Archive for the 'Borderlands' Category

One Shot

Posted by Zubon on November 20, 2011 in Borderlands and Dungeon Defenders. 4 Comments

Raid bosses are slot machines, and every goblin is to a lesser extent. You pull the level and hope for good loot. Quite a few games take this further, in what I still think of as Diablo-style loot, with lots and lots of drops with lots and lots of randomization. 95+% of it is vendor trash, but that’s not always immediately apparent. If you want to avoid throwing away your prize, you need to dig and see if there is a pony somewhere in that room full of horse poo.

Dungeon Defenders helpfully points out the items that would be upgrades. You can even see green dots on the map and highlighting through the walls. “Come check this out.” Of course, whether it really is an upgrade depends on many things, such as whether your character wants to trade +40 to towers for +20 to towers and +21 to hero stats. So maybe you should still be looking at everything, because that armor may say it’s a downgrade, but you are trading 8 points of something you don’t want for +25% base damage. And then you have prizes like this one. 1 shot 0 kill The value algorithm says this is an upgrade for me. For those of you who do not know the stats involved, those are pretty good hero stats, decent base damage (with no bonus), a very nice firing rate, and an excellent reload rate. It needs that reload rate because this is a gatling gun with a one round clip. It could fire seven times per second, except that you need to reload this muzzle-loader after every shot.

The loot drops so quickly in Dungeon Defenders that it is automatically deleted (not looted, deleted) as you play. There is an item cap that protects game performance and encourages you to run around collecting mana and items. This somewhat counters the pro-social mechanic of dividing up the cash from loot left on the ground at the end of each round, because if you try to leave the loot, a lot of it will go away before the end of the round (past the first few waves). The item cap feels like it was designed for 100-200 enemies, and Survival maps quickly get to thousands of enemies. This discourages AFKing but gives you the choice between adding DPS to beat the level or trying to claim your prizes before they *poof.* The latest patch changed it so that the lowest quality loot gets deleted first, not the oldest; the opposite was a very strange design decision that led to your potential upgrades disappearing as you ran over to pick them up.

Mana is both the currency of the game and what you use to build towers, upgrade them, and power your abilities in the level. It also has a cap for how much can be on the ground (I’m not clear if that’s shared with loot), without the “lowest quality disappears first” provision, so your shiny teal 500-mana gem might disappear when the next 1-mana gem drops.

With so much vendor trash that it throws itself away, Dungeon Defenders may be approaching the reductio ad absurdum of Diablo-style loot.

: Zubon

Scaling Content

Posted by Zubon on September 7, 2011 in Borderlands. 11 Comments

I played through most of the Borderlands DLC this weekend. Most of it scales to level. This is both really great and really awful.

It is really great to have everything as endgame content. There is always tension in development between working on the leveling game and the endgame, and scaling content lets you create one dungeon that is available at many level ranges. Success! Are you really going to buy DLC that adds level 20 action for a game where your character is level 50? This isn’t an MMO where you are likely to have a stable of alts.

It is really awful in that it highlights the problems inherent in the game. If you stopped playing Borderlands because it felt like you just kept fighting the same guys over and over again, making them level along with you so that everything is an at-level encounter really drives home that you have yet another edition of the same guys, this time with a new number by the name. You don’t even get the MMO scheme of making this goblin blue with a flaming sword; you are still fighting exactly the same bandits and psychos, sometimes with a different name but exactly the same model and abilities. When you get new enemies, the zone structure will make you repeat many fights unless you complete the whole thing in one setting, and the fight is exactly the same because the enemies leveled along with you (or it might have gotten harder if you did not find better equipment, so you are fighting the same fight only you are relatively weaker). It’s great that you can have a Playthrough 2 where everything is even-con to make it a potentially meaningful challenge, but it really drives home that you put levels in a FPS where they add so little that you built mechanics to get around having levels in your FPS.

: Zubon

At this point, I’m open to the argument that “do the same thing 10 times a day for as long as you’re willing to subscribe” is the point of the current MMO genre rather than a defect in it.

More DLC as Something-Something

Posted by Zubon on August 26, 2011 in Borderlands and League of Legends. 9 Comments

Borderlands with all the DLC now costs as much as the DLC, which is 50% more than the base game. (And it is all 75% off on Steam this weekend, so if you meant to try Borderlands at some point, $7.50 is a good price point.) (The Borderlands trailer is still pretty awesome.)

See also ongoing discussion of joyfully spending money on F2P.

: Zubon

Engi Census

Posted by Zubon on August 7, 2011 in Anarchy Online, Asheron's Call 2, Borderlands, Champions Online, City of Heroes/Villains, Dark Age of Camelot, Global Agenda, Guild Wars 2, League of Legends, Real Time Strategy, Star Trek Online, Team Fortress 2, Torchlight, Vanguard and Warhammer Online. 25 Comments

Playing the Steam free game of the weekend, I have come to wonder: how many games have an Engineer that builds a turret; how many games have an Engineer that does not build a turret; and how many games have a non-Engineer that builds a turret. (I think I will avoid counting Warhammer Online’s Magus and units/classes that “summon” rather than “build.” I’m unclear whether the Raven builds, summons, or do we count “deploy”?) Was there some first game that set the standard that Engineer = build a sentry gun? It feels like engineers and self-directed turrets have become a standard game item, but perhaps exploring some examples will reverse this. I keep finding near-hits, where perhaps they consciously avoided calling the turret-builder an Engineer in recent games. I wonder if non-builder Engineers are also intentional aversions? Inventory below the break, please contribute in the comments.

Edit: let’s see what happens if we add in enemies that do the same, some of which may mirror heroes. Continue reading ‘Engi Census’

Steam Summer Camp

Posted by Zubon on July 1, 2011 in Asides, Borderlands and General. 4 Comments

Just to mention, Steam is doing one of their big seasonal sales with bonus achievements, giveaways, etc. Yes, this is a retailer trying to extract your funds, but they have a variety of games at huge discounts (missed Borderlands? It’s 75% off, with all DLC), so you might want to check it out.

: Zubon

Nothing and Everything as Endgame Content

Posted by Zubon on September 13, 2010 in Borderlands, City of Heroes/Villains, Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft. 9 Comments

I see more games trying to avoid having their earlier content become completely irrelevant while improving their endgame. You do this by having a version of the old content that scales to the new level cap; games without levels have this mostly baked right in anyway. Feel free to comment with your favorite game; World of Warcraft and The Lord of the Rings Online™ are the ones I know best for having another version of older dungeons available at the level cap. Borderlands had its own version: after you beat the game the second time, everything levels to the cap, from the final zone to the first skags.

City of Heroes took a different approach, and it seems to have worked against them from many players’ perspectives. Everything scales, and you can always drop back profitably, so every instance remains relevant as you level. Everything is endgame content and leveling content. Perhaps because of that, City of Heroes has never built much that is endgame content in name. A favorable interpretation is that very little is held back and hidden behind a grind; a less favorable interpretation is that there is little new to do at the cap, which quickly becomes “there is nothing to do at the cap.” Those who took the latter interpretation generally unsubscribed. The illusion of scarcity is an important marketing principle.

: Zubon

Unintuitive Controls

Posted by Zubon on August 16, 2010 in Borderlands. 8 Comments

The recent addition of Steam achievements to Borderlands encouraged me to fire it up and see how many popped up at once (~20). I thought I might blow up a few people while I was there, and I was reminded of how poor the interface is.

Maybe it works better on a console. The very first time I used one of the in-game menus, it felt like a console game ported to a PC incompletely. Menus required some odd, perverse combination of mouse and keyboard, screens that should have accepted either and instead asked for one but only responded to the other. At no point did I memorize which buttons brought up the different menus, instead finding one or two and then clicking between menus once the window was open.

Coming back after a break, I have no idea which button is for melee. “Had?” No, I did not guess it, though I was insufficiently motivated for much trial and error. I normally check that via the screen to edit keyboard controls. Oh, I can’t do that? At least G for grenade is intuitive enough. I can look it up, and I presume that it was in the tutorial, but once I am in-game there is nothing to suggest it. Or maybe there is something, but finding that is unintuitive, which is the same problem one level up.

I am reading The Design of Everyday Things, and I taken by the view that user error is usually design error. If your design does not lead users to the right action, that is an interface problem not PEBKAC. Some things are radically complex, but punching imaginary people in the face should not take planning or research.

: Zubon

Onion Headline Syndrome

Posted by Zubon on February 9, 2010 in Asides, Borderlands, General, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online and Torchlight. 6 Comments

I like The Onion, but I rarely find myself reading much of it because the full text rarely improves on the headlines. You might need to read the first paragraph to see where they are taking the joke, but stringing it out for 1000 words does not add much to the first 5 seconds. (I might take this as an object lesson, but look at me go, still typing.)

Syp finds the same problem with Star Trek Online, I said the same thing about LotRO skirmishes, and many of us have said the same about Borderlands and Torchlight: it is great at first, but there is not all that much improvement or variation over time. (I do credit the two single-player games for having interesting boss fights mixed into the repetition, where MMOs tend to rely on even more repetition, even in tank-and-spank bosses.) I appreciate being able to get 95% of the benefit in 5% of the time. Portal did that brilliantly and then ended.

: Zubon

Non-MMO inspiration banished to the first comment.

Breaking From the Collective Tempo

Posted by Ravious on November 19, 2009 in Borderlands, General and Lord of the Rings Online. 2 Comments

Borderlands has two speeds of play, much like its ancestor Diablo II:  paced and rushed.  When I play alone, I am going at my own speed.  It might be a slow safe sniper battle or a quick chest run in one of the Havens, but if a pseudo-scientist looked at some waves or something, I feel that there would be an alignment.  A pacing tempo, if you will.  When I play with others, even close friends, not only does the tempo markedly increase but the speed of play is not always in alignment with the me.  Frenetic is a good word for this in its most emotional definition.

I don’t like that feeling.  I love playing with other people online, but I don’t feel at one with my gaming experience when that feeling happens. Continue reading ‘Breaking From the Collective Tempo’

Cheat

Posted by Zubon on November 11, 2009 in Borderlands and General. 17 Comments

I increasingly view my Achiever tendencies as a mental disease, a bit of neurological programming from our ancestral environment being over-stimulated by modern tools that provide all the signals without the underlying substance. Parts of our brains react to the bigger numbers and flashing lights in our Skinner boxes, but running on digital treadmills will not get us anywhere.

Today, I encourage you to separate the reward from the activity, the pellet from the lever. If it really is the journey rather than the destination, you should still want to go on the journey without a prize at the end. Would you keep re-running that dungeon if there was no more loot to gain? Would you farm if you had unlimited gold? For some things, you would. Good. Do those, freed of any worries about winning a roll on a 2% drop.

There is an easy way to test this: cheat. Grant yourself the reward at the end. This will not work in an MMO, but if the game saves to your hard drive, you can edit the save file. Are you really farming for experience or gold in some flash game? Are you running Diablo II or Borderlands bosses to try for better equipment? Backup your game, download a save game editor, and just give yourself the gun you want. There, now that you are no longer pulling the arm on a virtual slot machine, do you actually want to fight that boss multiple times per night?

Because let me tell you, we may call them Achievements, but they just measure time spent, and if you do not enjoy what you are doing along the way, you could be spending your time elsewhere. If your game gates the fun content behind that kind of repetition, throw the game away and find something that will not make you crawl through barbed wire. If you find that it is the getting rather than the having, I hate to tell you this, but desire is the root of all suffering. There will always be more useless crap to want, and apparently it is useless crap to you if you no longer want it once you have it. If you are really willing to work long hours for a digital gold star, I need some wallpaper replaced in the guest room. I’ll e-mail you the imaginary star, gold piece, or sniper rifle.

: Zubon