Careful of this game this year! Up until now each year has been a decent iteration and block update on the year before. This year they reorganised things! The player cannot just play the preconstructed decks in custom games this year, your AI opponent can but you have to play a deck from your profile which is a single deck with shitty card for a LONG time while you win matches and get unlocking new cards. You get a single two colour deck to begin with, you need to unlock a huge amount of cards if you are hoping to build decks of other colours. And there are microtransaction packs to buy of course! I've also heard that a swathe of the best cards are not unlockable at all but you do get them played against you!

Oh, and no Two Headed Giant this year, just 2/3/4 player FFA! Hopefully modding will expand what you can do with the game, but out of the box a lot of things are locked down in exchange for the deckbuilding elements that got added. There is also a greater focus on in app purchases this year.

I remember seeing this announced at the time, I recall thinking that it was a basic cash in, just making a minecraft clone and adding in the guys with a big, young YouTube following. It's pretty scandalous that a shitty early build will be all that's seen from this endeavour. The substitute items and explanation are pretty damn insulting and I'm guessing that the majority of backers were under 18.

I looked up the forums to see what the reaction was like and I saw the statement from Winterkewl games.

http://forums.yogscast.com/showthread.php?135485-current-status-of-yogventures

The part that struck me was:

Winterkewl wrote:
I tried to cut all costs and continue the development even after the heavy losses of 2013 but the stress of trying to work full time and be full time on the game ultimately caused me to ruin my relationship with my wife, and she filed for divorce because I was so obsessed with finishing this game that she couldn't take not seeing me anymore. When the divorce began I suffered a bit of a crisis personally and had to take a medical leave of absence from work. I almost lost my job too.

The lead developer/studio founder had a full time job doing something else?!?

PHJF wrote on Jul 12, 2014, 10:31:
union-ized and un-ionized?

I would have been a rubbish chemist, I didn't see un-ionized at all!

I liked the ink blot test joke most. I really liked the Pavlov one too, mostly the idea he'd accidentally conditioned himself! The Ghandi and batman jokes were shockingly bad. I didn't understand the one about the difference between a chemist and a plumber.

nin wrote on Jul 10, 2014, 15:59:
They've basically been at 35K the entire time.

Nothing to do with the game especially, but look at the Funding Progress graph... that's the worst (most misleading) "trend" model I've ever seen!

Don't get me wrong, I read plenty of stuff in this section and like it. I didn't think the satire was enough, it came across to me as a clickbait piece that just had a bit of meta humour in it. Still if it tickled some people it must be a subjective thing.

garrywong wrote on Jul 8, 2014, 10:17:
This is the biggest collection of click-bait titled articles I have ever seen on Blues

I'm not sure what happened today. That "19 Maps" piece was just awful. It sounded like something about the history of the planet - but I actually got a list of which states begin with which letter and a diagram of what the US would look like if every state were a kitten. I like the levity in OooB but the inclusion of that was a bit of a low point!

Really enjoyed the game and the USA team had me rooting for them by the end because they put up so much of a fight. Belgium are pretty strong right now and you guys definitely made them work for it! I have to agree with Lorcin, after seeing another England tournament appearance with no backbone whatsover a bit of me wished we had shown some of that willingness to keep battling.

Man that race is tempting! I've already been putting way too much time into this game, got my first guy to 90 last week and started building a second one now with my new loot. Surely one more character wouldn't hurt...

Free speech confirmed!

Completely worth the sale price, it's a great little game. Being indie it's not incredibly media-rich but the dystopian hacker theme is done well via 2d artwork and the overall graphical style. Great tactical battles with a precise level of control with lots of second guessing and psychology versus another human. Lightweight so it also runs on an ageing laptop and the soundtrack is great! More features, missions and music in the complete pack (game+red DLC included) which is the best way to get this.

I would have been in support of this section being named "Out of the Pink" for a day!

There's an alpha gameplay video with interview. Very few animations and default Unity GUI so far but character and terrain models are present and a lot of gameplay rules are in place it seems. Some of the improvements I was hoping for (permanent visual indication of monster ownership, visible summoned weapons and mounted wizards) are already in place. PC is the main platform and I think Linux and Mac are in at launch too. No current plans for mobile devices so far but it sounded like they are a possibility if things catch on in a big way.

I'm going to back this tonight, I want to make sure it happens since I loved Chaos when I was a kid with a Spectrum and Gollop's credentials are beyond question. I'm a bit concerned at hints of a smaller player limit, in the video they talk of 1v1, 2v2, 2v2v2 and a 6 player max ffa. One of the prospects I was most hoping for was big team matches so it will be a shock/disappointment if in 30 years the scale of the game is reduced. I don't think I ever created a game as small as 4 player in that time.

As for the single player mode, I have no idea what to make of that yet. Some of it sounds like the typical progression system that many kickstarter games have which make it possible to offer incentives to heavy backers. Some of the talk of spell accumulation and a constructed spellbook sound like they could be amazing if done correctly. By far the biggest alure is online multiplayer since Chaos was a timeless game merely versus the AI, so anything great in the campaign mode is just a bonus to me.

Wow - the giant Titanfall advert that layers itself in front of Bluesnews and reappears every time I navigate is really obnoxious!

Darks wrote on Dec 6, 2013, 10:41:
I used to love these types of games, but over the past several years, turn based games have kind of turned me off. I’m more into real time like Sins.

Curiously I've gone the other way over time, the real time aspect puts me off now and I find the poring over of sitrep and colony summary screens to be integral to the appeal! Of the modern crop of space 4x games I'd say that Distant Worlds impressed me most for having the best living, breathing galaxy to explore and expand into. It was rich and organic but because of the real time pausable gameplay I always felt like I was missing details once the game began to grow and eventually I'd feel like unless I was pausing all the time, I'd be more or less letting the game play itself.

This comment was edited on Dec 6, 2013, 21:14.

In my experience the Steam installation is better in every way. If you played with GGG's installation first then you should go to their website first and create the link to a steam account from there. If you go to steam first I don't think you can permanently lose anything but you can create a second PoE account which is blank, and panic when all your sweet loot has gone!

The 2 main advantages of steam are:

1) It's more stable than the GGG installer in my experience. I had constant pack file errors build up over time leading to texture corruption and the occasional CTD (once again while playing in hardcore leagues!!!) - there is a repair utility in the game dir and it would find things needing repair almost daily, definitely every few days. This doesn't happen with Steam.

2) GGG's network security is based around requesting validation emails whenever your IP's resolved location changes from the last successful login. This might not affect you buy in my case my ISP here uses dynamic IPs whose locations cycle within 5 or 10 nearby towns. A switch of IP address and detected location leads to being dropping if currently connected, and a validation email being needed when you relog. Before moving across to steam this would frequently happen three times a day! Steam Path of Exile uses Steam security tied to your login like normal, and never does this.

Yeah I am still loving this one, I can't get enough. I'm up to I think $80 or $100 in purchases (almost entirely spent on stash space here too!) - it's unlike me to lavish that kind of cash on a single title but I am in the curious position of feeling happy to award the developers for having a wholesome philosophy and for all the fun they've given me.

The network / netcode issues still need to be mentioned, the desync problem remains in place and there is no plan to work on it specifically. I'm pretty sure it's a business model issue, the bandwidth consumption is aggressively streamlined in order to support the free to play model. Some things like the position of the player, mobs and bosses are predicted and actually synced with the client many seconds apart in some situations - as a resync happens you will frequently see that you were attacking thin air or you were a screen away from where you thought you were and being hit from all sides without defending yourself. Part of playing Path of Exile in the permadeath leagues is to accept that this WILL bite you at some point and it WILL leave you wanting to uppercut your monitor across the room!

The biggest strength of the game is that all parts of your build are modular and you can mix and match your favourite parts to come up with something noone else has. It's a min-maxer's wet dream! I made a novelty build using the notoriously bad Searing Bond skill combined with lightning warp totems and it ended up surprisingly viable. It's level 74 currently, it doesn't really have enough stopping power to push into the hardest end game maps but I was able to solo almost all of Merciless difficulty. I made a quick video: Searing Bond Scion. For now it's parked while I experiment on the next project.

If you are looking for an ARPG where you really have to embrace all the game mechanics and really think about how to design a strong character there is no better choice for me. Because they keep releasing new build-defining uniques and revisiting the balance of skills and abilities over time, it remains fresh and there's always something new to experiment with.

Examples like Lavabit and Silent Circle have show that you will get prosecuted and/or run out of business if you don't hand over full access to any public communication you host while on US soil. I imagine the rules are the same here in the UK. Why bother with claims like this that can't possibly be true? It just indicates that you are not even trying to be sincere.

Here is my lightning / shader setup for Skyrim

Ultimate Lighting Overhaul http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/37846/?
A shader mod based on SweetFX. I tried many of them and this has a fraction of the resource drain, my system is not cutting edge and there is almost no noticable difference. I haven't played for a few months but at the time I checked out all the shader mods available and this was miles away my favourite. The emphasis is on natural colours rather than a stylised or cinematic style. They have totally succeeded at that! The different weathers and times of day use colour palettes which are so natural and convincing, it really blew my mind and I frequently stop to admire what they've done. I know a lot of people say things like that but I am really into this stuff and this mod really stands out to me as being exceptionally well done.

ELFX http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/27043/?
An environment mod that actually adjusts world spaces this time. It makes sure that lights in game actually emerge from light sources (invisible sources would flood lights into the centre of rooms in vanilla) and it adjusts the radii of light sources to be what you would expect. Some additional lamps and lights are placed around time to adequately light them up under this system.

Climates of Tamriel http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/17802/?
Everyone knows this one, the definitive weather mod. Awesome with no downsides.

If you haven't tried those out I couldn't recommend them more. One of the best features of Elder Scrolls is the allure of the environment and these mods help that atmosphere a lot. Clearly these are aesthetic mods although the lighting does make indoor / sneaking gameplay different and imo far better.

Acleacius wrote on Nov 27, 2013, 15:35:
Now I have to keep checking back every 8 hours for the Flash sales!

I haven't put this to the test, but the thing I read on Steam yesterday said if an item is on your wish list Steam will email you when the product is "heavily discounted".

I put Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes on that list, it's 50% off now and the DLC is too... once a daily / flash deal comes up I will buy the whole set. I tried vanilla Fallen Heroes a while back and thought it was my favourite of the new fantasy 4x games by a long way but felt it needed more content and bug fixing... now is the time I believe!

Edit: Why can't I quote properly?

This comment was edited on Nov 28, 2013, 10:37.