So another Rift beta phase started on Tuesday and I planned to play some of that in between try-outs1 for new flatmates. Turns out I wasn’t able to access the beta all of Tuesday, so I turned my attention to two new games instead – Magicka and Magic the Gathering: Tactics. Please note that I spent little time […]

It’s no secret among people interested in game design that pretty much impossible to create a fully interactive, complete, and extensive narration tree. Ideally, every decision a player takes in a game would influence the rest of the game and the decisions following it. In reality though, such a tree quickly becomes completely impossible to […]

If you can see this post, the server move has been successful. There might still be a few kinks I haven’t found yet, but the general move is done with (hopefully) very little annoyance on your side. Commenting over here is, of couse, enabled once again. Enjoy 🙂

I’ve spent most of my free time last week setting up a new server to host Procrastination Amplification (among other things.) I will be moving the site over to the new server today, but it might take some time for your internet service provider to notice the change in servers. So, as long as this […]

Here’s a little quote for those of you that don’t read Tish, Tosh, Tesh as religiously as they should: “I believe that MMOs should be about the player’s story in a vital virtual world that’s indifferent to them.” – Tesh Traditionally, computer games make the player into an all-powerful hero that saves the princess, the world, […]

You might have noticed that my usual Monday/Wednesday/Friday posting schedule has broken down from time to time in recent weeks. (This week for example.) With work being what it is, I simply don’t find the time to write about gaming as much as I’d like to. Even worse, I don’t find as much time to […]

Playing in the Rift beta brought up an old question in me. How do you get players to care about anything but levelling up before they get to the maximum level?  and I still like what I wrote there. Today I’ll take a different approach to the topic though.

I’ve previously talked about the concept of leveling the abilities you use as you use them instead of the rather arbitrary experience points/level up systems that are out there. There is a huge load of issues with this concept and it is therefore not very surprising that its implementations are pretty much always flawed. One […]

The vast majority of my readers are PC gamers, not surprisingly giving my own inexperience with (and therefore lack of posts about) console games. I like PCs for a multitude of reasons, one of which is upgradability, another one is customizability.  I recently replaced my graphics card with a Radeon 6850 because I wanted a bit […]

Back in the day (in, you know, 2007) questing in World of Warcraft required you to read quest descriptions in order to determine where and how to complete a quest. Then a little addon called Quest Helper came along and changed that along with our ideas of how questing is supposed to work. I don’t […]