Author: Zubon

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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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Witchin’

The Steam summer sale reminded me that I own and installed The Witcher 2, so maybe I should try it out sometime? Trying it out reminded me of the two things in general circulation from review at the time: it is reportedly one of the great PC RPGs out there, but good luck playing it because the game features difficult combat involving many abilities with little to no explanation of how to use them. Penny Arcade had it about right: Continue reading Witchin’

Premature Climax

Many of my multiplayer gaming frustrations can probably be attributed to the excessive deployment of high variance tactics. Gamers take outrageous risks where they would normally not be warranted. If the risks pay off, they win big and feel awesome. If the risks do not pay off, they lose quickly, call something OP, then get another round to try to win big. After all, the downside of losing an online game is not that huge, especially if you down-weight the negative.

If you are the sort of person who plays Civilization on settings like “epic” and “marathon,” the idea of “win big or lose fast” is probably anathema. Whatever game you are playing, you are planning to settle in, focus on the fundamentals, operate efficiently and perhaps aggressively, and build to a satisfying climax. And then this twerp decides to throw absolutely everything at his first attempt, either failing miserably and quitting (smack talk on exit optional) or winning and declaring himself the best player ever (smack talk required).

This is where I place the distinction in an RTS between “rush” and “cheese.” Continue reading Premature Climax

Adjustable Grind

I have been playing Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten, which is pretty good. One unusual feature of its advancement system is a slider for how quickly you gain experience points and cash. Want to triple your rewards or stop them completely? You can do that. Want to remove the penalty for failure beyond “start over”? You can do that.

Defender’s Quest also classifies its achievements by difficulty. The hardest amount to “do everything perfectly in New Game++ with only one of each tower.” The in-game text goes on to note that New Game++ is really hard and that you probably want to turn on triple xp.

: Zubon

More American Standards

Rift This is the ESRB warning box that accompanies recent ads for Rift (now F2P! Oh, you’ve heard). There is talk of alcohol, other harsh language, mild naughty themes, imaginary consumption of alcohol, and — oh yes — the game is all about murdering sentient beings to death so you can loot their corpses and feed your soul(s) with power harvested from your victims.

Pink body parts will not be more than mildly suggested because we would not want to offend anyone.

: Zubon

Selective Vocabulary

I am playing Scribblenauts Unlimited, which is good. I discovered today that the game does not have “beer” in its dictionary. It does, however, have “shoggoth” and “parantha.” Guided by American standards for what is acceptable in children’s entertainment, you can kill people with rocket launchers, but alcohol is edgy. (“Naked” is an acceptable adjective. It puts a big mosaic over the object.)

: Zubon

Quick Review: Go Home Dinosaurs

Cute, simple tower defense themed around rodents protecting a barbeque from dinosaurs. I cannot speculate on why herbivores are holding a barbeque or why they killed cows.

The game crashed five times in the first hour of play. Honestly, you could end a review there.

Gameplay is made exceedingly simple by the low number of moving parts and the limited number of places to put them. You have a lot of flexibility in where you could place most towers, but there are only so many places where it would be sane. Each tower has a different shape, so you can see in a few seconds how the level is meant to be beaten. Drop towers, collect coconuts, win. There is increased flexibility over time as you can pick more towers and in greater variety, as in Plants vs. Zombies, but I don’t think this really deserves to be mentioned on the same page as Plants vs. Zombies.

The preciousness of the graphics would put Japan into insulin shock. This, combined with the simple gameplay and low difficulty, suggests it as a game for small children, although you would not give this to anyone unless they have already played PvZ to the point of boredom. And maybe not then.

Cute, briefly amusing, but not especially good. Wait for a really good sale if you get it at all.

: Zubon

[LoL] P2?

League of Legends has been out for almost four years, and there has been significant rebalancing over time, including completely redoing some champions. They have also given away champions and sold packs with many champions, such as their initial retail box. If you have played a meaningful amount of League of Legends, you probably own some champions you are not interested in playing. You do not pick them, but you may come back to them as the pendulum swings.

Cue ARAM. You now have a game mode where you will get a random champion from all the ones available to you.

This struck me as P2L (pay to lose). People buy packs or every champion as a way of paying Riot for the game, a de facto subscription fee (which reminds me of Kingdom of Loathing and monthly donations for prizes). If you get many champions, you probably have many you are not interested in playing, and you have only so many rerolls.

This has led to a new approach to P2W (pay to win) in creating accounts dedicated to ARAM. Buy only the champions that work well in ARAM. If you are willing to throw a little money at it, you can have most of the best quickly.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. I also have the same question about low-level LoL accounts that I do about low-level WoW characters: how many of these folks around are actual new players, as opposed to smurfs/alts?

: Zubon

What Are You Going to Do With It?

Your game has various sources of gear or whatever your unit of character advancement is (usually gear). You might get it from quests, crafting, events, PvP, single group dungeons, or raids. Of course, whatever sort of gameplay you favor is the one that should produce the best rewards or at least have a chance of eventually earning something comparable to the best. In games with raids, especially progressive raiding, raids usually produce the strongest gear. And I have always been pretty much okay with this, despite never being all that interested in online synchronized dance recitals.

Because what are you going to do with the best weapon in the game as a solo player? None of the solo content assumes that you are going to have an extra thousand DPS, so you will just blow through it even quicker. Of course, by the time you get the best weapon in the game (TV Tropes warning, happy Monday), you don’t need it, so it is even more of a cosmetic reward. You will probably enjoy solo content less if you have raid gear that trivializes it. You do not need raid gear unless you are raiding.

But I know we have some readers who do things with MMO content other than enjoy it, so perhaps you have your reasons.

: Zubon

Changing His Solo Ways

For some reason, this 2006 post appeared in my RSS feed. But of course, the writings of Wilhelm Arcturus are always fresh and ready to be mined for new insights. Such as:

I have not avoided groups in the past because I am anti-social. … I have avoided groups because they make leveling take longer in WoW. Solo play, for levels, is rewarded in WoW. When you group, your exp per kill is reduced, time taken to finish drop related quests goes up dramatically with each person you add to the group (so you do kill more, which mitigates the exp per kill loss somewhat, but a lot of the exp is in finishing the quest, so your exp/hour is still taking a hit), and unless your group all has the same quests, somebody is usually waiting for everybody else to get to their quest.

This of course brought 2008 to mind:

If it is designed as solo content, you gain little to nothing for bringing a friend. Indeed, it might take the two of you longer to do it together than it would to do it separately, say if you each need to loot a dozen ground objects that despawn after they are looted; you would have been better off each going alone, five minutes after each other, rather than going together and waiting for the respawns.

Both of which reinforce the point from yesterday that grouping brings with it the potential for great upsides and downsides. If most of the leveling game takes away most of the upside, that leaves a lot of distance for the increasingly common “solo MMO” to fall.

Which are perhaps some reasons why we are seeing the rise of MOBAs and a renaissance in small group games where you bring your friends rather than trying to seek the questionable benefits of a matchmaker service.

: Zubon