Category: General

General

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Offline Games: Also Bugged

I think I am somewhere around the middle of the story mode of Batman: Arkham Origins, although it is tough to tell without looking up something spoiler-tastic. The Arkham games really are some of the best around. I am, however, becoming rather frustrated by the poorer quality control at WB Montreal (makers of this game) versus Rocksteady (makers of the first two).
Continue reading Offline Games: Also Bugged

Everyone Wins?

Asynchronous PvP creates the unusual possibility of having something called “PvP” that never brings you into direct conflict with another player, where everyone playing wins, and the computer takes the losses on behalf of the players. Reward-seeking players will often create nigh-asynchronous PvP situations.

Given the chance to pick the fight, most people pick fights they know they will win. Given three potential targets to attack, with equal rewards for each, most players will pick the weakest target. Or the weakest (for them) — if you play Scissors, you will choose to attack Paper while you are online, then your offline team will be attacked by Rock.

It can be frustrating to have offline losses you cannot do anything about, particularly if those are scored for competitive rewards, but if PvP must come out to 50% wins on average, everyone seems happier when the computer takes almost all of the 50% losses.

Most of my links there cite examples from Marvel Puzzle Quest, where indeed you almost always win any fight you choose to participate in and lose most of the offline fights. Reference also Guild Wars 2, where karma trains are 90+% PvE content under the name WvW, where everyone gets more reward from trading captures on undefended towers. Look back to the less extreme case of early LotRO PvMP, where most people won most of the time because each team flocked to the battlefield where it was winning.

I can’t say it is much/any worse than the regular PvE grind, apart from the design time half-wasted on PvP content that will not be used for PvP. Maybe I should be pleased for the species that self-interest makes cooperation a favored path even with an explicitly defined competitor. But it seems hollow.

: Zubon

Magicite: A Good Walk Ruined

I’ve been on a roll with Steam early access games, but I still stick to my rule of thumb: read the discussion before buying. Magicite seemed good and fun. It is a rogue-like sidescroller with crafting and leveling aspects similar to Starbound or Terraria. It also has a bit of between-death progression I loved in Rogue Legacy. As a hint to the future, one achievement to unlock a race demands you beat the game in an hour. So far I am liking all the design on paper. So I buy it.

The game is in Early Access, but it is apparent right away that more love needs to go to crafting. It’s a nice system where you shift+click two things to combine them. Two sticks become an axe handle. Add another stick to an axe handle and it becomes a pick handle. The problem comes in two parts. The first is that this all occurs in the inventory, and it requires separate stacks of items. If I wanted to combine two sticks, I had to separate one stick from my stack of sticks. It is possible I was just doing it wrong. Continue reading Magicite: A Good Walk Ruined

“Chicken From Hell”

In Plants vs. Zombies 2, my wife’s bane is the zombie chicken. The Wild West’s Chicken Wrangler Zombie (!!) leaks chickens when he is damaged. The chickens are archetypal fragile speedsters: they move and attack much faster than zombies but instantly die from any damage. (Spikeweeds are particularly funny, as huge waves of chicken wranglers become massive clouds of feathers.)

What kinds of chickens are these that can sprint faster than zombies on rockets and kill you just as effectively as the Gargantuar? Recent news stories explain: that kind of chicken. Time travel is dangerous!

: Zubon

Grind Intentional Losses

MPQ I previously used a bit of understatement to describe Marvel Puzzle Quest’s match-making algorithm as unfortunate. “Horrible” might still be an understatement. The game pushes towards asynchronous PvP, and the only way to face reasonable opponents is to intentionally, repeatedly lose. This is not a bug or emergent gameplay; this is how the game is actually designed. If you win, you face opponents who also won. If you are good, you will keep getting better opponents until the level-based numerics make it impossible to win against a squad of level 100+ enemies. You can boost your numbers further by buying boosts, and then get harder opponents, and so on until you run out of money and/or go back to intentionally losing.

Because the game is still live, I presume that a fair number of people went with “spend money.” Because the sheep fed into this system cannot stick around long.

This is an improvement over a period of time when the game did something similar in PvE. If you won a fight in a PvE event, all the PvE enemies leveled up. Repeat unto level 200+ in a game where your heroes mostly cap at level 40-85. Imagine that in your MMO: for every monster you kill since you last died, every monster attacking you gets a stacking buff to damage and resistance. Actually, that could be an interesting challenge for instanced content, except that MPQ left it on for all their PvE events for weeks.

: Zubon

Sneaky Rocks

You fight several rocks in Runespell, ones that you can see from a long ways away and at least one that you challenge to a duel. (While I have never seen Yu-Gi-Oh!, I am led to believe that challenging magic rocks to duels via card games makes much more sense for that audience.) If the rock gets the first turn, the game announces, “You have been ambushed!”

And I’ll be honest, I did not see that one coming.

: Zubon

Your TV Tropes link of the day.