Game Ramblings
Various stuff...
Tabletop
Looks like no offline RPG game this week - schedules aren't lining up. There's talk about trying Dresden Files again at some point. I'm still a little iffy on it. I have another character (vaguely) in mind that I'd sort of like to try, but I don't particularly like the thought of having to go through character creation again with the interweaving of stories. I still love the concept, but find the reality of it clunky.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
I'm through the game about 2 and a quarter times, including getting a Pacifist run that was particularly rewarding to get through one particularly difficult combat scene without killing anyone. I've also confirmed that the bosses are not so ridiculously/frustratingly difficult if you know they're coming.
It's come out that the boss battles in DXHR were outsourced to another company. While I still have no idea why they would do that, it does explain why they're such a change in tone. The head of the studio that did them coming at the first boss with a stealth/hacking-oriented character is so brutal. All the encounters seem to have enough weapons around you could go in bare-handed and still win (one fight is even winnable with a single well-timed unarmed finisher move), but only the final boss really lets you do anything useful other than deal damage until the boss is defeated.
Portal
I've watched video playthroughs, so that I would be familiar with the game. I enjoyed the presentation and subtle humor. So seeing it up for free on Steam (even if I hate Steam in principle, I'm already using it for games like DXHR), I picked it up. It's cute, plays well, the puzzles are neat.
It's also the first game I'm aware of that has overheated my computer (to the point it suddenly shuts down). WTF?
Guild Wars
Can GW2 be released already? Please? No? Fine.
Talking about GW with Tashiro is strange sometimes. We've some very different points of view, and sometimes there's just nothing I find logical to them. Explaining often becomes difficult then because it's a matter of feel - and somehow things that sound mechanically the same in one game feel different in another.
I recently expressed that Winds of Change was made up of pretty much everything I liked least in GW. Afflicted are my least favorite enemies. When asked why, I don't have a good explanation - just that fighting them tends to feel like a slog through annoyance. They're generically named and ugly, but that's cosmetic. Maybe it's because they travel in large groups with (often) a wide variety of class types while most mobs focus on a few. Whatever the case, the encounters with them seem the least fun of any I've dealt with in the game... while Tashiro praises that they "fight with realistic AI" or somesuch.
Sunday's mission epitomized what I dislike about GW combat. We'd spent the previous Sunday trying several times to do the mission and failing. This time we (after the requisite hour or so getting people together and having them tweak builds, which is another problem) gave it a shot and died. Then we regrouped... for a while... finally went out again, and breezed through it. "Wait, it's over?" What did we do different? "We had a tank." Did we? Umm... good, I guess. Kueidan views this as being faced with a challenge and making adjustments to overcome it. To me, it feels so ridiculously binary: either everything goes right and it's easy or enough goes wrong that you fail. I don't get any sense of accomplishment from that, just frustration with failure and barely a moment of thought with success.
And that confuses me a little when I'm trying to be analytical. The methodology she describes is not unlike fighting a raid boss in WoW - it may take several attempts to get correct, tactics may have to be adjusted, there's often time involved in running back into an instance and getting set up. It's basically the same thing, but I actually feel so much more accomplished to score another victory in WoW than I do GW. Part of me thinks that might be because I have more of a sense of improvement or closeness to victory rather than simple success or failure.
Then again, part of me thinks that entirely perception could be due to personal investment in the games - would I care more about success in Guild Wars if I put more into the game to begin with? Maybe...
World of Warcraft
The guild situation may not be quite as bleak as I thought a week ago. My main co-tank has been gifted with play time, so is still present for raiding. We're still a little short on the healer side of things, but may be able to get by.
We actually managed 9-10 people on Saturday night, though we were only cruising through ICC. We overlevel the place, so of course it was easy. Some of it foolishly so. We pulled Sindragosa with only about half the group in the room, and still won. Putricide summoned all of one slime that I saw. The gunship fight was much easier, but not all that much faster (as it's based on damage done by vehicle weapons). Dreamwalker probably went faster than usual, but wasn't as quick as most. And we downed the Lich King in one attempt - playing my priest I was healing inside Frostmourne (yay, I got to see that!) when the group plot-died and I didn't realize what was happening for a bit. It was neat and kind of fun. Perhaps we should have tried it on heroic or 25-man.
The Firelands are due for nerfings this week. I sort of got the impression they might be gradual, but the generally-accepted view seems to expect them to be immediate. That means we might be able to struggle through the raid with 8 people (as that should be as difficult as 10 a week ago). If we can get together 9-10 again, we may well be able to make progress. There are still mechanics and timing to learn, but lower damage output and health pools should make the raid much more accessible. I'm a little surprised that they're doing this before 4.3 is even on the PTR, but I'm not displeased if it means we can do some "current" content again. I'm hopeful, but we'll see. It ultimately depends on who shows up.
Plenty of 4.3 information is coming out. Transmogrification, yay! Tier 13 sets are generally looking pretty good, though I've not see paladins yet. Three new dungeons are good, though I sort of wish they weren't all heroic. The heavy use of Caverns of Time is cool by me. The Deathwing raid sounds interesting (a whole fight of staying balanced on his back pulling off armor?). A new Looking for Raid feature should be good (as long as it doesn't overly complicate lockouts), though I'm disappointed to be under the impression it's 25-man only - it might have been a nice easy way to see raid content for the guild, but I don't think we want 15+ PUG members. I'm sort of sad to hear they're going to introduce a set of legendary rogue daggers. Practically speaking, legendaries are out of my reach anyway, but seeing focus on one class makes me a touch jealous.
I'm also curious about what the next expansion has in store. All signs indicate 4.3 won't be around for a year this time before we see 5.0, and I wonder if they can really pull that off. And what the content will be. And... and... Well, we should hear some details in just about a month in all likelihood.
Tabletop
Looks like no offline RPG game this week - schedules aren't lining up. There's talk about trying Dresden Files again at some point. I'm still a little iffy on it. I have another character (vaguely) in mind that I'd sort of like to try, but I don't particularly like the thought of having to go through character creation again with the interweaving of stories. I still love the concept, but find the reality of it clunky.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
I'm through the game about 2 and a quarter times, including getting a Pacifist run that was particularly rewarding to get through one particularly difficult combat scene without killing anyone. I've also confirmed that the bosses are not so ridiculously/frustratingly difficult if you know they're coming.
It's come out that the boss battles in DXHR were outsourced to another company. While I still have no idea why they would do that, it does explain why they're such a change in tone. The head of the studio that did them coming at the first boss with a stealth/hacking-oriented character is so brutal. All the encounters seem to have enough weapons around you could go in bare-handed and still win (one fight is even winnable with a single well-timed unarmed finisher move), but only the final boss really lets you do anything useful other than deal damage until the boss is defeated.
Portal
I've watched video playthroughs, so that I would be familiar with the game. I enjoyed the presentation and subtle humor. So seeing it up for free on Steam (even if I hate Steam in principle, I'm already using it for games like DXHR), I picked it up. It's cute, plays well, the puzzles are neat.
It's also the first game I'm aware of that has overheated my computer (to the point it suddenly shuts down). WTF?
Guild Wars
Can GW2 be released already? Please? No? Fine.
Talking about GW with Tashiro is strange sometimes. We've some very different points of view, and sometimes there's just nothing I find logical to them. Explaining often becomes difficult then because it's a matter of feel - and somehow things that sound mechanically the same in one game feel different in another.
I recently expressed that Winds of Change was made up of pretty much everything I liked least in GW. Afflicted are my least favorite enemies. When asked why, I don't have a good explanation - just that fighting them tends to feel like a slog through annoyance. They're generically named and ugly, but that's cosmetic. Maybe it's because they travel in large groups with (often) a wide variety of class types while most mobs focus on a few. Whatever the case, the encounters with them seem the least fun of any I've dealt with in the game... while Tashiro praises that they "fight with realistic AI" or somesuch.
Sunday's mission epitomized what I dislike about GW combat. We'd spent the previous Sunday trying several times to do the mission and failing. This time we (after the requisite hour or so getting people together and having them tweak builds, which is another problem) gave it a shot and died. Then we regrouped... for a while... finally went out again, and breezed through it. "Wait, it's over?" What did we do different? "We had a tank." Did we? Umm... good, I guess. Kueidan views this as being faced with a challenge and making adjustments to overcome it. To me, it feels so ridiculously binary: either everything goes right and it's easy or enough goes wrong that you fail. I don't get any sense of accomplishment from that, just frustration with failure and barely a moment of thought with success.
And that confuses me a little when I'm trying to be analytical. The methodology she describes is not unlike fighting a raid boss in WoW - it may take several attempts to get correct, tactics may have to be adjusted, there's often time involved in running back into an instance and getting set up. It's basically the same thing, but I actually feel so much more accomplished to score another victory in WoW than I do GW. Part of me thinks that might be because I have more of a sense of improvement or closeness to victory rather than simple success or failure.
Then again, part of me thinks that entirely perception could be due to personal investment in the games - would I care more about success in Guild Wars if I put more into the game to begin with? Maybe...
World of Warcraft
The guild situation may not be quite as bleak as I thought a week ago. My main co-tank has been gifted with play time, so is still present for raiding. We're still a little short on the healer side of things, but may be able to get by.
We actually managed 9-10 people on Saturday night, though we were only cruising through ICC. We overlevel the place, so of course it was easy. Some of it foolishly so. We pulled Sindragosa with only about half the group in the room, and still won. Putricide summoned all of one slime that I saw. The gunship fight was much easier, but not all that much faster (as it's based on damage done by vehicle weapons). Dreamwalker probably went faster than usual, but wasn't as quick as most. And we downed the Lich King in one attempt - playing my priest I was healing inside Frostmourne (yay, I got to see that!) when the group plot-died and I didn't realize what was happening for a bit. It was neat and kind of fun. Perhaps we should have tried it on heroic or 25-man.
The Firelands are due for nerfings this week. I sort of got the impression they might be gradual, but the generally-accepted view seems to expect them to be immediate. That means we might be able to struggle through the raid with 8 people (as that should be as difficult as 10 a week ago). If we can get together 9-10 again, we may well be able to make progress. There are still mechanics and timing to learn, but lower damage output and health pools should make the raid much more accessible. I'm a little surprised that they're doing this before 4.3 is even on the PTR, but I'm not displeased if it means we can do some "current" content again. I'm hopeful, but we'll see. It ultimately depends on who shows up.
Plenty of 4.3 information is coming out. Transmogrification, yay! Tier 13 sets are generally looking pretty good, though I've not see paladins yet. Three new dungeons are good, though I sort of wish they weren't all heroic. The heavy use of Caverns of Time is cool by me. The Deathwing raid sounds interesting (a whole fight of staying balanced on his back pulling off armor?). A new Looking for Raid feature should be good (as long as it doesn't overly complicate lockouts), though I'm disappointed to be under the impression it's 25-man only - it might have been a nice easy way to see raid content for the guild, but I don't think we want 15+ PUG members. I'm sort of sad to hear they're going to introduce a set of legendary rogue daggers. Practically speaking, legendaries are out of my reach anyway, but seeing focus on one class makes me a touch jealous.
I'm also curious about what the next expansion has in store. All signs indicate 4.3 won't be around for a year this time before we see 5.0, and I wonder if they can really pull that off. And what the content will be. And... and... Well, we should hear some details in just about a month in all likelihood.
I still don't comprehend the idea of 'nerfing' content. Ah well. Yeah, Samantha considers GW combat as a tactical thing. If you fail, see what you did wrong, adjust, and go into it. She's just glad it isn't a timing thing, really, just more of a 'what are they doing, let's deal with it' sort of thing. She said that last Sunday was the fastest 2:30 she's ever seen. One thing I find interesting (I don't know if I'll like it yet), is the sidekicking in GW2. You level down for the zone you're in. I think this is only for personal instances, I'm not sure. I do think that, and the dynamic levelling of monsters in the public zones, will be an effective variant to having to nerf material as the game expands.
ReplyDelete"Nerf" is such a broad term and often bandied about in the MMO industry. A particular class is doing so well in a PvP environment and nothing seems to counter it and everyone is rolling that class? "Nerf" the problematic abilities. A certain mob is unbeatable except by a select few? "Nerf" its health and damage until more people can beat it without being frustrated or annoyed. A particular boss fight is completely unwinnable? "Nerf" it by changing the mechanics or particular aspects of the fight until it can be won. A particular boss fight is made trivial by bizarre player behavior? "Nerf" the behavior by changing what the odd thing or string of things did to trivialize the fight. Things change, often to make the game more accessible or playable to the majority of the fan base. With 11 million or so subscribers, Blizzard has to make the game appeal to most of them, not just the elite top 20 thousand or so who like the game being "hard".
ReplyDeleteI find the whole back-end thought process behind nerfing content to be fascinating. It's an interesting blend of old and new philosophies that have been evolving over time. Of course, there are minor nerfs/tweaks that happen more frequently because an encounter proves too different from what was intended, but I'm talking the big ones that you've responded to with confusing before... First, for the sake of perspective, you have to understand one huge difference is that GW doesn't really have endgame improvement. You hit max level pretty early, get a max-damage weapon without too much trouble, pick up the runes and skills you want, and you're set. It's entirely possible to do this for most builds maybe halfway through a campaign. I can't cite for certain, but I'm sure WoW's engame is a concept inheritted from Everquest, if not earlier. You level cap, then you progress into multiple stages of "harder" content for increasingly powerful gear. It used to be that larger instances were the steps. You get better stuff from 5-man dungeons than solo world play, you get stuff from 20-man raids that's better than dungeons, and if you want the best gear out there, hopefully you can manage to get in one of those 40-man raids. This content was designed to be hard in order to cater to the people who liked it that way. That has changed some over time. As far as I recall, heroic 5-mans were introduced in Burning Crusade to offer challenge (and reward) scaled up to max level (at the time) with dungeons you may or may not have run while leveling up. This is similar to (but more limited than, from the sound of it) what GW2 intends with dungeons. Raids are now 10/25-man and are designed to be roughly the same difficulty with the same (albeit different amounts of) rewards. Over Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard played around a lot with different ways to have different difficulty levels in their raids independent of size. And each new expansion (or major patch) Basically, the mindset changed from simply "we have to have hard endgame content" to "y'know, making these lore-heavy instances that only 1% or less of our players see is sort of a waste." To that end, Blizzard has been walking a line between providing challenging endgame content and making that content accessible to more of the player base. Lowering the group number requirements has helped that, I think. Adding in "heroic/hard" modes for the raid encounters that are optional has worked toward that, too. Blizzard has all sorts of metrics about the groups that attempt encounters and how well they do, so they have a pretty good handle on how tought people are finding things to be. And starting (as far as I know) just prior to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, they started deliberately making previous endgame content easier. By this time, the "hardcore" players have already done the raids repeatedly, this gives those who are not as good/dedicated a chance to see it through just before the new hotness comes out. Sometimes it's been with a stacking buff for players. More recently, it's been an across-the-board reduction to damage/health of the enemies. Regardless, it's an active attempt to keep multiple demographics of players interested in the game, and that's generally a good thing.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit unsure of how I feel of the sidekicking, too. I think I saw it in play in Champions Online and/or City of Heroes/Villains. The idea of boosting/decreasing power level to match play with a friend is good. But adjusting level can be tricky, because levels usually unlock abilities (in fact, leveling up in some games is training on how to play your class, with abilities gradually unlocked), so bumping levels up or down can do strange things there by changing how a character plays. It can be even more touchy when equipment is a big factor in characters. So... have to see more about that.
ReplyDeleteIIRC, GW2 new spells are earned just by casting the other spells you know. Level doesn't seem to be a factor in that regard (however I wonder if you have to gain XP from killing monsters, or if you can grind the skills on lower level/lesser xp kills)
ReplyDeleteNo idea. And that's why it might work okay in GW2 - you can learn skills relatively independent of level. If gear caps out as quickly as in GW, then that may not be a problem either. But if they're adopting any sort of endgame progression in 2, it'll be hard to increase people to that level to join in with others. Decreasing effective level is probably less of an issue. It would be sooo much harder in WoW because so many abilities are level-based and gear (especially at "endgame levels") varies so widely. Turn my paladin to level 10 and I'd be missing most of the toolkit I'm used to. Go the other way, and you get a host of new abilities you haven't practiced with. You could scale items in a manner similar to heirlooms, but because there's such a wide range of item levels at level cap, any artificial level increase would would be a wild stab in the dark that would probably have to be tuned to the low end, making level-boosted characters almost useless in anything harder than a normal-mode dungeon instance.
ReplyDelete1) Actually, in GW, they usually do slight tweaks. Recently, they've been doing rebuilds of all the classes, most of which are upgrades, rather than downgrades. In some cases, they're divided into PvE / PvP splits. 2) and 3) That really should have been tested before it was released. The thing is, WoW isn't doing that. It's adding more content, then downgrading stuff that came before, essentially making 'hard' stuff 'easier' as they add new material. Rather than doing that, why can't they just set expansions at the higher end and leave it there? The stuff you're doing prior to 60-80 is considered build up. For new expansions, add things for every level, but don't actually nerf things. That way, people can find stuff from levels 1 to 80, and the high end / hard stuff they did before isn't cheapened by being downgraded. Boss X will always require a group of level Y+ to have a good chance of beating. Three expansions later, he'll still be that hard. I don't see this as a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteTo some extent, I can see your point, and that does make sense. It just feels weird to go 'yeah, you guys who busted your hump to get here and beat this? Well, it isn't so special now'. Really, what's the point of making these things OMG HARD if you're going to downgrade it later? Instead of making it a constant climb upwards with harder and harder things (and bigger and bigger gear to be able to do it), they should set it so that there's a plateau, and you can try going through the different things when you hit that plateau. And if veterans want to see the early level stuff in the expansion, they roll a new character and start from the beginning.
ReplyDeleteBalance tweaks are a different beast entirely. Classes do get buffed and nerfed at times, if things are found to be working or not as intended. The focus on levels doesn't work much. The tier 11 stuff they nerfed last patch? Yeah, that still requires level 85(+ when it exists) characters. The tier 12 stuff that just got nerfed? That still requires level 85(+) characters. None of it is getting so easy you could roll through with level 80s and do the job (I'm not even sure if you could enter the instance at lower levels). It does, however, mean that shortly after hitting level 85, you can probably throw together a PUG group and succeed in BWD, To4W, or BoT whereas when they were new, you realistically had to spend time gearing up in 5-man heroics first. Lowering the barrier of entry like that makes it more possible for people who are new or running alts to get through this stuff while the "best of the best" are busy with the next tier of content.
ReplyDeletePlateaus are boring. >.> Okay, not always, but injecting a sense of building/growing a character almost always makes a "RPG" more interesting to the players.
ReplyDeleteShouldn't exploring new areas, and picking out new things, be interesting? Or hell, finding new skills is nice. Why does it have to be 'levels' and 'power'?
ReplyDeleteI think if you go into a lower level area, your level drops and you'll still get XP (since you're effectively a lower level). There's monster kills, and quests and missions and such still. The thing is, when you level, you get attribute points. These can be spent to improve how certain skills work, or other factors.
ReplyDeleteSee, my response here is something like "It doesn't have to be, but that is usually what entices people better than any alternative." But that's pretty much what I said in my last post there. People like character advancement and so that's what most games try to offer as incentive to play.
ReplyDelete