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Pax Prime Hopes

August 28, 2015 by Belghast

The Big Show

It feels like we live in this world where there is always another big games show around the corner. I remember when quite literally all that existed was the Consumer Electronics show, at least for the United States. Now we have dozens of shows sprinkled throughout the year, all of which vying for exclusive announcements. As a result companies have to trickle information out so that everyone that attends one of the shows feels like they are getting to see something unique or special. This weekend of course is Pax Prime, and I had hoped this year I would be attending. The truth is however that Pax Prime will likely never be in the cards, as the husband of a teacher… August is a HORRIBLE time for me to be travelling. During this month my wife is in full on panic mode as she gets adjusted to another school year, and while for a bit I was bummed at not being able to attend, I am realizing it was ultimately for the best. As a result I will be a loyal yearly Pax South attendee and pretty much brush aside the thoughts of doing the Pax Prime thing. Instead at some point I will just go out to Seattle to meet my friends that seem to be pooling there, instead of trying to make one big combo trip. Having been to a Pax, I have to say in truth the folks at home have a much better view of what is going on there through the live stream. As a result I am looking forward to spending much of the weekend watching as much as I can. Which gets to the point of this mornings post. I thought I would talk a bit about the various things I am hoping to get out of Pax Prime 2015.

Final Fantasy XIV

The thing that I want this weekend… is a release date for 3.1. I know we are getting close, but I want to know a firm release date so I know just how long I am going to have to wait. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is going through a bit of a content lull much like it did after the release of A Realm Reborn. Quite frankly at this point I am tired of running Neverreap… since that seems to be the dungeon I get most often. Two dungeons in a roulette rotation simply is not enough, and I am honestly a bit concerned with the news that 3.1 is only going to add two more as well. My hope is that they create a four dungeon expert roulette instead of moving Neverreap and Fractal to Hard Roulette and making expert just be the two new dungeons. The other piece I am really looking forward to is the next 24 player dungeon the Void Ark, aka the creepy airship you sometimes seem flying around in the Sea of Clouds. The game needs a shot in the arm of content, because folks are starting to slow down… myself included. More so than this… I would like to see some future vision type stuff for 3.2 and beyond. In the past we have usually had this list of things that Yoshi P had promised for “future” patches and we are a bit low on that right now.

Wildstar

Similar to FFXIV… and honestly a lot of the things I am going to talk about this morning…. I just want a date for when the Free to Play conversion will happen. They keep putting new patches on the test server and it is starting to feel like maybe they are close, but what I need from them is a date. I am enjoying Wildstar so much more than I have at any point in the past, and a lot of the changes that are coming in with the free to play conversion are going to be generally good for the game as well. Past the free to play conversion… I would like to see some information about what their long range plans are. I don’t even know if they have a presence at Pax Prime this weekend, but even if folks don’t they tend to time announcements around major shows as well.

Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Since the expansion announcement at Pax South, I have had a strange connection with this title. Traditionally speaking I do not really enjoy Guild Wars 2 that much. That said I have to say the revenant looks more interesting than any of the previous classes. I fully expect that I will be picking this title up when it launches if for no reason other than the fact that it is once again “buy to play” and I have gotten my original purchase out of the game. This has been the year of announcements completely unfettered by timelines, and it is starting to get frustrating. Once again we have a big title looming on the horizon with zero date announced for when we will be expecting to play it. I am expecting that this one is going to be a lot like Heavensward was, where they announce the launch date and it is only a few months away. My hope is that Pax Prime finally is going to be the show where they talk about this at. Give your fans some firm dates.

Blizzard Titles

I am honestly not expecting anything new to come out of this conference from Blizzard. They did their big reveal of the World of Warcraft expansion at Gamescom, and I fully expect that with Blizzcon coming up in November that they will be holding everything else closely waiting on their big show to reveal it. I fully expect that they might announce a new Overwatch champion at Pax Prime, and potentially some more Heroes of the Storm champions or maps. What I am really wanting from them is an announcement for when Overwatch testing will begin and a beta key delivered in my mailbox. Everytime I launch the patcher and see that Overwatch button at the bottom of it… I get a little sad in side. I really want to play this game, and I sincerely doubt I will be doing so anytime soon. Over the last few weeks I have come to the realization that I still very much love Blizzard games… it is apparently only World of Warcraft that I am on tentative terms with. I would love beyond love them to announce something for Diablo 3… like maybe another expansion? They have already hinted that they might be doing a Warcraft RTS after they wrap up with Starcraft II… so that alone has me pretty pumped.

No Man’s Sky

I am so irrationally hopeful about this title, even though I keep telling myself that there is no way it can deliver on everything it has been promising. I love exploring new areas, and I love killing strange and interesting creatures. No Man’s Sky promises to give me a procedural generated world where I can do this… over and over again throughout the galaxy. On top of that the graphics are kinda cool as well with their hyper saturated version of reality. Again… all I really want from Hello Games is a release date. I have a feeling that we will have an announcement for some sort of beta testing to begin soon. Supposedly Amazon UK is already taking pre-orders so hopefully we will get a date this weekend.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

At this point I just want more information on this title. We saw a short trailer from E3 and I have been wanting more information since. Once again I have no clue if there will be a presence at Pax Prime, but I am hoping! I want to know more about the nuts and bolts of how this title is actually going to work. I want to know if there is going to be a multiplayer aspect, or if this is just one big single player skyrim-esc sandbox. I also want to know more about the world that surrounds the game.

Devilian

With my recent foray back into Diablo 3, it has made me extremely interested in Devilian a Diablo like Korean game that Trion is going to be publishing. I know Trion is going to have a good presence at the show so I am hoping we find out when the beta process is going to begin. I ended up with a key from Gamescom and I keep checking my Glyph launcher expecting it to show up in the list of games that are playable at some point soon. While on the topic of Trion Games, it is too soon to hope for a Rift expansion but I would still like to get more information about where that game is heading, and some more detail on the future plans for ArcheAge. The folks at Trion Worlds are awesome so I am always interested in what they have to say.

#Blaugust Day 27: Corndog Girl

August 27, 2015August 27, 2015 by Thalen

In the world of comic books, Marvel and DC have both been in a period of flux recently. Worlds have ended, characters have been rebooted, it's a whole thing. If you were invested in existing superhero comics, it can seem like a bad time. But some amazing books are coming out of the chaos. One of those is Prez.

The original Prez came out in 1973 as part of DCs attempts to appeal to 'the kids of today'. It followed a teenager, Prez Rickard, who was elected President of the United States after the eligibility age was lowered. His book only ran 4 issues, and he's showed up occasionally since then, usually as an easter egg or in an alternate reality story. If you know the character, it's most likely from the story Neil Gaiman wrote using him in Sandman issue 54.

Where the original Prez came out in a time of youth protests and political action, this new one taps into today's social media frenzies, reality stars, and corporate power. The setting is near future; to me it feels like a few years down the line on the road to the world of Transmetropolitan. Corporate personhood has been established by amendment (CEOs are anonymous figures behind holographic representations of their corporation), votes can be cast via Twitter, and an endorsement from an internet celebrity can win you Ohio.

Pharmaduke is the sensational new character find of 2015

In this strange yet scarily familiar world, we follow Beth Ross as she goes from unwilling internet meme (she accidentally fried her braid in a corn dog frier) to President. For the first two issues she's very much out of her depth and subject to forces beyond her control. The third issue, which came out yesterday, is where we see her start to realize that she has an opportunity here, and maybe she can do something great.

She's not wrong

I mentioned earlier that this feels to me like a world that could eventually become the world of Transmetropolitan. More importantly, this book feels like it could be the next Transmetropolitan. Obviously Beth has nothing in common with Spider Robinson, but the book has a lot of that same twisted humor and strange yet familiar setting, and uses it to poke at the idiocies of the real world. The third issue just came out yesterday, so there's a good chance you could find the whole run so far at your local comic book store. It's also on Comixology if you prefer digital comics. Read it. You won't be disappointed.

More on Learning Japanese

August 27, 2015 by Tamrielo

I’m now four weeks into mostly-self-taught Japanese. I’ve managed to get a few lessons with a tutor, who has been incredibly helpful and has pushed me farther than I thought I’d be able to go a lot faster than I expected. I’ve learned a lot about the process along the way, and can critique my own approach a bit.

The first thing I did was start working on the kana, essentially teaching myself to read and write in Japanese, at least the basic characters. Part of this was that it was a lightweight thing for me to be able to do, a bit of memorization and a bit of playing with phone apps before bed. It took me about two weeks to learn hiragana at a relatively sedate pace, and about five days to get katakana once I had a system. For anyone trying to do this, start with the apps; they’ll get you used to the shapes and the sounds nice and gently, but push yourself quickly to write the alphabets from memory as soon as you can. Part of the reason it took me so much longer to memorize the hiragana was because I wasn’t pushing myself to commit them to memory; the apps make you pick from multiple choice rather than writing them out yourself.

As odd a choice as it was to begin with the kana, it helped a lot to create a solid foundation for everything else. Genki (my textbook) uses a lot of kana even early on, and it helps to be able to read and write it without using romaji (roman alphabet) as a go-between. I’m not fast at reading kana, but I can do it now. There’s a bit of a weird side effect that happened to me, though. I’m able to read a lot of things without having any comprehension at all, which is a bizarre experience.

The next thing I started working on was going from the start of Genki and going through the chapters. The book is laid out very well, and I did a bit of dabbling in some basic greetings and some relatively straightforward sentence construction. One of the things I’ve picked up very quickly is that I absolutely cannot think in English while working on Japanese, and I think that’s one of the things that makes it seem like a very difficult language to learn. I have to separate myself from my desire to make English sentences to translate and just think in abstract concepts. In retrospect, I think this is something that’s caused me a lot of trouble in learning Spanish. A lot of Romantic and Germanic languages have very familiar structures to an English speaker, and you can often feasibly just come up with a sentence in English and replace a lot of the words with the appropriate words in, say, Spanish, and more or less get your meaning across.

Separating myself from trying to form coherent English sentences to translate into Japanese helped the learning process a lot. Japanese is a very structured, orderly language in a lot of ways, and I find that sentence construction makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. My tutor moved extremely quickly to particles in sentences, which are markers that indicate what the word or phrase preceding it is doing in the sentence. There isn’t an English equivalent, but it makes me think of sorting flags in file structures. Forcing myself to separate from English sentence construction made these a lot easier to understand and work with.

Getting a tutor early on was really helpful for me. Even just the three or four sessions I’m going to be able to have with her will give me a solid footing to keep teaching myself. I’m almost at the point where I can hold some very rudimentary conversations, I just lack the vocabulary for it. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is use my knowledge of English to evaluate the kinds of conversations I have most frequently, to get an idea of what the most useful things to learn in Japanese would be if I’m looking to reach a conversational level quickly. It’s given me an opportunity to think about how I communicate with other people and the kinds of things I say.

I’ve reached the point now where I can watch or read something in Japanese and I’m having constant flickers of comprehension. I recognize sentences or words and while I can’t quite get enough context to figure out what’s being said, I can make sense of how the sentence is constructed. I don’t know who is being talked about, what they’re doing, or where, but I know that someone is being talked about and that they’re doing something in a particular place. It’s a structure that lets me start asking the right questions– if I recognize 私 (watashi, “I”) and the particle の (no, indicating a possessive or apposition), followed by a word I don’t know, I still know that the speaker is talking about something they own, or something close to them.

It means that when I’m listening to spoken Japanese, I can start to make out the shape of what’s being said, even if I don’t know the specifics. It’s honestly really exciting to have those little flickers of recognition; it makes me want to push harder and learn faster. My biggest hangup right now is vocabulary; I just need to take in thirty-five thousand words or so to catch up with my English. No problem…

Shiphand Buddy Wrap-Up

August 27, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 27

Time for the money

Whew! We made it through all seven shiphand missions! Time to relax and reap the profit. But first let’s hand out some awards:

Most fun: Fragment Zero

Murdering swarms of things is super satisfying, and it also comes with a healthy dose of jumping around in zero-g. Win-win!

Shortest / Best cash per minute: Infestation/M-13 close call

If I just want one or two quick runs Infestation is my go-to, but if I’m chain running I will always throw some M-13 into the mix just for variety. I find waiting around for the hull breach section in Infestation extra annoying if I’m running them back to back.

Most annoying: Gauntlet

I hate exploding splorg. If the point requirement was a little lower or the timer was a little more relaxed for that section it would be fine. It is otherwise a fairly fun place but I can’t enjoy it knowing how much I struggle trying to get gold.

Yep. Still really hate these guys.

Now for the best part of shiphands: making cash money. Sure, the daily quest rewards a little money which is nice, but really the market board and commodities exchange are your best friends. You’re guaranteed one imbuement-type item, which can sell from 5g to upwards of 1p. If you’ve managed to get gold the reward baggie can have some great stuff. Once you’ve collected the dyes and mounts for yourself, throw those extras on the market! Usually the decor doesn’t sell too well on the market, but they do vendor for 1-3 gold a piece so I don’t complain. The runes were my bread and butter for a while, but with F2P and the stat changes looming on the horizon the market has cooled off quite a bit. They will still sell, but prices are very low right now. You can also hold on to them and exchange them for runes of your choice when F2P arrives!

Ooooooh! Shiny new intro cinematics!

Speaking of F2P – I did get the opportunity to run a few shiphands on the PTR, and there are some changes to keep in mind. First and foremost, they’ve been renamed “shiphand expeditions” or just “expeditions” in the group finder. All of the older missions have gotten fancy new intro videos a la Fragment Zero, which is a fantastic change. Not so fantastic is the re-tuning of the difficulty. I went in with the most badass raid gear I could buy from the PTR vendor, and the enemies were still noticeably more difficult to kill than they are with my normal gear on the live servers. Supposedly this is still being tuned, so hopefully when the drop launches these will still be closer to the difficulty we’re all used to already. The other big difference is that the rewards are being toned down a bit. Currently running quick shiphands is one of the most profitable pastimes in the game, and that will be less true when these changes happen. I’m disappointed, since I’ve been making a tidy profit from these, but I understand why the devs think this change is needed. I’m looking forward to the F2P transition no matter what though!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series. I really love the shiphand missions in WildStar for content that is bite-sized and great either solo or in a group. What are you waiting for? Check them out and let me know in the comments which one is your favorite!