Month: November 2009

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Guild Wars 2 Release Date Flashbang

I feel sorry for Jaeho Lee sometimes.  The man heads up the English-speaking conference call for Korean-based NCSoft.  Last time NCSoft at the conference call spoke substantively about Guild Wars 2’s possible release date it caused enough commotion that the ArenaNet’s brass had to respond.  Of course it can’t be helped, Guild Wars 1 was a success in what was considered a DOA-business model.  More people than rabid fans like me want to know about the sequel to ArenaNet’s first game. Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Release Date Flashbang

Happy Blog Birthday

The Steve Jackson Games Daily Illuminator turns 15 today. It is, to the best of their knowledge, the oldest blog still being updated regularly. Yes, it mostly exists to advertise their products (Zombie Dice this spring!), but the random internet items that proceed the daily product spotlight can be fun. As a RSS subscriber, I don’t even see the daily product spotlight. A personal favorite is the occasional chronicling of how we now live in the future, what with bladeless fans and people becoming cyborgs so slowly that no one much notices. Or I suppose you could just watch for DARPA RFPs for super-soldier suits and mechs (actual US military research), but it helps to have someone else spotting.

: Zubon

Conflict of interest watch: I once published a column for the Steve Jackson Games online magazine.

The Turbine Two-Step

When I play games I often rank them by tempo rather than genre.  Hypertempo games, like Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead, require a lot of energy and give a lot of excitement in return.  Slower games such as Civilization 4 or a tower defense give me a slow, entertaining beat.  MMOs have their own rhythm as well, and last night I filled a much needed missing tempo in my MMO library.

Lord of the Rings Online in itself has multiple tempos, at which I can play.  There is the calm steady beat of solo questing, the more demanding march of group instances, and even crafting affects the whole symphony with a coda of rest.  Still, Lord of the Rings Online is missing many tempos that are crucial to my well-rounded gameplay.  The combat is sometimes too rhythmic, even in group instances.  The game can feel like an If/Then line dance, where agro, healing, placement, and killing are all just part of any veteran’s action equation.  I felt this lack deep in my soul last night after playing for countless hours over the weekend.

I still wanted to play an MMO, but I needed a more aggressive rhythm.  One filled with staccato notes and out of control riffs rather than a steady Bolero.  I found Dungeons and Dragons Online. Continue reading The Turbine Two-Step

WoW Crafting

The production skills have almost no gameplay value. They can produce useful in-game things, and it is something to do as MMO players always need, but there is no fun in it. Recipe + ingredients + click + wait. It is convenient and dull, especially in volume. It encourages alt-tabbing, never a good sign for game design.

I find the gathering skills inappropriately engaging. The world is full of little boxes of candy, just for me! I was tempted to drop Blacksmithing, pick up Skinning or Herbalism, and gather my little heart out. At least you are out there doing something besides watching the little bar fill, and it progresses naturally as you play. Continue reading WoW Crafting

Weekend Deals on Steam

“Overlord: Complete Pack” with Overlord, Overlord II, and Overlord: Raising Hell is $8.75. I note that Overlord itself is just $1.50. I have heard mixed things about Overlord, notably that you spend too much time saving villages considering that you are the villain, and the Raising Hell levels sound like a lot of that. On the other hand, there are only so many good “be the bad guy” games out there, and there are good things too. If you want a review of a game from 2007, I might say some things after I play.

$1.50 for an old game, and it downloads and installs itself while I sleep? I should be looking through these digital distribution channels for classic games I never played. My list of books to read and movies to see also has a “games to play” section.

I did not enjoy Left 4 Dead much, but if you want the sequel, your pre-order time is almost up. Steam has the same deal there that Borderlands did: 10% off plus buy-3-get-1 free, which is just a brilliant offer for games with 4-player coop. Various places will also give you stuff for pre-ordering, like a Team Fortress 2 hat or a L4D2 bat.

: Zubon

Things To Do

Good version: the game has lots of content that remains meaningful at the level cap. Depending on your game, that could be a collection of dungeons, PvP, things to make or collect, areas to explore, or procedurally generated content that does not feel formulaic and repetitive.

Bad version: the game has lots of things to keep you busy and subscribed at the level cap. Depending on your game, that could be a variety of treadmills and grinds, or PvP and procedurally generated content that quickly becomes repetitive.

This is mostly an Explorer perspective, because I find it easier to think of what would make good post-cap Explorer content (new things to do) and bad post-cap Achiever content (do them each 5 times a day until you reach some new cap, to give us time to add more grinds to keep you busy until the next expansion pack). The distinction comes down to whether you would do X as an activity in and of itself, whether or not it produced some new numbers to add to your character sheet.

: Zubon

A difficult game to balance for PVP

Once per week, I podcast about Star Wars: The Old Republic. On the last episode, when the subject of “invisibility” style stealth for the recently revealed Imperial Agent class came up, I was adamant in my opposition to it. I hate when you are trying to PVP and thieves or burglers pop out of thin-air and do burst damage as if they had some kind of invisibility spell. I felt pretty sure they wouldn’t give invisibility stealth to Imperial Agents because, afterall, it wouldn’t be balanced for the Imperial Agent to have both cover and invisibility stealth when the counterpart, the Smuggler, does not. Well it seems I was wrong, because the folks at Darth Hater have seen video of an Imperial Agent go stealth with an non-timed toggle switch stealth.

How is this possible I wonder? One side of the fence has stealth, the other does not. It’s possible I think, because the game may not be designed around PVP balance.
Continue reading A difficult game to balance for PVP

On the Blogroll: Player Versus Developer

The hot topic these past couple of weeks has been MMO pricing models, and you will have trouble finding better discussion than at Player Versus Developer this month. Even if you do not agree with Green Armadillo on all the points, these are the critical points for discussion. Skip the distracting side issues and cut to the core. Here is a post on Facebook game scams, with an article I’ve been meaning to discuss. How about the conflicts of interest inherent in running a game with a cash store? You don’t need to fix balance issues if your players can buy their way around them. And there is the question of what is left to do if you are one of us not necessarily thrilled with the shift to RMT.

This last one reminds me of last week’s elections, because there is a sense of inevitability about the item shop. I cannot see the trend moving in the opposite direction. There will definitely be a place for subscription games, but the paradigm shift is already over if your position is reduced to “there will still be a place for it” or “we are still the majority.” Yes, for now, but winning 53-47 when it would have been 93-7 a little while ago means you are about to get steamrolled.

: Zubon

The House of Cards Return

So many of us are MMO tourists.  There might be a current base of operations, but even that will ebb and flow.  It’s just that most MMOs (perhaps, all) cannot create content faster than even the slow-playing majority of their players can take it down.  The mind wanders with all the times we were having fun, and soon enough we begin the inexorable internal debate of re-upping with an MMO that has accumulated some digital dust.  Syp portrays this gamer struggle in a delightful script form here, which amazingly enough happened to me with the exact same game this morning before he posted. 

The mind’s last argument is also its strongest.  One can’t argue the amorphous concept of fun very easily against rational points because rational points can always be irrationally hand-waved away.  The mind needs irrational reasons to bring down the house-of-cards that you will have fun where the grass might be greener.  Of course you can also spend $15 and hours of installing and patching and more hours figuring out why you left in the first place and rationally win.

–Ravious
on the homefront