The Gathering Storm- Book Twelve of the Wheel of Time

The first new Wheel of Time book in four years, and it is (sadly) with a new author, Brandon Sanderson, author of the Mistborn and Alcatraz fantasy series. Robert Jordan's boots are indeed large ones to fill, but I can tell you now, you need not worry. Sanderson is a supremely gifted writer. And yes, it begins with the wind whistling from the mountains, down to the plains etc. And they still say things like "Light!" or "Burn me!"

And as this is only a week after the book's release, don't worry, I won't give away any spoilers. I almost ran into spoilers when flicking past the Wikipedia entry on the book, it gives away the entire plot!

The book clips along at a right old pace, yet never feels rushed. The chapters are shorter, the changes of perspective faster, yet you never feel disorientated or annoyed at leaving a favourite character so soon, as you will return to them soon enough (well that is if your favourite character is Rand, like me!). But even the smaller characters, like Gawyn, Egwene, Siuan, Nynaeve, Cadsuane, Aviendha, Tuon etc all get plenty of airtime- with one notable exception- Elayne is only mentioned in the book, we don't get to have a chapter about her. Presumably he will get to her in the next book, after all she is carrying Rand's baby. Of the other two ta'veren, Mat gets a decent amount of pages, Perrin less so. This book is very much about Rand, perhaps half of it is devoted to him.

The characters and individual threads (in the pattern!) are fully fleshed out, indeed they feel very real and substantial. What is more, they feel right, somehow. They act, speak and think just the right way as they should, not diverging from their previously established archetypes unless demanded from the story. The dialogue seems almost perfectly balanced with descriptions and thought bubbles. He occasionally forgoes complete transcriptions and relies on a sort of precis of what was said- not in a rushed way- more of a 'skip the boring parts' way.

Indeed the pacing, along with the frequency of action, reminds you of no-one so much as a younger Jordan himself. But this is like a turbocharged Jordan, an energised writer not seen since the earlier books. Sanderson writes a bit like some kind of post-apocalyptic clone of Jordan, but one right at the height of his powers. Well, to call him a clone is unfair, he is certainly his own man, has his own writing style, although it is very smooth, the transition here. You could almost forget it was a different writer, but the brilliant turns of plot and just amazingly readable text, even in the slow patches soon remind you differently. I mean, he even made Aes Sedai interesting, and that's something I thought i'd never see after the drudgery that was Crossroads of Twilight.

While Sanderson is certainly a gifted writer and has been given much free rein, and indeed he must have had to fill in large portions of the story, the overarching story is still very much Jordan's. The main points in the story, and especially the ending, really feel like Jordan writing- they have a great feel of him- and you can almost see his invisible hand writing those sections. And of course all the main characters and their stories were written by Jordan.

So to sum up; The Gathering Storm is a brilliant, wonderful, not just fantasy but great book in any genre. If you're a fan of the series, buy this without hesitation. If you haven't read the previous books, read them, then get this.


[Art by Seamas Gallagher. You can see his blog here, and particularly check on this post, which has some fabulous pictures of the WoT characters.]

The Spy

So I suddenly had an urge to write one of those fancy Game Design & Balance posts from SHC about this, don't know why. I am banned from the forum at the moment, for posting a link to a Dark Knight rip (stupid Clamdong), so I shall post it here.

Ok. The spy.

The spy is one of my favourite classes to play as in TF2. It is one of the only classes that can utilize asymmetric warfare when conventional attacks fail, and outplay the skill level of your team. (The others are Scout, if you are good, and possibly Sniper). A good Spy can thoroughly disrupt the other team, killing unaware enemies with ease, killing key links such as a medic with an ubercharge, and demolish a turtle strategy of Engineers or Snipers. However there are still numerous problems with the class.

I will start with the most basic.

The knife

The butterfly knife is great at it's main role, that is back or side-stabbing an enemy for an instant kill. However, the non-crit damage from it is awful, the worst melee damage in the game by far. Many times I have gone in for a side-stab of a sniper in a corner, and as you stab he quarter-turns to one side and you only score a pathetic normal hit. Then he guns you down with his smg.
The non-crit damage from the knife needs to be boosted.

The cloak

The improved cloaking device II, wait wrong game... The cloak is the key strength of the spy. It allows him to sneak behind enemy lines and bypass his weaknesses of slow speed and low hp. The problem lies with the recharge time; it is simply too long. Assuming you get to a safe spot to rest for a while, you will have used up much of your cloak bar, which you then need to recharge. This increases the likelihood of an enemy stumbling into you, or at the very least slows your stealth ambitions down significantly.

The cloak recharge time needs to be reduced. I also think it should be replenished from friendly dispensers or spawn room lockers. Every other class when they retreat to these areas, can be back at full strength almost instantly, yet the spy can do nothing to speed up the process.

As for the total cloak timer length, while I would not object to it being increased, I don't think it necessarily needs to be. While it is a bit of a stretch to traverse some areas under cloak, for the most part it is just about long enough.

The disguises

So from the off there are at least three disguises a spy can't really use. The scout disguise, because he is given away very quickly by his too-slow moving speed and lack of double-jump ability. The heavy, because making yourself that slow does not help you at all, and the medic, because people will wonder why you are not healing them (and you display no Ubercharge status).

Now adding to this is the idiocy that when you pick a disguise, your nametag is randomly chosen from one player on the other team. If that player sees you, he will instantly know that you are a spy, as of course there can only be one instance of himself on the server! It's basically a free kill for the player that spots an enemy spy with their own nametag.
I would fix this by making it so that players only see another teammate's name displayed when they look at a disguised enemy spy. Of course if you saw two teammates side by side with the same name, then you would know that one of them was a spy, but the situation would not occur too often, and it would not immediately pinpoint the enemy spy the way the current system does.

Passing through enemies

Currently a disguised or even cloaked spy cannot pass through enemies. If you try to walk through a teammate and you bump off, this is a dead giveaway to all but the most green novice. Similarly, if you come to a sudden stop and see a flash of colour, that is your cue to light up your gun and score an easy kill on the disgruntled spy.
This would not be such a problem, were it not for a fundamental flaw in TF2's map design and mapping tools (besides the over-abundance of desert/industrial textures). There are simply not enough nooks and crannies for a spy to hide in, and there are not enough alternate routes. The average map has at best two or sometimes three tunnels or passageways between main areas, and most of them are too narrow to allow a spy to sidle past an oncoming enemy unnoticed.

That spy has to either hop into one of the rare "passing places" that allow the enemy to go past, or back up all the way into the entrance and waste most of his cloak doing so. It is one of the major weaknesses in the current implementation of the spy, that there are so few routes to get behind the enemy team, as they come in waves out of their spawn in a linear path to the front line. Of course you learn to wait for a lull in the traffic, and move then, but you are always just a corner away from bumping straight into an enemy and being completely wide open.
Certain points in the game it is extremely tricky to get behind the enemy into a good position. It generally gets harder on the last point of a stage, as the enemy are more bunched up, but it is usally still doable. Otherwise you have to wait for them to walk past you before you can strike, but by then they are probably under fire from the rest of your team anway.
One particular bad point is the last cap on the last stage of dustbowl. The defending team's spawn doors open directly onto a flat wall, and there is pretty much no way for a spy to get there and decloak unseen. Consequently the cap generally devolves into a stupid slugfest that needs a quad-ubercharge by the attackers to even break through. But I digress.

I would make the spy able to pass through enemies while cloaked. This would help greatly with moving behind enemies and around the map.

Ok, that's about it for now. Happy backstabbing!!


Art by Clickmon of DA.