Sep 2nd, 2014

September 2nd, 2014

(Christophe Vacher, The Messengers)

Interview after interview of the creator of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi, seems to come out lately and a clear fact comes out:  Final Fantasy 6 was his masterpiece and the poor guy does not even realize it.  I have thought for many a year that Final Fantasy 6 was sort of a black sheep in Japan.  When you read that Famitsu, the biggest name in gaming magazines in Japan(which still make bank there), does polls and asks opinions, it seems Final Fantasy 5 is the favored one over there in the SNES era.  In two interviews recently he has expressed surprise at the gaming blog "reporter" asking so many questions about FF6 instead of FF7.  He sees FF6 as a sort of failure in the west because it did not sell well.  He claims that one of the reasons they went "big" with FF7 and did away with 2D sprites, and spent $100 million on advertising was because FF6, according to Sakaguchi, didn't sell well here.

The other day I posted about all the new technologies converging in computers.  The stuff is still so new that they would add way over $1000 for the components that are first gen of their tech, which means they aren't hugely more powerful.  What it really means is that we're coming to an end to "patch in just a little more power" to an older system.  A Z77/Z87 platform computer will need to resort to extreme measures to keep up with Z97 and newer platforms.  Pushing DDR3 to DDR4 speeds will involve high voltage overclocking.  Non-G sync video cards will require overclocking as they still try to draw as many frames per second as possible instead of only drawing what is needed.  Many mid and lower CPU's were not created with the idea of PCI-E channels being used for things like Hard drives, and if you're rocking dual or quad videocards trying to keep up graphical power you probably will not have the lanes for a new SSD.  All this overclocking and extra stress put on the motherboard is going to reduce the computer's life for only marginal power upgrades.  I speak from experience.   I played Fallout 3 and Mass Effect on a system that was maxed out SDRAM(non-DDR!), a super overclocked single core processor, a IDE connected Velociraptor Hard drive, a PCI-E videocard re-engineered to fit in an AGP slot, power cable adapters to work with the new SATA and 6/8 pin connectors.  All these "patches" individually were more expensive than the better working upgrades, but could be done one at a time instead of a whole upgrade.  It gave this computer about 1 extra year of life before it burned down and melted.

On the D&D world building side of things, I have completed the World History notes portion of my planning.  It clocked in at 25 pages of single spaced, size 8 font.  If you are potentially one of my players, do not let this scare you.  This is a lot of information and notes that players will never have to know.  It is part of the equation in the world that gives reason to many of the current events.  I would say that 50% of it is stuff that no one living in the game world knows.  Later I will take World History, Magic Theory, Government profiles, Class Write ups etc and trim each of them down, combining them into a small "player knowledge packet" with only a couple of paragraphs per page and some artwork to set the mood correctly.  Its not my first rodeo, and I would classify the amount of information for this world to be "medium" in size.  Its a take on the "classic" fantasy D&D world, leaning on cliche is ok because people want it to feel like D&D, so its easy to fill the world out.   Why do so much work if only I will ever know what it contains?  Well sometimes weird shit happens.  Sometimes you have a player cast some sort of lore finding spell on a statue that has nothing to do with the story, but I will want to be able to talk about where it came from, who made it, why its there, and why it is important/unimportant.  Also I find it fun.  In fact, world building is my favorite part of the D&D experience.  The more world I build, the more "open" and "sandbox" the game can be.