Category: RPG
Torchlight 2 beta
YEAAAAHHHHHHHH. Got in an hour or so on Elite Hardcore as the Engineer with a couple random guys and died at level 7 in a huge mosh of undead. Great stuff– and I am pleased to report that even in multiplayer games YOU CAN DODGE ENEMY ATTACKS. For gaming value, even from what little I’ve seen so far, TL2 is pure gold 20$ for this? It’s crazy.
The countdown begins for D3
Diablo 3 is just shy of a week away from release. Following this game for so long, many of us have seen from the periphery a lot of the design paths that didn’t make it into the game (especially Maurice!Bastard who played a demo at some Warcraft tournament eons ago and actually read the website from time to time). Here’s a list and why I think each change was made. There is probably an exhaustive list of this somewhere.
Health Potions in addition to the health globes: Originally there were no health potions, just the health drops in the form of the big red globes. Now there are health potions and globes. Why: I think they just couldn’t work this one out with the testers and the game became too dangerous without the player’s ability to heal whenever they wanted. During the beta, any time I died it was because I was trapped by one mob and being shot at by another. I don’t think this matters, but we may see the health globes disappear in the final…
No basic weapon attacks: This one is really odd. You always attack using your skills, rarely the weapon you have. If you equip a bow and are not a character that has archer skills, you will never see an arrow fly from your hands. Yet the weapon will add to your DPS and any other effects. It’s very strange. Why: this has got to be the real money auction house. There’s no other explaination possible. Blizzard wants users to be able to use (and that means buy from them or other users where they get a cut) as many weapons in the game as possible so where it seems like there was a constraint on weapons for characters to make them unique, this is gone.
No weapon animation for skills: This ties into he point above and the monk is the most noticeable character for this. When you have a weapon and your character uses a skill (such as any attack) the weapon disappears. If you are carrying a bow and you want to punch someone as the monk, the bow disappears until the skill animation is over. Why: Again, this looks like the real money auction house. They want all characters to buy all items in the game and since characters can use any weapon (but only attack with skills), they would have to animate all skills with all weapons for all characters. That’s easily done if you started designing the character animation that way like pretty much all the other ARPG’s I’ve played– but if you have to go back and redo all the animation after someone said “hey we need a revenue stream here with the weapons” it will take forever and a day.
Character animations aren’t that great compared to the monsters: This is one that has not changed and probably should have. The monsters look incredible– just awesome incarnate. The characters are sadly, just OK– nothing really special at all and their run animations are bit loopy across the board. The worst is the witchdoctor (male version) with his shaking palsy and hunch–quite inspiring to make one select him right? Why? locked in because of Armor sets. Totally constrained changing or iterating over the character models at some point during development (far too early from the looks of it).
Characters are the same but you can tell they were originally designed to be different: Baurice!mastard complains about this one quite a bit. The characters are all either close or long range DPS generators and though they look different and have some different types of mana, they are essentially the same across the board. Why? It’s suspected that they were trying to balance out the PVP and wow who gives a shit about that at all? I would say the only character that feels different is the Witch Doctor. If you play the Demon Hunter or the Wizard it really does feel like the same character with different animations for stuff.
After the beta, I’m really on the fence with D3. I played D1 for about a month and then picked it up a couple years later because of various LAN’s that destroyed my dwellings from time to time. I played D2 again for about a month and then picked it back up because of the ZYEL mod and well, yes, played a shitload over the years. Instead of being more like ZYEL with it’s insane monster rushes and mentally unstable level of crafting options, D3 is looking to be another play for a month, play it a bit with friends here and there after but with Torchlight 2 swinging out soon after, it may be completely eclipsed. That said, the D3 gameplay is jewel-like in it’s polish and very very fun. If they had abandoned any ideas around monetizing in game items would it be a better game? Signs point to Yes.
Kingdoms of Amalur: The Same’maning
I LIKED the demo. I bought the game. The demo SOLD me on the game. I especially enjoyed the combat. The fighting felt solid and fluid. I had control of the action and it mattered that I timed my blocks, dodges and attacks. I was playing Skyrim at the same time and was amazed at how much better the combat felt in Amalur. The skill choices in Amalur are spread out over three main character types. These skill trees seemed cool and interesting in the demo. The game let you spread your skill points over the three skill trees, never locking you into any particular path (this is the first problem and you’ll find that out much later). So as I said, I LIKED the demo. That is where I should have stopped myself I think.
Insert EA rant: People this is a EA game. FUCK YOU EA. I can safely say I will not buy another EA game ever. When I pay 60 dollars for a game I don’t want to be reminded about DLC EVERY FUCKING TIME I START THE FUCKING GAME EA! I don’t want to see that fucking STAR by the Downloads menu item in the main menu for the game EVERY FUCKING TIME I PLAY! YES I SEE EA THAT YOU WANT ME TO SPEND MORE FUCKING MONEY! YES I SEE EA AND NO I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING BUY ANYMORE EA SPACEPISS! EA GET THAT GOD DAMNED STAR OFF MY SCREEN YOU FUCKING COPORATE FUCKASSES!
So here’s how Amalass plays. You’ll play the game for about 3-4hrs and more or less at this point you done EVERYTHING in the game. From this point on you’ll be playing a rehashing of more or less the same enemies, quests and find similar loot for the next however many hours you choose to spend playing. AND YOU CAN SPEND A SHIT TON OF HOURS PLAYING THE SAME SHIT OVER AND OVER. I was maybe 20hrs in when I finally stopped with the non-main quest shit and just powered right through the main quest in 6hrs. I didn’t need to level up anymore and the game was fucking so gawd damned easy on normal. I just got to a point in the game where I was fucking bored and upset with how generic and shitty everything was feeling and said, “Okay, how about now I just win this shitty game.” And so I did, I followed only the main quests, running from yellow circle objective marker to yellow circle objective marker, skipping all the useless dialogue, fighting the same fights over and over and won.
Yes you get more skills on your way to the fucking boring ending but the new skills don’t do anything that great! I got a crowd control skill that I had to use over and over as a melee fighter. Unlocking shit skills that have to be used is a GAY! Where is my choice now? I level up and if I don’t use these new skills I lose. Fucking dumb. AND if I do use them I win instantly. The game is balanced in this strangely perfect way, when you are doing the “right” thing the game is insanely easy and quickly becomes boring after your 10-12th victorious battle.
OH ya I tried to play a fight/thief character, it FAILED. Once I respected and put all my skill points into the fighter tree I instantly became 100% more deadly. ? Why the fuck let me break my character by spec’ing into two or SHIT three trees at once? Is that some way of making the game cooler? Here gamer, put points into any tree you want. If you happen to use only one tree, BINGO you’re good! If you experiment with using multiple trees, FUCK YOU, you’ll hopefully get around to respec’ing into one tree only and quickly see HOW FUCKING WRONG YOU WERE!
The game is worth 10$ tops! Normal people will play 4-6 hours and stop cuz that is all the fun there is in the game. Shitty buffet trough feed americans will play all the fucking way through and buy all the DLC and want more. This game is the mount everest of mediocrity and I climbed all the way to the fucking top and took a GIANT piss on the dead diabetes ridden gamer corpses that littered the peak.
All that said I did craft a fucking KICKASS great sword that did 50+ more damage than anything I found in the game, so that was cool. The crafting system was cool. The fighting system is cool for 4-6hrs. The animations/enemies are very Todd McFrainer or whom ever the fuck that comic guy is. The world art is okay, very wow’ish but it’s fine. I can’t help but think a great number of people wasted a HUGE amount of time making this incredibly so so game.
4 player D3 Beta Hardcore run
I have to spoil it for everyone– no one died! For sure after this night there’s no possible way to deny the power D3 will wield over peoples across the lands; there are some confusing design choices (noted in the video again and again) but overall: fantastic. 24:26 pretty much sums up my emotions around the beta.
DarkSpored
Awesome RPG initiative system
The new Marvel RPG is all the rage this week and it’s only out in PDF format so far. It’s very Fate-like, except it uses a bunch of the funny dice like D&D and is very abstract where stuff like Champions/Hero (and Exalted) are very precise and crunchy. While I find it completely impossible to imagine running an actual superhero RPG with my group, I like reading about the systems. I’m a bit of a Systems Addict actually so I stumble upon stuff of variable usefulness. Yesterday my stumbling came across a post about the Marvel RPG initiative system by one of the FATE creators, and apotheosis followed.
Initiative is a tough nut to crack in pen and paper RPG’s because of turn angst. Ideally you want something that rewards players who have spent some sort of resource for their speed, whether it’s in items or their character build or even gotten a good die roll, but as RPG’s have moved towards characters taking ‘actions’ or a ‘scene’ or in Marvel’s case: a ‘panel,’ rather than attacks (with or without the stunts we so love now since Feng Shui) you don’t want some characters dominating the combat scenarios by getting to take a turn more than other player’s characters because then those people without fast characters just sit there… and sit there.
This has typically been solved, unsatisfactorily in my opinion, by a ’round the table’ method where everyone rolls a die, maybe modified, and gets to go in that order, or someone on the player side goes first, then it goes around the table with the GM going last. In contrast to this method is the tick-based systems of Exalted and Champions, where a character’s actions determine how long it is until they can take another action. While this is the most realistic of the systems and fun when all the players (not necessarily the NPC’s) have the same action counts, woe is it to be the archer or a player with a high tick attack action– because you sit there waiting and waiting to take an action, only to take one and have to wait and wait again. While the tick systems are the most tactically deep, in practice, when you have outliers like someone too fast or too slow, it breaks down in play (i.e.: don’t play an archer in Exalted)
As this post discusses, the new Marvel RPG has a hand off mechanic where the player or NPC that takes and action gets to choose who the next actor in a fight is and this is simple and downright brilliant. There is tactical depth, the ability to team up attacks, the ability to out-manuver your opponents by making them take their turn before they want to, etc. What’s more, this could easily be tacked on to ALL non-tick-based initiative systems and looks to work just as well for social or physical conflicts. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay? Yes. FATE (Dresden, Bulldogs, Anglerre) in all the incarnations I know of? Yes. Even in OD&D this could work. Sure, some skills players have in each RPG may not work with this in some systems, but they could simply be adjusted since the ‘actor’s choice’ mechanic is so simple.
New XCOM
The new xcom is looking all sorts of awesome, but don’t take my word for it! The developers have been doing a mess of interviews these days on why and how they are developing the game. It’s homage as well as pushing the genre itself forward. Like Fighting games, we have had a huge resurgence of the genre due to Street Fighter IV and here’s hoping a similar thing happens with turn based tactical games. The days of Jagged Alliance and Temple of Elemental Evil being AA titles is long gone, but the craving is still there for something that isn’t indy, but isn’t AAA either.
I picked up both the first XCOM and XCOM: Apocalypse (my favorite in the series) off steam to give them a run through again in the next couple weeks. Though these stand the test of time pretty well, with the new game they may no longer NEED to.
Diablo 3: what in gods name is the witchdoctor doing in the game?
I’m in the D3 beta. It’s great. My fears about how the game plays have been completely allayed. The monster hit lag is unfortunate, but not a ruiner. The real money auction house is delaying the game’s release, but that’s OK too. It should have no effect on players that choose not to use it and you can probably play through the game without even noticing the crafting parts and just pick up any items dropped on the ground FTW, let alone actually using the auction house. The character models aren’t that great, but the monsters look awesome (monsters don’t have a billion combinations of armor and weapons so it follows that there’s a lot more leeway with their design). However, the Witch doctor’s inclusion has me befuddled.
I liked the other black characters in Diablo 1 and 2. The magic user in the first game fit really well when he could have been just some generic pointy-hatted gandalf clone with a stupid beard, or some naked woman that said stupid stuff all the time. The paladin in D2 was another non-northern european character that was believable and fit in well. That said, I just don’t know where Blizzard is coming from with the Witch doctor. Essentially, the Witch doctor replaces the Necromancer from D2– he has many of the same powers and is the core choice for a person that wants to use a summoning character–so system wise, he’s important, but as fluff and the character model itself he is WAY out of place. Here are my issues in order of magnitude:
3) Aesthetically, the witchdoctor is a hunched over, quivering creature with some sort of strange shaking fit that happens to one of his arms. He himself looks like one of the creatures you will be fighting more than any of the other characters.
2) The setting for the Beta is in a very northern european looking region (Tristram); all the voices are some odd mix of welsh, scottish, irish and english thrown together in some sort of midlands pond scum. Given that you are in a remote village that had been plagued by demons and undead before, it’s difficult to imagine some creature looking as odd as the witchdoctor (almost naked as he is starting out) would be killed outright– let alone being let INSIDE the village
1) Given that said village is under attack at the outset of the game by waves of zombies and the witchdoctor himself raises zombies as one of his first powers in the game, it’s equally strange that a person like him, wearing a demon mask and raising zombies, would be allowed anywhere near the INSIDE of the village and almost certainly would simply be killed outright. Of course, since the dialog options are all the same for each character, the NPC’s accept the witchdoctor the same as if he were the barbarian or demon hunter, which makes the doctor’s instant acceptance after killing just a handful of zombies feel like a giant shoehorn sticking out of Diablo’s bright red arse.
I originally thought the Monk would stick out like a sore thumb in the game, just like he did in the (non-Blizzard) expansion to Diablo 1 back in the day, but the witchdoctor is a big carbuncle right on the face in comparison. I realize not all of D3 will happen in fantasy Northern Europe land and the witch doctor won’t look quite as ridiculous but as it stands, it’s a very strange choice for a character.
Summing up the goal of the new D&D
While having no plans to play the game, I still love peeking at the unfolding drama of the in-the-works ‘internet influenced’ version of D&D and seeing the 4th edition books hit the used-book store shelves in droves (you WILL be nostalgic for this edition I tell you).
The man behind Avadon the Black Fortess and the Geneforge series summed what should be the goal for the design up brilliantly:
I would go as far as removing the “doesn’t have an option which enables it to be” and replacing it with “isn’t,” because shit, I recently ran a FATE game where at least two of the players were barely coherent due to drink and it worked, while not 100% fine, very well; and I’ve run epic-combat heavy sessions of Exalted when players were absolutely OBLITERATED and they were fantastic. Unless you’re playing some vampire-erotic or MAGE or something awful like Twilight 2000 where you have to concentrate a lot all the time, you must expect players to drink heavily when playing an RPG– and not the SURGE and DEW of our youth. Being a player in an RPG, allows a lot of downtime during sessions– you’re not always doing stuff– and between doing stuff it’s perfectly understandable that drinking is happening; sometimes a lot.
That said, I think this internet edition, like the other versions since 2nd, are going to be about using miniatures on the table like Descent and not really an RPG proper. We rarely, if ever, used miniatures in our D&D games as kids and when I want to play with miniatures, I’ll play Warhammer or AT-43, and if I want to roleplay it’s just going to be a drawing on a dry erase board with no hexes, squares or any other crap to detract from the imaginings. Combat in RPG’s is just better when the distraction of little pieces of lead (well, now plastic) aren’t around.