Yesterday we discussed bad designs made brilliant. Let’s talk about designs you hate that others love, perhaps because they are bad designs. Continue reading Bad At and Good For
Month: December 2012
Small Thoughts, Small Complaints, Small Post
I am very surprised at the degree I continue to log in to Guild Wars 2. In a constant period unspoiled by content updates, expansions, etc., I usually flit around 2-3 MMOs. I don’t nibble as much as Syp, but I do enjoy small plates. Guild Wars 2 has continued to be my main MMO, and I am having a blast with alternate characters, which is something I rarely do in most MMOs. I will have to discuss my WvW-only character in a future post.
I am slightly frustrated having a necromancer main with the gear options. It seems there are a bunch of cool scepters and staves, but the artists seemed to have forgotten to colorize some for the necromancer. Are there any green-plague glow effects? Seems like fire and ice elementalists get a lot of love. I’ve decided that I love Memory of the Sky for my staff because of the dichotomy of light and dark with necromancer’s staff skills. I would kill for a green-tinted Wayward Wand as a scepter, but my choices now seem limited to ice, skulls, and eyeballs.
In Lord of the Rings Online I am finally hitting Rohan proper with the Norcrofts zone. Overall the Rohan expansion is really good for a quest-based MMO. The flow is exceptionally good. The stories are also nice with some decent gems scattered around. There is also some conventional silliness like a fell-beast cool with watching me burn down it’s roost or me having to constantly interrupt a funeral to advance a quest line. Still I am enjoying the expansion. I’ll have to discuss mounted combat, revisited, in a later post too.
I would play it a lot more if the client was not an inefficient woolly mammoth of a program. With my computer running Guild Wars 2 on max settings, I can be in the game in less than a minute. Lord of the Rings Online is at least a couple minutes. It is a shame too because the quests are so conducive to small bites of playing. I also hate that the client won’t run windowed unless it changes Windows 7 to basic view. I’m sure optimizing load times and compatibility with Windows 7 graphic mode is near the bottom of their engineer’s to-do list.
Guild Wars 2 Wintersday event is coming on December 14, and the Lord of the Rings Online Riders of Rohan 3-mans (Goblintown, Mirkwood, and Misty Mountains) have less than a month to be released. That is about where I am heading.
–Ravious
Bad Design Can Be Great Design
Good jobs take advantage of your strengths. Great jobs take advantage of your weaknesses.
A system that is bad design in most games can be a great feature in a game that consciously builds around it. Continue reading Bad Design Can Be Great Design
Resetting Characters and Worlds
I find myself preferring new game plus models where you carry over a bonus to a new character rather than taking the same character through a new, higher-level version of the game.
[PS2] Tutorial
I have criticized ArenaNet for explaining major game features with “go read the wiki.” PlanetSide 2’s entire tutorial is a link to YouTube videos on the launcher. Logging in, you are dropped directly into a warzone without an explanation of advanced features like “how to tell who is on your team.” You are told to go control the land for your faction without mention of how to do that.
This has a worse introduction than Dwarf Fortress. There are other games that start you without a tutorial or have a steep learning curve, but this one drops you directly into combat with experienced players rather than “start level one and figure it out as you go along.” On a scale of 1 to 10, the introduction gets a negative number for skipping both the tutorial and that entire space where the beginning would be. I was killed by teammates before seeing an enemy, then again before shooting one. The part of the game that every player will see seems designed to drive away new players.
MMOs strive to be a niche market by making the players work for it. If you want to play this game, you must go watch these videos and read these links on another site so you can know what is going on and how to play. It is a strange thing that almost every buy-the-box game gives you an introduction so that you can start off on the right foot, though they already have your money even if you never re-load the game, while this F2P+cash shop game is making it hard to get started, but they need new players to come back and spend money after their horrible first experience.
: Zubon