So, a while back I said I wasn’t planning to leave Tumblr - I wasn’t actually wrong, as I didn’t plan to leave, but I sorta stopped logging on and found that not having Tumblr in my daily routine didn’t really bother me that much.
So the tl;dr is that I won’t be on Tumblr anymore! If you enjoyed the stream of consciousness bullshit I reblogged, maybe check out my Twitter @EibonCyk that I mostly just retweet stuff on (it’s far more political than my Tumblr was, though). If you want to stay connected, I’m Eibon#0002 on Discord.
I also wanted to give a shoutout to some of the people/blogs that made my stay here memorable before the cut:
My opinion on Battlefield V was the exact same I had on Battlefield I
If they can make a good story, one someone can find poignant or at least interesting?
I don’t care how historically inaccurate it is.
“But X unit wasn’t in Y and it’s not accurate to the exact-” yeah and an IBM machine couldn’t promote a man named Major Major Major to the rank of Major in 1943 as a giant cosmic joke but that doesn’t mean Catch-22 is a bad book
Okay i learned recently that this has no CG in it so the fact that this is all 2d drawn shit is fucking mind-blowing what even was the Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 series.
getting bullied at art school is the worst bc not only are you getting picked on by people who post voltron discourse but every mean thing they say to you is verbatim lifted from a text post you’ve already seen and that has damaged my self respect in a way that nothing else ever could
knowing i am lower on the college food chain than 20 year olds who say “weird flex but okay” and “sure jan” in real life has done irreparable psychological damage
I can’t wrap my head around art school bullies
i said i hate anime and now they want me dead
Oh I thought they were just being mean you didn’t tell me you provoked them
notch is the human version of those episodes in sitcoms and cartoons where a character gets really rich out of nowhere (lottery, inheritance, etc) and then acts like a pompous selfish asshole because of their wealth, causing them to lose all their friends and become miserable, minus the part of the character making up with their friends and learning a moral about the dangers of materialism
Anonymous asked: Follow-up on gated unlocks: To what extent is that applicable to content that's baked into the main game, before expansions or DLC, for games that aren't primarily online and controlled by the server? I can brainstorm a couple uses: Encouraging healthy player behavior and avoiding bad word-of-mouth from players who "only got three days out of" your sixty-plus-hour adventure. But how much does that actually factor in to design decisions, if at all?
It’s still applicable, even for base game content. If memory serves, time-gated gameplay really rose to prominence in the social games arena - primarily with Facebook games like Mafia Wars and Farmville, then established itself quite firmly in mobile games. But we’ve seen it as a feature appear pretty far back, across many platforms and titles.
If you look around, you’ll notice some of that time-gated design showing up here and there even in single player games. Dragon Age Inquisition’s War Table missions that will still work even if you’re playing offline, and completing those missions can unlock additional dungeons and such in game. You may be familiar with the Calendar Man achievement from Batman: Arkham City, where you have to visit the eponymous villain in his cell on twelve specific holidays over the course of the year. It’s even been used as an easter egg of sorts - if you play Metal Gear Solid 3 and just let 3 real weeks pass between your first sighting of boss character “The End” and the actual sniper duel against him, the character will die of old age in the game.
We designers definitely think about extended play while we’re designing the base game experience, but we also have to treat it with a lot of caveats - players have limited amounts of time and they have to be able to choose where and when they play. We must let them dictate their own engagement along the game’s critical path, or they’ll never be able to finish. However, this sort of time-release content is great for side missions and extra stuff - optional content where we can hide bonuses and rewards for players who are interested in playing beyond the critical path.
Time-gated content was less of a thing in the more distant past because continued engagement wasn’t as important. Back then, games were primarily measured only on sales. No DLC, no patches, and expansion packs only rarely. We didn’t have as much incentive to encourage players to keep playing back then. Today we do, so we continue to explore ways of engaging players over time.
The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.
