How we arrange folks in the office is a constant challenge.  It's basically an overconstrained problem.  While at the main Microsoft campus it is a core part of their environment that everyone has an office to themselves, here at Ensemble we think it's more important to promote casual communication by typically putting people in 2 or 3 man offices.  Who actually goes in which office, though, is where it gets tricky.

The main opposite forces are departmental... at the same time you want members of a department together (since they work together on tasks and can share knowledge) and mixed (so that cross-department communication is easier, and because it tends to not happen as much on its own requires more assistance).  At the same time there is a tension to put people on the same task together, but this changes often more frequently than we want to juggle offices.  Of course, as one of the leads on the team (and thus most directly charged with maintaining comms with the other departments), I want to be with the other leads, but at the same time I need to be in close touch with all the actual people I'm trying to coordinate (ie, the other programmers).

There's no perfect solution, of course.  Bungie has an interesting arrangement, with more mobile desks in one large shared space, and tight noise controls -- it's like a library in there, very focused.  But that would be a hard sell in our very, uh, "energetic" culture here.

Anyways, our team is growing again and we're both figuring out where to put new people, and trying to troubleshoot our existing processes.  As tasks ebb and flow different departments need more or less communciation, that sort of thing.  Ensemble certainly doesn't get everything right first time, but I really like that as a culture we are committed to constantly trying to self-assess and improve...

My copy of Europa Universalis III finally arrived, only a full week after I could've downloaded it.  :(

One of the things I loved most about EU2 was the event model.  It was a beautifully elegant way of injecting history into the gameplay and into the experience, and really made playing as each nation significantly different.  Paradox has significantly simplified that system for EU3 and I'm not sure it was a net positive change for the series.  While it certainly empowers more alternate histories, as you aren't nearly so constrained by arbitrary predestined events, the new system is too hollow and generic.

Don't get me wrong, even after only a few hours of playing I can feel that addictive EU / Paradox gameplay getting its hooks into me.  It's 1510 or so and Castille has already made a good start colonizing the New World when not tied down in fights with the various merchant leagues.  But I'm looking forward to trying the game out with the inevitable "add a zillion events from EU2 into EU3" mod pack.

Hooray, yesterday heralded the return of my Wii.  Of course, I lost all my saves and have a new Wii friend code, but hey, I can deal with it.  Now I finally have it hooked up in all it's 480p glory on my main A/V rig, and the boys were quite eager to play Boxing and Bowling on it as soon as they could.  Most of the other games are still a little too hard -- Chicken Little: Ace in Action in particular.  The whole notion of a cursor is much harder physically than what's required for most of the Wii Sports games.

Just in time for Warioware: Smooth Moves, which will surely be acquired on my next trip to the game store...

It never fails.  Whenever I have a choice between digital distribution and a physical game, I always seem to wind up with the choice that gets me the game later.  As readers of this blog probably know, I'm a huge fan of Paradox, makers of games like Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis.  Their latest game, Europa Universalis 3, is coming out this week.  In fact, it already *is* out if you digitally download.  But unfortunately I'd already pre-ordered the Collector's Edition straight from Paradox -- I like giving developers as much of my money as possible and I'm enough of a fanboy to really want the CE.  To top if off, I'd heard reports of them shipping the CE early, since apparently they are shipping them directly from Sweden (where Paradox is located).

Unfortunately for me I must have gotten my order in too late to have the early shipping kick in, since now I'm sitting here with no EU3 and a digital download version just mocking me...  With Burning Crusade and so many other good games available now it's not like I can really justify buying it twice to play it a few days earlier than I would otherwise... but it's tempting!

The sparse updates last week were largely due to the Burning Crusade... I've been playing with just about all of my spare time.  One of my guildmates made level 70 already, which amazes me.  I, on the other hand, have been rather unfocused, splitting my time between a new space shaman, getting my Jewelcrafting to 310, and exploring the new zones and reaching a paltry level 62 with my main character.

I'm very impressed with the quality of the Burning Crusade.  Blizzard has really learned their lessons from the main game about how to make interesting zones, and just being back in the habit of doing quests and earning XP is amazingly addictive.  In fact, it reminds me how much more I like it than the old raiding only endgame...

Well, tonight is Burning Crusade launch.  It certainly says something about the sheer overwhelming presence of World of Warcraft that their mere expansion pack inspires midnight openings and crowds out the rest of the MMO field to the point that there were basically no major MMO releases for Holiday '06 in fear of it.

Not that that's stopping Vanguard, but that is a different matter altogether.

Anyways, turns out my local EB, where I have the Burning Crusade reserved, is not in the lucky set doing midnight release.  So at 11:55 I'll be at the local Walmart hoping to score a copy tonight.

I can't really explain why I feel so motivated to pick it up tonight as opposed to tomorrow AM, but nevertheless I'm excited to do so.   In fact, there was some discussion at work today what the best way to try and bribe a Gamestop employee into letting us buy a copy early would be...

All this week we've been playing Twilight Imperium (a huge space empires boardgame) at lunch.  Sandy picked up the 3rd edition and we've been having an epic space conflict among 5 of us.  Note that when I say all week at lunch, that's the same game.  We're maybe 2/3 of the way through.  The third edition of TI seems a little more polished than the 2nd, but it's still a monster game.  Periodically random other ES folks will wander by while we're in the middle of some esoteric rules deciphering and mock us (and we're certainly deserving of it).  TI is no Squad Leader or World in Flames when it comes to rules complexity, but it's a lot more intricate than our usual boardgaming fare around the office -- games like Puerto Rico, Fist of Dragonstones, Pitchcar, and the like.

I need to spend more time getting my homebrew boardgame designs in shape.  Games like TI are inspiring to me because they are so much fun even with such unwieldy complexity.  I constantly see ways I'd like to try and improve on their game mechanics.  Of course, most of my boardgames wind up like many of my little weekend games... 50% finished and not very playable.  But it's still fun to mess around with 'em.

I dunno if it was a bad translation or an attempt at humor, but the fact that one of the Final Fantasy XII "hunts" (optional boss side game) is called a "Ring Wyrm" struck me as just bizarre.  More or less bizarre that the "White Mousse" I'd just killed previously is hard to say. 

The whole mechanic of hunts, and sidequests in FFXII in general is kind of odd.  They are presented with a lot less production quality than I would have thought.  You can easily miss a TON of content in the game that way, and there's a lot of stuff in the hunts and side missions that are, as far as I can tell, pretty much impossible without a strategy guide.  That's a sign of very lazy design, IMO, but fortunately the overall Final Fantasy production values can still carry it. 

Perhaps even odder, the game is tuned to assume you do a healthy proportion of these impossible-to-fnd side missions, or just spend time mindlessly leveling up.  In general FFXII has a lot more busy-work than the previous entries in the series, which is an unfortunate development.  I thought FFX did a pretty stellar job of balancing the two, and it's a shame to see the series move backwards.

With today's announcement of the iPhone most of my geek friends, mailing lists, forums, etc seem to be exploding with nerd excitement.  Personally, I'm not quite seeing it.  I've never been a super phone geek (though I do like my Treo).  A physical phone just seems an anomaly these days... most of the time I use my cellphone it's through the integrated bluetooth speakerphone system in my car.  To me the ideal phone would not be one that's glommed onto my iPod, but one that physically barely seemed to exist.  Perhaps those are one and the same for people who always carry around their iPods, but at 8 GB I certainly can't fit my whole library on it... (shrug)

In any event I'm sure there will be several acquired by people around the Ensemble offices and I'll have a good chance to scope it out before considering switching.

Actually the tech announcement I found much more exciting was the existance of IPTV on the 360.  I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade to a high-def PVR since while I love my Tivo to death, it doesn't do HD (and due to some cable arcana, we can't upgrade to the newer HD Tivos).  If IPTV comes to this area (which seems like a crapshoot) it would be perfect...

A few details emerge on Guitar Hero 360.  I'm far more excited about this than I possibly should be given that I've played this a lot on the PS2 already.  But the idea of downloadable content + achievements is incredibly compelling.  Achivements in general are far more addictive than they have any right to be... Xavier and I finished playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance this evening and while I'm pretty much done with the game, I'm still considering whether I just want to go back and scam out a few of the easy achievements I missed the first time around...