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Quick review: QUBE

If you liked Portal’s gameplay, you will like QUBE’s at least 75% as much. The developer video included with Portal 2 explains their original plan: no portals, no Chell, no GLaDOS. QUBE is that, also with no story. What QUBE does have is about 4 hours of puzzles in an environment that feels a bit like running through Aperture Science.

QUBE stands for Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion. The first puzzles relate to colored blocks that do different things. Later puzzles start rotating rooms, using light and magnets, and letting you decide which color boxes should be.

The puzzles are not enormously difficult. Most of the time, once you understand what the tools in a room do, the solution is intuitively obvious. The more interesting puzzles come at the end of a sector, when you get complex interactions instead of new tools.

It can be glitchy. I had boxes teleport, spring away, and disappear entirely. One point requires precision platforming in the dark. About 90% worked as intended for me, and the rest eventually worked.

There is no story and only hints of a setting. There are no words. If you loved Portal for the humor and tone, this will not do anything for you. It just has puzzles in a 3D environment.

: Zubon

[GW2] Mounting the Learning Curve

Guild Wars 2 has special mechanics for its classes. I have no idea how they work and have no idea where in-game would explain it. I assume the wiki has some information. I also assume that there will be more information available somewhere, sometime, but that it felt suboptimal to implement that while major changes to those mechanics are underway.

I tried two new classes for the last BWE, Mesmer and Thief. I knew that Mesmer abilities revolved around clones and confusion. Okay, first fight, I have just my basic attack, here we go. Bam, bam, why is there a clone of my by the enemy? There’s another one. Oh, they’re gone. Trying that out of a few fights, my basic power was flipping between three different versions faster than I could read the text on what it was doing. Oh, so those little lights indicate how many clones I have out. I’m not entirely sure what the clones do beyond what it says (use one attack).

The Thief comes with a Steal ability, which picks up an ability from the target. That will involve learning some icons to make full use of it. Thieves stole the GW1 Assassins’ shadowstep, and they have Initiative dots. Initiative is … I don’t know. It looks like an energy system of sorts, because I at one point did not have enough initiative to throw a dagger. Skimming the forums, it looks like they’re mid-revamp (or maybe just balancing heavily), so it seems unprofitable to learn much now. Having played only a few levels, it only mattered once, and it mattered by stopping me from doing what I was doing. I presume it matters more later.

Part of a GW2 training area will need to be an explanation of what your class mechanics are doing. Maybe that comes later in life. I was only getting to Engineer kits on the first character I tried, and the Elementalist’s element swapping is intuitive once you notice the icons. I haven’t even looked at half the classes, so I may have quite a bit to muddle through. I can see level 20 players in groups saying, “Is that what that does?” for the next two years.

: Zubon

[GW2] Pre-release Cash Shop

Guild Wars 2 has been testing the gem (cash) shop in each of the BWEs. In this final BWE, they are doing it for real: you really buy gems, which you can use this weekend and then they will be reset for release. I find this an interesting economic model, and not necessarily a bad plan on their part, but I’m only as far as thinking, “…interesting.”

If you’re going to pre-sell the game, why not pre-sell the bonus toys, too?

: Zubon

Character slots seem to be $10 each, but I’m not sure where folks got the quote of 800 gems/slot. The game launches with 5 races, 8 classes, and 5 character slots (across all servers, characters are not server-bound except for WvW purposes).

Experimentation

As near as I can tell, this summer’s Steam sale is less about making money and more about economic experiments. Sure, the revenue is nice, but the long-term value to Valve will come from seeing how people react and buy. There are flash sales, community choice, today’s deals, pack deals, and a few other ways to see sales. They vary in discount, placement, and duration, but you’ll see the same sales appearing multiple times in multiple places. Missed that flash sale? No problem, it’s tomorrow’s daily deal, and you’ll get a chance to vote to bring it back in a few days.

It is a real time experiment in marketing with millions of people paying to participate.

: Zubon

[DayZ] Why Is This Fun?

There is no point to DayZ.  

There are no objectives.   You can’t win, nor progress, nor develop any significant power advantage over the environment, PvE, or other players.   You invest hours on end only to lose it all in the blink of an eye.  

All you can do is try to survive. 

You never thrive in DayZ.   You are always one meal away from death. Around every bend in the road, in every building,  every step you take brings you closer to your eventual demise.   You will die.  There is no survival.

Why then do I find myself on the tail end of a ten-hour DayZ marathon, wishing I could skip sleep and work and log in for another ten?

~Cyndre

Missing Puzzle Piece

I increasingly find myself Googling the solutions to quests and puzzles on the assumption that they are broken. I sometimes find that I have been outwitted, but more often something is wrong with the game. That could be a technical error or a design flaw.

The Secret World has had some trouble with broken quests, and it is always upsetting to solve a puzzle and later find out the computer was not accepting the correct answer. You usually find that out after trying 20 “well maybe” guesses after the right one. I was just playing QUBE, which is enjoyable but has a couple of points requiring very precise jumps, which can be difficult when you apparently have no feet; you can look down and see yourself levitating somewhere off the platform you are standing on. Google, YouTube… okay, yep, I was doing exactly the right thing just 3 pixels off. Dodgy game physics are a related issue. Google, YouTube… okay, yep, just keep repeating that sequence of moves until the box slides instead of teleporting away.

On the design side, frequent readers know some of my pet peeves. The broken logic of adventure games is classic, as is that article, if you haven’t read it yet. Other games substitute “guess or brute force all options” for logic. Another old favorite is when you missed something because it was two pixels wide. Oh, I need a coin to proceed, and it was the slightly brown line in the sidewalk crack from seven screens ago? You know, I don’t feel bad for not taking the time to find that one. I’ve probably spent enough time trying to figure out what I was supposed to be finding.

I recall the early days of LotRO, which launched with many early quests involving things to click on the ground: a sack of bandit loot to reclaim, a mushroom to pick, a body to bury. With the newbie zones heavily populated, you could run to exactly the right spot and not find the quest objective because it was still respawning. Players cleared entire camps of dwarves without realizing that the clicky was by the first campfire, and how amazing that bodies could disappear and resurface! Modern tech has mostly solved this problem: the clicky disappears for you when you click it, but other players can also do so without rivalry.

: Zubon

Origin

I was hesitant when Steam launched. Let me get this straight: I will need a dedicated internet connection to play or access my games, I get no physical media, and if Steam goes away or cuts off my access — best of luck? What’s the upside here?

As it turns out, Steam has been an excellent corporate partner in my life. It has been reliable and has continued to improve over the years. It provides sales, updates, cloud storage, and matchmaking. The biggest downside is that its sales model encourages impulse purchases of marginal quality games. The only time I was not liking Steam was when I damaged a RAM slot on my computer, so everything loaded slowly; Steam pops up advertisements (“Updates”!) when you close a game, so Steam was refusing to close and let me have my computer back until it threw ads at me. Now I prefer digital distribution to physical media, because I lose CDs more often than Valve goes out of business. To the extent that you can say it about a corporation, I trust Valve.

I was hesitant when Blizzard moved everything to BattleNet, for all the same reasons. I might trust Blizzard, but Activision-Blizzard? I refused to buy SC2 until I found a rather good sale, and I do not own D3. I’m still not convinced that golden goose will go un-slain.

Does anyone trust EA? At all? About anything?

: Zubon