That Old Difficulty Bugbear
Another MMO difficulty discussion has appeared!
Both Keen and Bhagpuss have posts up, with the former talking about being praised for running his healer over to the tank during aggro, and the latter missing:
Having to look around, pay attention, evaluate the situation, review options, compare current circumstances with previous experience. I miss the need to know, in detail, what tools I have in the box and which ones I need to pull out when. Crucially, I miss having the time to do all that and enjoy it.
This discussion is a bit different than the usual “good ole days” ones though. For one thing, Burning Crusade was relevant up into the end of 2008, and I distinctly remember entire heroic dungeon stratagems revolving around face-pulling with the paladin tank and then hiding in a door corner Consecrating and hoping for the best. Wrath shifted things a year later, of course, but the raids brought them back. Then there was Cataclysm for a minute. A minute too long IMO, but nevermind.
Point being, it’s been less than a decade. And potentially zero difference in coordination required, depending on the content you are doing. I’m not sure what the “Unrest Fireplace” deal is, but if it requires 6+ people with crazy pulls and such, that almost sounds raid-ish. Or Challenge Mode-ish. Sure, it might also be “open-world” content, but let’s be serious: there isn’t much difference.
The Bhagpuss angle is also interesting, as he admits that it isn’t a lack of challenge per se, but rather a changing in what the challenge consists of:
Players and developers alike have come to expect overt, clear signals in the form of ground markers, circles, cones, colors and written or spoken instructions. We’ve gone from improvisational theater to an on-book recital with cue-cards and a prompt.
What Bhagpuss misses is the “local knowledge,” which dictated which mobs were easy and which were not, which guards would protect you, where the safest farming spots were, and so on. And… that’s okay, I guess. It is indeed a challenge type that has been entirely supplanted by modern games with mods and Wikis and crowdsourced and datamined knowledge, often weeks before the content even goes Live.
On the other hand… if you had time to improv, was the content really that difficult?
And what does it say about the difficulty itself, if it were dependent on the slow accretion of experience? I do not consider trial and error particularly challenging. Nor memory games, for that matter. Which really just leaves… execution. The eponymous Raid Dance. I don’t know any people who are seriously thrilled about a difficulty that revolves around playing voidzone Guitar Hero for 12 full minutes, but a challenge that can be defeated via YouTube isn’t much of a challenge either, IMO.
There really isn’t one answer here. Everyone wants content tailored to their skill level, which means we all end up wanting different things. I will say though that many MMOs actually do have what Keen and Bhagpuss are probably looking for, in at least token amounts. If you want an entire game revolving around that though, sorry, you are going to have to stick with the niche titles. Because for however many amazing experiences you had, twenty other people died for what seemed like no reason, their group fell apart, and they lost hours of their life.
These days, you will know why you failed: you stood in the fire.
Ark: Griefing Evolved
I picked up Ark for $12 as part of the Humble Monthly bundle the other day, and my five or so hours with it have been… interesting. Even more interesting was what I was reading on the Steam forums about the recent addition of handcuffs into the game:
Ark is a great game but it’s become unenjoyable for some and unplayable for others. As I write this, my avatar on official server 16 has been caged, immobile and unplayable for over six hours. I’d suicide and respawn… but that’s not an option. […]
And no, you can’t do anything about it. Handcuffs can’t be escaped and don’t allow you to use your hands. No punching walls or using anything to suicide with. Your captors encumber you so you can’t burn stamina, food and water to kill yourself. And captors are able to force feed you to keep you alive indefinitely. So you’re stuck, unable to actually play Ark for as long as they decide to hijack your game.
In case you don’t know much about it, Ark has a “torpor” mechanic that is primarily used to knock out dinosaurs so you can tame them. As it turns out, torpor can also be used on other players (the game is PvP by default). There have been cages and prisons and the like for a while now, but players used to be able to kill themselves by thrashing about, as the esteemed sir throttlejam mentioned above. Handcuffs remove this ability, and make it so that other players can manipulate your inventory directly.
The player responses to throttlejam’s plight go on to demonstrate that one really can justify anything. They basically run the full gamut from “your friends will save you” to “you got what you deserve for not playing with friends” to “go play on a different server.” Quick note: your character’s progress is limited to the specific server you are on. Playing on a different server basically means rerolling.
Some people were doubting throttlejam’s description of events. Surely it can’t be that bad? Which then led to this description:
You’re not unconscious. You’re handcuffed and they put weight in your inventory to encumber you so you can’t move and they force feed you like taming a dino. All you can do is stand there and wait… forever. You’re in a cell made of greenhouse glass and you can see everyone else being held around you… and there are multiple levels of nothing but cells and captive players. I can see them all.
An immobile player uses very little food or water… so it’s not a big drain on a large tribe’s resources to imprison a LOT of player avatars. On this server there are maybe 20 – 30 players online at one time… and these guys have most of those players avatars in lock up. How’s that fun?
…I think I’m done with Ark for now.
For the record, it is not necessarily due to Ark’s dedication to raising the bar for sociopath simulators. Indeed, my gameplay thus far as been entirely on a single-player server – I went to a official PvE server for about five minutes, saw a huge player-constructed tower, and remembered I don’t actually like people all that much. No, I’m primarily done with Ark for the time being because not even a GTX 970 can eek out more than about 24 fps on a good day.
Well, that, and I built a small hut, then a larger hut with a better view, then realized that I’d never be able to farm with a nearby source of water. I actually scouted abroad pretty far, found a nice area near a river, and then it occurred to me that I’d be looking at another half dozen hours just gathering resources. Let alone taming dinosaurs, or venturing out and getting immediately eaten by raptors.
There’s fun, and then there’s fun. I’m more in the mood for the latter.
Dirty Bomb
Dirty Bomb is an Overwatch-esque* TF2 clone in perpetual Open “we’ll take your money though” Beta. It features fast gunplay, pseudo-Titanfall maneuvering, overpowered abilities, and a large roster of $9.99 characters.
Yep, shotgun to chest would explain that death.
I only became interested in Dirty Bomb after the recent Humble Bundle was offering multiple character unlocks and 50,000 points (enough to unlock another character) in the $1 tier. Now that I have around 10 hours invested, I can perhaps see this game as being a stopgap FPS solution to my Overwatch itch.
There are some interesting things going on in Dirty Bomb. Before heading into a match, you have to lock-in three Mercs – while you will be free to swap between them mid-match, you cannot select any others. Running speed is affected by your currently equipped weapon ala Counter-Strike, so running around with knives out is the best way to get around. There is a limited amount of wall-jumping and various “long-jump” shenanigans.
One of the mechanics I enjoy a lot is the downed state. Basically, when you “die” you really fall to the ground and writhe around until the wave-based respawn timer triggers. While on the ground you can be revived by any character if they spend 5ish seconds holding F down, or instantly by any of the Medic class abilities. The other team can prevent a rez by finishing you off, either by pumping more bullets into your prone form, or landing a melee hit. I enjoy the tension in the choice to finish someone off, as bullets are in short supply (you basically have 2-3 clips unless you have an Ammo guy on your team) and splitting your attention in the middle of a firefight can be deadly. Do you finish that guy off, or try to take out more people and risk a Medic zipping in and instantly reviving him?
Pardon the stickie bomb stuck to my face on the left, there.
There are some shortcomings in Dirty Bomb. First, the game looks like it came out in 2010. While that does ensure that it’s playable on a number of PCs, the lack of production values of almost any kind makes me leery of “investing” in expanding the roster. Not necessarily in the money-sense – if you only play with Missions up (which reset every 3 hours), you can unlock a new Merc every ~10 hours of gameplay – but in the time-sense.
Second, the game feels unbalanced all to hell. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Execution” mode, which is essentially Dirty Bomb pretending to be Counter-Strike… with a grand total of two maps. With respawns disabled, it becomes very evident that the characters with airstrike and orbital laser bombardment abilities are far and away better than more generic characters, in the sense that they can one-shot most everyone.
Overall though, Dirty Bomb is fine for what it is: a F2P FPS distraction. If you are like me and have zero interest in trying to get into TF2 after nearly a decade of updates and uber-veterans, you could probably do worse. Maybe. Whatever, it’s fun.
* Obviously Dirty Bomb came out before Overwatch, so it’s not technically Overwatch-esque, but you know what I mean.
Impression: Infinity Wars
I took a look at my Steam Wishlist the other day, and noticed that one of the items was a F2P game called Infinity Wars. It was not a game I was expressly seeking out, but one of those games casually mentioned that I wanted to check up on later. “Hey, why don’t I just, you know, take care of that?”
So I did.
Infinity Wars bills itself as a digital TCG, but plays out as a hugely complex combination of Hearthstone, Magic, and one of those elaborate board games that weird friend of yours keeps trying to get you to play.
This Draft game isn’t going well already.
The basic premise is that each character has 100 HP, 100 Morale, and a fist full of cards to reduce one or the other down to zero. Oh, and you pick three creature cards to play in your “Commander” zone before the game, and those determine the “purity” of your deck, e.g. what type of cards you can put in. You gain 1 resource per turn, sort of like Mana Gems in Hearthstone, and the creatures you play have persistent HP levels also like Hearthstone. But rather than there being just one play area, there are three per side: attack zones, defense zones, and support zones. And the order in which you place creatures in a zone matters, as if they were lanes in SolForge (which can you rearrange at will). Also, there activated creature abilities and spells you can cast.
Oh, have I mentioned that all turns are simultaneous?
If this sounds like a complicated mish-mash of mechanics, that’s because it is. Rounds in Infinity Wars are incredibly, stupidly complex with about a million and a half different ways for things to go wrong (or right, depending on your ability to bluff and/or get lucky). For example, say you have a 7/7 and a 5/4 creature currently in the Attack Zone, while your opponent has an 7/4 in his Support Zone. The “ideal” play here would be to keep both your creatures in the Attack Zone, but rearrange them so the 5/4 is left-most, with the assumption that your opponent puts the 7/4 in the Defense Zone, they kill each other, and your 7/7 wins the day.
But maybe your opponent isn’t dumb, and knows you will do that. Perhaps they move the 7/4 to the Defense Zone but also plays a spell targeting your 5/4 that deals 4 damage, which would kill that creature and allow the 7/4 to trade with the 7/7. But maybe you figure that is what he would do, so you actually move the 5/4 out of the Attack Zone and into the Support Zone instead, thereby making it an invalid target for that spell. And maybe your opponent figures he will hedge his bets by also casting a separate spell to buff his 7/4 creature by +5/+5, so it can beat your 7/7. But you happen to suspect such shenanigans, so you move both of your creatures to the Support Zone.
End result? Nobody takes any damage, all creatures live, and your opponent has a 12/9 in the Defense Zone. Begin planning out next round.
The problem with Infinity Wars is exactly that: the complexity. Sometimes you can get your opponent to overthink themselves into just taking a ton of damage to the face. Other times you get tricksy and get wrecked. Or maybe you join the New Player – Constructed queue, and get matched with someone who plays the goddamn USS Enterprise.
Thought I was kidding?
I still don’t know what the fuck that even does – I blocked it once with a random creature and it got Phasered or something, and returned to my Support Zone and made Exhausted. Simply put, there is way too much shit going on to make an informed decision. All of my opponents cards were new, and I didn’t feel like 1.5 minutes was enough time in a given turn to make rational play. There doesn’t even appear to be a way to review what happened in the last turn, which if true, pretty much kills the game entirely.
Of course, once you get behind in this game, things quickly snowball all to hell considering your opponent can see what creatures you play before they ever get out of your Support Zone (unless they have Haste or Vigilance, creatures have to wait a turn to get moved to the Attack/Defense Zone). If you’re stuck casting one creature a turn, they can simply preemptively target your lone dude with the understanding you either try to block and it becomes a valid target, or you leave it in the Support Zone to make the spell fizzle but also eat another round of damage/bullshit effects.
What Infinity Wars was successful in doing though is making me appreciate Hearthstone all the more. Is Hearthstone a dumbed-down Magic: the Gathering? Maybe. But outside of Force of Nature/Savage Roar OTK combos and the like, you have time to react, read cards, and otherwise get a better grasp of what’s going on in a given game. Magic has deep complexity for veteran players, sure, but that same complexity really fucks over newer players when any given action they perform can be countered seemingly out of nowhere. “OK, I block your creature and it dies.” “No it doesn’t… Giant Growth!” “Oh, you’re tapped out? Fireball to the face!” “Nah, going to return three Islands to my hand to counter that spell.”
I dunno. Maybe if I stick with Infinity Wars, I will get a better grasp on the… Star Trek metagame, or whatever. Or perhaps I will simply realize that this is not a game you can enjoy without diving into the shit face-first.
If subterfuge and ruses and an infinite and a half different possible outcomes are your cup of card game tea though, have I got the game for you.
FFXIV Impression: Wrap-Up
My 30 days have expired.
The highest my character reached was 25 Arcanist/13 Thaumaturge, with a smattering of other classes inbetween. I did have a few open days in which I could have pushed to unlock my first Job (Summoner at 30/15), but when you know you are not resubscribing to an MMO, you tend to lose (even more) interest in final pushes. Here is a random smattering of my wrap-up thoughts.
Invisible walls e’erywhere
I was genuinely surprised by the frequency and sheer brazenness of the invisible walls in FFXIV, especially coming from the (amazing, apparently) openness of GW2. While the minimap will generally indicate which areas are off-limits, sometimes it makes no rational sense. No swimming in your game? Fine, I can understand having oceans and lakes (invisibly) roped off. But sometimes you can wade into ankle-deep streams and sometimes you can’t. For example:
That’s a damn-high vertical leap, by the way.
There is falling damage in the game – and flying eventually – so it is not as though every cliff-face is restricted. But some are. It’s generally one of those things I am hesitant to test lest I fall to my death, but when you actually bump off such a wall, I get an irrational urge to try finding the seams.
I suppose it didn’t bother me in FFX, so it shouldn’t bother me now… but it does.
Character Modeling
They are damn good.
What a coincidental shot!
And I’m not even talking about just the culturally different tastes in women’s fantasy attire, I mean all the other incredibly intricate things FFXIV characters can do. The emote system is extremely thorough, to the point you can pantomime practically any conversation. The entire system is one of those “minor” things that you get used to after a while and later feel is lacking from every other game you play.
Tonal Whiplash
Speaking of cultural differences, I don’t even know what’s going on with quest text half the time. Are the writers trying to be funny? Edgy? Are there localization shenanigans afoot?
Uh… huh.
That must be very cold indeed, er, Hezzkhezl.
Maybe the game is simply a lot darker story-wise than its otherwise cheery facade would indicate, I dunno. Most of the early quests have you doing generic level 1 fantasy things like picking up apples or whatever. Then you get that, provided you accidentally stop spam-clicking your left mouse button near the quest givers.
I also enjoy the meta humor a bit…
Just kidding, Ruin spam for days.
…but not so much when it only underlines the awful gameplay the class in question provides, e.g. Arcanist. “Sure, let me use Aetherflow and Energy Drain efficaciously… there we go. Now just got to wait 60 seconds for another go-around.” The Thaumaturge proves that the designers are not completely incompetent; if Aetherflow had a lower cooldown or having it up gave your DoTs a chance to proc a free Energy Drain or something, the class might actually have some redeeming feature.
Alas.
Waiting for things still sucks
It does.
This is not nearly anything as bad as what WoW got up to towards the end of my dungeon running career. Then again, I wasn’t actually forced to do any dungeons to continue the story up to the level cap either. But nevermind, I already griped about that.
Second Pass?
I have been pretty harsh on FFXIV thus far, but I do recognize that it largely follows the same MMORPG mold in which all the goodies are back-loaded into the endgame. Part of the point of my criticism though is that that sort of thing doesn’t work for me anymore. If you are in a period of your life where you can muscle through 30+ hours of unfun gameplay to “reach the good bits,” well… cherish it. There is nothing systemic about MMO design that forces a designer to build their games this way. If WoW came out now, I’d have the same criticism.
All that said, the original FFXIV plan was to play with a friend and check out the sights together. That plan got delayed by a necessary PC upgrade on his part, so when and if that happens, it’s entirely possible I will give FFXIV another month to turn things around. We’ll see then if my perception of the game changes, especially as a melee character.
Mandatory Dungeons
During the discussion about FFXIV’s mandatory dungeons, MaximGtB said the following:
[…] Besides, having these dungeons are in no way a road block, at least when looking at it from an MMORPG point of view. If you can’t spend a few hours to clear a dungeon, maybe failing a few times before you finally succeed, then the game is not for you. What are you going to do at 60, then? Log in, do one or two levequests, then log out?
What I mean to say is that spending massive amounts of time, trying stuff for hours on end until you succeed, and/or suffering pants-on-head morons ruining your game are the bread and butter of the game. If you can’t stand it at level 15, you won’t stand it at the endgame either.
Here is my “much too big for a third-tier nested comment” response:
The mandatory dungeon aspect is problematic for several reasons. The first of which is economic: all that telling a player “this game is not for you” accomplishes is losing out on at least another month’s subscription (assuming they bought blind in the first place). Even if the game is not for you, what sense does it make to force the issue right away?
Second, sometimes what a game is changes for people. Maybe that player solos their way to endgame and leaves at that point anyway. Or maybe they intended to solo, but encountered a stranger that befriended them, and sucked them into the vortex of social gaming for 6+ years. Which is precisely what happened to me in WoW. Had I not been primed already though, I would have quit FFXIV at the “spend 20 minutes waiting for a boring dungeon with total noobs” wall. WoW opted for the carrot, not the stick, and thus captures both types of players while converting a special few.
And, bizarrely, FFXIV already has the carrot in terms of first-time completion bonus.
The third reason is because the vast majority of FFXIV (and most MMO) content is solo. Long-term players run the same dungeons for months grinding 0.2% upgrades, yes, but how much solo scripted encounters, quests, writing, world exploring, etc, is there on the way to level cap? All of that is content the solo player could be enjoying, if not for patronizing “ice-breaking” of these designers.
Fourth, it was just damn inconvenient at the time. The day before I actually cleared the dungeons, I wanted to log on and accomplish things, but I was also expecting an important phone call. When I logged on, I realized that I couldn’t really do anything. Grind FATES and get even further ahead of the leveling curve? Re-run the starting areas a half dozen more times leveling up alternate classes? I wanted to progress things, but couldn’t. So I logged out and played actual games that actually let me play them.
Finally, these mandatory dungeons were boring as hell. What kind of first-impression were they going for? They have to be easy for new players, but that’s no excuse for them to have close to zero backstory for a Main Story Quest. Back-loading all the good bits these days is just dumb. Most MMOs are guilty of this for some reason, but most MMOs came out before we as gamers knew any better (or got to experience the higher bar).
Clearly though, FFXIV is successful enough in spite of the way dungeons are handled. I feel like it would likely be more successful had they taken a different approach, but good luck to them.
FFXIV Impressions: Dungeons
A little while ago I got the early dungeon wall that I heard people grumbling about back in the day: a point near level 20 where the Story quest gets gated around running three dungeons in a row. I spent an entire day’s session pushing through it like a particularly difficult bowel movement, with very similar end results.
Somehow they managed to make playing an Arcanist even more boring.
The first two dungeons were not actually that bad. Long, boring slogs through story-less gameplay, but whatever; I’m not sure Wailing Caverns performed much better when I played it six years ago. Then came Copperbell Mines. If I continue playing FFXIV, it will be in spite of my experience in this dungeon.
To be clear, it is not necessarily the dungeon’s fault. I assume Copperbell Mines is just as bland and flavorless as any other dungeon in this game. But within the first two pulls, I realized we were in trouble. The only non-new player was the healer, and it became very clear that 1) the tank had no clue how to hold aggro, and 2) the lancer had no concept of how dungeons or the holy trinity works at all. The lancer spent the entire dungeon running ahead, grabbing aggro, then running away once his HP hit 25%. While no one can expect a tank to completely take control of that, one can reasonably expect the tank to at least have higher aggro than the healer. Which he could not, to literally save his (and everyone else’s) life.
FFXIV has this reputation as a nice, friendly environment for noobs and such, but I feel that it let us down in this case. Friendly suggestions to not be fucking stupid (paraphrasing) did not reach the lancer, who might have been illiterate for all we know. Had this been WoW, either the lancer or tank or both would have been straight-up kicked (assuming no 4-hour timers) for not doing the goddamn jobs they signed up to do, but no no. It is our responsibility – nay, privilege! – to repeatably wipe with the classical stoic grace of British aristocracy. I summoned my tanking pet to at least give the healer an extra 15 seconds of life and largely went down with the ship with a stiff upper lip.
At the end of it, several things were very clear to me then:
- There was zero reason why those dungeons were mandatory for the story.
- There wasn’t any story to those dungeons at all. No background material, no Dead Mines-esque buildup.
- It was yet another “travel across the world three times sequentially” time-sink, after literally just finishing a similar one.
- I’m done waiting 15-20 minutes to play a game.
- I’m done waiting to play with bad players.
This attitude will, of course, put me at odds with the standard MMO appointment-gaming zeitgeist.
I was also struck with the realization of what FFXIV’s combat reminded me of: Aion. As in, a pretty world with great animation and bizarre old-school throwbacks combined with an awfully boring combat system. Again, I’m an Arcanist, so I’m sure that has something to do with it – Thaumaturge felt more exciting for the little I played of it. At the same time, I view FFXIV allowing me to pick a boring-ass class more of FFXIV’s problem, than my own.
In any case, my free month is up next week, so FFXIV has until then to convince me it has any redeeming factors at all. People keep going on about the story, but I can no longer tell if they mean an actual good story, or a good story in comparison to other MMOs. Either way, it has the aforementioned amount of time to get down to business if Square Enix wants to continue getting my own.
FFXIV Impressions: Combat
FFXIV has one of the worst-feeling combat systems I have ever played.
Must be some hill.
It is not just the 2.5 second global cooldown, although that is a significant factor; it is the entire early game experience. I started with Arcanist, which is probably something I shouldn’t have done to begin with, and here are the levels in which I get buttons I can use:
- Level 1: 2.5-second generic nuke.
- Level 2: instant-cast DoT
- Level 4: Summon and forget a pet
- Level 6/8: 60-second cooldown gives a buff that let’s you press a button once.
- Level 10: 2.5 second cast DoT
- Level 26: 2.5 second cast DoT
Eww.
So, from levels 1-9, you press 1-1-2-1-1-1, then from levels 10-26, you can press 3-2-1-1-1-1.
I thought that melee had it better, but when I rolled a Marauder, I saw that the level 2 ability was a 2-minute defensive cooldown and I instantly deleted the character. Now that I look at the rest of the Marauder ability list, I do see quite a few extra buttons to push, but I was pretty exacerbated at the time.
I did manage to get a Lancer up to level 8, and I will say that melee definitely feels better than Arcanist at least, but my Lancer was a Miqo’te so… yeah.
I hate when I’m disemboweled for 30 more seconds than normal.
Now, I have heard all the arguments already – something something console gamers, something something players new to MMOs. But, Christ, this is vanilla WoW paladin-level nonsense in 2016 (or 2013, whatever). Regardless of whether it ramps up to having too many buttons to push at max level, the era in which a game gets away with having a boring start is basically over.
…or not, considering how FFXIV is clearly the #2 MMORPG on the market at the moment. But still! In terms of combat, Guild Wars 2 beats FFXIV hard enough that even FFXI gets bruises, let alone in comparison to WoW. The moves look fancy, but that’s just because you have to look at something while you wait one extra second * a million goddamn times.
[Fake Edit:] After writing the above, I realized that I hadn’t actually seen the WoW beginning experience sans Heirlooms in like three expansions. So I went ahead and created a “F2P” Starter account and rolled up a Warlock, Mage, and Paladin. Conclusion? As it turns out, WoW doesn’t really give you many abilities either:
Paladin in particular looked pretty heinous, with Crusader Strike having a 4.5 second cooldown and Judgment not coming until level 5. If I’m looking at Wowhead correctly, it seems like Paladin is Crusader Strike, Judgment, Templar’s Verdict until… level 38, when Hammer of Wrath unlocks? Can that be correct? Holy fuck. I haven’t leveled a Paladin since TBC, but I’m pretty sure that was my rotation throughout all of vanilla content. At least back in the day, we had to recast Seals every time we hit Judgment!
In any case, one of the differences I noticed right away on all the WoW characters though was how utterly satisfying it was to kill mobs. The Warlock had 2.5-second Shadowbolts just like the Arcanist, but the Warlock was 1-2 shotting all the creatures in the opening areas. Hell, Corruption at level 3 was more than enough to kill them in seconds too. Try that with Bio and let me know how it goes.
So, basically, I’m sticking with what I said earlier: FFXIV has one of the worst-feeling combat systems I have ever played. And that negative feeling apparently has everything to do with the longer GCD and longer Time-to-Kill, rather than lack of abilities. Although more buttons to push would help a lot in making the combat feel less like a slog.
FFXIV Impressions: Beginning
Amazing opening cinematic? Check. Playing for two hours without entering combat once? Check. Playing a Final Fantasy game: confirmed.
Fantastic skyboxes.
I had bought FFXIV ages ago for $15 in some sale or another, and had ostensibly been waiting for a good time for me and a friend to jump in together. The GTA 5 brouhaha, however, gave me an impetus to clear hard drive space and I didn’t want to redownload FFXIV again. So I channeled my inner Shia LaBeouf and just did it.
The first thing I encountered (after the lovely character generation screen) was the inability to create a character on Hyperion. Apparently when there are a lot of people logged onto a given server, Square Enix just shuts down character generation for a while. There are websites to keep track of this sort of thing, but they are only updated every couple of hours. In digging around, it appears this issue is related to the fact that FFXIV does not boot you for being AFK. Like ever, apparently. Leave the game running for 10 hours while AFK? You keep your spot. Game has been out for three years, right? Don’t know if this is a Japanese thing or what.
[Fake edit:] Apparently they finally added an auto-AFK logout in the recent expansion.
Characters with fully-rendered panties seen through basic armor, though? Definitely a Japanese thing. And technically Korean too, but who’s counting.
Total accident in character design, I’m sure.
I ended up creating two four characters, as given how every character can be every class, the most important decision you can make is deciding on a look. And, bizarrely, this made character creation almost more difficult for me. If you don’t like playing a Druid in WoW, create a new toon. If you don’t like playing a cat-person in FFXIV though… good luck, as you’d need to do everything all over again.
I’m assuming there is a way to pay money to change it.
In any case, I stuck with human, because as nice as the Miqo’te look, I’m not terribly convinced that the tails won’t look goofy in endgame gear. Or any gear, really. Still kinda gun-shy with tails after sticking with my namesake draenei in WoW for nearly a decade and basically having 100% of all cloaks look dumb. Plus, apparently the Miqo’te are the spiritual Blood Elf equivalent in FFXIV, so there’s that. I almost stuck with Lalafell for the lol’s, but it was actually the running animation that nixed it for me. Playing a gigantic Roegadyn healer briefly crossed my mind as amusing, but my human (or “Hyur”) was already an Arcanist, and that seemed silly.
Further impressions to come.
In An Age 
Spell It Out
Mar 7
Posted by Azuriel
I was playing GTA 5 this weekend, and one of the missions really reminded me of why I prefer game devs to just spell out what they expect you to do as a player.
The mission was technically a “side-quest” of a heist the main characters were setting up. This particular branch was to acquire a getaway vehicle, take it to a discreet location, then call Michael and let him know where it is. Not just any vehicle will do, but there are a million carjack opportunities in the game, so it didn’t take long to find one the game was satisfied with.
What did take an annoyingly long amount of time was figuring out A) where a “discreet” area was, and B) phoning the location in. Back alley? Not discreet. Docks? Not discreet. Area marked in green? Whoops, that’s an entirely different mission area. I tried calling Michael half a dozen times, but never got the option to “Mark the Location.” And I never knew whether that was because I wasn’t in a discreet location, or if I was but I had to be outside the vehicle to make the call, or if the quest was just fucking bugged.
There are a lot of challenges I enjoy in gaming. The one challenge type conspicuously absent from the list is being a goddamn mind reader. Or, more specifically, trying to figure out what the designers wanted players to do. Sometimes the issue is that I missed what would otherwise have been an obvious clue. Hey, it happens. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m not going to wander around cluelessly for 15 minutes not playing the game. Give me a puzzle, and I’ll try to solve it. But I’m not going to fucking hunt for the puzzle, because I have zero faith in my ability to divine whether all the proper programming flags were set.
So, I looked the quest up. Turns out they wanted the car in a neighborhood area. Drove there, parked, and the option to Mark the Location came right up. Fantastic. If they could have just dropped some markers down on the map like they do with everything else in the game, I would have been done with this vanilla quest more than 20 minutes ago instead of it completely breaking the flow of my gaming session.
And looking at my experience with MMOs? Same sort of thing applies. I played WoW when it didn’t have quest givers on the minimap, when quest items didn’t sparkle, before addons highlighted quest areas, and when Thottbot was breaking new ground over Allakhazam (I think). You know what? I’ll say it: it sucked. Killing mobs and not knowing whether you were just unlucky with quest drops or if you were killing the wrong specie of bear sucks. Get lost in a cave sucks. The item you need to click on being the basement as you scour the other three floors fruitlessly sucks.
I’m not saying there can’t or shouldn’t be mysteries in a game. But it should never be a mystery that you are in a mystery. The difference between hunting for clues and being clueless is immense. It is the difference between playing a game and not.
Again, I have empathy for the players for whom their primary enjoyment is figuring shit out on their own. I hope there are addons or options for you to turn off all the quest tracking overlays. But if the designers want me to collect ten bear asses to complete a quest, that is my quest, not exploring the taxonomy of virtual Ursidae and/or their habitat. If you want me to stash a car somewhere “discreet,” you either tell me where that is, or allow me to stash it somewhere I think is discreet enough. Which was apparently 100 feet away from where GTA 5 said I couldn’t make the call.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Game Design, GTA 5, Programming, Quest, Spell It Out, WoW