Over the Hump
Okay, so maybe things aren’t looking all that grim after all.
Just like with FTL, and just like with PlanetSide 2, I have gotten over the WoW “dissatisfaction hump” to emerge on the other side. I am still annoyed with the pitiful AH situation and Blizzard’s related policy of indefinite realm life-support, but I am (finally) having some – dare I say it? – fun. It was a close thing, though. In fact, I feel somewhat guilty for rewarding game design that contains dissatisfaction humps at all.
As mentioned before, I started out playing my namesake paladin in Ret leveling mode. The rotation seemed unbearably clunky, and I wasn’t having fun. Indeed, it was not until yesterday that I started feeling comfortable hitting Exorcism on cooldown, instead of the much more elegant proc-rotation that Exorcism was tied to back in the day.
With that feeling “off,” I tried to transition to my Elemental shaman, mainly because she is my resource toon (Herbalism + Mining). The Elemental rotation hasn’t changed much, but Blizzard increased the missile speed of Lightning Bolt and somehow that was throwing me off all goddamn day. Well, that, and the fact that mobs were no longer dying in a single LBx2-FS-LvB rotation, meaning that I ended up having to hardcast several Lightning Bolts into mobs’ faces.
In a fit of desperation, I settled for my warrior, as she was the Blacksmith and thus the only toon capable of making some blue weapons.
Oh. My. God. Was this where Blizzard was hiding all the fun?
Simply put, the warrior was amazingly fun. Every 90 seconds I was rounding up 5+ mobs and Brostorming (ah, memories) them all to death. Even when I didn’t have the cooldowns up, I would frequently round up at least three mobs at a time because why not? Impending Victory, just like Victory Rush before it, turns the Hybrid Tax on its head with a cheap, 20% HP heal every mob death leading to an unending chain of corpses that ceases only when the zone is depopulated. Nevermind Charging every 12 seconds. Or how the stance redesign means you don’t have to worry about weaving stance requirements into all these cool buttons.
Hrgh. I kinda want to start playing right now…
At the moment, I am back on the paladin simply because that character is my historical main. And, you know, I was informed about all these new BoA heirloom weapons and Az is the only toon with 500+ Archaeology. In fact, that is sort of where I am right now: spending probably 3 minutes reading about WoW for every minute playing. Which, of course, is exactly how I played the game for 4+ years.
Things Are Looking Grim
Yeah… I’m not sure about this whole WoW thing anymore. Again.
I have not really bothered logging in since the last time I wrote about it, which means I am less than 10 quests into the expansion on any character. On Tuesday, I had an extra long length of time available to play, so I buckled down for the long-haul. Before heading out of Stormwind again though, I decided to continue feeding Auctionator some additional data and perhaps looking into pimping my 85s a bit with some blue gear. Or, hey! I have alts with professions that need leveled, so why not kill half a dozen birds with some AH stones in the form of buying some crafting mats?
Let’s see here… wait a minute…
Wait, that’s TOTAL?
I thought Auctionator was bugging out on me when it completed the AH scan in literally two seconds, while also stating there are 52 epic items scanned. “That can’t possibly be correct… can it?” Yes, in fact, it can. A generic search for epic items in all categories reveals a total of 137 auctions (presumably 52 unique items). Now, it is certainly possible that I have missed a major announcement when it comes to scaling back BoE epic items, and Wowhead is telling me there are are only 134 epic non-BoP, non-heroic raid items in this expansion.
But what is being presented to me here is truly ridiculous. Aunchindoun-US was always a low-pop server, but as my early posts under PVsAH demonstrated, there was at least a functioning marketplace where you could be a big fish in a little pond. What I am seeing is not a little pond, it is moist patch of earth. Checking even the expansion staples like Ghost Iron and Green Tea Leaves only confirmed my suspicions. My faction’s AH officially qualifies as a failed state.
This discovery completely killed the mood, and I logged off. It is obviously possible to level up and even raid without a functioning economy, but why would you? I have mentioned before that I want to play games I can invest in, or at least feel the simulation of investment. Knowing the economy is dead, knowing the server is dead, and knowing that Blizzard isn’t ever going to bite the goddamn bullet and put realms like Auchindoun out of its misery means my incentive to push forward is dead. Server transfer, I hear you ask? Literally $250. Otherwise, if I have to abandon all my alts with all their professions (and pay $25 on top of it all) just for opportunity to have fun playing your game on one character… well, I politely decline.
For the past three expansions, Blizzard has been solving all the problem elements of low-pop servers except the one that matters: the server itself. Play BGs with everyone else, run dungeons with everyone else, raid with everyone else, and now even quest with everyone else. Isn’t it about time you let us be with everyone else?
Of Station Cash and Shift Codes
If you were not already aware, SoE is running a Triple Station Cash day this Friday, the 21st of December. The normal exchange rate is basically 500 SC = $5, so this is a pretty outstanding deal… provided you are into SoE games like, I dunno, PlanetSide 2. I already picked up two $15 prepaid cards at Walmart, which comes with a bonus 500 SC on top of the book value of 1500 SC. On Triple Station Cash days, each $15 card gives 6000 SC. With 23 hours already invested in the game, I figure $30 to unlock (nearly) ALL the things is fair play. If I hold out until another weapon promotion (e.g. they bundle 4-6 weapons together at a discount), those dollars stretch even farther.
In other news, if you have been playing Borderlands 2 lately (or stopped and plan on picking it back up), you should know that they dropped a Shift Code on their Twitter feed that awards 5 Golden Keys. Additionally, there is another Shift code as part of their Claptrap video promotion, bringing the total Golden Key haul to 6. If you have Borderlands 2 on PC, I’ll go ahead and save you some clicks:
- 5 Keys: WT5TB-XC5ZC-CX3T3-BBT3B-B35WB
- 1 Key: KJ5BT-FBKSK-KXJ3T-3BTJT-FJX5C
I haven’t played Borderlands 2 in a few weeks, but plan on booting it back up when the next DLC rolls around (I have the Season Pass); this amount of free uber-gear was enough to get me to log back in to at least redeem the codes. To be honest, I have been increasingly amazed that Gearbox hasn’t been selling Golden Keys for $1 apiece or whatever, as there was definitely a time period in which I would have bought some. On the other hand, I sort through their Twitter feed on a daily basis on the hunt for Shift Codes, so I guess that comes out as a bigger win for them.
The PlanetSide 2 Quickstart Guide
So you went and downloaded PlanetSide 2. Now what?
The following set of tips and tweaks that will hopefully make your beginning experience that much smoother in PlanetSide 2 (hereafter Ps2).
Why Bother in the First Place?
To be completely honest, the new player experience in Ps2 is awful. Right after character creation, you will be drop-podded down into the thickest fighting on the map as a Light Assault class, and probably killed in seconds before you even had the chance to look at the keybindings. You will empty a clip into the first enemy you see, and they will turn around and kill you with two bullets. Your HUD will be filled with icons that may as well be Egyptian hieroglyphics, there will be cooldowns and resources and cash shop items and oh my god get me out of here. The entire purpose of this quickstart guide is to soften the blow, but you are still going to be punched in the face. So why bother, especially with this F2P game?
Because this happens:
Escorting the 15-man Galaxy so it can break a stalemate.
And this happens:
Moments before your squad’s own deployment.
Oh, and this was yesterday:
Still frames doesn’t do the firefight justice.
I am not a part of a Guild/Outfit, I did not schedule my play session, I know none of the people I was playing with, and I likely won’t even see them again. Many people will say that the “correct” way to play Ps2 will be a part of an organized group of friends. That might be more fun, but it can be plenty fun logging in solo. Will you experience the sort of uniform fun that comes from playing a few maps of Battlefield 3? Not all the time, no. But I can say you will never get a moment in BF3 when you are flying in formation with 20+ other airplanes, raining havoc upon your foes. Or having the ability to create a tank on a whim, instead of waiting for a respawn.
Suffice it to say, when Ps2 is good, it’s really good. When it’s not, it’s not. This guide is about getting more of the former, and less of the latter.
Finding the Action
So you’ve just been killed within 30 seconds of starting the game for the first time, or maybe you have just been wandering around, lost and confused. Where is all the action taking place?
First, hit either Esc or M to bring up your main menu:
First thing I do whenever I log on.
- Click the Social button.
- Click the Join Squad button next to a squad you think will work for you.
- Click the Map button.
- In the lower-left part of the map, click Squad Leader and then Deploy.
If you follow the steps, you will be drop-podded near where the squad leader is located, which will typically be in the middle of a war-zone. From there, find some friendlies and follow them around, occasionally shooting bad guys. There is no guarantee that your squad knows what it is doing, but the idea is to get yourself acclimated to this particular FPS flow, with base layouts, how firefights play out, and so on.
When you die – and you will, many, many times – you will see a screen like this:
Get used to it.
First thing I’d recommend, if you haven’t already, is change your class: click on either the Combat Medic or Engineer. For the Deployment locations, they are generally listed in the distance from where you were killed. You will not always be able to respawn near where you were fighting; sometimes your spawn location will be taken over (if a base) or otherwise destroyed (Sunderer). A Sunderer is a troop carrier vehicle that can deploy into a mobile spawn location, and will be your best friend in any base assault.
It is also worth noting that the little symbols on the right end of the bar correspond to what kind of consoles are located there. Every base will have a Pistol icon (Infantry console), but whether there are others depends on the base layout. For example, if I want to spawn somewhere where I can create an airplane, I’ll need to choose one of the bottom two.
What Do I Do?
The general idea is to take over every base on the map. Each area on the map will have one or more types of bases, ranging from small outposts to those huge Biodomes you can see from miles away. Taking over bases involves putting warm bodies next to the capture nodes for the base/region and waiting for a bar to fill up. In larger bases, there will be generators that power shields that keep your faction’s vehicles at bay, along with shields that protect a 2nd generator keeping the enemy’s spawn location active.
It sounds complicated, and to be honest, I believe it is overly complicated for no reason. If you familiarize yourself with the various icons though, it becomes much easier to follow.
Not pictured: 167 other stupid icons.
Basically, if you see the Up Arrow icon in someone else’s colors, go there, and hang out near the weird data thing pictured in the lower right. You can see your progress towards capturing this particular node in the center top of your screen. Once captured, you should be able to start spawning near this location. If you see an [A] icon instead, that means… well, do the exact same thing. The key difference is that capturing an [A] node is just as quick as before, but your faction won’t actually own that point on the map until that second bar in the center-left part of your screen fills up. With bigger bases, you will also need to cap [B] and [C] if they exist. I don’t know for sure whether the map only caps if there are people hanging out near a capture point, but hang out anyway; being near a facility being capped gives you a huge XP bonus (enough for +4 Certs for a Biodome, in fact).
Not pictured above are the various generator icons, the respawn generator icon for large facilities, and other things. While you do want to help blow generators up (go up to them and hold E to destabilize them), it is not something I would focus on as a brand new player. You are likely going to be of much more use helping your team cap nodes than bringing down the shields so your tank column can set up shop outside the enemy respawn location.
Teleporters are probably useful. Use them. Indeed, if you are assaulting a Biodome, if you capture the outlying bases (they will have the Up Arrow symbol near them) then you gain access to a teleporter that sends you to a shielded room in the heart of the Biodome. “Shielded” as in you can shoot enemies out of the room, but they cannot shoot you inside. Biodomes sieges in general are good sources of close-quarters killing/farming XP.
There are three types of consoles are indicated by their symbol: Pistols (Infantry), Tanks (Vehicles), and Airplanes (Airplanes) Go up and press E to use them. You can restock ammo infinitely at the Infantry consoles, along with changing your class. Vehicle and Airplane consoles are pretty straightforward, and you should never feel like you don’t know enough about the vehicle in question to build one and drive it around. Each player has their own individual Resource pools from which to build vehicles, it fills up by X amount every 5 minutes automatically, and it has a cap of 750 points. Ergo, if you have 750 Mechanized Resources and aren’t building a tank, then those Resources are going to waste.
Speaking of wasted points, here is another Pro Tip: you spend Infantry Resources to get more grenades (among other things).
Yet another thing that should have been in a tutorial.
- If you have more than 100 Infantry Resources, go ahead and stock up on (explosive) consumables.
- Pick the class with the consumable (grenades are universal), then click a Loadout.
- Click on Grenade or Utility, depending on what you have.
- Make sure the appropriate item is selected, then click Resupply.
The short version is that things like grenades are considered one-use consumables; you can only carry one grenade at a time (unless you unlock more), but you might only start with 5 total across all your classes. Since the only other use of Infantry Resources is busting out a MAX unit, anytime you have more than ~100 points, spend them to stock up on your consumables (which includes medpacks, proximity mines, C-4, and anything else you’ve unlocked). If you let your Infantry Resources cap out at 750, you are seriously hurting yourself later should you get into a situation that calls for some supplemental utility.
Classes
As I mentioned before, I am recommending the Combat Medic or Engineer for new players. Why? Not only are both useful in a group setting, but you are also much more self-sufficient as either class than you would be by yourself. And until you get a handle on what is going on, you are probably going to find yourself lost and alone pretty often. Here is a quick rundown:
- Infiltrator – Press F to cloak, but you cannot fire or be healed. Class is a bit weak until you unlock better sniper rifles. Hack enemy consoles by pressing E.
- Light Assault – Double-tap or hold Spacebar for jetpack. If you are ever fighting somewhere that you can get to without a jetpack, you are doing it wrong.
- Combat Medic – Press F for AoE heal (including yourself). Use your heal gun on people; revive the dead. When you revive someone, finish healing them.
- Engineer – Drop ammo boxes, drop a turret that you can man. Repair everything, especially friendly MAX units.
- Heavy Assault – Press F for an extra shield. Only class with default ability to hurt vehicles via rocket launcher.
- MAX – Press F to run fast for a few seconds. Left-click left gun, right-click right gun. Swap anti-tank weapon for anti-air depending on fight.
Personally, I play Engineer 90% of the time in-game. Running out of ammo is a pretty major concern in Ps2, and few people run around as Engineers despite it being an easy source of XP. Each time someone gets resupplied, you get 10xp, or 10% of a kill. Plus, after you take a base, there is typically a lot of repairing that needs to be done to get the AA guns and consoles back online.
Miscellaneous Tips
- There is friendly fire in this game.
- You can move your drop pod slightly with WASD. Aim for rooftops.
- Press Q all the time. It will help you spot enemies you didn’t actually see. Plus, if someone kills them you get free Spotting XP.
- The secondary fire (press B) of the Engineer Turret is another ammo pack. Once you buy some other Utility item, drop your “regular” ammo packs and get the benefits of having both.
- You can swap out a MAX’s weapon loadout at any Infantry console without losing the MAX itself. If you switch classes though, the MAX goes on cooldown.
- Drop an ammo pack near Sunderers, get massive amounts of Resupply XP from people running back to change classes/get more ammo.
- Normal guns can damage light aircraft (Scythes, etc), so shoot at them to encourage them to go somewhere else. Larger aircraft are immune, though.
Certifications, aka Certs
All the XP you are earning is basically a means to get additional Cert points to unlock new weapons, gear, attachments, and… well, everything. The Cert interface is pretty confusing, especially when you start browsing the weapons, but there are some inexpensive items to get you started.
Another UI element that could be cleaned up.
In the screenshot above, we are looking at the Suit Slot of the Heavy Assault class. Note that there are six different options, but you can only equip one of the upgrades under the specific tab at a time. I already have the first rank in Nanoweave Armor, which gives me 10% base health and cost exactly one (1) Cert to purchase; the next rank is pretty inexpensive at 10 Certs as well. The different classes usually have different options, although sometimes an unlock is class-wide, such as Medpacks and even some weapons like shotguns. If you unlock something new, such as a gun attachment or the aforementioned Nanoweave Armor, you have to specifically equip it in a Loadout before it takes effect.
The above process is the same for vehicle Certs.
Are there must-have Certs, or always-avoid Certs? Probably. I recommend getting the Nanoweave Armor upgrade on all your classes since it is 1 Cert a pop, for example. There are some similarly cheap upgrades for the healing/repair guns. I might also recommend unlocking Medpacks since they get unlocked for all classes with a single purchase (don’t forget to equip them and buy more with Infantry Resources!). From there is starts to hugely depend on what class you have found yourself gravitating towards. Since I enjoy the Engineer the most, I went ahead and bought him some Proximity Mines. Just yesterday I purchased C-4 for my Light Assault as an investment in future shenanigans.
When it comes to weapons, I have been playing it pretty slow and avoiding spending any Certs. The majority of the guns cost a whopping 1000 Certs, which is probably 10-20 hours of straight gaming assuming you know what you are doing; no matter how cool the weapon, you are likely go to get a lot more mileage out of class upgrades than weapons, especially since the former cannot be purchased with Station Cash (only boosts). Once you do find a weapon you enjoy using though, I recommend investing in a better scope and horizontal stabilizer.
By the way, you will passively earn roughly ~12 Certs overnight. It is not a whole lot, and you stop earning them after 48 hours of not logging on, but there are some decent early ranks you can pick up with that amount.
How Much Will This Really Cost Me?
It’s Free to Play, bro.
…for the most part. We all know F2P games are not always as free as they appear, but Ps2 is a lot better than any I seen. The 1000 Cert floor for most weapons takes them off the table for rational people, and while all of them being “sidegrades” is probably a bit too charitable, I am extremely satisfied with the default guns (as Vanu… your faction mileage may vary).
The only point at which I feel at a decided disadvantage is when it comes to the Heavy Assault rocket launchers and the light aircraft rocket pods. The default dumb-fire rocket launcher for the Heavy deals the most damage out of the available options, but the AA rocket launcher can change a “getting farmed in respawn location by aircraft” engagement into an enemy rout. On the flip side, flying a light aircraft with the A2G rocket pods can turn you into a jealous Greek god, meting out judgment upon the lowly worms in your warpath.
There are ways around these limitations – switch to a MAX with an AA gun if aircraft are near, and… just use your machine gun or not fly – but these were definite F2P thumbscrews for me. I have heard similar things regarding High-Explosive rounds for tanks vs the default ammo, but I have not used ground vehicles all that much when I could be getting my Greek on.
Important note: Cert/Station Cash unlocks are currently character-specific. In other words, if you dropped some real cash unlocking rocket pods for the Scythe (Vanu faction), you cannot use those rocket pods on another Vanu character on another server, or different faction on the same server. This is slated to change in future, i.e. unlocks becoming account-wide, but there was no timeline given so who knows when that will go into affect. Such a change will apparently be retroactive, but in the meantime, it is a good idea to stick to a faction/character you think you can live with.
Conclusion
If all the negative press regarding the new player experience has made you leery of downloading Ps2… well, it’s true. The new player experience sucks. However! From what I have been reading, the developers are listening to and implementing feedback at a pretty quick clip. Plus, hopefully this Quickstart guide will ease your passing into what I have found to be a very entertaining FPS.
Honestly, after being able to create vehicles on a whim, I don’t know if I will be able to go back to the Battlefield 3 model of camping the helicopter pad for a chance at 3 minutes of fun. There are still timers in Ps2 to prevent light aircraft spam, but between using Certs to reduce the timer or simply creating a tank to wait down the clock, I am never at a lack for mayhem to get into.
Into the Breach
It has technically been four days since I started playing WoW again.
Awakening at my favorite spot after 1.5+ years.
I say “technically” as the first two sessions were 1-2 hours long and essentially involved me downloading and configuring over a dozen addons because Blizzard’s UI options are atrocious. It has been more than a year since I last played, and I understand that a lot of my ire would not exist had I been playing continuously this whole time. But that is exactly my point. To someone just coming back into WoW from a long absence, the returning user experience is pretty bad. Not quite PlanetSide 2 starting experience bad, but close.
My first issue was with the UI scale. When I looked at my old WoW screenshots, it looks like I was running around in 1280×960 resolution, which was fine at the time. Now that I have a 24″ monitor that nags me for being in anything less than 1920×1080, within five minutes I started developing neck pain from having to look to the far corners of the screen to squint at quest text. My initial scan of the options left me with the impression that no scaling UI option existed, so I ended up spending most of Tuesday mucking around with the impenetrable MoveAnything addon and reconfiguring by hand. Eventually, I wised up and Googled my way to the UI Scale slider, but this was way after any rational person would have given up.
Something has gone terribly wrong.
After two days of screwing around, I did approximately six of the new Pandaria quests before I simply logged off. Unlike a lot of GW2 ex-pats, the clunkiness I experienced with, say, the combat had nothing to do with standing still and trading blows – it was with much simpler things. For example, I kept trying to press E to interact with NPCs or loot bodies. Nope, I have that key bound to Crusader Strike (or whatever primary attack I have for the class/spec I’m playing) because, you know, solely clicking on shit with the mouse never went out of style. And can a brother move a goddamn window please? Maybe I want my quest text a little more to the center of the screen. You never know how much you can miss simply moving shit around until it’s gone.
There were some things I appreciated though. When it came time to assign talent points, I did not feel the immediate need to look builds up on ElitistJerks. In fact, it was the first time in years where the entire talent selection process felt… pleasant. “Huh. I’ll probably use this one more than that one. Oh, this one looks fun… I’ll take it.” The glyph system felt similarly serine, although that was mainly because there did not appear to be any actual useful glyphs for Retribution.
Which reminds me: designers, stop being idiotic by ignoring opportunity costs. I can understand the rationale of changing the glyph system to be different than simply +5% DPS options; the Enchanting and Gemming system already has you well covered there. But why would you give people 20+ glyphs with upsides balanced with downsides for three limited slots? If you ask me to choose between X and Y, the downside to X is losing the chance to pick Y. If Y is so bad no one would ever choose it, yeah, maybe it looks like X has no downside… but that’s the designer’s fault for screwing up Y. As it stands, my paladin glyph choices were made based on which ones I could take that inconvenienced me the least. If I felt more comfortable having empty glyph slots, I would have left them that way.
Anyway, some other things I appreciated were the “What Has Changed” tab and the rotation guide thing. The spellbook being divided into spec-specific abilities was helpful, even though it baffles me why Retribution is so limited ability-wise. The Dungeon Journal interface is incredibly slick, and this was the first time I ever looked at it, believe it or not.
Whoever finally convinced the devs to do this deserves a raise.
When one of my (ex-former?) guildmates was showing off some of the new pets though, trying to bring out one of my own felt like opening one of those trick cans that shoot the snake and confetti out. “Oh, right, the Pet Battle thing.” It looked pretty overwhelming, to be honest, but I like the way it was set up graphically (I haven’t actually battled anything yet).
I am going to stick with WoW for now because playing games I don’t immediately like until I do (or until the cognitive dissonance kicks in) is my M.O. around here, but I just want to say: good lord, my first impression was bad. If there was ever a moment that I doubted WoW’s longevity was primarily due to social inertia, it has finally past today. It isn’t about the graphics or combat mechanics being old, it’s about downloading a bunch of 3rd-party tweaks just to make the game somewhat playable¹. Which is completely ridiculous if you think about it. If I were a normal person trying to come back again, I would have uninstalled within the first half hour.
But (un)luckily for you, I’m not, I didn’t, and god have mercy on my soul free time.
¹ “Playable” being a term relative to the other games one is playing, of course.
“Salad Dressing Weekly”
The following excerpt (it’s actually almost the entire article) is from a Wired interview with Ken Levine regarding why Bioshock Infinite has such generic box art:
When I got to sit down with Infinite‘s creative director Ken Levine on Thursday after playing the game and asked for his thoughts, I got an extensive, thoughtful answer that in a perfect world would put an end to all of the bellyaching.
“I understand that some of the fans are disappointed. We expected it. I know that may be hard to hear, but let me explain the thinking.”
“We went and did a tour… around to a bunch of, like, frathouses and places like that. People who were gamers. Not people who read IGN. And [we] said, so, have you guys heard of BioShock? not a single one of them had heard of it.”
“And we live in this very special… you know, BioShock is a reasonably successful franchise, right? Our gaming world, we sometimes forget, is so important to us, but… there are plenty of products that I buy that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. My salad dressing. If there’s a new salad dressing coming out, I would have no idea. I use salad dressing; I don’t read Salad Dressing Weekly. I don’t care who makes it, I don’t know any of the personalities in the salad dressing business.”
“For some people, [games are] like salad dressing. Or movies, or TV shows. It was definitely a reality check for us. Games are big, and they’re expensive, I think that’s very clear. And to be successful, and to continue to make these kinds of games which frankly, of the people who make these types of games, there’s not a lot of them, and they haven’t exactly been the most successful with these types of games that have come out in the last few years. I was thrilled because I love them, and I hope that we had some small role in getting those games greenlit… But they have to be financially successful to keep getting made.”
“I looked at the cover art for BioShock 1, which I was heavily involved with and love, I adored. And I tried to step back and say, if I’m just some guy, some frat guy, I love games but don’t pay attention to them… if I saw the cover of that box, what would I think? And I would think, this is a game about a robot and a little girl. That’s what I would think. I was trying to be honest with myself. Trust me, I was heavily involved with the creation of those characters and I love them.”
“Would I buy that game if I had 60 bucks and I bought three games a year… would I even pick up the box? I went back to the box for System Shock 1, which was obviously incredibly imporatnt — that game was incredibly influential on me, System Shock 2 was the first game I ever made. I remember I picked it up… looked at it and I said, I have no idea what this game is. And I didn’t have a lot of money back then. So, back on the shelf. And I was a gamer.”
“I wanted the uninformed, the person who doesn’t read IGN… to pick up the box and say, okay, this looks kind of cool, let me turn it over. Oh, a flying city. Look at this girl, Elizabeth on the back. Look at that creature. And start to read about it, start to think about it.”
“I understand that our fan says, that’s great Ken, what’s in it for me? One, we need to be successful to make these types of games, and I think it’s important, and I think the cover is a small price for the hardcore gamer to pay. I think also when we do something for the hardcore gamer, there’s something we’re talking about and something we’re sure about. The thing we’re sure about is that we’re going to be releasing a whole set of alternate covers that you can download and print. We’re going to be working with the community to see what they’re interested in.”
“We had to make that tradeoff in terms of where we were spending our marketing dollars. By the time you get to the store, or see an ad, the BioShock fan knows about the game. The money we’re spending on PR, the conversations with games journalists — that’s for the fans. For the people who aren’t informed, that’s who the box art is for.”
I like this excerpt for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I think its useful to occasionally be reminded that the majority of the games we like playing couldn’t have been made without a bunch of other people paying for them too; people who “don’t get it,” or otherwise are incapable of appreciating the game for what it is or what it represents. There are some outliers as always, high-profile titles exclusively geared to its niche, and thankfully the positive PR around the indie movement has made it possible to break the AAA budget straightjacket.
But sometimes the “dumbing down” is, in fact, necessary. Or at least useful in ensuring that you see more development from that studio/those designers.
Overboard
I am officially back in action, having successfully moved all my shit across town and (more importantly) getting the internet hooked up at the new place. During the transition, I took the opportunity to indulge in my baser whims, and ended up purchasing the Playstation 3, a very decent TV to play it on, and… games. All of the games.
- Demon Souls
- Journey Collector’s Edition (Journey, Flower, flOw)
- Final Fantasy XIII
- Heavy Rain
- Catherine
- Metal Gear Solid 4
- ICO & Shadow of the Colossus bundle
- Red Dead Redemption: Game of the Year Edition
- Valkyria Chronicles
- Uncharted 1 & 2 (came with PS3)
- Infamous 1 & 2 (came with PS3)
- Bayonetta
In fact, I might have gone a bit overboard, even though all of them were less than $20 apiece.
Scratch that, I know I have gone overboard, because this also happened:
Well… I… but… MoP was $20 so I thought… sigh
The funny thing is that I have so much choice at the moment, that I have chosen not to play anything just yet. The only game I have booted up in the last 48 hours has been XCOM (it was $28 at GMG over the holiday), and that was just because it was one of the few Steam titles that I could play in Offline Mode. I only played XCOM until the end of the tutorial (difficulty Normal Ironman), but so far it has piqued my interest. Then again, I should also probably get back on the WoW train if for no other reason than to actually use the last few remaining free days. And then there is some PlanetSide 2 things I want to talk about. Nevermind the fact that I should probably finish hooking up my PS3 and pop at least one disc in the tray…
So, yeah. Overboard.
Since I am already in for a penny, might as well get all the pounds: if there is some PS3/console exclusive title that I should be on the lookout for come Xmas sale time, let me know in the comments. For example, I almost overlooked Bayonetta until I saw it on eBay last night.
Reviews: Darksiders, Greed Corp, Nimbus
Game: Darksiders
Recommended price: $5
Metacritic Score: 83
Completion Time: ~19 hours
Buy If You Like: Devil May Cry/God of War meets Zelda meets comic book
There are zero complaints in the visual department.
Darksiders is a 3rd-person action game with puzzle elements that tries to straddle the line between Devil May Cry/God of War demon-killing and the sort of casual world exploration and puzzles of Zelda games. You control War, one of the four horsemen, who gets framed for starting the apocalypse party early, which results in the death of the entire human race. As you struggle to clear your name and/or figure out who was responsible, you kill a lot of demons and four-story bosses while uncovering new items and re-unlocking your prior abilities.
While it seems the most popular comparison is with Zelda games instead of Devil May Cry, I just felt the puzzle elements in Darksiders were curiously out of place. The visually stunning post-apocalyptic landscape is rife with ready-made puzzle elements, but I never got over the fact that War couldn’t just scale that wall with his big-ass metal hand. Are you telling me I can wield a car like a baseball bat, but I can’t just stack some debris in the corner and use that to reach the 2nd floor? Why aren’t I just punching down every door I encounter, especially when I unlock the Power Glove Gauntlet that lets me punch icebergs? While the puzzles do keep combat from growing too stale, after a while you realize that more than half of your game time is spent in empty rooms moving boxes around (etc). That might be fine thematically for a 14-year old elf-boy, but it never felt right for a horseman of the goddamn apocalypse.
That said, I did end up enjoying my time in Darksiders. The game is incredibly stylistic, the visuals are fantastic, and the action is pretty serviceable in a button-mashing way. Although I just pooh-poohed the puzzles, that is mainly because of the tone of the game, rather than the puzzles themselves being annoying. Indeed, while demon locks do appear on some doors arbitrarily, the majority of the puzzles are based on more “realistic” scenarios. You know, assuming that it’s realistic to punch subway cars into place but not use that same power to knock some tree limbs out of the way.
On a final note, if you play on the PC as I did, the port job is not especially keyboard-friendly; in terms of lazy port, it ranks up there with the original Borderlands for PC. I still WASD’d my way through the game anyway, but it was seriously annoying how anyone thought “Tab + number” was a good button combo to select abilities while running around.
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Game: Greed Corp
Recommended price: Bundle
Metacritic Score: 76
Completion Time: ~8 hours
Buy If You Like: Symmetrical puzzle/strategy games
Definitely more Checkers than Chess.
Greed Corp is a strategy game that is a lesson in efficient and frugal design. Whereas in an RTS-style game you can have three factions with totally unique units and hundreds of different forms of interaction, Greed Corp is pretty simple; there is one walker unit, one factory that builds walkers, one cannon, one consumable unit that flies walkers to a different hex, one harvesting building, and the resources being harvested is the terrain itself. The goal is to use all of those things to remove your opposition from the map, sometimes quite literally.
Regardless, there is can be a surprising bit of depth to the shenanigans. For example, the harvesters knock its own hex and all surrounding hexes down one level at the beginning of your turn (hexes brought below level 1 crumble apart). There is no way to remove a harvesters other than self-destructing it, which knocks another level off each surrounding hex, along with sinking the main hex down into the abyss. What this can lead to is sending a single unit flying into your enemy’s island territory, plopping down a harvester, and laughing maniacally (or sobbing in frustration, depending) as that whole island eventually breaks apart.
Eventually though, my enjoyment evaporated once the late-game Expert-level AI opponents started demonstrating the weaknesses of perfectly symmetrical maps. Namely that it didn’t matter how clever your own strategy was when all it takes is one of the three random opponents to opportunistically ruin your day. When the outcome of your best-laid plans devolve into “whoever moves last wins,” it is time to move on.
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Game: Nimbus
Recommended price: Bundle
Metacritic Score: 80
Completion Time: ~6 hours
Buy If You Like: Twitch-based puzzle “platformers”
Kinda like a flying Super Meat Boy.
In essence, Nimbus is a pretty simple twitch-based puzzle-platformer… sorta. You control a ship that has no means of self-propulsion, and thus must rely entirely on environmental objects and inertia to ensure you do not become stranded on the ground (which kills you). Some of those objects are bumpers that always gives you a set amount of boost when collided with, some are speed squares that can accelerate you to dizzying velocity if you loop into them multiple times, and still others are little cannons which give you some respite along with directional control over your exit. The end goal is to touch the exit checkerboard squares as fast as possible, while also grabbing the secret coins hidden (sometimes diabolically) around the level if you are so inclined – doing so can sometimes unlock bonus levels.
It did not take me long to confirm that the old adage of “quick to learn, difficult to master” is fully applicable to Nimbus. While successful execution is the most important aspect of the game, Nimbus does a phenomenal job at keeping each level feeling fresh and unique like a brand new puzzle. Just when you start feeling comfortable with all the deadly spikes on the walls, you encounter a map that requires you to ram into spheres to trigger gate openings like a physics-based platformer. And just as you are getting used to some of the spheres having spikes on them, you are faced with a level where all the walls are made of deadly lasers. And then there are the ridiculous reverse-gravity levels. In short, Nimbus deftly avoids new puzzle elements feeling like gimmicks and more like natural progression.
I did not end up completing Nimbus though, as the later levels quickly outstripped my twitch abilities, even after ditching the keyboard for an Xbox controller. If you are not a fan of twitch platformers like Super Meat Boy, unfortunately you aren’t likely to enjoy Nimbus at all; there are few things more frustrating than knowing what you have to do, but running into that same goddamn spike wall for the 13th time in a row and redoing the entire level from scratch (there are checkpoint cannons, but sometimes only past certain points).
If you do happen to enjoy those sort of games though, Nimbus will certainly give you a run for your money. Not only are there secret coins to collect, but each level has a Steam leaderboard to compare best times as well.
Chicken & Eggs, PlanetSide Edition
I have been playing around with PlanetSide 2 (Ps2) for the past couple of days.
As far as initial impressions go, the “introduction” to Ps2 is uniformly awful. Oh, hey, they lifted the character creation head presets from Fallout. Pick a faction and server without knowing anything about either. And before you even get a chance to check out character/class settings and such, you are launched via drop pod into the heaviest fighting on the map and, in all likelihood, killed immediately. Now that you have some free time, go ahead and look over the thoroughly unhelpful menus while trying to ascertain to what degree SOE is set to gouge your wallet (spoiler: the Nth degree).
Not that it really matters, but hey.
Once you finally respawn, things do not get much better that first day. Coming from Battlefield 3 and even Tribes, killing people seems to take 1-2 seconds of full-auto fire more than it should. It is also difficult to tell who the enemy actually is – while you get a No Smoking sign on your crosshairs when aiming at a friendly, everyone has the same profile and even colors at first glance. Character animations look stiff, and the models seem lifted from Natural Selection, that Half-Life mod from a decade ago.
I respawned time and time again, courageously throwing myself in front of bullets intended for players actually capable of accomplishing something, while I returned fire with my Nerf Gun that shoots wads of wet tissue paper. In a lull in the dying action, I tried deciphering the stone tablet hieroglyphics that was my minimap. “Generator destroyed.” “Generator repaired.” Was that a good or bad thing? Whose generator? When the the vehicle I was spawning at finally got destroyed, I found myself literal miles away from any discernible action, with no way of knowing where to go, what to do, or why I was doing this instead of finishing packing.
I was lost and alone in the blinding snow.
Forever Alone…
The second and third days, by contrast, were infinitely better.
It took a lot of outside research, but I started understanding the pros and cons of the various classes. I learned enough about Certs (i.e. upgrade points) to know what they are, how to get more, and good places to spend them. I used Reddit to find a Google Doc that explained what the symbols on the map are, how to properly assault a Bio Dome, and some tricks for getting around. I learned enough about the weapon shop to know how badly SOE is gouging me (way worse than Tribes: Ascend, by the way)… but also the cool bit where you take a new weapon out for a 30 minute test-drive without paying anything.¹
On the third day, I found one of the best features in almost any game I have ever played:
Please make this the future.
I called this post Chicken & Eggs because games like PlanetSide 2 (and nearly all MMOs) require you to have social structures in place before you can really start having fun. Social structures which, incidentally, seem like a waste of time to seek out/develop when you aren’t having fun. “Join a guild to have a good time.” Why would I, if I’m not having fun currently? Which is supposed to come first? I am not necessarily suggesting that fun should occur without effort, but let’s be serious for minute: there are a hundred different games you could be playing right now that are fun from the word Go.
While I still believe the First Day experience in PlanetSide 2 is pretty awful, I absolutely love this grouping system with descriptions they have in-game and hope this sort of idea is lifted wholesale by every MMO multiplayer game. Why can’t there be some sort of in-game bulletin-board-esque system that allows like-minded individuals find each other in every game? Why do socially-oriented games basically require out-of-game social structures to work at all? I have always enjoyed the no-obligation/instant grouping of LFD, but I still recognize the existence of a social hole it cannot fill. Yet here, in a single simple feature, I can differentiate between the friendly strangers, the SRS BSNS folks, jokers wanting to recreate that helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now, and more.
So come on, social game designers, this is not that hard a concept. If the game is made better by playing with people we know, make it easier to get to know people in your own goddamn game. Nearly 99% of everyone I know online I originally met through WoW or blogging about WoW. Make your game a foundation for new friendships (by making it easier to do so) and people will continue coming back. We get the opportunity to express ourselves and meet new people, and you (likely) get a pair or more of multi-year customers.
¹ This feature is cool, but it has a 30-day cooldown on that specific weapon, and starts up an 8-hour cooldown on every other item. Apparently this cooldown is per character though, so you can cheese the limitation by rolling a new toon, trying it out, and then deleting it later.
In An Age 
XCOMed
Dec 27
Posted by Azuriel
By the time this gets posted, I will probably be done with my first play-through of XCOM: Enemy Within after ~20 hours.
Taking the advice of many others, I started out with Normal Ironman difficulty which turns the game into a sort of roguelike. While I have lost quite a few agents, the majority of them were rookie redshirts I tasked with carrying around the stun gun to take the aliens alive. A sort of morbid hazing ritual, if you will. An unfortunate few were grizzled veterans who got one-shot by new alien types before I had a chance to realize the danger. Or simply victims of poor planning when the only guy with a Medkit is the one bleeding to death. Too bad all the people standing around him cannot, you know, take the Medkit from his pocket and spray him, but I suppose knowledge of medicinal nanomachine application is only imparted at the character select screen.
I always find it interesting how I start developing relationships with the randomly generated characters though. Name, gender, nickname, nationality, and even class are all randomly determined, but you can customize some of those qualities. One stun gun redshirt managed to beat the odds and survive the bagging of two new alien species… and suddenly I am taking Chloe Dupont the saucy German Assault trooper with me everywhere. Mechanically, Chloe is indistinguishable from any of the other max-level Assault troopers, but I have had more fun
ordering herwatching her aggressively breach UFOs armed with a shotgun and the same stun gun she has carried since her initiation than any of the others. Just yesterday there was a rather hilarious moment when I put her on Overwatch mode, and during the enemy turn one Muton Elite turned a corner only to get an Alloy shot in the face, while a second Muton triggered her auto-reaction shot when it climbed a ladder I didn’t realize she was standing next to. It was practically a scene out of an action movie.Other times, I sorta feel bad bringing, say, any new sniper because that entire class is cursed. “Sorry, Yoshio Saito of Japan. You’re probably going to die.” Sure enough, that is the mission when the aliens start using grenades, a redshirt bites the dust, my other redshirt panics and, in defiance of his accuracy rate for the entire goddamn mission up to this point, shoots Saito in the back of the head, killing him instantly.
Anyway, game is pretty fun thus far and the full review will need to wait until A) I finish, and possibly B) I try out Classic Ironman. The only negative I have is the slight impression that the game isn’t really all that deep for a “tactical” game. A lot of times I feel like I’m playing a turn-based Dawn of War 2, or one of those WW2 squad-based cover games. Also, the game is terrible when it comes to indicating at which locations (and elevations!) you can actually see/shoot at the aliens someone else sees before moving there. If you have already committed your game to having grid-based movement, give me grid-based weapon ranges and Line-of-Sight indicators.
XCOM is no Final Fantasy Tactics, or Tactics Ogre for that matter, but it is pretty good nevertheless.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: FFT, Ironman, Medkit, Redshirt, Roguelike, Tactics, Tactics Ogre, XCOM