In this episode we discuss Valve's announcement that a new Half-Life sequel is coming to VR and the newest addition to Episode IV that makes it a super special edition, Maclunkey! And we talk about what we've been playing and watching over the past month, as is tradition.

Note: In this episode we incorrectly conflate Rob Thomas, the TV producer, and Rob Thomas, the lead singer of Matchbox 20. Apologies to both Rob's.

Hello everyone, welcome to The State of the Wyvern for December 2019! Before we get into the changes, we want to shout out those brave adventurers making their names on the leaderboards. These numbers may be a little different from the audio above, as we recorded this a few days ago.

The Leaderboard of the Dead Top 10

1. MyDude: 108 Deaths


2. Gemini: 100 Deaths


3. Golok: 91 Deaths


4. Conan: 85 Deaths


5. Maverick: 80 Deaths


6. Declan: 61 Deaths


7. Marixu Cas: 59 Deaths


8. Zehronious: 51 Deaths


9. Digg.com: 47 Deaths


10. Ktara: 47 Deaths

PvP Leaderboard Top 10

1. Mydude: 115 kills


2. Maverick: 89 kills


3. Caz: 80 kills


4. Gemini: 60 kills


5. Zehronious: 48 kills


6. Tiberius: 43 kills


7. Button Smasher: 40 kills


8. Rodnalf: 37 kills


9. Rather Dashing: 37 kills


10. Ktara 37 kills

The Hall of Honored Adventurers Top 10
All the adventurers below have one paragon point, so I'll just note the wyvern kills/current level.

1. Declan: 9 Wyvern Kills, level 7


2. MyDude: 9 Wyvern Kills, level 6


3. Golok: 8 Wyvern Kills, level 11


4. Friday: 8 Wyvern Kills, level 9


5. Conan: 8 Wyvern Kills, level 4


6. GregoPeck: 7 Wyvern Kills, level 10


7. Maverick: 7 Wyvern Kills, level 6


8. Gemini: 7 Wyvern Kills, level 9


9. Zehronious: 6 Wyvern Kills, level 8


10. Caz: 5 Wyvern Kills, level 7

New Features Since October
We've made quite a few changes since our last State of the Wyvern. You've been playing with them in the game for a while now, but just in case you missed some:

• Support / Questions / Bugs: Added a new section for people to find help with questions, support or bug reports.


• Bank Interest Change: Hats now effect the interest rate at the bank.


• Pumpkin Festival: The Pumpkin Festival is in full swing in Other Places.


• Pumpkin Festival Theme: Check out this savory theme now available in user settings.


• New Shrine: Added the Wyvernslayer's Shrine to Primrose Park. (The first people to kill the Wyvern 5 times get immortalized for all time in a game)


• Wyvern Fights: We now properly rotate the Wyvern fight power in cycles of 5. So the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th power levels wrap around at the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th fights and again ad infinitum!


• Wyvern Battle POWER MOVE: You can now hug the Wyvern. (Thanks to Will for this suggestion)


• The Leaderboard of the Dead: We now have The Leaderboards of Death in the Graveyard and count player deaths.


• Paragon & The Endgame: Every 5th Wyvern kill gets you a paragon coin. Learn more about them and how you can spend them in Helga's.


• New monster: Added a new level 1 Monster Annoying Bug.


• Daily News: When a player kills the Wyvern we note the kill number in the daily news entry.


• Daily News: You can now get a link to an individual piece of daily news to share.


• Send Mail More Easily: Added a link to send mail to someone on their profile page. Way less tapping or typing, yay!


• Town Square Organization: We've had the classic Town Square menu ordering for quite some time and it's placement didn't quite make sense with what's most important in a game day. We've organized the Town Square to make what you do the most in a game day the most prominent. Hopefully you find this change useful especially on mobile. We also moved Calinda's Hof to Other Places.

The Traveling Gnome Village, December 20 - 27
Just yesterday, someone asked me "When are you going to do something like the Pumpkin Festival again?" Here's your answer: December 20! The Traveling Gnome Village is a new event allows you to visit the Mythical Presents Elf and open presents. These presents could have all kinds of good stuff in them, but truly lucky adventurers will get a full weapon upgrade! It is the season of giving, after all, so you can also send a present to a friend every game day.

Some of you loved the Pumpkin Festival theme, and some are even still using it as their daily driver. With The Traveling Gnome Village, feast your eyes on four new themes that will unlock on 12/20 and remain in the game for those who want to stay in the Gnome Village spirit all year round.

The Turn of the Page, December 29 - January 2
This is a smaller event commemorating the New Year. Enjoy more forest fights, experience gain, and gold find!

Tale of the White Wyvern Season 1!
Get ready to dive back in at ground zero with a very different experience! Season games are temporary games that have tweaked rules, and our first season will run January 1, 2020 - March 1, 2020.

This season will have 40 forest fights per day (not including any bonuses), 5 PvP fights per day, and 3000 starting gold. We expect this one will move a bit faster than our main game.

When the season is over, we will commemorate the winners of the Leaderboard of the Dead, the PvP Leaderboard, and the Hall of Honored Adventurers on new shrines in Primrose Park. The game will remain open and can be explored, but the monsters will have left the land. You can still continue your conversations, engage in PvP, and get random forest encounters.

Season 2...
We don't have much to say about Season 2 just yet, but it will start shortly after Season 1 ends. We have different game types in mind for seasons, in addition to tweaking the variables mentioned above. One of those is races, where rather than an end date, we have an end goal-- for example, the first person to get 5 wyvern kills wins. In those situations, we'd end the game when that goal is achieved rather than on a timer, but the same rules would apply as for post-game exploration.

Fishing
A cool new feature we're working on is Fishing! This will work somewhat similarly to forest fights, in that you have a set number you can do per day. You can fish in a few different areas, and find a wide variety of fish with an equally wide variety of effects, such as extra forest fights or an attack buff. But you won't know what that effect is until you eat it the first time. These effects will be temporary and will expire after the current game day. Some fish won't do much for you, but will sell well, so fishing could be how you make your fortune. Asadi doesn't sell stuff for cheap, right?

We don't have a release window for Fishing yet, but we hope to share more info soon.

Accessibility and clean up
Finally, we want to present the best game we can to the widest range of people, and some of our controls are problematic to folks who experience the web via screen readers. We are working to clean that up, and to clean up other minor interface issues that have accumulated over the months.

Thank you!
Thank you so much for playing Tale of the White Wyvern! Let us know what you think about the new features, and if you need help we have some threads just for that purpose.

If you have a general game question, support request, or suggestion:
https://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/4227/tale-of-the-white-wyvern-support-questions-thread

If you have a bug to report:
https://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/4228/tale-of-the-white-wyvern-bugs-thread

Thanks again, and we'll see you January 1st for Season 1!

If you haven't played Tale of the White Wyvern yet, head over to https://thewhitewyvern.com/ now to play for free!

There’s a new update coming to Super Mario Maker 2 that brings many new features, but the big one is the Master Sword power up. This allows you to play as Link, with the sword, shield, bow, bombs, and Pegasus boots.

You’re still playing in the Mario tile set so this isn’t a Zelda-maker mode but it’s definitely a game changer since you can play so differently.

Another big addition is Ninji speedruns. These are Nintendo-made speedrun courses where other players’ runs appear as Ninji. These have a weekly reset timer.

Other changes include the pokey and spike enemies, as well as p-blocks, dash blocks, frozen coins, and snowballs.

However, one feature missing from the list is the Super Mario Bros. 2 mode. This has been theorized as coming for quite some time now, and if you’ve seen previous discussion about the game here, it’s something that we’re definitely into.

They have as much time as they want to make this and add it to the game, but it likely doesn’t make sense for them to add it once the game’s popularity begins to wane, so many (myself included) were thinking it would probably come out with the first big update.

I think it’s still coming though. You gotta believe!

It's been a dream for decades, but it's now a reality: a live-action Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian. In this episode, we discuss the first three episodes, how we see the series progressing, and how The Mandalorian might play into other Star Wars properties.

No need to rub your eyes or clean your glasses, you are seeing that title correctly. Valve has announced that they'll be unveiling their new flagship VR game in the Half-Life universe this Thursday at 1PM EST/ 10AM PST.

There's not much more to be said as of yet, as we don't know a time frame, gameplay style, whether there'll be a non-VR option, whether it'll be Steam-exclusive or if PSVR will get it... we don't know much.

What we DO know is that Valve is actually making a new Half-Life game. I can't wait to find out more on Thursday!

Source: https://twitter.com/valvesoftware/status/1196566870360387584

The final trailer for The Rise of Skywalker is out, and we have some opinions about it! We talk about our thoughts and predictions for the Skywalker Saga finale, as well as what we've been playing and watching this past month.

If you've been keeping up with Tale of the White Wyvern development and the happenings in-game, you know that the fifth wyvern kill is the "last" one, as in the one where you unlock all the game story, and the one where you need some intense grinding to win. And you may also know that a few have already hit that threshold and are working on their sixth time through. Well, if you're wondering what comes next on this journey, look no further: Paragon. Here's how it works:

After your fifth wyvern kill, the five repeat themselves. The 1st and 6th fight are the same, the 2nd and 7th, and so on. But every fifth wyvern kill will get you a paragon coin that you can spend whenever you like. (And not to worry-- if you've beaten the 5th already, you'll retroactively receive one).

Each time you spend one of these paragon coins, you will lose all of your charm and your dead card and be reset back to the starting point of 1 charm and 0 dead card punches. These are things that never reset by default when you start back at level 1, but in order to use these coins, you're cashing them in.

But it's worth it because you get some pretty great perks:

• +1 to your player paragon points.


• A permanent +5% boost to forest exp gain.


• A permanent +5% boost to forest gold find.


• A permanent +5% boost to your bank interest.


• New titles, up to your third redemption:
  
  
  
  • First redemption: Prestigious & Prestidigitonium
  
  
  • Second redemption: Demigod & Demigoddess
  
  
  • Third redemption: God & Goddess
  
  
  
  

These are additive, so on your second redemption you'll have +10% experience gain and gold find, for example.

To redeem these new coins, just pay a visit to Wrymdoor's favorite healer, Helga. She'll perform some secret magic and you'll be gaining experience and gold much faster! Just don't be surprised when Crugg acts like he doesn't know you anymore.

As I said above, you can redeem these whenever you like-- if you want to wait until you get into the later levels before losing your charm, you can do that. If you want to hoard your paragon coins you can do that too. The choice is yours.

We should have Paragon Coins in the game for you to redeem by Wednesday. Prepare yourself for speedy leveling!

If you haven't played Tale of the White Wyvern yet, head over to https://thewhitewyvern.com/ now to play for free!

It's that time of year, folks. The scent of pumpkin spice is in the air. So we thought, what better time to try out all the pumpkin spice flavored things we could get our hands on and review them live? What could go wrong? Come experience the flavor of the season with us in this special episode!

The “final” trailer for Episode IX is out now. I say “final” in quotes because we will surely see more footage in TV spots and international variants.

But here we go, the last major US trailer, and we are about two months out from the film’s release.

Tickets are available now, and I’ve already got seats for the Friday of release.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll get the discussion started with three things:

1. The scene of the new crew in the Falcon is something I’ve been wanting since TFA.

2. That arrangement of the main theme was sublime.

3. Threepio, you ok?

So go forth, watch it, and tell us what you think!

This game is weird.

You're a humanoid bird. Guns grow from plants. Out of ammo? Just plant a gun. That's pretty much your intro.

Right now, Revenge of the Bird King is NINE CENTS on the Switch. You probably have enough Nintendo coins on your account to buy it with those right now.

Beyond being weird, this is a fun game. The platforming is tricky but satisfying, though it does have its cheap moments. For nine cents you can't lose.