DAW2016: Final Day

DAW2016: Final Day

Developer Appreciation Week is here!  For the uninitiated the concept of Developer Appreciation week dates back to 2010 and was started by Couture Gaming the Blogger formerly known as Scarybooster.  The idea was simple, spend a week talking about all of the things you love about various game development companies and studios.  As a blogger we spend plenty of time pointing out what is wrong in the games we love, and talking about ways that they could be better.  That said it is important to understand that for most of us this critique comes from being a huge fan of the games and genres as a whole.  So during this week we point out the things that are going right and make a point of mentioning all the things we really appreciate out there.  If you too are a blogger please feel free to join in by posting your own Developer Appreciation Week ideas.

The Roundup

Today draws to a close this years Developer Appreciation Week and there are always more things that need to be talked about than there was time to do so.  During the week I wrote about five different studios.  Some of them were pretty pointed discussions, and others were just nostalgic romps.  What is always left at the end of the week however are a bunch more than I COULD have talked about. So the purpose of today’s post is to recap where I have been this week and do a few shorter blurbs.  Here is the rundown of studios discussed this week.

Now here are some topics that ultimately got left on the cutting room floor for lack of time.

Bethesda Softworks / Zenimax Media

Ultimately had I not taken a break for a day this would have been the missing topic.  I have this huge love for Bethesda games in their own right, but over the years they also snatched up iD software and became a third party publisher for amazing studios like Arkane.  The root of my love however comes from the modern Fallout and Elder Scrolls Franchises.  These are games that I can lose myself in for hundreds of hours and still feel like I have not even begun to scratch the surface on what there is to see.  There are so many times in the past where I have lost entire weekends to exploring Tamriel or the burnt out husk of the Capitol Wasteland.  I will also always have a soft spot in my heart for Elder Scrolls Online, since it feels like I have a closer connection to that title than most.  It has made me pretty happy to see that the game is now thriving after a pretty rough start.

Larian Studios

I love this company, in spite of the fact that they have seemed horribly confused as to what sort of game company they actually wanted to be.  They have this world that is amazing, and each game they have released has told a piece of the story of its background.  The only confusing part is that each game for the most part has been in a vastly different genre.  You have Divine Divinity which was originally a Diablo style game… and then the follow up Divinity II which has a very Elder Scrolls/Dragon Age type feel to it.  Then there is Dragon Commander which is this strange 4X mixed with RTS elements.  Finally you have Divinity: Original Sin that feels like the game they always had been meaning to create.  The title is so insanely content dense that I have trouble actually making any progress because I keep finding something else that is interesting to check out.  In the very first town it felt like every single NPC had some interesting backstory to delve into.  I just love that a game company is out there trying to create all of these different game types, and for the most part succeeding at it.  I have thoroughly enjoyed every single Larian game that I have set my hands on, and look forward to playing more in the future.

Supergiant Games

This company makes some really amazingly detailed and well crafted games.  Bastion had so much going on, from the physical mechanics of gameplay… to the amazing running narration.  I was also a huge fan of the soundtrack and have spent many an hour with it running in the background.  When Transistor came out, I was shocked that I loved everything about that game even more.  We have devoted at least three podcasts where we have gushed about Transistor, and how well written the story was…  which combined amazingly with the soundtrack and gameplay.  Now Supergiant has a brand new game that they showed at Pax East called Pyre.  At first look it doesn’t exactly seem to be my sort of game, but I know from past experience that if they have crafted it…  then chances are I will ultimately love it too.  I am amazed how they can seem to do it every time… build this completely unique experience that I still love just as much as their others.

Gearbox

This company comes with some baggage.  I unequivocally love the Borderlands series of games.  It has such amazing characters and writing, and manages to pull off a sort of self aware comedy that is extremely hard to do in a game.  Most “comedic games” fall short, and end up not quite translating into actual humor.  Borderlands has mastered the art of telling a real story while making me go into full on belly laughs at times. This in itself wouldn’t been all that amazing, but it is on top of a really damned solid shooter.  When I first heard the concept of “Diablo with Guns” I was not 100% sure I would be sold.  However playing the first Borderlands I was completely bought into the concept, and then Borderlands 2 came after improving quite literally everything.  Now I am not sure if I am sold on the notion of Battleborn, but I am giving it a shot because of the pedigree and some of the single player videos remind me a lot of the things I loved from Battleborn.  Now when I say the company has some baggage…. this is also the studio that released Duke Nukem Forever and Aliens: Colonial Marines.  I am just hoping that Battleborn ends up feeling more Borderlands… and doesn’t add to the detractor column.

Bungie

I feel like I have to write about Bungie, but I also didn’t really feel like I had enough ammunition to really do a full post.  I was never a Halo player.  I never owned an Xbox, and when I played the PC port it didn’t feel all that amazing as compared to the game I was super into at that time Unreal II: The Awakening.  I feel like Microsoft did a massive disservice by keeping a strangle hold on the Halo franchise, and does to this very day.  However when I first saw Destiny… I knew this was going to be a game for me.  In fact this was the game that ultimately made me buy my PS4 and learn how to play a shooter with a controller.  While the game didn’t really grab me and keep me during year one… year two and the Taken King expansion have been amazing.  I love this game so much and over the course of the last few months it is really my primary game.  While I loved the Diablo 3 season launch last night, there was a little part of me that would have rather been playing Iron Banner in Destiny.  The game has its hooks in me hard, and it really has become this perfect package of game play feel, with a reward system that makes it feel like my time spent was worth it.  Seriously bravo to Bungie for the creation of this game… the only thing that could make it better is if it released on the PC as well.

 

DAW2016: Square Enix

DAW2016: Square Enix

Developer Appreciation Week is here!  For the uninitiated the concept of Developer Appreciation week dates back to 2010 and was started by Couture Gaming the Blogger formerly known as Scarybooster.  The idea was simple, spend a week talking about all of the things you love about various game development companies and studios.  As a blogger we spend plenty of time pointing out what is wrong in the games we love, and talking about ways that they could be better.  That said it is important to understand that for most of us this critique comes from being a huge fan of the games and genres as a whole.  So during this week we point out the things that are going right and make a point of mentioning all the things we really appreciate out there.  If you too are a blogger please feel free to join in by posting your own Developer Appreciation Week ideas.

DAW2016: Square Enix

I knew sooner or later I would end up needing to do Square Enix because at various times during my life they played a huge role in shaping how I looked at games.  Lets go back to a time and a place where the only gaming news I got was through Nintendo Power magazine.  In one of those issues I was first introduced to a game called Final Fantasy.  For ages I had been looking for the personification of Dungeons and Dragons in game form, and while the gold box games did a decent job of doing just that… there was always something missing.  Final Fantasy bridged the gap and gave me precisely that, along with a story line that made me care about all of the dungeon crawling.  I remember being so insanely excited when I went to a nearby Walmart and they had this game in stock.  The only negative was that within a short few days I would be heading to Boy Scout camp for an entire week.  While I normally loved camp, this was quite possibly the most miserable week of camp I have ever experienced.  All that I really wanted to be doing was playing Final Fantasy from the comfort of my bedroom… and instead I was making campfires, and hiking up sharp flint rock strewn paths.  When I finally got home, firing up that Nintendo and playing Final Fantasy was quite literally the best feeling ever.  Regardless of how exhausted I was from a week of camp, I still ended up pulling an all nighter and getting through that damned Marsh cave.

When Final Fantasy 2 was released… aka Final Fantasy IV for the rest of the world… it once again dominated my life for a period of time.  I was completely blown away by the graphics at the time, and also amazed at how much more complex the story line of that game was.  This was also the point at which I learned the hard lesson of save at every single save point, because of a bad mishap with the Magus Sisters.  The game also introduced the term “Spoony Bard” into my vocabulary and for that I will always be grateful.  This was also the first game that gave me characters I had no interest in playing…  I am looking at you Edward and your inability to do any real damage.  The game also gave my quite possibly my favorite goofy archetype of character…  the Dragoon, with its amazing but also sometimes frustrating jump attack.  I was completely hooked on the notion of having this huge cast of characters that I could switch between at will…  but then ultimately only ever seemed to play with the same party ever.  For the most part that party was Cecil, Rydia, Kain, Rosa, and Edge… with that last spot being highly variable as I went through the play session.  This is really something I do even today when I play for example a Bioware game.  In Dragon Age Inquisition, my party is pretty much permanently Cassandra, Dorian, Sera and my character.

It wasn’t until High School that Final Fantasy 3 was released…  or Final Fantasy VI for the rest of the world.  I remember it coming out around Christmas break and at first I rented it…  which was a truly dumb idea given that the Super Nintendo didn’t have memory cards.  The main reason for this was because the game itself was something stupid like $85 when it released, which was an awful lot of my limited resources at the time.  However after a few days of playing the game I was making a trek to the big city to try and find a copy.  After searching a dozen different stores I finally found a copy at Target, and much to my shock it was on sale for only $65.  I am not sure exactly sure what it is about Final Fantasy VI, but for whatever reason I think this game will always be my favorite.  I tend to love games that pull a bait and switch on me, when you think you are nearing the end of the game… only to realize that the world just got much larger and instead of being nearly done… I was just barely starting.   I also have a soft spot for a lot of the characters in this game, because it managed to make me feel things that video games had not really succeeded in doing up to this point.  Ashgar and I have had a conversation about this… and for me the game that did all of these things was Final Fantasy V.  However for me… that game was not available and didn’t even receive a fan translation until I was well into college.  The two games do a lot of the same things, I just happened to experience six first.

Over the years there has been a string of Final Fantasy titles always in my life, and several non-FF series games that I loved as well.  For example I love beyond love Vagrant Story, and I remember playing the hell out of it when it came out on the PSX.  I also spent more than my fair share of time playing Chrono Trigger, and the subsequent follow up games.  Then there are games that I wish would get a reboot like Parasite Eve that were so amazing for the time in which they came out.  Essentially there has always been some Square Enix game somewhere in my life, be it Bravely Default that I am slowly working my way through on my 3DS downstairs on my bedside table, or the Kingdom Hearts collection I have sitting beside my PS3 ready to start in earnest.  All of these are in fact great experiences, but the one I feel like I really need to talk about is the miraculous rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV.  This game was released in 2010 and was essentially universally despised.  I remember getting into the beta for it and finding it just largely uninteresting more than anything.  I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t really feel anything about it.  So I was more than happy to return to World of Warcraft, and forget that the game existed.

However in August of 2013 the game relaunched as A Realm Reborn, and I have to say I was shocked at just how much I liked the title.  We played for a handful of months until our group ran out of content that we could realistically complete.  Then July of 2014 I decided to fire the game up again, because I wanted to see how it had progressed in our absence.  Final Fantasy XIV was one of those games that our group left on good terms.  What I found waiting on me was this rich cache of content that laid untapped.  Over the next several months we had what could only be termed as a renaissance of MMO gaming all centered around this game.  I was happy to raid once again, and happy to be doing pretty much all of the tropes of a MMORPG.  What made all the difference was the loving way in which this game was being crafted.  I have to give huge shouts to the localization team and namely Koji Fox.  Final Fantasy XIV is so amazingly well written and is packed full of more feels than most games ever manage to muster.  There is content that will make you painfully belly laugh, and other times infuriate you for all of the right reasons.  Then there are moments that will make you cry… and there are certain cut scenes in this game that even the mere thought of will summon up the waterworks.

While I am currently on a break from the game after burning myself out again with the launch of Heavensward, I know sooner or later I will return and be happy to do so.  Heavensward was quite possibly the expansion I have looked forward to the most from any MMORPG that I have played, since maybe the launch of Trials of Atlantis in Dark Age of Camelot.  Unfortunately much like ToA…  I got my expectations up way too high, and the content drought that followed the launch ultimately ended up with me stopping playing.  However as a couple of patches have built up for me, I plan on returning soon…  probably after I get the upcoming Diablo 3 season out of my system.  I am happy to know that there is still a very thriving guild presence in this game waiting on me.  I have a feeling that sooner or later we will all return for yet another renaissance of MMO gaming and when it happens… it will be in huge part to just how great Final Fantasy XIV turned out.

Lucky Banana

Strange Dream

Lucky Banana

This morning I am opting to make a more traditional blog post rather than an other DAW post because…  well the DAW posts take a lot out of me.  It takes a lot of effort to summon up this hardcore reminiscing, and after doing four of them, I need to take a day off.  I am sure I will return tomorrow with another segment.  Though it seems like not that many people are joining in, and it was a little disheartening the other day when a friend of mine called it a marketing gimmick.  In truth we forgot about it this year, and I felt that it was bad that we forgot about it.  Normally speaking this thing is supposed to happen during the last week of March, but instead I rescheduled it to happen the last week of April because I didn’t want a year to go by without this thing happening.  I feel it is important for us as players to remember that the games we often complain about… are made by actual human beings who just want to do a good job.  So it only seems fitting to spread a little love around during a single week in the year.  I don’t really get anything out of doing it, and I am certain Scarybooster didn’t when he first started doing the event back in 2010.  So if it is a marketing gimmick it is a piss poor design.

I’ve been pretty sick over the last few days, a combination of allergies and asthma, so last night I decided that I really needed to turn in early and get a full nights sleep.  I had a really strange dream as a result and I can only assume it is due to me not exactly being all here right now.  So I had this dream that I was being thrown a birthday party, but instead it was all of my internet friends.  There is a lot of the dream I am already forgetting but there were some really strange moments.  For example my friend Tam that I record AggroChat with, had this circa 1980s Lisa Frank folder with a rainbow colored tiger on it… and inside he had written on big chief notepad paper…  these summaries of different pen and paper character archetypes.  For some reason Markiplier was there, which I found odd because I only really know of him from various Pax panels.  He ended up getting me a gift called a “Cat Tether” which is supposed to be I guess like a cat leash?  The box looked like it came from the as seen on television aisle at Walgreens.  The rest of the dream is pretty fuzzy but I thought it was strange enough that it was worth writing about.  In any case I feel more rested this morning and feeling a little less horrible, so I guess it worked?

Iron Banana

Lucky Banana

The other reason why I wanted to take a day off from DAW is that I want to talk about the current Iron Banner.  Largely I want to talk about it… while there is still enough time to people to get into Destiny and participate.  In the past loot from Iron Banner felt like it was few and far between, but it seems like Bungie cranked the switch up to 11.  On average it felt like every three to four matches I was getting a piece of legendary gear.  This week the items up for grabs are boots, class items, Tormod’s Bellows Rocket Launcher, and Haakon’s Hatchet a bullet hose type Auto Rifle.  The loot that you get as drops seems to be limited to these four items that are available.  From the moment you hit rank 1, aka after your first match/bounty turn in you seem to be able to get either the Class Armor or Boots.  When you hit rank 3 the weapons start dropping, and I got my first Hatchet from that next match after hitting the rank.  The rank 3 package sadly is only a 320 artifact, which isn’t all that good for infusion, however all of the items that you end up getting are.  For most of the matches I have been sitting between 327-330 depending on my weapon loadout, and all of my gear so far has been 332-334 with sadly no 335s as of yet.

Lucky Banana

Over the course of my matches so far I have managed to get four Auto Rifles, six boots, six titan marks, and a single rocket launcher.  Now the dropped variants have wildly differing rolls, but I managed to latch onto one that wasn’t too horrible and have been using it for most of the banner.  Hip Fire sadly is useless on an Auto Rifle, but the other stats on this one are pretty great.  Right now I am a little over half of the way to Rank 5, and the goal is to buy the vendor roll which is phenomenal and infuse this 334 into it.  The vendor rolls for pretty much everything are really good this time a round, and if I actually cared about rocket launchers I might consider picking that one up.  If I ever use a rocket launcher I am going to use Truth for the tracking ability, because I suck at using rocket launchers.  Other things I have figured out, is that 330 seems to be the current cap for faction packages, because during the course of the last few weeks I have turned in a ton of Future War Cult, Vanguard and Crucible packages… and essentially everything I have gotten stopped at 330.  The funniest thing is that the last three Crucible packages have all rewarded me the exact same primary scout rifle The Saterienne Rapier, one of which was worth holding onto because it had hidden hand and explosive rounds… however the bulk have served as infusion fodder allowing me to bring up weapons I will actually use more often.  As far as Scout Rifles go… I am most likely to use my brand new Hand of Judgement that I pulled out of Challenge of Elders this week.

 

DAW2016: Bioware

DAW2016: Bioware

Developer Appreciation Week is here!  For the uninitiated the concept of Developer Appreciation week dates back to 2010 and was started by Couture Gaming the Blogger formerly known as Scarybooster.  The idea was simple, spend a week talking about all of the things you love about various game development companies and studios.  As a blogger we spend plenty of time pointing out what is wrong in the games we love, and talking about ways that they could be better.  That said it is important to understand that for most of us this critique comes from being a huge fan of the games and genres as a whole.  So during this week we point out the things that are going right and make a point of mentioning all the things we really appreciate out there.  If you too are a blogger please feel free to join in by posting your own Developer Appreciation Week ideas.

DAW2016: Bioware

This is going to be a difficult one to tackle, especially since I didn’t get a ton of sleep thanks to the tornado warnings.  However I am going to give it to good college try, and hope that the end result turns out at least not too shabby.  I first became aware as Bioware as a company with the release of Baldur’s Gate, or more so the existence of what I later came to know as the “Infinity Engine”.  I have been a fan of Dungeons and Dragons since I first found a players manual abandoned in a locker on the last day of school in second grade.  Finding that book spawned a lot of things, not the least of which was trying to hungrily gobble up anything TSR related.  I played the “gold box” series of games, namely because I had read the novels behind a lot of the stories.  There was just something missing with the game, and while I enjoyed them at the time they never really felt that good.  The story that was being told felt limited by the meager technology, and while I was happy enough with the end product…  that only lasted until I had played my first Final Fantasy game.  Baldur’s Gate was the title that brought me back from my console days into once again believing that the PC was a great platform for role-playing games.

Subsequent games were released…  Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate II and even one of my all time favorites… Planescape Torment… all using this “Infinity Engine” I have to admit I got a bit of the wrong idea behind what exactly the company Bioware really was.  In my mind it seemed like Bioware was the tools company, and Interplay, Black Isle, or later the reboot Obsidian were the game creator.  It wasn’t until Neverwinter Nights was released that I really started to understand that Bioware was both the tools division and a lot of great storytelling wrapped into one package.  Neverwinter Nights was one of those revolutionary games for me personally.  While the original campaign was awesome… it was the inclusion of the aurora toolset that set my mind on fire.  At this time I was playing a lot of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot so I tried to replicate some of my favorite features of those games using the Neverwinter engine.  I learned the C Script language and figured out how to code things like randomly generated loot from tables when you opened chests or killed mobs.  I also eventually figured out how to create a token based system along the lines of the one that allowed you to purchase armor in the Darkness Falls dungeon.  The end result was this amalgam of the EQ Plane of Hate and DAoC Darkness Falls that I called the “Plane of Spite”.  While I never did anything really interesting with it, I loved every single moment of working on it and figuring out the inner machinations of this engine.

It was not really until Knights of the Old Republic that I hopped back on the Bioware fandom, and I remember being crushingly disappointed when I learned that the title was going to be Xbox Exclusive.  Thankfully later that year it came out for the PC and I was absolutely thrilled to be dissecting that game world as well.  I loved Neverwinter Nights for its technical precision, and the Aurora and Infinity engines for giving me this awesome framework to go out and explore worlds in.  However KOTOR was the first time from Bioware that I was completely stunned by the storyline.  Last week we went into a discussion on AggroChat about the best Star Wars stories, and by the end of that show all of us pretty much came to the consensus that Knights of the Old Republic was if not the absolute best story, it was at least among them.  There are moments in this game that had shocking revelations that I have never quite recovered from.  Even though the engine is dated, and the graphics look like crap compared to what I am used to… I can still play this game happily over and over just because it was so damned well crafted.  I’ve bought it for others, and even own the mobile port of the game.  I feel like this game more than any set the tone for the modern incarnation of Bioware.

I ultimately for one reason or another skilled Mass Effect at launch, and instead picked up the Bioware banner once again with the release of Dragon Age: Origins.  During this period of time I was raiding in World of Warcraft rabidly… but there were a few weeks where I completely dropped off the face of the planet, and it was thanks to this game.  I was just completely enthralled with the world and the setting, and the concept of the dark spawn and deep roads.  I am a Dwarf at heart, so I loved every single moment of Orzammar.  My first play through was as a Dwarven Noble, and I have to say after all of the subsequent play sessions that is still the one I cherish the most.  Much the same as KOTOR, it was ultimately the characters that set this game apart from the others I had played.  They felt so fleshed out and three dimensional, and I actually cared about interacting with them.  I am a huge proponent of smashing things with a big weapon, and games that allow me to slaughter by the hundreds… but it is significantly harder to find a game that makes me feel.  Dragon Age made me feel so much, and during this time I had a really interesting encounter.  One of my guildies invited me to tank for some friends of his, and when I popped onto voice chat we had some of the usual getting to know a new person discussion.  I mentioned that I had been playing a ton of Dragon Age… and it was at this point that they started grilling me about this character or that, or what decision I made where.  It turns out that I was ultimately raiding that night with a bunch of the writers, and you could almost hear them beaming as they proudly chimed in that they wrote this or that as I gushed about various details.

With the release of Mass Effect 2, I later went back and became an addict of that series as well.  I still wish that someone would make that into a Walking Dead style serialized television show, because the story that is being told is among the best science fiction tales ever.  It just seems a crime that the only folks that will ever see the story, are the ones who have played through the game.  Then you of course have the release of Star Wars the Old Republic, that my friends and I tore through rabidly when it launched.  I burnt myself out on that game but recently a bunch of us ended up going back and remembering just how damned well written all of the story arcs really are.  At some point soon I want to go back and finish where I left off which is the start of the Revan content, and try out the new experience fallen empire content that I have heard so much about.  For sake of time though I am going to wrap things up, because otherwise I could probably carry on for a dozen more paragraphs talking about all of the things from Bioware games that I love.  It is a great studio, and while I was scared that EA would destroy its spirit… I have been pleasantly surprised that the core values of the company and the creative might seem to keep trucking along happily.  I look forward to more adventures be it with Andromedia or the next great IP that we have yet to experience.