Category Archives: Games

Tomb Raider

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Hard to believe it’s been 17 years but I played the original Tomb Raider back in the day and aside from being impressed with the fact that Lara has amazing back muscles to keep her from falling forward with that weight up front, I was relatively pleased with her first few outings.  Then the franchise doldrums hit and hit hard.  Single player rehashes are hard sells.  Mutliplayer ones are simply exercises in peer pressure.  When the 2nd Lara Croft film hit the cinema, you could see the bottom of the pit the franchise was in.

Fast forward to today and the reboot of the franchise is a welcome sight.  This is one of those games where the Croft name is more important than Lara, as for all intents this could be Lara’s daughter running around instead of the original one.  Gone are the linear tombs with massive puzzles and repeated deaths.  Welcome are the relatively open zones with succinct puzzles whose solutions are within eyesight.  I remember some of the nasty puzzles in the past that had you moving for what seemed like 5 minutes, into some sort of Rube-Goldberg machine and then die at the end from a missed jump.  Today’s game has less instant death and more “think it out” and act.  A bit like the Assassin’s Creed 2 tombs I guess, but smaller in size.

I play on the PC, which apparently at the lowest setting still gives better performance and art than any console.  I can play moderately well at Ultra and it seems more like a movie than a game.  The sound is amazing, I find myself shouting in surprise at events where guys jump out of nowhere and the scenery is simply the best of this generation.  When you do play it, and you will, take the time to look around on the Radio Tower.  Jeebus.

Tomb Raider

Everyone and their kid is talking about how the bow is awesome.  I am here to tell you they are correct.  Sure, you will use it to shoot people in the head but you can shoot them in the arm, the belly or the leg for various effects.  You can shoot ropes to slide around.  You can shoot walls to make distractions and shoot lamps to start fires.  Shooting from a dark corner, sniping 2 or 3 enemies before they realize what’s going on is amazing.  Shooting a flaming arrow into a gas pocket and knocking 6 of them down in a single attack, amazing.  The bow is practically perfectly implemented.

While the story isn’t something amazing, the progress of Lara’s character is.  Small and timid, injured without end, she continuously, if reluctantly, surmounts every challenge in her path.  Often times I found myself at the edge of my seat, wondering what was going to happen next.  I think the one facet that makes her relate-able to the masses is that anyone can see themselves in her shoes and acting in the same way.  This isn’t some episode of Lost where you’re screaming at the TV “Don’t go in there stupid!”.  Each and every action and reaction is similar if not identical to the one you’re having while playing.  Quite an accomplishment.

Tomb Raider is a must buy.

SimCrappy

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To the surprise of no one, SimCity launched and then fell flat for many players.  Either failed downloads, failed connections, server queues or just plain old bugs, many people were unable to play the recent installment in the classic series.

While I think the concepts behind the game are pretty cool, I do have reservations on a few items:

  • It requires Origin to play, no matter where you buy it.  I have a dislike for Origin for many reasons, the least of which is their EULA and shoddy customer service.
  • It’s from EA, a company who is charging players for a priority queue to play the game.  Now that’s brass balls folks.
  • The city size is 80-90% smaller than in previous versions.  Hitting 500K population is an achievement.
  • Due to the former, cities must work together in a region to support each other.  Cool concept until one of those cities decides to stop playing and you suddenly lose all your power.
  • You can “finish” your city relatively quickly, in a few hours.  Past Sim games took quite a while to reach a prosperous city.  To me, this is going to hurt the longevity of the game as once you’re at maximum capacity, every corner is filled and you know a change in direction (say from Power to Knowledge) would destroy your region, why bother?
  • Always on DRM.  If Diablo 3 taught me anything, it’s that always on DRM for a single player game is one of the stupidest things ever seen.  If it’s single player, I want to be able to play offline for when I don’t have the internet.  That’s why I have a laptop.

It just seems like a wasted effort on a game that had a lot of potential.  I am hoping that EA and other companies learn from this and find some middle ground between letting players actually play the game and securing their games (like a once every 2 week ping to the server).

March Madness

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March is going to be one heck of a month for gaming.  I can’t remember the last time there was so much coming at us the same time.  It will be interesting to see how this month profits for companies and perhaps we’ll see a 2 month year stem from it (the other being November).

Tomb Raider is out this week and is getting some very nice buzz.  I’ve been a fan of the series for many years and thought the puzzle element was always the best part.  Uncharted does the story/movie aspect a lot better.  Apparently this new one is meant to provide both and it looks like I’ll be getting it on Steam shortly.

Sim City is back, though the focus this time is on single cities rather than large metropolises.  Sadly, it’s an EA distributed game, and my wallet says I won’t be buying it.  Mind you, this is the first game where I thought of changing that principle, in over a year.  Says something about EA…

Bioshock: Infinite is out too and by George, that series has a stranglehold on philosophy in gaming.  While there are balance issues with the game, the story portion and pacing is the bar others try to replicate.  Fingers crossed it does a good job with the idea of freedom vs. religion.  All signs point to yes.

The next installation of the Starcraft 2 trilogy is out.  I played the crap out of the original Starcraft and Broodwar.  Starcraft 2 was essentially a new coat of paint and having it split in 3 never sat well with me.  Has a great following and will be interesting to see how Blizzard includes micro-transactions into it.  I do remember them saying they wanted to MOBA it a bit more.

Gears of War and God of War are out too.  Both have protagonists I can’t stand and acted more like tech demos than actual stories you cared about.  They are console exclusives too, and bets are on to say GoW sells better.

Now That’s a Game

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I was able to finish Ni No Kuni yesterday.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the game is a more modern take on the traditional JRPG.  I can honestly say I haven’t had that much fun playing one since Final Fantasy X in 2001.  I played FFX from start to finish at least 20 times since I bought it and I think Ni No Kuni is going to be in that list for a long time too.

There are 2 items that defined a JRPG – the leveling aspect (or need to grind I guess) and the crazy stories.  If you follow all the side quests in NNK, you’re still going to be under-leveled for the rest of the content.  If you actively hunt to find more familiars (of which there are over 400) to fill out your party, then ya, you would have a better chance.  Having  1-3 more levels makes a world of difference, where the stats of a character have a major impact.  Or, you can hunt Tokos, who give piles of experience, are rare and run away as soon as you see them.  The hardest of them all gave my team 2 levels per kill, even at level 70.

The story part of JRPGs is the stuff of legend.  Final Fantasy usually sets the bar on linear for 75%, then the last 25% is over the top.  FFX made sense until you fought Sin, for example.  Well NNK isn’t a whole lot different.  The boss you thought was the end was only 80% of the game.  You get to fight the “god” of the world and that’s a heck of a fight.  The final boss was a real challenge and when it was all over, you really feel like the book is complete.

For the other items that make the game, balance is great, tons of side quests, lots of charm, amazing music and a fairly open world after the first 20%.  The art though, that’s the kicker.  Amazing.  This is a must play.

Great Art

Ni No Kuni

More EA Kerfuffle

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A while back I had mentioned that I was voting with my wallet and no longer buying anymore EA games.  SWTOR and Mass Effect destroyed BioWare, PopCap hasn’t had a single release since being purchased and Origin still makes me feel dirty.

Dead Space 3 is the most recent example of money grabbing, where you had micro (or macro really) transactions in game to help you create better gear.   And a few days ago they said that they were going to focus even more on this type of business model for all future games.

Now, I’ve seen arguments that these “quality of life” features are just that, innocuous unless you want to boost past something and from some companies, I would agree.  Guild Wars 2 follows this path and does a decent job.  So does Path of Exile and Star Trek Online.  Games that don’t?  Everquest, LOTRO and every EA game that has an online store.  And I think this comes down to a basic design problem.

Games that are designed from the bottom up to have an online store tend to have a better ability to control the items in the store.  The core systems are designed around a consistent vision.  Games that convert either mid-design or post launch have very little chance to have unobtrusive stores and mechanics.  The game simply never accounted for it in the first place.  Clearly there are exceptions to this rule as Zynga has never made an acceptable store and DCUO has made a pretty solid conversion.

I’m not saying that EA is the devil of all games.  I am saying that their business practices (and those of Activision) are such that they are hollowing out the gaming population’s wallets and patience.  I am not ignorant that they will make millions on another CoD or Battlefield but hopefully the lesson with Medal of Honor, SWTOR and BLOPS2 can have them focus more on making quality games rather than finding a new way to nickel and dime.

Playstation, whatsamajigger

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Pardon the lack of posts lately, work is taking an incredible toll on everything – including sleep.  It was bad enough that I completely forgot that Sony was announcing the PS4 and I didn’t get a chance to read up on it until this weekend.

Disclaimer here, I have a Wii, XBOX 360 and a PS3.  I played a fair amount of the first with friends but haven’t really touched it in nearly 2 years.  The second was my go-to console for a few years if only because of price and some mods I had put on the box.  I only picked up a PS3 a couple years back (since the launch price was astronomically stupid) and that was driven primarily for the Blu-Ray drive price point. The games lately have all been pretty good, especially the exclusives.  My quibbles with the console though are the following.

1)      You can only run 1 thing at a time and that one thing isn’t voice chat unless it’s part of the game

2)      Every week has some sort of update that takes 5 minutes and provides no noticeable effect

3)      Every game takes 10-45 minutes on first load due to the install

4)      The controllers have no changeable batteries, meaning a 2 year old controller has half the life of a brand new one.  Irksome.

5)      No effective way to chat type (keyboard)

6)      No non-proprietary remote control for movies

What I like about the PS3 includes:

1)      Netflix and its UI.  I just find it works better here than the Wii or XBOX 360.

2)      Blu-Ray player.  I’m thinking this is the reason that Blu-Rays are so common now.

3)      The Dashboard is clean and includes everything you want.  And it loads quickly.

4)      The games are better.  This is subjective but what’s the last XBOX exclusive you played other than Halo?

5)      Free multiplayer.

I should also include the fact that I have a gaming notebook PC.  The thing is a beast, I paid a pretty penny for it and I have dozens of games on Steam that I can play through HDMI and a controller.

So the PS4 announcement certainly had me taking note.  From what I can read about it, it’s essentially a computer with a custom operating system.  Cloud-based gaming, check.  Download games to play, check.  Integrates with Steam library, seems to be a check.  Ports and doo-dads, check. Games, sort of check though the list went from 58 to 23 this week.  More powerful than my laptop, nope.

And that’s the kicker isn’t it.  It seems as if Sony is going to launch a service rather than an actual console.  I’m ok with that, really I am.  I am concerned as to how they expect to bill us for it.  Microsoft makes a lot of money with XBOX live, though they are the only ones making money in a F2P world.  If Sony launches earlier and provides great games and no fee for multiplayer, I see a massive advantage for Sony.  If they can solve the cloud gaming issues (lag, day 1 launch load, etc…) I think we’re in for one heck of a fun ride.  The only downside I see with it, and this applies to all consoles, is that I take up the TV when I want to play.  This is not good for the wife.  Find a workaround to this, and I’m sure you’ll sell billions.

Risky Business

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I have a quick story to tell about PvP and item loss.  Back in the day, Ultima Online had open world, free for all PvP.  When you died, no matter how you died, anyone could loot your corpse clean.  If you died to a bear, another player could loot you and they would take a reputation hit.  If they had killed you, then they already had the hit.  Take too much of a hit and you turned red and people could kill you without worry.  Most PvPers had a main character for PvP and then alts that were “clean”.

My characters had houses.    Before the Trammel split, you needed a key to open the door and you needed that key to be on you.  Most players had multiple bags, in bags and hid their keys deep down.  That way, when someone tried to loot you, they had to find the key.  My crafter character (mining, lumberjack, smith, tinker and more) had no ability to fight.  He did have the ability to create and sell items from the house.  One day, out cutting lumber he was killed and lost the key to the house.  With that key, the PvPer took ownership of the house, then sold it on eBay.  I remember quitting that day.

When I did get back, again before the Trammel split but after the housing updates to no longer worry about keys, when I did get killed I lost time.  Since items degraded on use, and a super weapon was perhaps 25% stronger than a regular one, the difference wasn’t huge.  That part didn’t bug me as much.   The game had items that provided a boost but not such a boost that items were prized over all else.

I don’t mind PvP and item loss, if the item loss is reasonable.  I consider reasonable as a measure of time to get back to what would be competitive, not to where I was.  Losing a house and vendors, I would have to work for weeks to get back anything close to the competitiveness I had.  Losing a set of weapons and regeants, I’d be out 30 minutes.  I like having some risk involved with PvP.  I don’t like forced risk with no options to mitigate it.  I mean, imagine if EvE didn’t have clones.  You think people would still be playing today? 

PvP without risk is pretty boring as you can’t really invest into it.  Planetside 2 has no risk but plenty of benefits (which is why there are so many aimbots).  WoW PvP is even worse, with no link at all between PvP and the rest of the game.  I do have my fingers crossed that Camelot Unchained it able to find the right balance between PvP with risk (therefore investment) and not causing people to quit with rage.

Future of Gaming

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Free to Play always leaves a dirty taste in my mouth.  My first experiences with the genre were when Facebook games like FarmVille starting popping up all over the place.  Extremely aggressive monetization schemes push me away – like a used car salesman I guess.  Some games have done pretty well by it, like DDO, where the proper game is solid and you buy more content for the game as you progress.  I like the concept of a free trial and buying modules; that makes sense.  What I don’t like is a game like TOR where you are given the entire game for free then nickel and dimed to get access to content not ever actually owning the content.  Mind you, reports are pretty strong that lockboxes are keeping the game afloat since nearly every single update to the store includes a new lockbox package.

I am assuming I’m not alone in this distaste as the F2P genre is in the middle of a rather significant upheaval at the moment.  Zynga is all but dead, iOS/Android apps have monetization barriers, Cryptic is taking a new business model, TSW is seemingly on its last legs and Planetside 2 is suffering from fairly massive player drops.

Take this with some salt but I see it a lot like the days of DAOC, EQ and UO, where choice was the prime determinant for games.  You like PvE?  EQ.  You like PvP?  DAOC.  You like sandboxes?  UO.  You like a mix of them?  Too bad.  F2P has such a glut of gaming choices today that no sane person is going to play your crappy game and give you money when the next game over gives a much better experience for the same cost.  If you like goblins that jump on pogo sticks and wave chickens, there are bound to be 2-3 games that can offer it.

Path of Exile

A prime example of this new paradigm is Path of Exile.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, the game provides an extremely full and rich quality experience.  There are plenty of F2P action RPGs either out or coming out, but I can’t think of a single one that provides the depth and customization that PoE gives for free.  Think of your typical loot based game where you have crappy loot and great loot.  PoE gives you the ability to upgrade the worst loot in the game to be better than anything that can drop, if you roll the dice properly.  Since the game is barter-based, there are no gold sellers.  Micro-transactions are all convenience based since you can’t outright buy power due to the fore mentioned gear customization.  One of the smartest moves they’ve done is to target a niche and under promise and over deliver on their product.

I can see this as the future of F2P, heck online gaming as a whole.  Scope your target audience, budget accordingly, get the core requirements and systems down pat, communicate it with the audience and then deliver a bug-free, polished experience.  There’s just no way today that a new IP can come out of the gate and expect to sell millions of copies in the first week or month.  Target small, reach it, and then slowly build out.

My Concerns with EvE

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While I think that EvE is a good benchmark for PvP sandbox games, I have the underlying impression that it’s painting itself into a corner.  To be noted, I feel the same way about WoW, though MoP was quite a break from the mess of Cataclysm.

If you follow EvE you likely follow Jester’s blog.   Prolific blogger is only the tip of the iceberg.  Of interest is a recent post on the current state of the game at the macro and micro levels.  A long but educating read for sure.

The thing about WoW is that while the game still caters to hardcore raiders, over the years, the game has expanded to attract more player styles.  The devs are the ones holding the real controls of the game as the cart can only follow the rails with a themepark.  If you don’t like the game, you have one throat to choke.

EvE on the other hand is a different beast, where the devs are only able to provide tools and modest controls.  While CCP might want the game to go in a certain direction, they cannot force null-sec to change unless they bring massive changes to the game structure -at great risk of pushing long time gamers out completely.  For a game that presents itself as a PvP game, there’s remarkably little of it outside of ganking – with the odd large battles occurring from time to time.  In fact, the massive battle a few weeks back was looked upon with derision since it essentially happened by accident and was fought over nothing.

EvE is at a point where the game isn’t about spaceships and moons and travel.  It’s about backdoor deals, scams, trades, alliances and stalemates.  It’s like there are two completely different games in EvE.  The starter experience is the complete opposite of the latter end.  And you can’t even bother entering the 2nd part of the game if you aren’t willing to make ridiculous sacrifices along the road.  And the joke is that CCP has stated multiple times that the people in high-sec are funding the null-sec playstyle, essentially the sheep are funding the wolves.

My concern isn’t with the game today, it’s with the direction of the game today.  Null-sec is moving towards larger, slower alliances with no middle or small alliances.  New players are put into a spot of eternal ganking or subservience to the large alliances to see anything outside of high-sec.  There’s no middle ground left.  The worst part isn’t that CCP is ignoring this – they are not – it’s that the people with the real control, the low-sec alliances, don’t see a problem in the first place.

Nostalgic Future

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Let’s talk a bit about nostalgia and the impact of looking forward, which seems to be all the rage with Mark Jacobs’ Camelot Unchained announcement.  I know I’ve touched on this topic a few times now but it seems like it needs a new look given the blog-o-sphere’s penchant for “old” games.  Just quick side-note here – I find it hilarious that Keen is playing a pirated version of UO, hosted by a 3rd party, playing for free and then complaining that the rule set is not one he agrees with.

Here’s my premise for nostalgia and its impact.  A game will grow so long as its core demographic gameplay elements remain stable.  EvE has grown because at the core, it’s been relatively the same experience with a few tweaks (albeit some major) to the game as a whole.  Anytime there was massive change, a significant drop happened.  WoW has grown over the years and cycled out its demographic at multiple points along development. 

This is an important distinction.  I do not know a single gamer that has not played WoW at some point.  I know of very few that have ever played EvE.  Of those players, the amount that have played EvE and still do are high while those that have played WoW and still do is quite low.  This is due to WoW being multiple games over the years (group-centric, quest centric, challenge centric, casual centric, story centric, etc…)

When someone comes along and says “X was the best game ever” they are pointing to a place in time where a single game appealed to their core needs.  DAoC was the “best ever RvRvR” because it was the ONLY one for a long time.  UO was the best PvP sandbox for the same reason.  When Trammel came, the core mechanics of the game changed and people moved on.

If you’re a game developer, make damn sure you have a target audience in mind and that you build for that audience.  Make sure your decisions are with that group in mind.  TOR’s failure is that the core demographic is clearly in players making alts and re-running the levelling content but was marketed towards the general MMO population.  DCUO is a perfect example of targeting the console crowd yet marketing to the PC.

Camelot Unchained will succeed if Mark Jacobs is able to target a specific demographic (admittedly small, say 50K) and cater to those needs without bleeding in the financial aspect of “moar playerz”.  This is the same concern I have for Firefall which seems to completely revamp its systems on a quarterly basis.  The same concern I had with D3 when it redid all skills 6 months before launch after 7 years in development.  And finally, it’s the main reason I have my doubts about Wildstar trying to appeal to everyone and succeeding.