Brent Weeks's Blog, page 22

Fan Art Tuesday: International Edition

Gaea Books of Taiwan has published The Black Prism!

Here’s the cover:

Go HERE if you’d like to buy a copy.

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Night Angel 10th Anniversary Hardcover Omnibus

For those of you who have been asking–for 10 years!–there will soon finally be a way for you to get Night Angel in hardcover!

On September 19, Orbit is releasing a hardcover omnibus of the entire trilogy. (Quick definition: “omnibus” means you get all 3 books together in one gorgeous package.) With a new foreword (that I really need to write!), this will include the goodies I added for the trade paper omnibus: an Annotated Glossary, Updated Map, and Deleted Scenes. Orbit is really aiming to make something beautiful with this hardcover–they’ve told me the concept for the cover art, and I think it’s going to be awesome! They’re also invested in keeping the price accessible. An entire trilogy-in-one totaling more than 1200 pages, at this quality, with extras and an amazing cover, without cutting corners, and at the price they’ve told me? Before now, I thought they liked me–this is proof!

(Before anyone asks, I won’t be doing a book tour for this one as my whole attention is devoted to finishing Lightbringer.) More details and cover image will come as soon as possible! Also, if you want to get longer and more entertaining versions of this kind of news before anyone else, please do subscribe to my (4-ish times/year) newsletter by filling out your email at the sign-up bar at the top of this webpage.

 

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Fan Art Tuesday: @oranjelly

Check out this wonderful illustration of Vi in the Seraph by Juji — who you can find on Twitter @oranjelly.

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When’s the next book, Brent?

New Monthly Q and A over at Facebook.

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What I’m Reading: Nero’s Killing Machine

I’m not sure if I should add a point or take it away for the fact that this had to be a difficult book to write. A history of a single Roman military legion is simply faced with an enormous problem: How do you make the story of what are actually many armies over hundreds of years into a unified story of an army, as if it were one living breathing beast? As one of the last chapters admits, the men of the early 14th legion would have sneered at the bearded, married, business-owning, involved-in-local-politics later legion that dared to share the same name as their beloved legion that ferociously banned all those things. This central difficulty is made worse by a peculiarity of how Rome recruited and fielded its legions: men signed up for 16- or later 20-year stints, after which they retired. Granted, some men would stay in, and be moved to the upper ranks, but the vast majority of each legion simply left. An entire new army was formed of green recruits every 20-ish years. (And you did NOT want to go into battle with that baby army for a while!) So how is this army with massive periodic turnover to be treated as the same army in one story over centuries? How do you successfully tell that story?

You don’t. At least, I don’t think that Stephen Dando-Collins quite makes the case on which this book rests: If you’re telling the tale of The Martial and Victorius Twinned 14th Legion, you’re saying there IS a tale of the fourteenth–and there isn’t. There are only tales, plural, of the 14th during certain years. It’s like talking about the Boston Red Sox. You can tell of the Cy Young years and compare them to the Roger Clemens years. At best, maybe you could structure a tale around the 86 years without a World Series win. (But really, to have the metaphor be more accurate, you’d have to have the Red Sox move from Boston every couple years to a new home city, and change coaches/generals more frequently. On the plus side, the level of looting could stay about the same.

Nonetheless, this is a reasonably entertaining and informative book of pop-history. I learned things. In fact, I learned some things that were directly in conflict with other things I’ve learned, at least one of them recently. I’d recently relayed to a friend the factoid that Roman legionaries were required to be 6′ tall–which I found remarkable! That’d be like recruiting only guys who are 6’5″ or something today, which would be pretty darn difficult, but on the other hand, I could see that recruitment strategy making a lot of sense when you’re looking to go murder people by the strength of your muscles alone. So yeah, sure, you want the tallest, strongest guys from every college sports team to go do your murder and looting work. And then one could see why armies made up of such men, also trained into believing they can kick anyone’s butt, and instilled with immense discipline would, in fact, be able to kick anyone’s butt–except this book says it’s not true at all. Crap. Sorry friend I told this factoid to. Instead, Mr. Dando-Collins says the average legionary was 5’4″, which is believable, and actually sort of remarkable in its own way. Imagine a bunch of guys 5’4″ kicking your butt and taking all your worldly goods. Plus your self-respect. Surely the Germans who averaged 5’8″ thought so.

In reading about the ancient world, I was again impressed by how fully a Judeo-Christian ethic seems to have suffused our present Western understanding of morality during warfare. War in the ancient world was incredibly brutal, and unapologetically so. Not just the fighting, but how people were treated in the aftermath, and what excuses (none) were deemed necessary to go to war in the first place. Certainly, instead of spreading the light of civilization or securing the borders so the Empire could be safe, one gets a palpable sense over and over that the men of the Roman legions just wanted to go kill people and take their stuff. (This, despite the fact that going and doing that would certainly cost a lot of them their lives.) Somehow in my mind, I’d separated the Roman soldiers from, say, Vikings. Vikings and other raiders are just thieves, murderers, and rapists, right? (Who happen to bring some good stuff along with them.) But Rome? Rome is law and order. Pax Romana, baby!

Well, that law is Roman law. Roman law provides no protection for anyone who is NOT a Roman citizen. So in the famous case of Boudica, where her dying husband Prasutagus (some say dad) tries to leave her half of his estate (the other half going to Nero, hoping that buys his good will), the law is very different from what we would think. Roman law doesn’t let women inherit, and anyone who dies without an heir leaves everything to Caesar. So to Nero, the guy tried to buy him off by… giving Nero only half of what belonged to Nero by law. It didn’t buy Nero’s good will at all–and, you know, Nero is Nero. So Nero’s little bailiffs go to evict Boudica who is “squatting” in Nero’s house with her daughters. (i.e. She hasn’t left her own house.)

She defies the bailiffs, and they beat the hell out of her and rape her daughters–and this is legal, or at least not illegal. A non-citizen has no legal protection, period. (It happens to be very unwise, but there’s no record that the bailiffs are disciplined for what will start a war.)

Boudica stokes the fires of Celtic fury at what’s been done to her–and everyone already hates the Romans anyway. (Go figure.) So they rise up, and take some towns. Now these are cities and clans aligned with Rome–which is exactly what Boudica’s clan had been, up until that month! And when Boudica’s army takes these cities, does she have mercy on the people there? Not even close.

The Roman writers, not shy about the realities of warfare, called it ‘an orgy of violence’. We’re talking non-combatants and children tortured to death literally for fun. Maybe you can try to dismiss that as propaganda, but it seems the Romans believed it was literally true. There may have been some religious significance to burning people to death and the like… but what? That makes it okay, then? Even if any of this was exaggerated, the death toll was like 70,000 in a couple weeks. Mostly civilians.

That London has a statue of a woman who murdered everyone in it who didn’t flee–meaning old people, young people, the stubborn, and those in denial that a fellow Breton would murder them–is deeply bizarre, that is, until you learn that Elizabeth I identified her as a brave figure fighting off a foreign invasion (just like herself), and later, Queen Victoria set her up as some kind of national hero (also just like herself).

Hmm, politicians abusing history to advance their own ends, how weird is that?

I guess all of us are suckers for an underdog story: brave woman stands up to defend her country against horrible guys! As far as I can tell (and I’m no expert, certainly), the real story is something like this: One, horrible men treat a woman and her family horribly. Two, horrible woman goes on to command the murder, torture, and rape of other tens of thousands of people much like herself. Three, horrible men’s army comes back, fight bravely and well, and then horribly murders the horrible murderers.

History’s awesome, isn’t it? Except where it really, really sucks.

I’m reminded of how earlier times should really be viewed as more alien than I sometimes do. People are people, sure, but culture is more powerful than we think. The Geneva Conventions seem obvious to us. They’re actually not obvious–they’re a triumph of civilization, of imposing morality on the most barbarous of human activities. (They’re often violated, sure, but they’re often upheld, too! And sometimes is a whole lot better than never.)

Excellently performed, although there was a slight technical irritant of the mic picking up the sound of Mr. Fass’s breaths, which became somewhat hypnotic: “Wow, that was a really long sentence to manage on that quick of a breath.” But this is surely a first-world audio problem–I mean, c’mon “the mic is too sensitive”? I can’t really take points off for that, can I?

3.5 out of 5.

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The Black Prism — Just $2.99 Today!

The Black Prism is the Kindle Daily Deal today (March 1). Go HERE to pick up your copy for just $2.99!

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What I’m Playing — Legends: Heroes of Skyrim (iOS/PC)

This is a virtual trading card game, of which the most famous is Magic the Gathering. This one is considerably simpler, and thus easier to learn and cheaper to continue to play. This is a game with In-App Purchases done acceptably. Look, I sorta hate IAP too, but it’s here to stay. In many ways, it’s the only way to make sure that a company continues to support and innovate in a game. Otherwise, a year or so after launch, a company sees declining profits or no profits at all and pulls the plug on a game, or at least pulls all the most talented staff from it. They do have keep paying people to keep many of these games going. (Yeah, you can point out maybe a handful or a dozen counter-examples, but CD Project Red/Witcher 3 is an outlier, not a business model.) So, my judgment of any game with IAP comes down to “How Greedy Are These People?” Legends of Skyrim has good single player campaigns that you pay for. You get lots of cards, lots of scenarios. You get to try all sorts of things, which to me is more fun than trying just one thing where you can win all the time. It MOSTLY avoids Pay-to-Win in its online multiplayer component. I really enjoy it. If I only have 15 minutes to play a game in a day (a sadly common occurrence), I’ll play this one.

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Fan Art Tuesday: Noon30ish

Another great fan art piece by Noon30ish featuring characters inspired by the Lightbringer universe.

See more by the artist here.

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What I’m Playing: Destiny 2

Destiny 2 is a hard game to talk about rationally. Take a bunch of incredibly talented programmers and artists and shackle them to greedy executives determined to serve up the most mediocre (read, cheap) product possible to keep outrage only simmering but not boiling over, and marketing folks wielding an enormous budget with great skill to placate gamers that REALLY SOON all their gripes will be fixed, and give one fair score to everyone.

The old problem with game companies was that they were run by programmers who had no idea how to run the huge companies they were suddenly in charge of. Deadline? What’s that? The ludicrous over-time hours, the terrific lack of ability to forecast when a project would be finished… there were real problems.

Their vast piles of money, and the vast piles of money they were leaving on the table through mismanagement, threw the pendulum all the way to this side of things. You can see the fingerprints of this on otherwise incomprehensible decisions:  Destiny 1 was a complete mess in terms of story and end-game mechanics. (Eventually, a year or so after I quit, it apparently got really good.) Why would you launch a game that wasn’t ready? Because you’ve got investors. You’ve got guys who only get bonuses if they hit their targets. So you push product out the cloaca and lean on the marketing department to fix it. Destiny 2 was a far more polished as a game, but they took many of the wrong lessons from it.

The developers learned wonderfully from Red Dead Redemption–part of what makes an open world fun is that there’s ALWAYS something to do when you’re on your way to do something else. “I’m just going to go kill these guys for a bit, then I go on to quest x–oh, look, a cave! Oh hey, there’s a tough enemy who drops a loot box if you kill him!” It’s ADD fun to the max.

The game shoots beautifully. The controls are so tight and slick it almost makes it hard to play shooters that are older. The cinematics and art are stunning. Beautiful set pieces. Big moments. Sure, the story is trash. The villain is possibly the least frightening guy to ever blow up a thousand planets. (He stomps around and talks. All game.) The difficulty has no spikes at all. If you don’t beat the final boss on the first try, I’d have to ask what quantity of illicit substances you’d stuffed up an orifice when someone pounded on your door and you thought it was the cops. But heck, difficulty spikes could keep people from the end game–where the In-App Purchases and company profit lives.

And indeed, everything I can see that inspires rage from the (admittedly rage-prone) online gaming community on sites like r/DestinyTheGame makes sense when you think about what costs Bungie/Activision versus what brings in money for Bungie/Activision.

It’s a shoot/loot collecting game… without loot. In Destiny 1, stats were rolled random for every gun. So you could get your 10th copy of Super Rocket Launcher Black, but you’d check that sucker out… because it might have the “god rolls” you were looking for. Destiny 2, all stats are set. Get a cool gun, try it to see if it sounds different than your other gun in the same class. But get another copy of that gun, and it’s exactly the same. Add to this that the rarest gun type, Exotics, had some common bug where if you got an Exotic Gun, say the XXX, you had really great chances that the next five or six or thirteen super rare Exotic Guns you got would be XXX… which all have the same stats. You might play all evening to finish one quest line just to get a exotic at the end… and you get your eighth XXX. And this would happen when there are only 26 Exotic guns to begin with.

They artificially slow progress at certain points in order to make the game feel like it has more content than it does. Even that had bugs, so some people had greatly slowed progress while people they’d play with (at literally the same time) would quickly outrank them. That’s… not fun. They speed progress for infrequent players (gotta keep ’em in the game so they can buy IAP), and slow it for people who are ranking up too fast. So if you figure out an efficient order to do quests, you’ll suddenly see your progress is slowed.

Guns individually feel great, handle great, sound great. Great work team… and that’s manacled to… your damage never goes up. This gun SAYS it’s level 200, and this one says it’s level 300. Put a lowly grunt AI out there against that gun, and what happens? Level 200 gun: three body shots to kill, or one head shot. Level 300 gun: three body shots to kill, or one head shot. In game-play terms, this means you never feel like you’re tougher than you were last week or last month. All the loot you’ve collected (it’s a loot collecting game) has done you no good at all. Now, whyever would they do this? Because if you have enemies who are intrinsically tough, some players will go to those areas and die. Or level up too fast if they get lots of experience for killing tough enemies (which is how games have done it before). Some players will never even SEE those levels that are so very expensive to create. Or players will be sad that tougher players killed all the monsters in an area. Or can kill in one shot what takes them many, many shots. There are ways to fix this, but they involve making multiple areas. That costs money.

It’s a doll collecting game. The only thing that changes is the cosmetics.

The guns are also weirdly homogenized. Instead of there being hundreds of different guns, with dozens of different feels and bizarre combinations, you have like ten. Some have better stats, more scope sway, extra damage drop-off, different skins and shot sounds… but they eliminated outliers. They said they did this so that the PVP (Player versus Player) wouldn’t get lopsided. But… they already tweak your guns when you go into PVP.

And the PVP experience isn’t good. It’s the least fun I’ve had in PVP since I had the lowest ping on Duke Nuk’em. Even when I won handily I was saying, I hate this. When you play with even one other friend, you’ll tear up opponents. Alone? Good luck. You can’t sort by map or game type or exclude certain ones that infuriate you… Didn’t these guys do Halo? Halo 1… Halo 1 had better match-making by far. And bigger teams. (Destiny 2 is only 4vs4. I’m serious). Halo had quicker load times. That was 16 years ago. In video game years, that’s centuries.

But let’s buy the official line (because we’re not cynical at all) and believe that guns are homogenized so no one has kick-ass guns in PVP. Okay, even if you actually couldn’t figure out any way around that–(say, when you joined a PVP match, your ‘unbalanced’ guns would be re-balanced for PVP)–even if that’s true, a huge number of players don’t WANT to play PVP. Especially when it’s crappy like this. And what does Bungie care if I’ve got a gun that’s “too strong” when I play against the AI? It doesn’t hurt anyone else’s fun. Instead, you’ve made EVERYTHING Bud Light.

A loot collecting game should feel like walking into an enormous grocery store in the Pacific Northwest and venturing into the beer aisle: there are so many beers there, it’s daunting. You know some of those beers won’t be at all what you like. You might hate them. But some you will love. And some, some people will hate and others will love, and people will debate the merits of various beers and what should go with them for hours.

Bungie/Activision have warped us to Michigan circa 1995: “Well… we got Bud. Or Bud Light. Or Natural Light. Or Natty Ice–that’ll get ya trashed! Or Coors. Wait! Wait! We got Rainier here too! It’s an embarrassment of riches at the 7/11 tonight, folks!”

Everything here has been done to have to retain and pay the smallest staff possible to do hot-fixes and rebalancing work that is usually just part and parcel of a massive online social game. (It’s certainly no MMORPG.)

A lot of great people, talented people and hard-working and skilled people dedicated to their art worked on this game. They did amazing work. The suits did amazing work, too. It seems they saw their job as giving gamers the lowest possible return on investment since No Man’s Sky. I can only guess that at least one meeting featured a graph of plotting rising levels of gamer outrage to show at what point gamers won’t buy the sequel. Those people make more money than you or I ever will because they’re actually really good at finding that point, and at manipulating gamers into getting excited for the inevitable “more accessible still!” Destiny 3. People raging at Destiny 2 will pre-order Destiny 3 to get that sweet Lazer Tiger Skin pack for the BamBam Shotgun, and 4 Elite Gold Loot Crates.

Sad, huh? Video games are art. Unfortunately, the art in question is the art of commerce.

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Fan Art Tuesday: Nicky

Now for a different medium than we usually feature. Look at this magnificent sculpted miniature of Durzo Blint:

If you’d like to see more by this remarkable artist, check out this DeviantArt page.

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