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Level 1 Superman

The DC Universe Online tutorial takes place in one of Brainiac’s ships. While I respect that unity in the storyline, unless levels work radically different here, it is hard to take seriously a Big Bad when players solo his invasion ships at level 1. If Brainiac is not up to containing level 1 characters, he may not be much of a threat.

I picked Superman as a mentor, so he joined me at the end of the tutorial. (I presume that’s why, rather than everyone’s getting Superman.) This is another problem of scaling, because Superman is (depending on the latest universe reboot) kind of a demigod. Any problem I can reasonably address at level 1, he can solve without stopping. Big Blue should be smashing those robots faster than I can see them, and I’m pretty sure he can fly through the side of the ship rather than waiting on that teleporter. You can play Robin to Batman, but next to Superman, you’re Jimmy Olsen.

Comic books usually hand-wave the MMO problem of different levels. I think Daredevil knows that he’s not in the same league as Thor, but you at least pretend for a few pages that the heroes can meaningfully challenge the Silver Surfer.

: Zubon

[GW2] Valley of Movement and Microexpressions

ArenaNet’s Chuck Jackman (pronounced as Scottish as possible) shows off the new dialogue cut scenes in Guild Wars 2 in one of the latest blog posts. Unequivocally, he started the doom of ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 by having to summon eldritch gods to get the job done. It is possible that everybody will be insane/dead before a beta starts. Still, which do you think is scarier, Cthulhu or an art director that has probably already bested a few of those gods? Anyway, amongst the cries of the damned, Jackman writes:

We also use a layered and additive approach on the face. This allows us to animate a mood or emotion-based “face idle” and layer on the lip-synch animation as well. We can then drop additive facial gestures at the appropriate time in the dialogue. For example, we can have a character looking timid or frightened while they talk. Then maybe something happens to scare them and we can drop an additive flinch animation onto the character’s face, body, or both independently at just the right moment so that they react to what is happening to them in the scene.

I have to say that this sounds really cool, especially after watching some deadpan facial expressions on the heralded Skyrim. An official video of one of these new dialogue scenes gives the full impression. I find two teachings colliding from my untrained pundit’s eye: microexpressions and constant movement. Let’s explore both! Continue reading [GW2] Valley of Movement and Microexpressions

Re-Re-Balance

A big difficulty of playing Dungeon Defenders around launch has been the post-release re-balancing. There has been a lot of it. Daily patches have not been unusual, and those have contained both bug fixes and balance changes. I don’t know if strategies that worked last week still work. I do know that some things from two weeks ago don’t work any more.

This is not a good post-release state. It will presumably pass, but to paraphrase SynCaine, WTF kind of developer releases something that needs a 50% nerf? That particular one got walked back a bit, but the numbers you see in patch notes are not small. Scroll through patch notes and count how many times something has changed by 20% or more. 20+% is not a tweak.

This is interesting in the sense that there is always something new to re-learn, but one does not make plans on that basis. It is hard to feel invested in a character or a world when this much is in flux.

: Zubon

Boom

The great joy in having an Apprentice has been the deadly striker tower. It is slow and single-target, but it has range and power. It gives you life-affirmingly huge numbers. After being annoyed by wyverns as a Squire, it is lovely to watch them drop from the sky.

But the range, the range is what makes this toy shine, along with its ability to shoot through walls. You hear it charge up, fire, and somewhere a pinata has exploded. I had heard my friend on his Apprentice laughing about it before, because they are nice on the ogre gate in The Summit, but playing Endless Spires was the first time I made heavy use of my own Apprentice. I set up deadly striker towers near the central crystals then watched them pick off enemies on the walkways around the spires. I hadn’t even been aiming for those. I cackled like a madman who had struck comedy gold. It’s a beautiful map for showing off what the towers can do: long, winding paths with wide open spaces. You get to watch the bolt of doom arc over the depths, striking some slow-moving orc in the face, and he collapses in a colorful cloud of mana.

: Zubon

Reach out and touch someone.

Stable-Filling

Witness the evolution of AFK power-leveling, even in the face of nerfed towers! I was amused to get level 20 in three Deeper Well Insane runs, which is trivially easy (Squire: harpoon and bowling ball at the top of each stair, slice & dice and harpoon at the upper doors, harpoon somewhere else for the “used all DU” bonus). I was messing around with the bonus level on Hard, but that has become inconvenient with recent updates. The Ramparts Hard is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million xp and 2 million mana (currency) per hour, which means taking a character from 0 to the level cap in about 3.5 hours while reading A Feast for Crows. I didn’t really grind that out, but fiddling and testing got me a respectable Apprentice and Monk, so I have some toys to try creating the perfect builds for Insane difficulty. It seems entirely feasible to take a character from 0 to 70 in an hour or two of play, although by the time you can do that, you will have pretty much everything at level 70 already.

When they introduce new classes, there will be legitimate characters at the level cap within an hour of the update. If I can actually get the “time to cap” down to an hour, it might be worth proliferating characters while farming a bit of mana. I imagine some people already have three level-capped characters of each class (pure towers, pure hero, hybrid). It’s silly, but it seems practically free if you are going to be farming mana for upgrading items. Of course, then you should farm more mana to equip those characters, and farming that mana can get you even more characters…

: Zubon

Uniqueness

The latest Kongregate giveaway may interest you, because it is for $10,000 of gift certificates (over 10 years), although the gameplay involved is not interesting. No, what interests me is this: what work is “unique” doing in the game’s description, “Choose from one of six unique races”? In what sense are dwarves, elves, and humans unique? Are they saying that they are not identical with other and trying to use “unique” as some kind of superlative for “different”? Is it a translation error?

At least they did not go on to claim that their races were the most unique.

: Zubon

[SWTOR] Emotional Rollercoaster

Supra-edit: BioWare’s Stephen Reid says these two things are unrelated. So as not to waste prime article space, these other two things are also not related.

I just got a free beta key for SWTOR from Rock, Paper, Shotgun! I thought, well I didn’t think Rift was going to be all that fun, and playing in beta changed my mind. Maybe a free romp in SWTOR will do the same. Here I come static lightsaber battles!

Then I remembered I would have to install Origin. That brought my high crashing to the ground. I really don’t want to install something on my computer that seems shady at best. If EA simply wanted a great way to bring updated games the PC, why didn’t they just leave it at that instead of creating EULA-backed spyware. Any corporation that asks me to believe them when they won’t even explain what they deem necessary… well, I have my personal high road on this one.

In the world of quid pro quo, I don’t mind a source gathering information for say an operating system that I need or a game-buying service that I love, but making SWTOR’s rider the installation of Origin brings my high back to “meh.” I am now mulling my beta key. I want to play, but not that much. Put too many hoops in my way, and I have plenty of other games to fall back on. Still the first hoop (getting a free key) was a big one.

–Ravious

EDIT: Winged Nazgul to the rescue! Up we go, rollercoaster.

The Running Narrative: Bastion and Your Brain

Bastion comes highly recommended, although that is more for the atmospherics, visuals, and narration than the gameplay. I think of the gameplay as “Zelda,” and since I have already played Recettear and Spiral Knights this year (Spiral Knights is closer), I don’t feel a lot of drive for the gameplay, so let’s focus on the narration.

Bastion is best known for building the level around you as you go and having running narration. Whatever you do, there is some smooth-voiced dude telling it as part of the story, whether you rush blindly ahead, stand around waiting, or intentionally leap to your doom. It sounds like a story he already knows and is just recounting as you play it out, rather than something you can affect (there is a fair degree of forced linearity, so that’s easier). Interestingly, the human brain does exactly the same thing, constructing a narrative after the fact to impose a consistent story on events beyond its control or understanding. In either case, the narrator will take whatever it is given and piece something together after the fact.

And now I find myself wondering how random you can be within the game and at what point the narrator gives up on explaining things to you. I would hope that it also has something of the Left 4 Dead director to impose something on you when dramatically appropriate.

: Zubon

Psychonauts: Exploration and Leveling

The leveling mechanic of Psychonauts is a marriage of Exploring and Achieving that is a song to my EASK heart. Reaching the level cap is painful, but you only need level 30 (of 101) to have the requisite abilities. Past that, it’s all ability upgrades for convenience and more power. And how do we do this leveling? We find stuff. Every psychic level has a bunch of figments, every physical zone has psi cards and psi challenge marker, and then a few other miscellaneous collections. The late game lets you add an entire hit point bar from a collection quest.

Most of your levels come from normal play, picking up figments effortlessly plus a lot more to gain with just a little effort. In most levels, the figments will guide you through the level, pointing out a good place to head next and serving as an indicator that you have not gone somewhere yet. Then the maps are decorated with hidden spots, platforming, and the occasional mechanics puzzle. Some items are ridiculously hidden, but most are visible from a distance or have something more visible right next to them, like a series of psi cards in the area of a psi challenge marker.

There is a reward for exploring the map. That’s nice. It is also not required to complete the game, since the first couple of upgrades are nice, but then they are mostly convenience or crap until you start getting awesome abilities past level 70 (damaging levitation, damaging shield, regeneration, infinite ammo).

: Zubon