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.
Language of Action
This amusing comparison was posted on Reddit the other day under “Morrowind vs Skyrim vs Dark Souls”:
/slowclap
The implication here is (presumably) that games these days are being dumbed down, or at least are not being made as challenging as their predecessors (Dark Souls aside). This sort of “hand holding” is pretty much the de facto standard in MMOs as well, in the form of highlighting of the questing areas and the like. ¹
To which I say: “Good.”
If there is one particular scenario I despise more than anything else in videogames, it is when I sit down to play one and then can’t. I do not mean that I try and fail and am unable to progress – that part is good! It’s gameplay, it’s doing things, it’s actively engaging my faculties. Rather, I mean when the game is not even allowing me to try anything because I am missing something and don’t even know it. Or maybe I am not missing anything and the game is at fault. Indeed, whenever I get stuck in a game, these are the usual possibilities:
- I cannot solve the puzzle.
- I missed an invisible quest trigger.
- I cannot locate the quest objective.
- I do not know where to go next.
In all those scenarios aside from #1, we can entertain the possibility that it is the game designer’s fault. And that’s the problem! Sure, occasionally it is my own damn fault for not reading the quest text correctly or I didn’t pan the camera 110° to the right or whatever. But after 20+ years of playing videogames, I can assure you that my default assumption is not that these designers do everything on purpose. Games are art, but if you set out to evoke a particular emotion with a piece and it generates the exact opposite, we can say that that piece of art failed in its goal. Sometimes mistakes can make a game better (like… Gandhi in Civilization), but an equal or greater amount of time they are simply mistakes.
Things can go too far the other way, of course. In the opening scenes of The Witcher 2, as you approach the ominously empty bridge, you get a prompt telling you which buttons to press to avoid dragon fire. “What dragon? Oh.” Quests in Skyrim which ask you to find the artifact that has been hidden for centuries… and there’s a very visible quest marker that appears directly over it. I can concede that something like this other Reddit picture is too much:
I hated Navi anyway.
At the end of the day, though? I am playing videogames to do things. I do not consider walking around a room pressing the Interact button every few steps as doing something. There is a place for games in which the “doing” is figuring out where to go or what to do next. And that place is “Pile of Games I’m (Literally) Not Playing.”
¹ I still remember the river of tears that resulted from WoW adding quest givers to the minimap back in Patch 2.3. Yes, seriously, tears.
Bring It, 2014
The normal sort of thing to do is look back on what 2013 brought us, but ain’t nobody got time for that. And 2013 sucked anyway. Let’s see what’s in store for next year, yeah?
The Repopulation
For as much as crusty old bloggers harp about Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online, I find it amusing how not a one of them (that I am aware of) has mentioned The Repopulation. What is it? Why, according to Kotaku it is the love child of SWG and UO. MMO? Check. Open-world sandbox? Check. Build your own towns? Check. No levels or classes? Check and check. Can just be a crafter all day, or dancer, or street performer? Ayep. Hell, they even claim you can seamlessly switch from hotkey MMO style combat to an action-oriented 1st/3rd-person shooter perspective. It’s a veritable pantheon of Jesus features.
You can craft a Portal turret pet. Need I say more?
Apparently the game is already in Alpha from a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012, although they are giving it another $50k Kickstart for some reason or another. Closed Beta for backers starts in March. The end result will be a F2P MMO that sells “memberships” in tiers for a one-time purchase, which is perhaps the most novel business model I’ve seen yet. In fact, I think that was the last undiscovered videogame payment scheme. Achievement unlocked.
WildStar
It’s a thing.
Elder Scrolls Online
Also a thing.
EverQuest Next: Landmark
If Landmark ends up being anything more than a commercial disaster, it will be in spite of having the most vague, nonsensical marketing strategy I have ever witnessed. I mean, watch this promotional video. That was uploaded on December 6th, 2013, so it’s not from back when they didn’t know how they were going to cover up the EQN delay.
Okay, this does look kinda interesting.
That being said, I am always keenly interested in anything that allows players to freeform create things in game spaces. I’m not talking about building a house somewhere in UO or other nonsense. I’m talking about actually being able to craft something that can effectively be used as a portfolio of game design. Hell, I still have all 11.6 gigs of Portal 2 installed because I imagined that one day I would get around to building my own puzzle as an example of level design. Did it happen? Nope. Could it have happened? Yep. PlanetSide 2’s Player Studio deal apparently had some budding designers banking $5000-$8000 in a quarter, for crafting the equivalent of hats and camo. Landmark will have the same sort of system in place, on a much larger scale.
So, Landmark is on the radar. I’m not convinced that it will actually be a “real” MMO in terms of it being entertaining to play the non-crafting bits, but who knows? Certainly not SOE, that’s for goddamn sure.
Destiny
Not a thing. Seriously, it’s Borderlands 2 Online minus a PC version. Which means I’m not playing it.
Firefall
I hadn’t even thought about this game since I ran into a bugged quest back in July. Actually, I take that back. I had an entire post ready to go entitled “Firefail” and it was to be accompanied by this picture:
Welp, so much for that.
Basically, I tried patching the game and got stuck at the last 0.04 MB. I truly did try everything, including a full uninstall of the game client and a redownload.
As it turns out, I might have dodged a bullet there. Apparently, the CEO of the game studio was fired after having spent millions of dollars on high-end camera equipment and, no joke, converting a tour bus into a mock-up of in-game transport. That bus job cost $3 million from an MMO game studio’s coffers. Oh, and I guess apparently the CEO announced that he unilaterally cancelled all PvP in a forum post? You can read a sort of insider view of the dirty laundry in this (verified!) Reddit thread.
WoW: Outlands 2.0
Probably a thing.
Holiday
I’m still on one, technically.
In the meantime, please enjoy the three new anime micro-reviews I uploaded: Nichijou – Everyday Life, Planetes, and My Teen Romantic Comedy: SNAFU.
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