Free Candy For Everyone

See my Civ4 review here.

I finished my second full game of Civ4 this week and thought I’d post some more thoughts up here. I bumped the difficulty up two levels from my first game and promptly got my ass handed to me when two AIs decided to attack me at once. So I restarted and was a bit more giving in my diplomatic relations and managed to squeeze out a Space Race victory in the final few turns of the game.

Here’s the final scoreboard. You can see this and the previous game I played. Turns out Noble difficulty is a lot harder than Chieftain. Go figure.

So you can see that I also tried out the “Quick” game speed. Quick! Haha. Here’s a screenshot showing my total time played.

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The patch to EE2 is out and available for download. Yay, another outpouring of developer time and energy is available for the fans to enjoy. We hope. It’s available here. The big new feature is a completely new multiplayer lobby. There’s a lot of new features there, as well as a ranking system. Hope people like it.

Oh, and for new visitors, I was in charge of the programming for that patch, which is why I care.

Joystiq has a post about an article saying that only 80 games per year will be profitable with the next generation. I’m assuming by “next generation” they mean the new consoles - Xbox 360, PS3, Nintendo Revolution. They say “Here’s hoping this won’t curb creativity and innovation as riskier markets have been known to do in the past.” Hahaha. I laugh at you. You think that there’s any chance this won’t curb creativity? Haha. I’m still laughing.

I don’t know what the statistics are right now for profitability of games. But I know they’re pretty low. Most games do not make money. But then a huge blockbuster comes along and pours money into the publisher’s coffers (*cough* World of Warcraft *cough*) and it funds development of all those not-as-successful projects.

Just in the five years that I have been in the industry, I have seen changes. There are changes in how difficult it is to get a project approved by a publisher. The process of signing a developer seems more rigid - in the past, projects could get signed by having someone with one successful title at the helm who talked the talk and could wow ‘em into giving the developers the bucks. But the days of the cowboy are going going gone. If you talk real good, maybe they’ll give you a chance to make a prototype with your own money that they can show to the big suits higher up and get them to decide to fund you. Ok, maybe I’m being extreme. But there’s certainly a sense at all levels that everything is riskier.

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I know I’ve been on the prowl for the official word on what’s going to be in World of Warcraft’s next patch. They finally posted the page with info here. To sum up:

• There is a new area called The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj where there are two new high level raid dungeons. Whoopee. Not appealing to a non-level 60 like myself. The interesting part is this: “Players will have to complete a world event of massive proportions before they can open the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj on their realm.” The idea that we have to actually do something to open up the area instead of it just showing up is really neat.
• Linked Auction Houses! This is great. All the major cities will now have an auction house. As before, there are three actual auction houses with content - the Horde have one, the Alliance another, and the neutral cities like Booty Bay have one accessible to both factions. This should be nice for my server where we just don’t have enough stuff in the Horde AH since there are 2.5 times as many Alliance! Tanaris was really tough to get to, but Booty Bay is very accessible. Should be much more effective to trade between the factions now. Interesting to see what it’ll do to the economy. There are some items which are simple for one faction to get and hard for the other (or impossible, like this leatherworking pattern) that end up selling for buckets of gold more in the neutral AH.
• Multiple Battleground Queues - Yeah whatever. Where are the cross-realm BG queues? This is ok, it let’s you queue up for Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch and just enter the first one that becomes available. Not too exciting
• Paladin Talent Revisions - I have one character who is a Paladin, so this could be cool. They don’t mention anything on this page, but some of the news that came out after Blizzcon indicated that they’d be giving the Paladins mass buffs to help out in raids. I can’t seem to find anything that talks about that now… Looks like it was all pulled down? Hmm.

Into the future, one of the Blizzcon articles mentioned they’ll be introducing weather into the game. Looks like that’ll be in a later patch though. I’m looking forward to the AH feature the most. I spend way too much time travelling across the world to sell stuff. It’s ridiculous. This should help eliminate the wasted travel time since right now, if you’re on the Eastern Kingdom continent, getting to the AH in Orgrimmar is a good 30+ minutes of travel at worst.

I just noticed my sidebar is acting totally screwy in Internet Explorer. I always use Firefox, so I’m not sure if this is a new behavior. Anyone out there been seeing this before today? (I did just mess around with some stuff on the sidebar, but really, it shouldn’t cause links to disappear)