Five Short Game Reviews

What have I been playing lately? Not WAR.

WAR just never clicked for me and that has kind of killed the whole MMORPG genre for me at the moment. Since I'm always aimless without MMORPG's I've been playing a billion games ...

You'd think I'd feel guilty about posting not about WAR on my WAR blog. You'd think ...

Left 4 Dead

This is Valve's Co-op zombie shooter. When I get in a good game I have a lot of fun. But that's always my issue with multi-player FPS games -- it's fun when it's fun. Other nights you can spend two hours just trying to get in a good active game and only spend like 20 minutes playing.

Tonight was the latter, which is why I'm blogging instead of playing games.

Incidentally, if you play my SteamID is "Boat".

Company of Heroes

I really, really like Dawn of War. Not enough to buy Soulstorm, mind you, but I do own the game and the other two expansions. I bought CoH a while back and just finished the campaign this weekend.

Company of Heroes doesn't really do it for me. The WWII setting and the units just aren't as exciting as Warhammer 40k. Which is funny because I'm a much bigger WWII buff than 40k buff.

Sometimes while I'm playing Company of Heroes I close my eyes and imagine I'm really playing Dawn of War 2.

Gears of War 2

Is Awesome. The first night I got it I stayed up about three and a half hours past bedtime playing it. Just as a relative comparison, I would usually go to bed half an hour early when I was playing WAR.

The NXE (New Xbox Experience) has been a double-edged sword. It has Netflix if you have a Gold subscription, so I finally can justify getting a Gold subscription so I can play online. On the other hand it has Netflix so my wife has been watching movies almost every night and I haven't been able to play much. I beat Gears 2 in a few days. My average time to beat a game is never, since usually I get bored.

X-COM : Apocalypse

This has always been my favorite X-COM game because it allows you to dispense with that irritating turn-based combat that takes forever. After ten years of trying I've finally beat it (yaaay).

It never fixed the problems of the first two X-COM's though. Nothing but random levels get extremely boring after a while. Also, your guys get experience (which is cool) but can pretty much be arbitrarily killed (which is not cool) which inevitably leads to a ton of saved-game reloading.

Disgaea DS

I'm not sure why I bought this. But it is a tactical Japanese RPG. In fact, it is like a caricature of a Japanese RPG. I kid you not, this paragraph is in the manual :

Suggest a Topic for the Dark Assembly

You will have more topics to choose from as you level up. The voting of the members will begin if the topic needs to be approved by the Dark Assembly. The topic will be approved when the difference between the agreeing points and disagreeing points exceeds the required Mana to suggest the topic. You can always force the topic to be approved, but it is not recommended while you're still at a low level.

I once had an idea for a video game called "Newt Gingrich's Pro Congress Challenge". I didn't develop the idea much in my head, except that I knew you would move the N64 joystick in a circle continuously to filibuster.

But that insane idea I had as a joke looks like Pac-Man next to the crazy crap in any random JRPG.

The Failure of Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa is shutting down.

One time I started to write a blog entry about the things that you do and do not want to hear MMOG developers say. It was a little too much work, but the Tabula Rasa devs were definitely going to have an entry in the "do not want to hear" column. In interviews, Richard Garriot or other Tabula Rasa developers would talk about how they were rethinking many of the assumptions of the genre.

This is a big red flag. A big red flag that is on fire in a room full of dynamite in a museum filled with priceless artifacts.

If you are making an ordinary single-player game with six or ten hours of gameplay you have a lot of leeway to be innovative. You can do something totally new and still make a great game. Even then it's very rare for totally new and innovative games to cross the Good Game Rubicon and really be great.

MMOG's are a different animal. Every mechanic needs to be balanced against every other mechanic and then still remain at least somewhat fun for months or years. A single player game might revolve around two or three simple mechanics. Any MMOG needs probably twenty or thirty specific, complicated mechanics before they can even earn the name.

This is not to say you cannot innovate in an MMOG. You absolutely can and should. But you only innovate on four or five mechanics out of the twenty or thirty you'll need. Nobody is going to have the time, energy, or talent to rethink every standard mechanic in the genre. Even if you could, nobody will play your game because it would be practically impossible to learn.

At one time I was really looking forward to Tabula Rasa but I never ended up playing it. I remember reading about an expansion a few months ago. They were very excited because they were adding Armor Sets to the game. When you try to innovate too much you end up missing these "baseline" features to your game, things that no MMORPG should go without.

Richard Garriott was one of the pioneers of the MMORPG genre but he never found much success after Ultima Online. There's something special about video game pioneers that tends to make them long-term failures. If you've ever read about the development of video games during the 1970's and 1980's, it strikes you that practically none of these people (except for Shigeru Miyamoto) has had much success or longevity in the industry after their "pioneering" days were done.

It shows you that the creation of video games is a complicated thing. You do need your innovators, your "scientists", to pave the way. But the world of the not-new belongs to the engineers, who can take the innovative ideas, refine them, and make them into good games.

WAR, WoW, and the Race To Max

I'm no longer keeping up with other WAR blogs, nor my own, nor WAR itself, so I'll apologize up front if this has been covered ad nauseum.

But has anybody noticed the general relaxed attitude towards leveling? This is a big change from WoW, where people are killing themselves leveling up whenever there are extra levels laying about.

Now, I'm sure some people in WAR were killing themselves to 40 -- and certainly a lot of WoW players take their sweet time hitting 60/70. But as a whole it seems like the goal in WoW is to hit max and the goal in WAR is to take your sweet time.

There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest is the respective focus on PvE and PvP. In WoW being "ahead of the leveling curve" was a huge advantage. You didn't have to compete for mobs or quests if you were ahead of other players. Faster leveling begets even faster leveling.

In WAR there's not a lot to do if your ahead of the curve. Scenarios won't pop and there won't be a ton of world PvP to enjoy. You might not even be able to play much with your guildies.

Also, if anybody else is playing Left 4 Dead and is similarly in need of FPS co-op buddies, drop me a line. "boatorious" on xfire, "boat" on steam. In a completely unrelated note I expect my glorious return to WAR to be delayed even further. My ... uhh ... my internet is out so I can't play WAR right now. But I'll be back soon.

Where Is Boat

I haven't quit WAR, but I have quit playing it.

Lately I've just really been in the mood for X-COM : Apocalypse, so that's what I've been doing.

There have been a flurry of bloggers quitting lately. That's my understanding, anyway. The first victim claimed in my not-playing-WAR to playing-WAR transition has been my WAR blog reading. Most nights I don't have more that two free hours and I never have more than three, so spending an hour going through blogs every night seems a little ... opulent.

Anyway, I guess I should talk about WAR ...

WAR Auction House == WoW Auction House == PAIN

For every five to ten hours I play the game, it seems like I have to spend an hour at the auction house unloading items. This is pretty similar to WoW, actually. I wish there was an easier way, doing this stuff kills me.

There Are A Lot Of Crafting Mats

The abundance of crafting mats is also a little bothersome. Perhaps I'll devote an entire post to MMORPG crafting at some point, but in the meantime I'll say that I do not dig all the inventory management required for crafting. Especially in WAR where not only will I have like 20 stacks of different kinds of crafting-level-50 apoth ingredients, I'll even have separate stacks of equal-quality, equal-level fixers that literally do the same thing.

PvP Seems Pointless

Once again I'm low in tier (now tier 3) and I don't see much point to PvP as I'm just not that effective.

How Do I Level Up Then?

I don't know. Leveling up with PvE is so bloody slow. Honestly, just as much as X-COM: Apocalypse being awesome, this is why I've quit playing for the moment.

How Long Until I Quit Quitting?

The reason I don't think I'll quit WAR is that I can't think of anything about it that really, really bugs me. I think it will take me another week or two to work the X-COM bug out of my system, then I'll be back, causing trouble and taking names.

The PvP Longevity Fallacy

As I've been grinding scenarios for XP in WAR I've had a lot of time to think about PvP and MMOG's and what I like to do. I wanted to talk about this but I'm realizing that to explain my feelings I need to explain other things first.

The PvP Longevity Fallacy

If you look at Counterstrike, Starcraft, DoTA, Halo, you'll see that these really popular games have staying power because you can play against other people.

I've heard this point argued many times in defense of WAR but I heartily disagree.

If a person likes a single player game, they buy it and play it. If a decent number of people like a single player game, they buy it and play it too. If you sell enough copies to pay for development, then hey -- suddenly you have a franchise.

PvP games aren't quite that simple. A person buys it, then logs on to see who else is playing. If it's one of the 800 pound gorillas -- your Counterstrikes, your Halos, your TF2's -- they'll find plenty of conveniently (nearly) full servers running the particular flavor of game they like and then everybody's happy.

Now, if you're a mid-tier competitive game, you do still have people playing. But you might have trouble finding good games to play at your skill level, or with the levels you like, or rules you like, etc. You might take a day off and think, "Hey, I'll get some extra playtime in" just to discover that every server is dead during the day.

And then there's the dregs. You need a critical mass to play online and some games lose it quickly and entirely. The multiplayer game really can't be bought or sold strictly on the merits like its single player brethren -- the quality of the game depends on how other people view the merits.

That's why, when I get one of my FPS or RTS hankerings, I won't start looking for a game I'd like the most. I'll start looking for the game that everybody else plays, so I can get some good competitive multiplayer.

It's called inertia, and it's why some good PvP games last forever while others die sudden deaths.

Improving low tier open RvR and PQ's

Being in a guild with a bunch of bloggers is rather interesting, because you'll think of something during the day and think "hey, that's a good idea for a blog." Then you'll log on to vent that night and somebody in vent will say, "hey, you know what Mythic needs to do ...", and proceed to describe your exact idea.

So I'll admit that my ideas are unoriginal, because between thinking of them and writing them I've already seen some of them written down. So instead of a "proposal" for improving the lower tiers, consider it my "vote".

1. Hot Pairings for low tier RvR
   
   It's real simple -- in fact, it's a lot like WoW's battleground holidays and Mythic's plans for revolving capitol cities:
   
   
   Make one pairing a night give double XP, double renown.
   
   Players are going to be spread really thin in the lower tiers before too long, and it would be nice to bring them together for some open RvR. Personally, I spent about 20 minutes doing open RvR in tier 1 because there just wasn't anybody to fight or anything to do, which leads me to my second proposal ...
   
   
2. Hot PQ's
   
   Same idea, only applied to PQ's. Every hour the "hot PQ" changes, and gives increased XP, influence, and better rewards. This would make it a lot easier to round up a group for low-tier PQ's.
   

Thoughts on Blizzard's Dual-Spec Announcement

I’m disappointed in WoW’s announced spec-change system. I’m glad they added something, but I don’t think they went far enough.

Blizzard has a habit of trusting their players too much. Ninjas, griefers, and bad guild management thrive in WoW as a result.

Blizzard accordingly looked at the spec problem, and saw that healers and tanks were stuck with either a “primary” talent build for PvE, or a “dps” talent build for PvP and soloing.

I agree that this is a problem -- however, most players would identify, I think, a much more insidious problem – that they are forced to spec a certain way for raids and to get groups.

Allowing players to change spec out-of-combat does not really solve the latter problem. Players in high-end raiding guilds will now find that they’ll be required to have two raiding specs instead of one – and this will soon trickle down to most other raiding guilds as well.

And I’m sure that before long you’ll see group leaders demanding that members have two certain specs instead of just one. So this fix will provide relief for some players but it won’t provide relief for most.

I always felt the best solution to the spec problem would be giving players special talent trees that would become available only in certain situations. First you’d have your existing talent tree which would be used in any open-world situation. Then you’d have a PvE tree which would be used upon entry to any PvE instance. You’d also have a PvP tree which would be used upon entry to any PvP instance.

This would essentially eliminate “spec peer pressure”, as raid leaders and group leaders would only be given veto powers over one of your specs, allowing you your open world and PvP specs to do with as you wish.