Need-Based Socialization
Keen has a rather curious post asking “Should Everyone Craft Everything?” The premise of his argument is that specialization is the root of socialization, and as such, a proper MMO would not allow everyone to craft everything. In fact, anyone who suggests that they should be allowed to have some level of self-sufficiency is “an entitled xenophobe” better left to single-player games, and the catering to whom is a “dumbing down” of a MMO to the “lowest common denominator.”
Which, along with the Free Space, is a full Bitter MMO Vet Bingo.
Special thanks to Keen, SynCaine, Tobold, and their commenters for the inspiration.
The fig leaf proffered is that perhaps everyone can make all the basic recipes, but that only specialists can make the best items. However, the whole notion is ridiculous, for a number of reasons.
First, you cannot “force” specialization in any game that allows alts. It wasn’t even much of a commitment on my part to develop a full stable of crafting alts in WoW because I wanted the ability to switch up my endgame play-style anyway. Even if you imagine that your perfect MMO limited you solely to one character per account, people could bypass the restriction via multiple accounts. That is, after all, exactly what EVE players do when they circumnavigate the restrictions of real-time skill gains (itself a way of forcing specialization). I suppose on the plus side, this makes your subscriber numbers look pretty peachy.
Second, you don’t actually need mutually-exclusive specializations in order to have a robust economy, as Keen claims. Within the beginning chapters of every Economics 101 textbook is an explanation of comparative advantage. The simple version is that two villages can produce both rice and fish, but at differing ratios: Island A can produce 10 units of rice or 5 units of fish in a day, and Island B can produce 10 units of fish or 5 units of rice. The ideal proposition is for Island A to produce rice, Island B to produce fish, and then trade half for half with one another, leaving both the richer for it. In fact, an economy between the two islands works even if Island A can produce everything more efficiently than Island B.
Or, perhaps more simply put, there is an opportunity cost to every action, regardless of whether or not you can do everything yourself. Any in-game economy will continue humming at full speed as long as one person is willing to mine ore and another more willing to farm gold than ore. Even though I could make everything myself in WoW, I still bought huge sums of materials and even finished goods because it was faster than doing it myself. Indeed, the existence of an AH at all will typically create entire economies by itself (barring ghost town populations).
Finally, there is a curious sort of bluntness to the dispassionate thought that people need to be forced to interact with one another via extreme limitations. Don’t get me wrong, I am someone who is thoroughly behind the idea of Divine Trinity and other forms of implicit specialization. But I feel like these sort of roles should be arrived at organically, rather than at the character select screen. I am a tank because I enjoy being a tank, not because I happened to pick “Paladin” in 2008. If I had stuck with Warlock, my first WoW character, how much less value would I have brought to the game, to the friends I made, and to my own game experience? As WoW has proven time and again, and even in the largely role-less GW2, just because everyone can be a tank (or tank-like), doesn’t mean they are willing to step into that role. So what possible good can come from shackling a potential tank to a dreary DPS-only experience? “So specialization matters”?
Further, the days in which I am inclined to make new friends out of perfect virtual strangers is largely in the past, and no amount of cumbersome game mechanics will get me back to that place. Even if extreme specialization is for the next generation of MMO player’s sake, I’m rather skeptical that such methods would at all work out the way people imagine they would. As Tobold recently pointed out, our generation of gamers were playing MMOs before the advent of Facebook and other social media – our games were our social media, our place to meet like-minded individuals. MMOs these days are 3-monthers not because they lack in content or design, but because we’re unwilling or unable to invest the social capital necessary to maintain our interest. And why would we? Either we brought along all the friends we already have, or they didn’t make the jump with us. In both cases, we’re full-up on social interaction, thanks.
So, essentially, I say let people do what they want, and they will sort themselves out according to their predilections.
Smedbombs
John Smedley, the president of SOE, did a Reddit AMA a little while ago and dropped some bombs.
If you could relaunch a shutdown title which one would you pick and what would you do differently this time?
SWG. I would do everything differently.
SWG PLAYERS – OUR NEXT GAME (not announced yet) IS DEDICATED TO YOU. Once we launch it… you can come home now. (source)
Here are some more snippets:
- The PlanetSide 2 pricing model is not a good gauge for EQN/L (and Ps2 prices may be decreased soon)
- There will be a Bard in EQN
- The Ps2 Player Studio will eventually allow players to create vehicles and even weapons eventually.
- EQN is confirmed to be coming to the PS4.
- The whole Storybricks/emergent AI thing is the secret sauce to EQN.
- You can expect EQN:L, expansions to EQ and EQ2, and an unannounced MMO in 2014.
- When asked about the closing of Vanguard, he admitted that they were actually running it at a loss for years.
His response to the closing of Free Realms was rather depressing:
1) Are you planning on adding more family-friendly options? First there was Toontown Online, then there was Free Realms, and CWA. Is there another youth-oriented game planned?
1) No. No more kids games. Kids don’t spend well and it’s very difficult to run a kids game. Turns out Kids do mean stuff to each other a lot. (source)
There was another question/answer that I felt was rather interesting, concerning card games:
Will Legends of Norrath also be sunsetted in the near future?
no. Actually after seeing what Blizzard did with Hearthstone it’s given us some other ideas…. LoN is an awesome card game. We can take that to the next level. (source)
The whole WoW-clone phenomenon is well established, but I still find it interesting seeing it take place in real-time.
Review: The Witcher 2
Game: The Witcher 2
Recommended price: $5
Metacritic Score: 88
Completion Time: ~36 hours
Buy If You Like: The Witcher, atmospheric and political fantasy gobbledegook
The atmosphere is almost – almost – enough to carry the entire game.
The Witcher 2 (TW2) is a sequel to the original, fairly ground-breaking game following the travails of Geralt of Rivia. Geralt’s profession is a Witcher, a human who has mutated his own genes in order to more effectively fight the monsters that spontaneously appeared in the world many years ago. After the events in the original game, Geralt was playing bodyguard to a king only to see his charge assassinated in his presence and then framed for the crime. TW2 takes place immediately following those events, and the wider ramifications and intrigue surrounding a recent batch of regicide.
I am going to be completely honest here at the beginning by saying that I finished playing TW2 only grudgingly, and after several months-long breaks inbetween. The game features a decently robust journaling system that will allow you to read up on what you are supposed to be doing and the general lore of the entire game world, but the litany of nonsense fantasy pronouns and references to the original game events (and the books they are predicated on) is truly unending. While I am willing to admit that the breaks I took inbetween playing certainly contributed to my general confusion, I do not absolve the game from what I feel was a profound lack of engagement. “Why was I doing this again?” “So I’m fighting this guy, but it’s important I don’t kill him, because I want this valley to become independent, so that… err?”
One of the major strengths of the first Witcher was its creation of what felt like a distinctly authentic atmosphere. Most fantasy games have a sort of whitewashed, Disney quality to them at odds with the historical reality of peasantry who bathed infrequently, had access to few paved roads, and a general unconcern with hygiene. The Witcher felt dirty, gritty, and real. I am happy to report TW2 continues in that praise-worthy tradition. Hovels look like hovels, trolls like like trolls, and you can practically smell the NPCs through the screen. The casual race discrimination (in terms of humans vs nonhumans) and ease in which people’s lives are upended or destroyed feels correct in a way practically unique to the genre.
Layered on top of this “fantasy realism” are the most banal, discordant, gamey quests and mechanics that I’ve ever seen.
Good ole meta-humor.
We are talking about completely shameless fetch quests, kill 20 monster quests, and boomerang quests that shatter any sense of immersion in the fictional world. In fact, by the end, I hated the game world for its perfectly realistic twisted pathways and obstacles, as I was forced to circumvent them dozens of times as I did quests A, B, and C in sequence. And can I talk about the map for a second here? Literally the worst, most useless map in any videogame I have ever played. Shit made no sense, and zooming out gives you a view of the overworld that had zero to do with anything given how you were actually trapped in small zones around the one main location of the Chapter.
The combat in the first Witcher was not particularly deep or complicated. Combat in TW2 has actually devolved to the point where I was feeling nostalgic for the timed button pressed of the original as a measure of skill. All you do here is left-click for a quick attack and right-click for a strong attack. You can block, cast a Sign, roll-Dodge, or use an item too, but combat never felt integrated into the game world at all. Maybe the devs were intentionally trying to ensure you didn’t feel like a badass playing as a Witcher. Well… mission accomplished.
By far the worst aspect of the game though (map aside), is the direction that they took potions. See, potions are an important part of the game’s fiction; Witchers mutate themselves almost solely so they can brew potions that let them regenerate health, have extra power, and so on. In the first game, you could drink potions at any time, but could only meditate (e.g. sleep off the toxic potion side-effects) at certain locations. Which was dumb. However, TW2 decided to let you meditate almost anywhere, but you must be meditating before you can drink a potion. When can you not meditate? In combat, near combat, or somewhere where combat is implied to be occurring. The issue is that your abilities are balanced around potion use but potions only last for 10 real-time minutes. So you spend the entire goddamn game quicksaving every 30-seconds because getting into combat without having potions up is suicide, but you can’t exactly be running around with potions up the whole time, especially when you are exploring.
Only in The Witcher series…
I am belaboring the utter travesty of the combat system because I’m at a point in my life where this shit just doesn’t fly any more. I used to suffer through all kinds of JRPG combat systems for the fruit that was their (quirky) plots. You can’t really even say that TW2 would have been a better Adventure game though, because the physicality of fighting is important to understanding the world Geralt and friends inhabit. You can’t cut-scene every battle, after all.
Ultimately, I think what killed The Witcher 2 for me was the simple fact that the rest of the gaming world continued moving. Yeah, this is a game that came out in 2011, so a certain amount of slack should be given. But… I can’t. If you have played Skyrim, for example, coming into this game will be physically painful – you will chafe at not being able to hop off the wall where you want, not being able to attack when you want, not being able to go where you want, not being able to drink goddamn potions when you want. All of which is a real shame, because The Witcher 2 features a wide array of morally grey choices that actually change large portions of the game, rather than being “mere” emotional placebos.
But, you know what? I kinda want to have fun when I’m playing video games and The Witcher 2 offered me the opposite of that. I’m keeping an eye on The Witcher 3 because I enjoy the game world they have created and the choices you can make inside of it, but I am oh so wary. And oh so tired of poorly implemented game features/design.
No Better Time to Buy
If you happen to be in the Hearthstone beta, there is perhaps no better time to purchase packs for real money than right now. See, Blizzard changed the following cards in their most recent patch:
- Unleash the Hounds
- Sylvanas Windrunner
- Blood Imp
- Defender of Argus
- Pyroblast
- Dark Iron Dwarf
- Abusive Sergeant
- Warsong Commander
- Charge
- Novice Engineer
While most of the changes were nerfs (aside from Unleash the Hounds), the salient point is that Blizzard compensates those who might have spent Dust crafting these cards by making the disenchant Dust amount the same as the crafting cost. In other words, I could craft Sylvanas for 1600 Dust and disenchant her for 1600 Dust instead of the normal 400 Dust.
“Whatever,” right? Wrong.
What is not immediately obvious is that you have the ability to craft Golden versions of every card in the game, which are the digital equivalent of foil cards in paper CCGs. These Golden version of cards typically cost four times as much Dust to craft than normal. Do you know what this means?
Dust. Dust everywhere.
As far as I know, every person who signed up for the Hearthstone beta has gotten a key by this point, so technically anyone who cares about this game has the opportunity right now to take advantage of this scenario. Those two cards above gave me 1200 Dust by themselves, which is 400 Dust away from any Legendary I care to craft. I went ahead and disenchanted both my Pyroblasts as well for 400 Dust apiece, as I never really felt inclined to use them all that much in the first place. Given how this “bonus” Dust window only stays open for about two weeks total, you might want to make your decision sooner rather than later.
This scenario was about the only thing that would have gotten me to pay real money for Hearthstone. And I did. As I have mentioned previously, my prior lack of interest in paying is not an indication of some deficiency in the game, but rather the strength of being able to play for free with few impediments… provided Hearthstone isn’t your sole source of entertainment. If you’re capable of only playing once every 2-3 days to knock out dailies and then go into the Arenas, you can do quite well for yourself over time. But if you want to dip a toe into Constructed, you’ll do much better with the various Legendaries.
Just be warned that sometimes bullshit like this happens when opening packs:
Really, Bliz? Really?
Notorius Reputations
The mystery of where Ghostcrawler’s next opportunity has led him has been revealed: Lead Game Designer at… Riot Games. As in, Lead Game Designer for League of Legends. Needless to say, some corners of the internet flipped their shit. A response from Riot Games illuminated some of the reasons he got hired on:
A lot of the things we want to focus on with game health this year (and preseason is a kick-off to this effort) is primarily around fixing a lot of the old problems. After finishing up support (IE the gold item particulars + Annie problem), we want to focus on adding choice and depth by taking a HARD look at “ball of stats” stuff so we can actually introduce interesting stuff with trade-offs.
I have never actually played League of Legends, so I cannot speak to any of the complexities of the game. But while the jokes about Ghostcrawler balancing things write themselves, it’s worth a slight reflection on how, pretty indisputably, WoW is more balanced class and spec-wise than it has ever been. My prediction is that he’s going to tank LoL all right… in the aggro sense. It sorta sucks how his reputation automatically makes him an undeserved (IMO) target of scorn. But hey, if you’re good at something, I guess getting paid (more?) to do exactly that thing isn’t so bad.
Old Skool
In my continuing efforts to reclaim hard drive space and knock out some more of my Steam backlog, I booted up MINERVA: Metastasis. For some reason I thought this was the user mod for Bioshock I remember hearing about back in the day, so I was quite surprised to find it was a Half-Life 2 mod. Still, at 5+ gigs, I figured it was about time to see what’s what.
And that what seems to be old fucking school.
More than anything, the sound FX is what took me back.
As I turned the first corner into some Combine while armed with the machine gun, the first thing I did was hold the right mouse button and prepare to aim for the head. Instead, I shot an under-barrel grenade which damn near instantly killed me. “Oh. Oh my.” The machine gun clearly has a holographic targeting reticule, but in this circumstantial trip down nostalgia lane, aiming-down-sights hasn’t been invented yet. “Am I supposed to be hip-firing like some kind of animal?!” Yes. The answer is yes.
Also, your bullet spread pattern will always random, no matter whether you squeeze one round off or empty the clip. That is some Bronze-Age shit right there.
Game design evolution is a funny thing – very rarely is there ever any going back. For example, remember when you just had 100 HP, maybe 100 shields, and neither regenerated at all no matter how long you cowered in the corner with 17 HP remaining? It seems like just yesterday to me, because it literally was. I pooh-poohed Bioshock Infinite for having CoD- (and now Battlefield-) style regeneration, but now I’m not entirely sure what to think. I mean, is regeneration worse than spamming QuickSave every 30 seconds? Going to a CheckPoint system sounds even worse, as designers rarely hit the sweet-spot between The Last of Us’s one-enemy-filled room or Far Cry 1’s “hope you brought a sandwich, because the CheckPoint is on another island.”
I think that the first two Bioshocks got it right, insofar as there was no regeneration but you could stockpile medkits and the like up to a certain point. I felt no reason to explore in MINERVA when I was at full health, as there was literally no reason to; without hidden upgrades or things to stockpile, frequently there existed many rooms completely void of any reason to exist (beyond verisimilitude, I suppose).
In any case, the mod was worthwhile for the nostalgia and game design lesson alone. I just talked about having arrows over quest objectives the other day, but there were probably half a dozen spots in MINERVA where I had no idea where to go, or what the game expected me to be doing. And as is usually the case, the answer was staring me in the face. Then again, I did have to look up how to get past the room with the shield generators because, for some ungodly reason, we were just supposed to know that two grenades were necessary to destroy them. I tossed a grenade into each of the four generators, alarms went off, and once they recovered I went “Aha! They must need to be disabled in a specific pattern!” Nope. Just a dev’s modder’s Gotcha! moment.
Or maybe we were just all smarter in the olden days.
Factoids from Smed
In the midst of phat beats the Smedster was laying down yesterday, there were a few random facts I didn’t want to let slip through the cracks.
In practice, our primary job is making fun games. That always comes first. PS2 was a $25M investment. (source)
It is pretty rare that we get to see how much a game costs directly from a knowledgeable source.
Player Studio items – let me make this simple. We excluded them because we didn’t like the idea of giving away someone else’s item. The player who made it would get no revenue in that case because it’s a free item. We are considering just eating the cost of this. Either way we are likely going to allow Player Studio items. (source)
In case you were wondering about the “eating the cost” comment for Player Studio items. Here is a bigger drop though:
We’re in the middle of developing Everquest Next Landmark (on schedule right now for end of this month). We rebooted the game 3 times. It was a massive delay and it hurt us financially. But it was the right thing to do for us, and for the industry. Most importantly you all are going to get to play something we’re very proud of and we think is a whole lot of fun. (source)
Emphasis added. So… the weird sort of “marketing” surrounding EQN:L is starting to make sense. Namely, SOE didn’t know what the hell they were doing either. That’s almost comforting. But a little scary too, considering it appears as though SOE is going to be leaning on EQN:L for financial stability.
We’ll have to see how it plays out, but for my part, I am liable to start my SOE subscription back up once I can start playing EQN:L given how I’ll likely be getting PlanetSide 2 bonuses as well.
Good Guy SOE
So, I find myself playing PlanetSide 2 again. Yes, I had stopped for good. Probably more than once. I might be what they call an “unreliable narrator.”
What brought me back into the fold (for the time being) were forum tears. Specifically, I saw a veritable rash of QQ posts on Reddit concerning how overpowered A2A missiles are, how unfair it is that skilled pilots (presumably packing lolpods) are being blown out of the sky by noobs, and so on. So I did what every rational gamer would do in such a situation: log on and run the flavor-of-the-month gravy-train all the way to cheeseville.
Let the hate flow through you.
11 kills in 43 minutes may not sound like anything – and it’s not – but they were 100% other players in jets, which I can assure you is a feat I have never remotely came close to before. Indeed, the time was inflated a bit because I had to go in search of more jets, having destroyed the gate-camping ecosystem I was hunting in.
In the meantime, there was another controversy brewing on the Reddit forums in the form of John Smedley changing the way subscriptions work at SOE. Currently, you can subscribe to Ps2 for $15/month, receive some membership perks, and then receive a monthly stipend of 500 Station Cash (SC). As Wilhelm has detailed previously, SOE has had a ton of issues with people hoarding currency from triple SC sales, to the point where they had to stop letting you redeem SC for expansions, subscriptions, etc. For the less economic-minded, the problem with SC hoarding is that SOE can’t actually count the cash you used to purchase SC as revenue until you redeem it; until you do, the SC technically counts as a liability. Indeed, since the introduction of Player Studio items, SOE faces the additional uncertainty of having to potentially pay out an unbounded amount of cash to players once per quarter, depending on how many people redeem their SC for those items. We aren’t talking about virtual money for virtual items anymore, we’re talking cash payments to player artists.
If that still sounds confusing, an example I’ve heard is this: imagine what would happen if 100% of EVE’s playerbase used PLEX for their subscription next month. Sure, CCP technically already has the money, but they are unlikely to have enough cash on hand to cover a full month’s worth of payroll, server costs, etc, with nothing coming in that month. Companies do end up estimating “breakage” (e.g. gift cards that are never redeemed and the like) but they can’t claim all of it without running afoul accounting principals.
The first solution Smed presented was interesting. Instead of a 500 SC stipend that simply accumulates, they would allow you to purchase one item a month that costs up to 2000 SC. A voucher, if you will. The primary issue under that scheme is that there is next to nothing in the Ps2 store that costs 2000 SC aside from the ocassional bundle, which you cannot even buy with it. Most player-created items – which, incidentally, are so much cooler than SOE-designed items that its sickening at this point – cost 1000 SC apiece, so ostensibly you would be coming out ahead under this rubric… but Player Studio items were also excluded. Even if Player Studio items were allowed, the creators would see zero reimbursement since the 2000 SC voucher was “free” – Smed stated in the thread that SOE was seriously considering eating the cost and paying the item creators anyway.
If you weren’t interested in fancy hats and cosmetic items though, you were going to be boned as a Ps2 player under this system. One of the perks of subscribing to Ps2 was getting access to a 2nd Deal of the Day, and said deals frequently put items at price points below 500 SC. Indeed, there were two items last week that were selling for 99 SC. If I wanted both, I could either spend an extra dollar and use the 2000 SC purchase on the other, or I could get both with the 500 SC stipend and have some virtual change left over for next month. And on the other end of the spectrum, if you have been playing for a while, there isn’t liable to be anything you want to buy in the store in a given month – especially since the devs decided to take their content-free optimization break. Each month you didn’t purchase anything as a Ps2 player was 500 SC you weren’t ever getting back.
After going back and forth across a 200+ response Reddit thread, Smed dropped some interesting information. The plan going forward for SOE is for the All Access Pass to be lowered to $14.99/month and to automatically apply to all SOE games (on the PC, for now). In other words, one subscription to rule them all. It sounds a bit weird at first, given how many of the games SOE offers are F2P to begin with. But that sort of makes it subtly brilliant: the fact you are receiving “premium” bonuses for games like DCUO might make you more inclined to download the client and take advantage of them. But what if I don’t care about DCUO or EQ1/2 in the least? Hmm. Maybe you have heard of EverQuest Next: Landmark & EQN proper?
The plot… it thickens.
As for the stipend, Smed will be bringing up a compromise to the suits: subscribers will get the 500 SC like usual, but you have to log on each month to claim it. While it seems silly that that solves anything, I wouldn’t be surprised that there are a non-zero amount of people that have auto-renew subscriptions and do nothing with them. After all, that’s kind of the point of auto-renew subscriptions as a business model. For every heavy Netflix user, there is someone like me who has booted it up for about two months out of the entire last year.
In any case, mad props to John Smedley for coming to Reddit of all places and laying down the behind-the-scenes facts. There are some people who are not happy with the way things shook out (the 2000 SC voucher sounded better to them), but no one can deny the fact that SOE climbed down the mountain and took the feedback of its players seriously. If you were going through Ghostcrawler withdraw like I am, look no further than… the PlanetSide 2 Reddit forums, apparently.
Review: State of Decay
Game: State of Decay
Recommended price: $7.50
Metacritic Score: 76
Completion Time: 18 hours
Buy If You Like: Grand Theft Zombie, Sandbox Roguelikes
Even with shortcuts, the game world is pretty large.
State of Decay is an open-world zombie sandbox game originally released for Xbox Live Arcade and ported to the PC. You take control of a randomized character and thereafter do your best scavenging buildings for supplies to build up your home base while recruiting additional survivors whom you much switch to after your character becomes tired or injured. Or killed, given how State of Decay features permadeath and auto-saving checkpoints. There is a fairly standard plot you can run through to beat the game, but it can be ignored for however long you wish.
I want to highlight the “PC port” part of this game again, because State of Decay unfortunately takes some hits from both angles. First, the game can be buggy. Zombies inside buildings can sometimes clip through the walls and start trying to give you a nice hug while still being immune to bullets to the face. During one play session, the NPCs on escort missions decided they would just stand there at the end of the mission instead of running to the “end mission” zone. Since the game won’t save until a mission in complete and there isn’t any way to cancel a mission in progress, I was stuck until I tried the outlandish solution of physically moving them inches at a time by bumping into them with my character. It worked, by the way.
The second PC Port hit comes from the fact that the game… well, it could use some work mechanics-wise. The core gameplay itself is rather amazing and refreshing. The map very much feels like a real set of small towns, and you can explore and ransack 99% of the buildings you see. As anyone who has read this blog might know, I have a (un)healthy obsession with looting stuff in post-apocalypse games like Fallout, and State of Decay definitely scratched that itch.
I see what you did there, devs.
The problem is that some shit doesn’t make any sense, gameplay-wise. When you’re looting a house and come across a crate of supplies (Food, Medicine, Ammo, etc), you can load it into a duffel bag and take it back to your base to deposit. You can even drop the duffel bag and pick it up later if you want. What you cannot do, apparently, is load the duffel bag into your car trunk. Or have the NPC that accompanied you into the house to carry something. Or drop off the supplies at an Outpost you created, even though it has a Supply Chest that gives you access to all your gear no matter the distance to your home base. While you can call in scavengers to sort of auto-loot the house, the fact that they travel on foot and are fully exposed to the zombies you likely drove right past means looting the next town over is pretty much 100% up to you.
Also, I’m getting real tired of games where you can loot items from containers, or leave items in containers, but cannot put items back in containers. “Oh, I suppose I have to destroy this perfectly useful baseball bat because I picked it up first instead of this handgun.” That sort of nonsense is nothing more than lazy programming.
Loot ALL the things.
The game also doesn’t quite seem sure what type of challenge it wants to present. Your character can sneak around and even perform stealth kills on zombies, but said stealth kills aren’t really stealthy at all – it always makes enough noise for other zombies to investigate. That’s… realistic, I suppose, but it makes stealth gameplay mostly irrelevant. And while it is frighteningly easy to die when mobbed, for the most part killing zombies is EZ-Mode; melee attacks interrupt zombie grabs, and homemade silencers make gunplay perfectly safe. There are stereotypical “Freak” zombies with extra abilities, but the open-world nature of the game means that most of the time you can lure them outside and then run them over with a car.
At the end of the day though, I enjoyed my time killing zombies and looting things in Trumbull Valley. The skeleton of an amazing game is definitely there; the devs just have to flesh it out a bit more. What I would like to see is a full-fledged sequel called Nation of Decay or something, in which I can load up the back of my Camero with supplies, pop a 80s rock ballad in the tape deck, and slam a zombie with my car door as I speed down the highway into the sunset.
In An Age 
Far Cry 3 #GameLogic
Jan 17
Posted by Azuriel
I recently started to play Far Cry 3, and have come to realize that it features a whole new level of bizarre #GameLogic. I mean, there is some nominal amount of disbelief suspension going on in every game, sure. How does sleeping in a tent regain health? Why can I get shot and regenerate by ducking behind cover, for that matter? Why do I have to pay hundreds of thousands of currency units to purchase weapons from a store that will cease to exist if I fail to kill the world-destroying evil guy?
Some invisible line felt crossed in Far Cry 3 though, about the time I realized I was hunting and skinning goats to increase my wallet size. I can buy a flamethrower from the corner drug store, but can’t buy a wallet with my (then maximum) $1000?
Step 1: Drive over there. Step 2: Skin some goats.
That goofiness aside, Far Cry 3 has been… interesting, thus far. The minute I realized that unlocking additional weapon slots and ammo storage was bound by killing/skinning animals and not level, was the minute I ignored the story altogether and went on a Buffalo Bill safari. You might think that the easy, beginning recipes would belong to animals populated around the beginning areas, but you would be wrong – I had to travel quite a distance across the map to find some goats to offer to Mammon, the dark deity of larger wallets.
Speaking of questionable design philosophies, Far Cry 3 is reminding me a bit about why Skill Trees are usually a dumb idea. Right now, most of the three trees are locked until I complete more story missions, but the “root” of one of the trees was, I kid you not, the ability to “cook” grenades. As in, I needed experience points and adding a tattoo to my arm to unlock the ability to pull the pin of the grenade and not immediately throw it. And you have to unlock this ability in order to choose anything else in that tree. This reminded me of TBC WoW, where Affliction warlocks had to put five (!) talent points in the 1st tier to lower Corruption’s casting speed down to instant-cast; I think the first talent point was a 0.2 second reduction, or something.
Character customization is great, don’t get me wrong. But, seriously, if you have that much filler in your talent trees, you are probably better off not having any at all.
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Tags: #GameLogic, Crafting, Far Cry 3, Game Design, Talent Tree