Gaming – Darkkeep

8 July 20248 July 2024

Planetside II – There’s a heartbeat there still, I think

I thought looking at an older game might be instructive with respect to the decline of games over time.

Planetside II can be seen very much as a spiritual successor to the Tribes franchise, released by SOE back in Nov 2012. It’s a game which never really got much exposure but maintained a loyal core following over the intervening years.

The PC version of the game is available either stand-alone or though steam, so the numbers reported by steam charts is not representative of its actual player counts showing Steam only, but the movement in player count probably tracks well.

The following graph shows the player count over the intervening years, with the dramatic drop-off at the start and a largely stable if waning player count in the following years.

This slow decline in player count can be seen in the numbers for the more recent months, showing a game clearly still pulling some new players to replace those who leave. But unfortunately not quite in numbers to reverse the overall slow decline.

19 June 202419 June 2024

Helldivers II – Player count slide

Helldivers II is a bit of a one-trick pony, but it’s a pretty good trick in fairness.

But like anything without much variety it runs the risk of becoming stale and losing people’s attention. Which is what we can see now by looking at the player numbers over the last few months.

Moving from a massive peak of 458,208 players, there has been a consistent slide in the player count of about 34% month on month.

Though for a newly released game in the first 5 months, such a drop-off as the novelty factor wanes is not unexpected.

The expectation is that the player-base will stabilise to a core audience that can be maintained going forward; with an expectation of a more gradual decline going forward.

This looks like that is happening with the player count now.

Having settled from the 22th May onwards around the 50k mark with a much less pronounced attrition in numbers.

The new patch released on 13th June saw a slight spike in numbers , with a peak of 91,692 players following its release. But did not result in a notable increase of the player count.

To truly revitalise the player-base something bigger is going to be needed. Possibly the release of a third faction (The Illuminate from the original?) is the one to watch for and maybe that could reinvigorate the player-base and count.

17 November 202317 November 2023

Vaesen Solo Play Aid

I’ve been dabbling with Vaesen by Free League Publishing for a bit now.
It’s nice investigative driven RPG set in an alternative Nordic 19th century, along with an expansion which covers Ireland and Britain during the same time period.

So as a forever DM, I was pleased to see a set of rules for solo play has been released.
It utilities a series of random tables to drive the story and encounters, making use of both dice and standard playing cards.

It was the later, the playing cards which I found rather cumbersome in use, so to that end I knocked up a simple web-page to simplify that part of the process.

You’ll still need the solo-rules, but image below (showing a sample card) takes you to web-page.

Pressing “Deal Card” will deal a new card from the deck of 52, creating and shuffling a new card deck as required.

Pressing “NPC State” will deal two cards, which are used to determine an NPC state to the players.

16 November 2023

AI for RPG Art

AI Art is such a godsend when it comes to generating images/art for role-playing game sessions. I’m using it constantly now to generate pictures for player characters and tokens.

The results are getting exponentially better as time goes on.

Here are a few I did a while back using Midjourney while not free, does have the edge out of the box over Stable Diffusion. That said Stable Diffusion is more than capable of generating useable images and tokens, added to which it is free.

12 January 2023

DnD Carnage – Open Games License 1.1

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ll have to be aware of the turmoil within role-playing games community over Hazbo/Wizards of the Coast attempting to revoke the OGL 1.0a license which has been used for 20 or so years.

And replace it with one which is closed (in spite of the name) and also performs a serious land-grab of third-party IP at the same time as looking to milk everyone they can.

Naturally this hasn’t gone down to well 🙂

The following video gives a good run-down on the situation along with providing a link to the revised license.

23 July 202223 July 2022

Which D&D version to play

Here’s a good video I recently got recommended describing the various versions of Dungeons & Dragons, along with the advantages/disadvantages they have and similar alternatives available.

Which D&D Edition Should You Play?

7 May 2022

Bad DnD Art

I’ve been playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons with a group for friends for the last year or so.

Starting with the starter campaign “Dragon of Icespire Peak”, followed by the first half of “Out of the Abyss” and then into one of smaller campaigns while the players level enough to tackle either the second part of the Abyss.

For the start of the sessions I’ve taken to capturing what happened previously in image form.

Allow me to present in crude pictorial format our story so far.

I know what you’re thinking… breathtaking.

6 February 202216 March 2022

Welcome to 1980s

One of the nice side effects of the lockdowns has been that I’ve had the opportunity to get back into playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Over the last year some friends and myself have been playing weekly and we’ve made our way through the introductory campaign “Dragon of Icespire Peak”.

Having successfully completed the afore mention campaign an interest in meeting the Drow and hence we moved onto playing “Out the Abyss”.

A few months later the party has escaped their captors (at least for now) and find themselves in a position to return to the surface.

Assuming they do return topside and don’t fancy returning to the Underdark, the plan was to allow them to work their way though the “Dungeon of the Mad Mage” which would give a nice change of pace.

It’s more a straight forward dungeon crawl in classic DnD sense, much like the old Red-Box Basic DnD set I got in long long ago.

Which got me thinking maybe now is a good time to revisit “The Keep on the Borderland” one of the starting modules which was released with the Basic Set.

I remember pouring over the original module all those years ago, so getting a chance to revisit it all these years later to really appealing.