I think I'm done with Western WarDogs....

Yeah, so my last post.... Not so much.  After the consistent, disappointing, experience on EU West and US servers in general I did the exact opposite of the Pet Shop Boys recommendation and I went East.

Yes, I've played my last five rounds on EU East and you know what... It's a revelation.  Sure there's still some questionable people, insta snapping aims and seemingly no recoil, but I've had successive interesting experiences and "fun" time spent in the game.

Which is what I said, if you spend enough time you find those nuggets, but I ain't got all day to sit panning sand by the river and there's a lot of sand to get through.

So EU East, I can't understand half the players, there's Cyrillic text flying by lots of Russians, but I got kills and killed, I got points and cash.... I had fun.

And I didn't get lazer beamed insta pudding set down by enemies.  I didn't get constantly insta vapourised by mortars nor tanks.... And you know what, firing 9mm from my Bison I got kills, okay shooting the dick hit meta but I got kills.

And I even took a mosin out and got a kill and a couple of head shots on armour (by the way, wearing a helmet and surviving a mosin shot to the face just totally annoys me.... but I did get the shot off, twice).

I've tried to understand why, as a game developer myself, but denuded of the larger picture I tried to understand; the first clear thing is there's still a spread of player levels out here, not everyone is running around in full max armour kits; don't get me wrong, some are, but not everyone.

Then the way they play, there's a lot more assault, ebb & flow, it's not a monotonous grinding constant chain of death death death.  Again, don't get me wrong, I've been inside fobs getting absolutely mullered, but it wasn't as insta and see nothing as in the West, I saw the attackers, I got one, I saw another, I marked a third, I heard grenades coming over the wall, I saw the breech happen..... I do not see any of that on EU West, it happens, but you don't see it, you're dead as a lower-spec-earlier in the chain poor player.

 So, I just came out an EU East game, we lost, but it was fun... That's the difference.  I wonder how regional variance is being tracked by Bulkhead, since my overwhelming negative experience has been in EU West servers and consistent.... Divide that shit experience across all servers & all regions, it maybe easy to overlook.

I think I'm done with Wardogs.... And that's a shame.

It's not the devs, the grind or the progression system. It's the player meta.

In the last week, I've had two genuinely great games. One was a late join where I switched into medic/scout, made around $30K and progressed both roles. The other had me running an SMG medic, keeping a higher-level sniper alive on a tower and watching out for infiltrators. Proper teamwork. Covering each other. Playing the situation, not just chasing kills.

That's the Wardogs experience I'm here for.

The problem is, those games feel like the exception.

Too many players seem to ignore comms, minimap intel, enemy markers and basic situational awareness. I'm not saying they're bad at FPS games. I'm saying Wardogs demands more than winning individual gunfights. Positioning, information, respawn distance and knowing when not to push all matter.

Here's a perfect example from my last game.

We're establishing a FOB. Builders are working, supply trucks are arriving, and Green starts pushing from the west. I'm on the flank as a scout sniper. I take out two approaching enemies, mark another push from the south and help clear it, then deal with another enemy on the opposite hill.

I settle into overwatch and keep marking targets. I must have marked around 15 enemies.... One assist.

Our players keep running straight into marked enemies, seemingly oblivious to the minimap. They push into firing lines, get shot in the back and give up the positional advantage we're supposed to be protecting.

Then a helicopter drops two enemies behind us while everyone is focused on the northern approach. I spot the southern threat, mark both enemies and engage. Two Greens go down. Five team mates are down.... I've got two revives.

I secure my flank area, make sure the bodies are in sensible positions, ask twice for a status update and watch for further threats. Nothing obvious, so I break my cover to try the revives.

There's a $500 bounty on one of them.... He's begging me to come over.

I approach carefully and start the revive.

"He's here! He's here, on my body!"

Zap. I'm Dead.

Was my teammate calling out to the enemy? Nope! It was the downed Green, still in the fight and communicating with his squad right up to the last moment.  Whilst my dead team mate calls me lame and bags out.

Fair play to the green. That's exactly the sort of information advantage and teamwork the game should reward.

But where was that awareness from my own team? A single warning could have made the difference.

That's what makes this so frustrating. The enemy is playing the tactical game, while your own team often treats it like a conventional run-and-gun shooter.

I've been playing FPS games since the Enemy Down league and the Day of Defeat days. I've also spent plenty of time with the mil-sim side of things in Arma. I understand both ends of the spectrum, and I genuinely hoped Wardogs would hit that sweet spot between accessible FPS action and meaningful tactical play.

It can. I've experienced it firsthand.

But when spotting, suppressing, holding a flank, communicating enemy movements and reviving teammates deliver so little satisfaction because nobody acts on that information, the whole tactical layer starts to feel pointless.

The game can provide the tools, the roles and the objectives. It can't make players use them in its current form, as it doesn't reward them to do so. But it can look at how its meta and reward systems encourage people to play different ways.

Right now, the most satisfying moments are too few and far between to justify the time investment, especially when you're working full-time and don't have hours to burn finding one decent squad, heck even one decent teammate.

So I'm stepping away.

Not because Wardogs is fundamentally broken, and not because I expect every player to run military-grade comms. I just want a game where situational awareness matters, teamwork pays off and playing your role feels worthwhile.

Wardogs has the ingredients for that experience. I just don't think the average match delivers it often enough.

And that's a shame, because when it clicks, it's bloody brilliant.

Scottish Independence Vote 2.0

The political landscape in the UK is in such disarray at the moment it's very hard to pick where the country is going.... The Country.... Even that is a loaded term.  When I say "The Country" I mean the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the collective "We Brits" if you will allow me to say.

I have always fervently believed the union makes us stronger as an island nation and even lets us have fun with it, especially on the sports field.  But politically, globally, trade & positively as a nation better together.

I even tip my hat to the Republic of Ireland, Isle of Man and the Channel Islands in that; perhaps even as far as the overseas dependencies which have maintained the "Brit" connection and retain their self-determination.

So why am I waxing lyrical about this?

Scotland.  I keep seeing John Swinney of the SNP banging on about Scottish Independence and another vote, sure fine, go ahead, rock the boat John; I'm positively sure there's no problems at SNP headquarters anymore... Right?  (Queue the Anakin Skywalker Padme memes here).

What is it John Swinney is banging on about which has irked me?  Well, it's the way he blindly goes into this independence conversation, seemingly without any thought for the Scottish Public; what he seems to be focussing on is what the big sweeping brush he can achieve for Scotland might be.

Such things as closer ties to the EU, France especially, possibly Scotland rejoining the EU as an independent country from the UK's exit, he bangs on about Industry and opportunity for Scotland.

But he blindly ignores so much of the whole picture and that's what annoys me about the mans position and policies.

He wants to remove the UK Nuclear deterrent from Scotland, so what happens to all those jobs supporting that infrastructure?

What happens to all the Scots in the UK armed forces themselves?

What happens to all the free University places?

All the NHS infrastructure if he took it to being the SHS?

With modern data and searching it's quite trivial to see the baseline numbers on this, numbers he is ignoring and none of it works out for the Scottish public.

Scottish Government Revenue (2025-2026) was £98.3 billion.

Public expenditure for Scotland (2025-2026) was £123.3 billion.

That's a deficit, that means Scotland cannot run the services it currently has to the quality they currently are as an independent country.

This means free further education, adult social care, housing and personal benefits as well as probably infrastructure like the road and rail would all suffer in order to close that hole in the public finances.

Then add to the fact that Scotland needs a defence system of its own, unless the Scots wish to routinely welcome Russian over flights or threats of invasion by Donald Trump.

It's bizarre that the numbers are so stark and there are so many members of the Scottish public ignoring this simple and perfectly understandable situation.  And it's one the devolved Scottish government itself puts upon the people, they kept free further education in Scotland, that's all out of the public purse, the  revenue from the North Sea fields off of Aberdeen & Dundee, will likely walk off with the private investment owners - which won't be Scottish for the most part.

It's just bizarre that the SNP and John Swinney are rocking the national boat like this, seemingly for their own notoriety.  And the current Westminster gaggle are too spineless to address them with the simple reality - Scotland cannot afford to be independent without making the Scottish people very much poorer financially, functionally and fraternally.

My thoughts on Warcraft Forever...

As an original World of Warcraft player, and a die-hard player from vanilla through to Wrath, I wanted to give my thoughts on World of Warcraft Forever. But before I can, I have to be a little lyrical.

I believe World of Warcraft is the best game ever made. There, I said it. I work in the games industry, and I genuinely feel that nothing has ever captured the zeitgeist and fired the imagination quite like it did.

Sure, it had bugs and flaws. I was among the early voices calling out Blizzard's lack of forethought around scaling levels and power. I made that clear on my appearance on Shut Up, We're Talking, all those years ago, when I founded this very blog.

My history with this game runs deep and long and old.

Would I say tired? No. I still dabbled from time to time, trying to understand the game I loved. I spent time on emulation servers. I even rolled my own, as any software engineer might.

So it's with a been there, done that, paid for it and tasted it for free perspective that I approach the Forever offering.

And honestly? I'm not going to play it.

That might be unfair to the game itself. As a standalone offering, it probably deserves my time and money. Blizzard would certainly love to have both.

But I can't bring myself to do it.

I don't trust Blizzard to preserve the game as I want it to be. I don't trust them not to wipe it away. And that lack of trust has become a deep, seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

I've watched executives wax lyrical about taking the war out of Warcraft. I've watched them gloss over that rhetoric, claim they've heard us—the players—and move on.

They haven't heard us. Not in the way that matters.

And that scares me.

I'm scared they don't understand what this game means to the wider player base. And, to be absolutely brutal, this is the game they should have made more than a decade ago.

Instead, it's arriving too late for me.

I love World of Warcraft. I always will. But I don't trust Blizzard with it any more.

Can Blizzard change that for me?

I'd love to talk to them about it. I just don't trust that they'd listen.

EA, Leveraged Buyouts, My Thoughts....

News has broken that Electronic Arts (EA) has agreed to a sale reportedly worth around $55 billion to a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund alongside Affinity Partners and JPMorgan Chase.

That's an extraordinary valuation.

EA is one of gaming's oldest and most recognisable publishers. Whether or not you're a fan of its catalogue, few companies have had the influence EA has had over the last forty years. Its sports franchises alone are enormous businesses.

But the sale itself is what caught my attention.

Much of the reporting quite naturally calls this a "sale", because that's exactly what it is for EA's existing shareholders. They receive cash and walk away.

The part that interests me is what happens afterwards.

From the public reporting, this appears to be structured as a leveraged buyout (LBO). In broad terms, that means the buyers contribute some of the purchase price themselves while borrowing the remainder to complete the acquisition. That's a well-established private equity model and not unusual in itself.

The important distinction is what comes next.

In a typical leveraged buyout, the acquisition debt does not simply disappear once the deal completes. Instead, the debt sits within the acquiring group and is ordinarily serviced from the cash generated by the acquired business. Existing shareholders have been paid. The lenders still expect to be repaid.

The exact financing arrangements for the EA transaction are not public, so I'm not suggesting I know the specific debt structure, repayment schedule or internal financing arrangements. But if this follows the broad mechanics of a conventional LBO, the acquired business ultimately becomes responsible for generating the cash needed to support that financing.

That changes incentives.

The company experiencing the stress of a change of ownership immediately suffers the added stress of serving the debt used to buy it. Framed from the bottom-up perspective of the people inside the organisation, that can seem deeply counterintuitive.

Every dollar spent on salaries, benefits, research, new technology or creative risk has to compete with the financial demands placed upon the business. Sometimes that pressure is manageable. Sometimes it becomes the defining constraint.

That is where my concern begins.

Games are not factories. They're creative projects with uncertain outcomes. One title becomes a phenomenon. Another, built by equally talented people, can miss its audience entirely. Creative industries don't always fit neatly into financial models built around predictable cash flows.

EA has advantages many publishers don't. Its sports portfolio generates recurring revenue that most companies would envy. That may make servicing acquisition financing easier than it would be for many of its competitors.

But outside those flagship franchises, EA's history has been far less predictable. Like every major publisher, it has celebrated huge successes alongside expensive disappointments.

The reason I care about this isn't theoretical.

I've lived through a leveraged buyout in the games industry.

Keywords Studios was acquired by Houting UK Limited, an acquisition vehicle backed by EQT, CPP Investments and Temasek in a classically structured private equity leveraged buyout. What followed, from my perspective as an employee, was increasing organisational consolidation under the long-running "One Keywords" strategy alongside restructuring across parts of the business.

I was one of the people who ultimately lost their job.

From where I stood, there was no appetite to keep experienced engineers available between projects, even if that meant retaining knowledge and being ready for the next opportunity. Instead, the business reduced headcount, with the expectation that people could simply be hired again when demand returned.

I can't say that decision was made solely because of the acquisition financing. What I can say is that, from the inside, it felt like a business becoming increasingly intolerant of anything that wasn't immediately billable or immediately reducing risk.

Losing a spreadsheet line is one thing. Losing your livelihood is something else entirely.

That experience inevitably colours how I read announcements like EA's.

I watched studios lose parts of their individual identity as more functions became centralised. I watched colleagues leave. I watched teams become leaner. Many of those decisions may well have had sound commercial reasons behind them; I cannot say that any individual decision was made because of the acquisition financing. Markets change, projects end, businesses restructure for many reasons.

But I also know what sustained financial pressure feels like from inside an organisation.

When cash becomes precious, hiring slows. Support functions shrink. Management layers are reviewed. Projects are merged or cancelled. Duplicate roles are questioned. None of those decisions are unique to leveraged buyouts, but leverage can make the consequences of under-performance much sharper.

Perhaps EA's future owners will prove my concerns unfounded. I genuinely hope they do.

Because behind every restructuring announcement are thousands of developers, artists, designers, testers, producers and support staff who simply want to make great games.

That's why I don't look at this transaction and see a headline valuation.

I see a business beginning a very different chapter, one where financial engineering and creative ambition will inevitably have to coexist.

Having lived through one version of that story already, I sincerely hope EA's ends better than mine did.

---

References: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjejyl34345o https://www.ea.com/news/ea-announces-completion-of-acquisition?isLocalized=true https://kotaku.com/helldivers-2-ceo-electronic-arts-acquisition-consolidation-safe-sequels-2000721559

 

XVE - Terrain Systems - Random Noise & Influence Mechanics

Well, politics aside I thought I'd talk about my game engine and some of the new terrain systems I'm working on.

There have been a couple of images and videos on the old YouTube channel with some of the examples, but here's a still for your enjoyment... See the MASSIVE tree remains on the peak it was to place trees (of the correct scale) into a natural pattern I then turned.

I started with the same noise algorithm I'd used for the peak itself, but that tended to give me slices of trees or uncanny looking placements.

Off to CImg I started to play with some noise algorithms and after a while I got an appearance for the groups of trees I liked; at least in 2D.

 

This being me though I went to bed and got distracted with horses and so only just came back to this very late on a Sunday evening, and the first thing I did was NOT the tree placements at all, no I started with the above set of points and wanted to check my "Area of Control" system.

This basically sets up the influence from each island, as you capture them the idea being that you improve them and they become stronger nodes, more loyal maybe, and that gives you bonus points towards your various activities and influence over neighbours... Whom you might conquer.

The trick however was how to set this up by default, so I decided to play a map up into individuals, and create a sort of area influence and then depending on the range you can travel that will build networks of connections to "who you might influence" or be influenced by.

However, that got quite complex quite quickly and my world still needs to be persisted on the server/back end, soooo.....

I got distracted again and made the initial influence a voronoi diagram pattern.

 

Sometimes you just have to let your mind wander, this weekend, the little computer time I had, was definitely just letting my mind wander.

I was quite tired after the latest release at work.... And to be honest, I kind of love Jason Voorhees.

 

 

People of Makerfield

Here I am again, being political, I watched Question Time last night... And I have to say I wasn't impressed with very many of the members of that panel.

The standout moments being the childish faces the Green Candidate pulled when members of the Green Party were quoted back to them.

The Liberal Democrat candidate and Reform candidates coming across as very nervous, or certainly not as confident as the others on the bench.

And then the Labour and Conservative candidates.... Often trying to bounce off one another as if they were jovial colleagues "We've had conversations at length".  To use a very English turn of phrase, they all piss in the same pot.

Really, people of Makerfield, you have an opportunity here to avoid voting for the current "mainstream" parties, those parties whom have hog tied and destroyed our democracy, spent our money and left this country a husk of itself in just a quarter of a century the decline in this country is unfathomable.

You Makerfield, you have the opportunity to simply null and void this party political shenanigans in the Labour party.

You Makerfield, have the opportunity to agree with many of the voices in that audience and indeed the candidates, that politics needs a root & branch reset.

That means simply not voting for the parties whom have proven themselves full of self-serving, lying, traitors.

I'm not telling you who to vote for.  I am however suggesting whom not to vote for.