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DCUO Reviewlet

I’ve had a mostly enjoyable time with the low-level content. DC’s big advantage is its iconic characters; how many other MMOs get to bring IP with the heft of Superman or Batman to the table? (Even SW:TOR loses here because it is TOR.) Play is dynamic and I have enjoyed both the setting and particularly the use of significant but less popular DC villains early on.

My experience is mostly low-level Metropolis. Unlike CoX, you can fly from day one, so you get the immediate experience of soaring over rooftops. It’s soothing, and the urge to wander around and look at things is rewarded by collections and clickies scattered across the map. I have really enjoyed reaching the iconic villain at the end of each arc, both seeing them in combat and then the cut scene where the villain speaks about his/her plans, hatred, etc. The take on Grodd is centrist, neither comic nor horrific (I’ve seen both in comics), while the Doctor Psycho scene is one of the best things I have seen in-game in a while. You never knew you wanted a scene with some Wonder Woman villain you’ve probably never heard of, but it sketches the character with surprising depth in one minute, including the use of images to show things left unsaid and explain about our unreliable narrator. (This is a common problem in comic books and graphic novels: forcing the text to do all the work rather than letting the images carry their own weight.)

The gameplay is simple, basically targeting an enemy and clicking until it falls down. The simple gameplay is explained well. For anything more advanced, you’re mostly on your own, enjoy clicking through menus. You can pick things up and throw them at enemies, although I have yet to find a car I can use like that. The basic enemies are plentiful, not terribly interesting, and only present a challenge in their absurdly quick respawn timers (for all the players in the area). You get to feel like a superhero as you endlessly beat down theoretically even-con enemies.

DCUO is F2P. The main limits for not being a subscriber are (item and character) slots and a cash limit. If you spend $5, you get the medium tier with 6 character slots and some restrictions removed, so that’s going to be worth it if the game has any appeal to you at all.

: Zubon

Achievement Spread

Games with achievements do better. I’ve lost my citation of the Microsoft data analysis that showed this, and it would be a stronger effect there because you have an overall score for total poundage of achievements there, but at least grant it for the sake of argument here because the point lies beyond this. Players are more likely to buy a game, play it more hours, and rate it more highly when it has achievements.

My question is how you set those up. Take two rather different MMOS: DC Universe Online and Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. DCUO has hundreds of in-game “feats,” of which 23 are Steam achievements. Most of those are “beat the game as x” or items from the DLC. Puzzle Pirates has 220 Steam achievements, many of which are the ranks of the various mini-games. I haven’t played Puzzle Pirates in a long while, but I’m guessing it is not 9.6 times as much game as DCUO. DCUO gives you an in-game feat after any story arc or minor accomplishment, but outside the game you see one at the start and then come back for a few shinies when you beat the game. Puzzle Pirates thinks it better to give Steam achievements to you constantly.

I’m wondering to what extent these are business or game design decisions, or perhaps very little thought goes into them at most shops. Achievements seem used to note progress, to highlight nice touches, to reward people for doing difficult or poorly designed content, to incentivize perverse behavior in team games, or to reward very long term play of the “collect 1 billion x” sort. See Torchlight for examples of most, from “Find the entrance to the mine” through the course of the game, over the game’s various difficulties, and into long hauls (100 levels) and the WTF of “talk to the horse 100 times.” Alternately, see Grotesque Tactics with just 10 achievements, 4 of which you can/must complete in the tutorial, and I assume the game slows down that pace or else the whole thing must be about two hours. (I and many others must have picked this up in a sale pack, because 62% of owners never made it as far as the first fight.)

There must be some optimal system of achievements that serves as verbal praise to encourage and reward the player. (I’m also fond of games that give bonuses for them, like DCUO’s feats that grant skill points.) It’s strange how rarely achievements are treated as a serious development subject, since they affect how players play games and feel about them. Like drugs and other things that affect your meat brain, psychological tricks can still be quite effective even if you know they’re there.

: Zubon

If you don’t care about achievements, you don’t need to comment to tell us that again. Really.

The Inevitability of $1,000 Mounts

Ever check out Gamebreaker.TV? It’s a really nice site, and I particularly enjoy the enthusiasm of the crew there, and our good friend Rubi of Massively joins in the fray there to make sure their MMO thoughts are refereed. Anyway, whenever microtransactions in MMOs comes up over there, so does the $1000 mount. I have to agree, the experiment of having one would be awesome. Yet they always add the caveat of “not game breaking.”

Well, hey, RockPaperShotgun tells us that a company decided to make a 1000 euro item. The 10th drone, normally available in game after what appears to be a long grind of getting drones 1-9 was made available for one-thousand quackers (like smackers, but European) for only four days. Then 2,000,000 euros fell in to the company’s lap, meaning for those already under the influence of Thanksgiving wine, they sold 2,000 of the drones.

Let’s recap: Continue reading The Inevitability of $1,000 Mounts

More Midriffs

Dungeon Defenders will be implementing gender-swapped versions its 4 classes. These will be new classes (update: new skills, same towers), not a cosmetic option for the existing 4.

The concept art shows that the Ranger is wearing only slightly more than the Huntress. And hey, so are all the female characters. Every female character needs a bare midriff, it seems, not just gnome death knights. To the chagrin of some players, the Countess is not running around in her underpants, with most parts covered except that midriff; she also lacks a gorget, but at least she’s not in a chainmail bikini.

I do like the Adept’s glasses. Jinkies!

: Zubon

Rollercoaster Going Uphill

Not that one.

The Dungeon Defenders patch notes thread is interesting just in its volume. These are not even all the patches, since bug fixes and such may be stealth-patched. The game has been averaging around a patch per workday, with multiple patches on some days. I think that means they released during late beta, and you have already heard my nattering about how this nullifies the possibility of a long-term view.

The next patch is chock full of quality of life improvements, such as auto-fire (which was previously player-implemented via developer-approved macro). Easier respec, more benefits for upgrades, use-based pet experience, restricting random events that can cause the game to be unavoidably lost in one shot, and adjusting the loot tables so you will not need to play Survival for 6 hours straight to get the best loot.

I’ve sincere about that: 6 hours. The best loot now comes from Survival waves, improving with each wave, and getting to those later waves takes hours. With the new changes, getting to wave 25 will still take 6 hours, but maybe you can get the benefits from a 4-hour stay on that map. That’s still pretty long and boring, but at least your crystal will no longer seemingly self-destruct from the items removed in the next patch. You still need to be able to play for that long, keep a Steam and Trendy connection that long, and to want to sit through (tens of?) thousands of enemies per wave, each of whom will be in 5-digit hit points by the later waves.

I don’t see a single “oh man!” change on the list, but it is addressing the details of the endgame they’ve created, not the core difficulties with the endgame itself.

: Zubon

A Flag in the Sand, Thoughts on “E”

After two years of stagnating in my Steam library I am finally playing Assassin’s Creed. I blame it on a friend who Tweets some awesome thing about the series every now and then. I admit I had no idea what the game was about except I would perch like a bird in high places and assassinate people that needed killing.  Having got past the initial tutorial places, finally seeing the meat of the game was a revelation. It was well worth the $5 I paid for it at the time, and I will likely get the sequel as soon as I am done with the first.

I didn’t realize how much of an “explorer’s” dream the game was. The cities are sprawling and lively. There are plenty of nooks to find and crannies to stuff bodies in. A lot of time and love was spent on each area to constantly feed moments of ‘neat!’ It’s so free-spirited that when I get bogged down in a sword-fight, I am just hoping it will be over all the sooner. I want to keep exploring, and to keep the explorer heart busy, there are two distinct modes of exploration in Assassin’s Creed: guided and hidden.  Continue reading A Flag in the Sand, Thoughts on “E”

Misleading Metrics

I wanted to give DC Universe Online another shot, so I booted it up. “Download a GB.” Hmm, I have a bunch of other games I could play right now. Before bed, I started a bunch of games and programs that needed updates. They were all ready to go when I next came back. But Steam is now under the impression that I have spent more than 12 hours playing DCUO.

I’m wondering how many other /played stats are driven by overnight AFKs. In City of Heroes, it was common for badge hunters to leave the game running overnight to farm healing, damage, or time under crowd control effects. The /played will be how much time that character has been logged on, but it’s not quite what we mean by how much time you’ve spent on that character.

: Zubon

One Shot

Raid bosses are slot machines, and every goblin is to a lesser extent. You pull the level and hope for good loot. Quite a few games take this further, in what I still think of as Diablo-style loot, with lots and lots of drops with lots and lots of randomization. 95+% of it is vendor trash, but that’s not always immediately apparent. If you want to avoid throwing away your prize, you need to dig and see if there is a pony somewhere in that room full of horse poo.

Dungeon Defenders helpfully points out the items that would be upgrades. You can even see green dots on the map and highlighting through the walls. “Come check this out.” Of course, whether it really is an upgrade depends on many things, such as whether your character wants to trade +40 to towers for +20 to towers and +21 to hero stats. So maybe you should still be looking at everything, because that armor may say it’s a downgrade, but you are trading 8 points of something you don’t want for +25% base damage. And then you have prizes like this one. 1 shot 0 kill The value algorithm says this is an upgrade for me. For those of you who do not know the stats involved, those are pretty good hero stats, decent base damage (with no bonus), a very nice firing rate, and an excellent reload rate. It needs that reload rate because this is a gatling gun with a one round clip. It could fire seven times per second, except that you need to reload this muzzle-loader after every shot.

The loot drops so quickly in Dungeon Defenders that it is automatically deleted (not looted, deleted) as you play. There is an item cap that protects game performance and encourages you to run around collecting mana and items. This somewhat counters the pro-social mechanic of dividing up the cash from loot left on the ground at the end of each round, because if you try to leave the loot, a lot of it will go away before the end of the round (past the first few waves). The item cap feels like it was designed for 100-200 enemies, and Survival maps quickly get to thousands of enemies. This discourages AFKing but gives you the choice between adding DPS to beat the level or trying to claim your prizes before they *poof.* The latest patch changed it so that the lowest quality loot gets deleted first, not the oldest; the opposite was a very strange design decision that led to your potential upgrades disappearing as you ran over to pick them up.

Mana is both the currency of the game and what you use to build towers, upgrade them, and power your abilities in the level. It also has a cap for how much can be on the ground (I’m not clear if that’s shared with loot), without the “lowest quality disappears first” provision, so your shiny teal 500-mana gem might disappear when the next 1-mana gem drops.

With so much vendor trash that it throws itself away, Dungeon Defenders may be approaching the reductio ad absurdum of Diablo-style loot.

: Zubon

Difficulty Curve

I have reached the point in Dungeon Defenders where I need a ranged DPS character to do more. I’m working out how to bootstrap that process, since the tasks for most really good ranged DPS weapons require either a decent DPS weapon or being assisted by someone who has one. I am solid on towers, but the red ogres absorb a lot of damage.

Medium difficulty is easy. Once you get past the low-level blahs and have all your towers, you’re good to go. I didn’t even try Easy; I presume you can sleep through it. Hard is mostly fair, requiring some thought and planning, and it requires you to use your towers well (or perhaps you can overgear and just shoot most of it down, but some of those maps are large). Insane is an entire other thing, and they keep increasing its difficulty because Insane is the endgame.

Like the WoW switch to raiding, Insane is a switch to demanding a DPS hero. Yes, the towers are extremely helpful once the enemy count gets to 4 digits (and keeps climbing in Survival), but the red ogres’ hit points have 6 digits. I have yet to see them hit 7 digits, but I have seen it very close in a 4-player game. Someone with great tower-building gear can still shoot that down, but the ogre tends to have dozens of friends with him and more coming from other lanes, so you may not be able to devote too many DU to the ogre. OTOH, I have seen screenshots of DPS-specialized characters above 200,000 DPS, so the ogres need not be overwhelming threats. That bootstrapping comes back: to get the items you’ll want for massive DPS, you’ll need to be able to take out the ogres that demand the massive DPS, unless you got them before they dialed up the late-game ogres. And I do mean to pluralize “ogres,” in that they spawn in pairs on some maps, to say nothing of the challenge where you get only ogres (from five entrances). My Squire is hybrid and only puts out about 20,000 DPS without Blood Rage, but he can take down the biggest ogre given a bit of time and maneuvering. The other enemies and ogres are there to minimize your time and maneuvering. And then there’s the end boss, which likes to spends its time airborne.

Maybe I’ll just get a bit more gear for my Squire and work on Insane Assault for the Huntress weapon.

: Zubon

The early maps are still pretty easy on Insane, especially the ones without ogres.