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Grinding

I have several casual games going at the moment. They give a range of grind. Two are idle games, which grind themselves.

One is Pathfinder Adventures, where I rejoice in the grind. The grind here is simply playing the game. Of course, that is always what grind is; I think of “grind” as when you must repeat the same content repeatedly to unlock new content or achieve some arbitrary goal. In Pathfinder Adventures, you can pay $25 for all the content, pay a smaller amount for a la carte, or repeatedly play “quests” that are essentially the same content as the main “story” but with randomized content and no cut scenes. Those award 100 gold (plus gold for enemies), where it costs 2000 gold to add a character option and 4000 to unlock a set of story missions. You use the same character set on quests with a different character advancement mechanism. Because I enjoy the quests, I have not spent any money, because I will happily get enough gold to unlock everything I want just by playing normally. It is a strange irony they are more likely to get money from people who want to play less. At some point, I will probably play through the story missions on all the difficulty settings, but “same content but you must roll higher” does not sound like a huge draw.

I am also playing Evil Defenders, a mobile tower defense game ported to PC and heavily discounted on Steam. It is mostly entertaining, but not good enough that I can really recommend it. Notably, it has a poorly balanced need for grinding, presumably a relic of mobile F2P microtransactions. Playing gives you “souls” you can spend to upgrade your towers. These are not “nice to have” but absolutely required to beat later levels. After hitting the first level where the difficulty curve spikes faster than the pace of advancement, I went back to try previous levels on higher difficulty settings to get more souls. I cannot yet say whether you need to grind for souls or just beat every level on every difficulty setting (bonus souls for each “star” on a level), but it feels grindy enough just having six difficulty settings for each level. And there are achievements tied to beating the fifth and six settings for each level, so you know my completionist, achievement-whoring heart is going there. Consulting achievements, I see that 92% of people who have bought the game on Steam have played it, much higher than Borderlands 2, but only 19% of players have completed all 15 levels. These are not long levels, the basic difficulty is 10 waves, and you could beat the whole game at one sitting were it not for the grind. More than half the players who have completed every level have also completed every level on every difficulty with a perfect score, so this game either caters to obsessive players or requires that sort of investment to beat the last level at all. Because if you need to defeat 14 levels at all difficulty levels to earn enough upgrades to beat the last level, why not make a perfect game of it?

: Zubon

Cancer and Crashlands

I have cancer.

It’s stage 4 esophageal cancer. You can look up statistics, but as it is “uncurable”… my first oncologist said I was looking at maybe 5-7 years, not decades. I haven’t had this discussion again with my current oncologist.

I am currently being treated at Siteman Cancer Center, which is one of the top 10 cancer centers in the U.S. My oncologist specializes in GI-tract cancers, and I am currently on a pretty good study regime with Herceptin. I have had 4 full chemo treatments in this first round of 8, and I am showing early stages of remission from my latest CT scan.

This is why I’ve kind of dropped off the face of the interwebs.

Crashlanding Back Here

Continue reading Cancer and Crashlands

Fluff and Crunch

rock titan The online CCG Spellstone includes the ability “invisibility,” which makes enemy skills miss. In addition to using it for assassins and illusionists, the game applies the same skill to represent carapaces that make attacks deflect, like turtles. This leads to the pictured Rock Titan, a huge pile of stone whose toes tower over horses, with a giant spotlight for its eye, which is very sneaky.

: Zubon

Pathfinder Adventures

At Tobold’s suggestion, I have tried a bit of the Pathfinder Adventures card game (on Android). I always seem to have a digital CCG of some sort going, and this seems to be a pretty good one.

I had intended to try the paper version, but I do not have a regular gaming group with which to play. This falls between a CCG and a tabletop RPG; the decks are characters, which change and level up through adventuring, but there is not quite the story feel of an RPG. If you want the mechanical part of the game, this is an efficient way to go about getting it without needing another play to sit out as GM.

I do not know how long this will stay in my playing rotation. The fixed adventures and the random quests are really about the same, in that you face some semi-random group of cards, most of which you will quickly come to recognize. I suppose they are better themed in the story adventure chain? I was finding it just as satisfying to run random quests. Given the minimal story, that’s about the same gameplay. The lack of cloud save is a negative.

The game’s model is F2P with microtransaction and “box” options. The “box” here is paying $25 for full access to all the modules and characters, as if you bought the box of cards. The microtransactions are for smaller quantities of gold, which you can use to buy the box cards, but there is quite a bit of grinding to be had to earn that gold. Personally, I found no hardship in beating 15 quests to unlock a second hero because that’s the game. At the lowest difficulty, the game is entirely playable with just the two free characters, and I will see how it does with three or more.

: Zubon

Dressing Room

a screenshot from the game Farm For Your Life showing the character customization screen The game Farm For Your Life has a simple feature that I have not seen elsewhere: on the character customization screen, put a mirror behind the character so you can see how that hair, jacket, whatever looks from behind. Yes, you can usually spin the character around to look, but is a mirror that hard? (Probably, yeah.)

In many game genres, you mostly see your character from behind anyway. Maybe the point of view should start behind the character, like in a barber shop or hair salon, with you the customizer as the hairdresser. And spend less time customizing the exact shape of a nose you can’t see 95% of the time.

: Zubon

Evolution and Enshrinement of a Feature

The first time I encountered an MMO with a confectioner trade to make muffins that buff people, I was enchanted. It is a simple and slightly silly idea with roots in developers learning what players like.

Hunger, thirst, and other biological functions are not common features in MMOs these days, apart from surprisingly common quests to make you clean up poop. Early RPGs commonly had hunger and sometimes thirst, reflecting the intuitive notion that you will starve to death if you never eat. This meant players needed to acquire food (and sometimes water) and eat regularly or else suffer a hunger debuff that might stack unto death.

Players generally hated that. It was the sort of bookkeeping that most people ignore in pencil and paper roleplaying games, like encumbrance. Yes, there are survival games where finding food is a core mechanic, but most of us are happy to assume it happens in the background. More importantly, players hate debuffs, they hate feeling like something is being taken from them, and they hate being reminded of costs over time.

It feels like a tax on playing the game. Continue reading Evolution and Enshrinement of a Feature

Unplayed Steam Games

I have many unplayed Steam games, largely due to buying packs of games where I am interested in a few of the ten. Then there is the Steam sale effect where you see a game you are kind of interested in playing at 75% off, so you pick it up now for potential play later.

I am thinking that Borderlands 2 has quite a bit of the latter. Looking at Steam achievements for Borderlands 2, 27% of people have not gotten as far as picking up the first gun. More than a quarter of people who own this game have not played it. 27% have completed the game’s storyline, which makes for nice symmetry. And 2.7% have been to all the named locations on the map.

I have no great insight here, just an observation. More than a quarter of sales of a AAA game did not lead to playing.

: Zubon

Casual Bites

Long-time readers know that I am an immoderate person. I binge, I commit fully. I mentioned that I was reading Worm; I went through 1,680,000 words in 17 days. So I don’t drink and I am careful about getting invested in things. I am coming down from that Worm binge and am once again (still?) wanting games I could play casually even if I likely won’t. The metaphor still holds: sometimes you won’t commit to watching a 90 minute movie but you will watch 5 TV episodes in a row.

One thing I liked about the MMO genre was the ability to make small units of progress. Hop in, get a few easy objectives in 15-30 minutes, go on to whatever else you’re doing. Beyond coasting, it combines the casual game spirit of low investment play with the long term perspective that these little units add up. There are plenty of single-player games that are similar, which are mostly what I am seeking in my Steam library as I have given up on MMOs.

There are lots of games that I want to play but do not feel up to committing the time necessary to give them a fair shot. I have some 4Xs but it is not quite satisfying to pop into one of those for a few turns. I have Banished installed but my only visit to its tutorial reminded me of The Witcher 2, not in difficulty but in that its interface turned me off so much that by the time I can get over that feeling I also forget what I was supposed to have learned. Before I completed the first tutorial it seemed that building a basic settlement involved going 2 or 3 levels deep in each of several menus for each of several steps, requiring roughly a paragraph of explanation each. Banished has a rather good (if harsh) reputation, but I don’t know if I’m up to that kind of commitment just to learn the interface.

My current need is gaming in bite-sized increments with intuitive gameplay. Being me, I am likely to leap into and consume something in mass volume, but I need that intuitive gameplay to get me past the commitment conundrum of needing to invest in learning a game before I am able to enjoy it. I want the game to meet me at least half way in terms of interface, when many of our gamer games seem to pride themselves on requiring large time investments to learn their mechanics.

: Zubon

Testing

I am gradually playing through Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep in Borderlands 2, and I have come to wonder if the game was playtested solo and/or with the Mechromancer. I assume it must have been, so either the design team did not listen to those testers or they decided these were good design decisions. Part of the point of the DLC’s story is that Tiny Tina is a lousy GM with little concept of balance, fairness, or sanity, but that is not something you really want to inflict on your players.

For example, there are a fair number of enemies with one-shot (or nearly so) attacks. Borderlands 2 comes with one-shot protection, kind of like how City of Heroes prevented you from dying due to falling damage: you would be left at minimal hit points but not dead. This DLC keeps that rule, but has some of those heavy attacks be DoTs, have elemental effects with DoTs, or come as a multi-hit beam rather than a technical one-shot. It is a weird state of affairs when you build a mechanic into a game to prevent a problem, then design around that mechanic to make sure that problem still happens. This is mostly a problem for solo players, because in a multi-player game anyone can revive.

There are also several points at which Tina arbitrarily smites you because that’s how she wants the story to go. She usually gets talked out of it, but there are occasional scripted deaths where it is just a free trip to the rez point. (Not sure if some are whole-group and some just the mission owner/closest person, since I’m playing solo; if the latter, this works much better in group play.) As I have mentioned, this sort of thing is a major momentum breaker for the Mechromancer. When your class’s core mechanic is building up a buff over time, nothing ruins the play session quite like arbitrarily resetting that buff.

I’m amused by the metagamey story and the occasional rainbows and unicorns when Tina forgets she is telling a dark and brooding story. The gameplay mechanics of the DLC are shaky.

: Zubon