Silus - Shard of Flame

What aspects I would want is a tricky question. As for what I aspects I would have based on what I know now, I would have an aspect for Magic: The Gathering for sure. Probably a linguist one for Spanish. Maybe a computer knowledge aspect?

Finished this one yesterday after getting the omnibus for Christmas and procrastinating it for an age and a day. I'm... conflicted. We got to see some of the things that had been hinted at: aspects turning into nightmares, Sandra, Stephen's overall downward spiral coming to a head. But none of them got real room to breath. There's been so many hints about rules and mechanics to the aspects that just got thrown out the window. The scene with Lua on the deserted island kinda says that this is on purpose, that the reals are made up and the mechanics don't matter. If this was just the last story by itself, I would be fine with this, but hints from the earlier books (particularly JC interacting with Stephen more physically) implied there was something more real to what was going on in his head, something potentially superhuman. This ending kinda laughs at you for expecting answers to questions from earlier in the series. There are a lot of things that are left deliberately ambiguous but not in a good way, in my opinion.

My favorite book before discovering Brandon was The Meq by Steve Cash. Late 1800s through most of the 1900s about children that stop aging once they hit age 12. They heal extremely quickly, some have extraordinary abilities, and others hold artifacts that can affect people's minds. It's about their struggle to fit in as immortals in a mortal world, the friends and enemies they make, and their trying to rediscover where they came from. It's a trilogy, and while I found the ending pretty unsatisfying, the first book remains one of my favorites.

There's nothing wrong with porting it, it's that the system they would be porting it to is very different and to really take advantage of those features, they would essentially be making another game, which most developers aren't willing to do. So what ends up happening is a sort of copy/paste of the original game onto the different hardware, which, in the case of the Wii U, will fall short because it won't take real advantage of the features that people buy a Wii U to use. Thus, in the end, it feels like a lazy port.

As I've been reading recently in the forums since WoR release, I've heard the term Squires thrown around, being associated with a Knight Radiant and sharing somehow in their magic. There are hints at this from the end of WoR, particularly with the Lopen (who is one of my favorites of Bridge 4, btw). What I don't know is where the term comes from and what information we have about it. I'm assuming there is Word of Brandon to corroborate all this, but since there's so MUCH of it out there, it's a daunting task finding it all. So can I get some help? Where can I find WoB about Squires? Is my understanding of it correct? Are there things about them that we know that I don't? Please just fill me in here!

Proud to have supported the IndieGoGo for this anthology, a lot of the essays I've read have been really poignant (especially Howard and Sandra Taylor's), though there's a lot of stuff I haven't read because I'm not familiar with the work of the authors in question. The print copy I got is a real gem of a book. I would definitely recommend this anthology. WoK Prime is fascinating. It's so interesting to see how going back and changing Kaladin really changed the whole course of the story. Heck, WoK Prime reduces Canon WoK to the first few chapters and the bulk of its plot is actually what became Words of Radiance! Or that's how it seems to me, anyway, from these chapters. With the numbers of chapters in between the Merin chapters, I'm assuming we would be jumping all over Roshar in the meantime, given what Brandon has said about WoK Prime and how its plot threads were a lot more all over the place. I would love to see later on how those plot threads get woven into the canon plot of the SA.

I got the Limited Edition I ordered in the mail today! (Merry Christmas!) It's a nice, high quality book! Despite being a small book, it has some heft to it, like it's made well enough to last. Did you get this edition? Do you intend to? If you did, what do you think of it?

@Chaos They're different enough that a straight port to the Wii U will be instantly recognized and called out as lazy by the fans. I'd rather they put their funds/effort toward other things, like nowhere's suggestion of bug fixing. I'm in the same boat as Wyrmhero, PS3/Xbox 360 are the newest consoles I have access to because I just don't have the money to stay "up to date". lordofsoup and I obviously have very different definitions of "expensive". This is also why I don't do PC games for the most part. I don't have a machine modern/powerful enough to run most current games, and when I've tried running games on my machine, it tends to bog it down for the things I actually need it to do. (I'm pretty much in the same boat for my phone.)

The Wii U and the rest of the console lineup are so completely different that designing for both of them for the same game is like trying to explore two different planets simultaneously. It just doesn't work. The Wii U is it's own thing, it's really not comparable. I think the Wii U is great, but doing both sides of that coin just isn't feasible for a developer. As for the graphics, if the game overall is well built, the graphical fidelity, or rather, the level of extreme detail, doesn't matter to me. The 360 and the PS3 have awesome graphics, and the difference between there and the next generation feels minimal to me. I care about it being an awesome Mistborn game, and that isn't about the graphics, that's about atmosphere, and controls, and gameplay design. If they can pull that off, then it's a great game, and no one is going to care about the graphical detail except for the most nitpicky.

Yeah, I agree with most everything in this topic, though I have to be emphatic about Eragon being the WORST. My fandom of LotR has been...interesting. I watched each movie after reading each book for the first time, so my experience with each is very intermingled. I haven't read the Hobbit, so I'll need to do that before seeing the movies. I thought LotR had a great adaptation, trimming a lot of the fat from the books that made it really drag for me.

It would depend a LOT on the staging of the fight. For instance, if the fight starts at close quarters, duralumin + pretty much anything would be able to one shot the avatar rather decisively. If the avatar has metalbending, though, I'd give the fight to them with almost no reservations as they could pull a TLR and bend the metals in an allomancers body. Bending has a lot more raw force to it and can win in a drawn out fight, however, allomancy has more diverse applications and powers. Tin and pewter add a level of physical prowess such that in a hand to hand contest the allomancer wins. Iron and steel (again, depending on staging) offer an extreme amount of mobility that only a natural airbender could rival. Zinc and brass allow for a whole new dynamic of emotional manipulation. Copper and Bronze (assuming that bronze can track bending) would be important in a more crowded environment, say the middle of a big city. Overall, Mistborn have a lot of tricks and counters that could end the fight quickly, but if the avatar can get around those and keep the mistborn at a distance, they'll be able to pull out a win.

Perhaps Kelsier vs Mace Windu would be a better match? Or maybe Elend as a Lerasium Mistborn?

I disagree, I think Audrey's condition is something that was always present, but she had simply never been around enough for Stephen to really make any diagnosis. I think that the illnesses present in each of the aspects are about Stephen's subconscious projecting onto them, creating reflections of himself and his own condition. He is a genius at anything he even sort of tries to do and his aspects reflect that capability, but he and others around him see him as unstable. So in creating sort of "alternatives" to himself, personalities that are not him but at the same time represent him, he creates each of them with one (or now possibly more) specialty and a psychosis as a more mundane reflection of himself. Also, if this were the case, wouldn't Stephen himself have that psychosis up until the moment that that aspect manifests and he can siphon it off? For instance, wouldn't he have been a schizophrenic up until when Tobias manifested? And wouldn't he know exactly what their issues were from the start? He wouldn't have to figure out what Audrey's issues were if he'd dealt with the same thing before manifesting her.

I liked this story a LOT, though I agree that it raised a whole bunch of questions about Stephen/his past/his aspects that weren't addressed and didn't really address anything that had been brought up previously except in passing. I also thought Dion was the weakest of the characters in the story, but with characters this good, that's not saying too much. I thought Stephen's death speech to him was a little odd, I saw it more as example of Stephen trying to reach out than anything genuinely powerful. Also, INFINITE BATMANS was just about the funniest part of the whole book. Favorite new character probably goes to Yol, I kinda figured at that moment in the story (basically intuiting how Brandon sets up characters) that he was going to be silly, but MAN, he was GREAT! His outfit, his rap career. But you also saw some depth and dark to his character through his later interactions with Stephen and what he was hiding. Though my favorite character from this book has to be Audrey, she has the best one liners and pulls off some of the most awesome stuff in the whole book. See her get fleshed out from the little we saw from her in the first book was great and her psychology and expansion of her capabilities have very interesting implications for the future. What I found a little disappointing though was that I felt Ivy and Tobias got sort of overshadowed this time around by Audrey and JC. Sure they're the older aspects that Stephen depends on, but neither of them had any real standout moments. Heck, with Stephen's deductive abilities getting better and better, their relevance might actually be going down. (Though the climax in the cellar points out that that time is a ways away still.) One thing I felt should have been addressed better in this book was the introduction of Kalyani's husband, as that was one of the shots that REALLY took me by surprise and has the most immediate and dramatic implications for Stephen's mental stability. That's not to say Brandon should have tied it up with a bow, but at least say SOMETHING about it at the end when they're at the mansion, as it's something I think Stephen would look into immediately. Overall, good book! Makes me very excited to see more from this storyline!