Category Archives: Games

So I Want To Be a Hero – Quest For Glory

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No word of a lie, I can clearly remember getting Hero’s Quest for Christmas when I was younger.  I unwrapped the gift and saw the picture below and could not wait a second more to get back home and play the game.

It all started here

I had played a few shareware games, Commander Keen and whatnot, by that point but this was the start of my fascination with games.  Now the game series had to change titles because of a boardgame with the same name (which was also awesome) and turned into Quest For Glory, spanning 5 games.  I remember even buying the little books as guides, with the red plastic window to read the clues.  I played all the games, extensively (even 4, which was notoriously buggy) and was saddened when 5 was announced as the last in the series.  Which, in my opinion, spelled the death of Sierra games.

Tears aside, Syp’s recent foray into nostalgic games had me thinking I could do something similar with QfG.  Let’s see how that goes!

Building a Hero

First off, QfG is a mix of adventure and RPG, with most of the focus on the former.  You class, either Fighter, Thief or Magic User, impacts the types of tools you have at hand in any given puzzle.  Most of the puzzles have many solutions, depending on your level in your skills.  For example, a Thief with Flame Dart can attack at a distance rather than sneak around.

For my tastes, I have always been drawn to the Thief.  They have a subset of missions in every game that just seems more fun.  I opted to make a Thief with a set of points in every skill, allowing me to try anything out.

9000!

9000!

And off I went.  Sent into Speilburg (this game is notorious for puns), I meet with the sheriff at the gates to learn about some brigand problems, along with a curse from a local ogress.  Get rid of the brigands, rid the land of the curse and become a hero – sound simple!

I head next door to the inn and meet some cat folk.  Always cat folk in fantasy games, don’t really know why dogs aren’t around more…anyways.  Nice people, got robbed by the brigands and now they have to lay low, charge me a pretty penny for a sloppy meal and then ask me to find their stuff.  I don’t know, maybe give me a free meal and I’ll think about it?

qfg2

I explore a bit more of the town afterwards.  Hit the Guild Hall to learn about being an adventurer.  Buy some magic spells from Zara, buy some apples from the cute centaur and sit down for a mug of beer and some stories at the pub.  Looks like this peaceful town has a thieving problem, which is right up my alley!

At night, I find a shiny coin in that same alley which leads me to the thieve’s guild.  Buy  myself a license, train up a bit on lockpicking and hit the town.  Only 2 houses to lift from and very little within them, maybe a few gold total.  There are many ways to die however, of which I find quite a few novel ones.  That cat is especially friendly.

Time’s up in the town, let’s head out into the wild!

qfg3

Until the next chapter.

 

Slow Start to the Year

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Syp has a post that reflects my current thoughts, that the year is off to a slow start.  I think this is mostly due to the new console generation, and the push-back on development of cross-platform games.

From a PC-only perspective, we have the indie stream (kickstarter and Steam) where development timelines are “always beta” it seems.  Sure, we get the odd Banished coming along but the real push of games seems to be months away.

The first real launch appears to be TESO, in a month, and from beta reports I’ve read – Reddit included – there are some rather significant bugs that still need to be ironed out.  They’ve mentioned no open beta, so the odds of having these bugs killed before launch seems small.  I guess there’ll be a day 1 patch.  Fingers crossed.

TSW Tokyo was delayed.  GW2 living story doesn’t seem to be having much impact.  Diablo3 did put out patch 2.0 (the loot-bonanza) which seems to be going well.  How the RoS expansion comes to fruition is a separate manner.  I honestly do not expect major sales on that front but it’s interesting to read about.  Neverwinter’s Icewind expansion is a few months away.

Wildstar still doesn’t have a launch date, though apparently this “phase” of beta had completed invites.  There are certainly bugs in the game, it’s a beta after all, but there are apparently some core mechanics that need to be tweaked.  The hype is in a lull right now and given that elder game is currently being tested, we’re likely 3 months away.

WoW is the last one on the list.  WoD heresay indicates that friends and family beta is just getting started.  The watercooler discussion still shows that there are large design gaps to be filled.  I would be surprised if WoD launches before November at this pace.  This would make the current patch 14 months old, which is so astoundingly stupid I am at a loss of words.  It does give TESO and Wildstar a ton of breathing room.

Other games on my list include Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, Xenonauts and a couple other outliers.  Hopefully when March finished, we’ll be on a good wave of launches to fill out the year.

Race to the Bottom

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An interesting article on TTH-Respawn about the Death of Mobile Gaming got me thinking.  Always a dangerous thing, I know.  In the continuing race to the bottom, markets get saturated, value gets inflated, the bubble bursts and then there’s a crash, followed by a renaissance.  It’s a cycle, seen a few times but usually takes a LONG time to come about.  Today’s hyper consuming market is changing that.

To point, mobile games are still relatively young.  A true Android capable platform is only 2-3 years old, iOS about 5.  The original mobile games were exploratory in terms of controls and limited screen real estate.  There was innovation, it was new and with so little competition, it was “easy” to find the gems in the pile.  And today we have (had) Flappy Bird and the literally hundreds of clones.  Now, I don’t have issue with Flappy Bird itself – it was a simple game with no aspirations. I have issue with the market around Flappy Bird.  Issues with Temple Run.  Issues with Clash of Clans.  There is so much garbage in the mobile space today that it’s next to impossible to make money and quality.  Games that were offered for free on PC through Flash now dominate the Paid App Store.  99c for a game doesn’t speak much to value.

This delves into the MMO space too, where the largest glut was a few years ago, the days of Allods Online.  Everyone took WoW, took out the stuff that made it good and sold it for cheaper.  The actual dev cycle for an MMO is measured in years, so it must have been quite the ride to see all these games fail, and fail spectacularly, while you haven’t even released yet.  I won’t go too far into the F2P debate but clearly, the line at which people associate value with product is at a completely different place today than it was even 3 years ago. Quality aside, TESO and Wildstar’s single largest hurdle is public perception of value.

Consoles… I don’t even know where to begin.  Hats off to Call of Duty, FIFA and the NFL for making so much money on the exact same recycled product year after year I guess.  The market for games is so astoundingly atrocious that I can’t name a single XBONE exclusive title that isn’t a rehash.  PS games at least had Naughty Dog.  It’s just so bad that I can’t even bother to pay attention anymore.

That leaves us with the last refuge of the damned – PCs and indies.  Every couple weeks, another game seems to pop up.  Jewel and Murf have been posting/tweeting about Banished lately.  A game that likely never would have heard of if not for the blogging circle.  And it’s not a game that’s free, or one that is so cheaply priced you don’t even think about it.  In fact, the average Steam game tends to be between $10-$15.  The perceived value for that dollar is so drastically different on PCs than other media that it makes you wonder if it’s a completely different target audience.  There’s Free and then there’s Free.

The seemingly unending cycle to pump out crap to be consumed (pushed by large and small groups) is not sustainable.  There’s no money left in mobile outside of IAP – and even there, whales dominates (something like 1.5% of the population pays > 50%).  F2P MMOs aren’t a whole lot different, depending on their model.  Expectations are at a point where the large majority is expecting everything for no cost.  How does that make sense?

In the quest for the last penny, or for all the pennies, it’s remarkable how many developers have lost sight of the true value of games.   Here’s hoping that bottom is found soon.

Old School Challenge

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When I was a kid, games were tough.  There was little grey area.  Digital meant black or white – you missed the pixel or you didn’t.  The concept of “ledge grabbing” was unknown and you could die for a ton of reasons, many of which made you want to destroy your controller.  Battletoads, I’m looking at you!

SNES back on topic.  There were quite a few “twitch” games, where precise movement was required to complete a task.  Super Mario World and the star road is a prime example.  Few people saw this section of the game but having to fly for 2 minutes with a cape and avoid all sorts of stuff flying at you was a massive drain on your fingers.  Recently, I was playing Donkey Kong Country and after the first zone I was standing at 25 lives.  I was thinking “I’m set for the rest of the game!”  Then I entered the second world and in particular, the mine carts.

Now, if you’ve never played DKC, then I get why this doesn’t mean much to you.  For those of you who did, this is likely a part of your memories you pushed in a dark corner.  These mine cart zones are an exercise in “press jump”, which you would think is a simple affair.  Back to the digital comment from above, where either you have it or you don’t.  There are a ton of obstacles you need to avoid and the hitboxes for these things are larger than the actual objects.  Jumps are measured in pixels, not inches.  In one particular level, I blew through 20 lives.

I compare this to today’s games, like Assassin’s Creed 4 of recent memory.  It’s platform based (mostly) but there’s so much room for error.  I think I died 5 times total (outside of naval warfare) for the entire game.  You mess up?  That’s ok, go hide.  There’s just so much padding on skill today that you need a real outlier, a Rogue-like or Demon Souls to remind you of challenge.  Plug back 15 years though and the cream of the crop is likely considered too difficult for today’s players.

I’m certain that has a large impact on MMOs as well, given that players who have been at it a while are used to a certain level of challenge and have a certain skill set.  New players don’t have that, there really aren’t any games that teach them about challenge, other than pulling that slot machine arm another time.  It certainly makes for a culture gap between the “older” and “newer” players.

Reliving Youth, One Game At A Time

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I loved my SNES.  I really liked the origina NES but the games on that were mostly crud filler.  Atari had more choice…  The SNES was a real eye opener as to what gaming could produce from Super Mario World all the way to Super Mario RPG.  I played hundreds of SNES games.  I remember a local corner store had a subscription service where I paid a monthly fee and could rent as much as  I wanted.  Boy did I get my money’s worth.
image

Don’t get me wrong.  I wasn’t on the couch all the time.  I was an outdoors kids by and large, living on the outdoor rink for the entire winter months.  But when the lights went down, when we had to be a bit quieter at home, the SNES was where it was at.  I can still clearly remember going out to buy FF6 at the store, with a sticker price of $99.99.  It took a lot of work to scratch the money together to make that purchase.   And it was worth every penny.

Memories

I went back to that model on the original XBOX.  A friend had a full set of roms and a good emulator.  I modded my console and put in a ton of hours on that.  Even the odd ball games.  Mind you, I think I put way too much time into Earthworm Jim and not enough into Secret of Mana.

I was thinking recently about my two little girls.  The eldest has been playing with our tablet for some time now and all around the educational games.  My tablet (t701) comes with an integrated keyboard, so she gets to practice writing as well.  Good stuff.  But if I want to be able to share my passion for gaming, I need to find adequate games for her.  Consoles today are not the place.  Outside of Skylanders, what kids games are left anymore?  Bubsy is gone, Kirby, Mario and all that are super complex today.  My kids love the Wii and that’s all fine and dandy but there’s more out there.

So I found an emulator on Android, SNES 9X, which for the lovely price of FREE, plays all my old roms.  I still have an old box somewhere with the SNES cartridge connection but ROMS on a tablet are a great experience.  The downside was control schemes.  Games from the 90s were not designed with touch screens in mind.  Enter my logitech gamepad.  I use that with Steam + Big Screen already (which is awesome) and I wondered how it would work here.  Given the integrated keyboard and powered USB slot, it was a plug and play experience.  So now I have a 10 inch portable screen and a controller to play a few hundred games.  And my kids can experience old school gaming with new world convenience.  Win win!

Thar Be Trolls

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As long as the interwebs have existed, there have been trolls. Shielded by anonymity, they wreak havoc on a community and you can often find the trainwreck on forums.

Reddit has a very interesting way of dealing with trolls. It’s a democratic system that downvotes into oblivion. The truly bad cases are PM-ed to the nth degree. It’s hard to find a post that’s been on reddit’s top list that doesn’t have at least one deleted account posting. So, social tools ftw I guess.

Game forums are, by and large, based on the old phbb forum. You get a post count, stickies and the ability to ban. Even the largest game on the planet has notoriously horribad forums. 

Enter some contenders. LOL has a tribunal system where the really bad people go, based on warnings/votes. XBONE has a 3 tier system based on reputation scores, with more or less a hell layer for the worst offenders. These systems work well enough as the games typically cater to small set of players, 5-50 and the games are relatively short.

MMOs are long and contain thousands of players at once. Other than building a dedicated server for bungholes, the penalties are all related to time-outs or outright bans. To further complicate things, the in-game activities are not usually linked to the forum posts, where the trolls have the largest audience.

Trion is trying something new in that the actions on the forums carry the same weight as in-game. You can potentially be banned for forums activity. Time will tell if it works. Reaction is mixed and I think that has more to do with a culture saturated in trolling.

Respawn has a post touting the right of free speech and takes to a logical extreme the courts have outright rejected (at least outside the US). Freedom of speech gets you just far enough to where the other person’s rights begin. You’re certainly allowed to say what you want but you have to be ready to live with the consequences.

To be quite blunt, games are miniature societies who have their own rules. You don’t have to play them, there are hundreds to choose. If you want to be an asshat, I’m sure EvE is looking for more players. If you want to be a part of a society, then you play by those rules. If that society judges (and that’s the most appropriate word) that you are more a hindrance to them then a boon, get ready to be cast out.

The concept of individual rights superseding those of society is a separate topic and way too political. Depending on your location on our planet, the answer changes drastically. For games though, they are on the internet. And the internet is getting mighty good at fighting trolls.

Fun Times

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Oddly enough, after a few rounds in the TESO beta and some postings around, I’ve more or less come to the conclusion the game is a mashup of GW2 and TSW.

And I have a massive dislike for GW2, hence my issues with TESO. PvP has no value for me in MMOS, outside of filler content. The simplistic controls and lack of class structure make for a bunch of monkeys on keyboards. I’m sure people love it (Bhagpuss sure does) and I do like reading their stories – but they are their stories, not mine.

That leaves TSW and the other half. I played at launched, played at B2P and a few other times. Each time I left was due to other commitments. Summer breaks, holidays, work hours and so on. My fallout from Rift is quite parallel. Reading my RSS feed of late and seeing the Monday night crew in TSW, I wanted to go back and I did.

Apparently I had a full roster of characters too. I wanted a fresh start though, to see with a new set of eyes. Plus I wanted to keep my nickname (going on 20 years using Asmiroth now) so I deleted my old guy and created a new one. Templar on Arcadia.

Off to Kingsmouth, to live the nightmare.

TSW has 2 unique properties. First is the lack of levels and rather a system of skill points and skill trees. It’s complex due to skill synergies but if you pay attention, it’s a whole lot of fun. Plus I like Meta. The second part is quests.

Quests in most MMOs are a means to an end. Either the reward is the prize or the destination is. I have a new sword or I’ve found a new zone. No one pays attention to the quest itself. TSW is different in that the rewards and negligible. The quest itself however, is multi stepped and complex.

For example, one quest had me chase down boxes of eaten squid to reach a big bad guy. No quest trail, no arrows, just me looking at the ground. Another asked for zombie body parts (like slow and dry) so I had to find them. They were not very close to the quest giver.

Investigation quests are mini sleuth exercises. While on their own they are fun (you can cheat but it’s way more fun to give it a shot) they really shine in a group. I tagged up with Septakill for some other quests and we fell on this murder investigation. Went to city hall, found some records, went to prison and talked to a ghost, looked at a wall (which was oddly the most complex part) and followed some pigeons. The pigeons were the best part. 7 of them, each saying a different thing. Based on the clues given previously, you needed to touch the pigeons in a certain order. Each of us took a few stabs at each step and it was a lot of fun figuring it out.

The second breadcrumb

Long story short, I remember why TSW hooked me previously. It’s an experience rather than simply a game. You feel a part of it. Skipping quest intros makes no sense because that’s the point of the game – to be a part of the mystery. If ever you’re around, feel free to send me a message.

Sounds Like a Dare

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Greg Street had the following tweet recently.

gstreetdare

That really does sound like a dare more than a discussion, as it’s the core of many rants.  Still, dare accepted.

I am going to assume that he relates to WoW and his tenure but it also applies to other franchises.  Sure, CoD has made a bajillion dollars on an simple formula.  GTA and Assassin’s Creed are in the same boat.  Tomb Raider has seen multiple iterations, mostly crud for recent years until the last reboot.  Final Fantasy, ever the iterative franchise, has found glory and shame for nearly 30 years.  It’s hard to debate that the original FF14 was a positive step, or that any of the FF13 games were solid.  Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 took two wildly different approaches – which would you call successful?  But we’re talking about separate games within a franchise stream, not the same game.  A separate game should take risks, there’s a transition break between them for players.  Mass Effect may transfer saves between games but the experience between the 3 is not the same.

When Greg talks about franchises, I see it more more along the lines of a single product.  Expansion packs and DLC for games are where this discussion truly has merit.  These games are living entities, whose beating hearts are the players within.  Certainly, after a while people grow old within the confines of the game and some new life needs to be injected.  Blizzard has traditionally focused on iterative design and that design usually takes 18 months to 2 years to be applied.  Icecrown Citadel was current content for over a year after all.  Let’s avoid the talk about SWG + NGE ok?

I think that changes over time, tweaks and system adjustments make sense.  Jarring changes, like adding/removing entire sub-systems changes the scope of the game.  It took 9 years but WoW finally figured that Pokemon was popular and Pet Battles were the result.  If I recall from previous stats, Pet Battles are currently consumed by more people than raids – so a change in direction much.  Let’s try and summarize the big changes.

Raid size changes – This was a big one from Vanilla to BC.  It destroyed many guilds and changed the way raids were implemented in every game since.  Iteratively, there have been many more changes, with the largest benefit coming from Flex Raiding.  My thoughts are that all games should support this last model.

Stat changes – Remember when you needed resists on all gear just to step into a raid?  Or magic power and healing power being different? How about armor penetration?  Stat bloat due to item levels?  All are gone in WoD. On their own, they were somewhat small changes as they coinciding with expansions which naturally replaced all your gear.  Systematically, it changed the entire way battles and planning worked and rejigged balancing.  These changes were needed, primarily due to poor planning on Blizzard’s part (ArPen in particular).  Talents have undergone a few revisions, but the near removal of the system today means leveling has little merit.  Pretty much a precursor to the “buy a 90”.

Itemization – A few things here. Item drops turning into tokens.  Valor/Honor points for gear.  Role specific drops.  Transmogrification.  All except for the last one had a rather large ripple effect on gaming.  Most were implemented to avoid the issues with raid gear allocation and the headaches of DKP systems.  Too often, an entire raid’s gear drops would be disenchanted and a group could make little progress.  How often did I scream about Shaman gear dropping on an Alliance raid…

Social Tools – These are iterative but massive in scope.  Guild levels is a small one and one that is poorly implemented.  Extremely poorly implemented as it makes no sense to be a in a guild that isn’t level 25, especially if you have an alt.  LFG came in patch 3.3 and absolutely destroyed any sense of society WoW had at the time.  The era of go-go-go was born and I am still a firm believer that WoW’s implementation is flawed at the core.  LFR was implemented because no one raided.  It was under 10% at the time, less than 1% for heroic Firelands.  It was a logical step to take, but again had a massive impact on existing raiding groups and wasn’t fully integrated.  Flex Raiding is still being tweaked but is where the natural evolution of this problem should have lead 3 years ago.

 

Now, did these things need to change?  Yes, clearly.  There were some significant design issues at the core of the game and the demographic for WoW has changed over the years.  Where the initial focus was a combination of EQ and Warcraft 3 players (young males) today’s MMO landscape is more around a 30-35 year old individual (male and female).  Time to play has gone down while available income has gone up.

Did the actual changes implemented address the design issues?  For the most part, no.  In fact, by and large, they introduced even more significant issues.  The BC to WotLK phase saw this the most.  Cataclysm took a drastic turn and simply disconnected all the systems instead, to avoid chasing down balance issues.  The big items listed above are still “broken” in their implementation.  LFR is a good idea but WoW’s version has been a cancer on the community.  The consistent focus on the individual instead of the group has been a core driver for too long and really has had a disastrous effect on the industry as a whole.

So while Greg’s tweet sounds simple, the crux of the argument is not that changes are / are not required.  It’s that the changes implemented must be quality changes that improve the game yet maintain a core vision and cohesiveness.

 

Learning Through Trial

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I’ve been thinking more about the skill gap issues that most MMOs have today.  Skill gap in that the game from 1-max rarely requires any effort and then people are put into group situations that they simply are not prepared for.  Cataclysm is a prime example of this problem.  It would be interesting to see statistics of how often stuns and interrupts are actually used during the leveling curve…

A couple games recently have taken a somewhat different approach to this problem.

FF14 has trials and forced grouping all the way through the levels.  From the very start you learn about situational awareness, prime targeting, interrupts, line of sight and avoiding the red.  If you don’t learn, if just one person doesn’t catch on, then you simply cannot progress.  This is great.  Your leveling experience is complemented with the system intricacies.  Outside of tank defensive cooldown usage, it really primes you for all group combat.

The Secret World takes a more direct approach with the Guardian.  Given the structure of the game, you can fill any role, so it gives you the choice of defeating him as a DPS, Healer or Tank.  All of them are tough battles in that you need to have a very solid understanding of the role, skill synergies and how to manage interrupts.  I know some solid gamers who were stuck on this guy for a while, he’s no cakewalk.  TSW already has a pretty punishing skill level and this just brings it up to 11.  Still, it makes sure people are prepared.

WoW has trials.  There’s rumor that they are going to expand on that system for WoD, likely using the Silver medal rank as the baseline.  Having done those, I can say that Silver isn’t all that hard to achieve if you’ve ever done group content and were awake.  For those that have not, those that have just leveled and done pet battles, then this could be a tad challenging.  It’s also quite a shock, since nothing up until this point actually requires skill.

I’m getting of the opinion that all games should have this type of system.  While I prefer FF14’s, since it’s from the start, both TSW and WoW have decent interpretations.  It certainly will help with bridging the skill gap at the start of end game activities.  That naturally will help with the animosity of “noobs” and “l33t” players.  Raising players knowledge of the game systems is always a good thing.

Raids Are a Nightmare

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Sensational title for the win!

WildStar, if you didn’t already know, is pushing for a fairly difficult raid environment.  Compared to other games that have a variable player count per raid (or only 1 size), WS is taking a slightly different step.  There will be 20 man raids and 40 man raids, completely separate from each other.  I know that the resources required to develop either size raid are equal but it seems to be a waste somewhat, and that’s what I’ll be discussing.

I played Vanilla WoW.  I did Molten Core and Blackwing Lair.  AQ & Naxx were off my list because of the first two.  I won’t argue balance on these raids, they were relatively new takes on EQ’s zerg-fest, and had their share of bugs and issues.  What was challenging was the logistics.

Today’s raiders have it easy.  You need enchants, potions, buffs and whatnot.  They are easy enough to find and the challenge is getting the gold to buy them.  Let’s say a raid session sets you back 500g, at top tier.  In Vanilla this was a bit harder.  Tubers were BOP, gear needed resistance on it, enchants were rare (diamonds anyone?), repair bots and money was scarce.  It honestly took me longer to get ready for a raid than it did to be in one.  It just was not fun to slog through prep work to raid.

Then you get into the whole herding chickens aspect.  I was a role leader, DPS.  That’s 30+ people you need to corral together on a  set target list.  The difference between top DPS and bottom was massive.  Losing a single top DPS player could break a raid.  How does 1 person make or break a raid?  We had penalties for not showing up on time, in a day when summons were rare and travel was hard.  Sign-up sheets and a bench.

It is logistically impossible to consistently raid with the same people every time.  People have things to do and you can lose 2-3 per raid – most times in the middle of a raid.  Having a bench means people are on a waiting list to have fun.  What?  Math and people do not mix.  If I need a bench for a 10 person raid, then I need 1-2 people, max.  If I need a bench for a 40 person raid, I’m looking at 5+.  That’s 5 people, heartbeats, that are on a waiting list.  Maybe they just go to another place where there is no list and then you have to backfill that slot.  Managing people like this isn’t fun for the raid leader, guild leader or the people being managed.

Now we get into fairness, specifically around loot.  Enter the DKP systems.  Enter the master looter role.  Enter tribunals.  You have 40 people.  You have 5 pieces of gear (at best).  You have 35 people who are not getting anything for the effort.  You have a ton of gear wasted if they are class specific (shaman/pally gear….) and no one to collect.  As fair as you want it to be, people will be upset for many reasons, most stupid and selfish.  But you don’t have a choice, you need those people to actually raid.

Finally we get into simple usage metrics.  Raids are vastly underused compared to the effort developers put into them.  Until WoW put in LFR, the top tier raiders, 40 man raid target audience, accounted for less than 1% of the entire population.  LFR currently sits around 60% of all players having consumed raid content and 10% at top tier.  If the most accessible raiding system can’t get higher than 10%, and this is with recycled content (LFR, 10 man, flex, 25 man, heroics), how can other games expect more?

Perhaps this 40 man raid idea is an experiment.  Maybe there are a ton of tools surrounding this structure to help move it along.  Strong class balance, LFG tools, partial lockouts, tokens, flexible sizing to cap among others come to mind.  I am waiting with fingers crossed that there’s more coming on this topic.