Betas and Busy

Howdy.

I played a shitload of Mass Effect: Andromeda over the weekend. The game has really sunk its hooks into me. For me, the planet of Kadara was a real turning point. Everything prior to that was cool, and I was really digging the 'explorer' vibe, but Kadara is where I really got into the story, and where I really started to like my companions. I'm now about 60 hours into the game, and a little less than halfway to completion.

I don't remember if I mentioned it or not, but reading Nexus Uprising has added a lot of cool background information to my experience. If you've played MEA at all, you can gather from the title what it's about.

Really, I'm having a harder time than ever with the critical abuse that this game has taken. I'm not gonna expound on why people act like hateful lemmings, but let me explain how you should approach this game.

One, it's a new games that takes place in the Mass Effect universe. A lot of mechanics, weapons, species, and more will seem familiar. However, it is NOT ME4, in any sense. It has a 'feel' that is vastly different from the other three games, and story-wise, it's a clean break that references back to ME1 and ME2 a little bit.

Just go into it loving the universe, but not expecting more of what you know, and you'll fall in love. I really feel, strongly, that this was a great move for the franchise, and I really wanna see more in Andromeda.

As always, Torment is what I'm hitting a bit each week, and it'll shift back to being my 'main' game once MEA wraps up. Torment is a hell of a game.

Meanwhile, I've been on two betas. One was Dawn of War III, which I sniffed at briefly, but just never made time for because of MEA. The other, I can't talk about at all because of an NDA, but I'm enjoying the hell out of it.

PRE3
We're in the last seven weeks before E3. It's getting so close, I can start to feel the hum of excitement coursing throughout the gaming world.

Typically, leading up to E3, I set some gaming goals for myself. Nothing really hardcore or crazy, just for fun, and to nudge me a bit to clear my pile of shame somewhat.

This year, we're targeting Mass Effect: Andromeda, Torment: Tides of Numenera, and the Elder Scrolls Online campaign, which I've been sitting on the end of for over a month now.

What's tough is that between now and E3, we're seeing Dawn of War III drop this week, Prey next week, and Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind on 6/6.

And I haven't even mentioned the PS4 games I still haven't finished.

The pile of shame is going to swell, and then hopefully, the summer sees a drought of releases. 2017 has been nuts in terms of releases.

Oh shit, I also accidentally bought Ghost Recon: Wildlands! Don't ask! But it's really fun!

Beyond that, I'm going through the joyful exercise of slowly building my E3 week. Every day, I scour the internet for more dates and times and anything that might add to the week. I build quite an experience for myself every year, and this year shall be no different.

So far, we know about EA, Microsoft, and Bethesda's pressers. We're still waiting to hear from Ubisoft, Sony, and maybe PC Gamer. I hope they do another PC Gamer Show at E3. I've really enjoyed those.

It'd be interesting to see someone else push their way onto the scene. Squenix has done PRE3 pressers on occasion. Acitivision or Blizzard would be interesting.

What's been getting harder each E3 is the fact that EA owns BioWare, and EA's presser is worse and worse every year, and they just haven't leveraged BioWare well in a long time. This year will be interesting, since we're going to see a new IP from BioWare.

What I'm expecting, though, is that Andrew Wilson will come out, lead off with two minutes of a shooter that everyone but me wants, then talk about BioWare for maybe 90 seconds, and then we go into 90min of fucking soccer.

I hope not.

I'll do a full EA preview when we get closer to the actual event.

What about you? You hyped for E3? What do you wanna see?

-Blaine

Let the countdown to E3 begin in earnest

Yeah, so I more or less start the countdown to E3 as soon as the previous one ends. Yeah, I love it that much.

I don't REALLY start thinking about it much until I start seeing how publishers are positioning products marketing-wise in December at the Game Awards. That often tells me a lot about what we're gonna see in the spring, versus what will still need to show at E3 the following year.

I start really zeroing in on it a bit more when spring training hits, as that's the last HUGE thing for me, in terms of time off from work, before E3.

Star Wars Celebration is now inserted in there, as well, though they're skipping it next year. Sigh ...

... so yeah, I'm now fully locked in on E3, which is now only two months away. A little less, actually.

As has been happening the last couple years, the major press conferences are spreading out more and more, as publishers jockey to dominate the news cycle for at least a day each before the show starts on the Tuesday of E3 week. We now have EA going on Saturday, MS and Bethesda on Sunday, and I'm assuming, Ubi and Sony on Monday. I'd love to see PC Gamer Show return, as well. With Monday wide open now, maybe they could slot in early? I dunno. That's usually Microsoft's spot, but they've jumped to the day before, so who knows what the hell is gonna happen now?

And E3 is changing. They're now open to the public, publishers are setting up their own nearby events, some publishers have returned, and the online viewership is higher than ever. I love it.

Where once it was an event that a lot of read about a month or more later in a printed magazine, everything from the nature of the vertical slice demos (more and more, they're just recorded videos) to the cost and bombast of the pressers (they're bigger and louder than ever) is totally different, and that's not even bringing up the 'live at E3' streams that have cropped up in the last decade.

I remember first 'watching' E3 on G4TV. I actually went a couple years, before ever watching it at home, and I gotta tell ya, watching it at home is better, though I am ever-thankful for the context that actually having gone has provided me. If you've never gone, and you love games, just go at least once. It's fucking rad, and if you're working, be prepared to lose about 10 pounds. For real.

I'm really curious to see how the show and its attached pressers/events 'feel' when there's more breathing room.

And for the uninitiated, E3 is really two distinct parts. First, there's the 'PRE3 Pressers,' as I call them, where each of the major publishers (Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, and Sony) takes the stage and announces the announcements that leaked the week before.

The second part, the actual 'E3' floor show, runs Tuesday through Thursday that week. That's where you see all the live demos and shit.

So, I'm really curious to see how this year feels. It'll be fun.

I'm also curious to see how the show evolves in other ways. I think one thing that they can do is chase after more of the PC indies. The console 'indies' get plenty of love by being propped up by the console holder, so it'd be nice to see games like Wasteland 3 and Pillars of Eternity 2 get some love. This is as much on the press outlets as it is the show organizers.

I think it may also be time to check against the original purpose of the show, which was to hype games and gaming-related products to press outlets and retailers. While I'm not opposed to allowing the general public into the show, I think maybe they should restrict the hours or days in which the general public can attend. I promise you, the general public being in attendance is going to be a problem this year.

But we'll see.

I think, over the next several weeks, I'm going to do a column or two on what I wanna see at the show this year, as well as some previews of products that I know are going to be there, about which I'm excited. Good times.

What about you? What's got you stoked for E3 this year?

-Blaine

Streaming, Streaming, Streaming

What's your favorite part of gaming live streams? Of  recorded gaming videos on YouTube? Do you want different things from them? What annoys you in each of them and makes you click away?

I'm considering going back to Twitch. I'd prefer not to use hyperbole, but the scene over at YouTube Gaming feels stagnant. I'd hazard a guess that YouTube is used mostly for playback, while Twitch is used more for streaming. And, really, those are two different kinds of videos. I've been treating them as one and the same, but they're not. Hey, check me out!

I'm contemplating a few things in regards to my streaming.

One, what is my identity as a streamer? What's my brand? I feel like this should be defined by a couple things. First, where is my passion, and second, is there a niche I can fill? I feel like my passion is storytelling in games, and my niche could be ... RPGs ... eh ... maybe the indie PC RPG stuff, and games that are tangentially related?

Actually, my niche could be gaming enthusiasts in their late 30s and older? I look at a lot of what's out there, and it skews waaay young. Some of the streamers look like maybe they're approaching my age, sorta, but their production style and on-screen persona definitely skew toward the more obnoxious. I don't mean all streamers, just a lot of the popular ones I see.

Two, my venue. Twitch or YouTube Gaming? Or Beam? I went with Twitch at first, while I was still learning the ropes, but then switched over to YTG because I'm lazy, and wanted my shit to auto-upload. It saved me a few clicks. It also seemed like a chance to get in early on something. Now ... it just doesn't seem like it's taken off.

Microsoft today announced a partnership with Beam that'll integrate Beam into Windows and Xbox for broadcast and consumption. I need to investigate it more. If things like video export to YT aren't there, forget it.

Three, my level of commitment. Like a lot of things that aren't my job or marriage, my level of commitment wavers. I just got real shit to do and worry about. And I think I need a bit more of a plan. I also need to be willing to stick to that plan and forego some things to stay on a regular streaming schedule, if I'm going to actually commit. Honestly, I wouldn't mind this being a solid income-supplementing side gig. Right now, we're nowhere near that.

I also get waaay too busy, which annoys and depresses me. I think being busy makes me unhappier than anything else in my life, but it's also part of being a grownup, and it never lasts longer than a few weeks at a time. I just need to pay more attention to what I'm committing to, so as to avoid it as much as possible.

Regardless, I'm actually pretty happy with my ongoing Mass Effect trilogy effort. Check it out below.




I heard an episode a day will enhance your sex life. Seriously. :P

Anyway, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for helpful feedback.

Thanks!

-Blaine

The Dev Life

I'm a developer. That still feels a little weird when I say it. I wanted it for so long, and now I've had it, for two and a half years. I'm a little old for being at this stage in my development career, because I took such a circuitous route getting here, and that bothers me a bit, but I try not to let it. I have a much richer background than most developers.

The short version is that I worked a string of shit jobs, eventually working my way into shit job management, before finally going to college when I was 21.

I graduated with a BA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago, and went right back to shit job management, only now I was higher-ranking and much better paid.

After a few years of that, I took a huge pay cut, and actually did help desk for a university for a while, which was actually really, really enjoyable. If you ever get the chance to work at a university, do it. It was a really fun, magical time for me.

The money, though, is in corporate. I was eventually lured away by the siren call of corporate cash money, and worked help desk for a short time there, before eventually being promoted to a SysAdmin job.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

The reason I made the jump was because I saw it as a chance to break into development, and that opportunity was there.

Instead, I chose to demonstrate my value by jumping into the support side, because that's where the help was desperately needed, and I knew I could bring value.

I taught myself things like how to build a domain, the ins and outs of Active Directory, and how servers work. Before long, as I said, I was suddenly a SysAdmin, which is somewhere between 'God' and 'rockstar.' You're always the smartest guy in any given meeting. When shit hits the fan, you're the one that steps up, and saves the day.

It's a super-cool job, and an easy way to stay employed, but it lacked the creative nuance I wanted. And the hours can, depending on how well-run your shop is, kinda suck. For me, at first, they were awful, but then, after an organizational change, they improved drastically.

Regardless, after a few years, it was time for a change.

Fall 2013, an opportunity presented itself. A buddy from the dev team here was leaving, and I quietly put in some feelers. I got paid one of the highest compliments I've ever received in that process. "We were hoping you'd still be interested."

For political reasons, they couldn't ask me if I was interested.

Anyway, after some figuring, it all worked out, and I went from being a SysAdmin to an entry-level developer.

Since then, it's been a crazy and fascinating position. As a SysAdmin, you question every step you take, everything you do, and you never, ever, move forward without some kind of escape vector or rollback plan.

Development, if your TFS is well-managed, is free of a lot of those constraints, when you're talking about actual development code.

The biggest change, though, for me, was being told I did something wrong all the time.

In the infrastructure world, I didn't hear that often. I wasn't perfect, but ... well, you don't do bi-weekly releases. In the dev world, the biggest challenge for me has been the emotional side of 'bugs.' I'm wired in such a way that every mistake I make feels devastating, and I try very hard to learn from each one, self-flagellating and burning inside. What's become apparent is that is not a helpful approach. I've had to dial it back a bit, and just kinda act like 'it is what it is, now let's fix some shit.'

Of course I still care, but I've toned down my internal reaction. I still learn from it.

What's interesting, too, is that you're not always learning from your own mistakes when fixing bugs. Sometimes, someone made a mistake YEARS ago, and your change just revealed it. That kinda shit actually happens quite often.

The biggest thing, though, and this was good advice from my boss, is really testing the hell outta your own shit before you lob it over to the QA folks. This is where I think I'm focused the most on improving.

And I tell you what, too. I've seen guys learn to staple together various frameworks and call themselves developers (I actually stole that phrasing from a fellow developer and friend), but really learning the craft takes years. I'm at about two and a half now, and I'm only recently really feeling like I can kinda handle the basics of most projects and situations.

It's a fucking great job, though. It's, for me, a perfect balance between logic and art. And my team is just awesome. I love my team, and they tolerate me.

What's amazing is visualizing the solution and then just building it out. People do this kinda shit as games, for fun, and I get PAID to do it. It's awesome.

So, yeah, it took me a while to get here, but I've got years of management and systems administration in my toolset, along with the development experience that I'm building. That'll all coalesce into some kinda super-job at some point, but for now, this gig kicks ass.

If you're even thinking of going into development, just do it. Get the free version of Visual Studio, SQL Server Express, hit up some of the training on Microsoft Virtual Academy, and learn C#. From there, move on to web development in ASP.NET, or maybe game dev, or whatever you want. If I can claw my way into this career, anyone can.

I think the basic lesson, though, is that this is also the hardest job I've had. It's not the worst hours, it's not the harshest conditions, in fact, it's great. But it's really hard. I'm not used to feeling like I'm in over my head, and I'm not used to being humbled, and this job doles that out constantly.

At the same time, it lets me be creative, and if I think I have a better way of doing something, I'm free to just go try it, which is awesome. It may even be the best part.

OK, I'm going on longer than intended. My job has been on my mind lately, and writing about things usually helps me clarify things, which it definitely did today. If you're still reading at this point, thanks for making it this far.

As a side note, I really wish my Cardinals stabilize their fucking pitching. Holy cow. In terms of offense and pitching, this is the opposite team from last season. Crazy.

OK, back to work!

-Blaine

PS - I REALLY miss smoking, but I really don't. Also, fuck bugfix week.