Author: Zubon

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Simple Graphics for Simple Minds

Setting things on fire in-game is satisfying to a degree that is psychologically worrisome. The implementation, however, is important.

One thing I really enjoy in Team Fortress 2 is playing a Pyro. When you light someone up, they really are on fire, and it covers the entire character model. They yell for help, announcing that they are on fire. If there is water on the map, they may go diving off the edge. If you get a kill, the body will smolder on the ground. Nothing messes up an enemy charge like lighting up a few people, who instinctively go looking for health in a way that simple bullets cannot cause.

Contrast this with your MMO. What happens when you hit an enemy with an elemental effect? Most of the time, it seems, you can have an animation during the casting time and for a second or so later. You can have someone on fire from a half-dozen sources, and they just have a string of debuff/DoT icons. Stacking DoTs is still a good thing, but is a far cry from the panicked shouts of ogres.

Some do this a bit better, or do for certain effects. Some of the City of Heroes control graphics are great. Lock your enemy in a block of ice, boulder, or sphere of electricity. Have little ice cubes fall off a slowed target. Great. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢’s Red Maid gets a great graphic on her immobilize, with red specters rising from the bloodied waters to hold you in place. Does your game do anything like this well, where an ongoing effect has a highly satisfying ongoing visual? Let us know.

It would be nice to see them scale, from a low-level singe to a high-level pyre. I am not sure how well that works for all energy attacks. I can see frost scaling from a blue tint from a low-level slow to a giant ice cube. I would need to think about some of the others.

: Zubon

Issue 15

You can start the new Strike Force with a team of 4. It may even be possible to complete it with that, if you have the right characters and no PUG members. It is not much fun, it is bugged, and it is not the kind of thing you can do with whatever random people who happen to recruit. This puts it with a small amount of the level 50 content, like the Statesman TF, Lord Recluse SF, and Hami.

I’d say more, and there is more to the Issue, but I don’t care at this point. I’ll wait a little longer before uninstalling City of Heroes.

The thread discussing it is interesting, if only for the way that games’ urban legends get made. You can see people discussing how to get something to work and what worked for them, even after the developer has posted and said it doesn’t work. And heck, the developer could even be wrong. It has happened before.

: Zubon

Lori Drew Dismissal

While it will not become final until filed next week, Lori Drew’s conviction has been dismissed. This is important to gamers and other online folk, because the government’s theory in the case was that any violation of Terms of Service should be viewed as the same offense as hacking (“unauthorized access”), and therefore a federal crime. This would be a fun way to get rid of certain people we don’t like, but is probably one of the less intelligent legal theories to come out of California recently.

: Zubon

Password Security Fail

Oops! There was a problem with the following:
-Please note that your password should be 5 to 8 characters long and is case-sensitive.
-Retype Password can not be greater than 8 characters.

I should have tested all the other password security features that it rejects. Bonuses for international characters and punctuation! At least it does not explicitly restrict you to English words.
Oh, and Reader’s Digest is giving away some Kindles, which is where I found that friendly error.

: Zubon

Downtime = Weight Gain?

I have lost five pounds since getting into Team Fortress 2. Many of you are familiar with gamer diet, wherein you get a new game and forget to eat while you play for hours at a time, but I have been actively applying this to dropping some weight. First, willpower is a limited resource, and freeing myself to binge on one thing saves my resources to avoid binging on another. Second, my major effort is reducing calories, a good portion of which comes from eating only when hungry, rather than from boredom or habit. With a constantly active FPS, I do not have time to be bored or wander off for food. In an MMO, a ten-minute horse ride is a great time to go make a sandwich; in a FPS, a ten-second respawn time is all that separates you from a control point that is still in play. With no snacks at the desk, I have no caloric threats until we get back to the original point of gamer diet: look up from the game and realize it is time for bed.

Who has time to be hungry when there is an entire BLU team to set on fire?

: Zubon

Reader Critique Requested: Toytown Tower Defense

Having noticed that our readers include a great many fans of tower defense games, the maker of Toytown Tower Defense asked for feedback on why his game might not have been well received. Or let’s put that in less polite terms: it is rated just below 3.5 on Kongregate, when some real garbage clears 4. Let’s get some reviews in the comments, something more substantial and useful than the Twitter-like comments on Kongregate. Try it before my ensuing comments bias your impressions. Continue reading Reader Critique Requested: Toytown Tower Defense

Learning Curves on the Shooting Range

My wife hesitates to try cooperative multi-player games because she does want groups depending on her to do something she does not know how to do. If your tank does not know her job, you wipe. If this is your crowd controller’s first time in a complicated fight, you may be in serious trouble. This worked fine in City of Heroes: not only could she solo for almost everything, but when she did group, she was a Scrapper who did not care about dying. There are very few cases in CoH where anyone cares if the Scrapper dies or has less than the perfect DPS setup.

As I am learning Team Fortress 2, I see that, but there is another factor: many of the people shooting me already know what to do. There are nine classes to learn, most with some special feature, six of whom have three additional options for their equipment; there are also all the maps to learn, some with multiple stages, all with their scattered refills, control points, backdoors, ambush spots, ramps, etc. While you are trying to get the swing of all this, one guy is lobbing pipe bombs at you, and you will be shot in the head in you pause in a sniper’s field of vision.

Some things are more intuitive than others. Protect this point, check. Move the cart along that line, check. And then you find that the map has multiple vertical levels, a little room with ammo and health, back stairs that everyone else on your team seems to know, and windows that you may or may not be able to shoot through. While someone with a flamethrower is leaping around the corner at you.

One of the great barriers for PvP games is that they are not newbie friendly. If veteran players are alongside green recruits, that is great for training the new guys and integrating them, and horrible for having their first night of play involve being shot in the head twenty times by guys they never saw. TF2 is kind enough to give you a picture of your killer, so you can see where those snipers are after someone kills you.

: Zubon

Player Respawn Timers

Most death penalties come down to lost time, in its various incarnations of lost experience points, item repairs, corpse runs, and debuffs. As death penalties become increasingly light, one type almost invariably remains: you wasted the time you spent failing, and now you need to run back to continue. (If you die in a group, you may just sit out a while until rezzed, hoping your group does not wipe at -1 member, or a shorter time with -2 members during the rez.)

This time-to-return can be very important. If it is very short, and the death penalty is otherwise small, you zerg things: just keep dying and coming back until you get through it. It is a measure of how far we have gotten past meatspace that we can now intuitively see solutions that include “die and come back” as part of viable plans. To take the first few examples that come to mind: our LotRO static group wiped on an overpull with adds last week, but ran back to clear it easily since we had taken out 75% of the enemies on the first try; LotRO three-man instances are short enough for people to die and come back while someone keeps the boss from resetting, and some turtle-raiding strategies involve planned deaths to reset the stacking DoTs; fights against CoX archvillains and giant monsters often involve multiple resurrections and hospital runs/teleports, and the Hamidon raid usually involves planned near-wipes.

This is usually not a good thing for the game. Continue reading Player Respawn Timers