I played the heck out of Batman: Arkham Asylum since its release a few years ago.  It was just an overall amazing game that had a perfect mix of stealth, combat and exploration.  Its sequel came out last week and naturally I picked it up and it does not disappoint.

The engine is the same and combat is essentially the same – everything just flows.  The difference is using gadgets in combat.  You can stick bombs on people in combat, or run up on their shoulders or dive bomb from the skys onto their heads.  There just isn’t a break in the combat, which feels great.   The game has an overworld of sorts, where you’re essentially in a city and have access to mini-zones (in the form of buildings) for story driven content.  The overworld is big enough and diverse enough but with upgrades to your cape and grapnel, you can travel from one end to the other in about 90 seconds in the air.  I’m sure it would be 5-10 minutes on foot.  Plenty of Riddler trophies and achievements to get (400 total), all of which can be marked on the map if you find an informant.

Voice acting is still amazing, a lot out of the 90s cartoon.  The story is pretty strong and the gameplay diversity is strong (throw ice bombs to create patches that you can float on, then pull yourself along the water) but at the same time it throws nearly all of it at you at once.  You’ll find Riddler trophies all over the place and 30% of them you won’t be able to get until you have the proper upgrades.  Even some of the missions will try your patience due to wonky situations and just simple bad luck.

That being said, it’s an amazingly strong game.  I wouldn’t put it equal to Deus Ex since it’s a different target audience but it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a very long time.

I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to play games for over 20 years.  I’ve seen the good (Zelda, Diablo, UO), the bad (half the n64 library) and the ugly (Contra’s difficulty, FF’s downward spiral).  Through it all, the only binding factor is fun.

When I’m playing I don’t think “Am I having fun?”, since I wouldn’t be playing if I didn’t.  Sure, there are games that take a while to get going (Kingdom Hearts 2 I’m looking at you) and some games that go through bad patches (Deus Ex:HR) but are in their essence, great games.  Rarely do I find a game so bad that I just drop it completely.  I guess that’s why I buy so few games, I only play the ones I know I will want to play.

Certainly back in the day there were more crappy games.  They cost next to nothing to produce, there were no aggregate review scores and the internet didn’t let people play the game before release.  We have better quality today but in the same token we have more games to chose from.  To set themselves apart, the games focus on niche areas – harvesting, Smurfs, combat, FPS and so on.  It’s easier to find a game that provides your type of fun but at the same time, there are dozens more games that you simply will not touch because they have no appeal.  I think I played 75% of the SNES library and I have a grand total of 6 PS3 games.

It’s interesting to see a game that aims for the most sales and the most diversity while also appealing to their base crowd.  MMOs fit that rather well since they require thousands of players together in order to succeed.  It’s also interesting to hear the people complain about the game going one way instead of another, while still playing it.  How MMOs will work in the future is another post entirely but it surely seems that the persistent online game world (Farmville counts) is the way to ensure maximum fun (since everyone wants some social aspect) while piecemealing in the niche products.  Kinda like Jello with fruit inside.

This supposes that you have seen all 6 films and have not read much more into the fan fiction (there are hundreds of books, especially the new jedi order ones).  Maybe you played some Star Wars battlefront or maybe Dark Forces – hell maybe even Force Unleashed.  All in all, you know that Jedi suck.

In the first two films, you had a whinny wimp of a jedi but still pretty cool in what could be done.  In the third you had him against a Sith Lord and Empreror who shoot lightning out of their hands and can’t be beaten (except by each other).  Sith are awesome but they have power issues.  The 3 prequels showed you how stupid the jedi order is and why it essentially deserved to be wiped out.  Not a single person who watched those movies found an ounce of guilt to watch them all die (well maybe the kiddie jedis).  Other than Anakin, Obi-Wan and Yoda, you had dozens and dozens of jedi who just sat down for 3 movies while the Sith is jumping from planet to planet, throwing stuff, beating people up – basically doing what they want to do.  Oh, and more lightning.  When Anakin dies in the final prequel, he’s still a jedi and boy are we happy to see him die.

The games are interesting in themselves. Dark Forces you were a jedi of sorts but not any jedi I’ve ever seen in a movie.  You blew crap up all the time and had great powers.  Knights of the Old Republic let you play good or evil and I’ll be damned if anyone went full healing rather than full lightning.  Force Unleashed is you as a bad guy, plain and simple.  If at the end of the first one they said “now you’re good, gimme your lightning” I would have thrown up.

The Star Wars franchise was built around the samurai code of honor – mortals versus demons.  Then George humanized these demons and took away all the honor from the mortals.

So here we look at The Old Republic and class choice.  There are 4 in the Jedi order and 4 in the Sith Empire but they pretty much are mirrors of each other.  So if you have a choice between playing a goody two-shoes jedi who runs around healing and throwing rocks at people and a sith who shoots lightning and burns people, where you going to go?  The same place over 75% of the player population is going to go.

In the category of painfully obvious, DCUO is going free to play.  I guess they wanted to milk as much of it as possible before the swap but the game is designed for F2P, from start to finish.  I bought it when 2 weeks after it launched, leveled 3 characters to max level in 2 weeks and then the game died.  There was nothing to do but hunt other costumes.  Raids/dungeons/groups were horribly broken.  At the 30 day mark from game launch, the servers emptied completely.  I could be on at 8pm and never meet another soul.

During the summer, they merged all the servers into one big one.  Well, 1 per continent, per device (PS3 and PC) for a total of 4.  That from an initial total of like 60.  Heck, we’re barely 7 months away from launch, so this might be a record for time to swap.

Is it worth giving a shot as F2P?  Hell yes.  The core game is solid and leveling to 30 is a LOT of fun.  It lasts about what you’d expect from a console game, maybe 8-10 hours.  It’s at that point that the F2P will get interesting.  Either they add interesting content so people pay or the game truly dies.  My vote is the latter.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from WoW and patch 4.3

Melee classes will be getting a buff that is only active in the new raid to help them compete with ranged classes.

What does this mean exactly?  It means that melee classes (the up close and personal ones) are finally being acknowledged as being inferior.  This includes all variants of rogues, DPS warriors, DPS DKs, cat druids and enhance shamans.  Last expansion (Lich King) focuses on bringing the player and not the class, so that for the most part, every character brought something useful to a fight.  This expansion, there are quite a few classes that simply are useless in high level content.  Rogues are gone, maybe 5% of the entire player population, enhance shammys are dead, DKs and Warriors are only good for tanking and druids are going caster or tank.  There’s so much twitch, AE, move-or-die elements in fights that anyone standing close to a boss is near guaranteed to die.

Rift has this issue a bit as well with some warrior builds, though everyone can play at range if they want.  Solid decision since you can swap to a melee build when it works.  SWTOR has 4 (out of 16) builds that work only in melee and 2 more than are melee tanks, a HUGE disadvantage when you look at the ranged variants.

This type of buff in WoW is akin to using duct tape to fix a cracked window.  You’ll need to keep patching the window until you decide to replace it.  Games have reached a level of complexity where situational awareness is the primary key for survival and being in melee range is simply a guaranteed way to die.  You want a better fix that’s just as stupid?  Increase melee DPS range to that of other ranged attackers.  Make tanking skills require the minimum that currently exists.  Done.

I think Diablo was the first computer game where I actively played with other people. Well I’m sure there were BBS games along the way but this was the first where I knew who I was playing with.  Lots of polish, fun combat and just a well thought out game. Diablo 2 was a vast improvement, Warcraft 2&3, Starcraft –  all games I played the crap out of.  World of Warcraft was like that too, just addicting in the polish and content.

Bioware (or previously Black Isle) is in a similar boat but for single player games.  They were amazing stories with solid systems to back them up.  No one doubts that Mass Effect 2’s story was epic but the systems supporting it were iffy at times.

Today I can look up the mobile phone app store and find games for 5$ that are innovative and can keep me busy for 10-30 hours.  There are free MMOs to compete with, games with epic stories, systems and content.  If you’ve played Plants vs Zombies at all, then you can see what a smaller company can do when they have vision.

Blizzard and Bioware are losing their vision and becoming corporate in their activities.  When at first you could see the passion ooze from their games, now you can clearly see that’s it’s just automation and basically a cash draw.  Cataclysm brought nothing new or fun to the game, just more time sinks.  Dragon Age 2’s zones were limited to a city and the choices were boiled down to half of it’s predecessor.

After having watched some Diablo 3 videos (the NDA is lifted, so check you tube) you can see that the game is near identical to Diablo 2.  I have trouble seeing why it would run ahead of the pack if not for the name of the company rather than the quality of the game (which I hear is ho-hum). Compared to other dungeon runners (hello Torchlight!), there just isn’t anything here that says play me.

I have an Xbox360 and a PS3.  I haven’t played an Xbox game since Batman 2 years ago and my PS3 has a collection of 4 games total.  Why would I pay 60$ for trash when I can pay 5$ for something fun, exciting and time consuming?

I am losing faith in the industry day after day in that the spirit of the game is gone and the spirit of the almighty dollar is taking its place.

So, impressions without breaking an NDA right?

A new beta phase is starting in a few weeks, with the current one ending shortly.  Some people were able to sample it recently.   All told, this is a beta and beta is beta.  I expect there to be lag, I expect there to be balance issues, some tweaks to numbers and a large amount of bugs (I log about 10 an hour).  What I don’t expect to be missing is gameplay strategy and content.

Example.  Depending on the zone you’re in, you might have 10 quests or you might have 40.  One particular zone is simply bereft of any direction or cohesion, you don’t know what to do or where to go.  This in itself isn’t bad, I’ve played a few games like that.  The issue is that the other starting zones all appear to be the complete opposite – providing story and direction and actual content.  Even the best of these zones has areas where there’s simply nothing.  Wide areas where there simply is nothing to do other than walk through it or ignore it.  You’ll find dozens of these examples in the first 10 levels – complete interior zones with 5-10 rooms and you never have a single need to go into any of them.  So much effort by the artists, so little by the developers – a real shame.

Another topic which grates me to no end is forced grouping.  There is no game other than Everquest that currently forces you to group to complete exterior content while leveling.  Sure, there are optional spots from time to time, maybe a dozen or so while leveling to max.  I found 5 in the first hour  – three quests at level 3.  After leaving the starting area, I had to travel THROUGH a forced grouping zone to get to the next hub.  Don’t get me wrong, I do like grouping up, it is part of the point of MMOs after all.  What I dislike is being forced into doing it with such a piss-poor design.  Let’s say you’re in a zone and you have 10 active group quests.  Finding someone is an act of asking in chat or finding people running around you.  if they are nearby, super.  If not, then getting to the actual spot can be a 10 minute affair.  Ridiculous.  Use Rift’s system for quests and porting people to the right spot.  Add a summon part button.  It’s simple, other games have done it and done it much better.

Last is character development.  This is so fluid during beta I can’t comment on the value for launch but as it stands, leveling pace is decent, if not linear in time spent.  What is a concern is class power.  When you level up you either get a new skill or an upgraded one.  The upgrades are minimal really, since you start off dealing huge damage in the first place.  Let’s say I do 100 damage per hit at level 1.  By level 15, I might be doing 150.  Enemies also scale at this rate, except for elites.  One I killed had 13,000 hit points.  Do the math on how long it took to kill him, simply mashing the same buttons over and over again.  Boring does not begin to describe it.  Each level should mean something or it should not.  Right now, we’re in the middle ground where it makes you think you’re stronger but in fact, it’s marginal.  How about the skills grow on their own after I’ve trained and I only need to go back when I get something new?

Still a lot of work to do and a short period of time to do it in.  As I’m looking at it, it has less chance at success than Rift due to gameplay mechanics and horrible community tools but both can be turned around in short order.  Unless of course they are looking at a 3 month turnaround for players – which is what I give it optimistically.