Category Archives: Games

Patch Day!

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Both Marvel Heroes and Neverwinter are having kitchen sink patches today.  Well, maybe a bit less on the former.

Marvel Heroes, as I’ve mentioned in the past, has some problems with core mechanics and less to do with balancing.  Patch notes try to address a bit of that.  I don’t get why you need to login to see patch notes…  Anyhoot, they are upping the drop rate of heroes and costumes (I’ve seen a total of zero in about 60 hours, even though I’ve played the entire game with +drop gear), fixing some rather large combat bugs and adding more grouping to end-game content.  1) is cool.  2) is badly needed. 3) doesn’t even come close to addressing the problem of longevity.

Remember DCUO when it launched?  Everyone could reach max level in a day or two, then had nothing to do (raids were sort of in but broken).  Well, Marvel Heroes is the same except you’re not at max level.  You can complete all the content in what seems like 5-6 hours and get to level 25 or so.  With a max level of 60, you’re looking at about an extra 100 hours of grinding the same content (about a dozen dungeons) and no rewards from it, because itemization is more or less broken past level 30.  Yay?  There’s a tremendous, massive, gaping lack of incentive to keep playing as there’s no tangible progress.  I don’t change my appearance, I haven’t changed items in over 10 levels (I’m at 37 now), I haven’t had a new skill in 7 levels either.  The most “optimal” run for me right now gives me 5% of a level in about 7 minutes of work.  And I have 23 more levels of this to go.  Eh…there’s just no real carrot.  And honestly, 20$ for another character, which is basically another skin, is crazy pricing.

Neverwinter on the other hand has content a plenty but lacked balance.  This patch is a true kitchen sink.  Grouping is being fixed, threat, class balance, enemy difficulty, bugs, crafting, display… you name it.  I had tried a fair amount of Tier 1/2 dungeons, with friends and random folk.  As a Cleric, I just simply died after 5 seconds of combat due to threat mechanics.  Not only is that changing but the tank class is getting an across the board boost of 35% to threat plus a few more tools.  Maybe the game will actually have a trinity rather than just the current damage/healer paradigm.  If they get it right, I think it could be seen as the standard for F2P games from now on since it’s the only one that I know of that hasn’t been retro-actively made F2P but instead designed that way from the start.  Fingers crossed on this one!

PS.  For those looking for a decent ARPG, free to play, massive amounts of depth and challenge, try Path of Exile.  They are open beta, they are taking money but it feels more like Minecraft open beta than anything else.  I think it’s one of the best ARPGs out there, personally.  Here’s a picture of the skill tree, no joke.

Path of Exile Skill Tree

Path of Exile Skill Tree

E3 – Tone Deaf

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When asked what a person with unreliable (or not any) internet access should do for the XBone, Microsoft executive Don Mattrick had this gem to say.

“Fortunately we have a product for people who aren’t able to get some form of connectivity,” Mattrick said. “It’s called Xbox 360.”

While not as bad as Mr. Orth’s twitter tirade which basically said you don’t live in society if you don’t have permanent internet, there is a clear sense of contempt from from this company that just baffles the mind.  It’s like they have a vision for their products and services that is completely disconnected from their user base.

I mentioned yesterday that MS was going to need some significant PR spin to handle the next few months.  I guess that will only apply after E3 is done.

PS. I wonder how much bandwidth their service will take and how that will impact internet service providers.  I know Netflix is changing the way my provider works and there are problems in the EU for throttling certain services.  Will be interesting to see.

Console Wars – Cart Firmly Ahead of Horse

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Did you know that America’s Funniest Home Videos (or AMV now) is the longest running reality TV show?  I think it has to do with the idea that you know something is going to happen but you want to see it anyways.  I mean, who doesn’t want to see more of “ball hits crotch”?  You know half the episode is going to have that but you still watch it.  It’s a comedy of errors really.

I feel like Microsoft is in the same boat.  How many years now have companies tried to put in draconian DRM into media?  Remember when Sony put rootkits into their CDs?  Ubisoft gave up on the “always on cloud” DRM when the servers simply could not handle it.  SimCity had probably the most disastrous launch in gaming history, enough to lose a CEO.  Even the lead up to the XBONE reveal had it’s share of PR problems.  I don’t understand how a multi-billion dollar company did not think that they were going to have a problem on their hands.  Every single sign, every single trend said that they were heading into a storm.

And when the big reveal came about, they didn’t have detailed answers for a completely new way of operating.  I  mean, you know you’re going to cause a heck of a storm in PR.  You’re going to break some companies’ business models (Gamestop).  You are surely going to light a massive fire in the pits of gaming.  And your answer is 2 weeks of silence? Maybe they were hoping Sony would come onboard, then it would have put the ball in their court.

I mean, I get the want to move outside gaming.  There are more people who watch TV (streaming or not) than there are who play games.  The price point for that market is around $100 right now, not $500.  The only people willing to pay that price are the hardcore gamers, you know, the niche of gamers who have been royally ticked off since the initial reveal?

I get questions about why Steam is excluded from this discussion, given that you can’t trade games.  There are a few reasons for this and foremost is that Steam provides a service while Microsoft provides a platform.  I can play Steam offline for a trip to the cottage.  I can install the game on another computer a near unlimited amount of times.  It has access to many more games.  Prices on said games reach astronomically low prices.  Every single choice Steam has made has been with the consumer in mind.  Consumers, in turn, have accepted the service terms because it meets their needs.

Sony seems to have won E3 but there are many months to go before system launch.  The irony is that Sony didn’t do anything different than what they did in the past.  How do you get accolades for offering vanilla ice cream?  I expect that Microsoft HQ is going to go into silent mode for the next few weeks and re-jig their PR plan.  This cannot have gone anywhere close to what they had expected, even though every sign I could read said it turned out exactly like expected.

I think this past month will be reviewed for years to come in marketing classes and the lessons learned will have a major impact in all future technology launches.  There are simply too many gaffes and gaps in logic to not merit further scrutiny.

Neverwinter – Kitchen Sink

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Holy cow Batman, what a patch! Cryptic is officially launching Neverwinter on the 20th of June. That means it’s “super mega patch” time!

I really like the game but there are some significant issues that need addressing. Threat is seriously broken for both healing and tanks.  The grouping system doesn’t pick the right balance of characters and if someone drops, it’s impossible to add a new person.  The auction house UI needs some serious work to actually find anything. Enemy difficulty is all over the map, but mostly it’s boss encounters that need tweaking. I can’t say the systems themselves are broken, just in need of some serious balancing.  You know, exactly what a beta is for.

Well, it looks like Cryptic got the memo because the patch notes are out in a new blog post and they are massive. I’m talking MMO expansion pack massive. Obviously there’s a lot of future testing needed but the overall message is clearly “we heard you”.  It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a dev even bother to address half the things Cryptic is aiming for. /hats off

I’ll be waiting for it to hit the live servers before taking another dive but if this patch addresses the concerns listed above, it might just be my go-to MMO for a long while.

XBONE – New Answers

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There are a few more answers for the XBONE (that is such a better name than XBOX One dontcha think?) that better describe the game environment.  To sum:

Resell

You can trade in your games.  There may or may not be a fee, publisher’s discretion. (Well this is certainly interesting!)

Trading with Friends

You can only trade to friends who are on your friends list for 30 or more days.  A game can only be given once.  (This reads like I can no longer trade games with by brother and then get the game back.  And it destroys the rental market.)

Additional Account Access

Up to 10 people on a single XBONE can access an installed/owned game.  The primary owner can log into a friends device too and access their home console games.  (So pretty much just like today)

Kinect Privacy

Kinect only listens for the phrase “XBOX On”.  I guess that is region specific.  You can turn off the sensor once the game is active but some games will require it to be on (Either MS thinks people are stupid or they themselves are stupid.  If the Kinect is listening for a word, it’s listening to all your words. I can just imagine people surfing the web and getting trolled with a video and someone screaming “XBOX Off”.)

Internet Requirement

Play 24 hours without internet at home or 1 hour when at a friend’s place, otherwise gaming is disabled.  (Gone over this already.  I guess if you tethered your phone to wifi once a day…)

Summary

More information is good and pretty much every answer given now matches up with speculation from a few weeks back.  I personally don’t have an improved perspective on the console, and in fact I think it’s the complete opposite now.

I don’t need a home entertainment console connected to a single TV.  Maybe I did in 2007.  I need a console to play games, kick ass games.  Games I can’t play anywhere else.  Here’s something I want to show you, the list of 2013’s exclusives per console.  See a pattern?

PS3 XBOX
The Last of Us Gears of War: Judgment
God of War: Ascension Dark
Dust 514 Deadfall Adventures
Beyond: Two Souls Ascend: New Gods (XBLA)
Ni no Kuni Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine (XBLA)
Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons (XBLA)
Tales of Xillia State of Decay (XBLA)
The Witch and the Hundred Knights Crimson Dragon (XBLA)
Puppeteer Matter (XBLA)
Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Twilight Land LocoCycle (XBLA)
Until Dawn Skulls of the Shogun (XBLA)
Hyperdemsion Neptunia Victory
MLB 13: The Show

 

Consequences and Challenge

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Death in Marvel Heroes is an odd thing.  It happens through mostly lag up until you’re done the main missions, so a lot of people will never really see it – and if they do, people around them have 3 minutes to revive them.  That part makes sense to me.  Neverwinter puts a debuff on you once you get revived that way, the timer is shorter too.

If you play alone however, say in the mission terminals at the end, death is a different beast.  Scaling here reminds me a bit of Rift, where the mechanics of the game prevent you from doing content too far above your level.  3+ and you get an experience, damage intake and damage output penalty, starting at 20%.  You will get 1-shot.  Dying does two things.

First, it brings you back to the last checkpoint.  Sometimes this is the door to the zone, sometimes (like in Castle Doom), it’s invisible markings on the map since the map is so darn big.  Second, if leaves every enemy at the state they were when you died.  Boss at 60% hp when you died?  He will be when you get back.

Doctor Doom last night was 4 levels above me, took 5 minutes to kill and he killed me 8 times.  While I was happy to beat him, there was missing that “perfect run” feel that you get in other ARPGs.  Could I have done him in a clean run?  Maybe not last night due to skill lag but it certainly felt possible.  I remember trying to kill Belial in Diablo 3 for a few days in Inferno.  It was extremely frustrating.  Dying here had a repair cost plus a full reset of the boss himself.  Finally I got lucky and he died and I never wanted to see his face again.  The consequences here were such that I never wanted to play that part again.

I will be trying Doctor Doom again, hoping to improve.  It becomes an analog test with varying degrees of success.  I can improve on that.  Belial on the other hand, I was ready to punch through the screen.  When I beat him, it felt more like a digital switch – either I won or I didn’t.  When I did, I never felt an ounce of challenge in him again nor a desire to even attempt it.

I find it a difficult balance to show people “hey, this is tough but when you get through it’ll be worth it” and “hey this is tough, let’s pull out your hair”.

 

Filler versus Fuller

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I remember in the vanilla version of World of Warcraft, green gear was awesome and each class had a preference for a given set.  You either used Strength, Agility or Intellect for damage and you picked up Stamina if you needed an HP boost.  This made Rogues happy with Monkey (AGI/STA) or Tiger (STR/AGI) gear.  Still, that left over half the combinations sub-optimal and I can’t remember anyone who ever wore a piece of the Boar on purpose.

People would should “but this is green gear, it should be at least useful“.  And their laments were ignored for many a year.  Burning Crusade took a first pass at fixing this making it much more complex but forgiving at the same time.  There simply was no more bad gear for you, simply sub-optimal.  MMOs since then have learned this lesson.  Rift, GW2, Neverwinter all have a logical set of stats on gear.  If it isn’t clearly marked as vendor trash, it should be useful.

Blizzard also learned something from this when they launched Diablo 3, since all the stats were harmonized.  You just couldn’t equip a piece of gear with stats that made you bad (say strength on a Wizard piece).  And the world rejoiced!  Well, when they could log in that is.

And now we get to the meat of it all, Marvel Heroes.  I finished the last boss, Doctor Doom at about level 25 (of 60).  You replay individual missions past that – sort of. It’s a long slog.  Anyways, the gear issue.

There are certain types of bonuses on gear, right?  You can have offensive stats, defensive stats and power stats.  Offensive you have simple +damage, crit and attack speed.  There are others but those are the only ones that really count.  Offensive stats are cool and mostly practical.  Some skills don’t crit and +damage works weird with some skills but that’s tweaking.

Defensively you have dodge, defense and health regeneration.  Defense is broken after you finish the main quest line, it caps at a numerical number rather than a % number.  So you block 1000 damage let’s say but the enemy does more and more each time, like 5000 on one boss attack.  Right now, defensive stats other than dodge are pretty useless.

Power stats are the really cool part.  Just like Diablo 2, you can get power boosts – like +2 fireball – or you can get power tree boosts – like 5% attack speed for fire tree.  Some stats only work until a certain rank, others add to your existing rank.  Some trees have no attacks, which makes bonuses to those trees, other than a flat +1, useless.  In the end, you’ll be aiming for 2-3 powers being boosted and the rest sort of falls into place.

All this combined to say that gear can have a lot of variables on it.  Unfortunately, due to balancing/design, some of these stat groups are useless.  100 defense + 5% attack speed to a passive tree are examples.  It’s not that they are sub-optimal, it’s that they provide no bonus at all and are more or less the same as not wearing any gear in the first place.

While the game officially launched a few days ago, there is still missing what I call a “final beta balance patch”.  Neverwinter is also missing this but they have recently posted that a a “kitchen sink” patch for their open beta is forthcoming.

Marvel Heroes is fun.  Still, it is in dire need of a core systems patch to make their “end game” viable.

Used Games and the Future

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So, here’s an interesting post on the future of used games and Microsoft’s current approach (well, more than MS really).

If the secondhand market is not having a major detrimental effect on the primary market, then why would it need to be addressed?

If it were the case for movies and games, then yes, I’d favor similar measures by music/movie industries to protect themselves against it.

Well, this is the disconnect I guess. You admit you only hold this view because of the detrimental effects (you think) are impacting the industry. You are asserting that a fundamental aspect of property rights and consumer rights as it has existed since the beginning of trade should be adjusted and recodified on a per-industry basis, not because it’s inherently bad or unethical, but just because you think it’s a threat to the industry’s health. Which means you are essentially arguing for protectionism for corporations–consumers are free to exercise their consumer rights only up to a certain point, but if that free exercise is perceived to threaten the viability of the industry, then their rights must be limited in order to save the industry.

I don’t think I can put into words my disgust at this demeaning display of groveling at the feet of your game developer overlords. Even a die-hard laissez-faire capitalist would not be so subservient, because even a capitalist would accept that sometimes industries die and that’s the way the world works. As much as I enjoy games, there is no inherent good in this industry. The ends do not justify the means here; there is nothing that makes the gaming industry inherently worthy of preservation, not to the point that would justify carving out a special exemption for them where used games are somehow magically not OK when they are OK for every other packaged good on the planet. Just because your favored set of content producers couldn’t properly adapt does not justify rewriting the rules of what “property ownership” means and fundamentally removing the ability to preserve, inherit, pass on, lend, and share its products.

The industry does not come first; consumers do. I have no sympathy for an industry that cannot properly stumble its way around a viable secondhand market like every other mature industry in the world. Sometimes your old product just isn’t good enough, and the way you solve it is by making a better product, not by forcing consumers to adapt to your archaic and myopic business model with your dying breath. If this industry can’t find a way to make money off the primary market — even with DLC and exclusive pre-order content and HD re-releases and map packs and online passes and annualized sequels and “expanding the audience” and AAA advertising and forced multiplayer — then, if I may be so blunt, fuck it. It doesn’t deserve our money in the first place. If an entire industry has its head so far up its ass, is so focused on short-term gains, and has embraced such a catastrophically stupid blockbuster business model in the pursuit of a stagnant market of hardcore 18-34 dudebros that it thinks it has no choice but to take away our first-sale rights as its last chance of maybe, finally, creating a sustainable stream of profits, then it can go to hell. It doesn’t need your protection, it needs to be taken out back and beaten until it remembers who its real masters are.

I especially have a hard time having any sympathy because so many of the industry’s problems are of its own making. They chose to focus on shaderific HD graphics over long-lasting appeal and gameplay; they chose to focus on linear scripted cinematic B-movie imitations that were only good for one playthrough instead of replayability and open-ended design; they chose to pour so much money and marketing into military porn and fetishized violent shootbang Press A to Awesome titles, exactly the kinds of games that hardcore gamers, the most likely gamers to trade in games quickly were prone to buying and reselling; and perhaps most galling, they chose to give Gamestop loads of exclusive pre-order bonuses while they knew exactly what Gamestop would say to those customers once in the store. They kept making insanely lavish and nonsensical displays of spectacular whizz-bang, despite that being exactly the kind of game most susceptible to trading after one week because there was nothing left to do with it. And now they’re discovering that putting so many insanely expensive eggs into one fragile and easily breakable basket is maybe not the most sustainable business model ever.

So forgive me if I find myself not caring one bit when the industry complains that it’s just so hard to sell six million copies of Gears of Medal of Battle of Uncharted Angry Dudes VII in the first week and that’s why they need to take away used sales for the entire platform. No, the problem isn’t at this end.

There’s just something so precise about this rant that I can’t help but keep reading it over and over again.

It’s strange that the market is still aimed at dudebros, yet in the same breath complaining that people outside that scope won’t buy games.  How selling 1 million copies of a game is seen as a failure… the problem is clearly not on our side of the equation.

It’s the Economy Stupid

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With all the talk about economies and market, I’m reminded of a note from ex-Diablo 3 head Jay Wilson while at GDC2103.

…the company had a few assumptions about how the Auction Houses would work: He thought they would help reduce fraud, that they’d provide a wanted service to players, that only a small percentage of players would use it and that the price of items would limit how many were listed and sold.

Which in hindsight, is probably one of the most ridiculous statements ever made about MMO economies.

Remember now, Blizzard runs World of Warcraft, a game that supports over 9 million players and has had an auction house since launch.  And that service interacts with absolutely every single character, without exception.  How you can come to the conclusion that a game that is based 100% on gear, tradeable gear mind, would not use the Auction House is mind-boggling.

But this isn’t a post about how history has shown that WoW’s economy was a fluke but more about the fact that very few games are able to purposefully implement a real economy.  Everyone that has tried to replicate WoW’s has failed – including GW2 – in that nothing matters but the current end-state.  Anything you acquire up to that point is essentially meaningless.  Games that take a holistic approach to gear, where it matters more than end game (UO and EvE are two examples) have had long-term success.

A quality, long lasting MMO clearly requires a functioning economy.  It is invariably the glue that connects the various systems (crafting, PvP, PvE, etc…) and rarely gets the appropriate amount of thought.

That being said, the game itself has to be fun to have a non-niche appeal.  Otherwise you reach games like A Tale in the Desert, which is a great game but not one many have heard of.

Here’s hoping that both Wildstar and TESO are paying attention.  Economy drives the playerbase and the playerbase drives the game.

Marvel Heroes – First Impressions

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This post is brought to you by Marvel Heroes and the illusion of depth.  (That’s a pretty good pitch.)

The whole jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none concept shows up when I played Marvel Heroes.  I paid the $20 for 2 day early access and a different character, Rocket Raccoon.  I’m not one for day 1 access, as I have yet to see a single game launch smoothly (GW2 and Rift come close though).  For sake of argument, day 1 was last Wednesday and it has been a “soft” launch of sorts readying for the 4th.

Marvel Heroes is an action RPG but more of the loot piñata variety, akin to Diablo and Torchlight.  In contrast, DCUO and Neverwinter are clearly RPG MMOs with action elements.  Given my play schedule, as much as I love the second type, I really only have the time for the first one.  Looking at Steam, I have way too many hours into Torchlight 2, which turned into my go-to game after the D3 shenanigans.  I like the concept of random dungeons, random loot and comparing gear for a slight advantage.  I had 3 Outlanders, just to try out different builds.  A glaive build might need a wholely different stat, talent and gear spec than a poison build.  I did the same in D2.  D3, well you didn’t need a new character what with the slotting and the way gear worked, you couldn’t swap anyways.

Back to Marvel.  You get a choice of 1 of 5 characters to start, and they give you another free one (random) after 15 minutes of play.  After that point, any character you want has to be either purchased with cash or found as a super-mega-rare drop.  And the drops are player bound, so no 3rd parties farming here.  From a cash-stop perspective, I get that.  You’re essentially given access to all the content, for free, with 2 character options.

Here’s what you get in the game right now.  You get a single Act with 8 chapters (+prologue), enough to get you to level 30.  Once you finish those 8 chapters, you run daily/group quests for the remainder at a massively reduced experience rate.  This is very similar to Diablo 2’s end game I suppose.  You get a form of gambling with the crafting system (which requires materials).  This is more or less Path of Exile’s crafting system – which I think is awesome.  You get 1 weapon slot and 3 gear slots.  These have traditional stats but also can boost your powers.  These are reasonable stats too, where an item 10 levels above isn’t necessarily better.  So the complete opposite of Diablo3.  You get costumes to change appears.  Medals that provide a passive boost (more damage, stuns, etc…) that drop from bosses and 2 artifact slots that provide passive boosts as well but scale with level.  I have one that increased ranged damage by 30% (which is crazy powerful if you think about it).  That content is good.  It’s free too, so that’s a great deal.  There’s no real “end-game” but there never really has been in ARPGs loot piñatas.  D3 and Torchlight 2 have tried (I rather like T2’s map works and replays).

You end up with a rather linear path of progression that is identical for every future character.  Gear upgrades become the way forward.

On to heroes.  There are currently 22 characters, each with 3 “talent trees”.  I’d love to say there was some depth in those trees but I’d be lying – 5 or 6 choices per tree.  I’d also be lying if I said there was some semblance of balance within a character or between them.  Some skills are drastically superior to others and some other skills seem to do nothing at all.  If I said you could deploy a turret to assist in fighting, the default answer is “cool, a bit more DPS”.  In actual fact, that turret is more like a tank since it fires once every 2 seconds, can’t track a moving target (everything is moving) and somehow manages to taunt enemies.  Captain America, for those who bought him earlier since he’s “sold out” now, is a one person wrecking ball AND tank.  It makes it less fun to be in an area or in a group and you realize that your character is drastically underpowered/overwhelmed while other characters are breezing through.  I thought we were all super heroes?

The irony of all this is that even with the shortcomings, the game is fun.  It might be immersion breaking to see 4 Hulks on screen but it sure as hell is fun to see them all jumping on Venom.  It’s fun turning a corner and going “12 guys there, what to do?  Charge!”  It’s fun comparing two pieces of gear, with completely different stats to see which style best fits me.  The designer in me is screaming “why did you make this system work this way” and the gamer in me is screaming “I love that you made this system this way”.

I think I’m screwed.