It would seem the NBI talkback#2 is about Early Access and Kickstarter.  This is a rather interesting topic to me, in particular in today’s free to play world and day 2 patches.

I’ll start with the second one, Kickstarter.  I think we’re over the honeymoon phase and people are realizing that backing something is just like any other investment; you might not get a return.  When it started, everyone was on a high since they were backing a for sure promise of delivery.  Sorry!  There’s a pretty good reason big Kickstarters failed – horrible project and client management.  Either they got the money and had no idea how to spend it, or the concept was so poorly managed everyone thought it was bonkers (Hi Brad!).  There are good things that have come from it though, mostly board games and card games.  A few video games have succeeded, Pillars of Eternity being one of the obvious ones.  There are good ideas out there and Kickstarter is a neat way to see them come to life (maybe).

Early Access is plain ol’ dumb, from both a client and development perspective.  The benefits are pretty small.  Sure, you get valuable feedback for a few weeks, maybe a couple months from dedicated folks.  You need to spend less time triaging beta test applications.  There’s some good word of mouth that occurs, if the product is polished enough.  There’s some extra money to get through dev cycles.  That’s the good stuff.

The bad stuff is about expectations.  Once someone pays for a product, no matter the state, they expect some level of service.  A buggy game that stays buggy for weeks/months, loses all steam.  A game with no community involvement dies a slow death.  The biggest champions for the game are selling the concept to their friends who may buy a broken game.  By the time launch comes around, nearly everyone has moved on.

If the period is short, then there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.  But a short period means that the game is in polish mode, not dev mode.  Neverwinter and Marvel Heroes are two recent games that went this route, even Heroes of the Storm in their own way.  As soon as the cash store opens, or that I’ve bought in, I consider the game live.  It takes something to get people to come back once the marketing team actually decides to “go live”.  I remember the HotS beta invite, costing $50 to get it.  It was a simple “are you kidding me” decision.

Landmark is a prime example of how not to do Early Access.  When that opened up over a year ago (!) there were blog posts everywhere.  People dropped $100+ dollars to be in a beta that lasted a year.  The game has moved at a snail’s pace (if the snail was dead) and still doesn’t have a launch date.  Heck, the devs had to remind people the game was still around.  All the positive buzz for that game is gone and everyone who was interested has moved on to something else.  It just seems a wasted opportunity.

There is no life without death.  It’s defined by a start point and an end point.  I think the best stories told have more to do with death than they actually do with life.  Oddly enough, I find vampires enjoyable not for their immortality but for the threat they pose to others.  Harry Potter wouldn’t even be a story if his parents hadn’t died.  Childhood’s End does a decent job explaining the sense of hopelessness when mortality and procreation is removed from the equation.

The best games deal with death as a driver as well.  Last of Us, Ni No Kuni, FF7, Chrono Trigger…you could look at the top ones and each seems to be driven around death or the imminent threat.  It isn’t the violence or act of the PC doing the killing but the stuff around them.  Plagues, meteors, evil wizards and whatnot.  It’s a common fear and common driver.

To that end, I feel much more invested in a game where death is meaningful, touching on the topic of challenge/difficulty.  Dying and just popping back up like no sweat is an odd occurrence to me, like death has no meaningful impact on the world.  I feel somewhat removed from it all.  The actual mechanics can be varied but there should be something to come from it.

Like in GTA, you lose all your guns.  Or Path of Exile you lose experience (which could be a fairly large impact).  In RPGs with save points, you lose the progress since the last one, which is why I prefer save points compared to save anywhere.  When death has meaning, then it drives you strongly to avoid it.  You don’t build a team of glass canons because you know you’re going to die.  Zerging doesn’t work either.

The flipside to this is that death can’t be handed out like candy.  If it’s just a meatwall of death, then what’s the point?  Death can’t be meaningful if it happens all the time.  It certainly starts to become punitive.

I think it’s pretty clear that these items are inversely proportionate, with personal preference for the ranges.  For example, I have no fun in permadeath games.  Roguelikes with meta progress are ok, where there’s some form of progress even though you lose a lot – like a small stat boost or knowledge to get passed it next time.  Death in those games has to be earned though, so one-shots are just plain out of the picture and random for the sake of random is out too.

Graveyard camping is a great way to get me to quit a game.  The death rate is too damn high, even though there are rarely any death penalties (except perhaps old school UO).   Sniper roosts are one thing, but most of these camps are run by hackers/exploiters/greifers, with no benefit to themselves outside of misery to their victims.

Maybe this stems from my childhood at the arcades.  If I lost, I was down a quarter.  That was a tangible loss for me!  I remember a good rivalry between myself and 3 other guys.  There was certainly a much different motivation in the “winner stays, loser pays” games.  Chasing win streaks or high scores was a ton of fun.

I know where my personal comfort lies in terms of death penalties, and rates of death.  The more I think about it, the more it has an impact on my overall enjoyment of a game.

It would seem in most remarkable RPGs there’s an optional boss of some sort that is miles more difficult than anything else in the game.  The omega weapons in Final Fantasy are good examples.  Heroic-only raid bosses in WoW.  Culex in Super Mario: 7 Stars.  Pillars of Eternity is no different, as you get to fight the Adra Dragon after the 15 floor Nua dungeon.  Well, except for a few points.

First, the concept of difficult for difficulty’s sake annoys the crap out of me.  I dislike rigged games, just like playing Mario Kart has cheating AI.  I realize that there’s a fine line between challenging and difficult.  Demon Souls (and other like) are challenging.  You run through enough times and think it through, you can get by.  Difficult games are where you’re randomly put into a challenge with moving parts and have to make decisions that are vastly different than the rest of the game.

The Adra Dragon is the latter.  See, the 14 floors before that have their own challenges, some pretty tough ones actually.  You need to think your way through, even at max level.  Then you reach floor 15 and the dragon kills 5 of the 6 members in a single attack, an AE attack with no range and extremely large LoS, on a random timer.  Oh, it drops its threat target randomly, and has a hitbox a fraction of the size of its targeting box.  Also, this dragon has the best defense score in the game, miles beyond anyone else and its melee attacks knockdown and deal tremendous damage.  I get it, dragons are supposed to be tough but this particular one is of such a level of difficulty that there is very little sane approach.

It took me over 3 days to pass this checkpoint.  There are really only 2 options present to defeat this.  First, is to have a tank, either a custom one or Eder, and have specced defensively the entire time you progressed.  You then stack every defensive item you can on the tank, buffs, potions, food, you name it.  they lead out, start the conversation and through luck, turn the dragon to face away from the rest of the team.  Bad luck, and no matter what you do, the rest of the team can get hit by an AE attack and wipe you out.  Let’s say luck is in your favor.  You now need to have a priest/healer of some sort nearby to keep the tank topped up.  Everyone else needs to be at range, because there’s a melee distance attack that will 1 shot anyone nearby.  You need to debuff the dragon on all their defenses and buff all the attackers to hit.  If everything goes off well, you have a dead dragon.  If RNG is against you (and remember, the odds are very much not in your favor) then you’re going to reload.

The 2^nd option is the cheap way, which is to use a paralyze trap on the dragon, have a chanter who has the quick reload song and equip everyone with ranged high damage (slow) weapons, like arbalests.  If the trap hits (which for some reason has a near 100% hit rate), then it takes 2 rounds of ranged attacks, including many critical strikes, to take down the dragon.  Extremely cheap, still has some element of luck, but it’s a more reliable way to do it.

Did I mention that at higher difficulty levels there are enemies that spawn with the dragon that can mind control your team?

This post isn’t so much to complain about the outright difficulty of the event but that there is such a large disparity between the rest of the game and this particular battle.  There is no level of grinding to get through it.  There is only 1 effective strategy that isn’t “cheesing” and that one requires near perfect execution with favorable RNG.  I don’t mind losing, if I can see that it was something that I did wrong.  I don’t mind hitting a brick wall either, if it means I need to upgrade/improve something in the interim.  I do take issue with a near perfect execution and being the victim of a series of bad rolls and random events outside of my control. I want to learn, not cross my fingers.

Thankfully, this is an isolated event in an otherwise extremely polished game.

Without a PC, I’m stuck with mobile gaming on my tablet.  I’ll be blunt, the race to the bottom on mobile apps is pretty disgusting.  There are dozens, if not hundreds, of CoC clones out there, or a card based combat simulator.  I was reading about how the iOS store has 500 apps published per day.  How exactly do you parse quality in that type of environment?  IAP and ad-based games are atrocious.  Sure, there are games where it isn’t in your face but those are pretty far between.

So I tend to find the gems in the paid apps section.  Oh, there’s plenty of garbage in there too but with a refund system, you can always go back and complain about a given app.  The cost is an odd psychological discussion, where I spend $2.35 on a cup of coffee that lasts me 20 minutes but a game that lasts an hour won’t go for more than $2.

I’m not talking about Squeenix’ stupid price point of $15 for 20 year old games.  Those are just bonkers – especially for games that I already OWN just want to use on a different platform (hello emulators!)  There are some pretty good games at the $5 mark though, things that can keep you going for a long time.  And really, it’s important to support the smaller devs who are innovating because once they pick up enough steam, EA is going to come along and copy the crap out of them.

I have a whole whack of interesting ones that I’ve picked up over the past year.  The one I’m on right now is Enchanted Cave 2, a tweak on the rogue-like genre.  You go down a random dungeon and pick up loot, levels and stat boosts.  If you die, you lose it all.  If you escape (with a special item) you get to save some of the progress so far, making the next run a bit easier.  I remember playing the first game a few years ago on Kongregate (for free).  This version had a few more stats, a skill tree that you can put points into as you level, an enchanting sub-system and a crafting system to boot.  I think it was under $3 too. It’s a solid time waster.

It’s unfortunate that I had to go through about 2 dozens games to find one that a) kept my attention past the 15 minute mark, b) wasn’t a near complete clone of another game and c) didn’t have a crazy amount of bugs making the game unplayable.  There’s got to be a bottom to this barrel.

In which I use different terms for the same argument.

Some readers will have had the chance to buy a house.  When they go shopping for an existing one, or look at houses being built, choices are limited.  You are stuck with the lot, the foundation and the supporting walls.  I had a friend who was shopping and was complaining about the color of the walls.  When I mentioned that they could paint the walls, it was like a new dawn.  In the new developments, you basically get a choice of 5 house types and then your choice of tile.

For those lucky enough not to have gone shopping, nearly everyone has gone through a suburb or development where row after row of houses looks the same.  It’s like a bad movie.

Compare that to 25 years ago where builders would work with architects and planners to custom build a house.  Go to most neighbourhoods built in the 80s or before, and the houses are generally different than each other.  You can certainly still do that today but it’s hard.  You need to find land, an architect, a lawyer, a general contractor and run through enough permits to choke a horse. It’s hard but at the end, you have a house that’s your own.

That’s the argument behind complexity.  Given people the illusion of choice is not really a choice, not when beneath that choice there were dozens of choices taken already.  Imagine being able to make those foundational choices.  Being able to make mistakes and then learning from them.  If there’s no real chance at failure, then there’s no real progress.

While I was playing some more Path of Exile, I got to thinking about how this game differs from others.  I mean, they are all just carrot-on-a-stick generators, but some seem to have better looking carrots I guess.  As always, comparisons abound.  The 4 that I think bear comparison right now are Diablo 3, Marvel Heroes, Torchlight 2 and Path of Exile.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that the visceral aspects of Diablo 3 are much better than the others.  Abilities have an impact, monsters are clear and unique and there’s a fair amount of variety in the bosses, if you want there to be.   That feedback is part of the initial draw and it’s something MH, T2 and PoE are not really that good at.  D3 is a rewarding visual experience.

The thing is that feedback system reaches a stopping point, where you’ve seen all the skills and all the bosses.  Maybe it gets you to the end level.  It isn’t a carrot so much as an endorphin push.  You eventually develop immunity to it.  It’s at that point where you start seeing games for what they are – loot pinatas combined with number generators.  And that’s a part that Diablo 3 really is the weakest of the bunch and PoE really stands out.

Loot

Typical loot drops are rarely scanned after a given point.  The amount of gearing options available at max level really boil down to some simple guidelines.  Either it’s a clear upgrade for you, for a friend/alt, or may sell for something decent.  In D3, if it isn’t orange/green, odds are you aren’t going to use it.  There is a massive lack of build diversity in D3 and it is limited mainly by the gearing options.  The unique/set items are so wildly powerful, that some classes are pretty much non-competitive until you reach a specific gearing point.  It also means that you’re ignoring 99% of the gear drops.

In T2 and MH, the build diversity is much higher and that’s due to the way that the gear drops work.  T2 has sets/uniques and MH has about 18 terms for their gear.  But while there are key items that boost a particular feature of a character, nearly any type of high end drop can be an upgrade because each item boosts a random set of skills.  Combined with crafting, drops that are mediocre can be transformed into something very powerful.  I think MH really takes the cake here simply because it has so many possible gearing slots and options but T2 is pretty close in sheer item variance.

PoE is the outlier here and that has to do with the core design of the game.  There is no cash in the game, only a bartering system.  Skill gems are how characters develop abilities and boost their power.  There’s an internal gambling-like system for crafting, where you can take a grey-quality item and turn it into a superb piece of gear (potentially).  All this combined means that you’re always paying attention to the gear drops.  Maybe that piece has 6 slots, maybe that one has 4 links, maybe that one has an innate bonus.  Some types of drops also trade for better items (like a red-blue-green item giving a chromatic orb).  Right now, my weapon is a rare with some rolled mods and skill gem slots.  I’ve had it for over 10 levels.  I’ve had multiple rares since, none have come close to the stats on this thing, in the way that I’ve built my ranger.  The items that I’ve seen that were good, I’ve banked or traded away.

What the end result means is that there is always some form of progress.  D3 loot is a clear black/white upgrade system, just numbers.  MH/T2 has you stop and think a bit as to how the item fits into your build.  PoE goes the extra step and makes you go back to town to tinker with your gear.

Numbers

This is by far D3’s single largest weakness, the simplification of its numbers.  Only 2 numbers really matter (outside of uniques/sets) and that’s weapon DPS and the mainstat (Dex/Str/Int).  I know I am simplifying it, as critical chance/damage and resists have an impact but neither have as much as the first 2 items.  There’s just no way to fix this and it was the foundation of all the problems with the auction house.  A clear delineation of power means that only a small fraction of items have any value.  It also gives an exponential curve to power, where the difference between max level-1 and max level is a number most people can’t count.

T2 values main stat and then skills.  Sure, main hand DPS has value but it’s the other numbers that really impact your skill damage.  Getting a +5 to glaive had a tremendous effect.  This system is the closest to D2 that I’ve seen implemented, and had a large impact on the build diversity.

MH is all about skills, as the item’s innate power is more related to its level requirement than anything else.  Sure, you’re still going to want to look for +energy damage if that’s your bag, but you won’t equip something with +to a defence skill if you’re built for offence.  The power curve here is actually rather linear.  It keeps you coming back as there always seems to be some progress.

PoE has both the passive skill tree (oh lord the options) and skill gems.  This makes for a rather complicated system, where the base stats on an items are as important (if not less so) than the gem sockets, combined with your passive skills.  So let’s say you spec as a dual wielding cold master.  You will be looking for items with +cold damage, a few red sockets and resistances.  Would you swap an item with better base stats for one with 2 less connected gem slots?  Maybe if you were able to find another item to compensate.  I have a rare chest item with 6 green sockets, 5 of them connected.  Those 5 connected skills give me an amazing attack (tornado, piece, GWP, physical damage, faster attacks) that I really don’t want to give up.  I could re-roll a rare with better stats, hoping to get better sockets, but that’s a less than 1% chance.  With so many variables and numbers at play, it really makes you think about what you can actually use and what you’re willing to give up.

Complicated is good

I’m not saying simple games are bad, I’m just saying that I have a penchant for the more complex ones.  I like having to think things through, rather than just bot my way to the end.  It’s also neat that there are options along that simple/complex line.  I would say that folks who give PoE a try, once you get over the first few levels and start finding linked sockets, that’s where you start to see the true complexity of the system.  It isn’t a game where you’re chasing an ilevel, it’s a game where you’re given tools to think through.  And I think in today’s world of simple mechanics, a bit of complexity is a welcome sight.