No Man’s Sky

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Half price + content patch = curiosity.

I think the best way to explain NMS is that’s it’s a prettier version than Minecraft.  An a scale larger that cannot adequately be represented with words.

I started off on an inhospitable planet, with breadcrumbs to tell me what I needed to do to get off said planet.  The controls are simple enough.  WASD to move.  Mouse to interact.  Z/X for menu access.  The rest sort of works itself out.  There’s a sort of suspension of belief that sodium from 1 plant is enough to keep your hyper-complicated hazard suit working… but hey – I can make anti-matter with rocks.  Don’t argue with it.

Planets are fun to explore, though not in the sense of “an entire planet”.  After about 10 minutes you’ve seen all there is to see and can go to the next.  Or skip that one entirely if it doesn’t have resources that interest you, or a climate that won’t kill you.  Space movement feels a bit slow in terms of turns, but fast in terms of distance traveled.  It is really hard to represent 3D space in computer games, when the background is all black. For a long time I was wonder “is this it?”. Then I went to the Galactic Map.

Good golly miss molly.

nms

You can visit those dots.  Nearly all of them.  Not just the ones connected by lines.

That’s pretty much when the whole thing sort of came crashing down upon me.  In a few hours I had explored a half dozen planets and 2 space stations.  If the numbers check, there are actually close to 18 billion planets to explore.  The math makes my head hurt.

I just keep moving on, one small step at a time.  Trying to learn some of the local (Gek for me) language, one word at a time. Mine a planet, explore the local fauna, see if there’s secrets to be found, move to the next.  I am purposefully avoiding wikis or reading about the game outside of playing.  It’s a game based entirely on exploration, so why spoil it?

It is a tremendous technical achievement.  It’s rare enough to see a high concept game come out, but to see this one come out, take a severe beating, then this “super patch” is on another level.

I’ll hold off a larger opinion for later in the game.  For now, I consider myself highly interested in what this onion has to show below the layers.  Even if it only ever becomes a mining simulator with lots of customization, it’s a damn fine looking one.

Poor Saurfang

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Blizzard was in China and due to that timing, this launched late on Thursday.  I won’t even both saying spoilers anymore…everyone knows that a giant tree was burned, right?

First thing, holy crud the animators at Blizzard are good.  They should have worked on Superman’s mustache.  In isolation, this is is a tremendous technical achievement, not to mention the poignancy of the actual storyline.  This is the honorable orc I mentioned previously… who’s lost pretty much everything and everyone he knows (including his son).  You get a tremendous sense of that in this video.  Hats off.

Second, Zappy Boi!

 

Now the nuanced bits, in relation to how this video intersects with the actual War of Thorns.  If you recall, Sylvanas was pitied and she decided to burn down a city in spite.  It was such a self-serving act that made absolutely no sense in the larger scale of things.  The interwebs went nusto.  In succinct terms, it was dumb.

Saurfang clearly articulates this within the video.  There is no long game to be had here, and the Alliance is going to act in revenge.  Not like they have a choice, if Sylvanas is going to randomly burn down cities, then they need to take her out of the picture.  He knows what’s coming, he’s seen it before.  He’s tired of it.

I’m not sure if he wants to die so much as surrender in that walk across the field.   The Alliance would surely capture him.  Zappy Boi gives him a really weird talk about how the Horde is all he has, and Saurfang turns around, then gives a big roar.  This is where it goes off the rails for me.

Sylvanas’ actions will cause the death of numerous members of the Horde, for no sane reason.  She demonstrates worse qualities than Garrosh did.  He may have been mad, but he at least had a goal and took steps to get there.  The Horde is still healing it’s wounds from that time period, and now this crazy nut is in charge.  At no point has she shown any care for the Horde as a whole – it’s always about herself and the Forsaken.  I can appreciate that character trait, but the folks around her (in lore) certainly should take some issue to that.

Saurfang is put in a position where he has to support yet another leader that is acting irrational and putting the Horde in grave danger.  He almost decides he’s had enough and wants to quit, then through some weird twist decides to take up his axe and go to town.

Everyone has seen Braveheart?  You know that part of the war where Wallace looks back for support and the supporting armies desert him?  He still manages a win and then goes after them – ball on chain fun is to be had.

Saurfang in this spot is provided three options.  One is to quit.  One is to follow.  One is to lead.  Quitting apparently is not in his blood – that’s been pretty evident over the years.  Following is something he does well, but it seems to be driving him off the deep end because he sees where it’s going to lead (worse than Garrosh).  He could also simply decide to abandon the Banshee Queen and take 80% of the Horde under his leadership.  He’d get all the Orcs, Trolls, Tauren for sure.  Probably a solid set of the various Elf races too.  That leaves Goblins to make a strategic choice (lore dictates they take the easy/life path).  There’s a risk that Sylvanas lives through this fight and goes more crazy.  It’s pretty easy to see how the Horde + Alliance vs Sylvanas ends.  We already did that raid.

 

All that to say that as beautiful and well-crafted a video as this is, and at how it presents the Horde as not being unified behind their leader, it just reinforces the difficult storyline predicament that Blizzard has put themselves into.  Any Horde player that does not support Sylvanas’ actions is going to instantly empathize with Saurfang.  And that splits the Horde up – again.  Vs. an Alliance that has never been more unified and focused.

I am so utterly confused as to what’s being attempted here that I am paying even more attention to the storyline than normal.  So I guess that’s a silver lining?

Blaugust

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blaugustrebornlogo2018

Just dooo eeeeet!

The list for this is pretty large.  I am not on that list for really poor reasons.  I know the majority of the folks that are mentors on that list, so it would seem a sane step to be part of it too.  Ahh well.

I do think that this is a great initiative.  In the wide majority of cases, I prefer written form to video.  There’s a concise and direct aspect to this.  Unless I’m trying to build/fix something, opinion pieces are much more palatable when in written form.  The main reason here is that people think faster than they speak, and speak faster than they write.  The end result is that the written word is often a reasoned position, while the talking points are broken ides.  Mostly.

I am selfish in that I write for myself, as an outlet for my ideas.  There’s often too much in my head and this is really quite useful to get some space in there.  It just so happens that those ideas resonate with other folks.  As Bob Ross would say, happy accident.  As with other bloggers who have been around for a while, I’ve been offered to write targeted posts, and be compensated for it.  I’ve certainly done that on other sites, but never on this one. I stopped doing it after a while since it felt more like a job, and I want to have fun while writing.

I write in spurts, but rarely more than once per day.  I prefer to just schedule my ideas, or save them in drafts (I have about 50 of those).  I find that I can go weeks without inspiration, then it comes back.  It isn’t so much a habit as it is a hobby.

I firmly believe that writing has to have a personal goal, otherwise you lose interest quickly.  It takes time to write, even really small bits.  You want that writing to feel rewarding.  Sure it feels good to get a like, but if that’s your goal, then you’re going to have a bad time.  Love the act of writing, start small, and figure out what parts of that process you enjoy the most.  Then focus on those.  Have fun writing and it will be with you for the rest of your days.

Sylvanas – The What?

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I finished part 2 of War of Thorns.  It is much too short.  3 quests, all done within 10 minutes (solely because the last one has a 3 minute timer).

New Warbringers video is part of that quest line.  Spoilers ahoy.

The lore nut in me sees no logic in this.  This feels a tad too much like a rehash of the Garrosh storyline, though that had some decent defense.  This… this has no justification whatsoever.  Of all the opportunities to show the Horde having growth, the lessons learned post-Garrosh, this just throws it all out the window.  Maybe this is a way to bring Thrall back into the picture?  Did we not just do this dance?

A bit more.  In this 2nd act, you can see that Saurfang is acting under the concept of honor and is torn with Sylvanas – there are many orcs that are in this line of thought.  The Tauren are not for this either.  Trolls under Vol’jin were trying a different path, one much different than this.  Goblins… no idea.  They only care about making money.  Blood Elves are a bit of a mystery… they were from here after all.  Finally the forsaken are clearly going to follow their queen.  I dunno, that seems to split the Horde pretty much in the middle, if not 80% against this.  Of course, that’s only if you care about lore at all.

Final bit, in this tiny set piece, there’s no logic in destroying one city when the faction captial still stands.  I will agree it hurt the Alliance, but it’s pretty clear that there’s at least one counterstrike (Lordaeron for starters).

From an in-game lens, this more or less splits both continents into Horde / Alliance.  Given that leveling is scaled throughout, it means that 1-60 you’ll only ever see your faction. BC/WotLK is the first time you’ll see another faction, which is odd.  It does line up with the BfA island being split.

Long-term, we all know this is an Old Gods expansion.  Dollars to donuts, Sylvanas just became a raid boss when that reveal is done.  Maybe there will be some justification of these actions at that point.  Until then, the Horde is painted as the instigators and the bad guys.  There’s no shades of grey here.  I’d like to say that there’s a larger storyline, some redemption arc for Sylvanas.  Time will tell.

I can’t say that I’m disappointed, as my expectations for this entire line were extremely low.  Seems the initial reactions are similar.

In contrast to the previous Warbringers vid (Jaina), this is extremely deflating.

WoW Leveling

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On a tear now ain’t I?

Post brought to you buy a WoW Dev tweet.

Recall the internet furor that 8.0 brought in terms of leveling speed? No?  Internet furor is hard to measure.  Anyhow, the devs made a booboo when they crunched all the numbers for 8.0 and either monsters had too many hit points, or were hitting too hard.  I found a few of those within 10 minutes on my Warlock and just decided to wait it out.  That aside from the fact that from 60+ I gained no skills, and gear improvements are non-existent.  It’s the same gameplay from 60-100.

Previous to this, Legion made some leveling zone changes as well. The issue was covered in 2 main points.

  1. People were outleveling zones in a half dozen quests and unable to complete the story lines.
  2. Time to Kill (TTK) was too low.  Anyone with a cast time could barely hit anything before it died, and no one really knew how their class played until level 100+

To address the first item, the applied scaling to all the zones, just like in Legion proper.  I would say that was a successful change.  Similar issues to 8.0, but generally pretty small.  You could level pretty much wherever you wanted.  Neat!

To address the second item, they boosted all enemy HP so that the TTK went from something near 3 seconds to closer to 10.  That in itself is not a bad change, but it was isolated and, in my opinion, short sighted.

Leveling has 1 main goal, and that’s to get to the top.  Measuring that goal is done through two facets – the time it takes to get there (objective) and the fun had along the route (subjective).  Since pretty much Cataclysm, the time to level from 1-X was fairly stable.  Sure, heirlooms had an impact, but general time to level was pretty stable.  The tripling of TTK increases the amount of time to level.  It wasn’t massive, since the majority of experience is from quest completion, but it was certainly noticeable.

The fun along the way measure split a few players.  Some had fun rounding up 10-20 enemies and then AEing them to the ground.  Others wanted to explore more of the zone.  Others wanted to see more of their favorite quest chains.  It is impossible to please everyone under subjective measure.  Still, it’s somewhat fair to say that most people were pleased with the world-scaling changes.

Progress

The above noted XP change reduces the amount required to level by ~14% for 60-80, and a bit less for the other levels.  That covers the BC/WoTLK era (10-13 year old quest design) and is (subjectively) my least favorite part of the leveling experience.  With so many people re-rolling allied races, those who have clearly demonstrated they know how to level, it makes sense to have a leveling normalcy applied.

Maybe I will end up leveling my warlock.

Flying in WoW

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That time of the year again, where we appreciate flying with the understanding that it’s going away in 2 weeks. For at least a year.

I think there’s no better example of what flying does to WoW than leveling a Druid.  The benefits of instant travel, and the fact that you can interact with most world objects while in flight form make it feel like there’s a cheat code active.  Druids without flight form feel like molasses.

I’ve leveled my fair share to 110.  Usually I get a half dozen to max level by the end of an expansion.  Monk, DH, DK, Rogue, Paladin are there now.  Figure Druid can catch up pretty quick.  Aside from the Monk/DH runs, I’ve used ConsLegion to speed up the process.  Basically TomTom + auto-accept quests for super speed.

With the exception of Stormheim and Highmountain, most zones are decent enough on the ground.  Stormheim at least has the hookshot… so I’ve always left Highmountain for last.  Leveling was usually decent enough.  Maybe a level a session or so.  Most of the time is spent travelling between NPCs.  When I unlocked flying a while back, the DK and Paladin shot through levels – nearly twice the speed of before.

Druid though.  That’s another ballgame.  I made 3 levels in 2 hours. I cleared most of Valsharah in 30 minutes.  An I’m not in bear-mode, AEing everything.  This is cat-mode, where it’s stun/bleed/swap, arguably a slower process.

And that my friends, is exactly why Blizzard removes flying on a consistent basis.  Flying negates a supremely large amount of content.  Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the vertical aspects of zones.  Zones that are designed thoughtfully.  Stormheim is a whole lot of fun to move around (minus the large gorge in the middle).  It’s honestly fun to explore the nooks and crannies, and doing it 2 or 3 times isn’t too bad.  It’s when you realize that the content is really just padded with travel… and that you’ve already explored it to the end that it’s time to turn off that mode.

There is a good argument against flying when it comes to hunting rares/gathering.  It is easy as pie to jump from one target to the next without consequence.  Most rares have minimal value for a max level character after a couple weeks.  Nodes… that becomes a farmer’s dream and a money making machine.  I made a shredder to harvest herbs just for that reason alone.  A quick fix for this is to have a counting debuff while flying.  After it caps, nodes only appear while walking until it wears off.  I’m sure there are better ideas.

So here we are, 2 weeks from BFA and 2 weeks until I say goodbye to the skies.  I know it will come back, just not when.  I’ll certainly miss it for the first few weeks, then grow accustomed.  It’s that 2 month marker where I’ll be itching.  So fingers crossed it comes sooner rather than later.

 

Locusts and Gating

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Good games tell stories.  Some of them are player driven (most FPS), some of them are lore driven (most RPG).  In the former, the content is often even created by the players (see Twitch).   This post will focus more on the latter.

Single player RPGs have quite a few models, but most people relate to the concepts of sandbox vs. directed gameplay.  Skyrim is very much a sandbox, where you can explore pretty much every aspect of the game from the first step.  There are a couple things that remain hidden until you complete X, but it’s doable.  A recent article on someone clearing all the main Fallout franchise in 2 hours is another indicator of open gameplay.  Doesn’t mean the content isn’t there, but it’s up to the player to participate.   People are still playing it now.

FF13 is the complete opposite.  Hard gates, linear story.  Press A.  I’d be hard pressed to say this game had any longevity, or much replayability.

Still, the general theme is that you can sit down, play, and complete the entire thing (if you have enough food/time) in one go.  For a lot of games, that means that you have tons of people at the start, and then a dramatic drop off once that initial content is consumed. This is less a problem for solo games, but a very large one where you need people to play with each other.

MMOs

Expansions provide a lot of initial content, but then you often see droughts between patches.  Some are really good at keeping the content relevant, others a whole lot less. Wildstar hasn’t had a content patch in ages, but it still has players.  SWTOR has the ups and downs, filling it with player-driven events.  EQ seems to have expansions every 6 months.   All over the place, really.

WoW has been nothing if not inconsistent in this approach.  Vanilla had a dozen patches of content.  TBC had a few, but applied a massive gating/attunement process for raiders.  Extra content was a new hub late in the cycle.  It was typically a pile of content, with reputation as a gate to neat items – not additional content.

MoP went bananas on that, where dungeons were a joke compared to daily quest rewards, and then what felt like 18 months before WoD.  WoD, well let’s try and forget about the selfie patch, shall we?  It was a massive content drought with no gating aside from garrison upgrades (which were more or less gold-making machines).

Legion was different.  They had quest, reputation, and time gates on actual content.  Suramar had numerous of these gates.  Raids were staggered by time.  Broken Shore and Argus had quest/time gates as well.  It was a point where grinding provided little benefit (AP/Maw runs aside) to the new stuff.  And the stuff was generally released every 6 weeks.  Arguably some of that unlocked content was less fun than others.  I’m thinking flying was less of a reward and more of a relief.

Anti-Grouping

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I certainly recall having quests that required 3-5 players to complete way back when.  Nearly everything in EQ required way more people.  WoW was smaller groups.  SWTOR did it for a while too.  The latter 2 never really worked out, while EQ had so few quests and a mandatory grouping requirement, that it sort of did (after hours of waiting).

The quick and dirty answer to that was solved by Rift – quick grouping.  With a single button press you would join nearby players, all attempting the same event.  Was great for group quests, and even better for Rifts.  The system only started to breakdown when there was a lack of players around you (say mid-game when most were top level).  Still, the model made sense.

I loved that system for 3 main reasons.  First, there are practical ones.  Group content isn’t about throwing meat at the problem.  I like healing.  It’s useless to heal solo.  It works wonders in a group, so auto-grouping made it so that I could heal effectively.  I had targets, HP bars, focus, etc…  Second, it allowed for an easy way to meet new people.  I met my guild in Rift with that.  I’ve swapped guilds in WoW with that.  Sure, there are the silent, let’s-get-this-done-and-drop people, but you will find other folks.  Third, it’s stupid easy.  This meant that you could effectively auto-group while leveling, and doing the daily quests.

The LFG tool for custom groups does have use.  Sentinax farming.  Fishing rep building.  Things that are not quest related are done through this, and generally it works.  World bosses was better with an add-on, but it did also have LFG as a backup.  I get that part. The downside to LFG is the overheard of using the tool.  Compared to “press a single button”, LFG seems like a slow lead-eating cousin.  In effect, it meant that LFG was used once a week.

(Side note:  Fishing rep building should only ever be done in a group/raid setting. You go from 12 hours of effort, to 2.  And get to have fishing conversations with the raid.  Win-win.)

For some reason, Blizz decided to block the auto-group feature from addons in BfA and push people to use LFG.  Without actually changing LFG.  I am honestly a bit confused why.  For 95% of the uses the addon provided, that has just been removed.  We’ll go back into the solo-mode for world content, and then LFG for weekly bosses.  This is quite strange.

Aside from Argus quests to defeat champions (that only tanks can really solo effectively) there is no difficulty in daily quests.  Just time sinks due to combat for spawns.  Redoing Tanaan Jungle recently proves how crappy an experience that is to the openness of Legion.  It’s deafening silence as compared to dynamic grouping.

I think that’s my largest gripe with 8.0.  Sure, there are always going to be tweaks to gameplay, but it feels like the fun parts, the dynamic parts, have been removed for a month, if not forever.

At least I still have my fishin’.

Jaina – Warbringers

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It isn’t often that a gaming video has some resonance with me.  This is quite well done, mainly due to the way that the art (image and sound) work so well together.

Not much of a secret that I have been a Blizzard fan for ages.  I am quite familiar with the story lines that pre-date WoW, and the particular tone that Chris Metzen applied for so many years.

Jaina has been part of Warcraft since W3.  She was a well-crafted character up until the start of MoP.  Then she went off the deep-end and became a caricature of the crazy villain.  The focus went to the Wrynn family for 3 expansions.  Or Khadgar for 2.

Recall that everything Jaina has loved or fought for has been destroyed – her family, her lovers, her friends, parts of her nation, even Theramore.  I am struggling to think of another major character that has lost more.  (Sylvanas is a different topic, as most of it is self-inflicted.)

Looks like they are pushing her to be vengeance / remorse driven, which puts her in the anti-hero archetype.  People do not make good decisions when they are emotionally driven.  WoW has a penchant for redemption story-lines, and it will be curious as to how Jaina comes to terms with her past in order to move forward.

At the end though, if this is the first of three shorts… I am really looking forward to the next two.

Underlight Angler

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You don’t have an MMO unless you have fishing.  UO built that into my psyche.

WoW’s fishing had been the definition of a peaceful grind.  It has rarely provided much tangible benefit, except for the fun and some minor cash generation for selling fish on the AH.  Maxing actually fishing skill is a fraction of the effort to get the rest of the neat toys (read less than 1% of the time).

Legion brought a fishing artifact – Underlight Angler.  It takes about ~3 hours to go through the necessary steps.  It is so much easier to do with flying, as it gives quick access to Margoss (for special lures) and extremely fast access to fishing pools.

Once you have it, you leveling through catching more rare fish.  Each one gives 50AP.  I prefer Stormheim for this, as with the proper lure, the pool is 100% stable and you can pull out 20-30 fish.  There are 3 tangible benefits to getting this artifact and filling out the slots.  Walking on water, faster swimming/water breathing, and lower aggro radius while fishing.  These benefits carry through into BfA.

There’s more you can get through if you want.  There’s the friend model from MoP that has 6 people you can grind away.  Further grind away for some more rare drops which allows you to collect material to exchange for toys/cosmetics.  The friend grind really requires some groups to make due – except Margoss.  That one is long.

You can also go back into MoP or WoD and acquire some useful equipment/mounts.  You don’t really need a pole.  Having a Water Strider (water walking) is extremely useful for leveling.  A raft allows you to fish from pools while standing on the water.  Pretty much essential if you really want to do some fishing.

BfA brings in some changes, and more of the original Vanilla format for fishing.  It’s been a long while where there were ocean fish, then zone-based fish.  It’s changing to faction fish (some alliance, some horde), and 2 global fish.  The legion artifact still works, but the “port to nearest pool” won’t work.  Which is really a dumb skill, since it has a 5m cooldown and fishing a pool takes about 2 minutes.  I struggle to see how that ability could be abused.  Anyhow, instead of being on the pole, you need to use a specific fish for this ability.  The same fish is used for feasts – so it’s likely to go for 100g per fish on the AH.  Who wants to pay 100g for a port that could be done in 10 seconds of walking?

Still, I look forward to getting back into the zen of fishing.  It’s a great break from the go-go-go of regular MMOs.  And who knows, maybe someday we’ll actually get to fish up something more fun than fish.