June 2015 – Page 16

Lego Worlds Impressions

June 2, 2015June 2, 2015 by Belghast

Lego Open World

On an absolute whim yesterday I popped onto the steam website to check out what had been released, or was impending release this morning. One of the titles listed was something I quite literally knew nothing about called Lego Worlds. After some research, the consensus seemed to be Lego meets Minecraft. It has the same pedigree of the other Lego games out there as it is also created by Traveler’s Tales. Right now the game is on Steam Early Access for $14.99 and I figured for that price it was worth the risk. I was seemingly one of the few people who actually through Lego Universe was a pretty cool game. Similarly I have really enjoyed my time spent in Lego Minifigures Online, and will more than likely pick up the Lego portal based game as well. I may or may not be a Lego Maniac to borrow the 80s commercial catch phrase. As I sit here typing up my blog post I am sitting in an office surrounded by a mountain of Lego sets.

If you have ever played any of the Lego franchise titles like Lego Harry Potter or Lego Star Wars, this game will feel extremely familiar to you at least as far as movement and gameplay goes. Ultimately this is a game about destroying everything in sight, because when you destroy an object it erupts in a shower of “coins” which are represented by the 1×1 round plate pieces in various colors to denote denominations. Essentially as you roam around the world every new object you encounter, you collect its appearance. You can spend your coins to unlock the ability to build with these prefabs. This means that if you are running through an area and there is a neat lamp post along the trail, you can bump into it and collect its appearance and then build with these lamps from that point on. There is a truly overwhelming number of these prefab objects out in the world and in the three hours I spent yesterday playing I collected what seems like hundreds of them.

Custom Minifigures

When you start the game you are given a very limited choice of appearances in the form of either a Male or a Female explorer. As you roam around the world however you encounter lots of other minifigures. Some of them are friendly and simply walking up to them allows you to collect their appearance, and others are more aggressive and you have to defeat them to collect theirs. In either case these minifigures that you have met go into the same “coin store” as the prefabs you encounter, and from there you can spend your coins to unlock their appearance items. At any point while playing you can swap around your look by changing out the various parts that make up a minifigure including head, body, arms, hands, legs, hat, cape, and assorted hair slot options. So far while roaming around I have managed to run into twenty one different figures, ranging from Yeti to a Surfer Girl. Each of them gave me various unique bits to add to my assortment of appearance items allowing me to assemble some fairly strange looks.

This for example is the caveman beard and hair combination, with the wizard cape, skull head and outlaw body parts. I got tired of this look pretty quickly but the beauty of the system is that you can swap things out on the fly and incorporate new pieces you might find as you are roaming around. I feel like that is this games strong point is that it really rewards exploration. While roaming around you encounter all sorts of vehicles and animals that you can ride on. Like everything else once you encounter it, you can purchase it in the coin store to permanently unlock it’s appearance. Once you have paid for an vehicle or mount like this, you can then summon it to your location at any point. This means if I want to ride around on a polar bear I can on a whim, or summon a racing bike, or even an airplane. The more you explore the easier exploration gets as you have all sorts of modes of transportations to get you where you need to go. Also while you explore there are special large chests that have items that you can collect like weapons and other items to help you in your adventures. Since I favor melee I am right now using a big club to bash things, but there is also a rifle and a bow that I have managed to find as well to allow you to attack things at range.

Interesting Exploration

One of the most interesting vehicles that I encountered was this Ninjago inspired drill car vehicle. With it comes the special ability to hold A while driving it to drill the terrain. There are a few pitfalls with this vehicle, namely that it always seems to want to drill directly down. That said I had quite a bit of fun tearing up the terrain and drilling under a mountain. Now getting back OUT of that area was more of a challenge. This vehicle from what I can tell only appears in the similarly “ninjago” themed Biome, meaning the one with the cherry blossom trees and the huge pagoda like buildings. Other vehicles similarly spawn in unique biomes, like the Airplane appears to only be in the snowy biome, and the “Monster Fighters” style Roadster only appears in the desert/Egyptian biome with the free roaming Mummies. Essentially each biome seems to be based on a popular family of Lego sets and generally contains creatures that you might also find in that set. The only one that seems to make zero sense so far is that Cavemen and Cavewomen seem to spawn damned near everywhere.

The game right now is very “early access” and I do not mean necessarily that the game feels “beta” and buggy, but more so that the game feels like it is missing a lot of features that will be in what I hope is the final version. Right now there does not seem to be much purpose to the exploration other than to unlock items to build with. The problem there is that there seems to be little to no reason to really build anything. There are certain biomes where skeletons spawn infinitely during the night cycles, but building a structure does not really seem to present you with much shelter against the endless waves of them. For the time being the game is strictly single player, but I know multiplayer is in the works. Right now the list of things planned from the Steam page includes…

Like/Dislike system for tailoring World Generation
Procedurally Generated Underground Cave Networks
LEGO ID integration to allow for sharing and uploading of in-game builds
Additional Biomes
Painting Themes
Pre-Generated Towns/Villages/Settlements relevant to the Biome
Updated AI Behaviors to provide organic feeling to free-roaming creatures and characters
Red Brick Extras
Full liquid behaviors
Additional Minifigure Characters and Creatures
Additional Vehicles and Pre-Built Models
Additional Weapons
Cut/Copy/Paste chunks of landscape
Underwater Gameplay (including Vehicles, Creatures and additional sea life)
Character Customizer
Online Multiplayer”

So as you can see they pretty much intend to flesh this game out to be competitive with the Minecraft genre. For $14.99 it was more than enjoyable enough roaming around and interacting with things. However if you are looking for a complete game, keep moving on. There really is not much “game” to be had here and in that aspect you are far better off for the time being playing Trove because it offers a lot of the same fun and exploration gameplay, while also offering an actual game that creates reasons for your exploration and combat. This is planned to stay in Early Access throughout 2015, and by the time it launches next year it is probably going to be an awesome experience. The biggest suggestion I have if you plan on giving it a try is to hook up a controller, because the keyboard and mouse control options are pretty frustrating. The user interface has been designed for a controller and that experience seems to be the most enjoyable.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Lego Worlds Impressions

Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Mining Nostalgia

June 1, 2015June 1, 2015 by Tamrielo

Took a break on Friday to clear my head after all of the MMO nostalgia and get caught up on a backlog of work.

We had our Game of the Month podcast on Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and I want to talk a little bit more about that game. I’ll rehash some of the stuff I talked about in the podcast, so I apologize in advance for any redundancy.

One of the tangents we (I) got on while talking about Shadowrun was how difficult it is to make a game centered around old nostalgia and make it good. I have a litmus test for this sort of thing, that Ash mentioned in the podcast. A game needs to be good on its own, absent any context outside of its series. The further along a series gets, the more impenetrable it becomes, generally speaking, which is why the third or fourth game in a given series is often a significant reboot. To wit: Grand Theft Auto 3, Bioshock: Infinite, Assassin’s Creed IV, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the new Thief, Fallout 3, Jedi Outcast AND Jedi Academy– just a short list of games as I scroll down my Steam Library that are the third or fourth game in their series and a significant reboot, sometimes changing the game’s genre entirely.

Shadowrun is a good game in its own right– you can enjoy it without having a decades-long background in the kinds of games it’s inspired by. It’s perhaps why I’ve had so much trouble getting into Pillars of Eternity. There are awkward parts of the gameplay and the user interface that are borne of the game trying very hard to stay close to its roots, without necessarily evaluating if those roots make for a modern-feeling, up-to-date game.

Games are experiences that are meant to evoke certain feelings; they create a particular scenario in which your brain lights up in a certain way. Unfortunately, the key there isn’t the game itself, but the way the brain lights up, and that changes over time, ESPECIALLY with new experiences. I can play Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, one of my favorite steampunk games, and it lights up my brain in much the same way it did when I played it more than a decade ago. It’s also a deeply flawed game, with a lot of break points and issues. I’ve played similar games since, and they don’t evoke the same feelings. I dearly loved JRPGs growing up, but now it takes a truly spectacular one that approaches the genre differently to get me engaged.

Even if we like the same sorts of games over time, our standards will rise as we get better and better games. The bar goes up, and fewer and fewer games will meet it as time goes on. If we’re not careful, we’ll find that no new games meet our criteria anymore, and nothing new will light our brains up the way the older games do.

Lone Wanderer tweaked wallpaper (FALLOUT 3) by SLiqster

It’s why I harp so much on trying games you don’t necessarily think you’ll like, in genres you don’t always play. I mentioned Fallout 3 as an example in the podcast– the old Fallout games with isometric turn-based RPGs, and lent a strong sense of wandering through a vast world on your own and having many options for dealing with whatever problems or opportunities came up. The new Fallout games are first-person shooters, but importantly they’re still pursuing that sense of wandering through a vast world. Our bar for that sort of experience has risen, and for the most part an isometric game makes you feel detached and makes the world feel constrained to what you can see on screen. In a first-person shooter, you can pull out binoculars or a scope and look out over a vast landscape, which contributes to that sense of detachment and tunnelvision when playing an isometric RPG when put in direct comparison.

As games get better, the kinds of things we can express in them as a medium get broader, and certain genres will lend themselves to certain types of games more readily. This will change over time, as genres mature and the gaming landscape changes. The point-and-click adventure game that gave you chills as a child (7th Guest anyone?) has become a first-person thriller (Call of Cthulu/Amnesia) and eventually morphed into an MMO (The Secret World), all focusing on a very similar set of experiences and lighting your brain up in similar ways, but coming at it from very different angles.

http://joshflores.net/

With a game that’s about nostalgia, about triggering those old feelings, it’s important to pay attention not just to what those games did, but how the medium has evolved in the meantime. Slavishly recreating an old game isn’t going to have the same impact as a brand new game that evokes those same feelings in a newer, tighter package. This can even transcend IP– Shadowrun Returns and Dragonfall have little to nothing in common with older Shadowrun games, but it expertly pulls in references to older Shadowrun content as well as evoking the feel of old Black Isle and similar games, all without becoming inaccessible to a player unfamiliar with any of those things.

Coming off of the MMO nostalgia train of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I haven’t felt like an MMO has captured the feeling of the old games. For me, it’s because a lot of those memories are inextricably tied to the joy of discovering a new technology– the Internet, and the idea that I could play games with real people in a huge world without the constraints of a team vs team match was thrilling. That same earthshaking, intoxicating excitement isn’t likely to happen again until another major technological breakthrough that not only changes the way I play my games, but also changes the way I live my life. That confluence of events is what gave those older MMOs the spark that seared into my brain, and is (I think) why the genre has stumbled once internet multiplayer became a core feature of every video game. Certain games are trying to mine that nostalgia for older MMOs, but they’re missing the key factor; recreating the games and their features, not recreating the experience.

I hope that in my lifetime I see another technological leap that makes me sit forward, jump into a game, meet a new person in that game, and have us both get excited because, holy shit, we live in the future and we can’t believe playing this game in this way is an actual thing we can do. That’s how I’ll get my MMO nostalgia, and that’s why I’m excited about the new Shadowrun– it’ll make me remember all of the good times I had with old isometric RPGs without also reminding me that they now feel old.

Source: Digital Initiative
Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Mining Nostalgia

Blaugust is Coming

June 1, 2015June 1, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye NBI

As of this morning the month of May is officially over and with it goes the Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2015. I have some mixed feelings about the 2015 run, but in the important ways it seemed like a success. The good folks at MMOGames had offered me the ability to highlight NBI specifically during my “bonanza” blogging round up. The problem being there was a pretty massive falloff in the amount of blog content after the first two weeks. I still highlighted the Talkback Challenges but found it quickly hard to make an entire post made up of nothing but Newbie Blogger Initiative content. So I guess the question I am trying to answer is what specifically caused this cooling effect in the posts? Generally speaking in past years if anything there is a ramping up with new people joining the initiative as the month goes on and folks having a burst of activity right towards the end. That didn’t really happen this year.

That said any program that gets new people into blogging is a success in my book, and as I have said many times our community needs a constant fresh infusion of people willing to add their spin to the conversation. Here is a relatively final list of the Class of 2015, so you should absolutely add these blogs to your blog reader and check in on their progress every now and then.

Blaugust is Coming

I’ve had a lot of questions and commentary asking me to do the Blaugust event again this year, and since I had been mostly coy about this… as of this morning I am committing to making it happen once again. For those who did not participate in the process last year, or were not around the blogosphere… Blaugust is a festival of sorts devoted to the regular creation of blog content. Above anything else I have become known for my mission of posting something every single day on my blog. Granted there are lots of bloggers who do this and should be celebrated. I know personally I saw a massive spike in my readership when my content deliver became for lack of a better word “predictable”. The idea for Blaugust is simple… post at least one post each day during the month of August. That is thirty one days of posts, and if you win the competition you get the pride of being able to display one of our badges on your site showing you “won”. Additionally last year we had various prizes to give away and I am sure that will be the case again this year.

The big thing that is going to have to change this year is I am going to have to wrap some tools around the process. My life during the month of August revolved around making sure that everyone had gotten in their blog post each day. Where this got squirrely was when I factored in our Aussie bloggers who were blogging from the future, and even our six hour offset European bloggers were a challenge to keep track of. What is going to happen instead is that in order to participate you will need to submit each blog post through some sort of a form that is going to keep track of if you posted for a specific day. This should help out some of the folks that would end up posting after midnight, when they really intended the post to count towards the previous day. The important thing is the regular creation of content, not necessarily technically when you post it. We have a two month reprieve, but I wanted to get notice out there that I would in fact be doing Blaugust yet again, so that folks could start psyching themselves up for the “marathon”.

Infernal Horsebirds

This weekend I managed to push my crafters in Final Fantasy XIV to level 21, which gave them access to a whole new set of gear and allowed me to get rid of the other set I had been using. I figured this was as good of a place to rest for a bit as any. With only eighteen days until the head start I don’t figure there is a real chance that I will actually be able to push my crafters to 50. With that in mind I opted to start working on my Rogue a bit this weekend. For awhile now I have been torn as to which class to push next, and I have juggled both Monk and Ninja. What finally pushed me over the edge to Ninja was when I managed to get the Malignant Mogknives to drop awhile back. As such this weekend I managed to go from level 28 to almost level 34 which is not the fastest progress in the world but still acceptable. I figure I will speed up significantly in a few levels when I can realistically start doing Coerthas for FATEs.

For the time being I am running FATEs in the Costa Del Sol region while queuing for whatever the max level dungeon happens to be. Currently that is Brayflox Longstop which also gives me the opportunity to pick up the couple of pieces of the Infantry set I had been missing. I have no idea if I will manage to push up Ninja to 50 before the expansion, or if I will return to Crafting madness, but in either case I certainly have plenty to do to keep me engage until things launch. I really should devote a weekend day to the Post Moogle quests because I really do not think they would take that long. I did not end up with as much play time this weekend as I thought I would, otherwise I probably would have done precisely that. One of the things that I think is amazing is that as a Free Company we are still bringing in new people. Sure it has slowed down from the initial burst of players, but over the weekend we added another five members or so through our extended networks. This gives me hope for Heavensward and our ability to get things like the guild airship. I am certainly excited about the prospects this expansion has for our group.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Blaugust is Coming