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[GW2] Hiking the Cooperative Journey

Over the weekend I had a revelation in gaming. I played Journey on the PlayStation 3 (PS3). For those that have a PS3, the $15 for the game is more than worth it. It’s the story of your journey to the holy mountain. It’s rather gameplay light, and it is more about the experience. Given the amazing Metacritic score, I know I am not alone in believing it is an experience worth playing.

There is one catch to the game. As players go along they are occasionally joined by another player. Creative Director of thatgamecompany, Jenova Chen, likens Journey’s cooperative style to hiking. A player might notice another player behind and make sure the other player stays behind. A player might just let the other player pass, or the player might wait up so they can walk the holy path together. While players can unlock content gates for each other, it’s not like Portal 2’s cooperative mode where the two players have to be in constant communication to move forward.

Out of this simple canvas, magic happened. Each time I met a new red-robed pilgrim, there was a connection. Sometimes we played around not caring about moving forward. Other times we helped guide each other over the next hill. Of my two favorite moments, one I can’t share for spoiler reasons, I had a companion go up ahead, and something bad appeared to happen. I hunkered down, refusing to move for quite some time. Eventually I saw a bling in the distance as my companion was communicating with me via our one communicating button. He was waiting for me… right at the end of the level. He could have just moved on, but instead he had waited to make sure I would be okay. Experiences like that stand out in the noise of games where most human allies act like bots.

Why am I discussing Journey so much with a Guild Wars 2 tag? Continue reading [GW2] Hiking the Cooperative Journey

Selling Your Game on Kickstarter

If the last big trend in MMOs was the hybrid F2P model (headliners: Turbine), the potential next big thing is Kickstarter. Double Fine had a rather prominent, $3 million success on that. From the developer’s perspective, Kickstarter must be the best thing ever: get people to buy your game before you have even started making it. You know the game will be profitable because you don’t get started until you have already sold enough copies, plus some bonus cash from people who will pay $1,000 to have a weapon named after them or such. I’m interested in seeing where this will go. Or maybe it will be another fad that disappears in three weeks, but let’s look around.

Continue reading Selling Your Game on Kickstarter

A Stable Bass

This is one of the occasional music posts, so depart here if those annoy you. This one gets the WoW tag: we have a five-person group with three in the flashy front roles, but I’m focusing on the two in the less visible roles. Rather than one song, our music of the moment is Pentatonix in the third season of The Sing-Off. You can see all their performances in this compilation, but I encourage you to pursue the YouTube links for videos from “mrduckbear11,” who posts clips from the show, because the judges’ commentary is actually useful rather than just “the nice one, the mean one, and the overly excited one.”

The Sing-Off is essentially American Idol a cappella, skipping the part where you humiliate the lousy singers. The winners in the third season were a small, young group that was mostly noted for their interesting and risky arrangements. Five people, three lead singers, lots of interesting sounds. Listen to at least a few, and then listen to a recurring theme in the judges’ commentary: their percussion and beat box are great and tie everything together so that their lead performers can shine. Try starting at 4:30 on OMG or 6:08 on the Forget You/Since U Been Gone mix. Shawn Stockman’s phrase is “meat and potatoes”: they are strong on the fundamentals, not just the flair. Compare that to Delilah, another group from season three that started with one of the best performances in the series but was eliminated after a performance with a brilliant lead but a failure of support. The lead on that is actually better than The Band Perry, but the commentary is on-point: it becomes discordant without a base to stand on. Compare to Ben Folds’s discussion of their first performance, when the support worked well.

Do I need to unpack the analogy at this point? We even have the perfect analogue with a 5-person, 3-DPS group. You need those big, shiny numbers to win, but they don’t matter without your tank and healer. It got me thinking about the offensive line in (American) football: it is an unglamorous role with almost no statistics to support who is better or worse, and the camera is on the guy running the ball, but you can definitely tell when the offensive line fails and the quarterback is crushed before he can try to do anything interesting. If you know to watch, you can see the tank quietly being a superstar, but good support is usually invisible. (Grabbing another game, a friend loves to watch StarCraft replays at LAN parties and should about how the player trying to do something flashy or cheesy gets crushed on fundamentals. Grabbing a third, I still play League of Legends Dominion occasionally; people chase for kills, but capping the points wins the game.)

Do you have a favorite fight where the tanks and the healer really take front stage, rather than seeing people compare kill counts and damage meters? Flip back to the mix video and try 2:53, where the background gets center stage, the a cappella equivalent of a drum solo. Part of the appeal of City of Heroes was how support could be strong, essential, flashy, and featured, while a damage source is a damage source, and then there is the difference in LotRO DPS compared to WoW.

: Zubon

This comes on the eve of the Guild Wars 2 launch, a game eliminating healers and tanks, and I’m nearing the end of my time in Guild Wars playing a ranger as a support class.

A Bad Case of “While I’m Here”

I have several times described myself as making a 5% adjustment to my gameplay in order to work on achievements. That mostly comes through applying a bit of planning and re-arranging my order of content consumption to avoid repetition and grind. I have developed a hatred of being sent back to kill a named enemy that I killed on my way to the quest giver; it is much better to stack incentives if you can foresee it. Guild Wars is particularly good for that because of the rotating Zaishen and other daily quests, so you can plan ahead to combine errands. If you mostly play on the weekends, 5 minutes of picking up quests mid-week can significantly increase your rewards.

Dynamically combining errands, rather than checking upcoming quest lines, is what I call “While I’m Here…” syndrome. I take the Zaishen Vanquish, and I’ll see if I can capture any new elite skills in the zone while I’m here. Maybe I have a quest or two I can advance while I’m here, and I certainly will want to tap the walls to get any cartography points available while I’m here. There could be an outpost I did not need to visit during the main quest line, so I could unlock that while I’m here. And of course if I can get points towards any reputation grinds, I’ll want those while I’m here. Sometimes it starts a bit earlier, because maybe I am here for the Zaishen Bounty, and I notice that I cleared 30% of the zone on the way through, so maybe I should vanquish while I’m here. Hmm, now I have +10% morale, and the next zone over has no adjoining outpost, so maybe I should vanquish that one too while I’m here (or maybe I did that to a previous zone on the way to a vanquish without an adjoining outpost). You can roll this into any quest, dungeon, unlock, etc.: there is probably another goal you can partially advance while you are there.

I find many new players to be very impatient about unlocking their Hall of Monuments points. They got the game two weeks ago, and they need to get to at least 15/50 by the time Guild Wars 2 comes out. Operative phrase: by the time Guild Wars 2 comes out. You get no bonus points for getting it done early. If that is your main point in being here, you should try to minimize your total time consumed, which will mean advancing your various goals efficiently rather than getting a few points quickly and then repeating effort to get the next points. How do you get five HoM points in one day without really trying? Consistently work on several goals and achieve them all at once.

I understand your emotional turmoil at seeing 7 bars 80% full but not completed. Get past it. It will take longer if you rush. You can get most of the may to a lot of titles just playing normally and paying minimal attention to your bonus incentives. “While I’m here” will take care of most of the rest. That last bit is all you need to grind, and there are no extra rewards for having it done before the first day of the early start. I’m right there with you now, looking at my rubies and sapphires and knowing that I could be at 30/50 in one visit to the rare materials vendor, but there are still gem-producing bits of content I want to pursue, so why waste my time and money if I can expect to find a few more along the way? I can instead check the vendor occasionally in case the price dips, try to finish my set of hard mode dungeons, and know that I already have 30/50 in the bag even if it is not on the scoreboard yet.

: Zubon

Looking For Community

If you read through my commentary on this site and elsewhere, you might think I worship at the alter of Blizzard.   There is no question I admire their revolutionary approach to MMOs, and the changes that World of Warcraft has wrought upon the genre, and I enjoy “WoW Clones.”

However, there is one side effect of the technology developed by Blizzard that is perhaphs the most unfourtunate and dangerous degredation of the MMO genre since its inception.

Blizzard killed community.

Continue reading Looking For Community

Time Consumption

I have been looking at my /played, and I am not convinced that a MMO has hundreds or thousands of times the enjoyment of Portal or Portal 2. There is a lot more to do, but there is also a lot more of “something to do.”

I am increasingly looking to entertainment that does not have a quota of content to fill. The need to have another episode, another hour of play, another month of subscription fees can be productive, but it also leads to filler. When I read George Martin, I really believe that he needs another 500,000 words to tell his next story arc. He is not fulfilling a contract requirement. When I see a TV show that was written to last 1 or 2 or 3 seasons, I am thrilled, because the creators had a story to tell. When the initial story is over and they are stretching for 100 episodes, maybe they found a great take on “the continuing adventures of…” or maybe they just wanted to get enough for syndication.

Despite this, I know I will continue to spend more time on things that are designed to take up time rather than continuously finding new sources of great, dense content. The world seems basically structured for that, and trying “just one” will consume as much time as twenty entertainment sources that chose to refine rather than bloat. Star Wars: TOR seems to have fallen on both sides of this problem: it is story-based, so it has a finite end point at which players quite; it is an MMO and yet another Star Wars tie-in, so it will “supplement” whatever story it has with bloat like mixing sawdust into sausage. Some cash cows attract quality talent because of their high-profile, high-paying nature, but in terms of getting the best entertainment per hour, we should probably be avoiding established IPs, avoid MMOs, and avoiding sequels.

Unrelatedly, I pre-purchased Guild Wars 2 and got my cousin’s kid the collector’s edition.

: Zubon

10 Helpful Hints for the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event

Now that the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event (BWE) has been announced for April 27-29, I decided to make a small guide for those coming in to a fresh Tyrian world.

1. Welcome to IN MEDIAS RES, SOLDIER!

I have seen a lot of comments about the opening scene in Guild Wars 2. Basically for 2 of the 3 racial starting areas we’ve seen, it is chaos. Ghosts popping out of nowhere in the charr area, centaurs running amok throughout a human starting area, and norn standing around their forest picking their ears while players hunt. Don’t fret! Players are practically given god mode in the opening area. There will be plenty of time and safety to fiddle with dye colors and key bindings after the opening scene. Press “W”+Mouse 1 should get you through the area. Try and learn what you can during this time, but you will get a chance to go more “at your own pace” afterwards.

2. Always Be Movin’

That is the golden rule for Guild Wars 2 combat. Don’t stop moving! Seriously, I don’t care whether you are a rifle-toting warrior or a greatsword-wielding ranger; don’t stop. If you find yourself in a red circle, then move faster. A stationary soldier is a dead soldier. Your #1 skill for each weapon will be an auto-attack so you can concentrate on moving while your character will keep trying to swing away. Make sure to use Mouse 2, or whatever, to face the enemy while you are circle-strafing. If you don’t like auto-attack then CTRL+click the skill to disable it. Be prepared to press “1” a lot after that. I would also suggest keybinding dodge instead of double-tapping movement or mouse-clicking the button.

Continue reading 10 Helpful Hints for the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event

[Eve] Tiericide

CCP has announced some vague changes to the way the Eve racial ship tier system will work in the upcoming patch/ expansion.   No one is quite certain what they are planning or how they will implement it, but the prospect of the changes has me in a mental quandary…

Should I postpone my current skill plan for a month, effectively halting my improvement as a combat pilot during that time, for the chance of a huge power payoff down the road?

Continue reading [Eve] Tiericide

[Eve] Building Infrastructure

One of the neat aspects of Wormhole Life, is the process of transitioning the wild and untamed NPC space, into a livable and profitable home for our pilots.  This started right away, when we hauled in our ships, our POS (Player Owned Structure) and all the gun and maintenance arrays we wanted surrounding our home tower.   However, building a safe place to store your ships and your loot, is just scratching the surface of it…   We have a lucrative planet distribution in our slice of space heaven, so we wanted to maximize our Planetary Interaction (PI) right away.   Fortunately our Production Director, T’ango, is a spreadsheet maniac and tackled the PI set-up and we got that buzzing fairly quickly.  I am a cog in the machine and glad of it.

Continue reading [Eve] Building Infrastructure

[Eve] Managing Expectations

The past few weeks I have gotten a great deal of positive feedback about my Eve adventures both here, via email and in-game.   We have seen a sizable number of new players subscribe to Eve, in part because of my promotion of the game and the enjoyment I am experiencing with it.

I need to manage expectations somewhat, because I am cognizant of the fact that I am misleading some people in terms of what they can reasonable expect as a new player starting out in Eve.   To understand my Eve attitude, you need to understand me.

Continue reading [Eve] Managing Expectations