As I'm in a particularly giving mood, I thought I'd give some parting thoughts on Champions and what they can do to improve it. For all I know, they're already doing some of this in which case I will claim sole credit for those ideas. You can thank me later.
Fix PvP
IMO, it wouldn't take much to fix, really. I'll outline it in four easy steps:
1) Reduce holds/roots/misc effects (like crippling challenge) on players so you can't get completely locked down by one guy. Add immunity timers if you like.
2) Base credit on a threat-like calculation rather than damage so support actually gets something for their efforts.
3) Fix some of the more obviously broken powers like Teleport (still) and Mindful Reinforcement and, I dunno, take your pick of other crap.
4) Refactor the rewards so that PvPers aren't totally down shit creek for playing and enjoying that aspect of your game exclusively.
Beating this into shape really shouldn't take that long if their system isn't stupidly complex or fragile. Cause not like game systems ever are like that or anything.
Add More Missions
More Nemesis stuff, more UNITY missions (preferrably more than the same dozen or so that keep getting repeated now), and more story arcs would all be well received. If I don't have to do every single quest, it opens up a lot more options for people re-rolling because they can't afford retcons. "I did 1-30 in Canada on this guy, so let me do 1-30 in the Desert on the next guy."
I suspect this will get fixed with time. Bloodmoon is right around the corner which is a step in the right direction, but I suspect it arrives too late for a majority of the folks who have already jumped ship.
Fix Teaming
One of the fallouts at the confluence of badness in CO, is that people aren't sticky. In a game where every character can be a tank-mage-cleric, people almost never group up. Despite the fact that people will bemoan miserably (myself included) "required grouping", it is good for your game in the long run. If people don't build lasting associations between each other, the game easily becomes a single player game with annoying NPCs that can just as easily be put back down. You don't want to let your buddies down. Many people will stick out a bad situation longer if they're in it with their chums.
Fixes:
- Increase exp while teaming (currently it splits which makes it stupidly low)
- Fix threat (already in the works--see, I can take credit for that already!)
- Add More 5-Person Content
Add More 5-Person Content
I maintain that Cryptic knows how to make compelling encounters. They need more of this--a LOT more. And now that they have a pile of data on how people actually play the game, they can do a lot more with increasing difficulties. If it requires a reasonable 5-person team to complete more than a handful of compelling stuff, then there's reason for people to form longer-lasting relationships which, as asserted above, is a win for the game long-term.
I would think that a set of five really challenging new L42 missions (like Mandragalore and Andrith) would be enough. Make them sequentially harder. Make them keyed off one another for all I care, just put them in there so PvE minded folks have something to look forward to until you raise your level cap/add your next big free expansion/whatever. Challenge the people with uber solo builds to change them to be more group friendly. Give people a reason to explore the interaction between different powers amongst your group (auras anyone?) and you will give folks a reason to stick around.
This does require a pretty substantial change, however:
Make End-Game Rewards Worthwhile
No one but the most completionist minded people are going to grind UNITY gear the way it is now. It's 250 points for each of 6 secondary slots and 1000 points for each of 3 primary slots. You can get *maybe* ten UNITY merits a day. That isn't going to cut it. Furthermore, people aren't going to grind the UNITY missions just to get to Mandragalore and Andrith when both are bugged if they also don't have drops/quests/whatevers worth grinding for. There is zero reason to have the three crystal requirement for a one time use key to get into one of these. None. I'll negotiate this point when the stupid bugs get fixed and the loot becomes worthwhile--but not a moment sooner!
Add Decent Crafting
We already get (randomly) a tiny number of super uber awesome things to craft with from our daily UNITY missions but can't do anything with those. We stockpile these in the hopes that they actually do something with them which I have no doubt they will. These have to be worthwhile no matter what happens. If the crafting rewards are worthwhile, people have another reason to grind UNITY missions so long as the mountain isn't too high. That puts it past the tipping point: "oh, I can run and get a handful of UNITY badges which is kind of lame but I really want the Q. Essences so I can craft my Boots of Uber Sexy by the end of the week!" Yes, I think that would be enough.
As the inimitable Kruunch points out, if they don't have a fire lit under them right now, they need one and in a hurry. The longer it goes without being fixed, the more subs they're going to hemorrhage. Even though I'm probably throwing in the towel soon, I hope they get it straightened out.
2009/10/22
2009/10/18
Champions: The Ugly
That's right, kids, I can't do one of these without an "Ugly" post. So here it is, and it's not pretty. Look away if you must.
The Cryptic Live Team
I'm at a loss to recall a company that has fielded a live team as poor as Cryptic. I say this remembering the foibles of DAoC (some of them my own), the disaster that was Vanguard, or the tremendously disappointing Age of Conan. City of Heroes was a live team disaster and Champions follows eagerly in its footsteps.
And what precisely do I mean by "live team". Typically when an MMO ships, sometimes a number of months after, there's some shifting around. At some point you need to be thinking about the next Big Thing (TM) and that means rolling off some of your key personnel from the last Big Thing (TM). This leaves a number of designers, QA, GMs, whatevers. This is also when you get the best and most useful data about how the unwashed masses actually play your game. Typically this goes with "adjustments" which the same unwashed masses refer to as "nerfs".
Cryptic has done the worst job I have ever seen of rebalancing their games. The Cryptic I remember from CoH had Invuln tanks hiding in dumpsters because they couldn't take the alpha strikes from minions and lieutenants. Think about that. Invuln tank...hiding in trash cans...because they can't take the alpha strikes. Sure, they may have gotten it right later, but how did they miss that?
Following in their own footsteps, at one point a few weeks ago, they "accidentally" doubled the damage for all mobs in the live game. Wait! Was this an ops bug? Did someone bobble a merge? No! It was broken on their public test server for an entire week. Did no one report it there? No! It was reported pretty much as soon as people logged in there! How did that go live? Who dropped that ball?
How about some of their big nerfs?
Teleporters can get out of any jam through status effects and at a sliver of health in a way that you can't shoot at them. This made them unkillable in PvP. Do you think that breaks the competitiveness? Do you think that makes TP a must have for PvP? The fix? Make them not able to teleport out of status effects. Now they're only nigh unto unkillable.
How about mini-mines which was doing 4x too much damage. Four times too much damage? Really? How did this not get caught in beta?
How bout Mindful Reinforcement that is a shield that heals the target for an amount proportional to the shield remaining after some short period of time. Sounds great, right? How bout when it's broken to the point that it drops a 2500 point heal on the target even if the shield is broken? Sound good? Maybe too good to be true? It's still that way on live but will almost certainly be nerfed and nerfed hard in future patches.
Their missteps are bad enough but would be mitigated greatly by players having the ability to easily rebuild characters broken by wide swings in rebalancing which brings us to retcons.
Prohibitively Expensive Respecs
Most games call the "respecs". Champions paying homage to its comic roots calls them "retcons". In Champions you pick a lot of really important things way before you really know what you're doing. It's true for me now running the tables on my third character although less so, and it's true for people starting the game for the first time. Remember that this game is a skills based system with open power selection. Remember that it is a tried and true trapping of MMOs and RPGs historically to underspecify game information. Remember that this is Cryptic that doesn't like showing numbers to players.
The problem? You have to retcon your choices in order. This includes stat picks, advantages to powers, powers themselves, travel powers, and characteristic foci (otherwise known as super stats). The cost scales with level so the higher you are, the more expensive it is and the further back you go the more expensive it is. So when you have the least amount of information you're making the most important decisions and if you make a mistake, you probably can't afford to fix it. For me, this is less of a problem because I have the backup of (now) a pair of 40s and all the cash and experience that brings. For new players? They're probably screwed.
So you step out of the powerhouse with your brand new powers that you've chosen with as much care as you can and you go out to fight. Maybe it works out well for a while; maybe it doesn't. Maybe it takes you a couple levels to realize that you really wanted X instead of Y. Well now you're screwed unless you have a sizable cash reserve. To paraphrase one of the guys I played with, it's like someone at the top had a thing for prohibitively expensive respecs.
Why Hate Healers?
I mentioned it in my last post: the game penalizes healers. Like it or not, the holy trinity (tank, healer, dps) is popular because it works. Please indulge me in a brief football analogy. You get big beefy blockers up front, you get your guys who can throw and you get your good hands guys and everything works because each player is specialized for what they do. A few special ones can do two or three things (blocking tight ends and scrambling quarterbacks for instance). MMO roles work the same way. You want your beefiest characters with their oceans of hitpoints keeping the attention of the biggest and baddest uglies and you want your guys doing damage doing as much damage as they possibly can without turning that ugly's sights on them.
In Champions, healing aggro is broken. If you drop a big heal on a tank, you will get aggro. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. You can be in the right stance, you can stack your presence so that you generate way less threat, and your tank can stack presence so they generate way more threat and it just doesn't matter. You will get aggro and unless you're also a tank, you will die.
The devs have said that it's "working as designed" but have already adjusted it down on the public test server. This is a design decision that really shouldn't have ever seen the light of day. We do betas for a reason--it's to sort stuff like this out. You couple that with the day 1 nerf ("rebalancing") of defensive passives and exp and you get a game that's really in disarray on day 1. Bad Cryptic, no Twinkie.
Healing is already a much maligned role. You need them, they need you, and you only really notice them when they fail--whether its your fault or not. The game already penalizes them by not giving PvP or PvE credit, why make it harder on those who choose that role to take one for the team?
Content Holes
I've mentioned the day 1 "rebalancing" a bunch of times already, but in an attempt to call out one of the worst live decisions I've ever witnessed, I'm going to call it out again. On that fateful day they nerfed experience as well. On paper you can get from 1 to 40 doing quests and just quests but like I mentioned before, unless you go out of your way to do every single quest or spend a lot of time in broken PvP, you end up having to grind.
I listed this issue under "The Bad" but it really goes further than that because it's at the confluence of a number of poor decisions. You get your day 1 patch which rocks people on their heels. You get your really awful cost of retcons. Now you get people having to grind in a game that's otherwise very casual friendly. The solution? Now, more than a month and a half after release, we get a set of daily repeatable grind quests some of which are terribly broken. Some of these have stupid requirements "kill 150 X" or "gather 20 X" where the drop rate means you kill the same 150 X and takes up bag space. The kicker? Some of them are broken and don't give any XP! So you're really grinding anyway and people can see right through that. [keyshawn]C'mon, man![/keyshawn]
Broken Content
The table is already set for some very frustrating gameplay and a growing ennui from at least some appreciable portion of the vocal playerbase but let's kick it up that one more notch that makes it look ever so clownshoes. I will point out but two things.
First, most of the last three 5-person instances are broken in some way. I can probably say "all" of the last three 5-person instances are broken but there's one that I've never been to that no one ever goes to. The other two, one at 38, and one at 40, are broken in pretty bad ways. The level 38 one (Viper's Lair) has bugged both times I've been there to the point that the two ending bosses did not attack me at all. That's pretty bad. The broken 40 has a broken boss that pretty much instagibs your entire team within seconds of the pull. Despite the fact that the encounter is soloable if you use some broken powers, this seems bad.
Second, in a single shard game with multiple instances, what stops a raid group from going through and killing all the big world bosses in every instance? In other games we have raid timers which keep people from farming the same bosses multiple times a day. In Champions we have a reverse raid timer. Each big world boss will put an invisible debuff on you which cannot be seen in your interface which turns at least one of each boss's AoE attacks into an unmitigated instagib. The kicker? They stick this on a number of quest mobs. So if you're helping out to kill a big bad for a buddy, you're kind of screwed when you get the quest yourself. Brilliant! Functioning as intended or not, this qualifies from a player's point of view as "broken".
The Cryptic Live Team
I'm at a loss to recall a company that has fielded a live team as poor as Cryptic. I say this remembering the foibles of DAoC (some of them my own), the disaster that was Vanguard, or the tremendously disappointing Age of Conan. City of Heroes was a live team disaster and Champions follows eagerly in its footsteps.
And what precisely do I mean by "live team". Typically when an MMO ships, sometimes a number of months after, there's some shifting around. At some point you need to be thinking about the next Big Thing (TM) and that means rolling off some of your key personnel from the last Big Thing (TM). This leaves a number of designers, QA, GMs, whatevers. This is also when you get the best and most useful data about how the unwashed masses actually play your game. Typically this goes with "adjustments" which the same unwashed masses refer to as "nerfs".
Cryptic has done the worst job I have ever seen of rebalancing their games. The Cryptic I remember from CoH had Invuln tanks hiding in dumpsters because they couldn't take the alpha strikes from minions and lieutenants. Think about that. Invuln tank...hiding in trash cans...because they can't take the alpha strikes. Sure, they may have gotten it right later, but how did they miss that?
Following in their own footsteps, at one point a few weeks ago, they "accidentally" doubled the damage for all mobs in the live game. Wait! Was this an ops bug? Did someone bobble a merge? No! It was broken on their public test server for an entire week. Did no one report it there? No! It was reported pretty much as soon as people logged in there! How did that go live? Who dropped that ball?
How about some of their big nerfs?
Their missteps are bad enough but would be mitigated greatly by players having the ability to easily rebuild characters broken by wide swings in rebalancing which brings us to retcons.
Prohibitively Expensive Respecs
Most games call the "respecs". Champions paying homage to its comic roots calls them "retcons". In Champions you pick a lot of really important things way before you really know what you're doing. It's true for me now running the tables on my third character although less so, and it's true for people starting the game for the first time. Remember that this game is a skills based system with open power selection. Remember that it is a tried and true trapping of MMOs and RPGs historically to underspecify game information. Remember that this is Cryptic that doesn't like showing numbers to players.
The problem? You have to retcon your choices in order. This includes stat picks, advantages to powers, powers themselves, travel powers, and characteristic foci (otherwise known as super stats). The cost scales with level so the higher you are, the more expensive it is and the further back you go the more expensive it is. So when you have the least amount of information you're making the most important decisions and if you make a mistake, you probably can't afford to fix it. For me, this is less of a problem because I have the backup of (now) a pair of 40s and all the cash and experience that brings. For new players? They're probably screwed.
So you step out of the powerhouse with your brand new powers that you've chosen with as much care as you can and you go out to fight. Maybe it works out well for a while; maybe it doesn't. Maybe it takes you a couple levels to realize that you really wanted X instead of Y. Well now you're screwed unless you have a sizable cash reserve. To paraphrase one of the guys I played with, it's like someone at the top had a thing for prohibitively expensive respecs.
Why Hate Healers?
I mentioned it in my last post: the game penalizes healers. Like it or not, the holy trinity (tank, healer, dps) is popular because it works. Please indulge me in a brief football analogy. You get big beefy blockers up front, you get your guys who can throw and you get your good hands guys and everything works because each player is specialized for what they do. A few special ones can do two or three things (blocking tight ends and scrambling quarterbacks for instance). MMO roles work the same way. You want your beefiest characters with their oceans of hitpoints keeping the attention of the biggest and baddest uglies and you want your guys doing damage doing as much damage as they possibly can without turning that ugly's sights on them.
In Champions, healing aggro is broken. If you drop a big heal on a tank, you will get aggro. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. You can be in the right stance, you can stack your presence so that you generate way less threat, and your tank can stack presence so they generate way more threat and it just doesn't matter. You will get aggro and unless you're also a tank, you will die.
The devs have said that it's "working as designed" but have already adjusted it down on the public test server. This is a design decision that really shouldn't have ever seen the light of day. We do betas for a reason--it's to sort stuff like this out. You couple that with the day 1 nerf ("rebalancing") of defensive passives and exp and you get a game that's really in disarray on day 1. Bad Cryptic, no Twinkie.
Healing is already a much maligned role. You need them, they need you, and you only really notice them when they fail--whether its your fault or not. The game already penalizes them by not giving PvP or PvE credit, why make it harder on those who choose that role to take one for the team?
Content Holes
I've mentioned the day 1 "rebalancing" a bunch of times already, but in an attempt to call out one of the worst live decisions I've ever witnessed, I'm going to call it out again. On that fateful day they nerfed experience as well. On paper you can get from 1 to 40 doing quests and just quests but like I mentioned before, unless you go out of your way to do every single quest or spend a lot of time in broken PvP, you end up having to grind.
I listed this issue under "The Bad" but it really goes further than that because it's at the confluence of a number of poor decisions. You get your day 1 patch which rocks people on their heels. You get your really awful cost of retcons. Now you get people having to grind in a game that's otherwise very casual friendly. The solution? Now, more than a month and a half after release, we get a set of daily repeatable grind quests some of which are terribly broken. Some of these have stupid requirements "kill 150 X" or "gather 20 X" where the drop rate means you kill the same 150 X and takes up bag space. The kicker? Some of them are broken and don't give any XP! So you're really grinding anyway and people can see right through that. [keyshawn]C'mon, man![/keyshawn]
Broken Content
The table is already set for some very frustrating gameplay and a growing ennui from at least some appreciable portion of the vocal playerbase but let's kick it up that one more notch that makes it look ever so clownshoes. I will point out but two things.
First, most of the last three 5-person instances are broken in some way. I can probably say "all" of the last three 5-person instances are broken but there's one that I've never been to that no one ever goes to. The other two, one at 38, and one at 40, are broken in pretty bad ways. The level 38 one (Viper's Lair) has bugged both times I've been there to the point that the two ending bosses did not attack me at all. That's pretty bad. The broken 40 has a broken boss that pretty much instagibs your entire team within seconds of the pull. Despite the fact that the encounter is soloable if you use some broken powers, this seems bad.
Second, in a single shard game with multiple instances, what stops a raid group from going through and killing all the big world bosses in every instance? In other games we have raid timers which keep people from farming the same bosses multiple times a day. In Champions we have a reverse raid timer. Each big world boss will put an invisible debuff on you which cannot be seen in your interface which turns at least one of each boss's AoE attacks into an unmitigated instagib. The kicker? They stick this on a number of quest mobs. So if you're helping out to kill a big bad for a buddy, you're kind of screwed when you get the quest yourself. Brilliant! Functioning as intended or not, this qualifies from a player's point of view as "broken".
2009/10/15
Champions: The Bad
Sadly, all is not well in Millenium City...
The Game Is Really Short
Between the initial draft of the intro article and now, I've not only dinged my main up to 40, but I'm within mere hours of dinging a second alt to 40. How can this be? Didn't they nerf the exp on launch day? Yes, they did and no, it doesn't really seem to slow people down that much. On my schedule, it's looking like about 120 hours from level 1 to level 40 if you don't futz around and know what you're doing. I'm sure I could do it faster if I really wanted to, but half the fun for me is trying the same encounters I already know with different builds which leads us to...
The Game Is Really Easy
Very few times have I felt that the game was legitimately challenging once I had the correct build and the correct strategy. This probably isn't a shocker unless you consider that I solo the 5-person instances and most of the world bosses. In fact, this isn't even because I have some esoteric build or some innate penchant for gaming. It's in fact pretty common for people to do this. But wait! Didn't they nerf the defensive passives at launch? But didn't they nerf half of the overpowered powers? Yes, they did, and it's still doable.
On a purely personal note, I think they should nerf a bunch of stuff, but if they do and I can no longer solo 5-person instances, it's a deal breaker for me. The jump in difficulty from 5-person instances to, I don't know, a hopped up +6 level nemesis mission is too great. I liken it to WoW in the Bad Old Days (TM) when the jump from non-raiding to raiding was UBRS to Molten Core in a day when you couldn't easily get blues in every slot. It's that pronounced. So if I can't reasonably solo a 5-person instance, the amount of content I can experience (repeatedly) that's even remotely challenging without outside intervention dwindles to nil. I.e.: deal breaker.
I can get a challenge in Champions in exactly four ways:
- solo a 5-person instance
- pull a pile of mobs which no one has a hope of dealing with because AoEs are limited to 5 targets or less
- pick a build that's hobbled in some way (yeah, right, that sounds fun)
- PvP
PvP Is Hella Broken
I love PvP (I really do). It was one of my favorite things in WoW and as far as I can tell, the only reason to play DAoC. It was OK in Conan. In Champions, it's hella broken. Let me briefly list the ways...
Status effects have no real immunity timers. Holds, stuns, snares, knockback, knockup, it all can be chained with nary a pause. This means that if you're fighting someone with a spammable status effect (and many of them are) you die. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, die right now or in the next 10 minutes if you happen to have Regeneration at a high level. Don't worry, they can keep it up indefinitely.
Healers get no credit. I'm not talking "healers get less credit" I'm talking "healers get NO credit." The entire game is like this, in fact. If you are a healer in PvP as I often try to be, you will get zero points for your contributions at all. If it was your efforts that turned the tide, tough. If it was you that kept the other team score-less, so what? You get nothing. If you don't do significant damage, you get squat and thats just the way it is. Sound broken? It is!
The dynamic range of build power is too high. In WoW, even when massively outgeared (as we usually were), I always felt that we had a chance even if it was small as long as we played better than the other team. In Champions, it seems to be mostly build. If you have a broken build and fight against other broken build teams, I imagine it's a lot more interesting but the game just plain isn't designed for it. If you bring a PvE build into PvP, even one on one you're going to get worked and there's nothing you can do about it. This compounds when you fight PvP groups who all have broken builds and pound even the most resilient of heroes into dust in seconds. No, I'm not exaggerating this.
Lack of gear/cash rewards from PvP. I probably wouldn't have noticed this except that someone else pointed it out to me. You can totally level in PvP as long as you'd like but you get almost no gear for it and you get no cash to buy new gear. You can buy a small amount of gear that might fit your needs if you PvP endlessly and don't mind the unaffordably high cost of these items but that's not really reliable now is it? This is a problem for people who couldn't care less about PvE and is yet another example of why the game isn't designed for PvP. Sorry PvPers, it just isn't.
There's Little Replay Value
Because of the XP nerf at launch, if you don't go out of your way to grind mobs or PvP, you pretty much have to do every single quest. There are indeed, on paper, enough quests to go from 1 to 40 without grinding but if you're not super uber careful about it, you can easily miss one or two levels of experience. In all of MMO-dom that I've seen, I'd have to say that the grindy bits in this game are really, really forgiving, but it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the game which is almost mind-numbingly casual.
This means that if you do bring multiple characters to 40, you will be doing a very large percentage of every quest on each and every playthrough. I expect this to change as they add more content, but at the moment, the point stands. I was going to say "no replay value" but I am playing through it with a different set of powers which is amusing to me from a wannabe designer point of view if nothing else.
No Endgame
So you've saved the world from VIPER and ARGENT and Teleios, and a spectacularly ugly menagerie of career evildoers. As you ding 40 and get your invite to the premier super heroing group cleverly named UNITY, what do you get? You get a bunch of once-per-day missions that can get you a small number of unity points like three or six. Whoa. Hold me back. If you have a small handful of these, you can buy attunement crystals to two (that's right, TWO!) level 40 5-person instances. If you have a thousand of these, you can buy some pretty nice gear. It isn't spectacularly nicer than the stuff I got to 40 in to be honest, and remember that you can only run your half dozen random missions once a day.
So...well...by next April I could buy something...
Riiiiight. Bad desginer, no twinkie. If the margins were thinner, I might be tempted to grind these damned things out, but they really are repetitive and the increase in ability just isn't that compelling.
If PvP weren't so horribly broken, or there were more interesting things to do, or the game was significantly more difficult, I probably wouldn't mind running the UNITY missions so much. But, jeez, that really seems poor. If I were in a more caring and less drunken rage, I might give them the benefit of the doubt "they're not quite finished yet" but it really seems like they didn't put any thought into this.
Here's a tip: add 5 or so 5-person instances that are really hard. I know your design team has the chops to build interesting encounters. Make the last 1% of your character count for something, and stuff these places full of interesting bosses. Put them in a chain with whatever your favorite raid instance locking mechanism is so long as I know I have some challenge to look forward to each and every time I log into the game. Give me a reason to keep sending you $15 a month because...
The Population Is Shrinking
Since there's only one server with each zone split into a handful of instances, it's relatively easy to tell roughly if the population is shifting. Because all the later levels are done primarily in two zones, it's super uber easy to compare populations just by looking at those zones. I can tell you that the top level zones are roughly half to two thirds of what they were a month ago. This corresponds frighteningly well with the end of the first month + one month trial period from launch.
I do know that both Conan and CoH had the same kind of issues. There just wasn't much to do when you hit your last level and both of these games survive today. I've got very little doubt that Champions will be around for a while, but that doesn't make me think for even a moment, that they couldn't have hit it out of the park if they'd paid a little more attention to how people actually play these kinds of games.
The Game Is Really Short
Between the initial draft of the intro article and now, I've not only dinged my main up to 40, but I'm within mere hours of dinging a second alt to 40. How can this be? Didn't they nerf the exp on launch day? Yes, they did and no, it doesn't really seem to slow people down that much. On my schedule, it's looking like about 120 hours from level 1 to level 40 if you don't futz around and know what you're doing. I'm sure I could do it faster if I really wanted to, but half the fun for me is trying the same encounters I already know with different builds which leads us to...
The Game Is Really Easy
Very few times have I felt that the game was legitimately challenging once I had the correct build and the correct strategy. This probably isn't a shocker unless you consider that I solo the 5-person instances and most of the world bosses. In fact, this isn't even because I have some esoteric build or some innate penchant for gaming. It's in fact pretty common for people to do this. But wait! Didn't they nerf the defensive passives at launch? But didn't they nerf half of the overpowered powers? Yes, they did, and it's still doable.
On a purely personal note, I think they should nerf a bunch of stuff, but if they do and I can no longer solo 5-person instances, it's a deal breaker for me. The jump in difficulty from 5-person instances to, I don't know, a hopped up +6 level nemesis mission is too great. I liken it to WoW in the Bad Old Days (TM) when the jump from non-raiding to raiding was UBRS to Molten Core in a day when you couldn't easily get blues in every slot. It's that pronounced. So if I can't reasonably solo a 5-person instance, the amount of content I can experience (repeatedly) that's even remotely challenging without outside intervention dwindles to nil. I.e.: deal breaker.
I can get a challenge in Champions in exactly four ways:
- solo a 5-person instance
- pull a pile of mobs which no one has a hope of dealing with because AoEs are limited to 5 targets or less
- pick a build that's hobbled in some way (yeah, right, that sounds fun)
- PvP
PvP Is Hella Broken
I love PvP (I really do). It was one of my favorite things in WoW and as far as I can tell, the only reason to play DAoC. It was OK in Conan. In Champions, it's hella broken. Let me briefly list the ways...
Status effects have no real immunity timers. Holds, stuns, snares, knockback, knockup, it all can be chained with nary a pause. This means that if you're fighting someone with a spammable status effect (and many of them are) you die. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, die right now or in the next 10 minutes if you happen to have Regeneration at a high level. Don't worry, they can keep it up indefinitely.
Healers get no credit. I'm not talking "healers get less credit" I'm talking "healers get NO credit." The entire game is like this, in fact. If you are a healer in PvP as I often try to be, you will get zero points for your contributions at all. If it was your efforts that turned the tide, tough. If it was you that kept the other team score-less, so what? You get nothing. If you don't do significant damage, you get squat and thats just the way it is. Sound broken? It is!
The dynamic range of build power is too high. In WoW, even when massively outgeared (as we usually were), I always felt that we had a chance even if it was small as long as we played better than the other team. In Champions, it seems to be mostly build. If you have a broken build and fight against other broken build teams, I imagine it's a lot more interesting but the game just plain isn't designed for it. If you bring a PvE build into PvP, even one on one you're going to get worked and there's nothing you can do about it. This compounds when you fight PvP groups who all have broken builds and pound even the most resilient of heroes into dust in seconds. No, I'm not exaggerating this.
Lack of gear/cash rewards from PvP. I probably wouldn't have noticed this except that someone else pointed it out to me. You can totally level in PvP as long as you'd like but you get almost no gear for it and you get no cash to buy new gear. You can buy a small amount of gear that might fit your needs if you PvP endlessly and don't mind the unaffordably high cost of these items but that's not really reliable now is it? This is a problem for people who couldn't care less about PvE and is yet another example of why the game isn't designed for PvP. Sorry PvPers, it just isn't.
There's Little Replay Value
Because of the XP nerf at launch, if you don't go out of your way to grind mobs or PvP, you pretty much have to do every single quest. There are indeed, on paper, enough quests to go from 1 to 40 without grinding but if you're not super uber careful about it, you can easily miss one or two levels of experience. In all of MMO-dom that I've seen, I'd have to say that the grindy bits in this game are really, really forgiving, but it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the game which is almost mind-numbingly casual.
This means that if you do bring multiple characters to 40, you will be doing a very large percentage of every quest on each and every playthrough. I expect this to change as they add more content, but at the moment, the point stands. I was going to say "no replay value" but I am playing through it with a different set of powers which is amusing to me from a wannabe designer point of view if nothing else.
No Endgame
So you've saved the world from VIPER and ARGENT and Teleios, and a spectacularly ugly menagerie of career evildoers. As you ding 40 and get your invite to the premier super heroing group cleverly named UNITY, what do you get? You get a bunch of once-per-day missions that can get you a small number of unity points like three or six. Whoa. Hold me back. If you have a small handful of these, you can buy attunement crystals to two (that's right, TWO!) level 40 5-person instances. If you have a thousand of these, you can buy some pretty nice gear. It isn't spectacularly nicer than the stuff I got to 40 in to be honest, and remember that you can only run your half dozen random missions once a day.
So...well...by next April I could buy something...
Riiiiight. Bad desginer, no twinkie. If the margins were thinner, I might be tempted to grind these damned things out, but they really are repetitive and the increase in ability just isn't that compelling.
If PvP weren't so horribly broken, or there were more interesting things to do, or the game was significantly more difficult, I probably wouldn't mind running the UNITY missions so much. But, jeez, that really seems poor. If I were in a more caring and less drunken rage, I might give them the benefit of the doubt "they're not quite finished yet" but it really seems like they didn't put any thought into this.
Here's a tip: add 5 or so 5-person instances that are really hard. I know your design team has the chops to build interesting encounters. Make the last 1% of your character count for something, and stuff these places full of interesting bosses. Put them in a chain with whatever your favorite raid instance locking mechanism is so long as I know I have some challenge to look forward to each and every time I log into the game. Give me a reason to keep sending you $15 a month because...
The Population Is Shrinking
Since there's only one server with each zone split into a handful of instances, it's relatively easy to tell roughly if the population is shifting. Because all the later levels are done primarily in two zones, it's super uber easy to compare populations just by looking at those zones. I can tell you that the top level zones are roughly half to two thirds of what they were a month ago. This corresponds frighteningly well with the end of the first month + one month trial period from launch.
I do know that both Conan and CoH had the same kind of issues. There just wasn't much to do when you hit your last level and both of these games survive today. I've got very little doubt that Champions will be around for a while, but that doesn't make me think for even a moment, that they couldn't have hit it out of the park if they'd paid a little more attention to how people actually play these kinds of games.
2009/10/06
Champions: The Good
So we'll start out with the stuff in the game that I think is particularly good. The typical disclaimers apply.
Powers
Champions is a skills based game. You pick your powers with a handful of very small restrictions and off you go. You can choose to be a glass cannon, a full support character, or the tankiest of tanks since CoH pre-invuln nerf, or something in between. Want to multi-class? Sure! Want to follow one narrow path? Sure! Want to be good at a variety of stuff? It's all right there for ya, tiger, and for most roles you'll have more than enough power choices to fill whatever loadout you'd like.
Do some combinations suck? Yeah. Are some combinations super-overpowered? Sure! Are most sensical builds viable? You betcha. Champions cleverly gives you a small zone named the Powerhouse where you can somewhat test out your new powers before you commit to them. Furthermore, reverting uncommitted powers is free so other than time constraints, there's no real reason to not pick precisely which powers you think work well. With recent additions to the Powerhouse, there are very few skills which you can't actively try before you buy. Think of it as your one stop shop for superpower test drives.
I think this is a really cool feature. Being able to customize your build to your chosen style of play at a very basic level can be empowering. We'll revisit this point further in future posts since as with most things, it's a double edged sword.
Humor
Champions is bursting at its virtual seams with campy goodness. There are pirates, ninjas, and zombies. There are cowboy robots. There are giant dinosaurs. There are disembodied floating brains. There are sharks with frikkin' lasers on their heads for cryin' out loud. I'm pretty sure you can't go for more than five minutes without a pun or a joke or something in the game, most of which are 80s and 90s pop culture references that I actually get!
While some people don't appreciate this kind of thing, I find it tremendously amusing. It's sort of the return of the classic Sierra humor which I've so missed. It's sort of like being in a Tick comic which, as far as I can tell, is kind of the point. The fact that it isn't a dark, brooding, seething with generic rage kind of game really makes it stand out. It's the sort of thing that I liked out of the Buffy TV series--while it had its dark and serious moments, it never really took itself too seriously. I can appreciate that.
Mechanics
Champions has three mechanics which I hadn't encountered in other games: tap, tap+hold, and block. That doesn't mean that they're specific to Champions (obviously), only that this is my first encounter with them.
A tap power is a typical clicky a la your favorite MMO. Click on the button, hit 3, and fire off some power. Maybe it has a cooldown, maybe it doesn't. A tap+hold is typically a tap power which does something cool but gets progressively better the longer you hold it. Need a short heal to make sure the tank doesn't die? Tap your healing power and heal a small amount. Want to frontload your damage? Tap+hold your biggest DD and blast the goon into smithereens. Don't think of it as "overkill", think of it as "powering them into the afterlife"! There are also maintained powers which apply a per-tick effect, but these aren't especially new.
Block deserves its own discussion so here we go. One of the things that sucked in CoH was that if you fought a big boss and you weren't a tank (or were a tank without a resistance in that damage type) you pretty much got one shotted if you drew the boss's ire. That's just how it was and it was very lame. Cryptic seems to have learned ever so slightly from those days and have added a block power to all characters. If you block as a maintained power, you can reduce the incoming damage significantly as well as avoiding some but not all status effects (holds, knockbacks, whatever). This is a pretty cool thing because if you pay attention, you can usually avoid getting turned into chunky salsa when you get aggro. In fact, the game hits you over the head with it by sticking big colorful marquee over the tops of Big Bad's head when it's about to do something big and bad to you. In fact, most of the non-trivial bads have something like this and while the lesser of these won't kill you outright most of the time, the really big and ugly bads will almost certainly kill you outright if you don't block. So pay attention! Again, we'll revisit this (extensively) in a future installment.
Nemesis
When you get to level 25, you get to design a nemesis. You pick your nemesis's looks, their powers, their minions, and fight them on a semi-regular basis. The minions will jump you while you're out heroing and will occasionally drop a clue which leads to even more hijinks.
I think this feature is a riot. It's a chance to do some interesting storytelling and give the player a hand in writing that story beyond "I killed all the badguys," or "I clicked all the glowies." It takes the antagonist and makes it somewhat personal which I think is a nice touch. Furthermore, these missions seem to be better written and more difficult than your run-of-the-mill solo missions which is a welcome change of pace.
The next logical (and not unprecedented) evolution of this is allowing the player to design nemesis encounters and share them with other people. That, I think, would be spectacular.
Encounter Design
Some of the encounter design is exceptionally well done. The first 5 person instance you get to (Dr. Destroyer's Robot Factory) is full of interesting bits. You get consoles that you have to hit in sequence. You get infinitely spawning mooks. You get a set of super-campy super villain soliloquies and the final encounter is a giant robot. How can you go wrong with a giant robot?! Without going into finely grained details, I'll say that the parts that are good are really, really good.
Powers
Champions is a skills based game. You pick your powers with a handful of very small restrictions and off you go. You can choose to be a glass cannon, a full support character, or the tankiest of tanks since CoH pre-invuln nerf, or something in between. Want to multi-class? Sure! Want to follow one narrow path? Sure! Want to be good at a variety of stuff? It's all right there for ya, tiger, and for most roles you'll have more than enough power choices to fill whatever loadout you'd like.
Do some combinations suck? Yeah. Are some combinations super-overpowered? Sure! Are most sensical builds viable? You betcha. Champions cleverly gives you a small zone named the Powerhouse where you can somewhat test out your new powers before you commit to them. Furthermore, reverting uncommitted powers is free so other than time constraints, there's no real reason to not pick precisely which powers you think work well. With recent additions to the Powerhouse, there are very few skills which you can't actively try before you buy. Think of it as your one stop shop for superpower test drives.
I think this is a really cool feature. Being able to customize your build to your chosen style of play at a very basic level can be empowering. We'll revisit this point further in future posts since as with most things, it's a double edged sword.
Humor
Champions is bursting at its virtual seams with campy goodness. There are pirates, ninjas, and zombies. There are cowboy robots. There are giant dinosaurs. There are disembodied floating brains. There are sharks with frikkin' lasers on their heads for cryin' out loud. I'm pretty sure you can't go for more than five minutes without a pun or a joke or something in the game, most of which are 80s and 90s pop culture references that I actually get!
While some people don't appreciate this kind of thing, I find it tremendously amusing. It's sort of the return of the classic Sierra humor which I've so missed. It's sort of like being in a Tick comic which, as far as I can tell, is kind of the point. The fact that it isn't a dark, brooding, seething with generic rage kind of game really makes it stand out. It's the sort of thing that I liked out of the Buffy TV series--while it had its dark and serious moments, it never really took itself too seriously. I can appreciate that.
Mechanics
Champions has three mechanics which I hadn't encountered in other games: tap, tap+hold, and block. That doesn't mean that they're specific to Champions (obviously), only that this is my first encounter with them.
A tap power is a typical clicky a la your favorite MMO. Click on the button, hit 3, and fire off some power. Maybe it has a cooldown, maybe it doesn't. A tap+hold is typically a tap power which does something cool but gets progressively better the longer you hold it. Need a short heal to make sure the tank doesn't die? Tap your healing power and heal a small amount. Want to frontload your damage? Tap+hold your biggest DD and blast the goon into smithereens. Don't think of it as "overkill", think of it as "powering them into the afterlife"! There are also maintained powers which apply a per-tick effect, but these aren't especially new.
Block deserves its own discussion so here we go. One of the things that sucked in CoH was that if you fought a big boss and you weren't a tank (or were a tank without a resistance in that damage type) you pretty much got one shotted if you drew the boss's ire. That's just how it was and it was very lame. Cryptic seems to have learned ever so slightly from those days and have added a block power to all characters. If you block as a maintained power, you can reduce the incoming damage significantly as well as avoiding some but not all status effects (holds, knockbacks, whatever). This is a pretty cool thing because if you pay attention, you can usually avoid getting turned into chunky salsa when you get aggro. In fact, the game hits you over the head with it by sticking big colorful marquee over the tops of Big Bad's head when it's about to do something big and bad to you. In fact, most of the non-trivial bads have something like this and while the lesser of these won't kill you outright most of the time, the really big and ugly bads will almost certainly kill you outright if you don't block. So pay attention! Again, we'll revisit this (extensively) in a future installment.
Nemesis
When you get to level 25, you get to design a nemesis. You pick your nemesis's looks, their powers, their minions, and fight them on a semi-regular basis. The minions will jump you while you're out heroing and will occasionally drop a clue which leads to even more hijinks.
I think this feature is a riot. It's a chance to do some interesting storytelling and give the player a hand in writing that story beyond "I killed all the badguys," or "I clicked all the glowies." It takes the antagonist and makes it somewhat personal which I think is a nice touch. Furthermore, these missions seem to be better written and more difficult than your run-of-the-mill solo missions which is a welcome change of pace.
The next logical (and not unprecedented) evolution of this is allowing the player to design nemesis encounters and share them with other people. That, I think, would be spectacular.
Encounter Design
Some of the encounter design is exceptionally well done. The first 5 person instance you get to (Dr. Destroyer's Robot Factory) is full of interesting bits. You get consoles that you have to hit in sequence. You get infinitely spawning mooks. You get a set of super-campy super villain soliloquies and the final encounter is a giant robot. How can you go wrong with a giant robot?! Without going into finely grained details, I'll say that the parts that are good are really, really good.
2009/09/28
Champions Online
I let myself get talked into playing Champions Online, and like clockwork, the guilty parties left for Aion (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE). Bastards.
The game's been out for just short of a month and I'm a couple days from capping. In fact, if I hadn't been waiting for the afore mentioned bastards, I would have capped easily already. So just like I did with Age of Conan, I'm going to write up my impressions of the game.
Like most games, some good, some bad, and some ugly. Overall, I think it's a good game and worth a good month. More in a bit.
The game's been out for just short of a month and I'm a couple days from capping. In fact, if I hadn't been waiting for the afore mentioned bastards, I would have capped easily already. So just like I did with Age of Conan, I'm going to write up my impressions of the game.
Like most games, some good, some bad, and some ugly. Overall, I think it's a good game and worth a good month. More in a bit.
2009/07/12
Monthly Mingle: Mexican Fiesta
A few weeks ago, I was asked by the purveyor of All Things Edible to participate in a blogging event involving foods. I'm generally not good about Intarwebs events because, well, I usually forget, but this time it was something well worth pursuing: i.e., Mexican foods which totally rock. Note that the actual cooking was done two weeks ago and that the end product has already been consumed with much gusto.One of my favorite things from Chipotle, the happiest place on Earth, is their barbacoa. I can't type with any authority on what authentic barbacoa entails (cow head?!) but this is my take on Chipotle's version with some interesting twists. My version is basically a spicy braised beef with sauce and I proceed accordingly. But first! Let's inspect the ingredients.
The Raw Team
The Raw Team in this recipe is played by two and a half smallish Vidalias, most of a clove of garlic, and about 6 pounds of chuck roast. In this case, because the butchers at my local megamart hate me, the chuck roast is boneless which annoys me to no end. I would have much rather used a couple 7-bone roasts but I'll be damned if I can find one anywhere on the eastern seaboard. I do like chuck for this application, though, since it's full of fat and connective tissue, very tasty, generally inexpensive, and is generally considered the "classic pot roast". The Spice Team
Given that this is a classic braise, we want to end up with a flavorful liquid and chunkies. Thus, we require the services of:If that seems like a lot of spice, recall that we have about 6 pounds of meat here and it's all going into a crock pot full of braising liquid. Depending on your particular setup, you may require more or less but the intent is to end up with spicy beef when it's all said and done.
Procedure
Just like I would with a normal pot roast, I seared the beef as best I could without burning down the apartment. This had the expected result of filling the place with smoke but curiously failed to set off the fire alarms. Into the pot also went the 2.5 onions (sliced) and most of the head of garlic (smashed), and all the spices including the entirety of the can of chipotles. For those who aren't in the know, a chipotle is a smoked jalapeno. I usually get these dried, but in this instance I really wanted the adobo. To quote the great AB: "Adobo is dang tasty but it is double dang hot so don't go addin' more unless you knows what yous doin'." Luckily, I knows what I'm doin'! I can only guess what adobo actually is but if you get canned chipotles, it's almost always present. Don't go rubbing your eyes after handling it, though, I mean it.
Fill the pot until you get the meat mostly submerged, lid it up, turn it on, then let the waiting begin...
The Extraction
Many hours later and your home will be filled with the aroma of cooking chiles and beef which is a pretty awesome thing. You want to cook it long enough that it's going to defy easy extraction by falling apart. In my case, I was impatient and only waited 8 hours. I usually start these kinds of things off in the early morning and eat in the late evening (10 to 14 hours). 
Once extracted, allow to cool a bit before shredding. Bonus points if you can restrain yourself from eating the super-heated meat off the platter prior to shredding (super tasty, tho). If you've ever shredded pork barbecue, this is the same maneuver. This is where things get a little nuts. As is typcial with a large volume of water braise, most of the spice ends up in the liquid and I'm not about to let all that awesome chipotle, er, awesomeness off without a fair trial. Sadly, I have no visual evidence of the procedure, but it went a little something like this:
Service Options
Far be it for me to tell you how to eat your barbacoa, but here's what I did with it:Fiesta rice, pintos or black beans, your choice of salsas, or guac would all be welcome additions to the feast but I didn't have any of the above on hand. Also note that the whole wheat tortilla isn't strictly on my diet but, meh, I figured I'd splurge a bit.
Future Work
As this recipe is a work in progress, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve it. Some of the stuff I'm thinking about:
2009/07/02
Attn: Microsoft Marketing Department
NO ONE (no one) does the unimaginably ridiculous things that you show in your lame bing commercials. They are loud and annoying and they do not make me want to try your product. In fact, your advertising campaign bothers me so intensely that I may never try your product.
That is all.
That is all.
2009/06/13
The Question Is: "Do You Like Fun?"
This was the response I got when asking a co-worker if I should buy Red Faction. Well, shit, I like fun and I promptly went against Friday traffic to Best Buy, one of my least favorite places in the world to pick me up summa that. Today around dinnertime I pop the disc in thinking that I'd probably have to update the system software and lo and behold, the game disc even told me so! It even had the appropriate update (2.60) on the disc! Three minutes later, and I'm good to go...so I thought.
Turns out that the system update 2.60 had fried the blu-ray player. Oh yes, good times. Updating to 2.76 also did not work. You can imagine the swearing involved at this point. So now I'm doing a full system restore in the hopes that I don't have to pay Sony 150 of my hard-earned dollars for the continuing priviledge of using their broken-ass software.
I take back all the nice things I've said about Sony and the PS3. This is lame. Did I mention that it'll take 2.5 hours?
(Don't blog when mad, huh? Just wait till I get going!)
Turns out that the system update 2.60 had fried the blu-ray player. Oh yes, good times. Updating to 2.76 also did not work. You can imagine the swearing involved at this point. So now I'm doing a full system restore in the hopes that I don't have to pay Sony 150 of my hard-earned dollars for the continuing priviledge of using their broken-ass software.
I take back all the nice things I've said about Sony and the PS3. This is lame. Did I mention that it'll take 2.5 hours?
(Don't blog when mad, huh? Just wait till I get going!)
2009/05/05
I told you I suck at colors
...so I didn't even try!
The last, oh, two months have been spent in the pursuit of building a Mount & Blade mod. Oh the irony! Crappy documentation: Check. Broken API: Check. Convoluted code: Check. Poor grammar: Check. It's just like work! I might talk about it later but remember: I'm lazy.
This is the title image I made for it at some ridiculously DPI busting 5000x7000 pixels, now resized for more convenient viewing. If I were smart (and it's well documented that I'm not), I would have checked/realized that the image that goes into the game is a diminutive 340x275. A 340x275 image completely loses its meticulously crafted details when resized from gigantic so the three days I spent on it seem...underappreciated.
Rough pencils overdrawn and shaded in paint.net with a crappy 5.5x4" USB tablet. Yes, I have nicer tools (aka Photoshop CSR2 and a giant pressure sensitive Wacom) but I cleverly couldn't be bothered to dig them out. Click to embiggen. Really, it's much nicer.
The last, oh, two months have been spent in the pursuit of building a Mount & Blade mod. Oh the irony! Crappy documentation: Check. Broken API: Check. Convoluted code: Check. Poor grammar: Check. It's just like work! I might talk about it later but remember: I'm lazy.
This is the title image I made for it at some ridiculously DPI busting 5000x7000 pixels, now resized for more convenient viewing. If I were smart (and it's well documented that I'm not), I would have checked/realized that the image that goes into the game is a diminutive 340x275. A 340x275 image completely loses its meticulously crafted details when resized from gigantic so the three days I spent on it seem...underappreciated.
Rough pencils overdrawn and shaded in paint.net with a crappy 5.5x4" USB tablet. Yes, I have nicer tools (aka Photoshop CSR2 and a giant pressure sensitive Wacom) but I cleverly couldn't be bothered to dig them out. Click to embiggen. Really, it's much nicer.
2009/03/15
How Can So Much Love Fit In One Bowl?
Yes, I said this aloud to no one in particular not 15 minutes ago. The picture says it all. 
Well, ok, not "it all", but most of it. The rest of "it all" is played by roughly 2 pounds of cheese, a 1 pound box of macaroni elbows cooked to be super-aldente, about a tablespoon of chipotle powder, and topped with about a cup of the no-longer-elusive panko. All told, roughly $9.
It's telling that despite having had about a half dozen things cooking in my head to put in this space, that this is the one that finally gets me posting.
Carry on.
Well, ok, not "it all", but most of it. The rest of "it all" is played by roughly 2 pounds of cheese, a 1 pound box of macaroni elbows cooked to be super-aldente, about a tablespoon of chipotle powder, and topped with about a cup of the no-longer-elusive panko. All told, roughly $9.
It's telling that despite having had about a half dozen things cooking in my head to put in this space, that this is the one that finally gets me posting.
Carry on.
2009/01/02
And Now A Message From Our Sponsors...
If you've ever moved, you've undoubtedly wondered how you might be able to get your cleaning/security deposit back. This usually requires a lot of elbow grease and the inhalation of dirt, dust, and industrial strength chemicals. If you handle this phase yourself like I typically do, here are a couple helpful product tips.
Kaboom Bathroom Cleaner
If you've watched TV in the states at all, you've probably been accosted by a very large bearded man named Billy Mays who invariably tries to sell you something that appears too good to be true. Kaboom Bathroom Cleaner is one such something.
The year: 2007. The place: Madison Wisconsin. I'm furiously trying to make my three bedroom home market-ready and I'm attempting to deal with a two year old soap scum residue covering the entire bathtub. Nothing is working. Scrubbing Bubbles, even, has failed me. After two days of going through just about every household cleaner I could get my hands on and contemplating replacing the bathtub, I got a tipoff to Kaboom. Off to the nearest one stop shopping center and I'm back with a purple bottle of disaster. Two hours later, the tub is spotless.
The year: 2009. The place: Cockeysville Maryland. I have a strikingly similar two year old soap scum residue covering the entire bathtub (hey, at least I'm consistent). I reach for that trusty purple bottle.
I'm pretty sure that this stuff isn't meant to be handled by normal people--it works too well. I can't believe it's safe to use on bathroom fixtures. I can't say that I've always been happy with stuff I've bought As Seen On TV, but this stuff works and it works pretty goshdarn well.
Mr. Clean Magic Eraser
Upon opening the box, you're greeted by what seems to be a fine foam sponge. In fact, upon contact with water, the Magic Eraser emits a strange liquid that will clean up just about anything off of a wall. In fact, I've pulled the paint off a wall working on a particularly bad stain. It'll grab dirt, grime, scuffs, kitchen stains, and the place where the coat rack fell against the wall and left a nice mark. Best of all, it works super-fast and doesn't seem to leave unpaintable patches later.
I have no idea how this stuff works--and I like it that way. I'm fairly sure that at least one soul changed hands and/or some eldritch evil was tapped to ensure the Magic Eraser's cleaning ability. They named it appropriately and if you need to clean something off of a wall really fast, it's the product I recommend.
Just thought I should pass that along. Oh, and Happy New Year.
Kaboom Bathroom Cleaner
If you've watched TV in the states at all, you've probably been accosted by a very large bearded man named Billy Mays who invariably tries to sell you something that appears too good to be true. Kaboom Bathroom Cleaner is one such something.
The year: 2007. The place: Madison Wisconsin. I'm furiously trying to make my three bedroom home market-ready and I'm attempting to deal with a two year old soap scum residue covering the entire bathtub. Nothing is working. Scrubbing Bubbles, even, has failed me. After two days of going through just about every household cleaner I could get my hands on and contemplating replacing the bathtub, I got a tipoff to Kaboom. Off to the nearest one stop shopping center and I'm back with a purple bottle of disaster. Two hours later, the tub is spotless.
The year: 2009. The place: Cockeysville Maryland. I have a strikingly similar two year old soap scum residue covering the entire bathtub (hey, at least I'm consistent). I reach for that trusty purple bottle.
I'm pretty sure that this stuff isn't meant to be handled by normal people--it works too well. I can't believe it's safe to use on bathroom fixtures. I can't say that I've always been happy with stuff I've bought As Seen On TV, but this stuff works and it works pretty goshdarn well.
Mr. Clean Magic Eraser
Upon opening the box, you're greeted by what seems to be a fine foam sponge. In fact, upon contact with water, the Magic Eraser emits a strange liquid that will clean up just about anything off of a wall. In fact, I've pulled the paint off a wall working on a particularly bad stain. It'll grab dirt, grime, scuffs, kitchen stains, and the place where the coat rack fell against the wall and left a nice mark. Best of all, it works super-fast and doesn't seem to leave unpaintable patches later.
I have no idea how this stuff works--and I like it that way. I'm fairly sure that at least one soul changed hands and/or some eldritch evil was tapped to ensure the Magic Eraser's cleaning ability. They named it appropriately and if you need to clean something off of a wall really fast, it's the product I recommend.
Just thought I should pass that along. Oh, and Happy New Year.
2008/12/12
Last Days and Long Trips
Today was my last day; I've had plenty of them. In an attempt to not answer the same questions more than I already have, I'll sum up:
I'm moving to the Boston area.
That's about 400 miles from here (Baltimore area).
I know it's cold there; I grew up where we put spiggots in the trees (bonus: the correct term is spile)
I'm driving up there on Sunday to look for an apartment then driving back here on Tuesday, weather permitting.
I'm in town for a couple days, then driving to Michigan for Christmas.
I'm driving back here before New Year's to pack and clean.
Movers come to pack dishware and CRTs on the 30th.
Movers come for my junk on the 31st.
I'm here in town sans stuff for a few more days till I can take possession of whatever apartment I find reasonable, then I'm heading back to Boston on as permanent a basis as anywhere I've lived.
Seriously, I've answered those questions at least a dozen times just today.
I figure I've got about three days of solid packing and two days of good cleaning before I'm done. Given that I'm lazy and likely to be inebriated during my time in town, I figure a week should be good for the packing plus a few days for the cleaning.
My connectivity and sane-time will be at a premium this holiday, so in case I don't get a chance to say it at a more appropriate time, happy holidays to all.
Bonus Edit!
I've added an articles section for those who just want to see the tech stuff and not details from my boring life.
Seriously, I've answered those questions at least a dozen times just today.
I figure I've got about three days of solid packing and two days of good cleaning before I'm done. Given that I'm lazy and likely to be inebriated during my time in town, I figure a week should be good for the packing plus a few days for the cleaning.
My connectivity and sane-time will be at a premium this holiday, so in case I don't get a chance to say it at a more appropriate time, happy holidays to all.
Bonus Edit!
I've added an articles section for those who just want to see the tech stuff and not details from my boring life.
2008/11/18
A Wanderer Again
I'll be leaving my current place of employ at the end of the year to seek greener pastures. In this case, figuratively, since the change in venue also comes with a significant raise in pay. So I'll be packing my crap up around Christmas to send it about a day's north east to the greater Boston area; hopefully for a good long time to come.
If anyone knows of any good bars in the W/SW suburbs, lemme know.
If anyone knows of any good bars in the W/SW suburbs, lemme know.
2008/11/09
Games of The Past
Let's take a trip in the Way Back Machine to the early 90s. I was starting my seven year quest to graduate (twice). The fastest machines you could buy were i386s of which I owned a VASTLY powerful specimen clocking in at 33MHz with 16MB of RAM and a staggering 4.2GB hard drive. Ah yes. The glory days.
Games of those days were different. Machines were pretty limited by today's standards (then again, most everything was) so designers couldn't ride the coattails of super-ultra powerful graphics hardware and million poly models. In fact, the best 3D of the time? X-Wing and Doom! Duke3D is still three years away!
Now, I don't know if there's any real truth to this or not, but I've always felt that games of yesteryear were better designed and written--especially those games around my college years. Maybe the hard walls of available computing power made the designers of the time exercise their imaginations a little harder. Maybe with smaller budgets they were able to explore the depths of the art more deeply than we can today. Perhaps in those days we just expected less realism and more fun. I dunno.
One game which I've always regarded with a great deal of nostalgia is Star Control II; a game that I used to sadly say I never finished. I no longer have to say this! I've known of its existance for a while but never got around to playing it. Seems that the fine folks at Toys For Bob released the 3DO port source and the open source community did a port named The Ur-Quan Masters.
This is one of the greatest games of all time. No, seriously, #17 in IGN's Top 100 and here again in GameSpot's Greatest Games of All Time. Let me splain how awesome this game is...no wait, there is too much, let me sum up:
- The game is jam packed full of some of the best dialog I've ever seen, evar.
- Every race has a unique background and motivation not to mention their own theme music!
- The races are extremely unique.
- There's a good amount of cause and effect.
- The game has a good pace both in tactical combat and in the story line.
- You get to save the Galaxy! Come on, how awesome is that?!
I sincerely hope that my former employers (Activision; now Acti-Blizzard or Blizzivision or somesuch) a) choose to make a true follow up, b) hand it to Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford who did the original, and c) don't make it into something lame a la X-COM Enforcer. In any event, you owe it to yourself to play this game if you haven't already done so. It's by far the best game I've played this year.
Games of those days were different. Machines were pretty limited by today's standards (then again, most everything was) so designers couldn't ride the coattails of super-ultra powerful graphics hardware and million poly models. In fact, the best 3D of the time? X-Wing and Doom! Duke3D is still three years away!
Now, I don't know if there's any real truth to this or not, but I've always felt that games of yesteryear were better designed and written--especially those games around my college years. Maybe the hard walls of available computing power made the designers of the time exercise their imaginations a little harder. Maybe with smaller budgets they were able to explore the depths of the art more deeply than we can today. Perhaps in those days we just expected less realism and more fun. I dunno.
One game which I've always regarded with a great deal of nostalgia is Star Control II; a game that I used to sadly say I never finished. I no longer have to say this! I've known of its existance for a while but never got around to playing it. Seems that the fine folks at Toys For Bob released the 3DO port source and the open source community did a port named The Ur-Quan Masters.
This is one of the greatest games of all time. No, seriously, #17 in IGN's Top 100 and here again in GameSpot's Greatest Games of All Time. Let me splain how awesome this game is...no wait, there is too much, let me sum up:
- The game is jam packed full of some of the best dialog I've ever seen, evar.
- Every race has a unique background and motivation not to mention their own theme music!
- The races are extremely unique.
- There's a good amount of cause and effect.
- The game has a good pace both in tactical combat and in the story line.
- You get to save the Galaxy! Come on, how awesome is that?!
I sincerely hope that my former employers (Activision; now Acti-Blizzard or Blizzivision or somesuch) a) choose to make a true follow up, b) hand it to Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford who did the original, and c) don't make it into something lame a la X-COM Enforcer. In any event, you owe it to yourself to play this game if you haven't already done so. It's by far the best game I've played this year.
2008/10/14
Food For Thought
One of the blogs I read on a semi-regular basis is Seth Godin's. Agreeing or not aside he's linked a few times to Gaping Void, the site for the guy (Hugh MacLeod) who draws comics on the backs of business cards whose work I totally dig.
Well, it's Tuesday and I'm supposed to be working but like so many other Tuesdays, I'm stuck in the middle of a very tedious and boring task--as is the fate of many-a Systems Programmer over the ages (Internet time here, people). I don't get out to Gaping Void nearly enough but reading through some stuff there, I ran across this nugget from his September 12th post titled "Good ideas have lonely childhoods":
Rarely do I encounter something that expresses my own intuition as well as that.
Well, it's Tuesday and I'm supposed to be working but like so many other Tuesdays, I'm stuck in the middle of a very tedious and boring task--as is the fate of many-a Systems Programmer over the ages (Internet time here, people). I don't get out to Gaping Void nearly enough but reading through some stuff there, I ran across this nugget from his September 12th post titled "Good ideas have lonely childhoods":
5. "I want to be part of something! Oh, wait, no I don't!" I've seen this before so many times, both first-hand and with other people. Your idea seems to be working, seems to be getting all sorts of traction, and all of a sudden you got all these swarms of people trying to join the team, wanting to get a piece of the action. And then as as soon as they get a foothold inside the inner circle, you soon realize they don't really understand your idea in the first place, they just want to be on the winning team. And the weirdest bit is, they don't seem to mind sabotaging the original idea that got them interested in the first place, in order to maintain their newfound social status. It's probably the most bizarre bit of human behavior I've ever witnessed first-hand in business, and it's AMAZINGLY common. [AFTERTHOUGHT: "People are not primarily governed by their own self-interest. People are primarily governed by their own self-delusion."]
Rarely do I encounter something that expresses my own intuition as well as that.
2008/09/30
AoC: Final Thoughts
Whereas I think that ultimately, AoC wanted to be a great game, it falls well short of the mark due to some designer shortsightedness, some very unfortunate bugs, and a posture that makes it fairly unapproachable by the masses. That said, I did quite enjoy a large part of it. Those of us who delve into this sphere of gaming all too often forget the parts that were good and fun when we get a' ranting and that's a shame. It is, after all, us, who largely determine its legacy.
More importantly, I think that in this day of (very) derivative design, that Funcom took a very bold step in an interesting direction. I can't say that I wholely agree with that direction, but in an age of autoattacks and the lowest common denominator, they struck out into the largely unexplored wilderness of more hardcore design. I think that's great and hope that more games strike out unto the unknown.
[edit: for some reason, this didn't post when I told it to. carry on.]
More importantly, I think that in this day of (very) derivative design, that Funcom took a very bold step in an interesting direction. I can't say that I wholely agree with that direction, but in an age of autoattacks and the lowest common denominator, they struck out into the largely unexplored wilderness of more hardcore design. I think that's great and hope that more games strike out unto the unknown.
[edit: for some reason, this didn't post when I told it to. carry on.]
2008/09/29
AoC: The Bad
Age of Conan is not without its problems. Most games are like this. Age of Conan, however, seems to have more than its fair share.
System Requirements
World of Warcraft, for everything everyone says that sucks about it, runs on just about every machine you'd possibly think would run it. I ran it on a variety of old laptops for crying out loud. Age of Conan has no such ability.
My machine here is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo overclocked (most of the time) to 2.8GHz. It has 2GB of RAM, a 10K HDD and a 768MB GeForce 8800 graphics card. Age of Conan does not run fast on this machine. I have to turn stuff down. I don't think this is because the engine is particularly uber-awesome but I can't say for sure either. Normally I'd give a developer with a decent game the benefit of the doubt, but read on...
Bugs, Bugs, Bugs (not the wabbit)
All games have bugs. Anyone worth their salt who's worked on a shipping game can probably point at any of their products and point out at least one thing that's not quite right. Some may not be significant, but if a large portion of your client base is crashing every, say, 2 hours on an out of memory error, say, three months after release, I think I'm safe in saying that not everyone is going to be terribly understanding.
ButThatsNotAll! Seemingly every patch they break something, often in the process of, um, fixing something else. As a for instance: something that irked me to no end, is that in the process of fixing something related to conrols being saved per windows user, they broke the ability to bind your keys. This remained broken (with a convoluted work around) for the better part of three weeks. This also broke the handy thing that displayed the key combo on the hotbar. I had more than 50 things hotkeyed; yes, that's just about every button in the interface and it was damned hard to remember what they all were without the handy display.
So many bugs, so few words, so I will further share with you but one. The issue is that for crafting you need silk for mid/high level cloth gear. Silk of the normal type doesn't drop except for mid 50ish mobs. If you're higher than L50 (say, L80) you don't get crap for silk because drop rate is based on con level and, well, those L50 mobs are all super grey. Realizing the problem two months too late, Funcom decided to fix it. In the guild zones/crafting zones they added spawns of spiders. What do spiders weave? Spider silk! What do spiders drop? Cotton! Cotton is the lowest level cloth crafting drop. As it's been two weeks since I drafted this post,I'd like to check to see if it's been fixed but I can't since they've also broken the patcher and thus, I can't actually log in.
Everyone Wears the Same Gear
DAoC had the same problem but in DAoC's defense, the technology wasn't quite there for a huge amount of gear variation (circa 2001). Everyone pretty much wore the same shit, dyed it all black, and had the same spec until ToA which miserably broke the game. It's now 2008 and the game install for AoC on my disk right now is in excess of 26GB. They couldn't have found space to add a few more variations for player gear textures?
Post the starting island, everyone will pretty much be wearing the same gear. As an added bonus, my level 21 armor looks exactly like my level 80 armor! No, seriously, it's exactly the same. This is not hyperbole, they're exactly same models and textures. I'd post screen shots but as mentioned before, I can't actually log in. They've demonstrated that they have some great artists, so what gives? It's even pretty much the same boring crap between genders! Mr. Yahtzee got this one spot on.
Healing is Limited
I was reticent to put this under bad; I think they've done a very cool thing design-wise, but before talking about why it's bad I gotta explain how it works. If you want to avoid a long and somewhat arduous meander through the AoC mechanics, feel free to skip to the next section. Really, it's long, and I won't be offended.
There are three healer classes (Bear Shaman, Tempest of Set, Priest of Mitra). Each class has three basic heals: a large heal over time, a small heal over time, and a largeish aoe lump sum heal. The largeish lump sum heal has a 1 minute debuff that doesn't allow that same heal to affect the target. So two bear shaman can't stagger their big heals at all, though they do stack between the other healer classes. This is where it gets interesting: the big HoTs don't stack between classes, but the small ones do. It gets even more interesting for raid groups because the big heals are raid-wide while the HoTs are not. While there are other heals available, other than by potions, they're pretty small.
This is brilliant on one hand and terrifying on the other. Healing for any given group is fixed. You can swap out healer types and the amount of healing you get is pretty much the same. Your healers in a single group stack exactly to three, but you get diminishing returns after the first one. You can't increase healing significantly through gear or talents and since the vast majority of it is in the form of HoTs, you sort of let them go and that's pretty much it. This leaves the healer classes to go off and do other things like make the current target dead--generally agreed upon to be more interesting than watching little hitpoint bars.
What you can't do is deal with burst damage. I've called them "large heals" but they're about 1500 at L80 on a tank with probably 12K hitpoints. This is not a lot given that you can only fire it off every minute, i.e. maybe twice or three times per single-group boss. You can triple this by having three healers of different types but it's still not a lot. The long shot here is that you can calculate pretty easily and within some tolerance exactly how much healing is in an ideal group. Though I have doubts they did so consistently, you would think that it would be relatively easy to determine how much DPS an encounter could have. This seems ideal but is, in my opinion, quite flawed.
My main issue is that it means that encounter designers can't increase incoming dps significantly without blowing out the encounter parameters such that no one could beat it without luck. Perhaps they intended for this to spur their designers into more interesting mechanics. Alternatively, they might intend for a more interesting tanking game; who's to say?! The end result is that the dynamic range of encounters at least DPS-wise is fairly small.
A perhaps even more nefarious issue is that it fixes pretty significantly the make up of your groups in a way that not even the most ardent opponent of theorycrafting could ignore. In WoW, you could often get first kills by stacking heals, tanks, or DPS. This is good because you can keep making progress and picking up gear which will help you progress and keep morale up. Gear isn't that big a deal in AoC (largely anyway, by design) and you can't really vary the healing amount. So you're stuck with only one slider instead of two as a raid leader, and even if you bring down a new boss, it doesn't help your raid very much. I know that this topic was healing but its real effect doesn't really sink in until you consider it in context.
Poor Quest Distribution
Solo quests ran out for me at about L72 and I did a lot of grinding prior to that. You get some repeatable quests at L40 that you can repeat once a day until L80 but come on, that's boring as shit. There aren't even very many good places to grind beyond those so if you want L80 on your own terms, you don't even get many choices. City of Heroes had some of the same problem but there were at least a number of places you could grind. Even then, I'd like to think that the day of the pointless grind is long gone. Can we truly do no better in 2008?
There are a number of group quests in the range which are pretty good, but they're generally way too difficult for a not good group to succeed. Grouping in AoC is a very different game, moreso than usual for these typese of games, due in large part to the extremely limited healing ability. This by itself is not an issue, until you have to chance the feared pick up group who are used to the extreme levels of healing in other games. Now, I like the grouping dynamic in AoC, but it's really not obvious how it works on initial inspection. On the one hand, it's got a good bit of depth, but on the other hand, you'll never be all that effective without delving pretty deep into the mechanics. It's sort of like Vanguard in this respect; something I really like about both games.
The problem, as always, is it's not always convenient for people to group when playing and I really wish more designers would take that into consideration. AoC does a reasonably good job through most of the level range but the nearer you get to L80 the more spotty and less polished it becomes in this respect. I understand that work in this area has continued since I quit playing and that it's better than it was, but that's of little consolation for someone who had to grind eight of the most boring levels.
PvP Mechanics Are Broken
PvP mechanics in AoC are broken at a deep and fundamental level. Player hitpoints are too low and player damage is too high. They say they're fixing this in "the next big patch which is coming next week" which has been "coming next week" for more than half the time I've been playing. As a Bear Shaman (healer) with a good quality weapon and no damage gems, I crank out in excess of 2500 points of damage self-buffed with a single combo. For comparison, I have about 3800 hitpoints self-buffed. Bear Shaman is not a DPS class. Surely, that's not so bad, is it?!
With some well designed player crafted gear (i.e., fully +damage gems) and an epic smacker, I'm doing in excess of 4500 points of damage self-buffed with a single combo. When fighting normal mobs, I often don't use my damage buff because one normal combo will kill them outright. Imagine what this does to players! Nobody likes getting one-shot and in AoC right now, this is the norm. This is further exacerbated by the fact that you can't reasonably increase your hit point total beyond what the designers intended. So even in super-tuned crafted gear, I'm at the same 3800 hitpoints.
Everything in the Endgame Takes Lots of People
For the sake of full disclosure, I'm a raider at heart. I love taking apart encounters and applying obscure class abilities at the appropriate times for loot and great justice. It's the same satisfaction I get from putting together very large Lego models and base busting in RTS games--it's a problem solving experience and I like those. What I don't like about raiding is the HUGE amount of coordination it takes to get any number of people >2 at the same place at the same time and moving in something resembling the same direction, not to mention the subsequent drama over the aforementioned loot should any actually be acquired. AoC takes this hassle and applies it to just about everything interesting in the post 70 game.
For example: I've always crafted. I like crafting because I like making things, especially if I can make useful things. Crafting in AoC requires buildings in a guild city. You need 24 people to create a guild. You can get lots of alts so ok, that's not so bad. You also need a guild city. Hookay, the tier 1 guild city is a pain, but not too awful bad, probably a good 10-20 man hours or so if you know what you're doing. This gets you to L70 items. The next tier of craftable items is L75. This requires a T2 guild city. This costs you a good 50-60 man hours if you know what you're doing (don't even ask about the T3 city).
If you're in a small guild, these requirements are heavy which is a problem, because no one wants to run around a resource zone gathering materials as a full time job. Forget making L80 stuff; I don't think anyone in the game has built a full T3 city yet. You can't be a solo crafter. This is unfortunate, because crafting has traditionally been a solo endeavor; something to do when all your pals are sleeping off a hangover (or whatever).
Raiding really goes without saying, and compared to WoW's 40 (at least, when I played), 24 is way more attainable. But what if you're broke and want to make some coin so you can buy some new gear? Well, you're largely screwed because there's such a dearth of soloable content; doubly so because normal mobs drop so little coin. So your best bet is getting a group together and running through whatever instance pops into mind. You probably can't use the drops because for the most part, they pretty much all suck, but they at least vendor for pocket change.
Ok, what about PvP? PvP has been a pretty good bet while solo for most of the games I've played. PvP in AoC has three basic categories: world PvP (just about any zone on a PvP server or frontier zones on PvE servers), mini-game PvP (FPS type scenarios like CTF for small teams), and large scale siege warfare (think: keep raids in DAoC but not relic raids--it doesn't get that big). I don't play on a PvP server so I can't talk about that but I suspect it's the same as most PvP servers--there when you don't want it, hard to find when you do. Mini-games are pretty much nonexistant on my server (Dagoth). Siege warfare, well, that's a whole new ball of wax and one that I didn't get to participate in so I won't even rant about it here. Suffice to say that you need a T3 keep and enough goods to build another keep in a contested zone. That seems a bit extreme.
System Requirements
World of Warcraft, for everything everyone says that sucks about it, runs on just about every machine you'd possibly think would run it. I ran it on a variety of old laptops for crying out loud. Age of Conan has no such ability.
My machine here is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo overclocked (most of the time) to 2.8GHz. It has 2GB of RAM, a 10K HDD and a 768MB GeForce 8800 graphics card. Age of Conan does not run fast on this machine. I have to turn stuff down. I don't think this is because the engine is particularly uber-awesome but I can't say for sure either. Normally I'd give a developer with a decent game the benefit of the doubt, but read on...
Bugs, Bugs, Bugs (not the wabbit)
All games have bugs. Anyone worth their salt who's worked on a shipping game can probably point at any of their products and point out at least one thing that's not quite right. Some may not be significant, but if a large portion of your client base is crashing every, say, 2 hours on an out of memory error, say, three months after release, I think I'm safe in saying that not everyone is going to be terribly understanding.
ButThatsNotAll! Seemingly every patch they break something, often in the process of, um, fixing something else. As a for instance: something that irked me to no end, is that in the process of fixing something related to conrols being saved per windows user, they broke the ability to bind your keys. This remained broken (with a convoluted work around) for the better part of three weeks. This also broke the handy thing that displayed the key combo on the hotbar. I had more than 50 things hotkeyed; yes, that's just about every button in the interface and it was damned hard to remember what they all were without the handy display.
So many bugs, so few words, so I will further share with you but one. The issue is that for crafting you need silk for mid/high level cloth gear. Silk of the normal type doesn't drop except for mid 50ish mobs. If you're higher than L50 (say, L80) you don't get crap for silk because drop rate is based on con level and, well, those L50 mobs are all super grey. Realizing the problem two months too late, Funcom decided to fix it. In the guild zones/crafting zones they added spawns of spiders. What do spiders weave? Spider silk! What do spiders drop? Cotton! Cotton is the lowest level cloth crafting drop. As it's been two weeks since I drafted this post,I'd like to check to see if it's been fixed but I can't since they've also broken the patcher and thus, I can't actually log in.
Everyone Wears the Same Gear
DAoC had the same problem but in DAoC's defense, the technology wasn't quite there for a huge amount of gear variation (circa 2001). Everyone pretty much wore the same shit, dyed it all black, and had the same spec until ToA which miserably broke the game. It's now 2008 and the game install for AoC on my disk right now is in excess of 26GB. They couldn't have found space to add a few more variations for player gear textures?
Post the starting island, everyone will pretty much be wearing the same gear. As an added bonus, my level 21 armor looks exactly like my level 80 armor! No, seriously, it's exactly the same. This is not hyperbole, they're exactly same models and textures. I'd post screen shots but as mentioned before, I can't actually log in. They've demonstrated that they have some great artists, so what gives? It's even pretty much the same boring crap between genders! Mr. Yahtzee got this one spot on.
Healing is Limited
I was reticent to put this under bad; I think they've done a very cool thing design-wise, but before talking about why it's bad I gotta explain how it works. If you want to avoid a long and somewhat arduous meander through the AoC mechanics, feel free to skip to the next section. Really, it's long, and I won't be offended.
There are three healer classes (Bear Shaman, Tempest of Set, Priest of Mitra). Each class has three basic heals: a large heal over time, a small heal over time, and a largeish aoe lump sum heal. The largeish lump sum heal has a 1 minute debuff that doesn't allow that same heal to affect the target. So two bear shaman can't stagger their big heals at all, though they do stack between the other healer classes. This is where it gets interesting: the big HoTs don't stack between classes, but the small ones do. It gets even more interesting for raid groups because the big heals are raid-wide while the HoTs are not. While there are other heals available, other than by potions, they're pretty small.
This is brilliant on one hand and terrifying on the other. Healing for any given group is fixed. You can swap out healer types and the amount of healing you get is pretty much the same. Your healers in a single group stack exactly to three, but you get diminishing returns after the first one. You can't increase healing significantly through gear or talents and since the vast majority of it is in the form of HoTs, you sort of let them go and that's pretty much it. This leaves the healer classes to go off and do other things like make the current target dead--generally agreed upon to be more interesting than watching little hitpoint bars.
What you can't do is deal with burst damage. I've called them "large heals" but they're about 1500 at L80 on a tank with probably 12K hitpoints. This is not a lot given that you can only fire it off every minute, i.e. maybe twice or three times per single-group boss. You can triple this by having three healers of different types but it's still not a lot. The long shot here is that you can calculate pretty easily and within some tolerance exactly how much healing is in an ideal group. Though I have doubts they did so consistently, you would think that it would be relatively easy to determine how much DPS an encounter could have. This seems ideal but is, in my opinion, quite flawed.
My main issue is that it means that encounter designers can't increase incoming dps significantly without blowing out the encounter parameters such that no one could beat it without luck. Perhaps they intended for this to spur their designers into more interesting mechanics. Alternatively, they might intend for a more interesting tanking game; who's to say?! The end result is that the dynamic range of encounters at least DPS-wise is fairly small.
A perhaps even more nefarious issue is that it fixes pretty significantly the make up of your groups in a way that not even the most ardent opponent of theorycrafting could ignore. In WoW, you could often get first kills by stacking heals, tanks, or DPS. This is good because you can keep making progress and picking up gear which will help you progress and keep morale up. Gear isn't that big a deal in AoC (largely anyway, by design) and you can't really vary the healing amount. So you're stuck with only one slider instead of two as a raid leader, and even if you bring down a new boss, it doesn't help your raid very much. I know that this topic was healing but its real effect doesn't really sink in until you consider it in context.
Poor Quest Distribution
Solo quests ran out for me at about L72 and I did a lot of grinding prior to that. You get some repeatable quests at L40 that you can repeat once a day until L80 but come on, that's boring as shit. There aren't even very many good places to grind beyond those so if you want L80 on your own terms, you don't even get many choices. City of Heroes had some of the same problem but there were at least a number of places you could grind. Even then, I'd like to think that the day of the pointless grind is long gone. Can we truly do no better in 2008?
There are a number of group quests in the range which are pretty good, but they're generally way too difficult for a not good group to succeed. Grouping in AoC is a very different game, moreso than usual for these typese of games, due in large part to the extremely limited healing ability. This by itself is not an issue, until you have to chance the feared pick up group who are used to the extreme levels of healing in other games. Now, I like the grouping dynamic in AoC, but it's really not obvious how it works on initial inspection. On the one hand, it's got a good bit of depth, but on the other hand, you'll never be all that effective without delving pretty deep into the mechanics. It's sort of like Vanguard in this respect; something I really like about both games.
The problem, as always, is it's not always convenient for people to group when playing and I really wish more designers would take that into consideration. AoC does a reasonably good job through most of the level range but the nearer you get to L80 the more spotty and less polished it becomes in this respect. I understand that work in this area has continued since I quit playing and that it's better than it was, but that's of little consolation for someone who had to grind eight of the most boring levels.
PvP Mechanics Are Broken
PvP mechanics in AoC are broken at a deep and fundamental level. Player hitpoints are too low and player damage is too high. They say they're fixing this in "the next big patch which is coming next week" which has been "coming next week" for more than half the time I've been playing. As a Bear Shaman (healer) with a good quality weapon and no damage gems, I crank out in excess of 2500 points of damage self-buffed with a single combo. For comparison, I have about 3800 hitpoints self-buffed. Bear Shaman is not a DPS class. Surely, that's not so bad, is it?!
With some well designed player crafted gear (i.e., fully +damage gems) and an epic smacker, I'm doing in excess of 4500 points of damage self-buffed with a single combo. When fighting normal mobs, I often don't use my damage buff because one normal combo will kill them outright. Imagine what this does to players! Nobody likes getting one-shot and in AoC right now, this is the norm. This is further exacerbated by the fact that you can't reasonably increase your hit point total beyond what the designers intended. So even in super-tuned crafted gear, I'm at the same 3800 hitpoints.
Everything in the Endgame Takes Lots of People
For the sake of full disclosure, I'm a raider at heart. I love taking apart encounters and applying obscure class abilities at the appropriate times for loot and great justice. It's the same satisfaction I get from putting together very large Lego models and base busting in RTS games--it's a problem solving experience and I like those. What I don't like about raiding is the HUGE amount of coordination it takes to get any number of people >2 at the same place at the same time and moving in something resembling the same direction, not to mention the subsequent drama over the aforementioned loot should any actually be acquired. AoC takes this hassle and applies it to just about everything interesting in the post 70 game.
For example: I've always crafted. I like crafting because I like making things, especially if I can make useful things. Crafting in AoC requires buildings in a guild city. You need 24 people to create a guild. You can get lots of alts so ok, that's not so bad. You also need a guild city. Hookay, the tier 1 guild city is a pain, but not too awful bad, probably a good 10-20 man hours or so if you know what you're doing. This gets you to L70 items. The next tier of craftable items is L75. This requires a T2 guild city. This costs you a good 50-60 man hours if you know what you're doing (don't even ask about the T3 city).
If you're in a small guild, these requirements are heavy which is a problem, because no one wants to run around a resource zone gathering materials as a full time job. Forget making L80 stuff; I don't think anyone in the game has built a full T3 city yet. You can't be a solo crafter. This is unfortunate, because crafting has traditionally been a solo endeavor; something to do when all your pals are sleeping off a hangover (or whatever).
Raiding really goes without saying, and compared to WoW's 40 (at least, when I played), 24 is way more attainable. But what if you're broke and want to make some coin so you can buy some new gear? Well, you're largely screwed because there's such a dearth of soloable content; doubly so because normal mobs drop so little coin. So your best bet is getting a group together and running through whatever instance pops into mind. You probably can't use the drops because for the most part, they pretty much all suck, but they at least vendor for pocket change.
Ok, what about PvP? PvP has been a pretty good bet while solo for most of the games I've played. PvP in AoC has three basic categories: world PvP (just about any zone on a PvP server or frontier zones on PvE servers), mini-game PvP (FPS type scenarios like CTF for small teams), and large scale siege warfare (think: keep raids in DAoC but not relic raids--it doesn't get that big). I don't play on a PvP server so I can't talk about that but I suspect it's the same as most PvP servers--there when you don't want it, hard to find when you do. Mini-games are pretty much nonexistant on my server (Dagoth). Siege warfare, well, that's a whole new ball of wax and one that I didn't get to participate in so I won't even rant about it here. Suffice to say that you need a T3 keep and enough goods to build another keep in a contested zone. That seems a bit extreme.
2008/08/30
AoC: The Good
I've been playing Age of Conan for the better part of three months now; most of you probably already know that. Some of you have probably already heard my rantings on such but in an effort for closure, I'm writing them up here. For the haters out there, yes, I got to 80, and yes, I did a fair share of PvP, but no, I didn't raid. As always, YMMV.
This write-up ended up being way more gigantically huge than I expected, so I'm breaking it up into parts. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment!
The Storytelling
LotRO, for everything I disliked about it, had some pretty good storytelling for the storyline quests at least (the rest of the quests were...uninspired). The storyline quests in that game featured some well-narrated voice overs and some truly epic-feeling instances that were woven in pretty well with the Middle Earth stories we all know and love. Time has robbed me of specific examples, but you generally spent a lot of time clearing the way for the Fellowship or blocking the way of the unrelenting evildoers. I never saw the end of the game (too boring, sorry), but the storyline was the one shining gem amidst a fairly mediocre and redundant game, IMO.
Age of Conan seems to take this the next step--it pushes all the normal MMO mechanics we, um, "know and love" and weaves them into a story with all of the epic trappings befitting the Conan license. There's a great evil (check), it threatens all of existance (check), there needs to be a hero to deal with it (check), and that hero is you! (check) Ok, so we've got the basics covered; it doesn't really deviate at all from any epic fantasy plot. (cue writers)
So why can you res when you die? They go to great pains to explain this! It's worked into the story! I know, nuts, isn't it? If you're such a badass, why are you getting worked by low level thugs? They explain that too! Inside the fictional framework they've put in place, it even makes sense in a fantasy-plot-logic kind of way. That's a ballsy move. They could have left all of that unsaid like every other MMO I've played to date, but they didn't. The only glaring hole they left that I noticed is that everyone's a hero but, ya know, they did so well with the rest of it that I'll spot 'em that one.
The storyline quests were, in fact, the one part of the game that I really looked forward to. I was sad that post noobalicious island, there's only a handful of them and they're spaced pretty far apart.
The Voiceovers
I'm a sucker for voice overs; I don't know why. For the vast majority of games to date, they're awful. Some of my favorite games, in fact, have crappy voice overs (Spellforce was all over the map, the sequel was not much better, and many of Vanguard's voice overs were downright cringeworthy). It doesn't take much to come up with a list of games with crappy voice overs (don't even get me started on CivRev or EQ2) but coming up with the opposite list is way harder. Among the tops, IMO, are Mechwarrior IV: Mercenaries, Supreme Commander + expansion, and now, Age of Conan.
The entirety of the dialog is voiced over for the intro island (1-20). All of the storyline quests are voiced over. While some of them are mediocre, some of them are quite excellent. In particular, Rhiderch, your spiritual guide through most of the early parts past the intro, is quite well played, in addition to Turoch, Laranga, and Cassilda in the intro. In fact, Rhiderch has a set of dialog after you finish the last part of the quest at 80 for no other reason than story. The kicker? This game is not made where English is a first language! I'd love to know how the other language versions of the voiceovers are.
The Combat System
Admittedly, the combo system isn't what I was expecting, but that's their fault for picking terminology from a different genre. You basically get three swings to start with (left, middle, right) and add two more at a later level (lower left, lower right). To go with that, there's a set of shields on your opponent signifying where their defense is. Hitting a heavily shielded direction means you do a heck of a lot less damage so you're rewarded for hitting places where your opponent's defense isn't. To that end, there's no auto-attack. None. Every strike your character does is more or less because you hit a button to create that action.
A combo is just a starter with a string of attacks in a given sequence that, when uninterrupted, yields a multi-part hit at the end usually doing high damage and looking really cool. These start low (one move) and end very high (four moves). It's sometimes tricky landing a combo on a moving target especially when it's a four move job but it's not impossible. I'd expected a more freeform thing where you stick moves together and they speed up or slow down or have other bonuses/penalties but that's just my fighting game background shining through, I guess.
The thing I like most about the combat system in AoC is that you can't phone it in. You have to be aware and awake and mashing away at the right buttons at the right time. If you're not, you're probably not going to survive anything more than the most trivial of encounters. It's even more important when grouping since no character has even footing with any of the epic level mobs (elites from WoW).
The Art
The game looks really good. If you've got enough machine to do so, crank everything up as far as you can for the love of pixels. The environments are excellent. The character models are excellent. The weapon models are excellent. Normally I don't care terribly much about such things but this game looks really good. Just look at the screenshots.
This write-up ended up being way more gigantically huge than I expected, so I'm breaking it up into parts. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment!
The Storytelling
LotRO, for everything I disliked about it, had some pretty good storytelling for the storyline quests at least (the rest of the quests were...uninspired). The storyline quests in that game featured some well-narrated voice overs and some truly epic-feeling instances that were woven in pretty well with the Middle Earth stories we all know and love. Time has robbed me of specific examples, but you generally spent a lot of time clearing the way for the Fellowship or blocking the way of the unrelenting evildoers. I never saw the end of the game (too boring, sorry), but the storyline was the one shining gem amidst a fairly mediocre and redundant game, IMO.
Age of Conan seems to take this the next step--it pushes all the normal MMO mechanics we, um, "know and love" and weaves them into a story with all of the epic trappings befitting the Conan license. There's a great evil (check), it threatens all of existance (check), there needs to be a hero to deal with it (check), and that hero is you! (check) Ok, so we've got the basics covered; it doesn't really deviate at all from any epic fantasy plot. (cue writers)
So why can you res when you die? They go to great pains to explain this! It's worked into the story! I know, nuts, isn't it? If you're such a badass, why are you getting worked by low level thugs? They explain that too! Inside the fictional framework they've put in place, it even makes sense in a fantasy-plot-logic kind of way. That's a ballsy move. They could have left all of that unsaid like every other MMO I've played to date, but they didn't. The only glaring hole they left that I noticed is that everyone's a hero but, ya know, they did so well with the rest of it that I'll spot 'em that one.
The storyline quests were, in fact, the one part of the game that I really looked forward to. I was sad that post noobalicious island, there's only a handful of them and they're spaced pretty far apart.
The Voiceovers
I'm a sucker for voice overs; I don't know why. For the vast majority of games to date, they're awful. Some of my favorite games, in fact, have crappy voice overs (Spellforce was all over the map, the sequel was not much better, and many of Vanguard's voice overs were downright cringeworthy). It doesn't take much to come up with a list of games with crappy voice overs (don't even get me started on CivRev or EQ2) but coming up with the opposite list is way harder. Among the tops, IMO, are Mechwarrior IV: Mercenaries, Supreme Commander + expansion, and now, Age of Conan.
The entirety of the dialog is voiced over for the intro island (1-20). All of the storyline quests are voiced over. While some of them are mediocre, some of them are quite excellent. In particular, Rhiderch, your spiritual guide through most of the early parts past the intro, is quite well played, in addition to Turoch, Laranga, and Cassilda in the intro. In fact, Rhiderch has a set of dialog after you finish the last part of the quest at 80 for no other reason than story. The kicker? This game is not made where English is a first language! I'd love to know how the other language versions of the voiceovers are.
The Combat System
Admittedly, the combo system isn't what I was expecting, but that's their fault for picking terminology from a different genre. You basically get three swings to start with (left, middle, right) and add two more at a later level (lower left, lower right). To go with that, there's a set of shields on your opponent signifying where their defense is. Hitting a heavily shielded direction means you do a heck of a lot less damage so you're rewarded for hitting places where your opponent's defense isn't. To that end, there's no auto-attack. None. Every strike your character does is more or less because you hit a button to create that action.
A combo is just a starter with a string of attacks in a given sequence that, when uninterrupted, yields a multi-part hit at the end usually doing high damage and looking really cool. These start low (one move) and end very high (four moves). It's sometimes tricky landing a combo on a moving target especially when it's a four move job but it's not impossible. I'd expected a more freeform thing where you stick moves together and they speed up or slow down or have other bonuses/penalties but that's just my fighting game background shining through, I guess.
The thing I like most about the combat system in AoC is that you can't phone it in. You have to be aware and awake and mashing away at the right buttons at the right time. If you're not, you're probably not going to survive anything more than the most trivial of encounters. It's even more important when grouping since no character has even footing with any of the epic level mobs (elites from WoW).
The Art
The game looks really good. If you've got enough machine to do so, crank everything up as far as you can for the love of pixels. The environments are excellent. The character models are excellent. The weapon models are excellent. Normally I don't care terribly much about such things but this game looks really good. Just look at the screenshots.
2008/08/08
Wheels
Seemingly forever ago, I was at the beginning of what would be my last winter in Illinois. My modus transportatus at the time was a 1987 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera which we regarded not-so-fondly as the "Gutless" because it had trouble moving its 2900lb bulk even with a 2.8L V6 when it wasn't stalling in the middle of the road. At this point in the not so distant past, I had already had the transmission rebuilt twice and it was in pretty bad need of some intensive care. I was not prepared to provide this care (Damnit Jim, I'm an engineer, not a mechanic!) so it was time to replace it.
This is what I got:
This is the Saturn SL1, 2002 model. It was the last of its kind having been replaced by the not-critically-acclaimed Saturn Ion. As you may remember from my previous not-so-award-winning post on Fragmentation, it's mostly made of plastic. Thus, it weighs in at a comparatively svelte 2350lbs and is reasonably powered by a 1.9L 100hp inline 4. If that doesn't sound like a lot of power, it's because it isn't; but it was plenty enough to kick the crap out of the dying Gutless. It gets on average, 35mpg in city and 40mpg or more on the highway if there aren't a lot of hills (i.e., not PA). Yes, that's right, I get more than 40mpg on the highway most of the time (highest clocked in at 44mpg or so on a straight shot through Ohio).
After purchasing the vehicle, I ended up leaving the state for Virginia soon thereafter only to move to Wisconsin in a couple years, and now Maryland a couple years after that. You wouldn't believe the pain in locating and then transferring my title. It's been through a lot in the roughly 6 years I've owned it and still is in pretty good working order. It's a great car, even if a bit low on power, and it's hard to beat the gas mileage. But as much as I love my SL1, it was time for something new and hot.
Imagine my surprise when Saturn not only came through with a very sporty vehicle that I wouldn't have to haggle for, but also came through with one of the top vehicles in its class! I present to you, my brand new Saturn Sky Redline, 2009:
The Redline comes equipped with a 2.0L 260hp turbocharged inline 4 and has a curb weight of about 2900lbs. No amount of my picture taking can adequately capture its knuckle biting beauty. It is also not slow. No, sir, it is not. And if you compare it to just about any other vehicle in its class, it comes out ahead either in looks, power, or power/price ratio. Seriously. Go compare for yourself if you don't believe me. I'll wait.
I don't think I've ever owned a nicer thing. I even learned to drive stick so that certain people (you know who you are!) wouldn't mock me for buying a slushbox. For a guy who's spent more time driving 10+ year old rust buckets than otherwise, it's a pretty big change of pace and a heck of a lot of fun.
This is what I got:
This is the Saturn SL1, 2002 model. It was the last of its kind having been replaced by the not-critically-acclaimed Saturn Ion. As you may remember from my previous not-so-award-winning post on Fragmentation, it's mostly made of plastic. Thus, it weighs in at a comparatively svelte 2350lbs and is reasonably powered by a 1.9L 100hp inline 4. If that doesn't sound like a lot of power, it's because it isn't; but it was plenty enough to kick the crap out of the dying Gutless. It gets on average, 35mpg in city and 40mpg or more on the highway if there aren't a lot of hills (i.e., not PA). Yes, that's right, I get more than 40mpg on the highway most of the time (highest clocked in at 44mpg or so on a straight shot through Ohio).
After purchasing the vehicle, I ended up leaving the state for Virginia soon thereafter only to move to Wisconsin in a couple years, and now Maryland a couple years after that. You wouldn't believe the pain in locating and then transferring my title. It's been through a lot in the roughly 6 years I've owned it and still is in pretty good working order. It's a great car, even if a bit low on power, and it's hard to beat the gas mileage. But as much as I love my SL1, it was time for something new and hot.
Imagine my surprise when Saturn not only came through with a very sporty vehicle that I wouldn't have to haggle for, but also came through with one of the top vehicles in its class! I present to you, my brand new Saturn Sky Redline, 2009:
The Redline comes equipped with a 2.0L 260hp turbocharged inline 4 and has a curb weight of about 2900lbs. No amount of my picture taking can adequately capture its knuckle biting beauty. It is also not slow. No, sir, it is not. And if you compare it to just about any other vehicle in its class, it comes out ahead either in looks, power, or power/price ratio. Seriously. Go compare for yourself if you don't believe me. I'll wait.
I don't think I've ever owned a nicer thing. I even learned to drive stick so that certain people (you know who you are!) wouldn't mock me for buying a slushbox. For a guy who's spent more time driving 10+ year old rust buckets than otherwise, it's a pretty big change of pace and a heck of a lot of fun.
2008/07/10
Safety Tip #948
When one desires a piece of pie, avoid the urge to eat the pie in place (in the tin) even if you live alone.
That is all.
That is all.
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