“You know, I’d often thought that Mages would be impossible to handle properly in a computer game, what with the infinitely flexible reality altering business. And then I realized that while that’s the fundamental nature of their powers, in practice the game encourages you to use a) predesigned spells (sorry, “rotes”), or b) come up with your own. The idea is that mages are not, most of the time, coming up with totally new spontaneous ways of doing magic on the fly. As such, all you have to do is something along the lines of Elder Scrolls spell creation – you know such and such base components, and you can tweak those into rotes as you please, plus some predetermined ones that are maybe a little easier.”

The problem is more one of balance. If the game was just ‘Mage’ fine. However if you’re going to have WoD mages, vampires and werewolves(to go with just the main three), mages simply outpower the others in all areas. For PvP it would be a nightmare to tune. Even the lesser challenge of werewolves and vampires is tricky – they’re fairly balanced in non combat areas(with vampires perhaps having an edge) but in combat a werewolf is worth four or five vamps.

Still I look forward to it greatly.

Also, Love looks fantastic and I hope will lead to a spate of watercolour games.

Flip my wanting, that sounds exciting.

And it was good. It will be interesting to see what concrete marvels sublimate out of this most gelatinous of brain-dumps.

But I really can’t think of a company that has a better track record for something like this. You’ve got EVE, which is essentially a niche title with a learning curve a mile long and apparently infinite depth, and it just slowly grew and grew and grew into a very successful MMO. Now they’ve got their hands on the entirety of a franchise with a backstory that’s been developed, refined, thrown away, dusted off, and refurbished for decades– but more than that, expanded. It has a potential for amazing breadth and depth if they so choose, and, it would appear that is what they chose with EVE … So.

I’m going to try and not have any expectations about how it turns out, I don’t want my little nerd inside to die from disappointment.. but right now, news of this mmo starting development makes me very excited. Even if they probably totally won’t have Mages, my favorite race.

Heck, EVE even has the character development mechanic that was used on all those World of Darkness MU*es I used to play on. Log a request to learn skill X, wait for it, get it and choose another. And of course, a heavy PvP / player-to-player interaction focus, which was also a major part of those MU*es. (Note: I haven’t really played EVE personally, so I might have some details wrong)

Oh oh !

Don’t let me down now.

I may have to endeavour to find more brits if I manage to go next year.