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Ultiville posted:The base clix concept is quite good imo. Having stats listed on the game pieces is always an ease-of-play win, and bringing it to minis lets you keep that element of physicality that’s appealing to lots of people. And the click part simplifies a lot of things, not only do you not have to track damage on paper or whatever, you can get stat changes based on damage, which are resonant and a good way to distinguish otherwise similar pieces, without a bunch of bookkeeping or things to forget. heroclix is one of those things where its not anywhere near as popular as other games but it has a small player base that REALLY fuckin likes it and can sustain an entire state's worth of stores keeping it in stock same thing with the system itself. when it works, it really works and is fun as hell. when you hit the systems limitations its incredibly unfun
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Mar 18, 2024 17:55
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Clix was also well-targeted at a players who liked the idea of tabletop miniatures games but didn’t like the secondary hobby of assembling and painting miniatures, and additionally had no taste because goddamn are those Clix models ugly (don’t worry I’m including myself in this). The mechanics themselves were also pretty solid, but Mage Knight at least wasn’t very well cared for and was prone to balance issues caused both by power crept designs and (as a fun bonus) by con exclusives.
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Mar 18, 2024 18:10
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admanb posted:Clix was also well-targeted at a players who liked the idea of tabletop miniatures games but didn’t like the secondary hobby of assembling and painting miniatures, and additionally had no taste because goddamn are those Clix models ugly (don’t worry I’m including myself in this). Yeah I played Mage Knight for a little while because I also like the spacial aspect of minis gaming but don't care at all for the hobby aspect. If it had been a better developed game it could have been really good, also IIRC they kept too much from minis gaming in terms of free measuring and so forth, I'm pretty convinced they should have put it on a board/grid.
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Mar 18, 2024 18:25
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Kai Tave posted:Something that summary didn't go into is the video game license, which went from Microsoft to Smith & Tinker/Harebrained Schemes (who did the recent Shadowrun isometric CRPGs like Dragonfall) and then back to Microsoft. Did HBS actually hold the Shadowrun/Battletech licenses? Or were they just sub-licensing them from Microsoft?
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Mar 18, 2024 18:43
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Halloween Jack posted:Lowtax's Theory of Nice Chairs still holds.
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Mar 18, 2024 19:14
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Oh, it was something he said when he was invited to speak at a college--in the days of the dot-com bubble, the trick was to just rent a conference room with nice chairs, and tell the rich old people that this Internet thing is going to make them infinity money. They know they can trust you because you had the wherewithal to hold this meeting in a big room with nice chairs.
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Mar 18, 2024 19:23
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FishFood posted:Did HBS actually hold the Shadowrun/Battletech licenses? Or were they just sub-licensing them from Microsoft? Sub-license, as far as I know. They tried to make a new game called Lamplighters' League but it unfortunately didn't do well and Paradox laid off a lot of the studio.
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Mar 18, 2024 20:05
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RE: Heroclix, I didn't know until this weekend that they made one for Shadowrun I picked this guy up at Half Price Books to give out as a party favor at Adepticon. They had two on the shelf (the other was "G Dogg" the Orc bouncer) but this guy takes up enough space in a suitcase as-is. The game was called Shadowrun Duels and came out one year after the original Heroclix game. It sold like poo poo and lasted less than a year. I also didn't know that the original Heroclix game was designed by Monte Cook, so I can no longer say he never made anything I liked.
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Mar 18, 2024 20:14
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idk if there was some kind of huge scale buyout of a warehouse or something but ive been seeing a lot more poo poo like that at junk stores recently
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Mar 18, 2024 21:09
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John Romero posted:idk if there was some kind of huge scale buyout of a warehouse or something but ive been seeing a lot more poo poo like that at junk stores recently E: Mageknight was also a Wizkids line. You might be onto something here. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 21:16
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Dawgstar posted:Sub-license, as far as I know. They tried to make a new game called Lamplighters' League but it unfortunately didn't do well and Paradox laid off a lot of the studio. Iirc they got laid off before Lamplighters released, regardless of sales.
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Mar 18, 2024 21:42
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admanb posted:Clix was also well-targeted at a players who liked the idea of tabletop miniatures games but didn’t like the secondary hobby of assembling and painting miniatures, and additionally had no taste because goddamn are those Clix models ugly (don’t worry I’m including myself in this). It also operated in a narrow window of time where you weren’t getting previews or unboxing videos streamed to a device in your pocket. I had a friend who went in big for the Marvel/DC Heroclix lines and we’d open and look at a bunch of (ugly) minis and read their stats with interest. We spent more time at that than actually playing the game. I guess some people might still do that, like being surprised at cards in the next MtG release, but things have moved from “Legends released and someone has a list of card names they downloaded” to “I have oversized pictures of every card on my iPhone.”
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Mar 18, 2024 21:53
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Narsham posted:It also operated in a narrow window of time where you weren’t getting previews or unboxing videos streamed to a device in your pocket. I had a friend who went in big for the Marvel/DC Heroclix lines and we’d open and look at a bunch of (ugly) minis and read their stats with interest. We spent more time at that than actually playing the game. When I was playing Mage Knight I was definitely looking at a website that had every figure's stats and buying specific pieces off of eBay, so I'd say it was in a transitionary period at least. Which is interesting because the mystery was obviously an appealing feature to you but having that information was really important for me.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:15
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Halloween Jack posted:Oh, it was something he said when he was invited to speak at a college--in the days of the dot-com bubble, the trick was to just rent a conference room with nice chairs, and tell the rich old people that this Internet thing is going to make them infinity money. They know they can trust you because you had the wherewithal to hold this meeting in a big room with nice chairs. Remind me again how well that went for investment in SA
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Mar 18, 2024 22:27
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IIRC Something Awful (to this day!) pays for itself and has been profitable for most of its existence. Lowtax was just poo poo at managing money and lied to people's faces to cover for it
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Mar 18, 2024 22:30
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I used to collect heroclix, I really liked the game, and was collecting a bunch of marvel figures (mostly from amazon), but stopped when I got a bunch from free RPG days and realized that the power creep of newer figures kept outpacing the old ones, so I'd have to keep keep buying brand new figures all they came out, and I didn't really know anyone in my area who played it. Like there's power creep in a lot of games, but this wasn't even close. The newer figures had clearly better stat blocks from what I saw. it's a shame, since people here have said, the base game was fun, but the only way I'd get back into it is to play some sort of limited format. I honestly didn't know there were still making the game and there's still people playing it.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:56
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Was there ever a draft format, where you assembled your forces by taking pieces from a randomly assembled communal pile? That's the evolved solution in other abusively monetized games like Magic.
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Mar 18, 2024 23:11
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:IIRC Something Awful (to this day!) pays for itself and has been profitable for most of its existence. Lowtax was just poo poo at managing money and lied to people's faces to cover for it Didn't he buy a McMansion at one point?
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Mar 18, 2024 23:23
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:IIRC Something Awful (to this day!) pays for itself and has been profitable for most of its existence. Lowtax was just poo poo at managing money and lied to people's faces to cover for it 
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Mar 19, 2024 00:38
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Oh poo poo the boss is here everyone look busy. How about them reports? Synergy! Uh... graphs.
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Mar 19, 2024 00:46
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Foolster41 posted:I used to collect heroclix, I really liked the game, and was collecting a bunch of marvel figures (mostly from amazon), but stopped when I got a bunch from free RPG days and realized that the power creep of newer figures kept outpacing the old ones, so I'd have to keep keep buying brand new figures all they came out, and I didn't really know anyone in my area who played it. Yeah this reminds me of the dirty time I played heroclix. I think at the time there was a convention superman you could buy off of eBay that completely dominated everything else. That and it was very much a booster pack style format where you'd buy random minis and hope you didn't get multiples of the common ones which is stupid as hell
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Mar 19, 2024 05:46
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I still got the City of Heroes Heroclix from the CoV collectors edition, apparently they're a fun surprise to pull out. Manticore is apparently pretty good.
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Mar 19, 2024 07:40
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I actually played Shadowrun Duels and it was not a great game, unsurprisingly. A guy at my FLGS bought all of them and pushed them hard since he was really into Shadowrun. They were incredibly awkward to play with because they are not small figures, had action figure articulation, and the vast majority of tabletop miniature games are not made for 6" figures of regular sized people. It reminded me of Inquisitor, 54 mm scale, which is double the size of 40K and again, leaves you without much in the way of terrain when every game to that point is using a smaller scale. I started playing HeroClix when it first came out and got out around the time they started to get really crazy with the licenses. It was fun and you didn't need much, just the miniatures with the stat card and the grid maps. It was very manageable for someone in high school to play it and it didn't have the economy of a TCG outside of high level tournaments. We would do theme tournaments and had a good solid group. I went off to college around the time they started doing everything they could clix and dropped off since there wasn't a local store that ran it and I also didn't have my friend group to keep me invested. Both Mage Knight and HeroClix were solid and the BattleTech one seemed alright. I think WizKids, like Catalyst and honestly most game companies, was just poorly ran but we don't have a story of decks built through embezzled funds as an example of why they suffered. Usually putting out the amount of licensed stuff like they did is a sign of a death spiral but who knows. I doubt WizKids would ever warrant any kind of oral history considering its short existence, niche, and current success as a brand. Now Neca owns WizKids/HeroClix and seems to be doing well with it over the last 15 years.
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Mar 19, 2024 18:44
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I like that there is a reasonably active Clix thread... in BSS. Which kinda fits as I can't remember the last time I saw any kind of Clix in a game store, but it is a staple in comic shops. I even saw some SportsClix at a particularly haggard card shop not too long ago!
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Mar 19, 2024 22:00
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Robert Facepalmer posted:I like that there is a reasonably active Clix thread... in BSS. Sports clix were a very brief thing ten-ish years ago, those must have been sitting there for a good while.
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Mar 19, 2024 22:32
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Yeah, I was in there looking for unopened boxes of cards from 88-92ish, so it was totally on brand. I do like going in those kinds of shops to see what 'treasures' they hold and what insane prices they want as they are typically big 'I know what I got' types that are eternally baffled why nobody wants 1991 Upper Deck baseball for $50/box.
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Mar 20, 2024 01:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:If Catalyst is some fly by night operation how did they secure those two lucrative gaming licenses That's a Whole loving Story. To summarize: FASA died, rights went to Jordan Weisman's WizKids. WizKids licensed SR to Rob Boyle via a newly created FanPro LLC as a US subsidiary of Fantasy Productions, who had done German-language releases for Shadowrun under FASA. They then brought on Randal Bills and licensed Battletech, making Boyle and Bills the sole two paid employees of FanPro LLC. SR4 released in 2005 and Classic Battletech in 2006 through FanPro. In 2007, their parent company started struggling and divesting themselves of game properties then was leaning on FanPro LLC for support and driving the company under. Bills and Boyle tried to buy FanPro LLC from Fantasy Productions, which fell through, then threatened to make their own bid for the licenses when WizKids' current agreement came up for renewal. WizKids stepped in to mediate, and ended up licensing SR and BT to InMediaRes (who Bills worked for), of which CGL is a subsidiary. Then in 2003, Topps bought WizKids for $29m. They ended up dissolving WizKids in 2008, and the SR and BT licenses defaulted to the parent company, who have to date not had any real known counteroffer against CGL's bid to keep using them. Kai Tave posted:Something that summary didn't go into is the video game license, which went from Microsoft to Smith & Tinker/Harebrained Schemes (who did the recent Shadowrun isometric CRPGs like Dragonfall) and then back to Microsoft. The license never left MS. MS always owned the rights. FASA Interactive became a subsidiary of Virtual World in 1998, then they were in turn purchased by MS in 1999, becoming FASA Studio. They closed down in 2007, but MS maintains the rights to the IP. I am a true sicko for Shadowrun licensing lore. Edit: Even more amusing, the FASA name has come back now. They shut down in 2001, seeing the writing on the wall with declining revenues and getting out before bankruptcy while selling off their IP to WizKids. FASA Games, Inc popped up in 2012, headed by Ross Babcock who used to be with FASA Corp. They have since recovered the Earthdawn rights, as well as a few other minor properties that were in abeyance, and are now running kickstarters. Recently, they found a bunch of new old stock SR stuff from FASA Corp that's been sitting in the warehouse since 2001, and as such I managed to purchase several brand new SR2 and SR3 sourcebooks in 2023 at less than MSRP. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 02:25
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Liquid Communism posted:That's a Whole loving Story. To summarize: FASA died, rights went to Jordan Weisman's WizKids. WizKids licensed SR to Rob Boyle via a newly created FanPro LLC as a US subsidiary of Fantasy Productions, who had done German-language releases for Shadowrun under FASA. They then brought on Randal Bills and licensed Battletech, making Boyle and Bills the sole two paid employees of FanPro LLC. incredible. Thank you for sharing
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Mar 20, 2024 02:35
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Amusing side note: Ral Partha, well known as the main fantasy gaming minis company of the 70's and 80's was bought by FASA in 1998, went to WizKids in 2000, and then was spun off into Iron Wind Metals LLC. They brought back the Ral Partha trademarks in 2014 for the 40th anniversary. In the UK, Citadel Minatures (aka Games Workshop's minis business) started as a Ral Partha distributor while spinning up their own models. The first Citadel minis in the US were sold under the Ral Partha Imports brand in the the early 80's. The current FASA is what used to be the Ral Partha Europe division. Edit: Oh, and Iron Wind Metals still makes the classic Battletech and Shadowrun minis if you want oldschool metals! https://www.ironwindmetals.com/index.php/categories/cat-shadowrun
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Mar 20, 2024 02:56
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Robert Facepalmer posted:Yeah, I was in there looking for unopened boxes of cards from 88-92ish, so it was totally on brand. I have been loving looking through the dustiest baseball card shops near me. guys who got in during the boom and didn’t sell any of their og digimon cards. yeah sure I see the tag says $5 a pack but the box has a quarter inch of dust on it just give me the whole thjng for $25. the same guys who have to sell magic and Pokémon and despise everyone who comes in looking for them
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Mar 20, 2024 16:36
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John Romero posted:I have been loving looking through the dustiest baseball card shops near me. guys who got in during the boom and didn’t sell any of their og digimon cards. yeah sure I see the tag says $5 a pack but the box has a quarter inch of dust on it just give me the whole thjng for $25. Biggest bummer for me in a while was trying this at the local sports card store, because it's clearly the love project of some retired guy, and the store is essentially closed even when open, and no one ever, for any reason, goes in there, for the most part even including the guy (it has one of those "Closed until" clocks on the door more often than not). I finally managed to get inside expecting to find a treasure trove of ancient Magic and poo poo, but nope, dude is a diehard. That sports card store carries sports cards and nothing else.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:20
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theironjef posted:Biggest bummer for me in a while was trying this at the local sports card store, because it's clearly the love project of some retired guy, and the store is essentially closed even when open, and no one ever, for any reason, goes in there, for the most part even including the guy (it has one of those "Closed until" clocks on the door more often than not). I finally managed to get inside expecting to find a treasure trove of ancient Magic and poo poo, but nope, dude is a diehard. That sports card store carries sports cards and nothing else. rest assured, that guy probably sells a box of each new panini release to some business guy on his way home and makes his entire rent or does crazy work on ebay. theres a few card shops around here that have turned half their store into storage/a nightmare mess and have one rack of magic and pokemon because they are now just a physical location for an ebay/tcgplayer store
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Mar 20, 2024 19:19
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Halloween Jack posted:Oh, it was something he said when he was invited to speak at a college--in the days of the dot-com bubble, the trick was to just rent a conference room with nice chairs, and tell the rich old people that this Internet thing is going to make them infinity money. They know they can trust you because you had the wherewithal to hold this meeting in a big room with nice chairs. this was (is, probably) a big part of how MLM and other scams draw people in as well.
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Mar 21, 2024 05:22
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In industry-related news, Swen Vincke of Larian just said they're completely done with BG3 and D&D. No DLC, no sequels: https://kotaku.com/baldur-s-gate-3-sequel-expansion-larian-studios-1851356964 Guess talks with WOTC didn't go well.
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Mar 22, 2024 00:29
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Megazver posted:In industry-related news, Swen Vincke of Larian just said they're completely done with BG3 and D&D. No DLC, no sequels: gently caress. That absolutely blows. I'm on my third group of people I'm teaching 5e to who have said that game got them interested in checking it out.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:02
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Anonymous Zebra posted:gently caress. That absolutely blows. I'm on my third group of people I'm teaching 5e to who have said that game got them interested in checking it out. On the other hand, I want to play Larian games and don't want to play D&D games, so I think this is awesome news.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:15
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it's possible another studio could pick up the game for expansions etc. but the Larian guy seems pretty clear that he's not interested in making sequels of any kind for any game, which... well, it must be nice to be so rich that you can just decline to cash in on a massively profitable game in favor of taking a risk with whatever new thing you want to do
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Mar 22, 2024 01:35
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i doubt larian will struggle for sales when they can slap "from the makers of bg3" on any future game
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Mar 22, 2024 01:37
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So I guess I can play bg3 now instead of waiting for a definitive edition?
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Mar 22, 2024 01:47
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Leperflesh posted:it's possible another studio could pick up the game for expansions etc. What? When has another studio ever made official expansions for a video game? Not counting things like Activision that has many different devs all working on the same stuff, obviously.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:54
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