Awesome template for a temple or religious order etc.: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/tales-of-r ... awn-ritual
Official Gameplay Reveal Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwdrTLA ... XVyolQO3wj
It looks great, if you can get past the shoehorned Shaniqua. Which I might not be able to.
But if it's really great, I'll probably play it. It's just textures after all, brown people had nothing to do with this game. Sure would love a whitewashing mod though.
October 17.
Awesome, we have a crew! I will make an #alien text channel in the Battlegrounds section of Discord, and you'll all receive the "Alien Crew" Discord role. When the scenario is over, you will lose it so I don't ping you if you're not playing; as long as you keep playing scenarios, you keep the role. If we eventually end up having multiple crews, they'll get "Alien Crew 1", "Alien Crew 2" and so forth.
I also changed the prompt in the scenario page from "JOIN TEAM" to "FOLLOW STORY". No one else can join this scenario now, but they can follow its story if they wish, as if they're watching a movie or TV show, and we'll have summaries/videos/clip highlights etc. for them, with everything of course reflected on the overworld. The entirety of the colony will be explorable from the overworld! You'll be able to zoom in from galactic level all the way down to the freaking basement under the colony! SHOW ME ANY OTHER GAME WHERE THIS IS POSSIBLE. THIS IS THE REAL PLANETARY ANNIHILATION SUCCESSOR. And maybe there will also be planets annihilated here. Just maybe. At some point.
Start reading the rules and available lore in the Player Section I've given you when you can, and post here when you've done a full read-through. There's no great hurry, but I would like to play before the end of June if possible. This will be the FIRST scenario/adventure completed on Battlegrounds, and I can't wait! (As a side note, THIS is the game and adventure we should have started with, and NOT Pathfinder. Everything would have gone so much smoother in that case. Oh well. We did things the icycalm way = the hardest way possible.)
Oh, also only a few of you have so far created a World Anvil account and followed Battlegrounds. Please do this asap because I just locked the rulebook and you won't be able to access it without an account. Also, all other players should do this too as I'll be sharing Pathfinder content exclusively in this manner from now on. Username format should be CULTxusername. I need to see all your names here: https://akbattlegrounds.net/followers
I haven't yet set up the follower permissions, so even those who've made an account and followed won't be able to read the rulebook. I'll fix this probably tomorrow and let you know. Currently, anyone trying to access the rulebook will get the default World Anvil access denied page:
It's from The Fifth Element. Not an especially good movie, but I admit the reference is funny. That's probably the only memorable thing about that movie. And the only good thing coming out of it: for cheeky admins to use it as an access denied page.
I will eventually replace this with a custom Battlegrounds page with cool art and directing people to subscribe if they want access, because eventually I will be making the entire world private. I might even make this forum private too. Insomnia subscribers who don't play with us can get access right now the same way the players can: just make a World Anvil account using your Insomnia username, with or without the clan tag—it's up to you—and "follow" Battlegrounds and I'll give you full access. You're contributing to my game and our world too, after all.
As for Foundry, you don't have to do anything on that front. It's all web-based and you will connect through the browser I will recommend to the web address I will give you. I'll spend the first hour of the session explaining to you how to use the new VTT. This is 2.5D-capable and video-capable, among a ton of other wizardry, so expect much higher production values than Fantasy Grounds! It even integrates Syrinscape, positional audio per character, sounds triggered by actions, just a shitton of cool stuff (though don't expect ALL of it to be set up from the very first session; it will take me months to add it all). In fact, this will be Cult Engine 3, and I will launch it later this month with also much more added content. Within a few weeks there'll be so much content in the game, you won't believe what you're seeing. THIS IS THE REAL METAVERSE. NOT EVEN STAR CITIZEN CAN DO THIS.
Foundry Virtual Tabletop - Anniversary Overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuyzLlk_QQQ
A Foundry trailer to get you hyped! It should be a treat for all of us, and especially 4K users. It's a 2-year-old trailer though, and the engine can do a HELL of a lot more today.
Oh and I almost forgot, World Anvil has Alien integration that we'll be using!
https://blog.worldanvil.com/announcemen ... orld-anvil
World Anvil wrote:
For all horror fans out there, World Anvil now has an Alien RPG character sheet, completely integrated with our character and campaign manager! Whether you're looking for a campaign manager to plan and play your Alien RPG campaign or a character manager to keep your Alien PC organized, updated, and awesome, you've come to the right place!
That page includes instructions on how to set up your Alien character in your World Anvil account. You then sign up the character for my game, and voila: you're in my game! And you can do this with your Pathfinder character(s) too, so you can have all your characters, past and present, in your account.
However, don't do this yet because I am not sure I want to handle it this way. Remember we lost 2 players recently, and the separation wasn't amicable. Thankfully I hadn't invested much in them, so we didn't lose anything, but I can see at some point in the future someone storming off and taking all his characters with him and screwing my game over. So I want to see if it's possible to create all characters in my account, and just give editing permissions to their players. I'll look into this soon and get back to you.
But the point is that we'll get ALL your characters from all settings and campaigns into the overworld! You'll even be able to move them around! And you'll have all their stats and even inventories available 24/7! We'll facilitate this by stopping each session 10 minutes earlier so that every player can update his character on World Anvil. Eventually, this duplicate work will be phased out when we move entirely to Menyr that fuses VTT + overworld, but this is at least a year or two out, and even then it won't do much for the Fantasy Grounds or Foundry content. We'll still have to copy stuff over from those engines to Menyr. Unless someone builds an importer, I guess. There's already something along those lines between Foundry and World Anvil, but I think it only handles journal entries and not characters. So it might help me with transferring content from the Foundry scenarios to the overworld, we'll see, but it won't do anything for the necessary duplication of character data. But the effort will be worth it, I assure you. You'll see how much more immersive it will be having ALL the characters moving around the overworld, and their full stats and inventories accessible 24/7. Their homes, their whole bloodlines even (World Anvil has bloodlines as well as timelines, and organization charts, alliance webs, etc.)
And I left the best for last!
On top of the 5 players and 1 GM we'll have at hand for this scenario, for a total of 6 people—the most we've ever had roleplaying in a voice channel at the same time!—we can also have as many more people as are available to play as NPCs, or even perhaps as... aliens! HOW IS IT POSSIBURU, you ask? It's possiburu with the power of Ultimate Edition! Check the relevant chapter to freshen up:
GM Assistants: Combat Narrators & NPC Actors
https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7391
So we could have 7, 8, 9 people all in the same voice channel roleplaying! It will be wild! And of course the assistants don't have to pay for DLC, if anything I should be paying them, though I won't because I'd rather get more SC ships.
So once we have a date, I'll ping everyone on Discord and see if any other players are available and willing to drop by and help us out in creating a more immersive experience together. I'll give them role options, they might even be able to manage combat for me if the system is tactical enough, I'll have to look into that. And I don't yet know how many NPCs there are, or even if there are NPCs at all in this scenario. But there will definitely be in future ones, so anyone who wants to directly experience Foundry and Alien will be able to do so, as long as they're willing to give me a hand.
This option will be especially helpful to aspiring GMs. At first you will add to my workload because I'll have to manage you on top of everything else, but the goal is for you to eventually reduce my workload by smoothly handling your assigned NPC(s) or creature(s), and ultimately even add flavor to the game with your unique interpretation and playacting of these entities. It will be the first step towards me eventually trusting you with more responsibility in the Battlegrounds. If I see you're doing well, I'll give you more things to do, until some day I'll let you handle the entire session while I take a break and go surfing. That is the end goal for those who're interested in GMing, and that is how to begin on that path—and the DLC will be the perfect venue for it since it'll be simpler than Pathfinder et al. both in terms of rules and adventures.
I'd like to join.
I'm down to play.
recoil wrote:
this is the best DLC I've ever seen in gaming.
lol recoil knows what's up. What's even crazier is that I haven't yet unveiled the best I got. I will soon though and it will floor you.
Regarding the Alien scenarios (btw scenario is the sci-fi equivalent term of adventure), the books say that they are written for 3-5 players. But they also say that if you have fewer than 5, the GM is supposed to play the extra characters as NPCs. One dumb GM on Reddit played Hope's Last Day without all the pregen characters and they left out the person with the motion tracker and his group got savaged.
I don't want to run any characters myself as I'll have my hands full running the new rule system AND the new-for-us Foundry VTT, and the game will be much more fun with a full team, so we'll only be playing Alien scenarios when we can get a full team.
Note that you don't have to raise your monthly pledge to play in this, you can just send me $50 via XMR, and I believe that, even though it's only 2 hours of gaming (though it'll probably be closer to 4 for us, since we'll be learning everything), it should be some of the best 2 hours in gaming you'll ever have.
It's also possible that it'll be way more than 2-4 hours if I decide to add material that several GMs have published for this scenario on Reddit and the official Alien RPG forum. One of them even devised a follow-up scenario. I still haven't checked out the unofficial stuff, I am just cataloguing it for the time being. I'll check it out after I have read the core rules and the official scenario in full, and know what I am dealing with.
The pregens will be given out on a first-come first-served basis. There are exactly 5 of them, and ysignal will pick first, then recoil etc. This is how we'll handle pregens for all adventures and settings, not only DLC. There are huge differences between characters, so it'll be beneficial to be able to choose first, and that should hopefully motivate people to start threads and join teams asap once scenarios are unlocked.
P.S. I edited ysignal's opening post to add image and link. Always do that when you start a team-forming thread, using imgur.com to host the image. Also, I have now updated the overworld entry for Hope's Last Day so that instead of saying FORM TEAM it says JOIN TEAM and links to this thread.
Inside Star Citizen: Arena Reborn Part One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji6qE9gy_gs
Yep, I'm up for this too.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... ay-31-2023
CIG Community Team wrote:
The following cards have been added to the Alpha 3.20 column on Release View:
Arena Commander: Frontend Update
Replacement of the current Electronic Access Frontend. This makes switching modes, vehicles, loadouts, as well as creating lobbies, a more fluid experience, as well as giving developers the tools to adjust features and create new ones more easily.
Arena Commander: New Racetracks
Test your racing prowess in Euterpe Icebreaker, Miners Lament, The Snake Pit and Yadar Valley as some of the first persistent universe locations enter Arena Commander, alongside Halloran Circuit, a brand new racetrack on the New Horizon Speedway.
Arena Commander: New Horizon Speedway Rework
One of Star Citizen’s oldest locations gets its long-awaited update. The three Murray Cup Racetracks hosted in the New Horizon Speedway have had their tracks improved and location moved to the holiday resort planet, Green, the 3rd planet of the Ellis System.
Arena Commander: New Dogfighting Map - Jericho Station
Stanton's INS Jericho debuts as the newest location for all dogfighting game modes in Arena Commander. This true zero-g open space environment has players face off with few distractions and high performance in the lightest of all our maps.
Arena Commander: New Elimination Map - Echo11
The FPS map Echo11, previously exclusive to the game mode Control, has a new variant tailored for Elimination.
Arena Commander: New Map - Security Post Kareah
One of the new additions to Arena Commander from the Persistent Universe, Security Post Kareah will host all Arena Commander game modes, both FPS and Dogfighting (except for Classic Race).
Arena Commander: New Dogfighting Map - Winner's Circle
Alongside the reworked New Horizon Speedway Maps comes a long-requested atmospheric map for dogfighting modes. Battle in the earth-like atmosphere above the beautiful planet Green, the 3rd planet of the Ellis System.
Arena Commander: Experimental Game Modes
These limited-time game modes range from simple twists on current modes to entirely new modes. This initiative will not only allow rapid iteration of game modes to be put in players' hands faster, but also allow all teams to gather vital analytic data for specific activities, equipment, vehicles, and in-development features.
Right after ILW ended, CIG increased the prices of the Avenger Titan, Cutlass Black and Vanguard Hoplite. This means that if you had bought Warbond CCUs from these ships during ILW (e.g. Cutlass Black to Nova or Vanguard Hoplite to Mercury), but didn't own the CCUs to these ships, your Warbond savings were reduced or nullified. After CCU gamers started placing refund requests, CIG decided to revert the prices until June 27th. If you own any of these Warbond CCUs, make sure you own the previous CCU in the chain (e.g. Gladius to Cutlass Black) before that date if you want to lock in your savings. Now, it's not that big a deal—just a few bucks—but optimizing your chains with a bunch of small savings leading to big savings is the whole point, and what makes this minigame fun.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spec ... se/6002096
Zyloh-CIG wrote:
In the past we've shared that the team regularly reviews the value of offerings and may make price adjustments based on their findings. In this case, the Avenger Titan, Cutlass Black, and Vanguard Hoplite were adjusted (+5, +10, and +5). We certainly prefer providing advance notice, as we have recently done for the
Anvil Hurricane, and we fully intend to continue this practice in the future. For the time being, we're going to revert these prices until June 27th to provide a proper grace period.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... t/jmex15i/
CaptainZyloh wrote:
There will be an opportunity to acquire the Hoplite ahead of the change.
I also wanted to share a few mistakes I've made. The first one I already sort of touched on before, but you want to avoid getting a CCU from a concept ship, else it will end up having negative value if you hold on to it for too long and the ship goes up in price when it goes into production or becomes flight ready. I bought a CCU from the Vulcan a few months back, and I'm hoping I can finish the chains that contain it before it goes up in price. At least I bought the CCU to it during ILW, so if it does go up in price, I'll have two broken chains (not technically broken, but with negative value CCUs in them, which I will melt), but also higher potential savings overall. The second mistake was not buying more CCUs to concept ships. Even if you don't necessarily want that ship, that $5 or $10 CCU could turn into a lot more down the line. Though not all concept ships can be CCUed to I think, at least the expensive ones. Another mistake I made before ILW was not getting CCUs to time-limited ships in my chains, even if non-Warbond. I have a few chains missing a Razor CCU, which I think was available not too long ago, and now I'm left hoping it will come back soon. To be fair, I didn't actually have chains back then, only a collection of random CCUs, and during ILW I did make sure to get the non-Warbond time-limited CCUs I needed.
Bought another Fury and Fury MX with cash.
I'll be around to throw down during the weekend.
I'm down to play, this is the best DLC I've ever seen in gaming.
https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... ea4a3689e6
I'm looking for teammates for the Hope's Last Day scenario for the Alien RPG. We need 5 players in total to start.
Already bought a copy so count me in!
Why don’t brown people play more videogames?
Because they are busy fighting in the streets FOR REALS.
They don’t have time for videogames any more than dogs do. That’s why dogs don’t play videogames, whereas whites and yellows do play videogames where they control dogs.
Get it?
Videogames are for civilized people, not for brutes.
To condense my view on this, so that my rage may be better understood: brown people were neither the creators of this game or the technology powering it, nor its main audience. Why, then, do they infest its trailer pretending this is their culture? Street fighting IS their culture, but it is also the culture of dogs, and I don’t see any dogs in the trailer. In fact there shouldn’t be any browns at all in the trailer, or at most there should be a token brown for variety’s sake—purely as an aesthetic choice—like in the old days.
And then we have this truly disgusting black man who seems to be some kind of celebrity telling us that fighting is an ART—because the White man who wrote the script told him to say this. But fighting is a skill, not an art (otherwise swimming would be an art too and the word would lose all meaning), and the black celebrity comes off as even stupider than he is when he spouts that.
But the most stunning realization of all is that, ultimately, brown people DID end up contributing something to this artwork, by SHITTING UP its trailer. That was their contribution here: the customary ugliness and stupidity that covers everything they are allowed to touch.
We could have had a cool launch trailer, an exciting trailer, a beautiful and memorable trailer. We could have had an ARTISTIC trailer, since trailers are themselves works of art.
And then someone decided to hire browns.
Humble has all editions for 17% off, so I am refunding on Steam and grabbing the Ultimate Edition: https://www.humblebundle.com
I think the discount is only because I am subbed to their Humble Choice monthly bundle.
Edit: Yep, that's the reason, and if I'd been subbed for 12 months or more it'd be 20% off.
I've picked up a copy, will give it a quick try soon. Definitely want to see what the deal is with the adventure mode.
Street Fighter 6 - Launch Trailer (ft. Lil Wayne)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMjexQW4_d0
The acme of brownwashing.
The entire trailer is drenched in browns.
I am going to be brutal here, so stop reading if you think you'll have an issue with that.
I suppose it's fitting that a fighting game would be promoted by a whole cadre of browns, since hitting people is the only activity they're truly interested in. Even more fitting that it's a 2D game, since their crude prehistoric brains struggle to parse three dimensions.
But it's still misleading to show them dominating this scene. brown people didn't make this game: yellow people did. And Whites made the technology that powers it. brown people couldn't design so much as this game's LOGO, let alone anything else in it. This game is an orgy of aesthetic taste and advanced game design, and not in a thousand years would a bunch of brown people get anywhere near developing it. Hell they can barely even play it, as can be seen by breaking down the demographics that buy this game.
And yet they flood our fucking trailer with their faces as if they own the thing. They pose, they preen, they prance, they huff and puff in front of our cameras—and it's disgusting, and someone had to say it, and I just did.
Take the money the japs are offering you to pose in front of their artistic labor, but don't think for a moment that we don't understand what giant fucking grifters you are, and how much of a threat you represent with your crude ugly tastes not only to art, but to all of civilization.
On the positive side, at least in this game it makes SENSE to show brown people playing it, since this is, after all, their favorite genre, but when I see them in freakin' STAR CITIZEN trailers, or worse yet, in GAME MASTER ROLEPLAYING trailers, THAT's when I lose my fucking shit.
So this just came out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1364 ... _Fighter_6
Games thread: https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7641
It was apparently released at midnight UTC, which I have never seen before. Very cool.
I was planning to play this and Diablo 4 in June, but given how D4 turned out, I am happy to just focus on SF6.
Another interesting thing Capcom is trying with this game is charging twice the amount for extra stages lol. Even the Deluxe Edition won't get you the stages, from what I can see, you need the Ultimate Edition for €105 just for 2 extra stages lol. Moreover, the Ultimate Edition isn't much savings over the base game + Ultimate Pass, which comes out to €110. You're just saving €5 by buying the Ultimate Edition, so you may as well just play the base game, and if you like it enough, you upgrade later. Which will of course give you 4 extra characters down the line in addition to the 2 stages. In short, they've made the Deluxe Edition a bad deal, and super-incentivized everyone to pay double price on this game. Great tactic if you have a great game, not so great if you don't.
Please post here first if you want to play this with us. Don't just walk into a voice channel before doing this. I want the site to show activity in the Online forum as well as all others.
This game seems meant to finally put the street in Street Fighter, as there's a mode where you walk around the streets and pick fights with people? Not sure how that works, but I've been waiting for this for decades; at least ever since Suzuki failed to put good fighting in Shenmue, which had been billed as Virtua Fighter RPG, for those who remember that far back. SF6 won't be SF RPG, but walking the streets with your chosen character is certainly a start, and I want to check that out and support it. Maybe they'll go even further with SF7, who knows.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is Shenmue IV from these pics. It even has arcade machines! but... they just seem to be running SF6 lol. Capcom has a lot to learn about high-immersion gaming.
I'll hop on and give it a try as soon as I've had some more sleep. I am exhausted from pumping out the Battlegrounds update; the mere patch notes took half a day to write, and that was on top of a couple of days with barely any sleep. SF6 will be my minigame distraction while I recuperate. I am hoping it is good.
Hello all! Two and a half years after the release of Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 1.0 I am ecstatic to announce that Alpha 2.0 is Live! Ushering a new era of complexity and fidelity via the power of Cult Engine 2 and its revolutionary dual InfiniZoom/InfiniScreen technologies, among much more new functionality and content, Alpha 2.0 is the direct result of your continued support and—if you're playing the game—your patience. So please check the voluminous patch notes posted below, and look out for more update announcements in June and throughout the summer as Alpha 2.0 was a major tech blocker whose implementation has opened the floodgates for an unprecedented amount of content. No other game can boast such quick and gargantuan content updates as Battlegrounds can, and the industry will be finding that out very, very soon. Thank you!
FEATURES
- Upgrade to Cult Engine 2 (internal codename: World Anvil) by Cult Games London brings the greatest and most versatile overworld ever in the history of gaming to the Battlegrounds
- InfiniZoom technology unique to Battlegrounds: Zoom in from cosmic level to the center of a star or planet, and down into the subatomic level, and even across time itself and alternate dimensions; then zoom back out again, all in-game, in-engine (even Star Citizen can't do this)
- InfiniScreen technology unique to Battlegrounds: Use any number of displays (e.g. adventure screen, overworld screen, lore codex, and rules reference) to immerse yourself deeper into the metaverse, all rendered entirely in-game, in-engine (no other videogame can do this, least of all CRPGs; Supreme Commander can do a mere 2 screens and Planetary Annihilation can do 3 with mods)
- akbattlegrounds.net functional (optimal at 4K)
- Video integration up to 8K
- PDF integration: All books and printed matter shared and accessible directly in-game, in-engine
- Mobile integration: Get overworld updates delivered to your phone in real-time
- First ever gaming universe that can be followed 24/7 online by non-players as a TV show
- New rule system: Alien: The Roleplaying Game by Cult Games Stockholm
- New setting: Stars of the Middle Heavens by Cult Games Stockholm
- New scenarios: Hope's Last Day, Chariot of the Gods by Cult Games Stockholm
- New race: Synthetic
- New classes: Colonial Marine, Colonial Marshal, Company Agent, Kid, Medic, Officer, Pilot, Roughneck, Scientist
- New vehicles and gear including multiple spacecraft
- 116-minute Ridley Scott-directed cutscene intro to the new setting (viewable in-game, in-engine in a world-historic first for videogames, not even in Star Citizen can you do this), produced specifically for the Battlegrounds by Cult Cutscenes studios
- New lore videos: Nüwa City, First 10,000 Days On The Moon lore videos produced by new lore-focused studio, Cult Videos
- Enhanced crowdfunding features to support continued growth: DLC and blockchain integration, plus two new subscription tiers: Roleplayer for full DLC access, and Game Master for bringing entire groups into the Battlegrounds at a discount
- Producers and Executive Producers sought
- Roadmap published charting path to full release
- Corporate acquisitions: Several studios bought and integrated into Cult Holding Co., chief among them Cult Games Portland focusing on next-level theater-of-the-mind features, and Cult Games Paris rebuilding Cult Engine from scratch to achieve full first-person real-time and VR capabilities as well as full-3D next-level overworld with music and video and even automated worldbuilding features
- Fully remote-working virtual studio formed: Cult Games Cloud personally headed by icycalm to produce next-level adventures and campaigns fully utilizing the power of 3D VTTs for mass-scale warfare and millimeter-detail city-building alongside deep adaptive roleplaying, with Alex Kierkegaard's West Marches the first planned release
- Development forum opened (attached to industry-leading critical and theoretical journal Insomnia) to bring the reality of the complexity of Cult Games' operations to the public
- Web domain purchased (cultgames.dev) to finally bring the biggest game developer ever (20+ major studios and counting) out of the shadows
- Tagline finalized: The Ultimate Roleplaying Metaverse
- Longest and most detailed patch notes in the entire history of patch notes
PROJECT HISTORY
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 1.0: Fantasy Grounds DECEMBER 2020 (GOTY 2020)
Alex Kierkegaard's Ultimate Edition APRIL 2022 (GOTY 2022)
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0: World Anvil JUNE 2023
ROADMAP
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 3.0: Foundry JUNE
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 3.5: Pathfinder Society EARLY JULY
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 4.0: TaleSpire West Marches AUGUST (GOTY 2023)
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 5.0: Alchemy SEPTEMBER
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 6.0: Menyr EARLY 2024 (GOTY 2024)
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 7.0: Menyr Codex MIDDLE 2024
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Beta: Menyr Virtual Reality LATE 2024
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds 1.0 EARLY 2025
NOTES
I know you want the link to access the new content, but there is a problem with that. For reasons yet to be determined, the site works very, very, very... slowly. So slowly that it takes a good 20 seconds to respond to any click or even mouse-over. This means that if I give you the link, and you go straightaway, you won't see what I intend you to see. You'll keep clicking everywhere and wondering why half the content seems to be missing.
But nothing is missing. You just have to wait at least 20 seconds (can be up to 30 sometimes) after every time you click on anything, or even merely hover over anything. And then you'll see what I intend you to see.
I can't tell you how frustrating this is to me, not because the slow loading bothers me too much personally—I have infinite patience to spend on this game—but because I know many people won't have that patience, and as a result they won't see what I want them to see. At any rate I have multiple backend engineers working on this, and we might get a solution soon. If we don't, the ultimate solution is a move to dedicated servers, which is expensive. I do plan for this when Cult Engine is upgraded to VR, but that's a year or two out. In the meantime we might just have to live with these slow speeds, unless my engineers can work a miracle. We'll see.
So let me present to you the new engine and overworld here, pictorially, before I give you the link so you can check it out yourselves. This way, I can be assured that, on your first contact with the new features, you'll see what I want you to see.
Frontpage of the game at 4K. If you're running it at 1080p, zoom out with your browser to 50% to see what you should be seeing.
It will take a full 30 seconds for the Alien RPG cover to appear at the bottom-right. When it does, click on it, then wait another full 30 seconds for the next screen to appear.
The start screen of the Alien RPG at 1080p. If you're running it at 4K, zoom in with your browser to 150%, otherwise it won't look as good as what I am showing you here.
In short, the main site is made to look best at 4K, but the overworld is made for best results at 1080p. It's not possible to optimize for both resolutions with our current tech. So for now, we'll stick to this dual strategy. Eventually, everyone will be running 4K, plus engine upgrades will allow us to optimize for various resolutions. Until then, your browser's zoom function is your friend.
Next, click on "Press Start" and wait for 30 secs (you can also hover over "Press Start" to get the same info, but it's best to click so as to see the content expanded on the sidebar in its full glory).
The window that appears on the left contains all the info that you need to evaluate if you want to play in the Alien RPG setting. Scroll down to see all the details including the trailer, links to full reviews, a discussion thread, and even a link to the 201-page Player Section of the core rulebook readable on the site in its entirety!
At this point you might be wondering if this is legal, and indeed it is as long as I am sharing my books with my players. What is not legal is putting them up on the public internet, which is why right after publishing these notes I will make that section private, and all the players will have to register accounts to be given reading privileges. If you are a player, please make your account asap on http://www.worldanvil.com in the format CULTxusername and "follow" Battlegrounds and you'll be given the appropriate permissions pronto.
Note that different browsers render the PDF reader differently. Firefox's version is ugly, but the interface works well. Opera's is beautiful but the interface is lacking. I haven't tested more browsers, maybe there is one that's both beautiful and functional. At any rate, you can always just download the file (there's a button for that) and use any PDF reader you want. But I think it's especially cool if you can make it work on the site, with the cool header and background and whatnot. And remember, you can use a second display for this.
A lot more work is going into these PDFs than you would think. That 201-page Player Section for the Alien RPG had to be carved out of the 392-page core rulebook, then several spoilery pages from within the Player Section had to be removed, and finally I blanked out half a page of contents so you wouldn't be exposed to the titles of the GM sections of the book, like for example this section on scenario design:
It's not spoilery in the strict sense of the term, as it doesn't give out any specific scenario plot points, but it does something perhaps worse: it reveals how ALL official scenarios have been designed, something which you'd have more fun discovering for yourself by playing the game. And yes I am spoiling this now to make a bigger point, but don't worry: it's just one ruleset/setting among countless we will use. You'll have plenty to discover in my metaverse: more than in any other game ever. But understand the amount of work I am putting into producing these PDFs you will be reading in the game. It is a lot of fucking work. (P.S. Expect similarly edited versions of the Pathfinder First Edition "Core Rulebook" etc. to be uploaded soon, at which point all players should ditch the PDFs they're now using and switch over.)
Now go back to the main Alien RPG page and click on "ENTER ALIEN". You will arrive here (after waiting 20-30 secs, as aforesaid):
This is the main navigation hub for the Alien RPG setting, titled "Stars of the Middle Heavens". Lots of things to click on there already, as you can see: Explications for the various major regions and factions, solar systems of note, space stations, and even a (currently locked) scenario which comes with its intro text, mini-reviews, and even music to listen to so as to get you in the mood! Moreover, there are arrows you can click on to zoom down to specific systems, all the way down to the surface of a moon! Which moon, by the way, hosts the one scenario that is available for play right now. To play it, click on the link titled "FORM TEAM" in its description, which will take you to the forum where you must start a thread to look for teammates to tackle this scenario (you need 5 players in all). When a full team has been formed, I take over the thread and we begin play!
You could easily spend a full day digesting all the content already on the site. The Alien rules themselves can take you half a day, and there are a couple lore videos to watch on top of Ridley Scott's feature-length intro cutscene, plus maybe an hour of music to listen to while you peruse the maps and sights. Not bad for day 1 content, before we've even properly begun! There's even a hint somewhere about what the next content drop will be, if you can find it. Not hard to find right now, but hints like this will multiply, and as the world grows bigger and more complex, I expect most players and viewers to miss a hell of a lot of stuff! But that's part of the game too, and it's up to each individual to decide how deeply they want to be immersed into the deepest metaverse ever.
For those who want maximal immersion, with real-time updates even, I created the #metaverse text channel on Discord. This is a feed that's linked with the game via Discord webhook integration and will deliver updates every time a new article is created, or an existing one updated. This way you'll never miss an update if you don't want to. Or if you take some time off and miss a bunch, you'll be able to catch up easily on your return. In addition, I've split off the #roleplaying channel into an additional channel called #battlegrounds, so there are now 3 update channels:
- #roleplaying for news on the GMRPG scene in general, new products, articles, discussions, etc. (aka "industry")
- #battlegrounds for Ultimate Edition updates, plus Battlegrounds campaign news and so on (aka "mechanics")
- #metaverse for codex and overworld updates (aka "lore")
The absolute MINIMUM required for players to follow is THEIR PERSONAL CAMPAIGN(S)' THREAD(S). That's all you need to play, everything else we'll fill you in on when required. But you have to know what the hell is happening with your campaign. Beyond that, Insomnia will essentially produce an infinity of content for you to follow to your heart's content.
By this point you might be wondering why the first content on the overworld is Alien, which we don't even play, instead of Pathfinder, which we do.
The answer is that Alien is so new, and has so little content, that I was able to add EVERYTHING to the game, making that part of my multiverse COMPLETE AND COMPREHENSIVE. And not only that, but I've even programmed in all the material for the first scenario, meaning that as you play (in Foundry), content will be revealed on the overworld (in World Anvil) in real-time, and you'll be able to alt-tab back and forth between the two for the full Battlegrounds experience as I have been envisioning it. We're not just talking about maps here, we're talking every single character you meet or hear about, every organization, creature, rumor and piece of gear, all of it preprogrammed on the overworld and codex, ready for you to discover it in real-time as you play.
I tried to do this with Pathfinder; I've been trying for YEARS now to do this, and failing. There's just TOO MUCH CONTENT for Pathfinder to be able to do this; every single piece of content you add connects to a thousand others, and you never get to the bottom of anything, once you have started adding stuff. Which means I CAN'T produce a COMPREHENSIVE experience in that setting and ruleset, there'll always be stuff missing, "to be added later", and so on; even if I had only ONE campaign to run. How much more so when I have four! That's why it's taken me forever to launch the overworld: I've been trying to do the impossible, until one day a couple weeks ago I gave up and changed tack. By focusing on such a new setting as Alien, I was able to at last program the full icycalm Battlegrounds experience that I've been dreaming of and spouting about for years to anyone who would listen. It was with THIS level of completeness that I wanted to launch the overworld, and not with something incomplete and halfassed. And now that I've launched this, I can relax and start publishing Pathfinder content without the pressure of chasing "the perfect launch" on my shoulders. So you should see Pathfinder content go up starting in a couple of weeks from now, once I've recuperated from the immense effort needed to get here (I've barely slept in two weeks; I've barely even washed).
Those of you who've been following development for a while will remember another old policy that I am sort-of trashing now: the demand to unlock every new setting from within the game. This still holds for the major settings: Pathfinder Second Edition/Season for example must be unlocked by finishing the First Edition/Season. The D&D worlds can only be accessed via Spelljammer, and Starfinder via the Iron Gods campaign, and Call of Cthulhu via Strange Aeons. But it would make no sense for Pathfinder characters (or Starfinder characters for that matter) to unlock the Alien setting. The Alien scenarios have been made with fragile humans in mind, regular joes with no superpowers, most of whose fate is to be eviscerated by the titular aliens. You're not supposed to be able to fight back here—with some exceptions, in Colonial Marines scenarios, but even there, it's no shoot 'em up. So a Path/Starfinder party showing up and wiping the aliens out would kill the game. The 'finder games are categorized as "heroic fantasy", while Alien is hard sci-fi horror. To enjoy the Alien scenarios to their full potential, only regular human characters will do. So you can't unlock this setting, it must be unlocked from the start (with your wallet! more on which in a moment!), and you just jump into its short and snappy 50-page scenarios whenever you feel like you need a break from the monstrous 600-page Pathfinder campaigns with a 20,000-page metaplot hanging in the balance of every action you take!
Which brings me to the new Battlegrounds mode that I am launching today: Battlegrounds DLC. It's DLC because I am spending an arm and a leg on this stuff, and the current subscription income in no way covers it.
This is just for the Alien RPG, and I'll be adding a new setting every month. In fact June will see two of them, because I was planning to launch in May, but got delayed, so the June setting will still be going live towards the end of the month.
Other major recent expenses were €999 to upgrade my Menyr Kickstarter pledge to the highest tier (which will give us, among other things, unlimited beta player seats, instead of the mere one I had before):
(Alright, I admit it: I just want my face as a marble bust in our lobby. Keep in mind only 40 of these rewards are given out in the entire world, and now I got one. Money well spent in my book.)
And not to forget the $500 I just dropped on the top tier of the Alchemy Kickstarter so that we can play many of these smaller settings in the most cutting-edge theater-of-the-mind VTT that's coming out in September:
Learn more about Alchemy here, it's a godsend for many of the smaller GMRPGs that will be featured in Battlegrounds DLC: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alchemyrpg/alchemy-rpg-a-reimagined-vtt-experience
The above btw merely scratches the surface of the kind of money I am dropping on this. The mere ARROW ICONS on the overworld, the up and down icons, cost me $40 on a site that just does icons:
I couldn't just google "arrow icons" and use random stuff. The icons I picked are specifically sci-fi-themed and match perfectly the Alien setting. I spent half a freakin' day looking for them, then another half a day processing them so as to fit them in with the existing World Anvil icons. I'll probably be spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on hundreds if not thousands of icons to build up this ridiculous overworld over the next few years, and someone has to pay for all that. And it certainly can't be me, because I can't afford it.
In the early days I used to keep a record of all the expenses I was incurring for the game, with the intention of eventually publishing it, but past a certain point I lost track, and now I am just hemorrhaging money on a regular basis on a myriad little and not-so-little things, and I don't even want to think of an accounting as it could get scary. I am definitely spending more than I am taking in, and I've been relying on crypto winnings to make up the difference. But I've no idea for how long I can keep this up. As long as the market treats me well, I suppose.
And I haven't even talked about the big costs yet. When Menyr comes out, that's $250/month just for the server. I.e. what 10 out of the current 17 players are paying per month. Going just for server costs.
Keep in mind that current players are only paying $25/month for Battlegrounds. The other $25 is for access to my sites, the clan etc. This, as I recently realized, is comically underpriced for the professional GM market. Take a look at the kind of prices pro GMs are charging: https://startplaying.games/game/bladeru ... ric-dreams
She's charging $20 PER SESSION, with some sessions being a mere THREE HOURS, while I charge $25 PER MONTH, with many sessions being up to TEN HOURS. Just check our YouTube, we have sessions that routinely run to 8 or 9 or even 10 hours. For that one session you would have paid 50 dollars to play with HER. Instead you pay $25 for at least TWO of those sessions a month with ME, in MY world, with multiple other teams possibly interacting with you. One of my sessions counts like two or even three of other GMs'. In fact I don't think I've ever stopped a session myself in the 200+ hours we've played, it's always a player who says "Let's wrap it up, I have to go". Quite possibly we'd go for half a day if no one ever called time. And I am not even charging by the hour! And I am even paying for a lot of the materials out of my own pocket! That freak's not even spending any money on World Anvil subs, or Hero Forge minis or anything. She's making hundreds of dollars running a single adventure that cost her $20, and she butchers the whole thing too, I have no doubt. And that's more or less every professional GM.
Meanwhile, on top of the insane workload I put on myself, I have to scratch my head and figure out how to come up with the $250/month that my Menyr server will cost so we can roleplay in VR on the best hardware. The other GMs don't even know that a VR VTT is coming! You think they will know how to use it once it arrives?
"But icy you don't need a dedicated server, you can just run the server on your computer."
Yes, but then the overworld and codex wouldn't be online 24/7, thus it wouldn't feel like a metaverse to me. I want to do this right, I want to do this at the maximum possible level that current technology allows, and that means a dedicated server is a must! And I can't afford it right now, which is why when we were done with the Planetary Annihilation events and Ciaróg stopped backing the server (he was paying for almost all of it for a full year), I had to give it up. But I will need to bring it back in about a year, and then I can never give it up again as long as I am running the game. And I want to be running the game forever!
The only game with exclusive multihour Ridley Scott-directed cutscenes is "Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0"
Merely for Hero Forge miniatures I've spent $300 in the last couple of months. And I'll be spending even more for custom-made boards. No one has even seen any of this yet. And no one will ever see any of it unless I can find a way to sustain this level of expenditures, because I am not going to launch something that I will be forced to shut down a couple of months later. So my solution to this problem is DLC.
Ultimately, once it had dawned on me just how much money would be needed to deliver this project to the level that I want to, I took a long hard look at what Star Citizen has been doing, because it's basically the same game with mine, the same genre at any rate: a metaverse game. And CIG too have the same issue with me: that the game costs an insane amount of money, while very few people are interested in it. Star Citizen has only sold about 1.5 million copies, which for modern gaming is a pittance. And these 1.5 million players have to somehow sustain no fewer than FIVE gaming studios totaling nearly 1,000 employees for a decade and more! So how did Chris Roberts solve this problem? He solved it by leaning on his wealthiest and most passionate players to pull not only their own weight, but everyone else's too. These aren't broke F2P Fortnite players who are supporting this game: these are middle aged professionals with prestigious jobs and financial investments who don't balk at spending a couple thousand dollars on spaceships that MAY AS WELL be literal given how absurdly detailed they are. And it is THEY who are funding the game, not the dude who paid $45 for it. In fact, the dude who paid $45 is being subsidized by the rich dudes, even though he has no clue of it, and, quite possibly, even detests them (calling them "whales" etc.; the well-known tired slurs).
So let me do a quick detour here to explain to you how the Star Citizen crowdfunding model works: the most successful such model yet. The problem with supporting a project as ambitious as Star Citizen is that, as a supporter, you have no idea what kind of support is needed, and you need some GUIDERAILS to guide you. Imagine for a second that Chris wasn't charging for the ships or anything else. Imagine that every item and perk in the game was available to earn inside the game, and nothing was offered outside. After all, that was the original vision, and that's how games have traditionally worked before the modern era, including all of Chris's older games. So imagine he comes out and says, "Look, I am only going to charge you $45 for the game, but please donate more because otherwise the game will have poor features and low fidelity. The more you donate, the better I can make the game!"
But then... how would I figure out how much to donate? Would $500 do the trick? Would $1,000? Should I send half my paycheck every month to him? Should I mortgage my house?
Exploring the 22nd-century Sol System in "Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0"
The worst part is that I wouldn't be able to see any direct correlation between my donations and the improvements in the game caused by them. It's not as if doubling my donation would produce any discernible change in the game due to it. So I would get no feedback.
IN SUCH A SITUATION, HUMAN BEINGS ARE GENERALLY PRIMED TO CONTRIBUTE THE MINIMUM POSSIBLE, which in this case is the $45 cost of the game. Human beings are goal-oriented, and we need to feel that we're accomplishing something in order to feel good about ourselves and our actions. If I can't tell the difference between donating $100 or $200, my brain basically tells me to donate nothing, because it feels I am not getting anything back. There ARE some people whose brains are wired differently than this, and God bless them because several of them have supported me for years on Patreon with outsized donations without seeing anything extra back for their support, and this support has been vital to me. But in general, people don't function this way (I certainly don't), and our reptile brains need constant incentives to urge us to open our wallets further and unleash the FULL extent of the support that we are capable of, and that we WANT to give.
Which is where Star Citizen ship sales come in, exclusivity windows, wipe protection and the like. Now I know EXACTLY what $40 more is getting me for my money! I still don't know what difference my money is making to the game's development, and I can never know that because it's too much data for a 1,000-person company to share in detail with the public (not to mention that even they themselves don't know what $40 more contributes to the game...), but it doesn't matter to me as long as I can see the game improving every month and week and almost every day! As long as the game is growing, that's all I need to know to rest assured that my money is being put to good use, and beyond that I am incentivized to spend on the game as much as I can afford by the construction of an elaborate program of rewards—the most elaborate in the history of gaming, with moreover the very best rewards! And THAT'S why I've spent upwards of $1,000 on Star Citizen since the start of the year, and closer to $2,000 since last summer, when I started playing. I would never in a million years have donated all this money to Chris for no rewards, EVEN IF ALL THE REWARDS WERE EARNABLE IN THE GAME BY DEFAULT with no exclusivity periods and the like. And yes, this behavior MAKES ZERO SENSE, which is why Chris is forced to hire marketing psychologists to figure out how to extract the maximum amount of funding from his playerbase using every FOMO-inducing dirty trick in the book that no other game dares to use. He's not doing it because he's evil, he's doing it because there's no Star Citizen without this, and certainly no $600-million Star Citizen metaverse with millimeter-detail and astonishing depth of aesthetics and mechanics.
And keep in mind his game is almost laughable compared to mine. He WISHES his game had roleplaying. In fact if you read what he says, his ultimate goal is to allow a TINY BIT of roleplaying in his game. But he will never have full real roleplaying, because his engine is real-time. Real roleplaying requires a real-time-with-pause engine (because only a human brain can run such a complex game logic, and human brains work slowly), which only Cult Engine can deliver at this level of mechanical complexity and aesthetic fidelity (we're not making Baldur's Gate here). That's why he's forced to advance his metaplot OUTSIDE of his actual game, via singleplayer "campaigns" accessible on an OUTSIDE menu, while MY metaplot advances INSIDE the game in full multiplayer and even multigroup glory. In fact, practically every adventure/scenario in my game advances the metaplot, while absolutely nothing that happens in his game does. That's why he needs Squadron 42. He wouldn't have a story without it. And even this story that he has is of '90s complexity: singleplayer, non-interactive, with canned lines and invisible walls all around as far as the eye can see. Pathetic, really, for 2023. And that's why his game is an action game and not an RPG. He would like it to be a roleplaying game, and he'll push his engine and mechanics as far as possible to get nearer that goal, but he'll never reach it, because neither his engine nor his mechanics were built with it in mind. They were in fact built for the exact opposite of roleplaying, which is action (think about this for a second: can you roleplay an ace fighter pilot with real-time mechanics? No, because then you'd have to... basically BE an ace fighter pilot, thus utterly negating the roleplaying, the pretending, the art in the whole thing; the ultimate result in this direction being "eSports", which, unlike other videogames, aren't art, and for precisely this reason).
Modern settings coming to "Battlegrounds" DLC
All this to say that Chris and his Star Citizen have nothing to teach icycalm and his Battlegrounds in terms of game design, EXCEPT this one thing: their funding model. If I could learn from him—the premier expert in the world in funding cutting-edge modern artworks—how to increase my game's income, I have a real chance of making my game viable at a level of scope and detail that I can be happy with and proud of.
Ergo, this past year of playing Star Citizen extensively while diving headfirst into its intricate backer reward mechanics (explained in great detail in the greatest thread on the web on the subject on this very website [ > ]) has, I believe, taught me a tremendous amount about how to replicate what Chris is doing in order to cover my similar needs. So an intelligent and detailed multi-tiered reward structure is required in order to sufficiently motivate every player to contribute as much as he can, and so that every player can measure the level of his contribution to the project and take pride in it and enjoy it due to the regular rewards and constant feedback the system gives him.
People want to give more, they just don't know when, or how much. To give just a couple of recent examples, Rory offered to pay for about $150 worth of video material that I needed for a trailer I am making, and Chev paid $180 for a yearly Hero Forge sub, so we could get a bunch of extra minis. I didn't ask them for these contributions, they offered of their own accord when they heard about these expenses. But while I greatly appreciate their generosity, I can't depend on it, because, from my perspective, it's random. When I am paying $2,000+, as I did for GMRPG stuff in total in the last couple of months alone, I need to know I'll get it back. So I need regular contributions, and therefore I need a plan.
Hence I introduce DLC content so that instead of Rory and Chev giving me charity, they can purchase DLCs and get something measurable back. That incentivizes everyone to contribute more in order to get the cool rewards, and it gives me a clear view of how much DLC offered at what intervals and priced at what levels will net me how much additional income. I can do some math and plan my expenditures, and the players themselves feel better because that's how our lizard brains function. I would never have given CIG $2,000 if the ships had been available in-game without exclusivity windows, and no wipes to take them away twice a year. And that is DUMB, because that would have been A BETTER GAME, and I am basically REWARDING CIG FOR MAKING A WORSE GAME. But it's not my fault, it's how my lizard brain works—I want to see a tangible reward for my contribution, and some nebulous "support" rhetoric just won't do the trick I am afraid—and since our brains aren't changing any time soon, we must adjust our business and marketing policies to account for it. Is that manipulative? Are CIG's FOMO-generating tactics, limited-hull numbers and the like, predatory? Yes they are, BUT THAT'S WHAT IT TAKES TO FUND THE BEST REAL-TIME ARTWORK EVER, so do you want the damn sausage or are you going to obsess about how it's made and starve to death because of it?
"Hope's Last Day" is the first DLC scenario now live on "Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0"
I want the sausage and I don't give a shit how it's made—I even think it's kind of cool how cutting-edge artworks must employ cutting-edge psychological marketing techniques merely to stay afloat—and I look forward to spending thousands of dollars buying apartments and base resources in Star Citizen, while at the same time spending the money my players send to me for my Battlegrounds, to grow it ever bigger, deeper and more complex.
So I am glad CIG figured out how to get more money out of me, as every dollar I have spent on this game has been a pleasure to spend. When I see their swanky new offices, their new hires, their stunning trailers, and of course their ever-deepening mechanics and aesthetics, I know my money is being put to good use, and I can't wait to send them more, as my finances allow. (And btw, if you're inclined to say "icy just stop buying Star Citizen ships and all your funding problems with Battlegrounds are over", I will reply that buying Star Citizen ships IS MY JOB. The only reason I can give you cutting-edge gaming analyses is because I am neck-deep in cutting-edge gaming, and right now Star Citizen is where cutting-edge gaming's at, at least as regards full-real-time play, as opposed to roleplaying.)
That by the way is the only aspect of development they'll never show you on Inside Star Citizen because they (rightly) believe that the public isn't mature enough to handle it. I, on the other hand, am telling you frankly: These techniques are psychologically manipulative, and are intended to extract the maximum contributions from the players. And that's what I have to do too: I would have offered my DLC material as part of the base game—that was the original plan—until I realized that this would increase my costs without a corresponding increase in income, which would have made zero financial sense, and over the long term prove disastrous for the project. Ergo the shift to DLC. I WANT to add more and more content. I cannot do it without additional income.
In short, these are the changes to the subscription model and reward structure (and there'll be more in the future, as I add more—and more complex—rewards):
- DLC adventures cost $50 a pop payable by XMR to the following address:
- New unlimited DLC subscription tier for $100/month: play as much DLC as you want, including multiple adventures simultaneously
- New Game Master tier for GMs wishing to bring their entire group to the Battlegrounds at a discount: $250 for the GM and 4 players, with extra players charged at $50 per player
In addition to the above, I am selling Producer credits for $1,000, and Executive Producer credits for $5,000. Your name (or username/pseudonym/whatever) will be right at the top of the Battlegrounds frontpage, plus included in the epic credits video I am making, plus all trailers in which it makes sense. If you prefer to be even more anonymous, you can make an XMR donation, and there will be a donation button on the frontpage, same address as the one given above.
You can email me at icycalm@culture.vg after you've sent something so I know who to thank, or you can fire and forget and never contact me at all, whatever you prefer.
If you have friends who might be interested in the game, and can afford it, please tell them about it. Every extra player helps, both because it helps bring more life to the world, and because of the extra funding.
A fully modeled alien world stands ready for your characters to explore in "Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0"
If you want to raise your pledge but can't afford to jump a full step, any increase will help, even $20 or $10 or $5, as long as you can afford it. Don't make your life uncomfortable to support a game. Yes, it is the greatest game and artwork ever, but you need to be comfortable to enjoy it, so think about that first before you think about the game. If $50 is what you can afford, you can stick with that forever, no worries. I wouldn't have a game without you, and I know it, and I won't forget it. Your patience while the game was stuck for months on multiple occasions kept me going. I would have given up if you had given up. You can't make a roleplaying game if no one's going to play it. You certainly can't make alone anything as complex as what I am making. What I want to emphasize after this entire orgy of analysis on money, is that people are contributing a lot more than that. We probably would never have played anything if danjiro hadn't built 16 Pathfinder characters for us, taught me to use Fantasy Grounds, and ran our first session for us. I'd still be procrastinating without that massive kickstart. And people are still contributing skills and time behind the scenes that no one will ever know. recoil for example spending hours in GIMP obsessing over one-pixel differences because I am asking him to in order to help me deliver my next trailers. That would have cost me a lot of money if I had had to pay for it, not to mention I probably still wouldn't have got it as exact as I want because the cheap workers I can afford wouldn't have had the patience for it.
Ultimately, even with the increased DLC cost, I don't think my game is expensive for what you get with it. It IS expensive in absolute terms, it is the most expensive game in history because the minimum buy-in is $600/year. So fuck yeah, it is expensive! But on the other hand, when I ask for $50 on top of that for a fully interactive DLC scenario when Final Fantasy costs $80 and it's just bad anime with no mechanics, my game seems cheap. And you haven't even seen the TaleSpire, Menyr or virtual reality content yet. Just stop buying crap you'll never play on Steam, and you can afford my game no problem. Star Citizen ships are also a joke in terms of value compared to what I am giving out. You can earn all of them in the game, and every other player can too, but you can't earn a unique Battlegrounds scenario that interacts with and shapes the entire world. You have to pay for that, and it'll be the best gaming experience of your life, because the most interactive one.
To speak specifically about the first DLC offering, Alien, we're talking about an RPG where in most cases the entire group dies, and merely surviving these ordeals the designers have crafted is an accomplishment you'll remember for the rest of your life. Not to speak that these scenarios have been made with PVP in mind, with usually at least one "traitor" in the midst, plus other conflicting goals. If you land the "wrong" character, you are basically expected to be evil! And ranked on precisely how evil you were! We're talking about a game that features scenarios AT THE BACK OF FULL-LENGTH NOVELS, so you're expected to FIRST READ THE ENTIRE FUCKING NOVEL, and only THEN play the scenario to fully appreciate it.
I am not shitting you, the last 3 Alien novels featured Alien RPG scenarios in the back.
What other game forces you to read a whole fucking NOVEL before handing you a 2-hour scenario? I've never heard of such a game system before, and I think it's worth trying. If nothing else, it will cement the Battlegrounds' reputation as "Reading: The Videogame" (also, "Writing: The Videogame"). The entire GMRPG world is raving about the game and the scenarios, as you will see with all the quotes I have adduced at the relevant places on the overworld, plus of course the full-length reviews I've featured on the site. It's the hottest RPG of the last few years, so spending an extra $50 on it instead of on yet another infantile Japanese game or Western one with mechanics that haven't been improved in decades, doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
At any rate, this setting and these scenarios are now up on the overworld, and the system is in place for anyone to form a team and tackle them, if they wish. Later in the month I'll have something up even cooler—if such a thing is possible—(though, for that reason, even more expensive...), and from then on you can expect to see a brand-new setting and introductory adventure on the world roughly once per month, running the entire gamut of possible settings and experiences. A "roleplaying Steam", if you will, featuring truly interactive games, but selectable INSIDE the game world, and ALL of whose consequences ultimately interacting with those of all others!
I don't think anyone can understand how wild that concept is yet. I can barely grasp the ramifications myself, but I am eager to explore them, and the overworld I just delivered with Alpha 2.0 is the technology powering this new metaverse of roleplaying possibilities.
And btw, there are no player character limitations for the DLC, as there are in the main Battlegrounds settings (where it is 1 character per player, with some exceptions). Most of these adventures can be completed in 3-4 sessions, and many of them even in a single session, so you aren't committing to year-long campaigns when you build a DLC character, or, perhaps more often, just picking a pregenerated one. The mechanics are far simpler than Path/Starfinder/D&D as well, so you can fairly easily jump between systems/characters/adventures.
Dystopian settings coming to "Battlegrounds" DLC
Battlegrounds DLC is ultimately an opportunity to play a different RPG. To try a different setting, theme and style of roleplaying. An opportunity to expand the metaverse, to make wild connections between settings and characters. An opportunity to form parties with players from other teams that you don't normally get to play with, and to play at times that we wouldn't normally be playing (the sessions will be planned for slots when no regular team can meet, so they shouldn't take significant time away from our main campaigns). An opportunity for more experimentation with less pressure. No epic 600-page campaign to ruin. No decade-long metaplot to worry about. Even the sizes of the teams will often be non-standard, starting with Alien's 5-player teams, as opposed to the 4-player ones we've been used to up to now. You'll be able to see how much more fun the game gets with every extra player, and how much more complex the scenes and interactions between characters, especially in a game such as Alien which fosters intraparty conflict.
If you aren't interested in the DLC settings, on the other hand, or simply can't afford them, forget they exist. The base settings will give you all the roleplaying you can handle for the rest of your lives, guaranteed. And, ultimately, Pathfinder is the best rule system and setting, and even has the best adventures ever, so your experience will be second to none even without DLC. But if you feel like taking the occasional little break from Pathfinder to explore a myriad of wild worlds, systems, characters and scenarios, Battlegrounds DLC is your thing, and it's only just begun.
All this and more is coming soon to Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds: The Ultimate Roleplaying Metaverse.
http://akbattlegrounds.net
I bought a Storm with cash.
I logged in to the bank to check the balance, because the last report wasn't up to date due to our Ghost Hollow sortie. The balance was 21,897 aUEC, and I deposited 1,089,214.
Current balance: 1,111,111 aUEC.
Wallace Klim's place in Grim HEX. He'll give you drug-related missions, if you have an appointment.
Carousel Combat Tracker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKSyhZ4-Okw
We might be using this sooner than you think! Much, MUCH sooner.
I bought a Storm, two Furys and a Fury MX straight up cashmoney. I'm going to use the Furys as LTI tokens.
Star Citizen | STANTON (Final Trailer) 4K
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ouBKm7 ... XdPpMT44TR
Gameplay Reveal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrPZSq5 ... XVyolQO3wj
If black Spider-Man wasn't enough of shitting on the character, now we have TWO Spider-Mans, which is just as bad, INCLUDING one of them being black.
This isn't Spider-Man. This is programmer Spider-Man.
For those who don't understand what's bad about black Spider-Man, it's that Spider-Man has the biggest and deepest inner monologue in all of comics; that's practically his thing. It's as White as it gets, and it defies belief that a black man would be as introspective. Besides, from what little I've seen of him, they don't even TRY to give black Spider-Man deep introspection. And how could they, when they're programmers who aren't introspective themselves! black Spider-Man is an utter programmer/africa shitshow, and now they've infected even the MAINLINE game with this garbage!
ON TOP of all this, Spider-Man, like most superheroes, is a LONE WOLF. That's also why he can be so introspective: extroverted people are morons who don't ruminate on anything. So this buddy-Spider-Man bullshit with a latino african is just retarded beyond belief!!!
Too bad because the action looks incredible. It looks even better than how I imagined the comics would be. Oh well. We'll rip out all the assets and put them into Menyr/the Marvel GMRPG and play out real adventures instead of braindead QTE simulators with no story interactivity and retarded latino-african versions of our heroes breathing down our necks.
I am not touching this garbage.
Buy some old comics and read if you want a dose of real Spider-Man.
Excellent, we can use an Eclipse in almost all events, even in Ghost Hollow. And when shubn gets his, we’ll have two.
Damn, I wanted to tell you about this but I didn’t act fast enough.
The Prospector is a good idea, but beyond that, giving many vehicles to one clone isn’t a good idea, because a clone can only really use one of them at a time. If the clone uses the Carrack, how can it also use the Starfarer? Or the Galaxy? Or whatever else you want him to use?
Rather we need a different clone for every large vehicle.
Same with industrial vehicles. If we give the same clone all the industrial vehicles, then only one of us can work at a time. Whereas if we have half a dozen clones, each with its own large industrial vehicle (e.g. one for the Mole, one for the Reclaimer, one for the upcoming Hull C, etc.) all of us can work at the same time on different professions.
So ultimately each clone should have only ONE large military vehicle AND one large industrial vehicle—since the clone won’t be working and fighting at the same time. In the case of clone 2, it already has two military vehicles—the Carrack and the Starfarer—so we definitely shouldn’t be buying more for it. A Storm or Fury isn’t a bad idea because they are small and can be loaded into the Carrack, but definitely don’t upgrade these vehicles to anything bigger. If you intend these vehicles as LTI tokens for something bigger, I suggest you ask Support for a refund—they give refunds very easily within a 30-day window. All you have to say is that you changed your mind.
As for the Prospector for clone 2, that’s a good call because it doesn’t have any industrial vehicles.
From now on it would be best if people posted in this thread to ask me when they wanted to buy new clones or new stuff for clones.
Note that we have registered up to and including CULTCLONE-3 (I will be giving clone 3’s login info soon). The next free designation is CULTCLONE-4.
Using stockpiled ship upgrades from IAE 2952 and Invictus 2953, I have added an Eclipse to my account.
I have also purchased a Storm and a Lynx.
As the Storm is still in concept, a Nova loaner is provided to my main account.
I have purchased a 2 Furys, 2 Fury MXs, a Lynx Rover, and a Tumbril Storm for CULTCLONE-2.
Once the 24-hour cooldowns on some of these pledges have elapsed, I will be consolidating some of them for store credit with the intention of upgrading one of the LTI token pledges to a Prospector for CULTCLONE-2.
These items, along with some Warbond ship upgrades, resulted in CULTCLONE-2's account achieving Concierge status.
Can't wait to join you guys in the pain of the current game state. o7
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... ain_of_the
Installing and running Star Citizen Persistent Universe on Steam Deck! Remastered for March 2023!
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... persistent
There are various methods to get it working on Steam Deck, and some of them appear reasonably playable. One person reports being able to run box missions for example, which would be good enough performance for us to run a Carrack or Starfarer pilot etc. But in all, I suspect that a ROG Ally [ > ] or G Cloud [ > ] will provide a far superior experience. Note that they are saying you really need a keyboard and mouse with the Deck, and I suspect the same is true of all handhelds.
Terrific news coming out of PaizoCon! All Pathfinder Society Scenarios from now on will be getting the full 4K Foundry treatment! Moreover, so will Starfinder Society Scenarios! This latter news is especially amazing because it means the teams doing the conversions will probably be doing Starfinder Adventure Paths eventually, since the APs sell a lot more than the Society Scenarios after all. There are two studios doing these conversions, and I suspect they're getting more efficient since they're taking on more work. I have high hopes that a year or two from now all Paizo content will be getting the 4K Foundry treatment. My dream would be if they went back and did also all legacy content, but that might never happen. We can dream though. In the meantime, feast your eyes on screens from the latest content. I am especially amazed that the difficulty scaling of Society Scenarios has been programmed in. Also, now that Starfinder is officially supported, I expect the rules automation to improve quickly just like PF2 improved once official support for its content began.
Pathfinder Society Year of Boundless Wonder: Scenarios #4-13 & #4-14 (Foundry VTT)
https://paizo.com/products/btq02ejy/dis ... os-413-414
- 24 high-resolution character portraits and tokens for the unique monsters and NPCs in each scenario, plus a blank token ring and background for customizing your game.
- 5 high-resolution Pathfinder Flip-Mat encounter maps.
- Custom landing pages for each scenario.
- All scenes pre-configured with walls, lights, and sounds. A custom macro places tokens and hazards based on the group to provide GMs with the most convenient experience running the adventure for all parties.
- Soundscapes provided as ambient playlists and local sound sources to immerse your players, created by Michael Ghelfi Studios.
Starfinder Society Year of Fortune's Fall: Scenarios #6-01 & #6-02 (Foundry VTT)
https://paizo.com/products/btq02ek0/dis ... os-601-602
- 22 high-resolution character portraits and tokens for the unique monsters and NPCs in each scenario, plus a blank token ring and background for customizing your game.
- High-resolution tokens and art for all Starfinder Society standard player starships.
- 4 high-resolution Starfinder Flip-Mat encounter maps.
- Custom landing pages for each scenario.
- All scenes pre-configured with walls, lights, and sounds. A custom macro places tokens and hazards based on the group to provide GMs with the most convenient experience running the adventure for all parties.
- Soundscapes provided as ambient playlists and local sound sources to immerse your players, created by Michael Ghelfi Studios.
PaizoCon Teaser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEV5ktd ... XVyolQO3wj
New teaser just dropped from PaizoCon for 4K Kingmaker Second Edition on Foundry! We're not far from playing this! The moment you're done with your current campaigns, we begin! It'll be the ultimate Kingmaker experience because I don't think anyone has ever ran it 4-team co-op/PVP, nor built the entire kingdom in TaleSpire, nor taken a full decade to run it in the background while dozens of other campaigns are running at the same time and interacting with it.
Hopefully we'll have a full trailer in a few months to salivate over.
Dragon's Dogma II confirmed for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC; debut trailer, details, and screenshots
https://www.gematsu.com/2023/05/dragons ... creenshots
The environments are kinda bland, at least going from this short trailer. But you'd expect them to show you their better environments, if they have them. But the rest looks pretty good, certainly better than Final Fantasy.
1st Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOCCI53 ... XVyolQO3wj
Homeworld 3 delayed to February 2024
https://www.gematsu.com/2023/05/homewor ... ruary-2024
Star Citizen has ruined me with its ships. These lazy designs stick out at me like cancers on the screenshot now. Especially the larger ones are comicotragically lazy, as if a child had drawn them. Look at that barge of a capital ship and the Minecraft cubes in the background lol.
Grey-market Hercules A2 LTI on flash-sale for $499.99: https://theimpound.com/pages/midweek-mayhem
I thought I'd leave it here in case anyone is interested.
Here's something really exclusive: https://theimpound.com/products/eclipse ... 4898418941
Eclipse Best In Show 2950 - Standalone Ship
Regular price $1,199.99 1 available
It's not even LTI lol. Though 10-year insurance is almost as good I suppose.
This isn't technically a paint, but it essentially is, so I'll be dealing with these "variants" in this thread. It was brought to my attention by this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... clipse_bis
mnicetea wrote:
Is the eclipse BIS really 1,100? It’s never going to be available again right?
PolecatXOXO wrote:
It's whatever someone is willing to sell it for, but this is the wrong sub to ask.
No, that version will never be available again. It may win another year, but it will have a different BIS skin.
Asmos159 wrote:
i also want to point out that subscribers can buy previous subscriber flares, but cig puts them in the loot pool after 3 months despite it reducing their income. so i would not put it past them for those 15$ skins to be early access to a skin before the in game skin shop is implemented. then sell early access ot skins a few months before they are put in the in game shop.
cig are very clear that a lot of the stuff is not worth the money. only get it if you want to help fund the development.
Ocbard wrote:
There is little chance that they want the BIS paint for the Eclipse because of the BIS bit, but rather because it looks great in white. I'm not throwing any shade on CIG for selling ship paints. Indeed I have bought some myself. I could not care less if you could later on buy them in game.
All I mean to say is that buying a ship that is overpriced in the pledge store already for over 3x the price simply because it has a pretty paint job does not seem like a great idea to me. I'd rather support the project than someone who resells ships at such a markup.
But even the obscene markups help the game, because they increase FOMO for the NEXT time unique items go on sale.
Bottom line: This Eclipse looks kickass and the exclusivity merely heightens the desirability. It would look terrific with my character's white/red armor, and if I could afford it I'd snap it up in a heartbeat.
Just putting it here in case anyone of us might be interested in snapping it up (remember there's just ONE unit left), and also because I will be cataloguing cool exclusive paints and pseudo-variants in this thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... ur_shields
WingZeroType wrote:
PSA: Missile damage mostly ignores your shields and hits your hull
In the current 3.19 patch missiles do full ballistic physical damage, which means the physical damage penetration of shields applies to missiles as well. That means at 100% shields, 70% of the missile damage will still hit your hull, and that increases proportionally to 100% of the missile damage by the time your shields go down.
That makes avoiding incoming missiles more important! H and J are the default buttons for decoys (aka flares) and noise (aka chaff). Decoys are the way to go, spamming a few of them as soon as you see a missile indicator can often distract a missile. So can performing aggressive evasive maneuvers. Both of these strategies seem to work better on servers with a higher server FPS, so you might still be hit if the server's on fire.
Goodluck!
Talon2947 wrote:
I see a lot of people complaining that flares don't work. They need to realise that flares alone won't stop you being hit any more. It now works like in Top Gun. You need to dump flares and perform evasive manauvers to avoid a hit. I love it. :D
SteamboatWilley wrote:
Except when you pull a 20+g tri while dumping 10+ flares and the missile still hits you because AI/the servers are borked. There's "having to maneuver" and shit just plain being broken and we're firmly in the shit being broken stage right now. AI missiles do not lose tracking, and they will continue to loop and track you until the server catches up no matter what you do. I am by no means an ace but I have never had issues with dodging missiles until this patch cycle, even in the days when Dominators and Arresters were OP AF.
kiltedfrog wrote:
I am an ace, I won a LTI scythe in a dog-fighting tournament YEARS ago, and generally kept pretty fookin good at the game. Sometimes the server lags still big fucks you. I flew my bucc (very easy to dodge missiles in) to an HRT the other day and got blown the fuck out the sky by some undodgeable bullshit from a npc cutty.
Unity1232 wrote:
they do work you just have to use the proper flares now. Chaff for em flares for ir and cross section is decoys.
moderndegree wrote:
When the servers are lagging, neither will work.
jonboi1 wrote:
I'm not sure if the different types of missiles work as intended, but there are different varieties. Strike missiles hit your ship and focus on hull damage. Prox missiles blow up near your ship to prioritize shield damage.
BiggAudi wrote:
The lower the SERVER FPS/TICK RATE the higher your flare count has to be for something like the Corsair. Literally 10-12 flares to easily lose a missile from Klescher. It takes like 2 flares on a 20 tick server :)
SpectreHaza wrote:
You can press RIGHT ALT + H to queue up MULTIPLE flares at once, so one press just drops as many as you’ve set up, I typically have it set to 4 and drop them as necessary
WingZeroType wrote:
There was a bug in 3.18.2 where that didn't actually dump multiple, but that might be fixed now. I'll have to double check. Good call-out!
SirBerticus wrote:
Now, if only missiles would actually restock when you try to restock at any landing pad.
Sometimes the Mobiglass App charges you for the missiles but they don't get equipped, and other times it won't even offer to sell you replacement missiles.
Most of my fighters currently fly without any missiles on them because I used them and cannot replenish them without looting from derelicts using a tractor tool.
Tastrix wrote:
If it’s the same problem it was in 3.17, the app will still buy the missiles, just not equip them. Meaning, they’d be put into the local inventory, but you’d have to manually equip them through loadout manager.
Most people wouldn’t see this, because A) who checks their local inventory at a random mining station, immediately after trying to restock/repair? And/or B) many people only restock back at home base, where all of their other shit is, so a stock of missiles showing up is just more gear buried in the cluttered inventory system.
IF it’s the same as 3.17, that is. I have been doing any dogfighting this patch, so I couldn’t tell you.
WingZeroType wrote:
Sometimes if you wait a bit and try again it succeeds, but yeah missile restock is super iffy
xgamer444 wrote:
Leaving the stock missiles and racks on your ship helps reduce the odds of this bug from what I heard.
BiggAudi wrote:
The unfortunate solution to this is prior to retrieving the ship you unloaded all missiles in vehicle loadout manager. Save. Close mobi. Open mobi. Load all missiles and and racks. Save. Retrieve ship and zoom out
Siegs wrote:
It's a garbage solution but just don't ever land on a pad with missiles missing/fired. You can usually restock hovering over the pad, do that and wait for restock before you land. If restock isn't working, don't land just park outside. If whatever you're doing requires you to land you're a bit fucked lol.
This guy wins the thread:
Reasonable_Praline_2 wrote:
there is no pressure wave in space from explosives if there is not mechanical kinetic damage from frangible material there is zero damage from the boom
There is a ton of stuff like this in the game. Real space is nowhere near as much fun as people imagine it to be. That's partly why I gave up my aerospace engineering career lol. Videogames are more fun.
The two new ground vehicles, the Storm and the Lynx, are precisely what I needed to flesh out the ground specs for all the ranks. I haven't updated anything above yet, but here's a quick look at what the latest ground specs look like for all the ranks:
Clone: Anything
Soldier: Ranger
Inquisitor: Cyclone
Master Chief: Storm, Mule
Commander: Nova, Ursa
Supreme Commander: Nova, Lynx
I haven't thought about the hoverstuff yet. I'll be doing so soon.
Man I wish I could play SC right now. I can't though because I am getting ready to drop on you the mother of all Battlegrounds updates. Been working on it day and night for weeks, and hopefully in a few hours it'll be live, but if I get too tired I might delay it for a day as it's 6:45 AM over here. I am really gunning for today though. Keep an eye on that frontpage! Though actually this update is so huge I'll probably end up emailing everyone. So keep an eye on your inbox I suppose.
Bought a Storm and two more Furys (again a regular and an MX one), all three of them with their Concierge paints and all three with ca$$$hmoney. The extra two Furys will make excellent LTI tokens later in the year.
There is also a cool Ursa + Lynx LTI pack that I considered, but both these rovers also come packaged with large ships that I plan to buy, so I don't see the point of getting the rovers as standalones. Even as LTI tokens they aren't as good as the Furys because they cost $5 more.
Meanwhile I considered trying to get a Constellation Phoenix like shubn, but a Carrack makes much more sense for me right now so I'll save my money for that for later in the year. I am glad shubn grabbed one for the org and I look forward to being flown around in it and chauffeured in its Lynx. Both vehicles look terrific, and even better paired together. They are a luxury touring combo that can accommodate 3-4 crew with "a luxury master bedroom, 2 guest rooms and a hot tub". It has a bar that was replicated in reality in CIG's new Manchester offices for the Star Citizen YouTube and Twitch shows, and even a piano that can apparently play some Beethoven I think it is. The Phoenix is time-limited AND stock-limited even DURING Invictus, that's why shubn was celebrating on Discord for having bagged one. The next and final chance to get one is today at 8 AM UTC, so about a couple hours from now, if anyone is interested. It's $350 and comes with the Lynx and snub (10-year insurance instead of LTI tho). But org-wise we're good with just shubn's, we don't particularly need more of these. If you have to have it though, you have to have it, and I'll likely grab one this time next year.
Note that I now have a Nova loaner due to the Storm. I was meaning to buy one with aUEC, so that saved me a bit of work.
The background is Grim HEX lmao! They went into so much trouble for this little skit lol.
Also, I can see Star Citizen: The Roleplaying Game coming out eventually. I mean there are Fallout and Dark Souls RPGs, why not SC? It has way more lore than both the others put together, and a far larger and fleshed out world and room for class, skill and story variety. It would make for a tremendous RPG in the right hands.
LMAO they have a D&D skit at the end of the video where the guy is rolling survival to exit an elevator! Jared GMing while wearing a Hero Forge shirt, and they have a TV flat on the table with an amazing video map!
What an amazing studio! Almost as cool as Cult Games!