Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.The latest board game at our house is Seven Wonders. It is good. I may need more players to keep the game interesting over time.
In Seven Wonders, you control an ancient city. The basic play is: play a card (signifying building a building) and pass your hand to the next player. This happens 18 times and you’re done. That sounds kind of dull when you put it that way, why is this fun? Continue reading [TT] Seven Wonders
Before this I had played enough PvP in Guild Wars 2 to make it to a ways in to the Deer rank. This is very little, honestly, compared to the amount of WvW and PvE I have done. I was still okay with my necromancer, mostly in condition form, and I enjoyed watching PvP tournaments and streams on Twitch.
Then they changed things. No longer could I really hide in a server with 8-10 players on a team. Now they were getting pretty strict about PvP being a 5v5 ordeal. Being a 20%+ reason why your team lost is a lot more scary than being able to hide in a crowd.
What got me out of my shell was (1) the understanding that there are a lot of players hitting that PvP button a lot worse than I was, and (2) the Wintersday reward track being really good. So, I went in to PvP once again with a goal because, afterall, I had a carrot I had to chase. Continue reading [GW2] Where I PvP, Again
Pretty but shallow. Lovely visuals and sound, but it gains nothing from being in a game format. The story is evocative but never completely gels. I am told that there are semi-random elements, which would be an advantage of the game format except nothing makes that apparent and how many people want to walk through the game again in the chance that the verbal part will vary randomly? Also a reason why the story may not gel; it must support multiple, conflicting stories at once.
Great atmosphere, marginally worth the time (~hour), certainly not worth the price. You would be happier watching someone else play through the game, which is the same effect except for holding down the W key.
: Zubon
GW2 has revamped dailies. I’m torn, to the extent that I still care about GW2. It makes it easier and less interesting to coast and not care, which is probably not a good thing; Ravious, any insight into how this affects play for someone emotionally invested?
GW2 now has daily login rewards. Okay. It’s not a horrible mechanic, even if it feels like a F2P gimmick. The implementation here is better than many because it does not demand that days be continuous. If you don’t log on for a week, your login rewards progress stays on track.
WvW and sPvP achievements are still more or less the same. They tried to sell that one, but no, rotating amongst the WvW objectives is not a new thing. The newish bit is asking you to win in sPvP as a particular class or two per day for a bonus chest.
PvE dailies are the big change. This seems like another step in the continuing march away from the pre-launch design philosophy, here away from “play however you like.” The picture on the link above is representative: daily achievements are now very specific, such as defeating a particular world boss, one of the gathering types in a quadrant of the map, or completing events in a particular zone. If population spreads over time, this may not be a bad design plan, because it channels players back together in the zone of the day, the way Zaishen dailies do/did in GW1. I have not seen how well that works; I have seen mass piles on a world boss, but I have not had the interest to complete 4 quests in whatever random zone was picked today. I am not part of the population being channeled there.
The channeling effect must be minimized by the range of dailies. In the linked example, players are simultaneously being channeled into three different zones and then another quadrant of the map. You get all the restrictive feeling of highly specific dailies while still spreading your players across a fair amount of the map. Maybe that’s better than spreading them across the whole map? It seems like a lot of design philosophy to give up for a small gain.
: Zubon
I remember when The 7th Guest came out. It was cutting edge for its time, with amazing graphics that made the first real use of a CD-ROM. I acquired it in some pack or another on Steam and tried it recently.
Yep, it plays like the cutting edge of 1993. The puzzles are not as hard as you may have heard but as potentially incoherent. Historically notable but not something you should go back and play.
: Zubon
I had somewhat less than Wilhelm-level hardware problems and was mostly offline for a couple of weeks. Or at least away from a PC worth using for gaming. I felt surprisingly good about this. It forced me to keep to that intentional gaming plan I was having trouble with. And what did I miss? Almost nothing. I haven’t had the urge to re-install much.
I did browse around other parts of the internet. I found that I really enjoyed seeing people really enjoy themselves. Like how I was enjoying the cosplay at the summer gaming cons, it has been nice to see people simply enjoying their hobbies. You know, playing without thinking about game balance or playing a walking spreadsheet.
So that’s been cheering and enjoyable, but it has not given me much to say in an online gaming blog. I’ll check in sometime.
: Zubon
Season 2 of Guild Wars 2 finally feels expansion-y enough to talk about in a way where I can review it beyond “this update is cool or bad”. It’s strong enough to see a trajectory in design by ArenaNet. The storytelling is different. The goals are different. And biggest and most noticeable of all, we have new zones. We have zones which feel as important as the core zones, excluding Southsun Cove. That is what I want to review. Continue reading [GW2] Maguuma Wastes Review
Back from disease and travel, Mrs. Ravious and I played through the Seeds of Truth update, which is the seventh episode for Season 2 of the Living World. In the usual Season 2 fashion (especially this second half) there is a story instance and then two action sequences. There will be spoilerosity as I want this post to focus on the story of the update. I’ll get to the other updates in the maps and what not later.
So to catch up, the story is now revolving how one of Glint’s dragon eggs can change the world. Except that Caithe, one of your buddies from the core game’s story, just up and stole it once you got it off the Zephyrite leader’s still warm corpse. That was the cliffhanger last episode, and now the Living World starts to tell us why. Or, at least the seeds of why. Continue reading [GW2] Seeds of Nightmare
I was pretty intrigued by Zubon’s discussion of Kingdom Builder. Zubon had already made me a fan of Zaccarino’s Dominion game, and I wanted to check Kingdom Builder out as well. Well, there’s an app for that.
I was on a trip down to the Gulf for a wedding, and I decided that $5 wasn’t too much for a couple hours of board game playing. The Kingdom Builder app is pretty good, with the exception of not being able to take back token placement. More importantly, I have already learned plenty of strategy from the AI, at least enough that I could wander in to a convention game and not make a fool of myself. Â The $40+ dead tree version is on my Christmas wish list now.
Ticket to Ride dead tree version is also on my wish list, but straight up having never played it on app or the analogue world. I know it is an excellent game, and one touted by many as being a great Board Game entry for younger kin. I plan on getting the app this month so that if Santa Claus puts the board game box under the tree for me I will be in a place to teach others how to play.
My five year old also has been wanting to learn to play chess, and I’ve found that using Chance Chess (free online) to narrow down the moves has been an incredible teaching tool. We also taught her (and my 8yo) Monopoly last night. It was still shrink-wrapped… as a wedding gift of ours 10 years ago. That’s lasting worth, and who would’ve thought ten years ago that I’d have the beginnings of a board game family.
–Ravious
I have gradually been getting started on Dishonored (yes), and the achievements for the game are giving me ideas of how I might go about playing. Several amount to challenge modes like “play it as a pure stealth game,” “don’t kill anyone but your target,” and “don’t kill anyone” (I presume you can defeat the bosses without killing them yourself). But I have been finding myself somewhat paralyzed by wondering what closes doors and which achievements are mutually exclusive in ways you will not find out until half-way through.
Some are obviously mutually exclusive. “Don’t kill anyone” does not work with “kill lots of people quickly” or “kill people in a variety of ways.” Some are less so. It is not a priori obvious whether you can go through the whole game without (1) alerting or (2) killing anyone or (3) learning the magical powers. For example, maybe going undetected in some area requires killing a guard or possessing a rat or something. And then most games have non-obvious ways of failing challenges, so presumably keep lots of save files.
I am trying to plan ahead to economize, because it would be disappointing to learn that I could have passed a challenge if I had done one thing slightly differently 10 hours earlier. Dishonored is gratifyingly non-spoileriffic with respect to that, having big ticket challenge achievements (“play the whole game this way”) rather than highly specific things you would need to read in advance to know about (“acquire the herring before chopping down the mightiest tree in the forest but do not use the herring to chop down the tree”). This is also an virtue of Dishonored’s reportedly short (~20 hours) playtime, because playthroughs are not epic commitments. Dishonored has the downside that you can repeat missions but cannot retroactively un-fail challenges by not killing anyone on a second try.
Or maybe you can now? Probably not, but researching a bit has led me to many questions whose answers changed over time. For example, it seems that killing the assassins in the tutorial prologue used to count against “don’t kill anyone,” but now it doesn’t, and there are several other places where players found challenge-failing triggers the developers decided should not count against you. So researching turns up answers that may be outdated or inconsistent, and for best fun find a discussion between people who played different versions of the game where the rules changed, so we have experiences and maybe even videos verifying inconsistent answers.
I could alleviate some of this by not badge-hunting, but I like badge-hunting, and “challenge mode” is a special sort of badge-hunting that I think most of us can endorse. Now if only I could set the game to recognize which challenges I was trying for, indicate when they have failed for some reason, and give me the chance to rewind back through auto-save points to fix that. That would be a nice little feature.
: Zubon