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[GW2] A Mesmer Without Time

The end of the last week gave a lot to chew on over the weekend with the Guild Wars 2 expansion’s first look at an elite specialization: the chronomancer. Elite specializations are basically Dungeons & Dragons prestige classes that build upon a core class. The chronomancer builds on the mesmer, in this case.

Being a chronomancer gives another shatter, the ability to use a shield, and a new type of utility skills, wells. The theme of all these powers is the manipulation of time, which is most notable in the form of Alacrity.  Alacrity is a new buff that lowers the recharge duration of recharging skills, which makes it the opposite of the Chill condition.

I was blown away by the chronomancer on Friday’s Twitch demonstration. Dulfy provides all the notes in her usual fine form. As an aside, I really did not like the use of pre-recorded video. It didn’t feel like a great demonstration. It was neat that ArenaNet showed off a new sub-area and enemy, but there was a lot lost in the busyness of the videos. I would have much preferred a “now I am going to demonstrate the shield projectile ability after I explain it a bit”. Real time has a lot to be said.

Anyway, what I kept thinking through the end of the week news overload was “why wouldn’t a mesmer want to be a chronomancer?” Continue reading [GW2] A Mesmer Without Time

Gen Con Planning

I will be attending Gen Con again this year. Last year, a few of us said we were going, but that never coalesced into a meetup or event. Would we like to do something like that? If there is enough interest or if we have several bloggers going from our corner of the blogosphere, we could even register an event, although it looks like there are costs involved in that.

Designate a time/place to meet up for conversation and open gaming? Pick a restaurant and have a Ratslayers Tavern some evening?

I am opening the floor to discussion for attendees so that we plan and do something. It is a big event (56,614 attendees, more expected this year) and it is hard to stumble over each other in that kind of crowd.

: Zubon

[GW2] Trait-orous Fiddle

With the expansion, ArenaNet is redoing all the trait lines, and more. The Twitter pitch is that each trait line is being collapsed to 3 minor traits and 3 tiers of 3 selectable traits, where players pick one from each tier. Stats are being divorced from the trait lines, and instead of putting points in to trait lines, players just choose three trait lines getting all trait levels from that trait line. Specializations are essentially a trait line that opens up the ability to use specialization aspects.

This update will come before the expansion. After the expansion, the elite specializations will be available, and it must be slotted into one of the three specialization slots to use the elite specialization’s skills, weapons, and of course traits.

Bhagpuss puts the changes into the fiddling that seems to occur with many MMOs. In his mind it won’t be a substantial improvement.  Continue reading [GW2] Trait-orous Fiddle

[TT] Smash Up: Expansion Mechanics

Smash Up calls itself a “shufflebuilding” game. It consists of 20-card half-decks of factions like aliens, dinosaurs, pirates, and zombies; pick two, shuffle them together, and now your alien dinosaurs are squaring off against zombie pirates. It’s fun and I’ll probably review it later.

The base game comes with eight factions, and each expansion adds four. Each expansion can be played as a standalone two-player game, and any pair of them is a four-player game just like the original. Each of them is another set of options to add to any other set of options. Its modularity supports players in deciding what range of options they want to play with (and pay for).

That same modularity means there is value in duplicate sets. It does not help to have a second set of the same Dominion cards or another Settlers board unless you want to play two games at once. In Smash Up, you can combine the base set with itself or expansions with themselves so that your four corners might be alien dinosaurs, alien zombies, zombie pirates, and dinosaur pirates. Choices are exclusive only to the extent that cards are limited. Again: more potential options and, on the business side, more options players can usefully pay for.

: Zubon

A Decade of Guild Wars

Guild Wars is 10 years old!

It amazingly still has a small, active population. I’ve heard that because of the server architecture the cost to maintain Guild Wars is minimal, and the population that has made their home in the game should have no fear of foreseeable shutdown. Guild Wars 1 is going to be around for a while, especially since I still see people going back and buying the game for a mostly single-player experience.

I know I played in early beta events, but my first strong memory was the Collector’s Edition snafu. It appeared that there were manufacturing or shipping problems with the Collector’s Editions, and while I had the headstart period, if I recall correctly, my account would shut down after that. So I did the logical thing and bought a normal edition, being a poor grad student, and then later bought my Collector’s Edition to layer on top of that. My favorite memory is here, when I wrote about Guild Wars ending development.

I still have that Collector’s Edition, as well as the two other Collector’s Edition for Factions and Nightfall. I still look at them fondly from time to time.  Continue reading A Decade of Guild Wars

#justnerdthings

I was awoken by a nightmare in which I was playing a multi-player strategy game and was so focused on mopping up an opponent who we hit with an early rush that I forgot to develop my economy and so was useless to the team in the late game. It was like the gamer version of the nightmare of going to school naked.

: Zubon

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Jedi Master, PMP

Raph Koster discusses the design history of SWG Jedi, which is a bit of an extended apology as well as a good story. Most people reading this like MMOs and Jedi, so you probably already clicked the link. Welcome back.

For me, given my work, the most interesting section of the post is “We’re out of time.”

We had to go through and make tough choices on cuts. As early as that Christmas I was already triaging the entire game design. My criteria was “can the game function without this.” Not “will it be good.” Will it work at all.

Being able to think this way is an amazingly important skill if you want to complete projects. I have had co-workers who experienced the need to prioritize as a personal insult that you were not giving them everything they wanted. Projects managed from that point of view do not spontaneously generate larger budgets or more programming staff, but they do lose features at random instead of according to a logical scheme of “required” versus “nice to have.” As the idiom would have it, when filling your bucket, put the big rocks in first; if you are tossing in handfuls of gravel, there won’t be room for all the big rocks by the end. You can probably fit some gravel in the bucket around the big rocks.

Jedi never really seemed a good fit for that bucket.

: Zubon

[GW2] Lick ’em, Stick ’em Hylek

gw2hot_04-2015_Zintl_with_ItzelSlowing down from the big features after the Stronghold beta, ArenaNet discusses some of the new denizens of Heart of Thorns – the hylek tribes. Players should be familiar with the frogmen who appear mostly in Maguuma areas. I feel their biggest gluts are in Caledon Forest and Sparkfly Fen where they have  meta-event surroundings their territory.

The new hylek tribes are surfer-dude tree frogs – Itzel, and down-to-the-earth, end-of-the-road bullfrogs, the Nuhoch. The latter of which surprisingly has no “L” in their name. I think the article is a pretty good read for lore fans.

What I want to discuss is the core game’s “lesser races” versus what could be in the Guild Wars 2 expansion, Heart of Thorns. By “lesser”, I mostly mean non-player character races. Continue reading [GW2] Lick ’em, Stick ’em Hylek

[GW2] Stronghold Engage

star-trek-picard-engageThe Stronghold 24-hour live client beta for Guild Wars 2 was a ton of fun. Mrs. Ravious and I had a blast duo-queuing. It is going to be a fun addition to the PvP modes, but its future is in question.

Engage

I think Stronghold strains towards the edges of PvP. The core of PvP is arena deathmatch. Nowhere to run, kill or be killed. The current darling is probably Smash Bros. Guild Wars 2 has the Courtyard map for deathmatch, and I hate it. Continue reading [GW2] Stronghold Engage

[TT] Deus: Stacking

I played my first game of Deus this weekend. It has one elegant mechanic I’d like to discuss.

You have five types of buildings in Deus (plus temples, which are irrelevant for today’s topic). You build them by playing (and paying for) a card. You place your building, put the card in the appropriate column on your board, and (here is the interesting part) activate every card in that column, in order from oldest to newest. When you build your first production building, you get one production effect, and then the same effect triggers every time you build another production building.

That simple mechanic drives a lot of the action in the game. Because you can have only five buildings of the same type, that is both a snowball and catch-up mechanic. On the snowball side, someone with a good start can quickly capitalize on one good building to get several good effects. Specialization pays off. On the catch-up side, after you complete that tower of cards, it is done. You have placed your five buildings of that type, and you can no longer capitalize. Also, building temples (late game victory points) requires having cards in every column, so a certain amount of diversity is both incentivized by temples and required by the piece limit.

: Zubon