I recently wrote about the ongoing lawsuit between Ed O'Bannon and the NCAA regarding player likenesses for college athletes (and compensation for college athletes in general). While it seems unlikely that any college football games will be made using the NCAA license while this lawsuit remains unresolved in appeal limbo, it does seem inevitable to me that EA will eventually start making these games again. Hopefully, it will come with the ability to include real player likenesses, but that is likely to depend on the outcome of any appeals and the willingness of the NCAA to include real player likenesses in games. Video game sales seems far too lucrative an exploit for the NCAA to pass up, so I highly doubt that they'd simply refuse to grant their license.

Operating under the assumption that EA will go back to making NCAA Football games within the next few years (hopefully as early as NCAA Football 18), I'd like to start talking about the kinds of things that I'd like to see in such games.

It's been three years without a college football game. It doesn't look like we'll be getting one for 2016 either.
But hopefully a new entry in the series is only a year or two away...

Legacy features that must return!

I don't expect all the old features to return, and even the ones that do return might not be the same as in the older games. But here's the things that I think the game should absolutely have in some form or another (hopefully similar to previous games):

• In-season recruiting in dynasty
• Redshirt players
• Export draft class to Madden
• Conference re-alignments
• EA Locker: Roster sharing & Team Builder
• Custom stadium sounds
• "Toughest places to play"

Roster-sharing might seem unnecessary if the result of the lawsuits means that EA can actually license the rights to player likenesses. But it's unclear how that would work. There is no college football labor union (equivalent of the NFL Players' Association) that I'm aware of, so either the NCAA would have the rights to license all of its players as a collective, or it would be the responsibility of the game-maker to individually license each and every player. Hopefully, it's the former. But if it's the latter, that leaves open the possibility of individual players refusing to grant rights to their likenesses, which means they won't be included in the game. Would EA simply remove them from the roster? Or replace them with some generic player? Or go back to using "QB #10" as that player's name? Worse yet, would the game-maker even bother to approach all the athletes, or would they just settle for the key players from elite schools?

In any case, college football rosters are often in flux right up to the start of the season, and many teams need a few games before they settle on a final depth chart. So the ability to share roster updates means that the user base can keep the rosters up to date if EA uses outdated rosters.

Hand-me-downs from Madden

Madden is now a few years ahead of NCAA Football, and the past few years have actually seen a decent improvement in the quality and depth of the game. Of course, I'd like to see a lot of features from recent Madden games also get imported into any future NCAA Football games:

• Tackling / physics engine
• Improved running, receiving, QB throw-placement, and defensive play
• Player experience and confidence (needs to be much more volatile though)
• Skills Trainer, augmented with college concepts such as the option
• Stadium upgrades and renovation

Just please, for goodness sake, don't force another Ultimate Team gimmick down our throats!...

There hasn't been a legitimate college football video game since EA Sports stopped making the games after the 2013 season. NCAA Football 2014 was the last game in the series (and I didn't even review it!).

The reason for the disappearance of this game series was a class-action lawsuit filed by former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon against the NCAA regarding compensation for player likenesses in college sports video games. O'Bannon sued in order to get the NCAA to pay players some compensation for the likenesses that were used in such video games. The NCAA refused, since they consider college athletes "amateurs" who should not be paid. Over the past few years, there has been mounting controversy over the lack of compensation for college athletes, especially as sports like college football and basketball surge in popularity and profitability. Currently, schools can earn millions of dollars from their college sport programs (from ticket sales to TV deals to advertising and endorsements), but the athletes who play the games don't see a penny of the money. Instead, they get scholarships.

While I'm personally in favor of paying college athletes, I'm not going into that debate right now. Instead, I want to discuss the settlement that occurred, EA paying out the settlements to players, and what it might mean for the future of college football games.

I'll admit that I'm confused by this whole affair. There was initially a settlement, and EA is currently paying out likeness reimbursements to players. However, the case is still ongoing, as the NCAA has challenged the original ruling. This appeal resulted in an upholding of the NCAA's violation of anti-trust laws, but it also (as I understand) struck down part of the original ruling that required money to be set aside to pay players compensation for their likenesses. I'm not sure if these are two separate cases, or if EA independently agreed to a settlement. If anyone could explain the course of event, I'd greatly appreciate it.

In any case, EA Sports excited players earlier this year by posting the first Facebook post in almost two years on NCAA Football's official Facebook page. The post wasn't much - just a heartbeat monitor. Fans quickly started anticipating that this meant that EA was resurrecting the college football video game franchise.

EA quickly responded that the post was not meant to imply that any future NCAA Football games were in development...

Table of Contents

• What the hell does poise do?!!
• Show the entire upgrade path for weapons
  • Filter Soul Transposition list by boss soul requirement
  • Show all the players equipment
  • Restrict summons' usage of the Storm Ruler
• Less arcane NPC quests
• Don't teleport the player from one boss to another!
• DLC suggestion: The Age of Dark
• Lifegems or Estus from message rating
• A method to the madness
  • Cumulative covenants
  • An actual sin system and restoration of the Darkmoon covenant
• Un-tipping the invasion scale
  • What happened to the smooth online play of DSII and Bloodborne?
  • Even out the penalties for invasions versus cooperation
  • Disable "friendly fire" for Red Phantoms

What the hell does poise do?!!

In my review, I noted that poise seemed to have been turned off in the game's code. Well, FROM Soft has apparently stated that poise is working as intended. Really? How? What does it do? FROM was not forthcoming (so far) with any details on what the stat is supposed to actually do, other than to say that it is "more situational". Ok, whatever. So I guess it's up to the community to try to figure out how this stat apparently works, since it doesn't work in any way comparable to the previous games, nor does it seem to solve the problem that the original implementation of poise was intended to solve.

UPDATE Nov 16, 2016:
It looks like we've finally figured out what Poise does in Dark Souls III. It seems to only be activated when using large weapons that provide Hyper Armor.

I had previously believed that Poise functioned as an "escape method" from quick, stun-locking weapons (like daggers). My early interpretation of Poise was that a higher Poise value may allow the player to escape from a stun lock and be able to roll / counter-attack / parry after 3 hits rather than 5 or 6 consecutive hits. I even remember testing this hypothesis out and finding it to hold true. This would also apply to situations in which a player gets attacks from multiple enemies simultaneously (or in quick succession). Higher Poise would allow you to escape from the 3rd enemy's attack, rather than the 4th or 5th. But according to the Wiki, this doesn't seem to be the case. Am I wrong?

If it is true that Poise only affects Hyper Armor, then I'm still not happy with the mechanic, as it only applies to very specific builds, and might as well be a stat on the weapon rather than a feature of armor. But if it does also affect the ability to escape stun locks, then I guess I would be a little bit more satisfied.

Poise was originally intended to act as a counter to extremely fast weapons like daggers, rapiers, and so on, that could quickly hit and stagger an opponent and put them in a stun lock from which they couldn't escape (so long as the attacker still had stamina). It was also intended to give players with slower weapons an opportunity to tank their way through hits with such fast weapons. You'd still take damage, but assuming your attack with a stronger, slower weapon did more damage than your opponent's weaker, faster weapons, then the trade-off would still be in your favor. If you were going to use a very slow weapon, then it behooved you to also equip heavy armor and other poise-boosting equipment so that you could tank through opponents' hits. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. A knight in full heavy armor should not get stun locked in a 10-hit combo from a dagger. It simply shouldn't happen. This is what poise was designed to prevent, and it's not doing its job. If an invader shows up in your world with an estoc, and you aren't an expert at parrying, then you might as well just offer up your head on the chopping block and get it over with.

Without poise, heavy armor is worthless, and daggers are incredibly overpowered against slower combatants.

Without poise in this form, heavy armor simply isn't worth its weight encumbrance, especially since you can't even upgrade it to increase its damage resistance. This was a problem in Demon's Souls, which didn't have poise. Heavy armors generally didn't reduce damage enough to be worthwhile, they prevented the player from effectively rolling, and they were so heavy that they prevented the player from being able to pick up all the loot in a level because that game also had an item burden. Rolling was the end-all-be-all of defense in Demon's Souls, and that was one of the game's greatest weaknesses. It was easy to overlook because the developers didn't know better at the time. But they do know better now. Was poise exploitable in Dark Souls? Sure. It was really exploitable in Dark Souls II due to its connection to hyper armor and the inclusion of farmable healing items. But whatever FROM Soft did to it in DSIII seems like a severe overreaction.

Once I learned that poise wasn't working the way I expected it to, I gave up on trying to engage a lot of enemies with my slow halberd. Instead, I started fighting the knights in Lothric Castle and the Grand Archives with my flame-infused barbed straight sword - which I also spent a bunch of titanite to fully upgrade. This speedier weapon allowed me to attack these knights as fast (or faster) than they could attack me, giving me enough of an edge to reliably beat them. The ones with the tower shields and lances still gave me trouble, but the swordsmen fell swiftly to my +10 Barbed Flame Sword. Even Yahtzee noted in his Zero Punctuation review the starting long sword seemed better than any of the numerous boss weapons that he found. I imagine that this is because he also had trouble with the lack of poise, but didn't quite figure out that poise wasn't working.

Lack of proper poise allows the estoc's reach and speed to make it a deadly PvP weapon.

So this leaves us with the question of "what, exactly, is poise intended to do?"...

Earlier this year, it was announced that CBS will be creating a new Star Trek television series to celebrate the franchise's 50-year anniversary. Very little was known about the series except that it would be under the leadership of Bryan Fuller (a former Deep Space Nine staff writer), and that it would premiere on CBS's All-Access streaming service. As one of Fuller's first actions, he made a lot of Trek fans very excited by hiring Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country director Nicholas Meyer to be the chief writer of the new series. These happen to be my two favorite Star Trek movies (with Undiscovered Country getting better each time I see it).

A leaked poster for the new Star Trek series.

The biggest questions were when would the series take place, and what would it be about. Many of the previous pitches for show ideas that I had read sounded terrible. Many sounded like really cheap fan-fiction concepts. Like the idea of a series about James Kirk's descendant becoming captain of a new Enterprise to save the Federation from an extra-galactic alien threat. Boy, that one sounded dumb.

I avoided talking about the topic of CBS's new series up till now because I wanted to reserve judgement until something more concrete about the show was announced. Well now, something has, and it has me very excited. According to rumors, Fuller and Meyers are producing a seasonal anthology series similar to the popular American Horror Story. This means that each season would contain its own self-contained, independent storyline that could explore any time period, characters, locations, or concepts from the entire series' canon. I've been saying for years that Star Trek would be a great fit for an anthology series. The canon is large and expansive enough that focusing it on a singular time, place, and characters feels very restraining and limits the types of stories that can be told.

The first season will supposedly take place sometime after the events of The Undiscovered Country.

Of course, when I started pitching that idea to friends and anyone who would listen (don't know why I never blogged about it...), I hadn't conceived of a seasonal anthology. I was thinking more along the lines of a true anthology similar to The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. ...

Players of the Dark Souls III Network Beta have revealed some information from the parts of the game that have been playable. I was able to play the Dark Souls II open network beta a few years ago, but I missed the beta for III. So I haven't seen any of this information first-hand; I'm going off what I've read and seen from the internet. Anyway, according to the Dark Souls III wiki on fextralife, there are gravestones throughout the game that have epitaphs that provide some amount of game lore (similar to the lore notes from Bloodborne). One of these gravestones apparently says "Grave of a nameless retainer. Raised his sword for the Lord of Cinder". This is one of several references to the Lord of Cinder that are present in Dark Souls III.

The following blog will speculate as to the identity of this "nameless retainer" and the Lord of Cinder mentioned in the Network Beta test. This is only an educated guess being made by a fan a month prior to the game's release, but it may contain significant possible spoilers for Dark Souls III. There will also be spoilers for the previous Dark Souls games. Read ahead at your own risk.

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