I spent a significant amount of my weekend playing Marvel’s Avengers, and this morning I am going to talk about it. Last week I talked a bit about my initial impressions of the launch and getting my hands on the full game, and this morning you are going to get more of a 30 hours in view. Lets start off with a statement that I think folks are probably trying to sort out, and that is is this a must buy game? I can give you an unequivocal no. That does not mean it is a bad game or an un-enjoyable game, but I would never throw this on a list of must experience games ever. If you have limited funds and even more limited time, then you can probably safely give this game a pass for now.
Marvel’s Avengers by Crystal Dynamics is an attempt to take the huge stable of Marvel Comics characters and convert them into a reoccurring service game. The thing is… I have a soft spot for this concept because I loved Marvel Heroes the now long dead Diablo-like game from Gazillion. Really to be truthful I just want that game back, but unfortunately that isn’t in the cards. What you have with Marvel Avengers is a somewhat generic albeit competent hero brawler that sets itself in the general mission structure of a Destiny Strike. You take control of one of the heroes, drop into a “War Zone”, complete a sequence of scripted objectives, and win some loot in the process.
Where the game shines however is in the story content. That is the piece that Destiny never really got right. The first ten to twelve hours of gameplay are spent following a sequence of content through what is effectively the heroes journey of Kamala Khan, aka Ms Marvel. She goes from fangirl to glue that holds the team together and becomes a powerful hero in her own right. I personally think that it is worth the price of admission just to experience this story, but I also buy way more games than the average person so my barrier of entry is somewhat low. The story is essentially a “getting the band back together” experience, as you spend your time effectively rallying the troops. The events of “A Day” caused not only the world to lose faith in the Avengers but for them to lose faith in each other.
After the main story arc is finished, the story continues on a little bit further as you are asked to help Shield and the Inhumans on some side content. I am now working through the last bit of that, which I believe unlocks a new bit of story content. It should be known that I am playing entirely solo and in that mode the game includes a bunch of NPC Avengers to come help you complete missions. However based on my reading and watching of content, it seems like the Single Player and Multiplayer experiences are effectively the same with the insert of more humans rather than bots. Now we are going to get into one of the bad aspects of the game.
While you play through the story it feels like you are visiting a number of fairly unique set pieces. However once you enter the less directed Warzone play portion of the game, you quickly realize that there are something in the neighborhood of a half dozen maps in which every bit content takes place. Sure an individual Warzone might shuffle the elements, but you are going to memorize a good number of the venues quickly. The other challenge is that the mission lengths seem to vary wildly from dropping down a fighting a single elite pack to being lead through a sequence of five or six things. I am sure once I have memorized what every mission entails this will feel a little less weird, but for right now it feels a little jarring and makes it very hard to guesstimate how long something is going to take.
During the mission you do a lot of head hopping between multiple characters, but once I was given control I’ve spent the vast majority of my post story game time playing Captain America, who was my main in Marvel Heroes. As of last night I have hit the level cap of 50, which is the point at which you unlock all of your talent points, and I have my power level up to 136. Based on what I am hearing the power level cap is 150, which is achieved through wearing a full set of 130 yellow gear that you then upgrade to 140 with materials. The last 10 points is gained through the Major Artifact which serves as this games equivalent to the Destiny seasonal artifact and will give you those last 10 points.
I am certain at this point that there will be a limited number of things that will give me light levels… sorry I mean power levels. This very much follows the Destiny template, and it is a grind that I am deeply familiar with. The biggest challenge here however is that there just doesn’t feel like there is a lot of meaningful content to be grinding. Each faction gives you a daily mission to take down a boss, but as of right now there are 2 villains comic book villains in the game and 2 AIM mega robots that you can fight. Combine that with the six or so available map types, and the experience gets to feeling really repetitive really quickly. My hope is that we get a pretty rapid cadence of content drops, because at the moment the content available is feeling fairly threadbare.
At the moment I have spent the most time playing Cap and Kamala, but a close third would be Thor. They all command sufficiently differently to make them interesting, but after having ground Cap to 50… it seems like a big ask to grind them ALL to 50. For reference I had all of the heroes above level 5 by the time I finished the story and I believe had cap to around 15 and Kamala to around 10. So suffice to say that the story is not going to get you anywhere near the level cap, and if you want to do this thing it is going to involve a lot of grinding warzones. The levels come rapidly enough, but at this point I think I am around 30 hours into the game and just now have my first character to 50.
Marvel’s Avengers has some good bones, but I guess time will tell if this turns into a really great game or not. The story is solid and as I said before for me personally that was worth the price of entry. I just question if there is enough there in order to keep players engaged between now and when new content drops. The challenge cards I think were designed to be more of a thing than they really feel like, because you can progress them extremely slowly each day and they ask you to play in a very specific fashion to get that progress. I wish you could effectively grind your way through them, that every activity would add a little bit of progress.
So I spent my weekend playing Avengers, but in my heart I was just wishing that I could be playing New World.
The post Avengers After the Story appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start the show off with a bit of a retraction. Bel has found out that a lot of the weird mouse and camera interactions seem to have been caused by running RTX Voice while playing Avengers. As a result Bel talks about his experiences playing Avengers and how the story really shines but the gameplay is adequate but not as smooth as it could be. From there we talk about using things for alternate purposes, primarily how good cosmetic items work for hobbies. We talk a little bit about the phenomena that is Fall Guys and both how charming it is and how bizarrely it has lit the streaming world on fire. Finally we wrap up with a long discussion about Crusader Kings III and the story generator that it is.
Hey Folks! There is a thing that I occasionally do on my blog where I run down what I have been playing lately. There are games that I spend time in that don’t necessarily make it to the level of writing about. Regularly Playing has always served as a time for me to update the good ole sidebar of the blog and talk about the things that I am spending time exploring. It is also a time for me to push aside the games that for whatever reason I am just not that into right now. You have a lot of games that make their way back into the rotation, so when I say goodbye it is very rarely forever.
In theory this is a thing that I intend to do every month… but we are living in this time where it still feels like it SHOULD by all rights be March. I think this is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” because it feels like we are all still very much on pause waiting for things to improve. I expect a significant amount of shake up given that it has been a little over two months since my last update.
To Those Remaining
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Oh Diablo, my sweet Diablo… I can’t ever seem to quit you. This game probably spends the most time on this list, especially now that it exists in switch form. While I am finished with the current PC season, I do still fairly regularly pop it open from bed on the switch and chip away at the achievements there. What can I say that I have not already said a dozen times. I just hope I like Diablo IV even half as much as I love Diablo III.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
Oh precious baby, you are hanging by a thread. I’ve been back a bit of late for the Yo-Kai watch event, but even that has mostly just been something to do while watching something on television. I know there is a whole new story arc that I need to play through since the 5.3 patch has landed finally. I will do that at some point but I am just not overly excited about Final Fantasy XIV right now. I wish I was because it truly is a wonderful game, but I am not sure what changed in me that struggles to latch onto the MMORPG gameplay experience for very long. I find myself being a strict soloist in the MMO space right now, and as a result I never quite fully buy into the good aspects of the culture and the gameplay offerings. I wish I could get over my fear of doing content with other human beings that I seem to have developed.
World of Warcraft – Retail and Beta – PC
I am not what you would call actively playing this game, but every so often I decide to poke my head in and work on leveling some of my alts. During this lull in the expansion I have leveled one of everything horde side by the Shaman, Priest and Rogue. I’ve been most recently working on the Shaman who is in Pandaria and I believe a few levels away from 100? This is often times the character that I play while we are podcasting, or if I am watching some show because World of Warcraft requires a bare minimum of interactivity to play it on the level I am playing it. I still get a stupid amount of enjoyment from its simple mechanics and my ability to just turn my brain off and rely entirely upon muscle memory.
To The New and Returning
Avengers – PC
I super did not expect to be playing this game right now. I had a lot of issues early on with it, but it turns out that I was more or less bit in the butt by my own shenanigans. There are still some minor issues of mouse and camera not exactly working in the way that I would prefer but it is extremely playable and the story is really solid. In fact I think at this point I am mostly playing because the story is extremely enjoyable. The game hits a deep uncanny valley at times because I think they are trying to shoot halfway between the more traditional comic appearance of the characters and that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve gotten used to it however and once I did the story being told has become pure joy.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS4
I have been on a bit of a single player narrative game kick of late, and I have been playing a significant amount of Ghosts of Tsushima. I’ve not made it past the first part of the game, because I keep roaming around and killing baddies. I am more or less following the Samurai path where I present a challenge and then proceed to whittle down the rest of the masses after taking out their strongest. I love this game a lot, and the only thing that would have made it better is if I were playing on the PC with a Mouse and Keyboard. I’ve been a bit distracted the last week or so, but I am hoping over the extended weekend that I can return to this and keep moving forward.
Hades – PC
I am not entirely certain that this game has ever made the list, but I have had it in my arsenal for awhile now. I have a deep love for the types of games that Supergiant creates. Even when I don’t mechanically enjoy the game like was the case with Pyre, I really appreciate the story that is being told. Hades is effectively a blend of Diablo and a Rogue Lite game and involves escaping from the underworld, and powering yourself along the way to make that possible. It is a game or repetition because you are absolutely going to die over and over and over in your journey, each time starting back at the start and each time carrying some progress along with you. This has been in early access but we are starting to near an official launch, so I have been playing it again in anticipation. Really solid game.
New World – PC
I’ve not participated in two test events of New World and I am super happy to finally be able to start talking about it. The last long preview event that is wrapping up I believe today had no NDA and as a result I have been able to openly discuss it on the blog. As it stands I am so ready for this game to launch and to start being able to play it in earnest. I am hoping the next event is an Open Beta so that folks who did not pre-order can give it a shot and see if it works for them. This is definitely the type of game that I am going to want to find an active company to play in, and that does not mean that I am sold on the notion of leading one. I’m good at recruiting people, but I don’t seem to be good at keeping people engaged… myself included. So more than likely I will be looking for a company to join that would be open to any friends that I have who are also interested.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch
This is going to be a bit of a generic heading because I have been poking around in a lot of “retro games”. The thing is… I find it weird calling these game retro, because they are from my childhood. It is moments like this that I remember just how damned old I am at this point. Whatever you want to call them I have been back on a kick of trying to get my closet full of older systems and cartridges up and running on modern display technology. I’ve also purchased a Retro Freak console, which allows me to do a bunch of nifty things including dump rom and save games from cartridges and apply translation patches on the fly. The next project is to try and get my Neo Geo CD system up and running again and maybe apply the mod that replaces the very slow CD Rom with an SD Card interface.
To Those Departing
Destiny 2 – PC
I am not sure where we went wrong boo, I’m just not playing you. I have no clue what is up but for whatever reason I just haven’t been interested in playing Destiny 2 in this current season. I am not sure if it is the impending gear sunset or the fact that they are “vaulting” content to remove it from the game, but whatever the case I am just turned off right now. I think games should get larger over time not shrink constantly, and I hate the FOMO aspect of seasonal play. The truth however is just that I have not been interested in playing a shooter lately, and this last few months has been largely marked by me playing more single player and narrative driven content. I am sure I will be back when the expansion launches in November and have a grand ole time.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
You know that mission that AggroChat folks have been on about playing Guild Wars 2 and getting others to play it as well? For whatever reason it never sunk its hooks properly into me. I still don’t fully understand why this game that on paper should be something I am deeply into… never quite seems to work for me. There is just something about the gameplay loop that I don’t find as enjoyable as I should. The story content also never really hooked me, so while I keep trying to revisit this game… it never really does it for me. I am sure I will be back at some point because I am a glutton for punishment with a very short memory.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I can’t fully explain what happened here and why I stopped playing this game, but it happened. I am not even sure what distracted me. I just know that I have not logged in for a long while other than to convert to the Steam client. I am sure I will return because I was having quite a bit of fun with it. I also know that I was only a few levels away from hitting the cap at the time, and that there is a raised cap now that we have entered Chapter 4. I think I mostly got distracted by a string of single player experiences like Death Stranding.
Torchlight III – PC
I really do want to like this game, but I have not been all that into of it late. I think the core problem I have with the third iteration is that there just isn’t really a class that I enjoy. In Torchlight there was the Destroyer that I played a ton of, and in Torchlight II it was the Engineer. Both were big and bashy melee characters and right now in the third game there are two characters that CAN be played that way… but they both sorta feel fiddly. So I have been splitting my time between the Forge and the Railmaster…. and to be truthful neither of them feel the way that I want them to feel. I know Torchlight is a game that tries to cast aside the traditional Mage, Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric blend of classes… but I mostly just wish they had proper representation of those archetypes. My preference is to play something akin to the Diablo Barbarian or Crusader and they just don’t really have that represented.
Ships Passing in the Night
Death Stranding – PC
Death Stranding was a phenomenal experience. I legit get emotional just thinking about it. This is the game that I needed to play at the time in which I played it. It has become this extremely relevant allegory for the time that we are living in. I am not sure this is a game that everyone would enjoy, because the whole courier aspect of it that I found enjoyable could be pure tedium for someone else. The story being told though is really good and if nothing else you should probably watch a play through of it at some point.
Horizon Zero Dawn -PC
I had been anxiously awaiting the release of Horizon Zero Dawn for the PC, and when it came out I burned through it like wildfire. I think I put in a solid 50 hours in a very short period of time and cracking this open and revisiting it all was truly magical. I love Aloy and the world of Horizon, and I am anxiously awaiting the sequel. This is pretty much the reason why I will be buying a PlayStation 5 as soon as the pre-orders open. If you have never played Horizon Zero Dawn, you owe it to yourself to experience the game and the bow combat just works so much better with a Mouse and Keyboard.
Summary
I guess this is what happens when I wait almost three months between updates, there is a lot of change. I’ve bounced a few things off the list that I am almost certain I will revisit. Hell to be truthful what usually happens is just writing about them ends up making me want to log back in again. I know we have the launch of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 that will be eating some of my time, and I would really like to restart Jedi Fallen Order but this time play it with Mouse and Keyboard. Additionally I really want to play through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which has been on my list for awhile. In between those I will be wrapping up Avengers main story and seeing if I like the group content or not, and probably poking my head into New World each time a new test event opens. All the while the backlog continues to grow, but I have gotten fairly used to knowing I will never quite conquer it.
The post Regularly Playing: September 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This morning we are going to go on an adventure, or at least travel down a rabbit hole. Be warned that today’s post is going to involve a heavy dose of speculation. There are going to be things that I just don’t know and could not find the answers to, but drew my own conclusions. Like so many of these adventures that I occasionally go on, it starts with a random thought that I carelessly posted on twitter.
Color Coding Loot
Color coding loot as a concept is a brilliant one, because it quickly allows players to filter which bundles of stats are worth paying attention to and which should just be sold or broken down immediately. As someone who plays an excessive number of games that throw loot at you constantly, they are invaluable and help me do a first pass before actually sitting down and inspecting whether or not an item is worth keeping.
The thing is… we have ended up in this situation where most games use effectively the same system with a few minor tweaks here or there. This is a random assortment of games that have color coded loot rarity systems. As you can clearly see there is a pattern here and an agreed upon language that we have landed upon as to what each color means. The funny thing is this same logic applies to many other gaming related spaces, for example when I set up a discord my default is going to be to land upon a white > green > blue > purple > gold scale for hierarchy as far as ranks go. The same was true when I was in the business of building forums.
The Popularization
This lead to a search of what game popularized this concept. This was a fairly short search if we are willing to accept Wikipedia as the authoritative source. To keep you from having to click through and read the entire post on loot in video games, here is the relevant bit.
Loot may often be assigned to tiers of rarity, with the rarer items being more powerful and more difficult to obtain. The various tiers of rarity are often indicated by particular colors that allow a player to quickly recognize the quality of their loot. The concept of color-coded loot rarity was popularized with the 1996 game Diablo, whose designer, David Brevik, took the idea from the roguelike video game Angband.Wikipedia – Loot (video games) article
So there we have the most basic answer. The game that popularized this concept was Diablo and this style of loot coding has carried forward in the ARPG genre and can more or less still be seen today in games like Path of Exile or Wolcen. This however is deeply unsatisfying because even when the color coding was expanded by Diablo II and Diablo III you still end up with a vastly different scheme than what we have come to accept as the bog standard loot coloration. I feel like we still don’t really have our true answer yet of how we ended up where we are on what colors mean what things.
The Consider System
Now is the point where we start drifting into wild speculation. There are however a few facts that one should take into account. The game that I most closely tie the “standard” loot scheme to is World of Warcraft. I believe in my heart of hearts that its popularity is what has lead to the wide adoption of a specific meaning for each color. However we don’t really know how they landed upon the specific scale that they did. We do know a few things about the early designers of that game and its itemization. In many cases they were hardcore Everquest players, with Alex Afrasiabi and Jeff Kaplan in particular being the leaders of high end raiding guilds. So we know for a fact there is a specific color scale that they would both be intimately aware of.
Everquest was a game that did not give you clear statistics for the monsters you were encountering. It wasn’t like you could highlight the mob and get a specific level number to indicate how difficult an encounter might be. Instead you had something called the /consider command, that would give you a rough approximation both in text and color coding how difficult an encounter might be. So for example if you typed /con on a mob that was significantly lower than you it would spit back a message in green saying “looks like a reasonably safe opponent”. If you considered a significantly higher encounter it would spit back in bright red “what would you like your tombstone to say?”.
As a long time Everquest player, this scale became so ingrained that we just referred to encounters by the color that they considered. You might brag to your friends that you were able to easily solo yellows, or that you managed to kite a red. You also might complain that you ended up getting swarmed by greens and took a stupid death due to the glitchy aggro of a specific zone. It is within this consider system that I think we start to shape up what is the standard going forward.
The Dark Age of Camelot Consider System
Alex Afrasiabi, better known as Furor to the old timers… was the leader of a rather notorious raid guild called Fires of Heaven. I started my Everquest career playing on Veeshan, the server they were resident on and was quite aware of some of their exploitative tactics for coming up with creative solutions to encounters. During one of these such encounters it earned Furor and practically the entire raiding group a permanent ban from Everquest. I believe it was during this time that a number of Fires of Heaven folk set up shop in Dark Age of Camelot, which was the first true competitor for Everquest and offered a significant number of tweaks to the template. Again we are going into the territory of speculation here as I have no specific knowledge that Furor was among this group, but I believe if my memory serves me that Fires of Heaven had a Midgard guild.
The DAoC consider system is pretty close to that of Everquest, with a few tweaks. For starters there is no specific “even” consider within the system. Things that are Yellow are either on level or above your level. One of the problems with the Everquest system is that Red was a really obtuse consider ranking, especially at low levels. There were times that reds were absolutely something that was reasonably to do with a full group, but it was impossible to tell without the use of Allakhazam whether those mobs were 20 or 40 levels higher than you. In Dark Age of Camelot they fixed this problem by introducing purple as being extremely higher than you, meaning that no really… you were absolutely going to die if you tried this thing.
Another really interesting thing that Dark Age of Camelot did was set usability ranges on your gear. if you used an item significantly higher than your current level, it would wear down more quickly given that you “lacked the skill” to use the item. As a result the items in the game used this same consider color system to indicate how far or above an item was to you, giving you some indication of whether or not you should be using a weapon and when you should probably start upgrading it. As far as I am aware this is the first case this specific color palette was applied to specific loot items.
World of Warcraft Viral Spread
As I said at the beginning of this nonsense, I am absolutely certain that games like Borderlands use this color scale because World of Warcraft popularized it. World of Warcraft is the very first example I could find of using purple as the rarity immediately following blue for example. My theory is that Diablo had already popularized and codified the concept that loot should have colors denoting rarity, and since very seasoned Everquest and potentially DAoC veterans were over the itemization… that we ended up using that very familiar color scale as their gauge. I feel like I am bolstered in this notion by looking at the original launch color rarity scale. Red in the Everquest consider system was used to indicate the end of the scale, and this was also the original color of artifact gear. Yellow at some point became gold, maybe because in later revisions of the DAoC con system Orange was introduced to wedge between Yellow and Red.
Today we have a slightly different looking color scale with Artifact and Heirloom meaning very specific things and as such being outside of the actual rarity scale. Once World of Warcraft became a cultural event, this same loot scale spread from game to game until now it is just effectively the standard language for quickly indicating how special an item might be. Do I know for certain that anything I just said is the truth? No… not really. Like I said at the beginning of this, today’s was a journey of speculation. Do I think that my theory is likely? Yeah I really do think that Diablo popularized the concept of loot color coding and that the World of Warcraft Standard was deeply influenced by the Consider system from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.
The post Origins of Color Coded Loot appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
