Telling Stories: Tomato, Tomato, Shield Bash, Arm Thrust
How many classes are there in World of Warcraft?
If you said “eleven,” then you are wrong. But you’re doing good, that’s the number listed, you’re wrong with the best intentions. If you said “thirty-four,” you are also wrong, but you are very astute, noting that the choice of specs now is functionally like choosing a class. (Albeit ones you can swap back and forth between.) If you said “seventeen” then… er… you may wish to take some issues up with your elementary school teachers, that’s not even close to anything resembling a correct answer. But thanks for coming out.
No, the correct answer is “as many as you want there to be.” And the same is true of literally any game with classes or abilities. You’re only as limited as you allow yourself to be. You see a list of options and you group characters into small cliques, assuming that everyone who possesses these same skills must be the same sort of person… but that’s you talking, not the game. Not the game at all.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
As we last left our heroes or whatever, it was time for another trip across half of the map to talk with someone. Or, as it turned out, to ask someone for the right to pay our way onto yet another airship ride. (I will give the designers credit here and note that all of these locations can technically be reached on foot, but the march is kind of insane. In fact, the map never really points you to these things; you’re just told to go take another ride.) One brief ride later, the party was plopped down in front of Kashuan, the castle where the royal family kept something or other that does mean things to the engine of an airship and… yeah, I don’t know, exactly.
Look, let’s just assume that we’re getting the missiles to shoot at the Death Star vent, all right? That’s familiar.
The bright side is that Kashuan doesn’t make you do a whole lot of searching to find the Sunfire, since it’s right there in the courtyard. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean you actually have anywhere to keep it, because that’s the most difficult part of this equation. And as you probably expected, doing this with a series of torches isn’t an option, which means a search through the entire castle to find a torch that can hold the flame.
Hard Project: Firefly
Find a ship, find a crew, make no money, fail, get an online petition going, make a movie, fail again, stare at the wall…
The announcement of Firefly Online way back in the day seemed like a marriage of the most obvious IP in the world to the most obvious game type. A series that’s all about heading out into the great unknown for various purposes married to a genre that loves to send you off and wandering. So when the game was released, it… well, we never got there, actually. It’s been started and stopped so many times that it resembles nothing so much as the engine room of the eponymous ship class.
Weirder still, the franchise has never had any sort of game made, not even the most basic adaptation. That’s odd, to say the least. Maybe not entirely odd given the fact that we’re talking about a franchise only in the strictest sense of the term, but you’d think the number of passionate fans would align to make at least some sort of game come out of this. And yet it’s never happened. The closest we’ve gotten are the many started and cancelled incarnations of an online game based in the universe. Why?
Demo Driver 8: Wings of Prey (#176)
Going out in a blaze of glory, mostly because your plane is on fire.
I swear by all that is holy, if I never see another game based upon World War II, it will be far too soon.
Honestly, I am relatively certain that we are never going to need another game which involves more skirmishes against the Third Reich. We are full up on anything that involves fighting Hitler’s forces in any theater of engagement. So my opinions on Wings of Prey has two strikes against it right from the start. It’s Yet Another World War II Game, something we have not needed since 2001 or so, and it’s a dogfighting simulator, which isn’t something I really care for.
So there was never going to be an ending wherein Wings of Prey and I ride off happily into the sunset, holding hands and smelling the flowers. The best I could hope for was that the game would turn out to be better than my lackluster expectations, and to its credit, it succeeds at that. I don’t know if that makes me really like it all that much, but sure does give me some food for thought.
Telling Stories: Be afraid after all
Fear is one of the most primal motivators of human beings. It’s so important to roleplaying that I’ve talked about it before.
Of course, that article was all about the experience of fear, and there’s more to fear than that. Fear is a complex beast, multifaceted, snarling, and dangerous. To really understand fear, you have to understand not just what it does to your character, but all of the advantages it brings along with it. You need to understand how your character can use fear. You need to really understand the power of fear.
Because fear is a potent thing, a driving force, something that keeps us running and moving even when all reason dictates we should give up. Fear cripples us and at the same time enhances us, lifts us up and knocks us down. Fear is powerful. Let’s talk about making use of fear, investigating its power, and understanding how the greatest thing that you can do is start really playing into the idea of fear.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 