Mount & Blade; Tell 'em what they wanna hear

Or lamingtons? Mmmm, lamingtons!

One thing I like about mount and blade is that the price of gear scale in an interesting way. Basically buying pretty good gear doesn't cost a ton. But getting a few more points of armour or damage and suddenly your paying thousands for it. Which, if you happen to have made a ton of money, means you have something to do with that money. Or, if you haven't made a ton of money, means you can still have almost the top gear.

One thing that got me is that I assumed character skills that are party skills, would stack with other party members. They don't - so I've sort of bought into a bunch of skills, when really the better approach would be to specialise. Which is making my effort to make Lady Isollo of Suno the new Queen, really hard. Indeed, worse, every time I capture a place I have to assign it to one of the rebel lords on our side - and then the rest of them get annoyed with me. One even betrayed me and...went over to another side entirely! So I can't just capture and lose locations, or I'm going to lose all the lords I've wooed into rebeling with us. Hehe, one of them, when I tried to convince him, the AI realised that I was trying to tell each lord what he wanted to hear. Which is true, I was! >:)

Mount and Blade: My Kingdom for a Sand Castle! An inadvertant Eve Online comparison!

Yes, my horse is castle trained...

Bought the game Mount and Blade recently for $20 at a store. I'd played the demo ages ago and was always heart broken when play would stop because I'd reached the max demo level.

But no more! And I think the game deserves a few posts, the first being an observation it reminds me of eve online. Except it actually has a point. Harsh to eve online? Well, is there an actual king position in even online? There is in mount and blade and you can eventually take it and become king.

Driftwuld: Armour Hunter progress update

Plugging along on the next module of Driftwurld, pretty much done except for playtesting it.

The idea in it is that armour repairs are expensive, but you can hunt supernatural creatures called Rage Beetles, who have armour scaled bodies. If you kill one, you can take the scales and use them for armour repair. But it involved owning an ATV and racing along, firing at the Rage Beetle with a rail gun as you race ahead of it's snapping jaws (they can move fast and they live in areas where there isn't alot of open ground to get away from them).

With this module, the player has just scrapped his way out of being a dirt farmer and now actually has a fair bit of power and the capacity to start doing his own thing in life without the costs of it being prohibative.

The next module, I think, will be slaying drift monsters for cash, then after that maybe a world map where you can start investing that money in things or explore around for cash.

Must code in the Drift Kings attacks at some point, though. He's the main antagonist, after all!



First posted this here, then realised I should have posted on my blog first! :)

Diablo 3 - Yeah, sure, Blizzard aren't running an item shop!

Article here.

I'm really surprised how people seem to think diablo 3 wont have an item shop?

What, does all it take is that 'oh, it's players selling to players!'? That's enough to baffle peoples senses?

Let's make it clear - players can only sell to other players because blizzard makes their sale possible.

Blizzard makes a cut on each sale, that it made possible to do.

How is this not an item shop?

Blizzard is being smart with the revenue coming in from this system: players will be charged a flat fee to list an item, and if it sells there will be another flat fee paid to Blizzard. The company won't make more profit on a more expensive item, and the "nominal" fee will dissuade players from simply dumping everything they find on the auction block. Since drops are random and only players can sell to other players, the economy is still self-contained.

What's this self contained bit? It's self contained when it's a blackmarket at well? What's new?

Further, if you can sell stacks of items the "The company won't make more profit on a more expensive item" is completely untrue. A stack of 50 healing potions having the 'same' posting fee as awesome sword X isn't the same. The fee is divided by 50 in one case. Which means awesome sword grants a bigger profit.

I think there are a few stars in peoples eyes, out there. Or perhaps they are snow blind?

Forsaken world trailer

Forsaken world has a nice trailer to it. One day I'm sure mmorpg gameplay will, like video game caught up with their trailers, will catch up.