New members, meet new friends. Welcome!

Have you tried flying on your VR goggles? DCS world or il2 sturmovik?

Yeessssssssssssss. Fist bump I still regret selling mine. Loved that thing.

Depending on when you were there I was on Bristlebane and a few others as well. I topped out many years ago with some guild doing heavy runs on just about everything and burned out. Then I went to WoW and did the exact same thing, not once but twice. It was then I hung up my MMO shoes and have enjoyed (relatively) not being tied to a game as though it was a job. It’s really hard giving up, enough so that I understand the “addiction” term thrown around sometimes.

As with many others around here on MMO’s I had maxed characters for most classes by the point I left Everquest. I also two and even three-boxed for a while, as though the challenge of playing on my own wasn’t enough of a headache. By the way the solo ability is what drove me to WoW, eventually. But only after a couple of other MMO stops along the way.

Nice to meet you, Sam.

After reading your explanation, I could see a ton of interest in different gaming genre books. When you write them do you ever specialize so much that you have to seek out any licensing arrangements with specific games?

I didn’t. I made up a fantasy world, the rules, weapons, spells, and all that stuff. It involved a lot of spreadsheets, and copious notes. One thing I’m not a big fan of in this particular genre is how characters in the game worlds become over powered very quickly. I tend to write with some degree of realism, in fact, I got my friend Peter Clines to give me a blurb for Shards of Reality, and he noted that I my work always has a certain degree of realism. So my characters don’t have an easy time, and when they get hurt or killed, it hurts. Plus they wake up naked and have to do a corpse run. I don’t think anyone can wake up in fantasy land, and immediately know how to use weapons, spells, and the like. One of my favorite parts of RPGs is the beginning, when those levels come at you, and you learn how to balance your characters. So that’s what I tried to do.

My girlfriend has a publishing company, and she got the licensing rights to a popular card game. There were a lot of contracts, and legal stuff. I don’t think I ever want to go down that rabbit hole. It’s easier for me to just make stuff up.

Just read a bit of your bio and wanted to say to another former Navy and IT engineer, cheers!

I’m Will Swannack. I think I’ve been a member since 2008. I came here from a link on a 1up article suggesting some of the best video-game communities, and this one fits my tastes quite well. I like and play RPGs most often, but also love roguelikes and strategy games. In general, I prefer experiences with some heavy mechanical abstraction and don’t dig games with high verisimilitude (like basically anything first person, excepting the Etrian Odyssey series). Right now, I’m bouncing between Pillars of Eternity 2 and Slay the Spire.

I spend more time lurking than posting so you may not see my name pop up too often, but if you spend time in any given years board game thread my name will show up a lot more often. Video games were my passion for a long time, but in the last few years I’ve felt like I’m spending more time trying to reignite that passion rather than actually living it. Board games have mostly taken that space in my brain at the moment.

Most of my professional career has been in game development at a variety of smaller companies (though I spent a couple years at Popcap). I’ve moved into the VR space for now, but I do miss game dev.

I have a strong desire to make strategy video games with personal narratives, so I’ve been trying to combine roguelikes and strategy games into something like that for a while. I made a simple roguelike Through to try and understand how numbers in abilities and items work. Then I made a bigger strategy roguelike called There is Only Power to see how to add narrative and thematic structure to a roguelike. Now I’ve been stalling for a couple years on a post-apocalyptic merchant roguelike with the goal of tackling bigger themes with a similar structure. The “stalling” bit shows how well that’s going.

I really like reading threads of people who have radically different opinions than mine. I like trying to view a game through a different lens and then revisiting it to see if I can fully empathize with a different viewpoint. I quite like Tom Chick’s reviews for that reason: They’re often quite foreign but focused on experience and emotion, so they’re easier to try and inhabit for a unique perspective.

Had a lot of fun playing this when you wrote about it previously. I still probably have the screenshot of when I won a game too!

I’m really super happy to read that! It makes my day any time I hear people like the games I’ve worked on.

Will, I’m feeling a Steve Jackson vibe from where you’re going. How about a Car Wars style game with the merchant/trading back-end for repairs and extended gameplay?

That would be cool. I love Car Wars. I’ve really been digging fantastical post-apocalyptic stuff like the book Who Fears Death that’s sort of more mythical and strange. Numenera is sort of like that too. That stuff is really fun aesthetic inspiration.

Right back atcha! A couple of years ago I was at a convention in Texas. A guy named Shawn stopped by my booth and we got to talking. We were both surprised to learn that we had been stationed on the same ship, in Japan, at the same time in the 80s, but we didn’t know each other then. We’ve been friends ever since. It’s a small Navy world out there.

No. Motion in VR is still janky. They need to fix that hardcore before it goes mainstream. There are some titles where it works ok but most are solidly locked in position. :(

Eek
Help
Spike!

Nice meeting ya too Skipper.

Despite my hundreds of days played I would never say I was addicted. I’ve played with addicted people tho and it’s scary. RL and family first, always for me. And it was never about the loot, it was always about the people, the community.

I’ve had that happen as well. I’ve also remained lifelong friends (and two that are lifetime gaming buddies) with many former Navy coworkers. I was last stationed in Italy, and sure wish I’d had a PAC cruise at one point. I kind of did time there post-Navy working in IT, but work travel misses out on the fun we used to have on port visits.

It is indeed a small Navy world.

I was single for a lot of that time period, mostly neglecting my extroverted and social norm. As such, I think for me personally, it was a bad thing. I agree completely though on the community and people over the loot. The groups were why I probably over-stayed and over-played.

FUCK YEAH. Loved that game. Blew my mind back in the day.

(Shrug) I had a couple. They were OK. Hitting Dubai six times was a low point (I was in during George the First’s little desert spat).

MED cruises were nice, even better when the ship was stationed over there. I shouldn’t complain. I hit 17 countries around the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea.

But the brass was pretty uptight on this side. The rumors (or truths) were that PAC based crews were a little more loose and had a little more fun. I’m sure that’s probably horribly wrong, so perhaps it’s just me not knowing it was the same routine we had.

It’s always greener on the other side. Did you guys at least dip down below the Equator (in the Atlantic) to get your Shellbacks?

WESTPACs have a looong time between ports…

I did a UNITAS (that’s what they were called then-Round Cape Magellan) in the early 90s.