3 main topics for today!

Pre-orders

I’m not sure how many times I’ll say it but pre-orders suck nuts.  Arkham Asylum is such a mess that they stopped selling the game.  I know I wanted to pick it up and I heard the console version is great.  I also waited 2 days for the PC reviews to come out and I’m now saner for it.  At least they’re giving out refunds.

Wildstar

Free to play is coming and with it a whole bag of changes.  Stats are being revamped to more simple terms (and balance) and gear is being re-itemized in turn.  I’ll be honest, I have to play with a mod to understand heads or tails of all the stats on different characters.  This is a great quality of life change.

Dungeons are being scaled out more, so that you don’t see the first one at 20 and hit that wall.  Well, protostar games has been in for a bit at level 10 but that’s not really a dungeon as much as a tutorial.  This is good news as the dungeons in Wildstar are amazeballs.  They are also being rebalanced so that the damage from enemies is going more into telegraphs and less into standard attacks.  I’m hoping they tweak the logic of telegraphs though, as the timing on some of them is very hard to avoid. Especially when there are 4-5 effects on the ground at once.

Other items (some currently available as mods) include always-on sprint, world bosses clearly demarked, sell junk button, navigation system, revamp of the tutorials, and neighbourhoods.  This last one is pretty neat, where groups of 20 players can decorate together.  That’s pretty sweet.

All of this will be on the test realm shortly, in time for the fall conversion.  It looks quite promising.
FF14

After hoops and hurdles I finally got to play FF14 again.  I haven’t bought the expansion mind you, as my white mage was only 43.  He’s  47 now and that’s from fate grinds, main quests, levequests (sort of like random dailies) and taking down Garuda.  If there was a class that dealt the least amount of damage, white mages would be it.  Thankfully I have a tanking chocobo that I can just chain heal and he does most of the work.

From WoW and Wildstar, I’m used to a fair amount of mods.  Even SWTOR has a fairly customizable HUD, where you can resize items.  FF14…I can move the boxes around but that’s it.  Not that I have skill bloat, but there’s some tweaking I’d like to do to real estate.  Playing a healer, I’m used to a certain look and feel.  The 2.5s GCD is the most glaring change of pace to me and I’ll be honest, I struggle with it constantly.  I realize the GCD affects monsters as well, but they are already queued on their next attack before you can start yours.  Healing a smart tank is ok, healing a new one is quite painful.  The problem seems more pronounced when there’s AE happening, or multiple targets.  Triage at 0s is different than at 2s, and you’re 80% of the way through a cast…

I had mentioned this in a previous post and Rohan echoes it well enough, FF14 has a rather unique community.  The pace is much slower than other games and the rush to 50 on a new character is not a simple one.  There are many cut-scenes throughout and the mandatory dungeon runs put a huge hamper on “typical MMO” progress.  Going from something like Wildstar to FF14 is like F1 racing to a buggy cart.

Then you have the actual difficulty of the game, which to be honest, is higher than most other games. The increase in difficulty is gradual mind you, spread over the 50 first levels, but it does get hard.  And it’s not like there’s a ton of random stuff to do at max level that doesn’t include group content.  It doesn’t take much to develop a reputation on a server and it pays dividends to be nice as you’re going to need them later on.

I’ll give Garuda as an example.  I needed to clear that boss to progress and it took at least a dozen wipes and 3 groups to get it done.  First group I disconnected from due to a crappy network, but our DPS was too low on the feathers.  Group 2, the black mage wasn’t able to get their AE to work properly and again, the feathers.  Group 3 the tank was playing more of a DPS role, and was taking at least 50% more damage than the others I had healed and eventually they just quit.  The new tank was quite solid and we cleared it on the first try.  The entire run through was positive and light hearted.  No one lost their cool.  There were tips given out “have you tried this?” but never anything I’m used to seeing “oh you suck”.  There just seems to be a better level of understanding between players.

If you get frustrated easily, the odds are extremely high that by level 20-30 you’ll have burnt out on the game.  If you do manage to scrape your way to end game, you can only do it by having friends.  It’s a very interesting model where there’s a constant triage of players and it’s clearly a conscious decision.  I wouldn’t call it exclusionary, but more like it’s targeted.  Where Wildstar targeted (which they are doing an about face) the 1% of hardcore raiders and WoW targeted the grandmas and teens (which they seem to be focusing on more and more), FF14 seems to be aiming for the people who value strategy and social structures.

A few more days and I think I’ll be in expansion territory.

FF14’s expansion Heavensward is $40.  Warlords was $60, though it included a “free” level 90, which is $60 after the fact (though really, that’s what, 20 hours of gameplay at most nowdays?).  Most expansions runs between $30 and $60, depending on what’s in it.  Even more so when you think about if the game is F2P or subscription based.  Some don’t even charge for expansions – Neverwinter & EvE come to mind.

GW2 is 2 years old and aside from that first box price, I’d wager the majority haven’t dropped more than $20 in all that time.  $50 is absolutely reasonable for an expansion, if you know what’s in it.  And I guess that’s the rub.  Asking for money on faith is always a hard bargain to make.  Certainly with mixed messages and a rather poor PR department.  NCSoft barely has any PR, though I guess it’s better than having Smed going off on some tangent.12:00

I really think this is just a storm in a teacup.  By the time the expansion rolls around, everyone will go back on their “don’t buy it” mantra and scoop it up on release.

Let’s face it, MMO gamers are always looking for the next shiny thing and no matter how much they complain, it’s still going to sell to the active playerbase.

It is popcorn-worthy to see the frothing mind you.

The last couple weeks I’ve just had drained batteries.  Completely kaput.  I took this week off, mostly unplugged and slept what seemed to be a dozen+ hours per day. Typically when I take time off work, I still have some contact.  I’ll check mail a few times a day, maybe take a call or two to sort things out.  This week I let my BlackBerry drop dead and just disconnected.  I think that’s honestly the first time I’ve done that in 10 years, at least in a situation where the was a signal possible.

E3

I did keep up with the news somewhat mind you.  E3 came and went, and there really wasn’t much to talk about.  If you love sequel-itis, then hey, they’ve got you covered.  More Battlefront (with an amazing deluxe package that gives you a damage boost on normal packages), Fallout 4 has a date and an iOS app, Uncharted has a sequel, FF7 is coming back (curious how that will work out), SWTOR has a neat expansion/reboot…It’s not bad news so much.  I think devs have finally figured out how to use the consoles properly now, so the games are looking pretty amazing.

Anyone taking bets on when The Last Guardian will actually come out?

Steam Sale

There was a lot of stuff on sale, holy bajeebers!  I picked up Ori and the Blind Forest, which is a cool game in the metroidvania style.  With amazing art and music.  Superb game actually, great throwback to a fun game style.

The rest of the stuff I either already had or it didn’t interest me much.  Stick of Truth I did pick up, for something like $10, so that will fill some dead time eventually.  Arkham Knight isn’t on sale but apparently it’s the best of the series.  Winter sale I guess…

Marvel Heroes

2 year anniversary on a super cool ARPG.  Syp has posted a fair bit on it and it’s well worth your dollars.  I think they have a really great cash stop mechanic, though I’m curious as to how much is left in the Marvel vaults for them to release as playable characters.

I picked up Doom with some Eternity Crystal (the droppable F2P currency) and I am quite impressed.  He has great lines, looks cool and his moves are all pretty signature.  Due to some other characters being at 60 (including Cyclops) I was able to get him to level 60 in about 2 days of sporadic playtime.  Then with a bunch of lucky drops, kitted him out for some solid damage potential.  I also took the time to level up Squirrel Girl.  She’s awesome!

Wildstar

I had mentioned before how I wanted to get back into this game.  Well, I subbed up this week and patched my way in.  I had posted about what I thought was missing from the game, and I am rather happy to say that most of that downside list has been addressed.   There’s a lot of casual/daily content now at 50, shiphands, adventures, dungeons, plot dungeons, battleplots, battlegrounds and 4 main daily hubs.  Raids have been dropped to 20 players, itemization has been tweaked so it isn’t as crazy.  Lot of classes have been balanced as well (notoriously the warrior).

There are people playing, I see them all over the place.  That said, it need more people STAT.  It’s great that it’s going F2P in the fall but there needs to be something in there now to get more people playing.  I’m a bit reminded of what happened to SWTOR in this case, where the game dropped subs like the servers were on fire. It was a 90% server merge after all.  When F2P hit, the game took a few months but picked up a ton of steam and now there’s players everywhere.  Wildstar needs that player boost.  It’s a quality MMO.

FF14

Expansion hit a few days ago.  I have an old account I played with for a couple months, and I was impressed with what was there.  I dropped out however, due to real life taking almost all my free time.  I’m curious to see what’s about mind you so I wanted to get back into the game.

Let me say that Square Enix has some of the absolute worst infrastructure/support services on the planet.  It’s is almost absurd.  Trying to log in, my typical passwords aren’t working.  Ok, now I get locked out for some reason, though no idea how long I’m locked out.  I try again in 10 minutes, same message.  A quick search tells me it’s a 30 minute lockout, and extended by some magical number everytime you retry and the lockout is still in effect.

Fine, let’s try a password reset.  Ok, none of my security answers are working.  Maybe it’s the case of the answers.  Nope… not that either.  Ok, maybe I have a token attached to the account (there’s a field there but it doesn’t tell me if I have one).  I check my mail and it looks like I tried to attach one, but there’s no success message.  Fine, let’s try it out.  The app won’t work on my iPod and won’t work on my Android tablet.  It will work on my wife’s.  Super.  Put in the data to restore it, invalid key data.  Arghhhh!!!

I end up on the support site, submitting a ticket.  Interestingly enough, it asks me for the same security questions as before to submit but doesn’t give me any errors when I put in the answers I thought were correct.  I haven’t received any notice it was sent, or that there was an error.  Just an on-screen message that it may take some time.

So at this point, I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do.  Calling them is apparently a 2 hour wait and since they are only open during “business hours”, I’m not quite sure what that will accomplish other than a massive long distance charge on my phone.

/amazing.

Say what you will about Metacritic but it usually captures the gist of a game’s media impact.  It is rare that a game has extremely varied review scores, especially across the top 10 or so review companies.  Maybe +/- 10, with an odd outlier.

So, Metacritic is giving Heroes of the Storm an 86.  For comparison’s sake, LoL got a 78 and DOTA2 got a 90.  Smite has an 83 and Infinite Crisis has a 66.  Based on my extremely limited experience with the fold, that sort of lines up (LoL should be higher mind you, but still behind DOTA2).

IGN, the fine purveyor of fanboi tears, has opted to give HotS a 6.5.  It is the lowest score by 15 points.

The review itself makes a few valid points.  That the game is expensive and time consuming to play at an elite level is just trollbait mind you.  The map balance and focus on secondary objectives over competitive play is a consistent comment.  KTR put it well, it’s competitive PvE, which is certainly a different flavor of MOBA.

Still, it takes some pretty big kahunas to hand out a 6.5.  Especially for a site that is so drastically liberal with it’s score (WoD got a 9).  And you know, tied at the damn hip with it’s Hearthstone reporting.

So I think I’ll sit back and enjoy the flames.  This should be fun.

Az has a neat little question about, what games would you bring with you to prison.

First

The first one was this: you’re going to jail for ten years, but it’s a minimum security prison that will allow you to take one offline game (any DLC included) with you. But that will be the only game you get for those ten years. Which game do you pick?

I’d want something with a lot of replay and depth.  It’d be a tossup between Civilization 4 and XCOM (the first one from the 90s).  I have quite literally put in hundreds of hours into each of them and could easily do so again.  Mind you, Crusader Kings 2 is probably up there.

I do like Rohan’s bit on Neverwinter Nights, or at least some game that provides the option to mod away with in-game tools.

Second

The second scenario is similar, but this time it’s life in prison. For some insane reason, the Warden will allow you to take any three games and allow an internet connection. The parameters did not specify whether future DLC or microtransactions will be free for you, but let’s assume you can make enough money stamping licence plates to cover, say, $30/month. Which games do you pick?

I know this sounds corny, but cribbage, scrabble or chess.  You can play these games at a table, certainly, but the online aspect gets you the world to play with.  These are games that at 50+ years old and given my age, I’d need them to last another 60-70.  There isn’t a game today that would come close to lasting that long.

I realize it’s a hypothetical situation, more about paring down what we consider quality over quantity.  It’s still a rigged question though, since video games themselves have only been around for 30 years, online for about 15.  Still a fun question to ponder about.

First question:  Do I think Fallout 4 looks promising?  It’s just an engine demo, whoopee. The idea of a Fallout 4 does give me tingles though.

Second question: Am I going to pre-order?  Hell no.  I don’t do pre-orders for one, regardless of how awesome something is.  I certainly won’t do it for a game without a release date. Or a feature list.  Or actual gameplay video.  Or a preview.  Or some peer-review. Or some actual incentive.

I’m actually surprised at the audacity/brass tackle that Bethesda has here.  And hats off to Green Man Gaming to give a DISCOUNT on a pre-order for a game without a release date!

This is more like a kickstarter without the kickstarter, for a major gaming company.  It’s like if Ubisoft asked for pre-orders for the next Assassin’s Creed, without knowing anything about it. And then finding out along the way that the things that made you happy about the game were being removed.  And that it was full of bugs because they had to ship on time or issue refunds.  Oh hey, that actually did happen!

Who am I kidding.  People are still going to pre-order.  I’ll just sit by with some popcorn.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was trying two similar incremental games, Tap Titans and Tap Tap Infinity.  The former was more active, in that you needed to be playing the game to make progress, while the latter had off-line progress.  This situation actually brings to the front a few particularities I hadn’t noticed at first glance.

Both game’s progress is gated on acquiring heroes.  TTI has 21 of them, each 5 levels apart, combat wise.  From the start until you get the last one is maybe 4-5 runs.  From that point, completely linear progress.

TT has 42 heroes and they are not level based, instead you need the gold to buy them.  The last one, the Dark Lord, comes in around level 1800.  Along the way there are multiple “walls”, where progress just halts completely and you need to restart, once or twice to get by it.  When a wall is 2 hours in of furious tapping, it gets draining.  Especially without any off-line progress.

Both games have hero buffs at specific levels.  TTI is levels 10, 25, 50, 75 and maybe 100 (some only have 3, others 5).  TT has them at 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, 400 and 800.  These buffs may only buff the actual hero or they may buff the team or the tapper (you).  Hitting one of these hero milestones has a pretty big effect on the game.  30% more damage is noticeable.  Where TT differs again, is that you can reset (“evolve”) your hero at level 1000, which resets all the milestones but gives a boost to hero DPS.  Knowing when this is the right thing to do in order to get over a wall, and when a reset actually sets you back is pretty important. I messed up a couple times and it messed up entire runs.

So looking at this, both games have very similar models it’s just that TT’s is stretched over a longer play time (days vs hours), which allows for some more variance in the small details.  When a wall in TTI is only a few minutes versus 4-5 runs in TT, you really don’t have time to think about strategy.

Game Altering Milestones

TTI has 2 particular notable altering events.  First is a spell called Wormhole, which allows you to start at a later level once you restart.  This is useful since the lower levels really don’t offer anything close to the rewards of the later ones, so skipping the boring parts = good.  Second is a spell called Boss Rush, where you only fight bosses for a period of time.  This flies you through the content, if you can keep up with the difficulty, saving you an hour or more at the later point of the game.  Given that the starter portion of the game has a lower reward structure, you certainly want to get through it as quick as possible.

TT has similar items but more around the point of time and walls.  There’s an auto-tapping skill in the game that will get you through 95% of the content at later levels but you need to upgrade some items to get that skill.  It takes about 15 seconds per 10 levels and I can zoom through to level 2000 right now.  It physically saves me an hour+ of tapping.  MASSIVE quality of life boon.  Then there’s an item that more or less makes it rain money all the time (well, a combination of 2) and money is used to get through walls.  Finally, another skill allows you to dramatically increase your tapping damage (2000% or more) for an extended period of time, again used to get through walls. Now if the game can implement some sort of boss rush mode…

Taking the time to move away from simple DPS increases and focus on game altering abilities is a nice twist to keep things interesting.  Again though the difference is in when you get these abilities and TT is still at the days mark while TTI is in the hours region.

Other Games

I think the best games have these types of milestones available as goals.  I rather dislike the achievement hunter mentality that seems to be everywhere now.  While it certainly triggers the OCD in every gamer, it becomes a game in itself and detracts from the game.  What’s the point of hunting the 1000^th bear other than some imaginary point with no in-game bearing?

But a solid milestone, like completing an obstacle course and unlocking a new fast travel method, is a very neat incentive.  One the one hand it asks you to practically master one method in order to gain another, but in most cases it deprecates the portion of the game that is meant as a barrier for play.  And amazing design will take into account these milestones for even more challenges.

Black Flag had this and was oddly enough the best part of the game.  That pirate ship was chocked full of its own mini progress and ever increasing challenges.  Once you were able to start capturing some ports and getting the next tier of upgrade, the game just started opening up.  Then the game sent out pirate hunters and multi-ship fleets after you.  The game got progressively more and more complex, based on each milestone.  And it was mostly optional when you looked at the core game.  Ironically, Ubisoft didn’t seem to grasp this concept as AC5 was a rather large step backwards.

Moving away from the linear path of recent years and giving some enticement to get off the beaten path is a good thing.  Making sure that those side-roads have quality is just as important.  It really makes you appreciate the good games even more.