Kail

2005 February 5

Okay, so I guess Cion is a year old now. I'm just now working on the storyboard for page fourteen, which puts our average at just over a page a month. Barring our repetition of the issues we've already faces (e.g. the three month delay of the last page), it's looking like two or three weeks are normal time between pages. So, yeah, we're slow.

The last page was something like three months in coming, most of which I attribute to the flood of big name games that came out in November and December. I still haven't picked up everything I want. I suppose I might as well talk about the games I did get, since it's not like I've got anything more relevant to write about. I think I generally come off as a bit cynical when talking about games, so I'll try to keep things a bit more positive here.

World of Warcraft

This game is... well, it's not bad. But I feel like an idiot for having bought it. Subscription fees do not mesh well with my mindset, and having cancelled my account, I can't help but feel that I paid fifty bucks for a small cardboard box. There are a dozen reasons why I just loathe subscription fees, but that's a topic for another day. The point is that, while WoW isn't a bad game, my opinion of it would be about a hundred times higher if I didn't have to pay to play it. I don't have a problem with having to pay to play online, or providing some kind of "premium" service or something... whatever. What I want (and what WoW doesn't provide) is the assurance that I will be able to play this game. I can still blow the dust off my Sega Genesis and fire up a round of Altered Beast if I feel like it, but in order to play WoW, I need permission from Blizzard. Meh.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

I was totally ready to hate this game. I was a huge VtM buff in high school, and the first VtM game (Redemption) was a complete and utter piece of crap. Yet, amazingly, Bloodlines very nearly pulls it off. Probably the best thing this game does is the atmosphere. There are a lot of games that just don't have any kind of feel to them, like you're playing a generic DOOM clone with zombies instead of demons or something like that. Bloodlines, though, really solidly nails the whole idea of Vampires, and moreover, the whole "World of Darkness" theme comes across really well.

But, there are serious problems with the game. First of all, the game's combat system is not the greatest, but it still forces you into fights all the time. The big problem here (aside from it not being that much fun) is that there are a lot of different paths you can use to design your character, but all of them will lead to your character's premature demise save the ones that factor directly into combat. You can level up in any one of about thirty skills, from hacking to seduction to stealth to persuasion, but at frequent intervals, your smooth talking financier is going to be stuck in a sewer or something, fending off zombies with a baseball bat. The problem is that whlie you have a number of options (fighting, stealth, persuasion, whatever) for some parts of the game, for at least half of it, you're forced to rely on your combat skills, and there, you're going to really start to regret wasting points on "Subterfuge."

The biggest problem I have with the game, tough, is the general lack of polish. The game glitches frequently, crashes to desktop, runs into dialogue loops, and initiates similar head-shaking action every few minutes. Arguably the worst off are the cinematics, which are simply abysmal. Characters are animated poorly, or not at all (!), body parts clip into and out of each other, there are awkward pauses of extreme length in what are presumably supposed to be snappy exchanges, and so on. In the opening cinematic, the entire cast appears to leap to the left about ten feet before snapping back, a flurry of cloaks and other secondary animations whipping around the room as characters continue to recite their dialogue. In a later scene, your character is menaced by a Sabbat vampire who appears to have polygon vertices on one finger mapped to a joint on another, making it look like he has webbed hands or something. And it goes on like that. This lack of professionalism is just boggling. Why weren't these fixed? They aren't that hard to spot. Did the team not have time to watch the cinematics before the game shipped, or something? This isn't counting the numberous rendering bugs that occur on every computer I've tried it on. Ugh. This game has some potential, but it seriously needs a lot more patching before I'm willing to pick it up again.

Pirates

Yarr, speaking of patches... This is a neat game. It's not strong on plot or anything, but I've had a lot of fun puttering around the carribean in my little Sloop of War, irritating the hell out of the Spanish. It's not the kind of game I can really get hardcore into (probably because it's so easy at the normal levels), but it's just a blast to play. The graphics are neat, the controls are simple (I'd prefer some less abstracted system for the swordfights, but it's still really fun). It's not a game you play to "win," it's a game you play to have fun playing.

Knights of the Old Republic 2

Very nice. I forgot how much fun I had with the original KotOR until I played this game. Everything about this game just screams "Star Wars" at the top of it's voice. The only problem I really had with the game was that the story this time around seems a bit underexplained, especially at the end (which comes awfully abruptly). Other than that, though, the game rocked. Makes me wish I knew someone to play d20 Star Wars with.

Addendum: I'm probably not going to be updating the sketch page every week anymore. I don't think anyone cares about it, and it always keeps me up until like 1 AM working on the thing. I'll put stuff up there occasionally, but not on a regular basis or anything.

Adapa

February 4, 05

First comic for the new year!

I think this is the longest we've taken to do a comic, and there're a few reasons for this - two of the largest factors not related to the comic were of course, Christmas + New Years, and the World of Warcraft release (I'm going through a ten-step program to wrangle my life back from that game).

Now, in addition to that, the comic is going through a pretty crucial phase. (Warning: the following will probably only be interesting to writers.) Originally when I created not only the story of the comic, but had the idea to make a comic, it was because I was looking for something to do until I had the ability write my main story - an epic that I planned to span twelve books. This epic, of course, had hundreds of pages of backstory that made all the various plots and characters work, so all I really had to do was take a bit of the backstory, and make it into a comic - and from that, Cion was born.

The Cion story, as I originally imagined it, was one of those epic, sweeping some-people-do-some-things-and-change-the-world-forever stories - a myth/legend type o thing, like (I'm choosing a random legend here), the story of Daedalus and Icarus. Now, the good thing about myths and legends is, they sound great when someone is describing them (which is a part of the reason why I was able to snare an artist of Kail's skill). But if you try to dissect it to show it actually happening in a situation that resembles real life... well, they just doesn't work that way.

On top of that, because I knew how I needed the story to go, for the book series to work, I felt severely limited in what I could do, and the story felt unrealistic and childish - there were several characters that couldn't die, couldn't have their leg broken, couldn't catch a cold at an inopportune time, because that would stuff the sequence of events up.

So, over the end of year break, I did pretty much the only thing that I could do to make Cion a good story. I cut it loose from the book series.

It's a big thing for me, bigger than you'd expect, because the book series was my first story, the one I wanted to tell when I became a writer. But it was something that I desperately needed to do, because that first story is the one that you can't see fault in, the one where you're too attached to the characters to lose them, where you can't be impartial enough to make it real.

So now, Cion is its own entity, and anything can happen. I've been working hard at filling out the backstory, working out the way things work, and creating the various factors that will cause things to happen.

In spite of all these dramatics, I doubt that this change will make much difference to the comic as you see it, which is probably a good thing. The only thing I'm reshuffling is the future and what we haven't seen yet - what's happened in Cion so far is set, both on paper and in my mind, and I think I'd have as much luck changing it as changing my own past ;)

February 5, 05