Ten new vikis, cards that play, and clocks that tell the whole story

It has been a busy few days. Between Oct 20 and Oct 23, Vi.ki went from eleven vikis to 21, and the front page learned some new tricks. Here is what is new.

Ten new vikis

Ten games got a viki of their own, each with its own pages, photos, release timeline and launch clock:

• ArcheAge Chronicles, XL Games' action MMORPG on its road to Early Access.
• Enshrouded, the survival game that reached its 1.0 release on Oct 15.
• Chrono Odyssey and Fable, two games still to come.
• Crimson Desert, with its Charting the Unknown DLC counting down to Oct 29, and Diablo 4, counting up from Lord of Hatred.
• Civilization 4 and Civilization 3, the classics, with their expansions.
• Heroes of Might and Magic 3, the 1999 game, its HD Edition and the Remake, and Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, the new one in Early Access.

Some of them answer to a shorter name too: civilization4.vi.ki, civilization3.vi.ki and homm3.vi.ki all take you to the right place, and so do oot.vi.ki for Ocarina of Time and pbz.vi.ki for Phantom Blade Zero.

Cards that play

Rest your pointer on a card on the front page and it plays its viki's first moment right there, over the picture, with YouTube's thin red seek bar. The sound starts muted; the speaker in the corner turns it on, and Vi.ki remembers your choice. The Left and Right arrow keys skip five seconds. Click the card while it plays and the video carries on inside the viki at the same second, so you never lose your place.

If you would rather the cards stayed still, the "Autoplay video" switch beside the first shelf's title turns the previews off, everywhere on Vi.ki. Beside it, "Show upcoming" turned off puts every viki on one shelf, "All vikis", in the order you choose.

Every game's story, in order

Every game's home page now opens with a release timeline: the first launch, every expansion and the updates that changed the game, each with a source, and the next announced release marked Coming. The launch clock reads from it. A game that is out counts up from its latest release ("Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred out for"), not from a launch years ago, and a game with an expansion still to come counts down to that instead.

Where a release date has not been announced, the clock shows our best guess, clearly marked with a "Best guess" chip that explains how we got there. Each viki's clock now wears the colors of its own card picture, and a click on the clock takes you to that viki's home page.

Steam charts on SteamDB's own numbers

Games on Steam chart their players at the top of their home page, and those charts now use SteamDB's own numbers, checked count by count, rather than lines traced from a picture. You can drag the chart to pan along the time and zoom in and out, and each zoom level picks one even interval (an hour, six hours, a day, a week or a month), named under the chart, so the line always reads cleanly.

New ways to sort the front page

Each shelf on the front page has its own sort: by date (the soonest launch or the latest release first), by name, by when the viki was created, or by how popular it is, with Reverse to flip any of them. Popular counts the people who read each viki over the last 48 hours, with a little bar chart of the last 30 days above each card. Vi.ki remembers the sort you chose.

The vikis keep growing

Behind all of this, every viki gets a pass twice a day for news and better pages. The pass on the morning of Oct 23 alone covered World of Warcraft: Forever's RP-PvP ruleset, the Diablo 4 Season 16 test realm, Path of Exile 2's supporter packs, an Olden Era hotfix and new servers for ArcheAge Chronicles, and improved 21 pages.

Join in

Every one of these vikis is free to read, and if you know a game well, sign in with your He.art account and press Edit on any page. And if you want the next post as soon as it is out, the Atom feed brings it to you.