Jurassic world. It can not be worse than JP3.

Ok first off i am a bad bad person that fails at planning and time management. Sorry about that. Secondly I know I said this was going to be about Blizzards OverWatch… Then the new Jurassic Park trailer hit the web… .. .In case you missed it.

It… Is… Glorious…((also spoilers for the trailer and by extension the film.))

It is just about as facedesk stupid as you would expect a continuation of the Jurassic Park movie franchise to be. (The books are a different matter… So I will leave them out of this. )

You just went and made a new dinosaur... Probably not a good idea.

The story goes as follow. Jurassic World is John Hammond’s vision come true… But what is better than gene-modified dinos… Hybrids… Now way that could end badly… Then Chris Pratt is awesome and they have trained Velociraptors as hunting dogs… I would assume a CEO or other legal entity will get eaten… Also there are kids… Because Jurassic Park…I also like to point out that a pack of hunter/tracker raptors are an awesome idea.

So the trailer is only roughly two and a half minute long but it is packed with so much nostalgia and ambiance that... Well you get a little bit of that feeling you had when you saw the first movie. Now I have seen all the movies and I even think I saw the first one in the cinemas but I might be wrong. It was after all a few years ago. Now I loved the first movie, hard not to seeing as I was all of… 12 at the timer of release and that I had a fascination with Dinosaurs since a very young age. But I also picked up the book and enjoyed the heck out of that one. I think it is fair to say that Lost World did not really live up to the expectations, not only was I older but it lacked the punch that the second book had, at least as I remember it now thinking back. It was also a god awful movie in its own right. The less said about the third film… The better.

 

Walking with dinosaurs... Hammond style.

Actually let´s talk a bit about the third film any way. It did really take the bad things from the previous two movies and ramped it up even more. Big got bigger, Dumb got dumber and evil got more evil. And they had the audacity to put in the scene with the aviary. I like they tried to un-FUBAR the raptors (they seem to have given up that idea for this move and simply gone with “this is OUR raptors…” ) but all they manage to do is make them look.. Stupid… Not to mention young Clayton, lord of the jungle and first in line to inherit the Greytile estate…. Yes that little kid that somehow did what well trained and equipped adults failed to do. Fuck iNGen should hire him as the COO for their new park… In fact that would be an amazing turn of events. After all he should be 20-something by now…

crocosaursthingamabob... And yes.. that is a very big shark it is eating.

Any way Jurassic Park 3 was a horrid mess of Triceratops shit and it pretty much killed the franchise for me. So back when I first heard about the new movie (in any shape beyond “it might get done” and “raptors with lasers on their heads”) I was very much “Meh…” but you know what this trailer has me a bit pumped, and seeing how the film always was more fiction the sci-fi roots of the book all this stupid shit does not bother me. After all if you make genetically engineered “dinosaurs” why not make them a bit bigger and meaner looking, after all it is what the crowd is paying for. So what if the size of your regular lapdog or the T-Rex could not and would not outrun an average joe on a bike. You are putting on a show and by god a show they are going to get. Who give a fuck if the T-Rex is nearly blind due to shoddy DNA work or the beefed up…? Tylosaurinae…(or more likley a Mosasaurus? But who the heck knows...) only might liv a few weeks… It is showbiz.

 

I will most likely go in to Jurassic World hibernation now seeing as this is one of the franchises that I fear will go down hard on the path of spoiler-tastic.

 

Any way it is agood trailer and I am very much pumped for the idea and the concept. Also I kind of like Chris Pratt in these loveable douche roles

Of gods and… More gods.

 

Ra-merica...

So how do you kill a titan, I guess the answer will come down to who the titan in question is. But it is related to both my musings today.

 

Angry not pandas are cool

First off Blizzard have announced that they sold 3.3 million copies of Warlord of Draenor and that they have an active subscription base of about 10 million active subs. Now that is BEFORE they have the numbers from the Asian and Oceanic market. This marks not only the best reaction to any expansion of WoW but also the single largest increase of players in the history of the game. Now these are very impressive numbers but can almost hear some of you muttering in the bushes that a population spike is good but the real proof is in the retention of these new subs.

I agree and we all know that a good chunk of these people will drop from the game over the coming years but I think that enough will stay for long enough that Blizzard will have not only secured the next expansion but also have a little extra to put towards Overwatch. I am generally not a big Shooter fan but that game looks to be fun as heck.

But this does prove that not only are people inclined to return to the game they “started” in but also that peer pressure is a powerful tool. After all Mists of Pandaria was not bad expansion and for some of us war weary veterans it was a nice change of pace in the beginning. But there was a strong “trollolol kung fu panda” attitude among the more serious gamers… and I use the term serious very loosely here. This attitude have been pretty much absent with this new expansion and in fact there has been a opposite effect where a healthy dose of nostalgia and Orcs (who it would seem are a lot cooler then talking pandas.) have as we noted brought back the swing to WoW´s step.

So with WoW gaining more players with an expansion then most games doe in their lifetime I do not think we need to worry much about WoW going away any time soon and with Blizzard broadening their portfolio in the shape of the upcoming Heroes of the storm MOBA and earlier mentioned shooter Overwatch. I think it is safe to say that Blizzard as a company is not going anywhere any time soon. I will get back to Overwatch this weekend, but while Blizzard sits on godlike power and followers in other places god fight to the death to keep the creep going and juggle in the jungle.

Looking forward to Heroes of the storm I decided to dip my toes in to the MOBA scene. Now I never got in to DotA and I have played a grand total of two matches in LoL before it felt that I had better things to do then being verbally abused by people with the social grace of a drunk rhinoceros. But I got a free SMITE character code from Loot Crate so in order to research what I was putting in my loot giveaway pile I got reading up on SMITE.

Smite is a MOBA, in every way and shape but it breaks some new ground by being third person and forcing you to aim your basic attacks as well as your abilities. If you feel a bit fuzzy on what a MOBA is you can click here. The setting is also very funny. Imagine that all the gods of myth and legend decided to duke it out in an arena. So you have Tor teaming up with Osiris and Rama to kick the ass of Sun Wukong and Artemis backed up by Fenris. It is in my mind impossible to dislike the premise. But as I mentioned beyond that it is your standard MOBA with lanes, creeps and hiding in bushes. But the third person view give you a lot more control and lets you act and react to things in a much more dynamic way than the usual point and click top down view.

I have had some very nice fun with it. A lot more then I thought from the start and while I know that HotS is a standard top down MOBA, SMITE will give me a good sense for how a MOBA works without all the annoying click and clack. The gameplay of SMITE plays a lot like a mix between Diablo and a regular third person shooter, especially if you play a range characters. How you use your basic attacks to pummel your opposition and then spice it up with special attacks themed to the god you play, often very flashy and satisfying.

It is also fun to see how much respect they pay to the gods, most designs pull a lot from the mythos around the gods and you can often find small hidden gems if you know the lore of this or that god. It is also fun to see the use of Mayan gods, a mythos often overlooked in this part of the world. Each god is also fairly distinct and visually interesting. Now with that being said there is a lot of divine booty flashing and cleavage deep enough to hide Bacchus in. All hidden behind a flimsy excuse that they actually dressed a lot of the goddesses in more clothes tan they had in their original source material. Now I have nothing against a well-shaped human being and since we are dealing with gods such banalities as armor and other types of proper protection is easier to explain away… Would it hurt to even it out between the male and female characters?

Aphrodite... More dressed then Venus from the sea... But only just.

Neith... I guess she flash less then some ancient art. Still pretty much a pinup.

By comparison... Tor Odinson.

But the game itself is very fun and since it is pretty much free to play (if you do not mind the grind and random access to gods in the beginning.) I see no reason that you would not check it out if you like weird MOBAs or third person brawler games.

That is all today…. Come back Sunday for a trip on the hype train fo

A dark world gone dark.

So first and foremost it seems that the auto post system ate my originally planned post… But what do one do.

I sat today and browsed the regular forums and I came across an article posted as a reply to rumors that CCP was picking up third person shooter All Points Bulletin: Reloaded. The article is the closest to someone going on record of how CCP´s World of Darkness went from the one to bring balance to the force to a fading shade and finally exorcised. Now the rumor itself does make some sense in the circles who miss World of Darkness and actually know about APB:R as both are set in our “now” and APB:R feature a deep customization system for both characters and equipment. Something that most people expected from WoD too.

Now while the rumor itself was squashed in said reply I also liked an article with a purposed inside source from the Atlanta studio that was doing the development on World of Darkness. It is a very sad read and as a log time game master/LARP coordinator and played in said setting I was so very hopeful for a Eve style game that would let me lift my old character in to glorious 3D. But it was not to be and a long list of good intentions and bad decisions make it painfully clear that the game did not have much of a chance to begin with.

But in case you are unfamiliar with what White Wolf´s World of Darkness is, it is a setting in the punk/goth modern horror genre where all manners of mystical beings such as werewolves, vampires and mages move behind the scenes of everyday life. Fighting their own war of survival and dominance. The most famous of the lot is the game Vampire: the Masquerade that not unexpected deals with… Well… Vampires and the society they have spun around them self to cope with eternal life as a twisted reflection of the humans they once were.  If you have read or watched “Interview with a vampire.” You would get a fair idea of style and feel of the setting. Vampire the masquerade was also going to be the main focus for the game at release even if many fans hoped that more factions would come in over time.

So getting back to the story itself it came down to a delightful mix of hubris, passion and piss poor management. Not only did the WoD dev team have their members poached to fill out the dev team for at first EvE and later on the horrid mess that was DUST. This it would seem, if this source is to be believed was due to CCP aiming to always push one step beyond what they actually was capable of. Much due to how EvE ended up in a position of David having taken down the Goliath of big name online games. Now this is in its own right not wrong when you are dealing with a creative process. Without a certain amount of hubris you never get anywhere. Heck I myself do have a philosophy that if one is going to fail, one might as well fail spectacularly. That way one is at least remembered once the dust settles. Noting is as sad as failing and then just become forgotten. So in a way I have to tip my hat to them.

What piss me off is of course that the dragged one of my favorite IP´s with them down. I did not care much for when they flopped Dust... A as ambitious game that was going to break new ground with the interconnected gameplay between it and its “parent” game EvE, not only a new take on porting a IP to the console but also a new way of connecting players that we start to see first now with games such as The Division and others that connect mobile and console elements. Now that is not to say I bought the entire insanity that was the brief for WoD. Not only was it going to be set in the old world of darkness, the world that existed before the IP wide world reset that saw the world end literally. After this event a new setting was released and had by the time the game was being tested gained a fair amount of traction. But the game was also going to have a very big and detailed world and a fully player driven political system that would interconnect social media and perhaps even mobile devices. It would also be up to the ruling player to set the laws in their area, as per lore. There was also going to be “perma death” that is to say that a character killed is erased or has to start over from zero. Now this was going to be reserved for people committing the worst of crimes such as attacking and trying to kill other players or exposing to humans that vampires do in fact exists.

As I said there was no lack of ambition and while I assumed it was a case of aim for the stars and hope to land in the treetops, it was hard not to get swept up in the possibilities. Now of course any sane person see a few problems here, first and foremost it is one thing to build a galaxy for players to lord over, especially when planets and space station is barely more than window dressing. It is an entirely different thing to build a dozen or so cities for players to interact with. Not to mention filling said places with content that not only makes sense but also dynamically reacts to what the player does. It was not a big shock when the game faced delays and then in the end cancelation.

It does also lift something else that is not spoken of very often and that is that, by the sound of it that the gaming industry have the turnover rate close to my old job as a customer service representative. People simply get grinded down and either discarded when they cannot deliver or get smart and hit the road before they reach that stage. Now seeing how game development is a field that has a strong pull on young and inexperienced people it is a disaster in the making. Now a more cynical person would perhaps say that it is a valuable lesson for young people, but if it is anything like working in telemarketing or CSR is… I do not wish that on the most silver spooned of brats. Not only because that sort of harsh awakening usually breeds resentment but also because I feel that someone going in to a creative field should not be faced by only soul crushing fuckery.

Any way… I still wait for the time when CCP end up in enough of an economic dire strait that they have to sell the license to make a game based on WoD to another company. Hope as they say is the last that leave a human, often fighting all the way with fecal matter. 

Here is a link to the Guardian article in question that sparked tonight's train of thoughts.

And the only trailer ever released... 

Next up will not be Dr Who due to end of season… But next week will see me resume a more regular schedule