What did I play this weekend?

So what did I play this weekend? Well, two little little word games on my phone, a very short burst of Civ6 which I abandoned because the starting conditions were really poor after 20 turns, and World of Warcraft: Legion !

On WoW: Legion…

• I’ve chosen to take my Druid into one area as a primary character, and play my Death Knight and a Demon Hunter through others. That way over the next 6 months I can see plenty of the zones, learn a few classes, and casually click my way through the world content. perhaps teh Druid will get there first, maybe the DK, lets see.
• I love the story so far (only one zone finished, and the Druid is just on level 103).
• Having the “special” mobs marked with a star on the map is handy and I’m always trying to kill/complete them.
• Getting “free” artefacts is wonderful, but getting special storylines is even better. Frankly the weapons would not need to be “legendary” for this feature to be great.
• I missed playing this style of game, and it took a little while or my fingers to remember the keyboard. I can’t smoothly fight while strafing around a target yet, but that will come again.
• I stil suck at watching the mob, watching my cooldowns, and watching the area around me. I reversed my Druid Bear into another monster a few times, and thankfully Druid Tanks can still take a serious beating before they die.
• I’ve died a few times, but not due to falling damage or AFK (yet). Repairs are not cheap.
• The Demon Hunter feels like its a bit of a gimmick, but its also darn fun so far. I guess the Death Knight looked the same way too in Wrath of the Lich Kind, and its still my favourite class.
• I’m not preordering the next expansion yet, as you need a level 110 character to unlock the new races via a rep grind. As I’ve not played Legion mainstory yet, the idea of rushing through it to just grind a rep seems silly. I’d also be surprised if the classes were not made available to players without the grind once the game is officially launched. The grinders get the races months early, whcih is a reward of sorts.
• I also plan to farm some old dungeons or transmog, mounts and such, irritate the world around me, and make a general nuisance of myself.

Happy killing folks, TyphoonAndrew

More Civ6 Observations

I’m playing Civ6 steadily; a distraction from work-life combined with a hobby when the house is quiet. As such my frustrations with Civ-like games has returned a little because:

• The starting click through movies and “click to continue” screens are horrid. This game’s UX is so bad that you need to click “OK” to get to the starting menu! Who does that!
• The UX for political interaction is shite too – you click teh bottom left hand buttons to make choices and then close the screen with the top right! That’s UX fail.
• I hate using and defending Spys. I’d love a mod which removes them from the game.The in-game interface is ugly, constantly re-allocating the is a pain, and I want more detail on what they are doing and their success ratios. I give up trying to promote them.
• I’m now trying to learn the ins and outs of a Religious victory. Its nonsense at present. I’ll learn the Tourism one after I get the religious one down.
• The Domination victory is by far the easiest. By far.
• The starting position, presence of barbarian, and leader choice makes all teh difference. Those three factors are huge levers for success or failure. Yes that makes sense, but it also means some games are just dead from the start.

Anyway, on a lighter note – here is what happens in a sim game – a launch pad is next to sheep. Those poor sheep.

Civ6 update and benefit of DLC expansion

I’ve played around 320 hours of Civ now and still consider myself a novice. A key out-take from play so many hours as a novice is – this game has high replayability as a base game and does not need DLC to be worth buying. That’s excellent.

The new DLC expansion was released recently, again adding new content and also new game mechanics for Civ6. It introduces Eras, City Leaders, and a range of new sub-mechanics which will make the gameplay more complex. I’m holding off on buyig the expansion until I get a better grasp of the game as is.

PCGames – “Historic Moments award Era Score, and this is what determines what Age you will fall into as the era transitions. Reaching a certain threshold will trigger a Golden Age, but failing to do so will trigger a Dark Age. After receiving a Golden Age, the threshold is changed, and the next one is harder to achieve. But after receiving a Dark Age, the threshold is changed to make it a bit easier to get a Golden Age next time.”

The studio who creates civ6 has said they like DLC and microtransactions for their games, and can foresee doing more in the future (uptake is apparently very high for the DLC). I’d hate microtransactions to be in Civ but like the DLC small segments.

Refs:

• The announcement of Rise and Fall expansion
• Firaxis likes DLC fo Civ6 and will continue to make it.
• Overview of the “Rise and Fal”l DLC expansion

Autumnlands – a good read

Crossposting from my rpg blog – Autumnlands is a comic that I wasn’t sure about, but quickly liked. The story starts simply and gets more fantastic and magical as it progresses. After reading the first collection there is certainly more going on in the backstory that will be revealed than the initial story gives you – and I’ve several guesses that I’m keeping to myself for now. The wider story arc called “Tooth and Claw” plays out in issues I’ve not yet read but am looking forward to. Weird magic (floating cities, rituals of summoning, muto corpus / animal based hybrids in Ars Magica, lightning spells), beasties, rapid melee with swords and spears – what’s not to like?

More impression of Civ6

Civ6 is a punishing (fun) game. I’m playing on the easiest level as a learner and the AI has a naggingly consistent propensity to totally wreck my beautiful plans. 

My biggest gripe is how shit the startup screens are. Huge ego stuffing symbols from the creators, then a single mouse click which you always need to do. 

Hey designers – if I don’t have a choice then just move on. Or allow me to click quickly through. IDGAF about your company name. I care about Civ. /grumble. 

I’ll say I’m generally winning or at least making good in roads but cripes – the AI is sometimes illogical. 

For example:

• NPC civ plonked a city between two of my cities because there was just a sliver of space. Who does that! Bastards. 
• Building walls is an almost must do, but they drain so much cash and production early on. Perhaps I need to build in close and not spread so far. 
• The barbarians appear about 10 turns after your units declare war and swing over the other side of the map. Bastards. 
• How do I reduce how many other NPC civs are present. So many contenders. Perhaps I need to start on a huge map. 
• Who in hell knows how to start a religious victory style game? 
• Why are the penalties for killing and razing a city so nasty in the early game? Isn’t this what civs did?

Good game though. 

BattleTech Returns (maybe), turn based gameplay!

Polygon’s article on the Return of BattleTech is exciting. Huge Mechs, turn based strategy, nice graphics, hopefully Mech cutomisation. Yay, awesome! BattleTech via a Kickstarter campaign? Boo, but fair enough.

“The way the mechs move — they’re very slow and deliberate and stately — gives you get a sense of their size,” says McCain. “The camera shakes. There are particulates in their wake. Little cracks appear in the ground, or trees fall over. We want to evoke as much atmosphere and implied detail in the world as we can, to make everything feel like it has a sense of grandeur.”

Great video – Starcraft II – Legacy of the Void

Nothing short of a great cinematic for Starcraft II – Legacy of the Void. Kudos. Not sure I’ll play it any time soon, but those sneaky Blizzard guys know how to make a good video.

Free Torchlight? Great game, shitty distribution.

A free copy of Torchlight sounds good to me, so when the offer below ping’ed my email I started jumping through hoops to get it. Several resets, installations, and such later and I still have to wait for a key. Stuff it.

My advice to people is: unless you’re already using Arc (a steam style launcher, which is perhaps used for Champions Online or the StarTrek game?) for games don’t bloody bother.

When you have a problem – try their facebook link, which tells you to try the Support site, which has a different login to be created (wtf?), or open a ticket, which then links to an article which confirms that you’ll have to wait for a key AFTER you login to the game. Huh?

Too many hoops to jump through, a process too unclear, and frankly there are better ways to run a promotion than this malarky. Skip this and do something else.

I’m willing to bet thumping your head on the wall while listening to One Direction’s back catalog on a freighter ship bound for Iceland in winter is better than this crap.

Aside – Why in a god’s green earth does each game, game distributor, reseller, or whatever need a separate “launcher/service” to star their games? Blizzard get a pass because you can run the apps from the icons easily, and they’ve got 3+ games in the market that are current. I accept Steam happily too, although I’ve only two games on Steam at the moment.

Especially when they try to run in background and start when the PC does by default. We don’t need 5x different launchers sitting in the background chewing CPU and bandwidth, so stop frakking making these games use them. At least make the “optional” check boxes deselected.

TLDR = IF I WANT TO PLAY YOUR GAME I’LL CLICK THE ICON. DOLT!

See you online in a game which knows how to give things away, understands that hoops are painful, and at least tries to help. But Torchlight is (apparently) free at the moment, and you’ll need to see how much pain you’re willing to go through. I certainly think the game itself was great when it was released. Great game, shitty distribution.

Grumpy TyphoonAndrew today. I pity the virtual monsters I’ll meet tonight.

More on Adventure Era

I’ll admit to playing this little IOS game too much. So much so that I think I can offer some tips to other players.

• Plan your login/play times so that you match your expected gapto the work effort of tasks. For example there is no point using an extra worker in a task to get it completed faster if you won’t login till after the longer of the two times. Especially important for research and major upgrades which can take 8-24 hours. Click a long task before bed, and sleep happy.
• You will need to reshuffle where your units are placed to fit in the new ones when land gets tight. I can see why the game does this (to drive in-game purchases) but so far it can be played without spending real money.
• Stockpile your gold as a priority, because everything costs gold in the end. I made the mistake of having plenty of resources, and then struggling to pay to open up a new area of land. The next area of land I want is a steep purchase at 200,000 gold, but thankfully I’ve been focusing on gold as well as other resources so I can afford it. Plan to always have around double the gold of your next land purchase, because it seems relative to the cost of each research task  and the cumulative cost of upgrades.
• Once you open the Trader, check it often. It is a great way to buy resources cheaply. The Trader becomes active a few moments after you login, and seems to be in sync with the gold leprechaun about half the time.
• Research costs a hell of a lot too, so click through the next items you can see but not research yet, so you have an idea of what is coming.
• The Pet serves no purpose. I read somewhere that it opens a new area of land at level 12, but mine hasn’t. Meh, disappointing. Perhaps it only opens when your level matched the pet?

Happy clicking.

Today’s Google Search page game

A nifty little WASD shooter is on the Google search page today. I sucked at it but enjoyed it.

Should mmo have difficulty settings?

Single player games tend to give players the choice of a difficulty setting, which they can do because the impact of that choice isn’t shared amongst anyone else. D3 on easy is darn easy, and I think there is nothing wrong with playing a game for silly easy fun. We don’t always need to be raiding Hard modes, just like you can’t eat pizza every night. In an MMO all the players tend to be in the same “game” so the game’s difficulty tends to be controlled in strictly controlled ways. Instances, special quests, achievements, collections, and special creatures are around for the folks who like a challenge, but generally speaking most players are playing the same game.

If you can kill 3x monsters in the starter zone at the same time without dying then you are at a certain level of game skill. If you need help, or get *repeatedly unlucky* then you become very accustom to running back to your corpse.

What if the game had a difficulty slider, which changed some options?

• Rewards could be recognised (achievements) at different levels. We have this in raid modes, why not elsewhere?
• Instances wouldn’t need to change, but perhaps a player using the lower setting is forgiven more in terms of damage taken, dps, healing, so that the other players don’t suffer because somebody is playing on easy.
• A lazy player might always play on Easy mode, because they value easy fun over challenges. Perhaps they get slightly less rewards? Less cash to a casual probably isn’t an issue.
• A dedicated player might be rewarded with more gold or increased special drop rates because of doing it the hard way.
• The UI slider could apply for different reasons, so that even XP reward, death penalties, gold loss, and such are all configurable by the player. Perhaps even cofigurable per character and changeable in UI at anytime.
• It would make Ironman style challenges supported as part of the game backbone.
• It would add more bragging rights, which isn’t always a good thing, but depends on how it is used (gearscore & achievement linking?).
• It might help farmers of special stuff.
• Let learners learn. Let kids be kids.

Overall I’m not sure, but perhaps there is room for this.

* Repeatedly unlucky – ahem, meaning a fire stander? I used to rant in a furious way when folks said they were unlucky.

Just amid you are less skilled and get on with playing for fun. I did. The freedom of a noob is worth something.

Casually playing Adventure Era

A nifty little game called Adventura Era by Game Insight & Krivorukoff has me a little distracted (thanks to Tobold’s post). I’m playing enough that my wife first asked “what is that you’re doing” and then “put that down”. It’s a good game, and playing it on my mobile means that I always have it around when I want to, but I can also ignore it I choose.

Nothing really bad happens if you don’t play. Well, ahem, it is frustrating to come back to the game after 3-4 hours and ALWAYS find three monsters attempting to ravish my humble village, but paying off the monsters is part of the resource sink mechanics. It happens every damn time! So now I’ve decided to move almost all of my important buildings away from the areas with the monsters, so that I’m almost unaffected by them. That will take some additional effort and a bit more grinding that I like, but afterward I’ll rarely pay the 15 food, 50 lumber, or 100 stone resources that they need to be shushed and sent away when my cyclops-for-hire yells at them.

Apart from the basic build, expand, research cycle which repeats as your village increases in size and resources there are aspects of the game which I think are clever. The game is all about expanding your resource pool, and deciding when to spend your resources in the various resource sinks. All of the progressive choices are forgone conclusions, where you have to do X to get to Y, so start saving, building, or expanding. I don’t mind that the game is extensibility on rails, as I’m not looking for life changing gameplay. I’m looking for overly simplified entertainment. It allows small choices with almost no side effects, so for me the game’s fun is about efficiently. What worked, what do I need to plan for now, so that I’m not resource locked for too long later.

I also like the way that money really isn’t being begged for at every turn. The game is free and thankfully you can avoid the nag-ware style of other mobile/social games. My Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and other followers have no bloody interest in how many pets or lumber yards I have; just as I don’t give a damn about theirs.This is a casual distraction, not a thing to brag about on social media (but then isn’t most of social media a free casual distraction seeking to commercialise your attention?).

Each advance takes time, and during that time you can be clicking to earn your coins, rather than spending real money. It does not have a long life though, as I’m already seeing the increase in the repetition for grinding money, which is expected but undesirable for me. I can just as easily be entertained by my rss feed, so something that feels like work will have an expiration date.

For now, as the village’s ruler…I kind of pity those small virtual pixel-folk. They’re lucky I’m not give the option for human sacrifice to increase build time. Hmm, maybe something to recommended for v2.

Happy clicking, TyphoonAndrew

You Sir, Yeah, You Are Being Hunted

I picked up Sir, You Are Being Hunted on a sale for a lazy $17, and I kind of like the adhoc short play style of the game.

Death One – shot to death by a random robot patrol on the main island. To my credit I did figure out what the baloon was doing, but I think I didn’t move far enough away. Found one fragment next to the stones, but spend much of mu short life looking at the inventory, trying to understand how food works.

Death Two – ran out of Vitality and starved to death. Interesting that I was trying to play it safe, but as my character stated to really drop I ran everywhere and was spotted a heap of times.

Death Three – Afk and I assume slaughtered by a host of nasty robots.

I’m really enjoying it.

Is being watched in an MMO by Spooks OK?

By now most gamers have head about the NSA watching games like WoW and SecondLife for dangerous individuals. If you’re also watching out for potential impacts from the NSA’s activities exposed recently, you’re probably now saturated with odd and scary stories.

A meandering thought or two is below.

Frankly the entire concept reads like fiction to me, and is scary enough that I’m seriously considering changing a huge amount of what tools I use and what I do online.

By way of really dreadful example – please consider these revelations about what is plausible for surveillance. It is an video explanation of the methods recently exposed. Actual hardware hacks, device exploits, and all other manner of “hacks and hijacks”.

I’d back a MOO2 clone in a heartbeat

BioBreak blog reminded me today how much I loved the PC game Master of Orion 2. By today’s games it is a contradiction to all the features that generate buzz:

• single player
• turn based
• fully offline
• no time limits
• still images, or sprite graphics

Why was it so good? Well for a start it supplied a backdrop for my mind to fill in the story.

Wildstar actually sounds interesting

The more tangential information I read on Wildstar the more I think it might be trying to approach a different audience and supply a different game.

A few things sound interesting, like having playstyle pathways where you pick the style of challenge you want, and the game as aspects built especially for that style. If you like combat, you kill monsters. Prefer discovery, then be challenged to find nooks and special areas.

I also like the art style of the game. Having an overtly cartoon world means the rendering could be sympathetic to longevity in graphics, and also potentially avoids the problems of the uncanny valley which most “real-looking” games face. The tech and resources needed to render out a human face which looks “right” are crazy complex and high. A styled cartoon looks right as we fill in the detail mentally. Our minds are the sketchpad and resources which gives the game appeal.

A non-real style also means that emotional, special, and blood/damage effects can also be skewed toward imparting the meaning without a special particle engine. Take the presentation of a spaceship for example. I have no idea what a Devastator class warship might look like in a space game, but I can tell you without a second of thinking that rendering of water in Farcry was incredible and still looked like cgi. I accept the spaceship as real, but I call bullshit on the water’s repeating pattern at max camera distance.

I have no intention of playing Wildstar, especially as my old pc will not be up to the challenge; but I am interested. That is more that I can say about many of the other games being published and in Beta at the moment.

Interesting times. I’m going to keep watching it. TyphoonAndrew

I suggest you do not trust Perfect World

I wrote a post recently about disliking Perfect World’s spammy emails, but then credited them with with a single click unsubscribe. Well that feature is not working, so they really they fail on all counts. I wrote:

The best feature that Perfect World offered in that email was a “one click remove” link which removed me from all future offers.

Love that! A darn good feature right there. They got that dead right and kudos for them for doing it. I respect a company which lets folks opt out.

Well I was grumbly then, but they’ve sent the same junk, so now it is actually spam filter time for them. Then I do some digging through their policies, and while they claim to respect and protect as normal good companies do, they follow it with this junk:

No guarantees

While this Policy states our intended policies and practices for the collection, use and handling of personal information and we endeavor to follow such policies and practices, we are not in a position to guarantee these standards. There may be factors beyond our control that may result in disclosure of personal information or in the handling of personal information in a manner other than as stated in this Policy. As a consequence, we disclaim any warranties or representations relating to maintenance or nondisclosure of any personal information collected from visitors and users.

What utter fail. And lastly:

If you object to your personal information being transferred or used as described in this Policy, please do not use this Website.

Well we agree on that.

I had started toying in Neverwinter but cannot see that happening again now until my boredom rises past Warcraft, through SWToR, and back through Diablo 3. If a company cannot handle a simple opt out, I cannot trust they’ll do much else correctly, especially when they’ve written a part of their policy to disclaim any responsibility without consideration to the cause. It would be fine to disclaim events beyond their control, but they’ve written that they disclaim everything.

I suggest you do not trust Perfect World.

Have we lost Titan? End of days…

I both loathe and desire the Blizzard fan-base, as they make threads like this – where Titan is announced as delayed…(snarky-warning)

“only reason i got bizzcon tickets was to see titan info. guess its time to double the price and ebay em, really a shame”

You paid a huge amount of cash to attend the hopeful launch of a game which we know almost nothing about.

Camelot Unchained Kickstarter thoughts

Apparently the Camelot Unchained design goals are a counter-revolution. By focusing on design principals which harken back to MMOs of yore, they seek to provide that which has become lost in an age where (apparently) every MMO is replicating World of Warcraft, and wow is selling out to the greater dumber audience.

Sorry, not buying into this hype. Not again. For a start somebody better tell Eve that it is a wow clone, and ignore the plethora of smaller online games which have existed for ages…Puzzle Pirates comes to mind.

As I wrote in a comment in Keen & Graev’s blog – I get that CU is going back to earlier design goals of MMOs and the designers cite WoW as an example of what is bad in mmo game development trends…such things as pandering to casuals is specifically raised. Now the devs of CU have every right to believe this, and have formidable game development experience to back this thought, but holy hell what an arrogant perspective. That aside what struck me about the blurb on CU is the design is not really a step forward evolution at all either. It stinks of back in my day thinking. OK. Got it. At least its been said up front.

The idea of looking backward is not new, CU is going back to hard difficulty pvp based worlds. That is a good thing for the audience that loves it, but it is not an innovation at all. Killing lots of folks in an online game ain’t new.

The community of wow is the same community of people in every other game. Do you think the online chess community doesn’t contain dickheads? Gevlon disparaged WoW until he left and now disparages Eve’s population of morons and slackers. The nights where Wow was patched the server pop in Star Wars jumped up, and the same shitty people played against the same brilliant people. Community in CU will contain the same range of people as every other game, unless the build also includes the budget for a previously impossible amount of moderation and gm involvement – which seems doubtful given the reduced subscription cost.

When I read the CU kickstarter all I saw was a dev company using the strong thematic dislike for mainstream (theme park?) MMOs as a platform to fund the game style they like. Good on them. It has the same hyperbole, and will have the same spread of players as wow – but they’ll have bought into the idea that they are special snowflakes playing a different game. A revolutionary game built for them. Good for these players too, but until I read a feature-set which is actually an evolution I’ll call bullshit on most the CU hype.

Taking a massive cheap shot at WoW in an opening bid for funding is a strategic marketing gambit. They had better hope they don’t get 3-4 million players because that will create exactly the same in-congruent feedback which makes the wow community so polar.

In the rush to cash in on the WoW phenomenon, publishers/designers tried to simply “out-WoW WoW”, leading to most MMORPGs becoming more risk-averse, more “casual player”-focused, and overall, less challenging. This produced, among other things, a loss of the pride and sense of accomplishment that came from succeeding in the older, more difficult titles. We’re not talking about spawn-camping for 24 hours straight, but rather the sense of pride from succeeding in a challenging game rather than one which hands you everything on a silver platter. In CU, you will have to earn your skills by deeds, and they will increase slowly over time. Magical items will not be found everywhere like road-kill on highways, so gamers won’t feel the pressure to “keep up with the Gandalfs.”

The current design “foundation principals” are listed on the CU website. My fav is #13 called Chaos Goes Boing which I couldn’t understand on the first read, but embraces the chaos that can occur in an MMO. The foundation principals make for good reading too, although they do somewhat meander. Again, more power to them, in communicating in advance about what and why the CU devs are giving a very open view to their potential customers.

They are a small dev shop looking to create something that they love, and seeking a very effective and valid way to measure the interest and gain capital to make it happen. This is exactly why Kickstarter is a great service. Consider though Kickstarter itself is more revolutionary change for online games than another RvR MMO is.

To be clear – I hope the CU game is created and I think there will be a small and dedicated market for the gameplay. I’ve taken a few shots at CU here, but overall it is more a dig at their approach to the comms/PR than the actual desire to create something. Warhammer Online had some of the same banter, and could not stay afloat, CU by comparison looks at this initial stage stronger.

New game, known dev house, quasi-related IP reuse, reliable known theme and features, niche/different audience, boosted funding from a community; thus a respectable goal. Alas not worth my pre-investment.

Camelot Unchained by City State Entertainment — Kickstarter.

LucasArts Closed

Rhetoric surrounds the closure of LucasArts. I feel for the folks who have lost their jobs, and agree with the popularist cynical view that most of what made the company iconic originally has not been the daily activity for many years. That said the company did have some interesting different games in production for Star Wars and I was excited. 1313 was a new direction, and I was watching it. I was even a little excited despite feeling that the Star Wars MMO failed to deliver anything different or as good as WoW. It will be a shame if those games do not get picked up by other software development houses, and hopefully some of the staff too.

Of course the comments are a range of support and snide, the move is not totally unexpected given Disney has Star Wars now and can do as it wishes. This is a significant point in time to watch…will Disney provide vision for the franchise, or produce garbage?

IMHO Disney is a monolithic company operating in ways that only rarely connect with my daily life. I watch their films when I get around to them, and generally don’t buy merchandise or go to theme parks. They have purchased a powerful brand in Star Wars, with a very passionate support base. With that passion comes expectation and management of feedback, some fans are not forgiving.

I hope they have a new angle and create something in the spirit of the first Star Wars film. That would impress, and have a chance of providing a continuing fan-base well into the next decade.

Src: LucasArts Video Game Development Shutdown by Disney.