA game publishers and pay-2-win loot-boxes sold for real money. Since last Monday, it's gotten more interesting, and here's how.

The Belgian gambling commission is still looking into it, but the Belgian Minister of Justice has said that in his opinion these loot-boxes are indeed gambling and incredibly harmful for children. This is his private opinion, but if Belgium finds against loot-boxes and classifies it as gambling, then it will become regulated and taxed. Oh, and no one under eighteen years of age can buy them. If this happens, it's a very short step for the entire EU to adopt a similar stance. If that happens, kiss loot-boxes and predatory gambling practices goodbye. The EU market is enormous, and while I'm sure the big AAA's can ignore Belgium (11 million people), they can't afford to ignore the 743 million that reside in the EU as a whole.

As I mentioned, Holland is investigating this, as is Sweden, it would seem. Oh, and as a fun piece of trivia: in France, you can only gamble in resorts. No where else.

Gambling authorities in Australia are also investigating this, and while the gambling commission in Victoria indeed do think that it is clearly gambling, they can do very little about it as long as it's only on the 'net. Like online poker for example.

The really surprising thing is that State Representatives from Hawaii have stood up and condemned these micro-transitioned loot-boxes as a “casino for children”. I'm sure Disney was happy about that one...

Now, it turns out that Destiny 2, developed by Bungie (Halo series) under Blizzard-Activision has been caught with their pants down and their hands in the cookie jar.

Destiny 2, the sequel to the pretty popular sci-fi multiplayer shooter Destiny (no, really?), was released not only on console but unlike the first game, also on PC.

When it got released, people were a bit grumpy about the whole micro-transaction thing, but at least you earn loot-boxes (called bright engrams) in-game for free, you just have to go to the in-game store to open them.

Why do you open them in the store? Well, the speculation was that you would get tempted to put down some money and buy a couple of extra crates. OK, bad, but not villainous.

What is pretty damn villainous is what Reddit user EnergiserX discovered: Bungie was cutting away the XP you were earning without telling you.

The way it works is like this: once you reach max level, you still earn XP, but every time your XP-bar gets filled up, instead of getting a new level, you earn a Bright Engram (loot-box). What EnergiserX found out was that players were earning between 4-50% of what they were supposed to be getting. Isn't that fun? You work hard, grinding away to earn more loot-boxes, and earn 4% of what you should have gotten, all so that you would be frustrated enough to fork over you sweet sweet money!

Once caught, Bungie said that “they weren't happy either and that they have fixed the issue.”

Yeah, I bet they're not happy. No one is happy when they're caught stealing, lying and cheating.

Sadly some players have reacted with joy that “it's fixed now,” and “see, Bungie are good guys”. Come on. That like saying the guy who mugged you is a good guy because he gave back your wallet after taking all your money.

Finally, I want to address the claim the AAA publishers are constantly pushing: “Games are too expensive to make these days. We have to make money somehow.”

Pure and utter garbage. One might even be tempted to say Bullshit. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, was made with $12 million, three years and a team of twenty people. It's a commercial success after a mere three months after release.

If these mega developers can't figure out how to make a budget, how to make a compelling and fun game that people want to play, then good riddance. Go out of business, and leave the industry to those who can figure it out. Stop spending hundreds of millions on games that are soulless boring grinds and then claim we have to buy extra loot-boxes because you're so poor.

The AAA's have proven time and time again that they can't be trusted. Their word is as rotten as a dead rat under a porch in the summer.

Give your time and money to those who deserve it, until the “Big Boys” prove they can do better. Don't believe them when they say they'll change. Talk is cheap.

Ultimately what I find so ironic is that these monoliths, these gargantuan behemoths became what they are because they were the best, the most successful, the most beloved. But as they say: you either die a hero, or live to become the villain.

Until next time, support the good stuff and have a great week!

Rogue One

So, I finally got around to watching the latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One. (2016)

Yeah yeah, I'm a year late, but better late than never. So this is what I thought of the film. I'll skip spoilers as much as possible, but treat this as mild spoiler territory, just in case.

In a nutshell the story is this: a group of rebels attack an imperial base to retrieve the plans to the original Death Star. Sure, there's a lot more to it than this, but that's the really important bit. Rogue One is set a few days before A New Hope (1977) and goes almost right into it.

Much like Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One is a very pretty movie. The effects are gorgeous, and really solid. The acting is good, solid work all around. The music is wonderful, even though it's not by John Williams. Fun fact: some scenes are unused shots from Episode IV: A New Hope, and some outfits were recycled from the original trilogy. This is smart as it gives a subconscious connection to the original trilogy.

Speaking of the original trilogy, Governor Tarkin has a prominent spot in Rogue One, but as you may know, the original actor - Peter Cushing - died in 1994 so they couldn't really use him. They could have used another actor like say, Charles Dance, but instead they digitized Cushing's face onto an actor. For being computer graphics spliced into a live action film, they did a marvelous job. It is a tricky job to say the least, but they got very close to pulling it off. They also tried it with another character but that looked really awful. Mixed success there.

The script is mostly good, but they couldn't resist putting in scenes paralleling the original trilogy. You'll recognize them when you see them, and I wish they hadn't bothered. Also, some scenes are needlessly dark which makes it hard to see things, but they weren't too many.

My biggest complaints about the movie are as follows:

• A ship jumps to Hyperspace way too close to a planet, something that goes against deeply established Star Wars lore.
• They manage to communicate long distance while in Hyperspace. This would be impossible as the signal would have to travel faster than the ship.
• If you push an object in space that's bigger than you, it takes considerable energy, and if that object rams into another thing, that thing should move, not break. Also, the energy originally needed, would at the very least double, but apparently the laws of physics are very different when you're far far away...

These things are small, and you may think that they are excessively petty and ultra nerdy. And yeah, maybe they are, but fixing them would have been so easy, and it seems so sloppy to leave them like they are.

I could go on nitpicking, but I won't. The other things I could complain about are more or less a matter of taste, so I'll leave it to you to decide.

At the end of the day, Rogue One is an entertaining film, and I had a good time watching it. If you like Star Wars, there's no reason not to watch this film.

Other fun trivia: this is the first and (so far) only Star Wars movie without the yellow text scrawl in the beginning, as well as the only film in the franchise that never mentions the name Skywalker.

I'll stop ranting here, and until next time, have a great week!

Game news

Last week I talked about Vermintide, and now with the game live, I've played some more.

Although I haven't gotten even close to a complete playthrough I'm pretty confident in saying it's a great game. Well, it's great if you play with enough players. The AI is pretty dumb. I tested a map with a friend, letting the AI control the two remaining characters, and that did not go well at all. The AI would rather just stand there and look around, than pick you up if you've been beaten down. With three players out of four, the same map went just fine.

So if you have enough friends, or don't mind playing with randoms it's a really cool and intense game.

Total War Warhammer just made the news with pre-orders available six months in advance. Yeah, they want you to pre-order half a year before the game is released in April 2016... And as a pre-order bonus, they are giving you “for free” a fifth faction: Chaos Warriors. Come on now, really? We're not talking some cosmetic DLC here, but a whole fifth faction. They haven't even shown us anything about the Vampire Count faction yet and now they pull this. Just imagine how much love they would get if they had just said “Surprise, were adding a fifth faction. Here you go”. But instead they're pulling the whole pre-order garbage move. It wasn't even that long ago that Square Enix had to pull their ludicrous “augment your pre-order” crap because the players wouldn't stand for it. And now Sega goes and does this. Cutting out a whole faction that's already in the game just to push your product six months in advance? Not cool guys, not cool at all.

And show us the vampires already!

My third and final entry concerns the new expansion for Star Wars The Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire that I got early access to due to being subscribed at a key point. Now the KotFE expansion is a pretty mixed bag.

It goes without saying that no mmo expansion goes off without a hitch, and there are bugs. Otherwise it's fine from a technical standpoint.

But (and minor spoilers ahead) you have to play the entire KotFE story alone! In an mmo! My main character has always hung out with my wife’s main, but now they are forcibly separated. It was bad enough in the last expansion, Shadow of Revan, where you could do all the side content together and they split you up in all the story parts, but in KotFE there are no side elements. They have turned an mmo into a single player corridor runner game. Very railroady.

The story is OK. It's only the first nine chapters out of sixteen. It's by no means great so far, I'd even go so far as to say it's cliched and predictable. But it's incomplete so I'll reserve final judgment until we know it all. However, they went on and on about how your choices matter, and so far I haven't seen anything that matters.

As a part of the story, your companions are gone and you have some new ones. You will apparently get the old ones back, (when the system is not broken) and you can even get some of the other classes companions if you work for it. As a part of the new changes, all companions can now heal/tank/dps according to your wishes, that's fine. But they no longer use gear for anything other than appearance. Instead they get their stats from you. What I found as a result is that all the combat in KotFE is absurdly easy. I died once and that's only because I fell off a ledge due to my own clumsiness. The boss fights are hideous though. Not because they are in any way dangerous. No, they are mind-numbingly dull. The bosses are immune to everything you do except damage, and worst of all, they lead no where. The most climactic fight in all nine chapters led to nothing.

Once you get through the story you get to manage your new base. But although all the NPC's are voiced, you are not! Instead they have opted for a “retro” style familiar to all players of the original Knights of the Old Republic, or Kotor. Personally I think it's just about cost cutting and that's fine, just admit it.

It's worth noting that I am having fun. It may sound as if I hate it, and that's not true. It is enjoyable, but it's so damn frustrating when the rest of the game is so good. You go from having an intense and personal story to a narrative that makes more or less sense depending on which class you're playing. Oh yeah, almost forgot. A lot of importance is laid on what happened on Ziost during Shadow of Revan. But it's not mandatory to that expansion. By the time you get to go there, you have already defeated Revan, and my main missed it. I just never got around to going there, but KotFE assumes I did. Please don't base a new story on something that is essentially extra content.

That's enough rambling and ranting for this week. So until next time, have a great week!