New Ultra Rapid Fire Mode!

urf_render_by_kyle_garland-d6rrb5aFor those of you out there that have played League of Legends, you may be familiar with the special game mode they released roughly a year ago called Ultra Rapid Fire or simply URF. For those that missed URF or don’t play a lot of League, it was essentially a “god” mode for the game where the normal balancing constructs like cooldown timers and resource-gating on spells were almost completely removed from the game. What ensued was a fast-paced spam-fest of of team fighting.

The game mode was an instant success, and tons of people jumped in to play. It got so competitive that Riot eventually just had to auto-ban certain champions from being picked because the player base deemed them too overpowered (see Sona, Soraka, Lux, Ezreal, and eventually Hecarim). The frenzy grew and grew until the game mode was phased out.

For the past year, the League forums and subreddit have been littered with desperate comments begging for Riot to bring URF back. It seems like the first couple comments on every patch notes announcement go something like “#NoURF #NotWorth.”

Conversely, there’s also been fairly vocal opposition from the rest of the community that got tired of URF and is sick of people constantly asking for it to come back. Nearly everywhere you find someone in favor of URF, you will soon find someone staunchly opposed to it.

I will admit that URF was a silly fun mode to play, but I only ever played it against bots. The number of horror stories I heard about PvP matches was enough to keep me from playing against other people (regardless of my natural aversion to playing against other people in anything).

N.U.R.F

namiteeSo when data-miners started seeing “URF” pop up in PBE patches, everyone started losing their minds with excitement. “URF IS COMING BACK WOO!” URF was originally last year’s April Fool’s joke, so everyone began anticipating its triumphant return this April along with the funsy skins that had been revealed (like Urf, the Namitee seen to the left).

However, Riot threw in a twist. This year’s URF, the New Ultra Rapid Fire mode, would take the same concepts of the old Ultra Rapid Fire mode but turn them 180 degrees. The new NURF mode will feature essentially doubles the cooldown time and cost of spells, halves auto-attack speed and damage, and greatly reduces your movement speed. Now instead of running around the map like ADHD kids hopped up on Monster and chocolate, the game will take a painfully slow pace.

There’s already a huge uproar from the URF fans who act as though they’ve been asking for ice cream and were instead given a handful of hot coals. Some are already calling it the most boring game mode to date. Some are excited to play. Some are still holding out that NURF is the actual April Fool’s joke, and that Riot will bring back normal URF afterwards.

But Why?

To me it seems like this kind of game mode would require flawless decision-making skills as every action has a much longer period of time for the consequences to play out. I feel like it is a huge opportunity for people who haven’t developed lightning-fast reaction speeds to learn how to analyze all the different aspects of LoL gameplay from positioning to attacking to learning greater map control. I’m actually looking forward to trying this out with some friends and seeing how it changes the dynamic of the game.

Riot is apparently running a developer contest while the NURF game mode is available. The idea seems to be that slowing down the pace of the game will allow more people to look at the data of a League match and come up with fascinating apps to examine and analyze various aspects of the game. I would love to participate in something like this if I weren’t already strapped for time 🙁

So it would seem that NURF mode isn’t a total troll mode from Riot, and that they actually have given some forethought. Similarly to the previous Nemesis Draft, which seemed to have mixed results, it looks like Riot is trying out different psychological tactics to stimulate the thinking process of its player base. There’s a lot of people who seem incredibly upset with their methods, but I definitely think Riot is onto something here.

As for myself, I would love to see URF come back, but maybe in an ARAM sort of venue where people aren’t always picking the most obnoxious “OP” champions they can think of. URFARAM. That’s a game mode I could get behind 😛

 

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 1

A few days ago my good friend Rowanblaze tagged me in his post about Developer Appreciation Week 2015.  To the best of my knowledge this event was actually started by Scarybooster, but I cannot for the life of me remember if I actually got a post in while it was going on.  If not then this is something I absolutely need to remedy.  This morning as a result my post is going to be a little contorted but I really enjoyed the format from Ravanel of Ravalation… so I am rolling with that.  Thus begins my super contorted and rambling Developer Appreciation Week post.

Funcom Games – The Secret World Team

TheSecretWorld 2013-06-04 06-15-22-12 This game is absolutely phenomenal.  I was lucky enough to get on board early and do one of the lifetime subscriptions and I have to say I have never once questioned that investment.  Knowing that it is always waiting there for me to return to the world of the Templars and the Illuminati…  makes me happy inside.  While there are a lot of interesting things about the game, the part that always floors me is just how well written the quests are in this game, and how well the whole cinematic feel of them works.  I greatly prefer silent protagonist games, because they allow me to substitute my own inner dialog into the scenes.  What is awesome about TSW is they manage to do this is a way so that the silence feels like an answer.  I desperately need to poke my head back in and try out the new combat changes, because the nightmare level content was ultimately what crushed the hopes of my group.  From what I hear a lot of these rough spots have been ironed out.

Square Enix – Final Fantasy XIV Team

ffxiv 2015-03-28 20-48-43-91 I am constantly amazed at just how damned good this game really is.  Every detail of the game has a loving care applied to it.  Once again it is the storyline that first sold me on the game.  It gave me a series of characters that felt like my party in a traditional Final Fantasy game… and then made me care about each and every one of them..  yes even Thancred.  What has kept me coming back however is just how good their content is, and how frequent their updates are.  I’ve heard that the team is only around fifteen people…  and that they are doing both the live patches and expansion development at the same time.  I am floored that they can manage to crank out a new patch every month, and major patch every few months…  all the while working on a brand new expansion?  The way they manage to make content remain relevant to the players is pure magic, because I really enjoy running low level content with friends… and making it feel like it matters again.  Last night they patched in the 2.55 content… and I am completely amped to log in and play it.

Turbine – Lord of the Rings Online Team

ScreenShot00004 If there was a list of games that I wish I played more of, Lord of the Rings Online would be near the top.  There is so much for me to enjoy in the game, even not factoring in the fact that I love the franchise behind it.  The gameplay is a bit of a throwback to an earlier era, and more than anything it has always reminded me a bit of a modern updated Dark Age of Camelot.  That said the part that has always stood out for me is just how well they have managed to create the world of Middle Earth…  everything is how I had imagined it while reading the novels.  There are so many moments like the above picture where I reach some fabled destination and I have to just stop and sit in awe that I am in this or that place.  Another strange thing that I love about this game are the horses.  They have the absolute best horse movement of any game.  As you are moving around the horse feels right, which adds so much to the feeling that you are in a living breathing world… and not just a themepark.

Trion Worlds – Rift Team

rift 2013-06-24 21-10-59-03 This was the game that finally came along and successfully dislodged me after playing seven years of World of Warcraft, and that in itself is no small feat.  What makes me love the game however is its class system.  I love being able to mix and match bits and pieces of class trees to make something unique that does exactly what I want it to do.  Especially from a tanking front, this game will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first game to give me both charge and deathgrip in the same build.  The raid content was absolutely insane, and I greatly enjoyed the times I was able to experience it.  This is one of those games that I boot up every few weeks to poke my head in, especially now that it is free to play.  I’ve spent a lot of its four year history with an active subscription, and there is just something about the world that keeps me coming back.  With the impending release of the new Wardrobe system I am looking forward to popping back in and playing some more.  Trion was the first team to make me believe that a company could keep a monthly content release schedule, and through it all they have created some very impressive work.

SOE/Daybreak – Everquest II Team

EQ2_000009 Everquest II for me is a tale of the path not taken.  With EQ2 and WoW releasing at the same time, some of my friends went to EQ2, and I and the majority of my friends went to WoW.  That said this has been one of those games that I keep coming back to so that I can re-experience this ball of nostalgia that is Norrath.  This game has hands down the best world building of any game on the market.  I love the world of Norrath 2.0 with all its detail and quirkyness.  Sure it is not exactly how I remember it from the original Everquest, but that is part of the charm for me.  Every now and then you will be knee deep in a dungeon, and you will see some little call back that makes you realize “oh my god this is that place” that you recall from your memory, changed over time and presented in so much higher fidelity.  While I have issues with the combat system and likely always will… this is a game that I cannot seem to keep myself away from for long.  Even today EQ2 is a sort of comfort food for me… where I will hang out inside and vege out on the couch dusting off my Shadow Knight and exploring Norrath with new eyes.

To Be Continued…

I feel like I have so many developers that I want to show my appreciation for…  that I had to break these up into multiple posts.  Tune in tomorrow as I talk about several more developers.  Hopefully this will cause your own upwelling of nostalgia and end up with you posting your own thoughts in blog form.  If you don’t have a blog, feel free to use my comment space for that same mission.  There is so much negativity out there, that I believe completely in this notion of the Developer Appreciation Week.  Reach out and show your appreciation to those games you love.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 1

Binging on Persona 4

Part of what I did during my week off was pour a huge amount of time into my second playthrough of Persona 4. It’s basically a high-fidelity visual novel with an elaborate dungeon-crawler minigame. I love it.

It handles social interactions in a really interesting way. Whereas in a lot of RPGs, there’s no real limit to the amount of talking with friends/party members you can do, in Persona talking with someone takes time, and you have a set amount of time (one year, game time) to make friends, build skills, and do… pretty much everything you want. On top of that, everyone and everything has their own schedule and may or may not be available at different times. It’s actually impossible to fully complete the game on the first playthrough, because you have to spend time building up skills like Courage, Understanding, Knowledge, Diligence, and Expression, many of which are necessary when dealing with other people.

Yes, the silent, self-insert protagonist's default name is "Yu". They are not above terrible puns.

My playthrough was a New Game+ run, which lets me start with the money, the weapon unlocks, the stats, and the persona compendium (like a pokedex, except you can summon your pokemon from it for a fee) that I’d built up in the previous run. This saves a LOT of time building up stats and farming equipment, money, and personas, letting me focus on the relationship side of things (Social Links, in-game).

The difference is pretty stark between the normal game and NG+. There are at least five social links I missed entirely on my first playthrough, and several more that I started but didn’t complete. There’s also an entire bonus dungeon that I missed the first time through and a secret boss that I’ve now missed twice, because my timing sucked. Some of the choices you make also pretty heavily influence dialogue, so I got some very different responses from characters than I did in my first run. The structure is all the same, but the second playthrough gives me a lot more freedom to explore, and say things/make choices that I couldn’t have made previously.

Two of the best characters in the game.

All of the time spent with the characters wouldn’t be worth a lot if they weren’t good characters, and P4 has some excellent ones. I think the game suffers a little bit from introducing four party members very quickly, two of which are easily unlikable (one of which I find annoying at the start and despise utterly by the end of the game) and one of which is kind of bland and trope-y. Of the [Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, Teddie] group at the start of the game, I really only like Chie. The others (not Teddie) get deeper and more interesting later in the game, but it takes a long time, and by then you have other, more interesting party members.


The above song is stuck in my head now. It’s a mild spoiler, but the game tells you up front, within the first few lines, that you’ll be around for a year and then will be leaving. This means that, right near the end (winter in the game), you’ve made a whole bunch of friends and are coming to terms with your dwindling time remaining with them. The overworld theme, that you hear as you run around, is replaced with Snowflakes in P4 Golden (the Vita version), which adds a bunch of content included an extended ending (lasting an extra month).

That extra month serves as a lengthy denouement to the game, bringing you from the final (?) boss to the end of the game, giving you ample time to wrap things up and tie up any loose ends you might have, or just enjoying the company of your friends in the game (even if you’ve maxed out their social links, they have more stuff to do and say in the denouement). It’s savagely bittersweet and one of the best endings to a game that I’ve ever played.

It’s something I’d like to see more of in RPGs. The extended denouement really wraps up the story nicely, far better than a boss battle -> 5-10 minute cinematic -> end credits cycle does.

I’d be a proponent of moving the final boss battle forward about 10-15% in a game, and turning that ending section into post-victory endgame, where you get to spend some interactive time enjoying your victory.

 

 

 

 



Source: Digital Initiative
Binging on Persona 4

Moggle Mog Extreme

Bowling Aftermath

It feels like I have been on this sequence of strange posts lately, so this morning I am trying to get back to the normal swing of things.  This weekend was spent mostly recovering from Friday night, and not in the way that you might think.  We had a “team bonding” outing with my co-workers to go bowling, and it had been about a decade since I had last attempted to hurl a large marble down a wooden plank.  We bowled three games, and it feels like that was one too many for me.  The biggest issue I had was the fact that the shoes were absolutely awful.  At some point they changed from what I knew as the standard bowling shoes to these strange velcro things that I never could get to fit well at all.  I have a size 13 shoe, but my foot is not all that terribly wide at least not anymore.

I am not sure if they handed me a wide width or if they just make them insanely wide to accommodate lots of different feet but in any case my foot was sliding around like crazy in them.  Normally I would be able to fiddle with the laces to get it tight enough to work for me.  However the hook and eye velcro strap mess just would not synch terribly tightly.  Leaving my foot sliding around in the shoe most of the night.  At the end of the evening I had what felt like a stone bruise and it still hurts to flex my toes.  Other than that the evening was rather enjoyable, apart from the fact that I have zero skill at bowling these days.  The absolute best game for me was around 100, and I am not sure if I got any strikes.  The thing I did learn is that I apparently throw the ball exceptionally hard.  The lanes had a miles per hour readout saying how hard you threw each ball, and most of my coworkers were in the sedate range of 10-13 mph.  The hardest I saw from me was 22.5 mph, and the slowest about 18 mph…  apparently I was angry at the lanes.

Moggle Mog Extreme

ffxiv 2015-03-28 20-39-39-78 From an accomplishment standpoint, the highlight of my weekend is definitely Saturday night before the  podcast when we pulled together a raid.  One of the fights that we held in almost a state of reverence is Good King Moggle Mog Extreme.  It seemed like the pinnacle of difficult fights because it was so different from the normal version.  Anytime we brought the fight up, it was quickly ushered away as being too much of a pain in the ass for us to try.  Maybe it is the progress in turn 9, or maybe it is something else… but when it was brought up this weekend there was more of a chorus of “might as well” than anything.  What makes Moggle Mog extreme so difficult is that you have a very limited window to perform the fight.  At roughly 90% Mog stops taking damage from player attacks.  Instead when any member of his “court” of Moggles dies, he saps his own life healing all Moggles to full health.

From a functional standpoint this means that you need to drop the health of every single Moggle before finally finishing one off.  Two make this more complicated there is a tank swap mechanic, and at certain points during the fight the White and Black Mages will cast a spell that needs to be interrupted by dealing a damage to them.  You get three rounds to lower Mog’s health, before he starts channeling Ultima, which will wipe the entire raid if it casts.  Mog is also immune to any damage while any member of his Moogle court is alive.  This means that on the final turn you have to make sure every single Moogle is down low enough to be able to finish them off in a few hits, and jump straight on the boss and burn like hell.  I am not sure if it was on our third or fourth attempt but we managed to get everything to work just right and finished the fight.  It feels extremely good to have beaten a fight that all of us had declared was “complete bullshit”.

Appleanche

ffxiv 2015-03-28 23-14-40-50 I spent most of the rest of my in game time alternating between two activities…  World of Darkness and Botany.  In World of Darkness I have once again had zero luck in getting one of the two pieces of Dragoon loot that I need to drop.  Right now I am down to the boots that drop from the very first boss, and the chestpiece that drops from the second boss.  This makes for some demoralizing gameplay late in the instance when I know I have zero hope of getting anything cool apart from maybe a puff of darkness minion.  Sunday is a notoriously bad day for running raids in any game, but it seems like this is doubly the case in Final Fantasy XIV.  The worst was a dungeon where we ended up having to fight the Cloud of Darkness boss five times before we finally did things well enough to win and get our loot.  That run was fraught with other issues however so it was not a huge surprise that we were failing at the end of the raid.  I spent more than my fair amount of time tanking adds a a Dragoon.  Hopefully I can get in tonight and maybe just maybe pick up a chest piece before the raid.

Saturday during the podcast and last night during the 90 minute season finale for The Walking Dead I worked on leveling Botany.  My goal with trade skills thus far has been to brute force my way to 25 without the assistance of leves, while I have my recruit a friend helm experience bonus.  Once I hit 25 I start working on leves allowing me to shoot up quickly from that point on.  During the podcast I managed to hit 25, and then last night I started working on leves in the South Shroud area.  Botany has one of the best named leves I have encountered called Appleanche where you are asked to pick a bunch of Sprite Apples from this grove within a set amount of time.  Not sure why but that quest just makes me happy, and overall there is something amazingly calming about harvesting flowers and chopping down trees in this game.  After a few hours of Botany I found it rather easy to get to sleep last night, so maybe that is something I should indulge at the tail end of the night every night.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Moggle Mog Extreme