Category Archives: Impressions
First Impression: Firefall (Beta)
Downloaded the Firefall open beta client yesterday because, you know, Press™.
For those not keeping track at home, Firefall is… well, hell if I actually know. Without looking it up, I’m assuming it’s a F2P MMO set in an open-world, over-the-shoulder Borderlands 2 with bugs taking the place of bandits. After looking it up, it seems the devs want to emphasize the fact that it is a skill-based action shooter with sandbox MMO elements. Apparently the world is a not level-restricted, but the highest-ranked “dungeons” will need full groups with crafted gear. Which sounds like roundabout levels to me, but let’s play along.
One of my biggest fears with new MMOs – or any game which expects me to be playing for 50+ hours – is losing on the character select screen. How am I supposed to know which class will be the most fun months from now? And even if I luck into the best class for me, how will I know it won’t radically change (or get nerfed) years later? So, right away, Firefall got some major brownie points with me once I understood that a “class” means a Battleframe, which you can swap out at pretty much any time. Need a healer? Jump into your healer suit and go play.
In a twist, the Assault and Engineer classes have less armor than the healer and rogue.
Loincloth starting armor tropes aside, I think the whole Battleframe direction is pretty clever. Not only are you allowing people to play whatever role is necessary at the time, having independent frames means a player has to “level-up” multiple times while still allowing for quick catch-up. In other words, it’s horizontal progression. PlanetSide 2 has this same sort of thing, where you might have to purchase various levels of Flak Armor for each class (which is expensive with Certs), or you can just focus on playing Light Assault or Medic and save your currency.
In any case, from the extremely limited amount of time I spent playing, things seem fun enough. They certainly looked good, at any rate.
Borderlands 2 with an actual color palate.
Some people might not like the sort of cel-shaded motif here, but this sort of thing has never bothered me. If the game runs better and has more options for crazy effects, then I will “sacrifice” ultra-realistic graphics any day. Plus: everyone has jetpacks, right from the start.
I can’t give much more of an impression beyond the above, as I was unable to progress past the second “quest.” The first quest was to follow a waypoint, and the second was to kill some bugs and then return to purchase your sidearm from a vendor. Unfortunately, either I am completely oblivious (possible) or the the game was bugging out for me (likely) seeing as how no menu would appear after interacting with said vendor:
How about you give me a gun and I don’t shoot your face off?
Since the mouse controls your aim, I know that I successfully clicked ‘E’ on the vendor because the crosshair disappeared and an actual mouse pointer appeared. But no menu. I tried highlighting the guns in the background, clicking on every on-screen icon-looking thing, reloading the client, and finally restarting my computer. Open beta is open beta, but I was left feeling pretty disappointed all the same. Hell, I couldn’t even submit a ticket because that interface wasn’t showing up either. I could probably submit a bug report on the forums… or I could go play some other game that works instead.
While I was clicking around, I did notice something particularly interesting:
Customizable interface right out of the box?!
That’s right, you can move shit around your screen and I think resize elements right from the start. It might seem like a small thing, and it arguably is small, but it begs the question of why some MMOs *cough* require you to download 432 mods to do the same sort of things. Artistic restrictions? General laziness? More of this sort of thing, please.
I might check back in on Firefall later to see if the problem resolves itself, or I might simply wait until release. Until then, feel free to try it out yourself.
Card Hunter’s F2P, Multiplayer, and Potential
Let’s get started.
Multiplayer
As strong as the campaign mode is right now, Card Hunter’s multiplayer is probably going to provide the “long-tail” revenue for the game. Because by “multiplayer,” what they really mean is PvP. The basic setup is pretty simple: your three characters against their three characters in 20-minute matches. Every map I have seen thus far includes Victory Squares (+1 Victory Point per turn that you control it) as well, so the games do not necessarily devolve into simple death-match.
There are some pretty big incentives to give multiplayer a try, even if you aren’t necessarily into that sort of direct competition. Winning your first multiplayer match of the day grants you a chest that has a guaranteed Rare drop, for instance – plus another Rare item if you have a subscription. The reward path after that extends outwards to special Rare chests at 3rd, 7th, 12th, and finally an Epic chest at #20.
Pictured: Not Multiplayer, just a tactical genius at work.
A particularly clever move on the dev’s part – aside from the subtle push into subscriptions to double your guaranteed rewards – is the fact that if no one is available to play against (at your MMR), you will automatically get into a match against the computer. Which, trust me on this, just as brutal in MP as it is in the normal campaign. Which is awesome.
The downside to multiplayer is the downside to multiplayer everywhere: other people. I have only faced one human opponent thus far and he/she was a perfect gentleman/lady, but the beta forums are awash with concern over how to handle players who intentionally drag out games in attempts to win via boredom. Since the queue time for games visibly increases based on MMR, this is a particularly apt concern. The solution seems to be heading towards a progressively shorter turn timer (2 min, 1 min, 30 seconds) based on a player hitting certain limits, but I’m not entirely sure the full scope of player metagame malevolence is being appreciated here. Unless the triggers are invisible, why not wait until [Trigger – 1 second] to play your card? You know, other than to avoid being an asshole?
It is also worth mentioning that, given Card Hunter is a game about hunting for cards, you will also encounter other people with way better cards than you. The MMR should help with things a bit, but some of your matches are going to suck enormously when your mad tactical skillz are thwarted by a rich moron buoyed up to your MMR by the power of their cards. Speaking of which…
F2P
In talking about Card Hunter’s F2P scheme, there is really only two things to note.
First, my (beta) experience thus far as a non-paying customer has been fantastic. Based on what I have seen, I do not think there is really a paywall or some necessary purchase you cannot do without. Given the game’s incredible difficulty, you might feel tempted to purchase a few bonus chests or otherwise acquire more loot earlier in the game (when you are more restricted by random drops) though. While it is possible this could change as I enter the “endgame” (my party is level 11ish at the moment), it would very much surprise me.
The second thing is that just because you don’t have to spend money in a F2P to have fun, that doesn’t mean that you will get a good value for your money if you do spend. This is, unfortunately, the state I see Card Hunter’s cash shop in right now.
To illustrate the issue, let’s start with the cash shop currency page:
/sigh
I will ignore, with difficulty, the fact that there is a $99 option for the cash shop currency. I mean, I guess a 12-month subscription to an MMO would run $180 before discounts and such. But seeing the “best value” option set at $99 tells me that the devs are either A) incredibly optimistic, or B) setting up the game to make make one hundred dollar purchases of things attractive to players.
Gut reactions aside, a better metric of the F2P Evilness Scale is to look at the lower end of things. The minimum buy-in is $5, for example, which raises an eyebrow. What exactly can I purchase with $5? Well…
/double-sigh
So we have “cosmetic” options which are really just new figurines altogether. Do note though, that purchasing these new figures is the only way to access the other gender options for your race/class. You can purchase new Multiplayer Starter kits, which is the equivalent of a sort of theme deck in a TCG. While you can use your campaign characters in multiplayer – everyone is scaled to the same max level – the huge difference would be the quality of your starting items. There are “treasure hunt” maps which are dungeons that reward guaranteed epic items that you can purchase either individually or collectively with a discount. It wouldn’t be a F2P game without some ($5) lockboxes, of course. You can also straight-up convert leftover pizza into gold at a 5:1 ratio.
I saved the “best” for last, though. Card Hunter has a subscription option whose benefit is receiving one additional item any time you open a treasure chest. You will know about this functionality from the first map onward, because the game will show you exactly what bonus loot you are missing out on every single time. I… suppose that that is alright, in the scheme of things. It doesn’t necessary feel like cash-shop-in-your-face as some other games, even though it technically is.
*twitch*
How much do the subs costs? Basically it will be $10/month (with +30 pizza), or you can get the 3-month subscription for… err… hold on, let me break out the calculator. 850 pizza means $20 (690 pizza) + $5 (150 pizza), which leaves us 10 pizza short.
…excuse me for a second…
Are you fucking kidding me? Ten of your goddamn tokens? Don’t try and tell me that was an accident. This is some Microsoft Points level of intentionally asinine corporate bullshit. Jesus Christ, this is the sort of malicious “trick the customer” design that poisons the entire concept of F2P. If you want to charge me $23.62 for your 3-month subscription, fine, charge it. This ten-hotdogs-eight-buns nonsense has got to go.
Ahem. Where was I?
If you buy the $20 and $10 tiers, you can get the 3-month subscription with 170 pizza left over. That is enough overflow to then pick up one of the epic lockboxes (-150 pizza) and then you are left with 20 pizza… which is, of course, ten pizza away from purchasing the 30 pizza lockbox. About the only scenario that doesn’t leave you with leftover arcade tokens pizza is the $20 buy-in with the 1-month subscription + unlock of the Treasure maps + 3 of the Rare lockboxes. Which is probably alright.
Potential
With Card Hunter as it exists now, I believe most people will likely consume all that they wish to within a month, provided they play on an MMO time-scale. A month is not a bad amount of time at all, especially for how much entertainment value you get at the $0.00 price-point for a game that runs in your browser. Multiplayer might satisfy for a bit longer, but it’s tough imagining that it will provide months and months more content even for those that enjoy tactical games. After all, you will eventually get the strongest items in the game, and that will be that – it’s tough to transition from a state of eagerly anticipating a rare drop to simply having fun playing within the same game, in my experience.
Where things could get potentially crazy is with the Custom game feature. You can, right at this moment in beta, create your own encounters for other players to try. This includes “drawing” your own map and placing monsters. I have not had a chance to dabble with it, but if anything, this is the feature that could spiral Card Hunter out (further) into a class of its own. Imagine creating your own 3-5 battle modules, complete with the sort of D&D sheet in front and pre/post-game writeups. Imagine being able to string several of those along in sequence.
*evil cackle*
Or how about going even crazier? Like instead of multiplayer being two people using their parties against each other, imagine one side controlling the monsters. Or allowing multiple players to control the same side, e.g. 3-person teams. All of a sudden, the game stops being a tactical mock-up of old-school D&D and starts being an online version of D&D.
If you are wondering why I see all this potential in Card Hunter and not in other games, the answer is pretty simple: it’s possible. Let me break it down:
- Card Hunter is not being made by some large corporation (even if their F2P pricing is similar);
- Multiplayer and custom games are already implemented;
- The graphical overhead is nil and no voice acting, making additions easy to implement;
- The game devs clearly like D&D enough to play such a great homage to it;
- Free content that players will likely pay for the privilege to make.
Make DM tools/campaign creation available with a subscription, allow user ratings to separate the wheat from the chaff, pay the successful module creators in Monopoly money pizza currency, and watch the real dollars roll in.
Bam! You’re welcome.
First Impressions: Card Hunter (beta)
I got into the Card Hunter beta last Thursday.
It is rare anymore for me to spend a lengthy amount of time playing the same game. Game developers these days front-load their daily bonuses in such a way that the most “efficient” way to maximize your playtime is to switch between 3-4 titles. And yet I spent ten hours playing Card Hunter on Saturday, and another six on Sunday. So, spoiler alert: I really like this game.
Card Hunter grabbed me from the word Go. In essence, this F2P browser-based game is a tactical, turn-based RPG where your abilities come in the form of random cards. Instead of building an entire deck on your own, a character’s game deck is actually the sum total of the cards associated with that character’s equipped items. This might sound complicated, but it is the exact opposite – after about 5 minutes of looking at the screen, the system becomes immediately grokkable and engaging. For example, here is a character sheet:
I have an immediate urge to go play right now.
All of the cards along the bottom are the sum total of the deck. When you look at a specific item…
Kinda funny how it’s pretty much always going to be purple = epic from now on.
…you can see what cards it contributes to the overall deck. As you might imagine, weapons usually contribute attack cards, armor contributes armor cards, and so on. Occasionally though, you will have some items that contribute cards from outside their “theme.” Most items are limited to certain classes, of which there are three: fighter, cleric, and wizard. You can have either human, elf, or dwarf versions of any of those classes, with the differences being the typical D&D tropes; elves have low HP and fast movement, dwarves have the opposite, and humans are in the middle.
How does the game play? Fabulously.
Yes. YES!
As you can see, the “setting/lore” of the game is retro-D&D, and it is adhered to from start to finish. All characters are represented with those figurines, and all the maps are exactly like this one (with different terrain and such, of course). The game’s F2P currency are slices of pizza, the battles are all prefaced with D&D-module write-ups, and there is clearly some tension going on inbetween the new DM Gary and his rules-lawyer brother Melvin in campaign mode – not to mention Gary’s awkward crush on the pizza delivery girl. Change some names around, add in two more teenagers, and Card Hunter could have described my high school D&D experience to a T.
As far as the game flow goes, it is pretty intuitive. You and your opponent take turns playing one card from any of your characters’ hands. You don’t have to alternate which character’s cards you play – if your warrior has 3 attack cards and someone within reach during each of his/her turns, you can wail on them 3 times. When you and your opponent pass turns in sequence, the Round ends, everyone discards down to two cards, three cards are drawn (one of which is always a movement card), and any Round triggers fire (e.g. players starting their turn in lava take 10 damage, etc).
The strategic brilliance of this combat system simply cannot be praised enough. Yes, the card-based nature of abilities can lead to immensely frustrating, if not outright impossible scenarios. In the screenshot above, for example, my elven mage has drawn all movement cards, severely crippling any initial attack I could muster. Defeat can (and will) be drawn from the jaws of victory even if you are careful. Here was a moment I exclaimed “You have got to be shitting me” out loud:
I mean, come on!
The above screenshot was taken from the dreaded Compass of Fucking Xorr level, right from where you might imagine is an insurmountable advantage. The armored dogs are dead, I have the last mercenary backed into a corner with 5 HP, and all my dudes are (barely) alive. It’s a new Round, my turn, and… look at the bottom. Don’t see many red cards, do you?
In fact, I drew exactly one attack card, and it only deals 3 damage. That larger card in the screenshot is a “seen” card that I know is in the merc’s hand, and it’s a doozy. Basically, any time you would deal damage to the merc, he rolls a d6: on a 4 or higher, the damage is reduced by 3. Like many Armor cards, it also has the Keep quality, which means it stays in his hand after triggering, ready for the next reduction in damage. And from fighting this guy, let me just tell you that his attack cards all deal 6+ damage from two squares away.
I did kill the merc on the turn after this one, as he just happened to draw a “drawback” card that caused him to discard all his armor cards. But it was a close one either way.
In any event, I am having a blast with Card Hunter thus far. That might sound strange after I just dedicated a few paragraphs to describing what could have been a terrible RNG-based wipe, but that kinda goes with the TCG territory. Who hasn’t been mana-screwed in Magic: the Gathering before? Part of tactical thinking should include the possibility of things going wrong – if games like Frozen Synapse taught me anything, it would be that. If nothing else, it keeps you on your toes.
I’ll go over the other elements of Card Hunter, including the ever-important F2P bits, next time.
First Impressions: Dust 514
After talking about this F2P title on and off for the most of last year, I decided it was about time to put my conjecture where my mouth is. Err… hands? You know what I mean.
After quite literally dusting off my PlayStation 3, I started the process of downloading the 1.3gb game. To kill some time, I started playing Journey while downloading Dust 514 in the background. I didn’t make it more than five minutes before stopping Journey and doing some research as to how I could take screenshots on the PS3 because damn. An hour later, I stopped looking at $150 video capture cards and finished installing Dust 514. Ten minutes later, I begin updating the game. Forty-five minutes later, Dust 514 finishes downloading and installing a patch larger (!?) than the entire original download.
Now, if it has not already been clear from historical record, let it be noted that I am not much of a console gamer. This was not always the case. In fact, all the way up until the end of the PS2 era, I was a console purist. With the notable exception of Balder’s Gate and the original Deus Ex, I felt like PC RPGs were cheap imitations of the holy JRPG (i.e. Squaresoft), which could do no wrong. In my prior life as a freelance RPG reviewer, I have 60+ “published” RPG reviews attesting to that fact; I even gave Planescape: Torment a below-average score because the combat system was bad.
I’m bringing this up to illustrate the fact that this entire console generation has left me behind until now. Or, rather, I left it behind. Although I was in college during the Halo heyday and thus have experience playing its first three iterations many times in the fraternity house, I never personally owned an XBox. Ergo, my skill at thumbstick shooters is abysmal. Give me a mouse and keyboard and I will shoot your aim-assisted face off any day. Ask my thumbs to do more than spam the Spacebar though, and I’ll have some rehabilitation issues.
Enough preface, let’s dive in.
First Minutes
God damn this game is ugly. This seriously looks like I’m watching a 480p Youtube video of someone playing Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Yes, the Nintendo 64 version. Don’t get me wrong, it looks better than Darkfall, but it also looks like it was drawn entirely in watercolors on a soggy canvas. Or I’m looking at it through goggles filled with river water. My first red flag should have been the 1.3gb download, I suppose, although Skyrim was Skyrim with just 5.8gb. Then again, that was on the PC…
I made Azuriel Inanage a Gallente something something race, a decision based entirely on the look of the face mask. In my defense, the entire race decision seemed somewhat pointless considering everyone is in armor all the time, mercenaries can fight for any race, and you can train every race’s gear. I sat through several tutorial screens which showed me around the basic lobby interface, with its amusing “Would you like to learn more?” Starship Trooper prompts. They start out giving you 500,000 Skill Points and 250,000 ISK and then… basically drops you off at the pool.
Now, I still struggle with the judgment as to whether a game developer deserves a pass for this sort of design. Is it the noble “sink or swim” attitude, or is it “crunch time, we’ll fix it in a patch later” lazyness? I’m personally willing to muddle my way through a considerable amount of bullshit in search for that one kernel of fun, but that’s mainly because I’m a masochist at a minimum it becomes easy blog content. And I am not even really saying that Dust 514’s Skill/etc system is hard. It’s just… opaque. 100% function, 0% form.
You basically cannot spend Skill Points until you pay ISK for a Skill book that unlocks that specific Skill. So to start, I needed to purchase Skill X for Y ISK and then spend Z SP to unlock Rank 1. Some of the skills are “empty,” in that their sole function seems to be to sink ISK/SP by forcing you to rank up just for the privilege to access other skills. Others are more functional, like increasing shields by 2% per rank. The system seems to promote unlocking as many Rank 1-2 skills as possible (these ranks only cost 18k-36k SP), but you are gated pretty hard by ISK, at least at first.
So let’s go get some ISK.
It is worth noting, before I get into the outcome of my first few matches, how this game works. You start out with a few different loadouts with basic gear that you can always equip no matter what. Every other thing in the game, from weapons to side-arms to grenades to the very dropsuit you wear is a consumable resource. Meaning, each time you die and respawn, you lose everything you were wearing. Did you just buy some uber-gun but get ambushed at the spawn point? It’s gone now.
I suppose this is designed to evoke a feeling of risk and gravity as a counter-point to the more standard suicidal FPS inclinations. I wouldn’t say that I am completely risk-adverse per se, but I absolutely hate the feeling that I would have been better off not playing at all. Losing WoW Arena games back when hitting 1800 represented a huge leap in combat effectiveness, for example, felt brutal; there was no worse feeling than starting at 1780 Rating and then losing six games in a row. Dust 514 evokes that same feeling, as not only can you lose a bunch of purchased gear right away, but that gear also represents ISK you could have spent buying Skill books instead.
As it turns out though, those ISK concerns may be moot.
My first match was pretty bad, entirely due to my aiming like… well, like I was holding a gun using just my thumbs. It was a “Skirmish” map, which breaks down as a pretty standard cap and control game. At the end of the match, it turns out I received ~150,000 ISK for losing. Based on my experience thus far, the payout seems to be mainly based on time spent; the difference between a win and a loss seems to be around 50k ISK. Also, you can end up receiving “salvage” in the form of guns/equipment. I am still technically in the “battle academy,” aka the kiddie pool, but I would be surprised if you end up earning less out in the game proper.
Given how much ISK you get either way, any consumable equipment concerns are severely diminished. Even a top-tier assault rifle only costs ~11,000 ISK. There was not a full match in which I died more than 8 times, so I would still have turned a profit despite losing all those guns. Plus, presumably a better weapon would mean dying less in the first place. The value of a whole suit loadout is probably more substantial, but quibbling over the 700 ISK mid-tier guns suddenly seems silly. If this is the paradigm though, why bother with all the ISK nonsense to begin with?
Ah, right. Free-to-play.
Instead of purchasing items individually, you can buy blueprints which give you an infinite supply of them. These blueprints, assuming they don’t drop as salvage, can only be bought via Aurum, the RMT currency. Now, Dust 514 is probably cheaper in the scheme of things compared to, I don’t know, Planetside 2. But in this particular case, the game mechanics themselves feel a bit more insidious. Granted, it could just be my bias showing through, especially given how Dust 514 lets you preview the weapons or effectively “buy them” for significantly less than the Planetside 2 equivalent.
Honestly, I just don’t like consumable anything, even if I have more than I would ever need. I’m the guy still hesitating to use the stockpile of Elixirs while fighting the final boss. It makes no rational sense, but there it is. Ergo, I’m leery of CCP having my number, so to speak, when it comes to these blueprints. I’m not actually going to buy any, but I will feel bad all the same.
Anyway, those are my Day 1 impressions of Dust 514. Like always, I will stick with the game for a bit longer just to ensure that I give it as fair a time as is possible under the circumstances.
Unfair Impressions: Darkfall, Final (?)
I was not sure there was going to be a Day 3 to this series. Hell, Day 2 came as a complete surprise for that matter. My default expression in life is “Impress me,” to which Darkfall just laughs. “Okay, show me what you have to offer.” “Show yourself.” There is an inherent nobility to that uncompromising sentiment, a sense that all the other games out there selling themselves are, indeed, engaging in prostitution. Darkfall instead has the purity of your back yard, with the creek your mother told you to stay away from. No one gave you a quest to turn over rocks to see what lied beneath them; you just did it because you were there, and hey look at that weird bug, I wonder what happens when I… eww.
Sorry, sometimes I get carried away with my own bullshit.
#MMOLogic
In truth, I continued playing Darkfall because I was interested in how onerous it would be to make arrows for my Skirmisher. The spiders never dropped any coin, the vendors were asking for 30+ crafting mats for 1g, and my initial try at crafting wooden planks left me with not enough gold to purchase a pick axe to mine the requisite stone for arrowheads. Considering my character was ostensibly an archer, would the game allow me to run out of arrows?
Of course it would.
I abandoned the spider spawns, and tried the other starter monster spawn location. It too was farmed out; in fact, I don’t even know what mobs spawn there as none lived long enough for me to point at them. From the map, I noticed some ruins off to the west. If there’s ruins, there’s monsters. Sure enough, it was zombie spawn city.
My potential future. Kill me now.
While I sat on the fringes watching characters in clearly superior gear farming through the zombies like butter, it occurred to me that there is a distinction between sandboxes that few ever make. There is the sandbox in which you perform repetitive actions in order to have fun later, and there are the ones in which you have fun doing fun things that leads to more fun later. Darkfall, to me, is the former; Minecraft would be the latter. And the funny thing is that the former doesn’t sound all that different from what I was required to do in WoW.
The zombies that trickled past the farmers did end up dropping hard currency – around 1-3g every 5-10 mobs. Examining the pleasure I felt when I walked away with 22g at the end of the farming excursion was a sobering experience. There were likely better spots for gold farming, even in the protected newbie zones, but it was a glimpse back into the churning abyss of a grind without end. Work hard today so you can have fun later, as opposed to having fun… having fun.
In any case, I remain pleased that I gave Darkfall the ole college try. Every time I read Syncaine’s latest post about ganking a dude and stealing all his stuff (and his boat), or about how he AFK farmed while writing the post, I can visualize what exactly all those shenanigans looked like. And then realize that game he and others are playing exists primarily in their own minds.
Which isn’t a bad thing, of course. It’s just not my thing.
Unfair Impressions: Darkfall, Day 2
I felt like the screenshots were not enough to fully immerse you in the world of Darkfall. So here is a video of me attacking some spiders. Don’t forget to switch to 1080p quality!
In terms of the tutorial, I finally realized why I was stuck on the “skinning” portion. While you can loot leather from the glowing gravestones, if you have a skinning knife you can also skin… the gravestones. Because that makes sense. The failure rate seems ridiculously high, but eventually I loot one.
The next step is to hearth to your bindstone, which I did exactly two minutes later. Literally, guys, it’s a 120-second cast. I started it up and left to make my lunch for the next day.
This actually reminds me of another curious thing: AFK-farming seems encouraged in Darkfall. Much like in Guild Wars 2, you must buy a logging axe or herbing sickle in order to gather materials, and these items have charges (durability in this case) that deplete on use. The difference here is that you can start up the animation in Darkfall and walk away from the keyboard – your character will merrily continue chopping timber until (presumably) the axe is worn down to the nub or the tree runs out of wood. It reminds me of what I have heard about mining space rocks in EVE, insofar as gathering only requires button presses once every half-hour. Is that supposed to discourage people from farming, or a concession that farming is so boring the game will do it for you while you Tab out and play something more engaging?
At the Southern FFA border.
In any event, the next stage of the tutorial was taking a 100kg (!) mount idol from the bank and summoning a mount. From there, you are tasked to running to the border of the protected area, sticking your toe over, and then coming back inside. Ah… so I was paranoid for no reason this entire time. Well, sorta. Apparently if you aren’t careful, people can actually steal your mount and ride away. After which I assume you are shit outta luck. Considering that unsummoning the mount takes a minimum of 2 seconds after dismounting, you’ll never want to actually be in town riding the thing.
After much squinting at the abysmal UI, I finally found and dabbled with the Prowess system. Essentially, you earn Prowess doing things, doing a certain number of things (Feats), and presumably other ways too. Prowess essentially act as skill points you use to upgrade skills, increase your ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, etc), and so on. Most skills start a 1 and can be increased up to 100 with an increasingly harsh cost ratio (1:1 up to ~25, then 2:1, etc); each upgrade level typically improves cast speed plus some miscellaneous qualities by some percentage. As an example, putting points into Archery lets me fire faster and deal more damage per arrow, whereas Mining let’s me increase my AFK-yield.
That all makes sense, but I was taken aback a bit from the “Boosts”. At first, I was thinking they were F2P-esque boosts, but that does not appear to be the case.
Ha ha, we got you good.
Instead, they are… err. Well, you can buy the first rank of “the Agile” boost for 200 Prowess, and it increases Dexterity by +10 and the Stamina by +37. Considering that manually boosting Dexterity by +1 costs 30 Prowess, I don’t actually know the point of boosts in this context other than a designer “Gotcha!” moment. I mean, I suppose that it is a way to quickly achieve your class’s optimum stats while still offering a Prowess sink for long-term players (e.g. Warrior dumping extra Prowess into Intelligence once everything warrior-y is bought).
If there is a third day of playing Darkfall in my future, my goal is to figure out the crafting side of things. I understand the basics, but I’m a little uncertain about how one actually goes about getting hard currency; considering that crafting consumes gold as well as mats, you have to have a baseline of income from somewhere. None of the mobs I have killed dropped gold thus far. Does it all come from vendoring goods? There are no “quests” of course, and there doesn’t appear to be an AH either.
So… yeah. Darkfall.
Unfair Impressions: Darkfall: Unholy Alliance
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. You know you are batting in the Big Leagues when you can bamboozle people into believing you are a member of the Press™ despite running a blog that is barely eking out Google pagerank from an Amazon book review and a bioterrorism article written in 2004 that happened to use the phrase “in an age” in the title. I suppose that this is sort of the gaming blogger dream though, wherein people send you free things and you write about them; instead of, you know, the standard procedure of having to purchase things to write about, like some kind of animal.
Whatever the case, Aventurine has inexplicably included me on their Press mailing list for Darkfall: Unholy Wars, and I am now entitled to the game itself along with 30 days of Press™ subscription for free. Rather than allow this inevitably comical misadventure go to waste, I downloaded and patched the game last Wednesday night.
It is worth noting why this post is labeled “Unfair Impressions”: basically, I have zero interest in Darkfall: UW. In fact, I would say less than zero interest. The sum total of what I know about Darkfall is that it is a full-loot FFA PvP game that some say is the most skillful MMO out there. They also say it’s terrible playing by yourself. Fantastic. Let me wander around, lost and confused, as I endeavor to stay as far away from other people as humanly possible.
Well… they got the 2004 look down, at least.
Okay, I’m not going to mention how godawful ugly this game is. Not even once. The screenshots really speak or themselves. And as far as I’m aware, my settings are dialed to the max.
I am in the first town. I’m pretty sure this area is still a sanctuary, but I’m nervous about accidentally left-clicking someone. Okay, let’s follow the tutorial. “Buy an axe.” Alright, let’s see…
Way to maximize useless screen-space.
…good god, is this the vendor interface?
Alright, nevermind, let’s go out to a monster spawn.
Trust no one.
Halfway across the bridge, I notice a dude standing around. Is he a ganker, waiting for me to cross into no man’s land? Is he AFK? Can I gank him? It seems like a trap, so I shuffle away and swim into the river. My default strategy when I feel threatened is to make killing me as annoying as possible. Not that it ever stops anyone, but I derive the same satisfaction I imagine a puffer fish feels when swallowed by… whatever it is that chokes on a puffer fish before dying to its poisonous organs.
Don’t mind me. Please.
Monster spawn time. Cave spiders. I… think they shoot poison at me, but it is hard to tell. There are 4-5 people in the cave killing spiders already. Do they know each other? Is this zone still protected? I give everyone a wide berth and hang out in the cobwebs. I kill a spider and loot its tombstone. Leather. Spider… leather? But wait, my little achievement tutorial thing says I must skin the tombstone. But I already have… or have I? Okay, let’s kill another spider. Except another doesn’t spawn in my area, and now there are more people in the cave and it’s late and I want to play something else.
Alright… how do I log off? I binded myself to a stone in town, so maybe I can hearth back? After searching the painfully bad UI, I see the option. I click on the button and… wait. Still waiting. I get that it would be too easy to escape a ganking if it were quicker, but a full 120-second hearth timer?
Good lord, maybe this was a bad idea.
Dishonored: First Impressions
For some reason, I am definitely getting more of a Singularity vibe than necessarily a Bioshock vibe. It might simply be I am beyond the saturation phase of Unreal engine games:
Is this… better or worse than Half-Life 2? I can’t tell anymore.
I got about 3-4 hours of gameplay in yesterday evening, and am a bit past the point where you can start picking up various powers. Blink is pretty cool, although I was initially let down by my inability to Blink through objects. The other power I purchased was a sort of Life-sense ability that I am inclined to believe is stupid-OP. In fact, I feel pretty OP from the get-go, to be honest. In games like Deus Ex: HR, the downside to “stealth” kills were that they weren’t actually stealthy at all. That is not a problem in Dishonored: enemies are stabbed through the neck and die in under 3 seconds, perfectly silent (as far as I can tell).
In fact, given Blink, the Life-sense skill, instant stealth kills, and the verticalness of the beginning areas thus far, Dishonored feels more like a first-person Tenchu game than anything else. That comparison really hit home when I finished the first area and saw this screen:
I don’t remember sucking that bad during the level.
The Tenchu series is one of my favorite of all time, so it is not a bad analogy.
The main problem I have at such an early stage is the notion that we have another seemingly binary Bioshock situation between good/evil. As in, there are apparently two different endings, and if you go only halfway, you might be stuck with the “evil” one. Which is fine… in a game where it feels more like a legitimate choice. Bioshock, for example, just asked you not to kill the Little Sisters; DE:HR had scores of nonlethal maneuvers and/or weapons, and I think the nonlethal option was the default takedown when you pressed the button. Conversely, Dishonored has your sword attack bound to left-click, and you need to hold down the Ctrl button for a few seconds to knock someone out instead.
It’s fine for the pacifist play-style to be more challenging upfront. A brand new game just loses some of its luster when I am immediately confronted with a screen like this:
But… but… killing is so fuuuuun~
Killing is quick, easy, and fun in Dishonored. Dropping down from a 3-story building onto one guard, Blinking behind another with blade flashing, and taking out a third with a crossbow bolt before the first guy stops bleeding feels like I’m playing Ninja Assassin: the Game. It seems a bit too easy at times, but I imagine that is the point when I am on the first real mission and playing on Normal (there are two higher difficulties); later levels are probably more intricate. Tenchu was mainly as difficult as it was when you cared about getting Grandmaster, at least before those ridiculous “one alarm = failure” missions.
That said, I might start over before going further. If I go the nonlethal route, I should probably go all the way. And if I am going to kill ALL the things, I am probably going to need to bump the difficulty up a few notches.
The City of Steam Alpha Preview for the Rest of Us
If your own blogroll is remotely similar to mine, you have probably heard quite enough about that City of Steam game. The alpha test was wrapping up this past weekend so the devs started handing out codes to just anyone… which would explain how I got one. The beta test will not start for another ~3 months give or take, and there isn’t even a target release date, so the question undoubtedly on your mind – as was on mine every time I read about the game elsewhere – is simple: why should I care about City of Steam?
Well, do you have a few minutes? If so, watch this:
Feel free to expand that into 1080p full-screen, which is the resolution I played at.
In case you were not aware, City of Steam is a browser-based F2P indie MMO. And the above was from its alpha state.
With the exception of Glitch and Kingdom of Loathing, I tend to stay away from browser-based games for… well, no particular reason. I suppose I never thought of them being “for me,” where that is defined by nebulous double-standards like a willingness to pay for a discrete product as long as I don’t have to use a cash shop or spam my friends. Then there is the soft-spot in my cold, black heart for games with character progression deep enough to optimize the fun out it, as one might squeeze whey from cheese. Except, in this disgusting analogy, I eat the whey.
What were we talking about again? Ah, City of Steam.
I have read some descriptions comparing it to Diablo, but the gameplay is more akin to, well, a typical MMO. All the dungeons are instanced, there are some dungeons within dungeons (Dunception!), you can form traditional MMO parties of up to 5-people, guilds exist, the hub areas act as lobbies of sorts, there are daily and story quests, extensive crafting/modding system that alter actual weapon/armor appearance on your avatar, and… let’s stop here. It’s alpha.
While I had an indie MMO developer’s attention though, I just had to ask some (perhaps impertinent) questions:
Me: This is kind of a Bigger question, but… why browser based instead of stand-alone game? Was it easier to go with browser, or more accessible?
Me: I know I can’t be the first one amazed with the graphics. They are very, very well done and came at a complete surprise. Which is kind of why I ask.
Gabriel V. Laforge: It made it more accessible; we wanted to go on the idea that it’s a lightweight game that almost anyone can just jump on and play
GL: hence the short loading times and no massive client downloads
GL: Unity 3D and loads of our own in-house tools really helped optimize that, without sacrificing all that much in terms of graphics or content
Me: Have the more high-profile MMO news – like 38 Studios collapse, SWTOR going F2P, Funcom stock crashes – affected how you build or design the game? Has it complicated the seeking of outside investors (assuming you need any)?
GL: Yes and no…. the game started out as being something we just really wanted to do. Our lead designer, David Lindsay, wrote a series of Roleplaying books, (The New Epoch), upon which the game is based
GL: as for competitors, well, those are large downloads to play, so we don’t necessarily consider ourselves in the same league
GL: we have nowhere near the team or budget they do ;)
GL: as for investment, we have had funding from an investor who helped us get this far, so we’re set on that end
GL: from here, we still have to decide whether we’ll publish independently, or sign on with a publisher (we’ll only go with one who can share the same vision of making this game with integrity…. we REALLY don’t want to go with a pay-to-win model or any crap like that)
Me: A lot of us in the blog world are speculating on whether the MMO genre in general is contracting. Some have suggested that its widespread popularity was just a “fad.” Is that something you worry about as an indie developer? Or are you simply happy to be able to do a job you love? :P
GL: personally, I’m just happy making games
GL: as a company, we’re trying to present something different, and if it works, all the better
GL: if not, we gave it our best
GL: so far though, we’ve been having very positive feedback and reviews, so we’re optimistic
Me: Are there multiple instances of the hub world? If so, how many people can there generally be?
GL: Instances are private for now, for solo and groups of up to 5
GL: we plan to have publick instances for a lot more players later on (we were limited by the endgine before, but now we can make it)
Me: I mean The Refuge [ed: the first main area].
Me: I see a bunch of people running around, but I imagine there is some kind of cap, right?
GL: We havent’ reached (broken) it yet, and have gone up to 600 PCU so far
Me: haha
Me: I’m pretty sure that’s more than I’ve seen in WoW ;)
GL: Really…? Lucky us! :D
Me: I noticed the Mount slot… this is a vague question, but how big of a world will CoS be at launch?
GL: Pretty darn big; Nexus, the City of Steam, it a massive metropolis
GL: there will be enough places to explore to keep people very busy ;)
GL: right now, Alpha has about 150 difference levels
GL: at launch, we plan to have more like something in the upper hundreds, maybe a thousand or so, with more added with future updates
GL: might not be open world, but it will have plenty of flavour
Me: have you settled on a max level yet?
GL: 30 for Alpha, 40 for Beta, and from there, beyond :) (once higher level content is added)
Me: For my audience (such as it is), I have to ask: will there be a Looking-For-Group feature to facilitate grouping for the 5-player content?
GL: We plan to, given engine limitations on whether we can pull it off, but yes, is planned :)
Assuming you are still with me at this point, you might be wondering why I am devoting all this space to a browser-based indie MMO in its alpha state. The answer is quite simple: this may be the future of the genre.
Perhaps not City of Steam specifically, but here is an indie developer doing its best to craft an MMO on a shoestring budget in a world of AAA companies getting 38 Studio’d. And what is impressing me here is that the “nightmare scenarios” we tell ourselves in the blog world might not actually be that bleak. I no longer feel that it has to be $50+ million budgets or bust. Whether it is City of Steam or another indie offering, I am now convinced the possibility exists.
In An Age 
Bioshock Infinite Impressions: Day 1
Mar 28
Posted by Azuriel
I am hoping things get better than this.
Granted, I do not consider myself “in the game” quite yet; given how prominently Elizabeth displayed, I’m guessing everything up to her will still be considered tutorial. Of that tutorial though, some things are becoming more and more clear to me:
1) Fantastic visuals have the opposite effect on me.
The visuals, objectively, look awesome. The visuals are also immensely distracting. When I am trying to shoot a guy with a pistol, seeing a particularly well-done cumulus cloud in the background adds nothing positive to that gameplay experience. I had the same issue with Battlefield 3 in the beginning – it was difficult to “see” enemies amidst the Ultra-High settings – so this is something likely to get better over time, e.g. when I start tuning out the visuals.
Just gotta ignore all of this.
Incidentally, I never had this problem with Borderlands 2, and I think that is because the moments of cel-shaded beauty are more spaced out, and act as breaks inbetween more functional battlefield back-drops. I don’t want ugly games, of course, just games where you are not overloaded with visuals at time when precision and quick reflexes are called for.
2) Thus far, the theme isn’t all that compelling.
In the original Bioshock, the theme was taking Libertarianism to its extreme conclusion – a gaming subject matter particular novel for its time. Bioshock 2 introduced the opposite, showcasing the nefarious side of Collectivism. While it is still early yet, Bioshock Infinite’s theme of religious extremism slash Isolationism slash historical fetishism is… somewhat rote in comparison.
Bigoted religious cults in videogames are right up there with zombies, Nazis, and demons when it comes to stereotypical bad guys. This might be the first time we have seen such (intentional) overt racist imagery in a game, but I feel like I can already plot the rest of the story from here. There is still plenty room for surprises… yet Bioshock Infinite is going to have to surprise me, lest its thematic message be no different than the one you have seen dozens of times in the 32-bit era, or watching Glenn Beck for more than ten minutes.
Also… aside from some nice clouds and sunsets, so far the underwater motif of the original Bioshocks feels worlds better than open sky of Infinite. There was implicit danger at all times in the ocean, along with a sort of fantastic plausibility; underwater buildings are more impractical/expensive versus impossible. Conversely, in Infinite, sometimes it is not especially noticeable that you are in the air at all. Just look at that screenshot up there again.
3) Console Port
The very first sign a game is a console port is when it is Checkpoint-based. My dismay at discovering there was no Quick-Save was both immediate and visceral. Technically Borderlands 2 is also Checkpoint-based, but the difference is that A) those Checkpoints are a known quantity (you know where they are), and B) you can still save at any time when you Exit the game.
Ugh, really?
I am going to trooper on, of course, and perhaps it is a little unfair of me to expect brilliance from Minute 1. But given that I broke my Day 1 Embargo for Bioshock Infinite, I am a little bit weary of Buyer’s Remorse. I mean, I passed on Far Cry 3 for $30 for god’s sake!
Here is to hoping that I get blown away in the game proper, instead of musing as to whether I might have more fun playing Recettear like I was two days ago.
Posted in Commentary, Impressions
3 Comments
Tags: Bigot, Bioshock Infinite, Buyer's Remorse, Checkpoint, Collectivism, Console Port, Day 1, Day 1 Embargo, Impressions, Libertarianism, Racism, Religion, Visual Overload