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Exploring Fallen Earth

I’ve been struggling over the last month or so, trying to define the ways I enjoy playing Fallen Earth and I’ve not had much luck. Maybe if I just start hitting the small points, a bigger picture will form.

I first started playing and everything was confusing. Somehow I found I enjoyed this. After all, I am a clone that just woke up and realized what is happening in the world around me. Things would be confusing. Soon I escaped from the Hoover Damn and joined the outside world.

There were a lot of quests to do but I kind of felt tired of questing so I went in to town to see if I could learn more about crafting. It didn’t take long before I was questing anyway in order to learn how to craft. It seemed more interesting as the rewards were often crafting skill books which allowed me to craft more items.

I learned quite early on that pretty much anything you need can be acquired in one of 3 ways: craft it, buy it, or gather it (harvesting or hunting). This opens up a lot of doors for playing how you want to. If you like to craft, make it. If you are in a hurry, buy it. If you want some adventure, go out and find it.

Continue reading Exploring Fallen Earth

Champions Zone-Servers

Most MMOs make it difficult to play with your friends. Levels are a common culprit, as are character- (not account-) specific friends lists, but servers are today’s topic (and City of Heroes solved both those problems anyway). My friends play World of Warcraft on however many servers, and I can pick one on which to spend two months leveling to catch up. We have never been able to get everyone together on the same server for any game but EVE, except when we had so few people playing that we could not field a full group anyway. Whatever else you may say against the Champions model, it avoids this. There may be fifteen copies of that zone you are in, but you and your friend can meet in the same one no matter where you started.

It is a hard thing to make someone choose which 99% of the population to wall himself off from before making his first character.

Another virtue is the inherent scaling. Games have this problem across their lifecycle: how can you accommodate both early crowding and the later population shift? You do not want The Shire clogged with 500 hobbits at once, but you want new hobbits to be able to play once the horde is level 50, and then you want the level 50 experience to remain fun after the horde that sat there for nine months moves on. What about that group content?

In the early days of City of Heroes, you might have seen a dozen copies of each low-level zone as additional instances spawned. Champions Online takes the next step by eliminating the top-level server. Each zone has a lower population cap, so it is easier to have the “right” number active in it, and more instances appear as the incoming population expands.

There may not be a shared world, but you always have the right number of shared playgrounds.

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2 Release Date Flashbang

I feel sorry for Jaeho Lee sometimes.  The man heads up the English-speaking conference call for Korean-based NCSoft.  Last time NCSoft at the conference call spoke substantively about Guild Wars 2’s possible release date it caused enough commotion that the ArenaNet’s brass had to respond.  Of course it can’t be helped, Guild Wars 1 was a success in what was considered a DOA-business model.  More people than rabid fans like me want to know about the sequel to ArenaNet’s first game. Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Release Date Flashbang

Happy Blog Birthday

The Steve Jackson Games Daily Illuminator turns 15 today. It is, to the best of their knowledge, the oldest blog still being updated regularly. Yes, it mostly exists to advertise their products (Zombie Dice this spring!), but the random internet items that proceed the daily product spotlight can be fun. As a RSS subscriber, I don’t even see the daily product spotlight. A personal favorite is the occasional chronicling of how we now live in the future, what with bladeless fans and people becoming cyborgs so slowly that no one much notices. Or I suppose you could just watch for DARPA RFPs for super-soldier suits and mechs (actual US military research), but it helps to have someone else spotting.

: Zubon

Conflict of interest watch: I once published a column for the Steve Jackson Games online magazine.

The Turbine Two-Step

When I play games I often rank them by tempo rather than genre.  Hypertempo games, like Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead, require a lot of energy and give a lot of excitement in return.  Slower games such as Civilization 4 or a tower defense give me a slow, entertaining beat.  MMOs have their own rhythm as well, and last night I filled a much needed missing tempo in my MMO library.

Lord of the Rings Online in itself has multiple tempos, at which I can play.  There is the calm steady beat of solo questing, the more demanding march of group instances, and even crafting affects the whole symphony with a coda of rest.  Still, Lord of the Rings Online is missing many tempos that are crucial to my well-rounded gameplay.  The combat is sometimes too rhythmic, even in group instances.  The game can feel like an If/Then line dance, where agro, healing, placement, and killing are all just part of any veteran’s action equation.  I felt this lack deep in my soul last night after playing for countless hours over the weekend.

I still wanted to play an MMO, but I needed a more aggressive rhythm.  One filled with staccato notes and out of control riffs rather than a steady Bolero.  I found Dungeons and Dragons Online. Continue reading The Turbine Two-Step

WoW Crafting

The production skills have almost no gameplay value. They can produce useful in-game things, and it is something to do as MMO players always need, but there is no fun in it. Recipe + ingredients + click + wait. It is convenient and dull, especially in volume. It encourages alt-tabbing, never a good sign for game design.

I find the gathering skills inappropriately engaging. The world is full of little boxes of candy, just for me! I was tempted to drop Blacksmithing, pick up Skinning or Herbalism, and gather my little heart out. At least you are out there doing something besides watching the little bar fill, and it progresses naturally as you play. Continue reading WoW Crafting

Weekend Deals on Steam

“Overlord: Complete Pack” with Overlord, Overlord II, and Overlord: Raising Hell is $8.75. I note that Overlord itself is just $1.50. I have heard mixed things about Overlord, notably that you spend too much time saving villages considering that you are the villain, and the Raising Hell levels sound like a lot of that. On the other hand, there are only so many good “be the bad guy” games out there, and there are good things too. If you want a review of a game from 2007, I might say some things after I play.

$1.50 for an old game, and it downloads and installs itself while I sleep? I should be looking through these digital distribution channels for classic games I never played. My list of books to read and movies to see also has a “games to play” section.

I did not enjoy Left 4 Dead much, but if you want the sequel, your pre-order time is almost up. Steam has the same deal there that Borderlands did: 10% off plus buy-3-get-1 free, which is just a brilliant offer for games with 4-player coop. Various places will also give you stuff for pre-ordering, like a Team Fortress 2 hat or a L4D2 bat.

: Zubon

Things To Do

Good version: the game has lots of content that remains meaningful at the level cap. Depending on your game, that could be a collection of dungeons, PvP, things to make or collect, areas to explore, or procedurally generated content that does not feel formulaic and repetitive.

Bad version: the game has lots of things to keep you busy and subscribed at the level cap. Depending on your game, that could be a variety of treadmills and grinds, or PvP and procedurally generated content that quickly becomes repetitive.

This is mostly an Explorer perspective, because I find it easier to think of what would make good post-cap Explorer content (new things to do) and bad post-cap Achiever content (do them each 5 times a day until you reach some new cap, to give us time to add more grinds to keep you busy until the next expansion pack). The distinction comes down to whether you would do X as an activity in and of itself, whether or not it produced some new numbers to add to your character sheet.

: Zubon

A difficult game to balance for PVP

Once per week, I podcast about Star Wars: The Old Republic. On the last episode, when the subject of “invisibility” style stealth for the recently revealed Imperial Agent class came up, I was adamant in my opposition to it. I hate when you are trying to PVP and thieves or burglers pop out of thin-air and do burst damage as if they had some kind of invisibility spell. I felt pretty sure they wouldn’t give invisibility stealth to Imperial Agents because, afterall, it wouldn’t be balanced for the Imperial Agent to have both cover and invisibility stealth when the counterpart, the Smuggler, does not. Well it seems I was wrong, because the folks at Darth Hater have seen video of an Imperial Agent go stealth with an non-timed toggle switch stealth.

How is this possible I wonder? One side of the fence has stealth, the other does not. It’s possible I think, because the game may not be designed around PVP balance.
Continue reading A difficult game to balance for PVP

On the Blogroll: Player Versus Developer

The hot topic these past couple of weeks has been MMO pricing models, and you will have trouble finding better discussion than at Player Versus Developer this month. Even if you do not agree with Green Armadillo on all the points, these are the critical points for discussion. Skip the distracting side issues and cut to the core. Here is a post on Facebook game scams, with an article I’ve been meaning to discuss. How about the conflicts of interest inherent in running a game with a cash store? You don’t need to fix balance issues if your players can buy their way around them. And there is the question of what is left to do if you are one of us not necessarily thrilled with the shift to RMT.

This last one reminds me of last week’s elections, because there is a sense of inevitability about the item shop. I cannot see the trend moving in the opposite direction. There will definitely be a place for subscription games, but the paradigm shift is already over if your position is reduced to “there will still be a place for it” or “we are still the majority.” Yes, for now, but winning 53-47 when it would have been 93-7 a little while ago means you are about to get steamrolled.

: Zubon