On The Occasion of My 44th Birthday

Today's my birthday. Forty-four trips around the sun are now complete.

It's been a quiet day, but a good one so far. My sister bought me tickets to a MN United game (and some buttons), my mother got me a gift card, I've had Chinese for lunch and there's apple pie waiting for after dinner. The Vikings are winning as I write this post, Cirsova's appearing on the Superversive Livestream, and the Metro City Boys will be live in about an hour from now.

I'm enjoying a day where I can truly relax and enjoy this world, flawed as it is, because it's got beauty in it yet despite the works of the monsters among us; that gift card's going to getting me some more of that treasure into my house. Speaking of dinner, that's time is coming up soon, so I'm going to wrap this up.

And I'm looking forward to writing this post a year from now, talking in part about how well Reavers of the Void did as well as where Books 2+ of #StarKnight are doing.

The Anime Informing #StarKnight: Space Operas & Starship Action

Anime informed #StarKnight. There's no disputing this. There's a lot to account for, and I've written about many of them previously. You have the Leijiverse, especially its most famous part (Space Battleship Yamato), and of course the best Space Opera out of Japan: Legend of the Galactic Heroes. There's many more, and I've also talked about them previously.

Collectively, these are the shows where the fleet actions and hero ships of #StarKnight come from. Other influences include Dairugger XV (Vehicle Voltron for some of you.), with the bonus of the Super Robot angle, and Tytania. Each of the groups and players in these works have aesthetically and practical distinction that makes audience engagement easy to achieve; the Cosmo Force looks this way, the Free Planets Alliance looks that way, and so on.

It informed Reavers by having the Red Eyes pirates use either stolen ships or very simple original designs, reflecting their outsider status, and then the contrast comes easy by having House Ireton and the Solar Guard have aesthetically pleasing designs as well as superior discipline and coordination in their actions.

While we're not talking in terms of tens of thousands of warships (LoGH), we are talking about small fleet engagements; if you've seen Yamato's 2202 arc, you'll see some of the fleet actions between the Comet Empire and the Earth/Gamillas allied fleets. For hero ships, clearly that's Harlock and Yamato itself. Not that the Gundam guys have been slacking; it just takes time to make quality work, but it pays off when you get stuff like this. (From Origin 6.)

And that? That's a rough approximation of how the relationship between mecha and warships goes, in general; specifics will vary from book to book because each book covers different situations in different locations with different circumstances. (e.g. Macross Frontier's first fleet battle for comparison) Why? Among other things, it's because Super Robots and Real Robots relate differently to the same environment; Kotetsu Shin Jeeg gets into this.

Now combine these influences with the best of the West: Lensman, Star Wars, and others. That's how these influences mix together to create what you're going to see in #StarKnight.

Since some of these are available commercially in the United States, links:

• Gundam
• Macross
• Yamato (as Star Blazers)
• Harlock
• Galaxy Express 999
• Queen Esmeraldas
• Tytania
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes

My Life As A Writer: Something From Book Two

It's Friday. Time for something tantalizing to occupy your imagination for the weekend.

Imagine a lightsaber duel, in freefall, on Mars, as the combatants descend in parallel to the beanstalk anchoring a space station in low orbit while their allies scramble ships to catch them. To my knowledge, that's never been done before; it's going to be in Book Two of #StarKnight. Yes, one of the combatants is our man Lord Roland. The other is one of the villains of Book Two--which one is too early to reveal, other than to say it is not a returning villain--Go ahead and draw that if you like; I'm game for some fan art.

And that's not between giant robots. Not even powered armor. No, that's two men (albeit suited up) in freefall trying to kill each other with beam swords.

Yes, this means the plot outline is coming together. Have a good weekend, folks.

The Business: Someone Got The Memo

Late last night Person of Wolfness alerted me to this TV series pilot. Now you get to watch it. It's about 30 minutes, so do it over your lunch break.

Besides seeing some old B5 alums get work again, I have this to say: someone, somewhere, got the memo and is at least trying to put out something that isn't utterly degenerate crap. This is crowdfunded, just like Anaxar was, and I hope it doesn't meet the same fate (that is, getting shut down); it helps a lot that this is an original IP and not a fan film.

What I want to point out is that this is another step towards dis-intermediating the extant gatekeepers (and the streaming services that would wish to replace them). Here you have a pilot with production values on part with (e.g.) Andromeda but with far smaller parties achieving those results, and that's a big deal; it means that making satisfactory live action film and TV is increasing within the reach of independent creators.

Don't be surprised if this goes to series, somehow, but that's beside the point. The point is that Pedowood and its counterparts elsewhere are no longer the only viable game in town for we in the West. (And, increasingly, you folks in the East also get the benefit of better indie production capacity.) Other changes need to come about to make full use of the potential, but this technical capacity is nonetheless encouraging; our friends will soon be able to leave Big Media just as we indie authors left the Big 5.

My Life As A Gamer: Battle For Azeroth Summarized

It's been a few weeks since Battle For Azeroth launched for World of Warcraft. Already we've got problems, but first let me talk about the good stuff.

• The art team nailed it, again.
• Cinematics are fantastic.
• The music is just as good.
• The narratives are satisfactory, and often full of shout-outs to more famous examples of the genres presented.
• The new hubs are different, distinct, and yet quite functional; you're not going to keep your Hearthstone bound to a location other than one of them (unless you're a Mage).

The problem is that, aside from the last part, those are aesthetics and aesthetics are not fundamental to commercial success in MMORPGs. Gameplay is, and that is what is severely lacking.

As with the past few expansions, the questing experience while leveling to the new cap is both speedy and satisfying. The route has already been optimized, such that an addon--Azeroth Auto-Pilot--is available to skip everything superfluous (cutscenes, non-relevant quests, etc.) to reaching the new endgame as fast as possible. The problem is that the past issue with replayability (with alternate characters) remains and as such the demand for speed-leveling addons remains; this is never a good sign, and that this still persists reveals not so much an issue with Blizzard (as this is an issue in all level-based games) as it is with the very concept of levels. (Which I have posted about previously.)

It's once you get to the cap that you start running into issues. There really isn't much to do. There is one raid, whose hardest difficulty requires stupid levels of metagame wankery to beat, and it's already been beaten. The dungeons are already getting stale, even with the revision of Mythic Plus, and the new content options have already started turning players off due to the lack of effort put into them- Warfronts (not PVP despite the name) and Island Expeditions (which might as well be Nephalim Rifts, as they feels the same in execution).

Crafting has already been revealed to be a joke in bad taste, the deflationary rebalancing of the economy is already taking its toll, and people are reacting with their feet: the unsubscription rate so soon after launch has been higher than expected. "WOD 2.0", a second Warlords of Draenor, is the summary meme for the problem-state the game is in right now. For my part, if there weren't two more playable race options to unlock I doubt I'd be playing either; putting two of them behind content gates from Legion and holding back two more for a future patch has not gone over well with the player base.

And yes, you come into this expansion grounded again, and you need to earn flight back in a two part Achievement- the latter half of which isn't in the game yet. Enjoy being stuck on the ground, despite the zones again being build with flight in mind.

And then there's the new gameplay systems: Azerite Armor and Power.

The Armor takes the place of class-specific gear sets from the raids. Each one has a set of traits attached, which you choose according to your character's class and specialization and limited by the level of your Heart of Azeroth medallion. The latter is your new widget, which are you expected to power up by farming Azerite Power; it levels up as you do so, and its level limits what your Armors can do. This would be staight-forward if not for the fact that higher-powered Armors require higher Heart levels to active; this means that an epic raid drop can be a downgrade in your power until you can activate its traits, which can be identical to an Armor you already wearing.

TL/DR: New system is over-complex, counter-intuitive, and runs contrary to expressed design objectives and thus is rightly shat upon by the players as being bad.

Recommended? Not at this time; if a later patch doesn't fix these problems, it will become a hard "no". For now, if you're not already in then stay away.

My Life In Fandom: The Anime Informing #StarKnight

It's not a bad time to be an anime fan in the West. Not the best time--that was some years ago--but not that bad either, and hopefully the great days will come again soon.

But what is lacking is an appreciation for the great shows of yesteryear, the classics that defined genres, in the younger cohorts raised on streaming services and the outright glut of material coming out of Japan. It was telling when, some time ago, several of the marks doing reaction videos for Super Robot Wars X didn't recognize Aura Battler Dunbine or Nadia.

And mecha fans? Well, it's no secret that the Real Robot subgenre's dominance--specifically Gundam, with some also-rans--has been nigh-total since Tengan Toppa Gurren Lagann over a decade ago. This matters to me because I'm mixing Real and Super Robots with #StarKnight, and I can't just rely on half-assed (memories of) Voltron for maximum impact. That's like writing a Sword & Planet series to an audience that doesn't know John Carter.

So, with a little help from my friends, allies, and associates--you know who you are--I'll spend some posts in the run up to launching Reavers of the Void on the Eastern side of things informing #StarKnight. (Don't you worry, the Western side will get its due.) Not all the time, but at least once a week or so, and if it's available in the US for streaming or sale I'll gladly link to where you can find it.

In the meantime, run on over to TV Tropes and (re-)read the pages on Mecha Shows, Giant Robots, Super Robots, and Real Robots. Oh, and some Space Operas, because those massive fleets didn't come from nowhere. As for some other common tropes, like The Power of Love in Music, that I can do upon request.

We'll come back to this later this week.

Year Four Begins Now

Welcome to Year Four of the Retreat.

No grand plans or goals to announce this time, as the trajectory I'm on makes such a thing moot. I'm making the transition to professional author, and that alone will dictate a lot of what goes into the blog and its sisters going forward. I won't turn this into a blog of relentless shilling; if you read Brian Niemeier's blog, then you know he talks about things of interest to him as often as he does things related to his work. You can expect that here also. In short, I plan no changes to how I go about using this platform, other than to have a backup prepared in case this goes down for some reason.

It's good to be able to say that. It means that I've reached the point where I know what I want to do, and I have a regular audience for it--those "thousand loyal readers"--so I've found my niche more or less and should instead focus on keeping that going as well as I can. In short, I found my footing and I'm standing firm on it now.

So let's get on with the new year then. There's adventures to be had, so let's go get them.