Oh, goodness! Have you been waiting for me?
I certainly hope not, as I am less reliable than a '97 Chevy.
Anyway, the actual act of gaming has drawn my attention away from you and your faithful readership, which is probably why there are only two of you left. You are saints for staying, truly.
But now to get down to the meat of the subject.
Warcraft.
So I presented a rubric in my last WoW post, and I've endeavored to assess the game accurately and fairly on that scale.
1) Game Balance - Besides a few lesser annoyances, I'm relatively pleased with the new balance scheme. Paladins still heal too well in my opinion, and Death Knights are worse than useless in most cases, but overall, no one should be complaining.
2) Social Appeal - The mechanics are well-rounded and solid, and I'm pleased with the significant bonuses I can theoretically get. I say theoretically, because after several weeks of dedicated game-play, my guild is nearly to level 2. The system is simply not viable without a real guild population to fuel it. This is how it should be, but is nevertheless frustrating to a guild-master having trouble recruiting. As a completely unrelated side note: If you play, join the Green Dragon Legion on Kirin Tor. We may or may not pay you.
3)Intelligent Economics - Perhaps the most favorable change of all is the removal of ridiculous gold sinks. They still exist, but in much smaller incarnations, acceptable investments for the related benefit. I've managed to rack up some healthy gold reserves, even while spending on the flying skills, extra gear, and random useless crap I like. I feel rich and powerful, not trodden into the choking dust of poverty. I'm a hero, not a starving mercenary. Actually, I'm still a mercenary, I did a series of quests in which I took the walrus people's gold to kill off the wolverine people, and then turned around and took the wolverine's money to get rid of the bastard walrus people who paid me to kill them. It was great.
4) Hunter Skillz - My main got nerfed on his melee and crowd control abilities, but the trade-offs were more than acceptable. I'm doing a high-end DPS, I can solo even better than before, and I'm not excluded from instances or BG's for my class or spec any more. I do wish Blizzard would change it so I can sign up for instances as a tank though, because my pet is more than capable of keeping a whole mess of mobs, and a boss stun-locked and aggro'ed for as long as it takes me to kill 'em. Just saying.
5) Four words: I met Malfurion Stormrage. No, no, no, I've got one better: I met Ysera, the Emerald Dragon Aspect! Okay, so that was more than four, but the point is my little happy lore spot is still twitching orgasmicly from the cool shit I've got to do in Cata-land. They have done really, really well on the lore here, it makes sense, it's dramatic, and the world changes as you wander through it. Two thumbs up here as well.
In short, I approve of the expansion, and will continue to waste hours of my time living a life other than my own. I can recommend the game to anyone who's interested, it's fun and moderately addictive.
For part three, in about a week, I'll talk about the things I've learned, and share some bits about the guild system, and random instancing.
Next time, I'll talk about another online game, League of Legends. That'll probably happen Thursday or Friday. Feel free to request a topic, or send me info on something gaming related I ought to be mentioning.
Showing posts with label game. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Grim Darkness is Grim...And Slightly Broken
So my weekly gaming group has been checking out Dark Heresy, a tabletop role-playing game set in the Warhammer 40K universe, and published by the well known game designer, Fantasy Flight Games. The characters play as acolytes to an Inquisitor for the Imperium. For those of you who aren't familiar with Warhammer 40K, Starcraft is the best correlation (mostly because it ripped the idea off, blatantly, back when the first one came out).
We've enjoyed the fluff, and story, but we've had a great deal of issue with the mechanical aspect. The basic rules run off a percentile system with your target numbers defined by your characters attributes, leaving most beginners with a 65% chance of failing at any given task. The real problem is that modifiers for the game are capped at +/- 30. This means that shooting a dime at a range of a mile without a scope is penalized by a tiny amount, and that kicking in a basic wooden door with three people helping you still has a 25% chance to fail miserably.
So we grabbed some errata off Fantasy Flight's website and doubled the possible modifiers, allowing us to fail by fewer degrees, if not necessarily succeed. These larger caps seem to have fixed most of our issues, but we're still experiencing difficulty on a couple of fronts:
1) We have a tenuous grasp of the fluff in some cases. The Imperium has a contradictory dogma to say the least. The object of most missions is to root out "heresy" in whatever location of population you're assigned to investigate. But the definition of heresy in a simultaneously cosmopolitan and totalitarian society is basically left up to the characters, both PC and NPC. And while that freedom to think is not a bad thing by far, those unfamiliar with the setting are left wondering what they're supposed to be fighting.
2) Role-playing cliches abound, one of the most well known being the direct relation between the quality of a female's armor and how much skin it shows. In world of Dark Heresy three things have led one of my female players, Rini, to declare the entire system "a boy game." First is the penchant for making all the male characters hideously disfigured and then conveniently allowing the females to avoid losing limbs, eyes, acquiring scars, or having a cup size smaller than a C, no matter how tight the body glove. Yes they have a body glove. Second, crafting skills, although poorly defined, are listed as requiring strength for many tasks which I would deem don't make a lot of sense. Like applying a laser sight to a lasgun. I've watched an entire company of Infantrymen wrestle with their red dot sights, trying to muscle them on until one of them realized the screws weren't retracted and then the whole lot of them had a brain-wave. So strength just doesn't mesh with my perceptions of reality. And third, the one I attribute more to Rini than to any flaw in the game itself, the dire possibility of failure. Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense to fail at tasks that you can do easily in real life, such as kicking down a door, with or without training. But you are playing a fictional character who is distinctly not you. In real life, you possess nearly no combat ability, few if any contacts on other planets, and you don't work for the government, nor believe in a distant God-Emperor. So roll the dice, and pray the Psyker doesn't roll 9's.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Rules of Warcraft, coming Wednesday...
We've enjoyed the fluff, and story, but we've had a great deal of issue with the mechanical aspect. The basic rules run off a percentile system with your target numbers defined by your characters attributes, leaving most beginners with a 65% chance of failing at any given task. The real problem is that modifiers for the game are capped at +/- 30. This means that shooting a dime at a range of a mile without a scope is penalized by a tiny amount, and that kicking in a basic wooden door with three people helping you still has a 25% chance to fail miserably.
So we grabbed some errata off Fantasy Flight's website and doubled the possible modifiers, allowing us to fail by fewer degrees, if not necessarily succeed. These larger caps seem to have fixed most of our issues, but we're still experiencing difficulty on a couple of fronts:
1) We have a tenuous grasp of the fluff in some cases. The Imperium has a contradictory dogma to say the least. The object of most missions is to root out "heresy" in whatever location of population you're assigned to investigate. But the definition of heresy in a simultaneously cosmopolitan and totalitarian society is basically left up to the characters, both PC and NPC. And while that freedom to think is not a bad thing by far, those unfamiliar with the setting are left wondering what they're supposed to be fighting.
2) Role-playing cliches abound, one of the most well known being the direct relation between the quality of a female's armor and how much skin it shows. In world of Dark Heresy three things have led one of my female players, Rini, to declare the entire system "a boy game." First is the penchant for making all the male characters hideously disfigured and then conveniently allowing the females to avoid losing limbs, eyes, acquiring scars, or having a cup size smaller than a C, no matter how tight the body glove. Yes they have a body glove. Second, crafting skills, although poorly defined, are listed as requiring strength for many tasks which I would deem don't make a lot of sense. Like applying a laser sight to a lasgun. I've watched an entire company of Infantrymen wrestle with their red dot sights, trying to muscle them on until one of them realized the screws weren't retracted and then the whole lot of them had a brain-wave. So strength just doesn't mesh with my perceptions of reality. And third, the one I attribute more to Rini than to any flaw in the game itself, the dire possibility of failure. Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense to fail at tasks that you can do easily in real life, such as kicking down a door, with or without training. But you are playing a fictional character who is distinctly not you. In real life, you possess nearly no combat ability, few if any contacts on other planets, and you don't work for the government, nor believe in a distant God-Emperor. So roll the dice, and pray the Psyker doesn't roll 9's.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Rules of Warcraft, coming Wednesday...
Saturday, January 1, 2011
The Rules of Love and Warcraft: Part 1/3
I've had a turbulent relationship with the iconic MMORPG we all know and love. I started playing in '07 just after Burning Crusade came out. Some of my Air Force buddies played and I, a long-time fan of the Warcraft series, joined up and tried it out. I started with a Tauren Hunter, mostly for the pets, and like all RPGs with character options, proceeded to make one of everything. And I started a guild. With just me in it. And then I realized that this co-op gameplay experience required skill, social ties and above all dedicated work. So I gave it up. A few months later I was ready for more and I went back to find they had changed the game. A patch they called it. Except in my previous experience patches meant they were fixing bugs, not altering the fundamentals of game balance and play styles.
Over time I would take long breaks, come back and rebuild my shattered guild, level like mad for a few weeks and then jump back into the real world when I burned out. My last stint was probably my most successful. I had a mount, so travel times weren't death marches anymore, and I made the inevitable grinding a game in and of itself by tracking time spent playing and the tiny victories and goals on a homemade spreadsheet graph, with different colored lines for all my character's progress. And I had my wife start up an account, and my good friend Gus switched servers and helped me manage my guild. I played consistently for nearly a year and a half before having to shut it down again when I went to Basic Training.
When I got back they'd nerfed everything I loved into the dirt. As with all patches I found the bits I liked, and the ones I loathed and attempted to curb stomp them into a tolerable whole. So I played Wrath of the Lich King for about a month, decided I had better things to do with my money and gave it up again. Now Cataclysm is out, and with all the hype (and a tasty looking guild leveling system) I decided to give it the good ole college try this one last time. With no more foreseeable interruptions of internet access/cash flow/free time I embark on a quest for MMO gold.
I will grade Cataclysm on five scales from one to ten, hereby declared Base Ten Grading Scale. The catagories are:
1) Game Balance - If I wander through the broken husk of Azeroth and find that Paladins are still healing better than Holy Priests, or that anything else is fishy I will be most displeased.
2) Social Potential - I love playing with my friends and wife, so if the Guild Leveling isn't well done, or any particular gameplay elements make the social aspect of the game unpleasant or unworkable then my shiny new toy isn't so shiny. Also, my buddy Gus is likely to cancel his account as well since he has no one else to play with. Never let it be said that the social aspect of MMOs is undervalued by the players.
3) Intelligent Economics - If arbitrary gold sinks for nigh-critical features such as the ability to fly over a certain continent, or prohibitive costs for mounts, dial-spec talents, or any other advertised feature exist, I will not play. If the game feels like work, it is no longer a game. It's a job I'm paying to do.
4) Hunter Skillz - If I play my original main and no longer enjoy the level of proficiency and excellence I worked so hard to achieve, my ire will be kindled.
5) Loremastery - I'm a huge story buff in this game world, so if the new races are stupid, the cool flavor of the old world defiled beyond recognition, or some new weird add-on breaks canon too badly, I will no longer be playing a Warcraft game, I'll be playing a Warcraft spin-off. Not what I signed up for.
So with that said, I think my patches are just about finished patching and I'm off to enjoy some cool new exploration. Let the Legion's banner fly!
Over time I would take long breaks, come back and rebuild my shattered guild, level like mad for a few weeks and then jump back into the real world when I burned out. My last stint was probably my most successful. I had a mount, so travel times weren't death marches anymore, and I made the inevitable grinding a game in and of itself by tracking time spent playing and the tiny victories and goals on a homemade spreadsheet graph, with different colored lines for all my character's progress. And I had my wife start up an account, and my good friend Gus switched servers and helped me manage my guild. I played consistently for nearly a year and a half before having to shut it down again when I went to Basic Training.
When I got back they'd nerfed everything I loved into the dirt. As with all patches I found the bits I liked, and the ones I loathed and attempted to curb stomp them into a tolerable whole. So I played Wrath of the Lich King for about a month, decided I had better things to do with my money and gave it up again. Now Cataclysm is out, and with all the hype (and a tasty looking guild leveling system) I decided to give it the good ole college try this one last time. With no more foreseeable interruptions of internet access/cash flow/free time I embark on a quest for MMO gold.
I will grade Cataclysm on five scales from one to ten, hereby declared Base Ten Grading Scale. The catagories are:
1) Game Balance - If I wander through the broken husk of Azeroth and find that Paladins are still healing better than Holy Priests, or that anything else is fishy I will be most displeased.
2) Social Potential - I love playing with my friends and wife, so if the Guild Leveling isn't well done, or any particular gameplay elements make the social aspect of the game unpleasant or unworkable then my shiny new toy isn't so shiny. Also, my buddy Gus is likely to cancel his account as well since he has no one else to play with. Never let it be said that the social aspect of MMOs is undervalued by the players.
3) Intelligent Economics - If arbitrary gold sinks for nigh-critical features such as the ability to fly over a certain continent, or prohibitive costs for mounts, dial-spec talents, or any other advertised feature exist, I will not play. If the game feels like work, it is no longer a game. It's a job I'm paying to do.
4) Hunter Skillz - If I play my original main and no longer enjoy the level of proficiency and excellence I worked so hard to achieve, my ire will be kindled.
5) Loremastery - I'm a huge story buff in this game world, so if the new races are stupid, the cool flavor of the old world defiled beyond recognition, or some new weird add-on breaks canon too badly, I will no longer be playing a Warcraft game, I'll be playing a Warcraft spin-off. Not what I signed up for.
So with that said, I think my patches are just about finished patching and I'm off to enjoy some cool new exploration. Let the Legion's banner fly!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)