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First Impressions: Orcs Must Die! 2

I was pleasantly surprised last night to realize that Orcs Must Die! 2 (OMD2) had been released. I had not realized it was being made until there was a pre-order sale, and that seems to have been on the cusp of release. I enjoyed the first one and found it contrasted with the competition by having higher quality content but fewer hours of it: better gameplay, no grind. I stayed up too late sampling OMD2.

OMD2 is a much broader experience. It has three modes (story, classic, endless), three difficulty levels, cooperative play, and a chance to play as the villain of the first game. Levels are recycled within those options.

Character progression has been added. In the first game, you could upgrade a trap once, ever, done. There was also a within-map tech tree for enhancing traps and abilities. In the sequel, you earn skulls and spend them to unlock and upgrade things, in addition to what you unlock for completing levels. A trap might have five possible upgrades, and the total cost to cap everything must be in the thousands of skulls. I do not know how grindy this will feel in the long run; I did not use all the traps in the first game, so I don’t feel a need to unlock and upgrade everything. There will be the question of how many upgrades the game is balanced around.

I remain a fan of scaling difficulty by number and type of monster, not having monsters scale. Don’t give me a 80,000hp orc. Give me some ogres or 80,000hp worth of orcs. OMD2 continues saying that an orc you can one-shot on the first map is an orc you can one-shot on the last map. To give some options between orcs and ogres, orcs come in light, medium, and heavy, and they can again have shields or crossbows.

OMD2 starts faster than OMD1, presumably assuming you played the first one. The backstory is only briefly explained, and our Bruce Campbell protagonist continues his impudent dialogue. The first level of OMD2 is much more complex than the first of 1, and it ramps up more quickly. So far, the maps have been fair challenges: you can beat them on the first try, but getting a five-skull score will probably require a replay. I had a blast spending an evening mostly in story mode, and I will be back after having played more.

: Zubon

The Value of Interaction

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an excellent article by Jim Rossignol about the stumbling of Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR) away from the pure subscription-based model. His vehicle for most of the discussion is EVE Online, a posterboy for subscription model MMO success. He also discusses the value of sandbox and themepark:

And so perhaps what we want to pay for is something we find a specific sort of value in. We want to pay for something that rewards us not with more quests, or more numbers, but with fresh modes of interaction. And, perhaps because of the surplus of quest-based MMO experiences out there, we value the rare and special service that the sandbox provides.

I like Jim’s thinking, and had much the same thoughts using different words and synapses in response to a Guild Wars 2 blog post. The knee-jerk response to sandbox vs. theme park seems to be whether the content is developer-driven or not.  One could argue that W-space is EVE’s theme park because a lot of the content is created from developers. What really matters is the interactions that take place.

In my view, successful MMOs are successful because they offer a lot of fun interactions. It is not about freshness of content, whether it’s contested sleeper sites, a rift burning through the transdimensional atmosphere, or skritt stealing cannonballs from a firing range. The criticality of MMOs is whether that content allows for various degrees of positive interaction.

I felt bad for SWTOR since the start because the producers never seemed to realize that. The interactions were either hyper-personal with personal story or forced with a variation on the trinity. There is nothing wrong with theme park style design, but creating community is what is going to pay the rent. Community can only be created by interactions.

Tonight I plan on playing another few rounds of Doomsday on Team Fortress 2. I haven’t really played any other map since Pyromania. I am sure I will experience a fresh interaction (hopefully another crocket on the launch pad).

–Ravious

Kickstarting

Three items to note for you on Kickstarter:

Have you seen The Gamers? There are two movies, and the creators have taken to Kickstarter to fund the third. I hadn’t realized they also had a series, so I must check out JourneyQuest. I pledged.

If you liked Defense Grid, would you like to support Defense Grid 2? Defense Grid: the Awakening is an enjoyable tower defense game. The million-dollar, “fund the whole sequel” stretch goal seems out of reach, but they are most of the way to the first goal. I pledged.

And in our MMO world, Shadowrun Online is seeking funding. I’m not sure what it means that the MMO is going for $500,000 and the smaller tower defense game is going for $1,000,000. Shadowrun seems to be planning to use every revenue model at once: having separate F2P and buy-the-box servers, plus “premium” subscriptions on the F2P server and selling quarterly expansions on the campaign server. The monetization plan, at least, is thorough. I’m not a backer, but I thought y’all might be interested in the project.

: Zubon

Space Pirates and Zombies

The epic Steam Sales have a weird effect on me. I put lots of games in my wishlist, and when it goes on sale for what feels like pennies, I am pressed to the point of buy or don’t buy. I don’t know whether it is the coming Guild Wars 2 launch or summer doldrums, but I didn’t buy that many games off my wishlist. I did stumble on Space Pirates and Zombies (“SPAZ”), a game made by the 2-man Minmax Games. It had never been on my wishlist.

The game is a lot of fun. Steam tells me I’ve put in a dozen hours, and I feel like I have tons of game left to go. Read on for more thoughts and discussion about their take on death penalty. Continue reading Space Pirates and Zombies

Scaling

Did you ever play The Addams Family pinball machine? I recall it as probably the best I’ve ever played. It was the highest selling pinball game ever with 20,270 units. Read that number again. Best selling ever. 20,270.

Standards of success vary across industries. Also, the modern market for pinball machines seems small.

: Zubon

Wikipedia calls it “the best selling pinball machine since the 1930s” (emphasis added), but the pinball machines of the 1930s were early pachinko machines, not what you would think of as pinball. The first pinball machine with flippers was made in 1947, so the early pinball machines were pure gambling games of chance. The Roger Sharpe‘s demonstration of pinball as a game of skill is a lovely comedy of errors that reached the right result by mostly luck. (The previous version I read said they switched machines due to technical problems, not suspicion of cheating.)

Quick review: Stacking

Stacking is an easy, family-friendly puzzle game themed around stacking dolls. Each doll has an ability, and you use those to solve the puzzles. It comes from the fine people at Double Fine. A 100% playthrough is in the 8-12 hour range; if you go straight through without fiddling with the optional content, probably half of that. This includes the DLC that is included with the PC version on Steam.

The puzzles are simple. You can usually solve them with a doll immediately at hand. They are also well designed in that they have multiple solutions and some of those solutions have multiple options. The introductory challenge has three ways to get past it, and one of those ways can be implemented in at least two ways. I solved some puzzles accidentally just by seeing what the various dolls in the rooms could do. If you are having trouble, the game has a built-in hint system with increasingly explicit instructions as you ask for more hints. You will likely need it for a 100% completion. Some of the solutions exhibit a bit of adventure game logic, and sometimes you might not guess which variations count as one or more solutions. For example, in the DLC, two ways of fighting off the ghouls count as the same solution, but another way is a separate one; there are several soup- and disease-involved ways to make a guard sick, and they count as three solutions. Also good luck guessing how to get some of the “hi jinks”; the common problem of “right idea, slightly off” arises.

The story involves saving Charlie’s family, which has been forced into child labor by the dastardly baron. It has a Victorian tone and takes a lighthearted approach to child labor, indentured servitude, industrial pollution, homelessness, and poverty. Seriously, it’s really cheerful despite the setting, kind of the opposite of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Stiff upper lip, no worries, our can-do spirit will see us through!

You will be spending a lot of time in cut scenes. It takes a while for there to be much gameplay, rather than a series of introductory stories. Every scene changes has a cut scene or two. They are done as silent films: dolls emoting while instrumental music plays in the background, and then a card with their dialogue. It is timed for a low grade level’s reading speed.

Fun, flexible, and silly. Largely worth the time, if you enjoy this sort of thing. Your price point may be below the $15 retail; I got it on a Steam sale. If you do not have any Double Fine games, there are frequent sales on the three-pack, and their next game is ever in the works.

: Zubon

[GW2] Unshiny Armor

There is a clever attrition mechanic in Guild Wars 2 with armor repair. Sure the developers get points for replacing death penalty and energy with something that basically gives players a few tries before getting penalized. It’s really clever because it’s so maddening.

A good, sane player will never repair armor until it becomes broken, where it no longer provides an armor value. Sure players will die every now and then, but apart from dungeons, actual death should occur less than a few times per level. This all depends on player bravado and sought efficiency of play, but in the beta weekends, I seemed to be replacing armor enough that damaged armor was never an issue. In other words, money is wasted on repairing armor, especially if it’s just going to be mulched to a salvage kit anyway.

The reason that devilish designer is so gosh darn clever is there is an icon that makes sure to let me know that my armor has a dent in it. It’s a small thing for sure, but so is my three-year old, who can give me headaches like you wouldn’t believe. The nasty icon just sits there glaring at me making sure I know how unclean I am walking around like a family minivan with a finger-painted “Wash Me” etched in to the dirty glass. It only thinks it pretends to sit there unjudging with no condemnation for trying to avoid gold-sink tricks.

So, I do my duty and head to the armor repair NPC. It’s nice enough that he lets me know I am doing the right thing, like how the auto mechanic makes me feel good for changing a $300 fluid that is still marginally okay. And, I feel stupider for it.

–Ravious

[LotRO] Poor Party

LotRO has launched the Farmers Faire (guide, better than the wiki as I type this). The previous new event was the Treasure Hunt, so I am led to believe that the developers who brought you gems like the Haunted Burrow have moved on to other projects. Farmers Faire and the Treasure Hunt just aren’t very good. Granted, much of the festival content is a weak form of “click on this once a day,” but there have always been interesting things like dance lessons, emote-based trickery, shrew-stomping, and beer runs. The main new thing the two latest events bring is a chance to sell game tickets in the cash shop.

There are two things worth recommending in the Farmers Faire. Until a walkthrough is posted, “Fat Mayor” will be an amusing little puzzle quest. The major of Bywater is trying all the Faire foods, and he is slightly dissatisfied with everything, so you need to bring him an item in response to his complaint. Some of the prompts are clearer than others. “Manning the Market” is the other good quest. It is an umbrella quest with a half-dozen customers wanting things. They give you shopping lists that are intentionally written so as to throw you off unless you read the whole thing. The quests require reading comprehension, the ability to look around you, and a couple of guesses your first time through. There are two new mini-games, if you like scrambling to click on ground-spawns. Another one has text demonstrating why you might hate hobbits, which is genuinely amusing in text as well as genuinely irritating in-game.

Others are just crap. They have a few sentences of amusing text you can read out of game and no play value. One of the Market quests is effectively “click on this box repeatedly until you get ‘quest complete.'” One is “keep fishing until you get ‘quest complete.'” Two others are “keep fishing until you get ‘quest complete,'” but the quests are explicitly luck-based and you might fail them because you caught the wrong thing. One of the quests is unable to function with high populations, and the Faire areas will be heavily populated for a while; this quest gates another, which we know to exist only because a deed calls for completing it three times.

If you must have every deed, there are at least eight here, depending on how many tiers of “beat the mini-game X times” there are. There are also new cosmetic items.

: Zubon

Update: the wiki has a guide now. You can’t reasonably get drunk hobbits, but the drunk elves in Lothlorien work.