Last Call for Shade’s Eve Contest

WildStar’s Shade’s Eve housing contest ends today. You have until tonight at 11:59 PDT to submit your screen shots for a chance to win up to a year of signature service and a fancy midnight equivar mount.

Last Call for Shade’s Eve Contest

Still spooky though.

My free time and building skills didn’t quite manage to create a reality that lived up to the idea I had for this contest. I won’t be around enough tonight to do much more than take a couple screen shots, so I’m debating whether or not to enter at all. I think I will try though, because even though I don’t have much hope for a prize I do want to make sure they get good participation. I definitely want to see more contests like this in the future! I should probably start planning my Xmas-themed plot right away, but I’m one of those folks who gets grumpy if I see Xmas decorations before (American) Thanksgiving, so I guess it will have to wait.

Want to check out my spooky house? Visit Gracie Moonshine on Entity and let me know what you think! And let me know in the comments if you’ve decorated at your place, maybe I’ll stop by to trick-or-treat!


Last Call for Shade’s Eve Contest

Last Call for Shade’s Eve Contest

WildStar’s Shade’s Eve housing contest ends today. You have until tonight at 11:59 PDT to submit your screen shots for a chance to win up to a year of signature service and a fancy midnight equivar mount.

Last Call for Shade’s Eve Contest

Still spooky though.

My free time and building skills didn’t quite manage to create a reality that lived up to the idea I had for this contest. I won’t be around enough tonight to do much more than take a couple screen shots, so I’m debating whether or not to enter at all. I think I will try though, because even though I don’t have much hope for a prize I do want to make sure they get good participation. I definitely want to see more contests like this in the future! I should probably start planning my Xmas-themed plot right away, but I’m one of those folks who gets grumpy if I see Xmas decorations before (American) Thanksgiving, so I guess it will have to wait.

Want to check out my spooky house? Visit Gracie Moonshine on Entity and let me know what you think! And let me know in the comments if you’ve decorated at your place, maybe I’ll stop by to trick-or-treat!


Last Call for Shade’s Eve Contest

Fun with Squirrels

Groupy Stuff

Fun with Squirrels

Last night I had an absolute blast in Destiny.  During the day I mentioned that I really needed to do some Court of Oryx stuff on the Dreadnaught, since the Stolen Runes in their initial state do not stack… and I happened to have like four in my inventory.  My friend SquirrelPope chimed in to mention that he could also do with some CoO goodness, but we didn’t necessarily make any firm plans.  When I got home I started piddling around on my Warlock and shortly after dinner my good friend Carth showed up and we started up a PSN Party.  Around about this time I decided to swap back to my Titan and I got a PSN friend invite from Squirrel and next thing I know it we are on the Dreadnaught doing summons.  Over the course of the night we participated in probably a half dozen of the level 300 summons, and at least a dozen if not more of the 240 ones…  then a good smattering of the low level ones mixed in as well.  We were there long past the point where our bags were overflowing, and it managed to get me a level 300 artifact and Squirrel one as well for his hunter alt.  We took a trip to decode our goodies on the Tower before regrouping.

From there we chain ran a bunch of strikes and I managed to get a couple of exotics as a result.  The other night Carth managed to pull a Telesto fusion rifle, and I had commented that I really would not mind getting one since I didn’t have a great fusion rifle option.  Sure enough in our travels last night one of my exotics was a special weapon and that was precisely what I pulled.  The other item I got was extremely situational, No Back-up Plans arms which give you a force barrier anytime you kill someone with a shotgun.  This screams like something perfect for defender titan in the crucible.  Going to hold onto them because in theory they are a decent enough item, even though I skipped getting them when they were on Xur a few weeks back.  It was one of those nights of incremental movement in my light and not necessarily anything big.  The big two things were that I was able to push up Hawksaw from 293 to 296 and my Sol Edge from 296 to 298 making me extremely happy in both cases.  With the focus on secondary weapons for my exotic slot, now that I have both Telesto and Invective I also robbed my Hunter and got my favorite version of the Zarinaea-D Auto Rifle to replace my Fabian Strategy that I am apparently going to shelve.  I mostly liked the Fabian for the survival that it granted me… and I really notice it when I am not using it.

Armsday

Fun with Squirrels Fun with Squirrels Fun with Squirrels Fun with Squirrels Fun with Squirrels

It’s Wednesday, which means its Armsday… otherwise known as the…  I can’t remember what I ordered so for the love of god get these packages out of my inventory day.  Last week I put in orders for pretty much everything and you can see my actual picks above in the image gallery.  This is the first time I have actually used an image gallery so… hopefully no strangeness happens with my blog layout as a result.  Of these honestly… the only one I can really see myself using is the Judith-D hand canon and maybe one of the pulse rifles.  The Auto Rifle is pretty much guaranteed to turn into legendary marks because it has next to no impact.  As far as the shotgun goes… I have an invective and the ability to give all of my characters an invective… why would you use any other shot gun?  In all seriousness I am probably going to eat my 4th Horseman and give an Invective to my Hunter, because having a shotgun that regenerates ammunition auto-magically is a pretty spectacular thing.  The only thing that I really need to round out my special weapon options is the damned Black Spindle…  and next time it comes up I am probably going to pester Squirrel and Carth to make several attempts at getting it.  I want that damned thing so badly, and similarly I am hoping we see a return of the Firewall mission required to get the Sleeper Stimulant as well at the beginning of November.

The thing that excites me the most about this Armsday is not necessarily the weapons I got this week… but instead my hope for weapons next week.  For ages I have been hearing about how amazing the Suros Ari-45 Auto Rifle is… and it has now appeared as one of the packages for next week.  I’ve put in at least two of these orders, one on the Titan and one on the Hunter… and it would be pretty great if I managed to get my Warlock up to 38 this week and be able to put in another order on him.  I have a feeling like the Zarinaea-D it is going to be one of those weapons that I would love to have multiple copies of.  My only fear however is that maybe just maybe the hype surrounding this weapon is not going to live up to my expectations.  I have very specific tastes in weapons, and it is as much about the “feel” for me as it is the actual stats.  I like the Zarinaea-D because I love the “feel” of it… sure it is a laser beam of accuracy.. and packs a decent punch with good sights, but the sound is really what makes me love that weapon.  I have been running around with a version of the Suros Ari-45 on my Warlock as I level him, and while it is cool and a fun weapon to use… it is no Zarinaea-D.

 

 

 

 

Fives

Someone I used to work with used the “fives” metaphor for MMOs, though I’ve also heard it as “eights”. Basically, you need an answer to the question of “what is the player doing in five seconds?” “five minutes?” “five hours?” “five days?” “five weeks?” “five months?”. I think MMOs do some of these better than others. Five seconds is a combat moment, it’s that cool combo you pull off, that timely stun, that charged-up finisher. We’re pretty good at those in the hotbar space, but we’re still figuring them out in the more action-driven spaces. Five minutes is a quest step, or a few fights. It’s you scoping out a mob camp and figuring out how to take it on, or putting together something you’re crafting. Five hours is a level or two, or a zone, or collecting materials for an epic crafting pursuit. Each of these are like wheels, things that may turn multiple times in each five-[whatever] increment, enough to see the entire arc of gameplay in that block a few times.

Fives

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It starts to get a bit blurry after that. As more MMOs have come out, we’ve seen the levelling pace speed up. World of Warcraft has a lot to do with this. One of the things that WoW gave us was lots of people at max level, one of the first MMOs to really allow this. At WoW’s release, it took mere months to get to level 60; now it takes a few days. It’s set a breakneck levelling pace that other games have to at least appear to match, or feel painfully slow and dull by comparison. Now, five weeks is a max-level character, if it even takes that long. Five days for the most dedicated. I don’t think we even answer the “five months” question anymore; I can’t think of a game that gives me projects that take five months to accomplish anymore.

Other games do this as well. Very few talk about “weeks” or “months”; most non-MMO games don’t even pretend that people play them that long. 30 hours is a long time; 10-12 is more common. I put about 20-30 hours into Infamous: Second Son, and someone who worked on the game said that was a surprisingly long time. Very few games go past that 10-12 hour mark. I think it’s something of a sweet spot. As the average gamer age goes up further, games that absorb huge amounts of time are less popular. It might take the average player weeks to get through a 10-15 hour game, whereas earlier in their lives that represented a small chunk of a weekend, and they might have even gone to hang out with friends that same day.

Still, games keep an eye on those time blocks, and what you’re doing in them. Depending on who you talk to, they’re often referred to as “core gameplay loops”, which cover everything from a single button combo (sometimes called “moment-to-moment” gameplay) to an entire guild working together to build a city. If you have a game that feels weirdly unsatisfying, or that you like to play in short bursts but no longer than that, it’s usually because longer core gameplay loops aren’t supported. You’re hooked for five seconds, and five minutes, but maybe not five hours, and certainly not longer than that.

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A few games that make me think of this concept: EvE Online has absolutely captivating five-day, five-week, and five month loops, but it can feel a bit aimless in five hours and I find the five-minute and five-second gameplay loops boring and unengaging. Guild Wars 2 has a pretty compelling five-second loop and a very solid five-minute loop, but starts to fall apart for me at the five-hour and five-day loops, before picking up again at the weeks/months level, when you’re talking about forging legendary items and the other various long-term progression paths.

I say all of this and keep coming back to that five hour play loop. It feels like a lot of games fall apart here, where the thing you’re doing in that span of time feels a little underwhelming. In a lot of MMOs, that’s about the timeframe in which you’re going back to town to sell and repair a few times, maybe find and equip some upgrades. In a fighting game, that’s about the loop for a campaign playthrough. It’s a Chapter in Call of Duty, or a handful of quests in Borderlands. There’s not often a lot to think about in that loop, just keep spinning the smaller loops as you work towards the bigger ones.

I remember a game that had a cycle at that scale. Star Wars Galaxies would ask you to go back to town and hang out at cantinas, get patched up by doctors, and otherwise rest over long periods of time out in the field. It wasn’t the most robust of systems, but it was about as well-integrated as a lot of the other systems in the game and gave shape to larger play sessions. Fallout, on Hardcore mode, will ask you to eat and find water to drink. It’s a kind of sustenance that you need to do a bit of work for, a sense of long-term planning that ties the very short term and the very long term goals together and is visible, unlike the usual “whoops, my gear is broken, time to talk to a repair guy” concept.

Fives

It’s a little thing that adds a bit of depth and forethought to the game, or can in theory do so. We don’t see a lot of it anymore, and I think it has a lot to do with our shift away from games as worlds and more towards games as narrative experiences. Minecraft certainly has loops from five seconds to five days, for example, whereas I don’t think most MMOs do anymore; they’ve compressed things down into “dailies” that don’t really offer a longer-term core loop, or try to turn the same series of quests into a single loop that you do each day, with a reward once you’ve done them enough times. There’s no planning taking place there, just logging in and doing.

The whole thing is an exercise I do a lot when playing games. I take a close look at what I’m doing at each of the “fives” and see which ones are strong and which aren’t. It’s yet another angle to consider and analyze games from. Food for thought.