Month: November 2011

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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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A Flag in the Sand, Thoughts on “E”

After two years of stagnating in my Steam library I am finally playing Assassin’s Creed. I blame it on a friend who Tweets some awesome thing about the series every now and then. I admit I had no idea what the game was about except I would perch like a bird in high places and assassinate people that needed killing.  Having got past the initial tutorial places, finally seeing the meat of the game was a revelation. It was well worth the $5 I paid for it at the time, and I will likely get the sequel as soon as I am done with the first.

I didn’t realize how much of an “explorer’s” dream the game was. The cities are sprawling and lively. There are plenty of nooks to find and crannies to stuff bodies in. A lot of time and love was spent on each area to constantly feed moments of ‘neat!’ It’s so free-spirited that when I get bogged down in a sword-fight, I am just hoping it will be over all the sooner. I want to keep exploring, and to keep the explorer heart busy, there are two distinct modes of exploration in Assassin’s Creed: guided and hidden.  Continue reading A Flag in the Sand, Thoughts on “E”

Misleading Metrics

I wanted to give DC Universe Online another shot, so I booted it up. “Download a GB.” Hmm, I have a bunch of other games I could play right now. Before bed, I started a bunch of games and programs that needed updates. They were all ready to go when I next came back. But Steam is now under the impression that I have spent more than 12 hours playing DCUO.

I’m wondering how many other /played stats are driven by overnight AFKs. In City of Heroes, it was common for badge hunters to leave the game running overnight to farm healing, damage, or time under crowd control effects. The /played will be how much time that character has been logged on, but it’s not quite what we mean by how much time you’ve spent on that character.

: Zubon

One Shot

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

Difficulty Curve

I have reached the point in Dungeon Defenders where I need a ranged DPS character to do more. I’m working out how to bootstrap that process, since the tasks for most really good ranged DPS weapons require either a decent DPS weapon or being assisted by someone who has one. I am solid on towers, but the red ogres absorb a lot of damage.

Medium difficulty is easy. Once you get past the low-level blahs and have all your towers, you’re good to go. I didn’t even try Easy; I presume you can sleep through it. Hard is mostly fair, requiring some thought and planning, and it requires you to use your towers well (or perhaps you can overgear and just shoot most of it down, but some of those maps are large). Insane is an entire other thing, and they keep increasing its difficulty because Insane is the endgame.

Like the WoW switch to raiding, Insane is a switch to demanding a DPS hero. Yes, the towers are extremely helpful once the enemy count gets to 4 digits (and keeps climbing in Survival), but the red ogres’ hit points have 6 digits. I have yet to see them hit 7 digits, but I have seen it very close in a 4-player game. Someone with great tower-building gear can still shoot that down, but the ogre tends to have dozens of friends with him and more coming from other lanes, so you may not be able to devote too many DU to the ogre. OTOH, I have seen screenshots of DPS-specialized characters above 200,000 DPS, so the ogres need not be overwhelming threats. That bootstrapping comes back: to get the items you’ll want for massive DPS, you’ll need to be able to take out the ogres that demand the massive DPS, unless you got them before they dialed up the late-game ogres. And I do mean to pluralize “ogres,” in that they spawn in pairs on some maps, to say nothing of the challenge where you get only ogres (from five entrances). My Squire is hybrid and only puts out about 20,000 DPS without Blood Rage, but he can take down the biggest ogre given a bit of time and maneuvering. The other enemies and ogres are there to minimize your time and maneuvering. And then there’s the end boss, which likes to spends its time airborne.

Maybe I’ll just get a bit more gear for my Squire and work on Insane Assault for the Huntress weapon.

: Zubon

The early maps are still pretty easy on Insane, especially the ones without ogres.

Level 1 Superman

The DC Universe Online tutorial takes place in one of Brainiac’s ships. While I respect that unity in the storyline, unless levels work radically different here, it is hard to take seriously a Big Bad when players solo his invasion ships at level 1. If Brainiac is not up to containing level 1 characters, he may not be much of a threat.

I picked Superman as a mentor, so he joined me at the end of the tutorial. (I presume that’s why, rather than everyone’s getting Superman.) This is another problem of scaling, because Superman is (depending on the latest universe reboot) kind of a demigod. Any problem I can reasonably address at level 1, he can solve without stopping. Big Blue should be smashing those robots faster than I can see them, and I’m pretty sure he can fly through the side of the ship rather than waiting on that teleporter. You can play Robin to Batman, but next to Superman, you’re Jimmy Olsen.

Comic books usually hand-wave the MMO problem of different levels. I think Daredevil knows that he’s not in the same league as Thor, but you at least pretend for a few pages that the heroes can meaningfully challenge the Silver Surfer.

: Zubon

[GW2] Valley of Movement and Microexpressions

ArenaNet’s Chuck Jackman (pronounced as Scottish as possible) shows off the new dialogue cut scenes in Guild Wars 2 in one of the latest blog posts. Unequivocally, he started the doom of ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 by having to summon eldritch gods to get the job done. It is possible that everybody will be insane/dead before a beta starts. Still, which do you think is scarier, Cthulhu or an art director that has probably already bested a few of those gods? Anyway, amongst the cries of the damned, Jackman writes:

We also use a layered and additive approach on the face. This allows us to animate a mood or emotion-based “face idle” and layer on the lip-synch animation as well. We can then drop additive facial gestures at the appropriate time in the dialogue. For example, we can have a character looking timid or frightened while they talk. Then maybe something happens to scare them and we can drop an additive flinch animation onto the character’s face, body, or both independently at just the right moment so that they react to what is happening to them in the scene.

I have to say that this sounds really cool, especially after watching some deadpan facial expressions on the heralded Skyrim. An official video of one of these new dialogue scenes gives the full impression. I find two teachings colliding from my untrained pundit’s eye: microexpressions and constant movement. Let’s explore both! Continue reading [GW2] Valley of Movement and Microexpressions

Re-Re-Balance

A big difficulty of playing Dungeon Defenders around launch has been the post-release re-balancing. There has been a lot of it. Daily patches have not been unusual, and those have contained both bug fixes and balance changes. I don’t know if strategies that worked last week still work. I do know that some things from two weeks ago don’t work any more.

This is not a good post-release state. It will presumably pass, but to paraphrase SynCaine, WTF kind of developer releases something that needs a 50% nerf? That particular one got walked back a bit, but the numbers you see in patch notes are not small. Scroll through patch notes and count how many times something has changed by 20% or more. 20+% is not a tweak.

This is interesting in the sense that there is always something new to re-learn, but one does not make plans on that basis. It is hard to feel invested in a character or a world when this much is in flux.

: Zubon

Boom

The great joy in having an Apprentice has been the deadly striker tower. It is slow and single-target, but it has range and power. It gives you life-affirmingly huge numbers. After being annoyed by wyverns as a Squire, it is lovely to watch them drop from the sky.

But the range, the range is what makes this toy shine, along with its ability to shoot through walls. You hear it charge up, fire, and somewhere a pinata has exploded. I had heard my friend on his Apprentice laughing about it before, because they are nice on the ogre gate in The Summit, but playing Endless Spires was the first time I made heavy use of my own Apprentice. I set up deadly striker towers near the central crystals then watched them pick off enemies on the walkways around the spires. I hadn’t even been aiming for those. I cackled like a madman who had struck comedy gold. It’s a beautiful map for showing off what the towers can do: long, winding paths with wide open spaces. You get to watch the bolt of doom arc over the depths, striking some slow-moving orc in the face, and he collapses in a colorful cloud of mana.

: Zubon

Reach out and touch someone.

Stable-Filling

Witness the evolution of AFK power-leveling, even in the face of nerfed towers! I was amused to get level 20 in three Deeper Well Insane runs, which is trivially easy (Squire: harpoon and bowling ball at the top of each stair, slice & dice and harpoon at the upper doors, harpoon somewhere else for the “used all DU” bonus). I was messing around with the bonus level on Hard, but that has become inconvenient with recent updates. The Ramparts Hard is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million xp and 2 million mana (currency) per hour, which means taking a character from 0 to the level cap in about 3.5 hours while reading A Feast for Crows. I didn’t really grind that out, but fiddling and testing got me a respectable Apprentice and Monk, so I have some toys to try creating the perfect builds for Insane difficulty. It seems entirely feasible to take a character from 0 to 70 in an hour or two of play, although by the time you can do that, you will have pretty much everything at level 70 already.

When they introduce new classes, there will be legitimate characters at the level cap within an hour of the update. If I can actually get the “time to cap” down to an hour, it might be worth proliferating characters while farming a bit of mana. I imagine some people already have three level-capped characters of each class (pure towers, pure hero, hybrid). It’s silly, but it seems practically free if you are going to be farming mana for upgrading items. Of course, then you should farm more mana to equip those characters, and farming that mana can get you even more characters…

: Zubon

Uniqueness

The latest Kongregate giveaway may interest you, because it is for $10,000 of gift certificates (over 10 years), although the gameplay involved is not interesting. No, what interests me is this: what work is “unique” doing in the game’s description, “Choose from one of six unique races”? In what sense are dwarves, elves, and humans unique? Are they saying that they are not identical with other and trying to use “unique” as some kind of superlative for “different”? Is it a translation error?

At least they did not go on to claim that their races were the most unique.

: Zubon