• Game Reviews,  The Lazy Designer

    Minecraft – Everything a RPG Should Not Be

    While RPGs seldom are on the cutting edge of visual quality (unlike shooters) there’s always been a continual player expectation for improved graphics. Over the past decade or so there’s been a push towards realism and a higher visual fidelity — resulting in an escalation of costs to develop large-scale RPG projects. And then a game like Minecraft comes along. Minecraft has dreadful graphics. I know several people who won’t play the game because of the low fidelity ‘art’. Yet clearly, given its impressive sales, there are many more who do not care what the game looks like (or possibly they even play it *because* of the way it looks).…

  • My Life

    Time Travel!

    Well, not really time travel. Sorry. Haven’t got that figured out just yet. But I noticed that David Gaider (you know that writer guy from BioWare that I used to work with) recently posted a discussion of the early days of Dragon Age. I thought some of you might be interested. http://dgaider.tumblr.com/post/76176525033/on-the-early-days-of-dragon-age There’s also a link to his Rules of Naming Things, which I think is worth reading, but I’ll make you dig the link out of his article. In the latest Lazy book, I’ve written a bit about this, but David’s view of the early Dragon Age days is more entertaining than my take. (And for those of you…

  • My Life

    Toys!

    I totally forgot to post some pictures of the toys that the kids got over the holidays. Here’s some highlights: (Does posting pics get me out of needing to actually write a post today? For those who want an update… book 4 of the Lazy Designer is done… I’m just doing some final tweaking and verifying it looks okay.)