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Bottlenecks

I am still playing GemCraft: Chasing Shadows. There are a lot of levels, and when you start going past wave 100 every time, a level or two is an evening’s gaming.

What with more than 100 levels, the map is large and sprawling. There are, however, bottlenecks through which you must pass. At some point, your next level must be X. There are probably more of these than I realized; if you happen to go the way that is required, you probably did not notice it was required, whereas crashing into the wall in the other direction sends you back this way.

There are several points at which unlocking the next hex requires a particular skill. The game is nice enough to very explicitly say that you need skill Y from field Z1, and it will not let you start a level you cannot complete. I should note that you really cannot complete some maps without particular skills, not that it’s just really hard, although that comes from the arbitrary difficulty of the wizard towers. You must unlock the tower by using up some resources, either tower attacks or spells, effectively a handicap on the level.

These chokepoints also tend to serve as story units. There is a tale of The Forgotten going through GemCraft, and you follow it across the map. It is not the world’s strongest story, but you can retrace the ruins of previous battles fought, which gives the game a bit of mystique and an aura of doom. When you look up from your shiny gems that are blowing up monsters by the dozen.

: Zubon

10 vs 2

Last night I turned up the difficulty on a tower defense map and went for a higher difficulty achievement as well. It took a few tries, and I learned new things about how the game randomly changes some variables and can make the map much harder or easier. After more than 50 waves and 2000 enemies, I got it down to the last two and was carefully working down their hit points. Then Windows 10 forced an update and reboot. The Microsoft messages seem to imply that I should be happy about this.

: Zubon

Restricted Difficulty

The GemCraft thoughts come from trying to ride the bleeding edge of difficulty. Sometimes we look for greater challenge because easy is boring, but the leveling system in GemCraft also encourages you to push yourself as hard as you can. You cannot grind the same map repeatedly to level up. Instead, your experience point total is the sum of your highest score on each map. You can go back and repeat a level, but unless you up the difficulty and therefore your score, it will not contribute to progress.

So add more difficulty modifiers, add more waves, boost the waves, and summon them early: anything to up your score, because if you go easy this time, you’re probably coming back to re-do the level for a higher score (for more levels, to do better in the late game). And who wants to re-do 40 waves of defense when you don’t have to? Only now you’ve dialed it up to 50 waves and are trying to keep boosting that difficulty mid-level, eek out a little more and keep things interesting. Of course, if you overshoot the difficulty, you’ll probably find out all at once, and now you’re starting those 50 levels over. I have several times ended levels because I boosted several waves of difficulty without noticing their different speeds, so they all reached the critical point at the exact same time. Hurts.

GemCraft: Chasing Shadows also comes with “Iron Wizard Mode.” No xp, no levels, no shadow cores, no talismans, no difficulty dials: just 5 skill points per completed map and that is your total advancement. There is no way to lower your difficulty by re-completing levels with higher difficulty. There is no benefit to increasing your difficulty, unless making one part of a map harder makes another part easier. There is no bonus for completing the level quickly, well, or with perfect defense: just win at all. This is remarkably freeing. Making the whole thing pass/fail takes a lot of pressure off, even if the fixed difficulty can be a challenge to re-adapt to after having lots of levels in the main game. Also, I am now seeing the first levels again, with their few waves, rather than the 50+ wave maps I am seeing 80+ maps in. The simpler game is soothing. I can choose to have fewer choices.

: Zubon

GC:CS Thoughts

What happens in your brain as you play GemCraft: Chasing Shadows:

Okay, what gems do I get this time? That looks like a nice chokepoint. They’re coming from HOW MANY directions?

Okay, I’ll just put this tower here and … crap, reset, I’ll just put this tower here…

Easy waves to start, I’ll just enrage a couple of times, the extra hit points won’t matter … but that extra armor will, crap crap…

All right, settling into a rhythm. Let’s build up some mana, level up that mana pool. Very nice. Enrage a few waves. That was easy, let’s enrage a bit more. Yeah, just pour those swarmlings into the meat grinder.

I have 20 more waves of this. *sigh* No problem. Let’s speed that up a bit. Quintuple enrage the next five waves…

Wait, that one was a giant wave. Crap. Okay, no problem, just stop enraging a bit… although I already enraged the waves before and after it…

There are reavers everywhere! Freeze! Curse! Bolt! Zap, boom! Ha ha, getting ahead again, all right, all ri — crap, that wave’s still going and I’m out of spells. That’s okay, I can leak a few.

Freeze the giant, make him blow up on the other monsters… Come on, 2 seconds left on that freeze spell. Come on come on come on crap. Well, he’s dead now anyway.

Okay, whew, made it through that. No problem. Let’s take it easy for a few waves, catch back up. Okay, maybe not that easy. Oops, okay, maybe that was one too many enrages. Just one enrage for the wave after.

Pew pew pew. Freeze the swarmlings. It’s fun to watch them explode in clumps. Ooh, shrine’s full, let’s pop that.

And just the giants left… and done. Hey, three achievements, nice.

You then vary between “I wonder how far I can go in endurance mode” and “Oh god, endurance mode, I already went through 50 waves.”

: Zubon

Fine Tuning

I have been playing GemCraft: Chasing Shadows, a tower defense game. A great thing about the game is the ability to fine tune your difficulty. You can unlock three levels of difficulty. You can unlock nine different “battle traits” that add enemy traits and waves. You can select talisman fragments that give xp instead of bonuses that help you in the fight. During the round, you can on a per-wave basis choose to “enrage” enemy waves, spending mana/gems to boost monsters, and you can spend many small gems for high numbers of enemies or a few larger gems for bigger enemy boosts (or both). Rewards scale accordingly; I went back to an early map with some difficulty sliders turned up and got a score 20,000 times as high. Oh, and then there are achievements for other self-imposed difficulties, usually not using part of your arsenal or doing something very quickly on a particular map.

The base difficulty of the game is fairly low, at least in the paid version. (The paid version is easier than the flash version without the “magician’s pouch” mainly because it unlocks “endurance mode,” continuing the map after beating it to keep racking up xp. Xp in GC:CS is your highest score on the map, so going back and getting a few levels with your new skills and difficulty sliders makes everything else easier.) With many ways to tune the difficulty, you can dial it up to exactly the sort you want. Just want to run through the game and see everything? Keep it at the minimum. Like fighting big targets? Dial up “Giant Domination.” You prefer crushing swarms of foes? You can enrage swarmling waves into the hundreds. Hardcore elite gamer? Turn all the dials all the way up and go for it.

Oh, and there is “Iron Wizard Mode,” which eliminates most of your ability to level grind away the difficulty. Steam says that less than 1% of players have beaten that.

: Zubon

Steam also says that 13.6% of players do not have the “kill a monster” achievement. I like Steam games to have that “have you even played?” achievement. It’s informative.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

I finished Shadow of Mordor and have been enjoying the DRC as a dessert. The Arkham-style combat with better stealth (I should probably play Assassin’s Creed if it is like this) is just great. There is not a lot of variety in saying it, but I remarked many times, “The gameplay is so good.” It ranges nicely from stalking lone orcs to pit-fighting against dozens, with side dishes of giant monsters, packs of scavengers, and “try using this move!” side missions.

The central story is good. At a couple of points, when you see the obvious stand-ins for characters in The Lord of the Rings, I am torn between being annoyed at the Theoden expy and liking the idea of demonstrating that this is something Saruman does, not a one-time trick with Theoden. The side missions are also good, although the missions to free captive slaves are more or less the same. I briefly resented having weapon-based missions that tried to make me use one particular trick, but it made me get better at the game and I found myself much more effective when I used everything instead of just my favorite tricks.

The difficulty is low, although that is part of how I approached the game. Starting out binging on open world content is a lot like level grinding, so I was stronger than expected for most of the game. The structure of the game also fit quite nicely with how I wanted to play it, rewarding stealth and mobility more than “kick in the door.” Branding came at the perfect time for me, because I was tired of killing enemies only to have them keep respawning; making them permanently yours effectively gave me a progress bar as I took over most of the map. After a very easy Lord of the Hunt DLC, I am finding the Bright Lord DLC somewhat more challenging, as [spoiler] is not as tricked out as Talion.

This has been one of the best games I have played this year, if not the best. Strongly recommended. And oh look, the holiday Steam sales are on their way. Go for the Game of the Year pack.

: Zubon

Sharing, Spoiling, and Scavenger Hunts

Discovery-based fun became harder to design with the internet. Many designers are still working with concepts that made sense in their youth but not in an online world.

Pre-internet, in many games the discovery of hidden things played well as a social game of shared information. Take the Cult of the Vault challenges in the Borderlands games or any similar “find these things hidden in out of the way places” setup. It takes a special kind of obsessive player to catch ’em all because the symbols could be any size, on any surface, half-obstructed, down a dead end you have no reason to visit, etc. It makes a lot more sense to think of this as something you do with your group of friends, and you trade locations or hints on where to find them. On an internet forum, you might do that, pooling information to see who has found what where. That is a great social process. The output of that process is a complete spoiler list, which then eliminates the social game of shared information. That is an undesirable but natural outcome of releasing that sort of game into the internet, where we have become very good at coordinating this sort of information-gathering.

If you are fortunate, you can find a site with tiers of spoilers. Click A for vague hints of where to look, B for narrow ranges and more explicit hints, and C for screenshots or videos. If you are really fortunate, you are playing when many others are playing and can just ask for the right level of spoiler, “am I on the right path here?” And if your gaming friends are local rather than online, you can get back to that social process, perhaps mutated because at least one person in the group will have looked at the full spoiler list.

And so it goes for any hidden but compilable information. If you are on the forefront, with the early adopters and first researchers, you can still participate in that social information game. You can be one of those people compiling information that will eventually be part of a spoiler list, because it is exciting to share where you saw X or how you figured out the formula for Y. But that window is narrow, because if it is happening publicly it can only happen once unless you are part of another group that is going through the same process while explicitly avoiding others’ spoilers.

This may not be a horrible thing. If content locusts are descending on a game and moving on, and you are playing games years after the fact, having the spoilers available to consult is better than nothing after having missed the social game. You need other players to have the social game, and most video games do not sustain populations that way (or the population center moves on to another part of the game so much that it might as well be another game). It is a bit of shame that is happens in days or hours.

If I may reminisce, I remember the early days where complete information was not available. We approached Asheron’s Call’s spell research as if we could create a new spell using the spell components the way you might mix something in a chemistry set, only later realizing that there were fixed spells with fixed formulas (and finding the formula pattern was the shared information project). In the early days of Magic the Gathering, there were rumors of cards because no one know exactly what was in the sets. I usually like my games to have known, fixed parameters, but there is beauty in the unknown.

: Zubon

Kitchen Sink

Realm Grinder‘s development path reminds me of WildStar, in that it is gradually coming to an approach of “just throw everything in and hope it works together.”

One of my first impressions of WildStar was that it decided to use all the systems and hope for synergy. It has races, classes, specializations, paths, factions, and more, most of which have advancement systems built in. It has static quest NPCs, quests that appear in the field, challenges specific to your path, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few types and their names. There are achievements and unlocks and multiple parallel and overlapping advancement systems, the way other games staple them on between expansions but here building them in from the start. There is crafting and PvP and raids and city upgrades, and any sub-system you can think of from any other game probably exists in WildStar in some form.

For me, those never really gelled into something coherent, but maybe it did for you, and they have had a year or two of development time since I last looked in on them.

Realm Grinder did not have the pre-release development time that WildStar did, but it seems to be following the same path in terms of sub-systems. I mentioned initially that it launched with six factions, so you could range from clicker play to idling to offline. Then heritages let you keep a feature from each faction. Then the unlockable neutral factions launched. Then you could unlock a good or evil prestige faction that stacked on top of the original factions. Then Mercenaries let you combine upgrades from various factions. Then bloodlines let you take a bit of any faction and include it in your current build. The latest major release added research, which has six paths of trait trees themed around the six original factions, where most of it is accessible to all factions but there are faction-specific upgrades in each tree, and it is only available to the original six without using the prestige add-ons. A small update added challenges for the original six factions, which are mostly faction-specific but can provide bonuses across factions. And I might be missing a few in this kluge of limited, general, specific, overlapping, and mutually exclusive upgrade trees. The menus now have sub-menus to store all these buttons. And they are actively adding more, as research for neutral prestige factions is under development.

Despite all that, at any given time, your options are relatively limited and clear. If an option is not available for your faction, it is grayed out or not visible. Once you have chosen a faction and a bloodline, there are no other choices to make until you get to the late game of Mercenaries and research. Other than that, no, you just take everything available. Even the new research system offers more upgrades but not more choices until you get a few reincarnations in, because “select 4 of 4” is not really a dilemma.

If you are not sure which tier of the game you should be in, “the latest one you got access to” is usually the right answer, and failing that look at the order things were added. Each reincarnation you start with one of the base factions, move to a prestige neutral faction, go back for a prestige good faction, switch to Mercenaries, then go on to the research system. It is a lot like playing an MMO, where you go through the expansions in the order they were released. Realm Grinder lacks explicit levels, but it does have lots of numbers measuring your progress, and the major question is when to switch between progress methods (and which one fits your playstyle/time).

: Zubon

Irony

In Boom Beach, there is an enemy base configuration called Fearless. It has lots of big guns, but the enemy headquarters is too close to the beach, so the lossless way to approach it is to bomb the two big guns by the beach, drop tanks to clear a few small guns, then have everyone huddle in the corner like scared children while they safely plink away at the HQ. Perhaps “Fearless” refers to the enemy commander who thought putting his HQ in front of the defenses was a good idea.

: Zubon