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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He will never see this one coming … from five yards away, straight in front of him, on a flat stretch of dirt.
: Zubon
Update: no, that is not using stealth. You can Ambush from stealth, but there is no induction timer in that case. She just walked up to the guy, crouched down with a javelin for five seconds, and planted it in his forehead.
Lord of the Rings, on test. Notables:
: Zubon
Melmoth compares Stormwind and Bree-town:
There’s nothing terribly wrong with Azeroth, you understand, just like there’s nothing ostensibly wrong with Club 18-30 holidays, or college frat parties, it’s just that once you’ve lived a quieter more reserved life of gentle evenings with a nice glass of red and a good book in front of an open fireplace, it’s hard to go back to whipped cream and beer bongs and some strange man’s penis being repeatedly beaten against your forehead while someone screams in your ear to eat the green jelly out of the lady’s underpants faster.
Elsewhere, Penny Arcade summarizes the backstory of the hero’s journey ominously.
: Zubon
As harbingers of the coming evil we will face in the next LotRO raid, relics birthed from ancient evil have appeared in out-of-the-way spots across Middle-earth. How have the hobbits reacted? Irritation with how it affects the pipeweed crop.
Oh, new deed. Just a title.
: Zubon
Hat tip: arbitrary.
Are we past the point of repeatedly buying the same skill as you level, to get Fire Bolt II, Fire Bolt III, …, Fire Bolt CXVI? Just scale the skills with levels. I understand that having ten versions of each skill gives the illusion of “something new every level,” but you can give rewards that do not mess with your game’s scaling. You can even use a point investment mechanic to get most of the same effect without the annoyance of re-training and adjusting the hotbar.
City of Heroes does this. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ does this (except for passive skills). Warhammer Online does this. Dungeon and Dragons, the basis for all these CRPG mechanics, has been doing this for decades (fireball does 1d6 damage per caster level, capped at 10d6), although not so much in 4th Edition.
Really, we promise to pretend not to notice that our spells do 5% more damage while we are fighting goblins with 5% more hit points. MMO players are used to looking past that. Just stop pretending that Fire Bolt III was a good design decision, and especially do not start calling them Lesser Fire Bolt, Fire Bolt, Improved Fire Bolt, Greater Fire Bolt, Lesser Fire Blast, Fire Blast, …, Supreme Exalted Fire Conflagration… And double-especially do not do that while having all those fire bolts on an alphabetized skill screen with no indication of level order.
: Zubon
Are we past the point of clicking on bodies? Just put the loot in my inventory. Give me some sort of message, great, but most games do not benefit from the extra step of having me click on a body, bag, etc. Experience goes directly on to my character, cash sometimes goes directly onto my character; just put the loot in my inventory.
City of Heroes does this. Global Agenda does this. Team Fortress 2 does this. Rift does this with rift loot. LotRO skirmishes are half-way there with most rewards appearing in your barter wallet as a quest reward mechanic.
The downside is the question of limited inventory space. What do we do when inventory is full? When we click on bodies, the loot is just there, waiting for us to open some inventory slots. Do we just miss out on loot if we are full? My immediate notions would be:
Any version would be purely a gameplay abstraction that makes no sense even after the best stories I concocted justifying it in-world, but we already accept inventory mechanics in which 100 metal ingots take up as much space as a ring, bears sometimes carry swords and multiple hides but have only a 50% chance to have one leg or tooth on each corpse, gold bars are worth less than gold coins, and gold coins take up no space. Of course, I usually use ranged attacks. I can already imagine sniping one target in a dangerous group and running, where now I would need to go in if I want the loot from that kill.
: Zubon
For the LotRO Yule event, come quests lock each other out until you complete the other. In one case, this is a bit of logic: you cannot both donate to the beggars and shoo them away. In another, it is a great design choice: you cannot have both the eating contest and cleaning the tables from the eating contest. If you did, you would have quest objectives from both on the same tables, and actually winning the eating contest would be far more difficult as you tried to click the right thing. The design keeps you from accidentally making yourself fail quests.
: Zubon
Anybody that has followed this blog for awhile knows that we tend to have cycles of gaming and writing. I am currently going through a little downtime with MMOs. Perhaps it’s my subconscious prepping me for the intensity of 2011, the year of MMOs. I still have been gaming, even with MMOs. Yet, it’s been very different. I have not sat down for a long 2-4 hour session on a single game in quite some time. The seemingly endless Steam sale is only making it worse.
The games that are still on my short list all allow very quick bites of gameplay. I just beat Shatter’s story mode. It was a great buy for $2.50, and hopefully Steam will put it back up on sale. As that game left the short list, Super Meat Boy took its place. $15 is about $5 too expensive for my tastes, but the $4 I bought it for might as well have been free. The game is a fantastic, high-speed platforming romp. My favorite part is the combined replay of all my failures when I finally beat the level. It’s hilarious to see 10 out of 20 meat boys jump straight in to the nearest grind saw. Friend me up on Steam so you can see how much faster I am than you.
Long-time readers have seen several versions of my dissatisfaction with LotRO’s epic chain, in which you mostly provide support for the heroes of the story of Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. This is not the main cast of The Lord of the Rings, rather the local cast developed for the game, and you (pay to) play their supporting cast.
This weekend, the kin fielded a group to help someone run the last mission of Volume I. Yes, there is a buff to let you solo everything now, but it is an escort mission. You are familiar with how escort missions translate into suicidal NPCs, and LotRO players realize that Sara Oakheart is the central menace of Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ after the second or third time you escort her through certain doom. (You think I’m kidding.) So we fielded a group to support our friend who was supporting the NPC.
Jump to the very end of the quest. There we are, surrounding the redeemed elf as she confronts the Big Bad. It is not quite a cut scene; you lose control of your character and the camera, but it is still happening right there in front of your characters. It is odd to watch your characters just watching it happen. The villain has her at his mercy, taunting her as he lingers over the deathblow. “Wow, guys, think we should do something? She looks like she’s in trouble. If only our characters cared enough to help her out.”
And then, my apologies if this is a shocking spoiler, the good guys win. She pulls out a dagger and stabs the Big Bad through the chest: one-shot on a 150,000 hit point archnemesis. Maybe that was a devastating critical, but if she is carrying around a weapon that can deal 150,000 damage, why are we here? Why didn’t she use that earlier on the 20,000 hit point enemies? She was just sloughing for the entire epic chain!
: Zubon
The annual Yule festival is going in Middle-earth, and you know that Turbine does seasonal events well. Little will match the Haunted Burrow, but they have added a small zone for this year, in addition to returning events. It is a festival town with a bit of wintery wilderness. The G.L.O.B.E. theatre is the item not to be missed.
The event quests include a class warfare side story. The resort town is served by an unhappy underclass. You can shoo beggars and/or give them coins. To my mind, it is too blatantly emotionally manipulative to be effective. Even if it were, game mechanics mean that you cannot have a meaningful effect; you cannot make the lot of the poor worse or better, so whatever you do is meaningless flavor text. There is a hidden deed that tracks how often you donate, but you will never be able to bring the beggars out of poverty. Do what you like, and do not pretend you are a good/bad person for clicking effects that end when you close the text box. (See the guide for the one quest where you cannot get both titles.)
Kingdom of Loathing does have trackers in its holiday events that affect what happens, meaning it has more dynamic and meaningful holiday events than any MMO. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Santa.
: Zubon