Impression: Craft the World, pt 2
[Blaugust Day 4]
In the time since I wrote yesterday’s post (over the weekend) and today, I’ve “beat” the first campaign level and spent a total of ~18 hours in Craft the World. For the curious, you completing a campaign world involves finding the portal room, and then defeating the guardians in that and in five other rooms before reconstructing the the portal and getting out.
Across the hours, I believe I have figured out why I don’t like the game: the tech tree. Not the idea of a tech tree – which exists as a tutorial mechanism – but simply how poorly it is paced. For example, here is the beginning part:
Seriously guys?
Early on, you get the ability to craft wooden armor. Great! For that, you need rope. Which requires wool. Which requires sheep. Which might not be anywhere near your spawning location. In my first world, the sheep were all located beyond a goblin camp, which are a group of extremely tough mobs that you can’t hope to defeat without, you know, some armor. It was only later that I realized that the Portal spell you get at the beginning of the game could be used at any distance, but still.
Another example: wooden doors. One of the first “quests” you receive is to construct a shelter for your dwarves. Like most games, a shelter is only a shelter when the walls (including the background ones) are filled in, with the exception of any doors. You can make a wooden hatch pretty early on, which implies the ole Minecraft shelter approach of just digging a hole. However, your Stash is immovably placed on the surface. Thus, right from the start, you experience the uncomfortable dissonance of either A) building a shelter underground, leaving your Stash exposed, or B) crafting an incomplete shelter around your Stash and waiting possibly hours before unlocking “wooden door” technology.
What is almost worse than this clunkiness is how intentionally bad or misleading the entire scenario appears to be. Creating a Shelter requires you to place a Totem, whose description specifically says:
Creates an aura around the house that protects from monsters.
First, I have never seen it actually “scare off” the ghosts that come each night, so either that functionality doesn’t exist, or it requires the Totem to be closer to the Stockpile and not just within the Shelter, which is unintuitive. Second, for the Totem to even be closer to the Stockpile, you either need Wooden Doors or to construct a goofy system of vertical Wooden Hatches, severely slowing down your dwarves’ harvesting of trees/ground-level resources. Or maybe going even further into the Minecraft approach of boxing yourself in at night, then breaking the walls down in the morning?
Regardless, the Tech Tree is poorly designed and badly paced. I still remember getting about halfway through – which requires a ton of useless crafting – and then… suddenly, inexplicably having fun. Like a lot of fun. I was crafting Mine Carts and Elevators and using Scaffolding to reconstruct the terrible Shelter I had been enduring previously. Instead of creating useless items over and over, I was progressing naturally through the Tech Tree. Things faltered a bit more later, but by that point I still had more than enough things to do to keep me busy as I gathered more resources.
Technically speaking, the Tech Tree is only relevant in Campaign mode; if you enter the Sandbox mode, you can ignore the Tech Tree entirely. But it is one of those things that hold back the entire game with its terribleness. After beating the first Campaign world, I unlocked the next, which is an Ice World. I’ve played about 1-2 hours into that world, but everything that was bad originally is still bad now. Do I seriously want to spend another 5+ hours until I get Scaffolding? Or, you know, make heroic efforts tracking down Sheep in order to get Rope? Nope.
The bottom line here is that Craft the World is servicable if you especially like this genre of games, but only if you have already played the much better titles to death.
Impression: Craft the World
[Note: Day 3 Blaugust]
The aesthetics work really well, actually.
Craft the World is a game billed as “a unique sandbox strategy game, the mix of Dungeon Keeper, Terraria and Dwarf Fortress.” What initially attracted me to the game was the comparison to Dwarf Fortress, which is one of those mythical games that someone you know spent 6000 hours playing, but you didn’t even bother looking at after seeing the screenshots. I am led to believe there are texture packs for Dwarf Fortress, but considering I can’t even bring myself to play FF12 due to graphics alone, I figure I’ll wait until some fan recreates the entire thing in an actual watchable format.
In the meantime… well, Craft the World.
Right now the game still feels like it’s in beta. I am playing in the “Campaign” mode, which I understand to be an extended tutorial. The problem is that I have no idea how to “beat” the campaign. There’s a 40-60 minute timer which dictates when a monster portal opens, and I have been defeating said monters each time they appear. I think I read something about defeating a boss, who will then drop the portal for the next campaign world. Or something about completing all the “tech trees” to unlock it. Or something.
The actual gameplay is both interesting and somewhat vapid. Instead of controlling an actual character, you are the disembodied cursor simply marking which squares you want dug/built/collected/attacked. If a dwarf is available and feels like it, he will go over and start working the squares. So the gameplay cadence is queuing up a lot of work, spending time in the crafting menu, and then watching your dwarves (hopefully) carry it out. Resources are only collected two items at a time, and said items are only actually available once the dwarf makes it back to your Stash. So the end result for me was usually watching the dwarves go about their business, eyes glazed, and then realize 5 minutes later that they were all standing around idle.
Technically, you can control a dwarf directly at any time if you want to get more hands-on. In fact, you pretty much have to to get any sort of reasonable construction project going. Not only do you have an increased object placement range (uncontrolled dwarves can only reach 2 squares instead of 3), but your controlled dwarf has full access to your entire inventory. Otherwise, yep, the dwarves have to carry over the supplies two items at a time; not a whole lot of fun when you’re trying to get them to build a ladder down a mineshaft.
As I mentioned in the beginning though, the game feels Beta-ish. The controls have clearly been designed around an eventual tablet version, as hotkeys are limited and damn near everything revolves around left-click. There are quests/tasks in the Campaign mode which are either broke, or frustratingly vague. For example, one quest was to start a farm by planting Wheat. I actually had some Wheat, but nothing I did seemed to work in terms of getting it planted. Then I thought perhaps I needed “Grain” first, e.g. seeds, but no amount of Wild Wheat harvesting produced any. And, you know, the quest clearly says to plant Wheat, not Grain. I eventually completed the quest after collecting enough Wild Wheat, which shouldn’t have worked based on the description, but whatever.
In the meantime, I’m willing to give it a little bit more time to get more interesting. I can’t help but feel like there is something there, some nugget of fun waiting to be uncovered. At the same time, I also kinda feel like the devs missed everything that was actually fun about the games they were inspired by. Terraria this ain’t, that’s for damn sure.
More GTX 970 Musings
Having recently moved across town, I received the standard Post Office confirmation of address forwarding, complete with an envelope stuffed with coupons. One said coupon was for 10% off a single item at Best Buy. This prompted me to start looking at graphics cards again.
Spoiler alert: graphics cards are still stupidly expensive.
Or maybe not. Maybe they have always been around $300 for the upper bound of reasonableness. All that I know is that I’ve been staring at the GTX 970 series for months and the prices never seem to budge. It’s not even a matter of whether I could afford the card, it’s the principle of refusing to voluntarily pay MSRP for anything. That and the fact that I don’t need an upgraded graphics card to play any of the hundreds of games still sitting unused in my Steam library.
But… well, I’d kinda like to play GTA5 and Witcher 3, you know? My present rig is about four years old now, so in the scheme of things perhaps an upgrade is overdue. About the only modification I’ve done over the years is replacing the boot SSD after it died a few months ago.
Still, without a price drop, I don’t know if I’m going to do it. I’m not a #PCMasterRace powergamer that needs everything on Ultra; I just want to play relevant games at 60 FPS and 1080p. And honestly, it’s even harder to justify a card upgrade for just two games. I mean, the rest of my library will look better too, but… yeah. I dunno.
Okay Then: Blaugust 2015
So I decided to go ahead and do what all the cool kids are doing in August, which is spamming your RSS feeds with a minimum ten sentences of nonsense.
This post is going up in the evening today because I honestly wasn’t going to participate. In fact, it is entirely possible that this turns out to be a terrible idea, much like my attempt at Movember 2013.
See, I have a love-hate relationships with blogs that post on a daily basis. Since I mainly read posts while at work, a steady stream of content ensures the day flies by while I’m thinking about all the reasons why the blogger is horribly mistaken. Unfortunately, that same steady content stream also ensures that the discussion generated by any individual post is buried almost immediately. Within a day or two, the “audience” for your carefully structured rebuttal is probably just you and a person who is already 2000 words deep in other subjects entirely. Ergo, I feel 2-3 posts a week gives a blog room to “breathe” and evolve.
Plus, you know, it’s easier.
Nevertheless, I decided to go ahead and give Blaugust a go for one main reason, and several iffy reasons. Main reason? The grand prize is a free game from my Steam wishlist.
Hey, I never said it was a good reason.
The iffy reasons include “Do I think I can?” and “Wonder what my traffic will look like by September” and a general experiment to see if I can break my predilection for posts that “have a point” or some overarching argument. I prefer to write those sort of posts (and to read them), but sometimes that means abandoning otherwise serviceable drafts just because I haven’t crafted a thesis. Sometimes you just want to talk about how you had fun playing a game, and not feel like you’re questioning the validity of an objective reality, you know?
So… here we go.
Next Expansion Surprise
In a rather surprising twist, Blizzard announced it’s expansion announcement will be announced during Gamescon on August 6th. That’s a full three months ahead of Blizzcon, which has been the traditional venue for such news. Speculation abounds for the reasoning behind the early reveal, but I feel Wilhelm is on point with this observation:
[…] the date seems set to come in just after we get the Activision-Blizzard quarterly results for the second quarter of 2015 and, most importantly, the WoW subscription numbers that will come with it. That hits on August 4th according to the investor relations site.
For the first quarter of 2015 the subscription numbers were down to 7.1 million. Now there is a rush to get the next expansion announced early in August, a slow news month, well before BlizzCon, and just after the quarterly report?
WHAT A COINCIDENCE.
As mentioned in the MMO-Champ comments, what is also amusing is the hypothetical future in which the next expansion is released by the end of the year. Amusing because the “flying patch” still hasn’t came out yet, and thus we might have (inadvertently?) been put into the “unlock flying in Draenor when the expansion launches” scenario.
But how likely is a December 2015 release really? Blizzard has promised quicker launches for ages now, and I don’t think anyone thinks they are capable of doing so. Even if the August reveal is a fully playable beta… would Blizzard only run an expansion beta for 3-4 months? Maybe. I believe Warlords was 5 months from alpha to beta to release. If we see an expansion announcement in August followed by a beta test after Blizzcon in November, that would set them up for a mid-summer expansion release around the time of the WoW movie. That makes more sense to me… and puts the 6.2 raid tier at 10-12 months long. Just like the good ole’ days.
As for predictions over subscriber numbers? I honestly have no idea. I obviously suspect a large subscriber loss in the last quarter, but I have no idea how the numbers will be finessed by the WoW Token. I have eight such tokens sitting in my inventory right now, for example. Am I counted as a subscriber? Will they continue counting me for eight months despite my not redeeming said tokens? Tough to say.
Just to throw out a number though: 6.5 million.
Investment Window
It’s been a few months since I stopped playing WoW, but the entire time I was I was psychoanalyzing the merits of purchasing the crafted gear to boost my characters further. That dilemma reminds me of a similar problem I have with many F2P games, or any game selling convenience items. Specifically: when, if ever, do you invest more money into the game?
I have mentioned it several times, but I am currently “playing” Clash of Clans. “Playing” gets the scare quotes because the actual amount of time I spend interacting with the UI versus waiting for bars to fill up has steadily decreased for months now. Indeed, I am solidly in the design trap that is Town Hall level 8, wherein you are losing more resources to raids than you could ever hope to replace with either raids of your own or passive resource gains. Being in a raiding clan might offset it some, but realistically, some actual cash exchanging hands will be necessary to progress further.
Of course, having played the game for so long, I have zero desire to do so.
All of us have been there before: you finally get annoyed or bored enough to throw money at a problem, only to stop playing the game entirely a few days later. Even if spending that money did improve your play experience, it was too late to make much of an accumulated impact. Had you dropped cash at the very beginning though? Then you could have gotten months of utility out of that purchase, and otherwise generating a return on fun.
The problem I have though, is actually timing the investment window correctly. In the case of CoC, no time actually felt “correct” because it was just a game I was playing as a diversion; I had no idea that I would still be playing it months later. In fact, that’s most games. Reminds me of those RPGs with the “+5% XP” talents you can select early on. While a dubious investment in the long-term (the talent is useless at max level), you can recognize that if you were going to take such a talent, you need to take it sooner rather than later.
While my dithering ends up resulting in more money in my pocket, it also in some cases results in a diminished experience. For example, not outfitting my alts with the crafted weapons in WoW. Did I save gold by not crafting them? Sure. I also lost gold by not crafting and selling them. I suppose having 8+ months of WoW Tokens makes this a bit moot in a practical sense, but old AH habits die hard.
So how about yourselves? How do you choose a time to make an optional purpose?
Moving and Ownership
All this week I have been in the process of packing up my apartment in preparation for a move in meatspace. It is just a move across town, and there isn’t too much stuff, but the process always feels exhausting. Packing up the essentials feels really easy, but then you get to all the miscellaneous stuff that you hardly ever use, but would likely miss if it were discarded. For example, how many of your pots and pans do you use on a weekly basis? Do I really need a colander, much less two of them?
What really struck me though was when I packed up my PlayStation 2. Both the system and the games didn’t take up all that much space, but I pretty much turned on the system once in the last year, during an abortive attempt to play FFXII. I kept the system around because at some point console designers decided backwards compatibility wasn’t a priority, and why get rid of it if I still have all my classic PS1 gems?
It was at that point that I realized that I didn’t really need these things anymore. In fact, why I had physical media of any type was a hold-over from what feels like ages ago. I am pretty sure that all the PS1 games I own are also on the PlayStation Network, or even on Steam. All the games and systems and movies I own could easily fit on the external HD the size of my hand. I should be finished packing by putting on a backpack, minus that behemoth of a PC I use.
At the same time… it’s hard. First, you have to fight against the feeling of conservation. Why throw anything away? It’s something that still has use, still has value, albeit diminished by the passage of time. Second, there are all the what-if scenarios and general optimism. Maybe I’ll suddenly find myself on a retro-gaming kick, yeah? Playing old games in 640×480 resolution blown up on my wall via 100″ projector screen… that’s the life. And what if I suddenly drop everything and go teach English in Japan? Surely I’ll want to pack… err… uh.
The interesting thing to me about this whole experience is my evolving concept of ownership. Back in the day, I fought hard against “all-digital media” and the notion that nobody ever really owned anything, they just licensed it. I was there jeering at Microsoft along with everyone else during the Xbone E3 reveal. The curbing or removal of the secondary game market was an existential threat in my mind.
Now? In the middle of packing up my life, I feel I’d be better off owning less. I’m not going to play Kagero: Deception 2 again. Or any of the Tenchu games. Even if I felt like I had the time and inclination, it’s tough going back to anything less than 720p at this point. The game discs might have retained some value – I certainly made a few hundred dollars selling my SNES classics a few years ago – but is that value worth the time and eBay headaches? When I finish a Steam game, I delete it and then set the Category to “Finished,” which I keep minimized. I don’t think I have ever gone back and played any Finished games.
Games are largely experiences and experiences only. Some have replay value, sure, and others (like MMOs) can keep you entertained and experiencing them for weeks/months/years to come. The vast majority though? One and done. The more time passes, the more I feel these accumulation of games are no different than old newspapers; the hoarding of which is something less deserving of a nostalgic nod and more of a questioning eyebrow.
I’m going to lug around my box of historical gaming debris this time around – there’s no sense to unpack what I’ve already packed – but the odds are good that this will be the last trip they make in my possession, one way or another. And I am becoming increasingly okay with that.
Non-Customization
I don’t know if you’ve been following the new ground the developers of Rust have been breaking, but it’s both interesting and hilarious. The short version is that instead of customizing your character, all of your character’s physical attributes are randomly assigned and permanently tied to your Steam ID. This includes race, penis size, and now gender.
As you might imagine, some corners of the internet are melting down.
There are multiple layers of this design which are fascinating to me. The first is the sheer amount of free PR this generates. I mean, when was the last time you actually heard news about Rust that wasn’t about the size, color, and/or existence of the male sexual organ? Last thing I remember reading was from what feels like years ago, when Rust removed zombies… and people were crafting C4 to break into peoples’ shacks? It’s still a crafting survival game, right? I wouldn’t know.
Philosophically, the intended inability to choose your avatar’s features is also interesting. The money quote from the devs is this one:
To clear up some confusion, when we it does go live you won’t get a choice of whether you’re female or male. We’re not “taking the choice away” from you. You never had a choice. A man’s voice coming out of a woman’s body is no more weird than an 8 year-old boy’s voice coming out of a man’s body.
Some of the criticism is coming from people who don’t want to feel restricted in their character creation, or people who want their avatar to look like them (for RP purposes or otherwise). But in a sense… is this any different from, say, Witcher 3 or any other game with fixed player assets? As the dev mentioned, you never actually had a choice at character creation, so nothing is being taken away. Is it about historical gametype precedent? Or about the fact that the devs could have added customization options but have clearly decided not to?
In any case, I like the cut of this dev team’s jib. They are doing bold things that could go horribly wrong, which is the heart of soul of R&D. Plus, listen to this bit:
“We wanted to lock people to an identity so they could be possibly recognized for their misdeeds, just from their avatar,” he explained. “The idea being that eventually we’d take away player names, and emergent stuff could happen like mistaking someone for a friend, impersonations, etc.”
That sort of “reputation” is asinine in a multi-server scenario IMO, but good for them for going for it. And removing character names altogether? That’s a pretty brilliant social experiment.
I’m not invested in the outcome of Rust, but damned if I don’t feel a tiny bit compelled to see what kind of character gets rolled for me. Not going to lie: if I end up getting stuck as generic white dude #476, I’ll be pretty disappointed.
Good RNG, Bad RNG
I feel kinda bad for having sung the praises for Hearthstone’s Tavern Brawl mode right as they released perhaps the worst iteration of it possible. This past week’s Brawl is “Encounter at the Crossroads,” and follows the (intentional?) pattern of every other week’s Brawl giving you a deck to play with. Instead of being filled with Webspinners, your deck is filled with completely random garbage cards, and up to three Legendaries. It ends up being 15 Neutral cards and 15 Class cards, for the record, and they are completely random – Mad Scientists in decks without Secrets, cards that trigger off of dragons without a single dragon in the deck, and so on.
My utter disgust with this week’s Brawl got me thinking: what’s the big deal? There is RNG everywhere, so why hate this kind? What’s so worse about this RNG as compared to the Webspinner Brawl or the spell one the week before?
I think my biggest problem is that this was Blind, Lingering RNG. Last week, you didn’t know what kind of creature you would summon… other than that it’d be an X mana cost one, it would come before the spell resolved, and you knew what was in the rest of your deck. You knew how much removal you were packing, you knew what synergies existed, you kinda knew what to expect from your opponent.
With a Crossroads deck, you know nothing Jon Snow. You didn’t even know whether to mulligan your shitty opening hand; if you threw anything back, chances are you’d get something even worse.
Spoiler alert: I lost this game.
One of the benefits to RNG is the very thing that people often complain about: RNG can determine games. Yes, there will be games that you lose to coin flips. Yes, it feels awful when you’re winning to suddenly fall behind through no fault of your own.
At the same time… randomness can make things interesting. Randomness can challenge you, present you with scenarios you’ve never encountered before, and allow you to overcome defeat through judicious use of probability. Do you play around that 10% chance that the Piloted Shredder pops out something that destroys your strategy, or do you play it safe? That sort of thing is (or can be) an interesting decision, and different people have different thresholds of comfort when it comes to percentages.
I mean, imagine the opposite case with no RNG. Losing from your opening hand. Or at least your only hope being that your opponent has as bad a hand as you do. It feels bad, man.
This is what this Brawl has felt like all weekend long – inevitable lingering losses. I played in the neighborhood of twenty games to complete my dailies, and I was never blessed with those same insane, on-curve openings that I would routinely experience the sharp end of. In most of the games, I would have been better off conceding in the first two turns. Could you imagine someone feeling the same in the Spell-Minion or Webspinner Brawl? Don’t get me wrong, you could get way screwed out of nowhere in those Brawls. But that’s the thing: it’s immediate. It’s more fun, even on the receiving end. At least in comparison to being behind, with nothing good to play this turn, and knowing you have a 99% chance of drawing into even more garbage the next turn.
There’s RNG and then there’s RNG. This is the latter, it sucks, and I hope Blizzard never does it again.
In An Age 
WoW Down to 5.6 Million Subs
Aug 5
Posted by Azuriel
[Blaugust Day 5]
Holy shit. WoW is down 1.5 million subs in three months.
Decade boomerang.
As the graph from MMO-Champion indicates, the last time WoW had 5.6 million subs was back in December 2005. While there are quite a few people out there saying the expansion spike into Warlords “shouldn’t count” due to hype trains and such, it bears repeating that WoW had 10 million subscriptions six months ago. Four point four million subscriptions is a fucking genre’s worth of tourists.
Assuming you can still call the 1.5 million people who left between months 3 and 6 “tourists.”
For the record, Cataclysm dropped from 12 million at its height down to 9.1 million at the end, a 24% loss. Mists started at 10 million, and ended around 7.4 million, a 26% loss. Even if we completely disregard Warlords’ spike in subs for no reason, going from 7.4 million to 5.6 million is a – drumroll please – 24% loss. And the year is only half over. And the final raid has already been released more than a month ago.
When Blizzard said they wanted to speed up expansion cycles, I didn’t think they meant cramming in two years’ worth of losses into half a year.
I went ahead and listened to the conference call myself, but the MMO-Champ summary is pretty much spot on. The only thing I wanted to mention was how early on in the call they pointed to Hearthstone specifically as being one of the largest drivers of revenue in Q2. Which, of course it is, everyone knows that. Additionally, at some point during the call Blizzard admitted that Hearthstone, Diablo 3, and Heroes of the Storm combined made up the majority of Blizzard revenue in Q2. As in, at least 50% + 1. Who would have saw that coming 3-4 years ago?
Some questions remain. While I have no doubt WoW Tokens are included in revenue stream, whether they count as subscriptions in of themselves is a question mark. Sure, a redeemed one should count as a one-month subscription just like a game card. But what about my eight Tokens sitting on an inactive account? Am I “subscribed?” This remains to be seen.
In any case, if this upcoming expansion announcement isn’t literally the best thing in the world, I think we can expect to see some more timely exits from Blizzard staff and players alike in the coming months.
Posted in Commentary, WoW
9 Comments
Tags: Blaugust, Hearthstone, Investor Report, Loss, Q2 2015, Subscribers