Month: October 2014

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Roguelikes

I have been trying some roguelikes and games with roguelike elements.

Roguelikes seem shaky on the concept of a difficulty curve. They tend to have difficulty cliffs. Start, maybe a tutorial, good luck. And you know I’m all about the new player experience; creating an unwelcoming experience for new players is just poisoning your game, making sure it dies except for a dozen grognards who populate the last forum about the game and curse out new players looking for help as lazy idiots who should go play Angry Birds because they’re not willing to put in the time to learn how to play properly. Some roguelikes have heard about difficulty levels, but those tend be levels, not curves; either it adjusts the height of the cliff or makes it a plain. And too many games think that adjusting the numbers is an interesting way to scale difficulty.

Roguelikes seem shaky on the concept of balance. Players enthusiastic about roguelikes seem to be of the opinion that it is okay for difficulty to randomly vary between “doable” and “not even theoretically possible” because it is random. That’s the full justification: yes, you have effectively been given a 1000-piece puzzle with only 998 pieces, but you never know how many pieces are in the box until you put them together, and you’re not supposed to be able to put every puzzle together, so just keep reloading until you get a puzzle that does have all the pieces. I have seen advocates of balance via save scumming. I rather find it a large design problem if you can make all the right decisions and still lose. Which is to say, there was no “right” decision, so you had no meaningful decisions to make. But people like slot machines, too.

This is certainly not all roguelikes. Sturgeon’s Revelation still applies: 90% of everything is crud. But roguelikes that fail often tend to fail hard and do so in ways that are not immediately obvious whether the game has hidden depths or is just broken. I’m perfectly happy to invest small amounts of time in the face of randomization, but then you find creatively horrible ideas like “how about a 4X with roguelike elements?”

: Zubon

[RR] D&D 5th: Classes

The first thing that strikes you about the 5th Edition classes is how many there are. As with races, 5th Edition has embraced the expanded core, with barbarians, sorcerers, and warlocks all in the base PHB. You expect editions to add and subtract from the core classes as experiments did or did not work, but 5th has leaned towards as many “add”s as possible. Previous posts in this series have mentioned my brothers’ reactions; they started back when there were four core classes, and they seemed ambivalent between whether these were a variety of exciting options or an excess of bloat.

Classes are the main area where D&D turned around and fled from 4th Edition. 4th Edition treated classes and abilities fundamentally differently from every other edition of D&D, and 5th looks a lot more like 2nd Edition. That will tie into combat and spellcasting mechanics. Everyone used the same system of daily and encounter abilities in 4th Edition, while 5th Edition returns to the familiar attack actions and daily spells.

Does this bring us back to linear fighters and quadratic wizards? It certainly moves in that direction, but the section of the book on spells will tell us just how far. A 4th Edition innovation was severely curtailing the scope of high level spells. From the classes section, we see that 5th Edition is curtailing the number of high level spells, with lots of access to low level spells but capping at 1 9th level spell per day.

As noted previously, all classes have a core and specialization framework. You choose what sort of Fighter, Rogue, or Wizard you want to be, which dictates your abilities at certain levels. All Wizards are specialists now, but that means less than in previous editions. One big thing for 5th Edition is “no dead levels.” Every class gets something every level, such as a new ability or a new level of spells.

Finally, 5th Edition has quietly thrown open the gates on multiclassing again. The rules are tucked away, but they are freer than 3rd Edition, complete with a unified multiclass spellcasting level computation. (If that last phrase made no sense to you, just read it as “there was an issue in 3rd Edition.”) The layout of information and the class design encourage single-class play, but the mechanics are there for optimizers to cut loose. That seems a “best of both worlds” situation.

: Zubon

Quit Curves

The corner of a difficulty curve often becomes a quitting point, partly because it is a change in the game, partly in the way an extreme one feels like a betrayal of the relationship the game had been establishing, and sometimes because it indicates the developers are not very good. While Portal perhaps goes too far in making the first half+ of the game a gradual tutorial, it does have that transition into “and here are some harder puzzles, and now you’re on your own.” Do you have a favorite example of a game that says, “here are some tutorials, and now we’re jumping straight to the highest difficulty”? The Witcher 2 is notable for making that jump before completing the tutorial. Either the developers did not recognize that they turned the dial from 2 to 8 or they thought that was a good progression, and neither implies, “these people probably made good design decisions in other areas.”

: Zubon

Quick Reviews: PC Ports

Another weekend of “meh” from Humble Bundles.

Deadlight is a side-scrolling zombie survival platformer. Run away from the zombies, sometimes shoot or chop them, climb walls, and jump from ladder to ledge to avoid the electrified ground. The atmosphere is nice, and I found any plot incoherence appropriate given that people make bad decisions in crises. I played the first third of the game but stopped there due to dodgy controls. I presume it works better on a controller; someone must have tested the PC port but been ignored when they explained that it is a horrible idea to have a move that requires left-shift, left-control, and A or D. Also having different keys for opening visually indistinguishable types of doors, unnecessarily many moves because parkour, and some generally bugginess or finickiness in navigating obstacles. Not bad if you can get past some dodgy controls, but a basic requirement of a platformer is not to have dodgy controls.

Smallworld 2 I stopped before even starting the game. I may try again due to recalling some acclaim for the board game, but from the first screen the interface is horrid. I can see how it might work better on a tablet, but it misses things you would want on a PC like labels, flipping through the main menu without loading times, and a coherent display of information. Something about “Watch the Tutorial” rather than “Play the Tutorial” immediately put me on my guard, probably because of having seen the next note before it.

AdVenture Capitalist (not from the Humble Bundle) had a recent major update. The developers took a while between updates because they realized there could be money in this thing and made a mobile version, then replaced the PC version with a port of the mobile version. This reduced functionality, again with lousy menus, and any visual improvements were offset by new visual problems. They quickly walked back some of the visual problems, yielding an interface that is slightly prettier and significantly less functional than it was before the update. I have said that a rule of thumb for shipping the update is, “Does it make some things better and no things worse?” They took the opposite path.

On the non-PC port front, I played through The Blackwell Legacy, which was a sufficiently enjoyable point-and-click adventure game, and I say that as someone who has long since stopped liking point-and-click adventure games. The developer commentary is harder on himself than I was as a player in terms of exposition dumps and absurd adventure game puzzles. I only had one real guide dang it moment, in that to get the best ending you must stop and look at your notebook during the climax of the game. Borderlands players will remember that as “wow, the game is really starting to click here, I better stop and look at my inventory.” Setting, characters, and story are pretty good, enough that I will try a sequel.

: Zubon

Don’t Explain the Joke

There comes that moment in the game where you have crossed some threshold or achieved something notable, and you want to tell someone about it. And you realize that your non-gamer friends, family, and/or significant other would not understand what you are talking about; that it would take so long to explain to them that you would probably lose the emotional high from trying to explain its significance; and that they would still probably comprehend at the level of “he did a good game thing.” And then, in some games, where you would still need to explain a bit to your gamer friends, and then they would probably ask, “why are you playing that?”

But just so I can say it: I did a good game thing. Thank you.

: Zubon

A RIFT in my Brain

I’ve been enjoying RIFT a lot, and at the same time I’m wondering how long I will stick around. Coming back after so long, there is so much in RIFT. It could easily become my only MMO, and I would have content to chase for a long time. (I had to tell myself to walk away from fishing, for instance.) On the other hand, much like Ethic, things aren’t wholly clicking with me. I keep thinking “well, this is fun… but”. But. Continue reading A RIFT in my Brain

Quick Reviews: Quest of Dungeons and Scribblenauts Unmasked

I tried two new games on Sunday.

Quest of Dungeons is a turn-based rogue-like dungeon crawl. If you like that kind of thing, you will probably like this kind of thing. I did not see anything to distinguish it from others except for its adjustable difficulty. Based on the global Steam achievements, most players had the same thought as me and said, “take the archer class.” The game might be a bit more strategic without the ability to kill most enemies without taking any damage. I did not feel motivated to play through at higher difficulty, although I could be convinced if the different difficulties mean something other than “everything has x% more hit points” or “health potions no longer drop, good luck lol.” But then, I’m not a fan of the genre, so feel free to weigh in with your expertise. It is in the current Humble Bundle, if you’re interested.

Scribblenauts Unmasked is the latest Scribblenauts game, this time crossing over with DC Comics. I like Scribblenauts games, despite the difficulty’s seeming tuned to the vocabulary of a small child. This has a bit more of a story arc than Scribblenauts Unlimited, with the bonus of more “random events” you can have appear on maps for some variety. Of course, you can still solve almost all problems either very directly (apply the adjective “clean” to the dirty thing) or with your favorite few words (“flying,” “bazooka,” and “fire-breathing” do wonders for me). Either the developers recognized those or pick up how often I use them, which was pretty cool when a flying, fireproof, fire-breathing enemy appeared for a boss fight. The game encourages variety by cutting points for re-using words on a map and with challenges like “no weapons” or “no flying,” so the same answer could be worth half or double points.

I can’t go quite so far as to recommend Scribblenauts Unmasked because it does not seem to bring much to the table. If you want a bit more Scribblenauts, absolutely, get it. This is a retread of things you know, plus some comic book stuff. It’s a lot of comic book stuff, so you have more than a page of Robins from the various editions of Batman. Comic book folks would like it mostly for the range of things included like C-list DC villains (Kite Man!) and more than 100 Green Lanterns, although New 52 is the order of the day, which might be less thrilling.

A couple of “meh” games. They’re not bad, I just do not see a lot to recommend them when there are better games. But if you’ve already played the better games of those types, go for it.

: Zubon