August 2015 – Page 15

Shiphand Buddy: Deep Space Exploration

August 20, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 20

Hello and welcome again to another episode of Shiphand Buddy! Today’s edition is supersized, I hope you’re ready!

Alien abductions you say?

What: Escape your captors and fix your ship when your exploration mission gets hijacked by aliens!

When: Available at level 32

Where: Wilderrun

Gold Timers: Normal: None ; Vet: 50:00

Gracie’s Run Time: Normal: 18:24 ; Vet: 21:39

Shiphand Buddy Says:

Bear with me friends, this one’s a doozy! You start in the “prologue” section on your exploration vessel. Simply talk to each of the highlighted crew and head to the bridge to progress. Once you speak to the captain, ikthians appear and abduct you and the crew, beginning the “main” section of the mission.

You awaken inside a containment field. Use your modified action bar to taunt your captor until you annoy it enough to open your cage. Once you’re free, deal with this guy and then turn to help your fellow captives. Each of the 4 containers has a different access code, and entering too many wrong codes will zap and destroy anything still inside. You can still get a gold medal if everyone gets zapped, but can you live with yourself? There is a lore object just outside of this room that contains the codes, which are:

Protostar: 3596

Cubig/misc: 879

Rowsdower: 441

Humanoid: 975

After they’ve been dealt with one way or the other you can use a console to open the next area. I tend to clear everything out of the middle because we’ll be coming back here several times before we’re done. Occasionally you will notice ikthian weapons on the ground, pick them up and use them with CTRL+F1 to advance your objective. You can only carry one weapon at a time so be sure to use them as you find them. The weapon has a random chance of either applying a very strong bleed, a weakness, or backfiring and causing an enrage. Use against strong enemies at your own risk.

There are lots of big guys here.

From the central chamber, I begin with the west path. Along this corridor, keep an eye out for freebot parts. When you reach the room at the end you’ll need to take out two large enemies and a miniboss. Each can be pulled separately and dragged back to the entrance to the room for safety. The miniboss does occasionally patrol around, so be careful. Once the room is clear you can make a quick trip around the perimeter, jamming scrap metal into the engines and collecting freebot parts. There is a table near the entrance where you can assemble the parts back into Clamp, then make your way to the central chamber again.

Rescue everyone from these experiments

Next we’re heading down the northern hallway. Don’t forget to pick up and use the ikthian weapons along the way. This path opens up into a much larger room where you will need to free crew members from ikthian experiments, mostly by tapping “F” a lot. Note that there are two large enemies that patrol around, make some space to safely take them out. At the back of the chamber is another boss with large telegraphs and a tether attack. Kill him, finish rescuing your friends, and then return again to the central chamber.

Phew, that was a workout, good thing there’s only one path left now! The door to the east will open, and you can follow this route to the captain’s chamber. I usually clear out the spikehordes on one side to give myself some extra room before engaging him. The ikthian weapons will work on him, so you can always try that to help take him down faster, although you do run the risk of it enraging him instead. Once he’s finished you just have one more mob to kill and a game of simon to destroy the ship and activate the escape pods. Hooray! That wasn’t so bad was it?

Hooray! We’re outta here!

Wait, what? This mission is still going? Yep, it is time for the “epilogue”. When the screen clears, you’ll be standing in front of a control panel. Use it, and you’ll take control of a maintenance drone inside the damaged ship. Navigation here is tricky since you are floating in zero gravity. Do your best to avoid the drifting debris, and head out of the room and down the hallway. There are 6 life support panels to activate in the large room, and two more in the smaller room on the lower right hand side. You must be close to the panel, target it, then press “1” to activate it. If you take heavy damage you can move to a charging station and use your “2” ability to repair. Losing all your health will transfer you back to your body, and you’ll have to interact with the panel again to take control of another drone.

Positioning the camera overhead makes the path much clearer

Ok life support’s back up, time to open the hatch and get out of here. Seriously? There’s still more to do? Fine, I guess we can go and fix the gravity. Make your way across the room, and target the hookfoots (hookfeet?) and use your “T” ability on them to freeze them. Avoid the vents along the walls which occasionally send out a freezing blast. Keep following the path until you reach the laser grid. The beams probably won’t do enough damage to kill you, but they will bounce you around and annoy you. I usually turn my camera so I have a top-down view here, which makes it easier to see the gaps. Double jump is your friend, as is the pile of junk on the left side which you can use to bypass some of the beams. Reaching the end of the hallway will deactivate the lasers. Then you can jump up the junk pile again and into the next room.

Here we’ll meet the last enemy of the mission. He has the same large telegraph moves as the rest of the big ikthians we’ve already dealt with. Fun fact: if you happen to save an ikthian weapon, you can use it against this guy too! Once he’s down you just need to make your way around the room to seal off the 5 valves along the walls, then hit the switch on the floor to fix the gravity. Finally! All done!

Wait. OH *BLEEP* NO. There’s more? Leave the engine room and head down the hallway to the main chamber. Oh. Hey. They threw us a party! Congratulations, we’re finally finished!

Differences between normal and vet: There’s very few differences here. On normal you don’t have any ikthian weapons, which could be a blessing or a curse depending on your luck. There are also no lasers to jump through in the final section on normal mode.

Other Thoughts: This is the longest of the shiphands. I was honestly surprised that the run time on this one is only a couple minutes longer than Fragment Zero, because it feels significantly longer. I am constantly wishing it either had one less wing on the ikthian ship or that it would just end when you reach the escape pods, since that feels like a natural place to stop. Also of special note, the section where you pilot the repair drone can be particularly awful if you are prone to vertigo or nausea. Fun times!

Even after all those complaints, this one still manages not to be my least favorite. That title goes to our next shiphand mission. Tune in again to see me complain about our 7th and final (for now!) Shiphand Buddy mission: The Gauntlet!

Bound by Tenets

August 20, 2015 by Tamrielo

While working on MMOs, there were a few design tenets that “everyone knew”. They were the pitfalls you tried to avoid, the things you had to include, the concepts of structure and pacing that were how you knew you were designing correctly.

I understand where they come from. There’s a risk in breaking from the established norms, and as projects get bigger and more expensive, the risks are severe. That being said, I can’t think of very many best-in-class non-sequel games in any genre that have been massively successful without diverging significantly from the established tenets of the time. Even the very well-established series will reinvent themselves periodically to keep things fresh, and the ones that don’t change things up enough tend to flicker and die.

Sometimes these divergences come from technology. Assassin’s Creed was build on crowd AI and active movement concepts that weren’t seen anywhere beforehand. Ingress wouldn’t make sense without the cell phone as a gaming platform. Super Mario 64 wasn’t possible until the first fully 3D consoles were available. The first MMOs were built on this amazing idea that players could connect to an ongoing, persistent world and play with their friends easily, amid hundreds or thousands of other players doing the same.

Sometimes, the divergence is in how you experience the game. Thief took the first-person shooter genre and made it into a game about avoiding combat and avoiding enemies. Portal took the same genre and turned it into a puzzle-platformer. Adventure games and dungeon crawlers merged together into the modern single-player RPG. These evolutions happen between technological breakthroughs, generally– they’re the kinds of games you see when a console generation is mature, or when technology is relatively stable.

The difficulty here is risk. There’s a big problem when a type of game is unable to explore its potential because it’s too risky to do so, and there’s a very real risk of sameyness when the only things changing in a genre are the trappings. Adventure games and JRPGs both went through this, with the formulae going largely unchanged from game to game, and both have gone from popular, relevant games to tropes. There’s a constant fear of deviating from type when making a game, and some genres are more restrictive than others.

A lot of this comes down to verbs. Consider the verbs that constitute gameplay in a point-and-click adventure game. There’s “click on environment”, “talk to NPC”, and there’s “use item in inventory”. The outcomes may vary, but by and large you’re clicking on something in order to trigger an animation and either obtain an inventory object to move forward or otherwise trigger a progress flag. Talking to NPCs has a similar effect. Movement isn’t really gameplay, though it pretends to be, and the visual novel genre does away with movement entirely.

MMOs are similar. There’s “fight enemy”, there’s “click on object”, there’s “use inventory item”, sometimes there’s “talk to NPC” (though this is often a single block of text that you may not even have to read), and there’s “move” (sorta). “Fight enemy” is the most robust of these verbs by far, and everything else pales in comparison. Movement is rarely fleshed out beyond just running around, though occasionally there’s roll dodging. Even jumping, while usually present, often is dismissed as a viable gameplay type because “players get frustrated by jumping puzzles”. That last would hold a bit more weight with me if there weren’t so many incredibly popular jumping puzzle games, not least of which is the most commonly known video game character in the world.

Digging deeper, it’s a fidelity problem. First- and third-person action games have a lot of verbs– Grand Theft Auto is immensely popular in large part because there’s so much you can do. The verbs in that game feel varied and different and fun. Skyrim is similar– there’s enough depth in the various things you can do that you feel like you have a lot of freedom to do a lot of different things; it’s not just “fight enemies”. First-person platformers come in a variety of flavors, despite the “FPP” being a niche (platformers) of a niche (non-combat first-person action games).

I beat the drum about MMOs a lot, but one of the things that hasn’t increased even as the fidelity of the games has increased is the number of verbs. It’s still “fight enemy”, “click on object”, occasionally (but more often now) “talk to NPC”, and “move (sorta)”. We know we’re playing an MMO when we see hotbar combat, and fields of monsters, and gear/level grinds. It says a lot to me that Destiny made as big a splash as it did, despite its many well-known-to-MMO-player issues. It was a different way of experiencing both the FPS and the MMO, and drew from both pools.

I’m not convinced that we’re going to see a conceptual divergence in MMOs that leads us to the Next Big Thing. One of the advantages that the FPS has is the very strong middleware– the myriad game engines built for making first-person action games that are accessible and generate good games. MMOs lack that– each one has to be built from the ground up, even when using middleware, and it means that just getting a game off the ground is a herculean task. There’s no room to take risks, and as a result a lot of the MMOs out there feel like they’ve been cut from the same cloth.

Virtual reality might be the technological jump MMOs need to have a breakthrough, but I’m not yet convinced that’s going to be as big a technology as everyone seems to hope. Perhaps I’m just cynical from having lived through the same excitement in the ’90s. I think an MMO that keeps the core of the genre– play in a big world with your friends– while otherwise vastly diverging in how you actually experience it might pull the genre forward. I think that would drive a lot of players away, but it would also bring in players from elsewhere.

Until someone takes a big risk and has a solid foundation and resource pool supporting them, though, it’s unlikely that we’ll see anything like that anytime soon. It’s a very barren field for up and coming MMOs that are likely to make a big splash, compared to just a few years ago. I have a lot of fond memories of the rise of the MMO, and I mostly feel like there’s a gameplay experience I was able to have once that’s missing now. I’d like to have it again, but that window may have closed. We’ll see.

KingsIsle Blaugust Prizes

August 20, 2015 by Belghast

KingsIsle is Awesome

Some of you may know KingsIsle games as the creator of the wildly popular Wizard 101, Pirate 101 and the upcoming mobile monster destruction game Rise and Destroy. For those who do not they occupy a unique niche in the MMO industry. They create these awesomely rich cartoon worlds populated with tons of content, and all of aimed at being appropriate for pretty much all ages to play. I’ve not spent a ton of time playing these games but on a whim one weekend some of the AggroChat folks spent it rolling brand new characters in Wizard 101 and wandering around together. The game just exudes charm and I had enough fun that weekend that I decided to spend a little money on the game even though I really didn’t intend to keep playing it regularly. I’ve always heard they have an amazing community, and that KingsIsle in general does a lot to try and foster this. However I was pleasantly shocked when I was contacted by a representative from KingsIsle yesterday and handed some prizes for our Blaugust event. They handed me several codes for special bundles in both Wizard 101 and Pirate 101, each bundle having a retail price of between $29 and $39 bucks. That is absolutely awesome, and I actually spent a bit more time playing my Wizard 101 character yesterday. For those curious, I dug up the release videos for each of the trailers. I have yet to decide how I will reward these but it is awesome to have more options in the prize pool. If you interact with any of the KingsIsle employees, seriously give them a huge thank you!

Grand Tourney Gauntlet Bundle for Wizard 101

HooDoo Bundle for Pirate 101

Exhaustion Hits

Last night is traditionally the raid night for my second static group in Final Fantasy XIV. However we were missing a significant number of the key players, namely our second healer and tank. For a bit we considered other options, and were on the verge of just running an expert for the day and calling it good. Problem being as I sat there at the keyboard waiting for things to happen I kept dozing off while leaning forward, literally waking up when my head banged my boom microphone. So instead of doing Final Fantasy XIV shenanigans I retired to the couch to peacefully doze in and out of consciousness while waiting on my wife to get home. I didn’t really want to go to bed for real yet, because once I conk out I am often times dead to the world… and I wanted to make sure she made it home safely and didn’t have car trouble or anything out of the ordinary like that. Before the attempt at raiding, and a small bit afterwards I continued playing some Diablo 3. The game worked mostly because I had no one relying on me, and quite frankly I was playing on normal level which means I can doze off for a second here and there and suffer zero consequences from it. After I beat the normal storyline and unlock the content I will end up dialing up the difficulty as I attempt to level to 70 before the 23rd.

This is really a stupid mission I have set out on… largely because I really need to be in Final Fantasy XIV instead capping esoterics for the week. The interesting thing about Season play in Diablo 3 though is it feels like they have ratcheted up the drop rates of everything. While my profile has not updated to show it yet… at level 13 my crusader already has three legendary drops… including Genzaniku the awesome axe that summons a spirit to fight for you. When I entered into this seasonal thing I fully expected to lose my character at the end of the season… because I didn’t actually do any research before saying “sure” and clicking on the seasonal button. I guess however everything you earn in season just rolls over into your normal characters at the end of a season which is pretty frickin cool. So even if I don’t make any real progress in season 3, I will absolutely be starting a fresh season 4 character to play as well. I guess in the coming days I will be popping into Final Fantasy XIV to get in an expert or two and then popping into Diablo 3 because it makes an excellent way to wind down for the evening. I mostly enjoy soloing over there, but I am always looking for people to chat with while I am doing it. I finally got around to adding my friend Byx last night to battle.net and I know there are tons of other people that I should as well. I am finding that I am really enjoying the crusader, but in truth all of the classes I have played so far have been enjoyable in one way or another. I just find it so bizarre that at this point, World of Warcraft is probably my least favorite Blizzard game.

On Red And Blue

August 19, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #18

I have to give the Mass Effect series credit for being the first series I played where the morality system isn’t choosing between “Be a Good Guy” or “Kick Puppies”. (Neverwinter Nights and other D&D-based games have been really bad about that, as is Knights of the Old Republic) In Mass effect you’re always the good guy, you might just be a bit of an asshole about it. (You might also kick some puppies.) For those unfamiliar, Mass Effect tracks your decisions as either “Paragon” or “Renegade”, where Paragon is “Compassionate and Heroic” and Renegade is “Apathetic and Ruthless”. These aren’t directly opposed, so you can have a high score in both, depending on your actions.

In Mass Effect 1, these scores determine how many points you can put into Charm/Intimidate, and the resulting value of your Charm/Intimidate skill is what gives you access to particular conversation options. Mass Effect 2 got rid of the Charm/Intimidate skills, in favor of an alternate approach.

The Great Mistake

Mass Effect 2 decided to use your Paragon/Renegade values directly to determine your effective charm/intimidate values. Because Mass Effect 2 is very non-linear, the values required aren’t static. Instead, they’re a percentage of the total number of paragon/renegade points available in the areas you’ve been to. The problem here is that while your scores aren’t mutually exclusive, most of your actions are. Unless you go very hard toward one or the other, you’re likely to find that you can’t pass either Paragon or Renegade checks near the end of the game. (A particularly difficult one is sorting out an argument between two party members, and it’s hard to have this happen any time other than near the very end of the game.)

Playing the game without being entirely dedicated toward either red or blue feels more natural to me, and ME2 punishes you for it. Importing a character from ME1 mitigates this somewhat, as you start with a moderately large bonus to your meters based (roughly) on what they were at the end of ME1. This helps a lot, but isn’t a perfect solution.

Building a Reputation

Mass Effect 3 throws a decent chunk of that out. There’s still no individual charm/intimidate skill, but instead a statistic called “reputation”. Paragon and Renegade are tracked on the same bar, and the total is your reputation. There are also completely unaligned “reputation” points that extend the bar, but preserve your paragon/renegade ratio. Your available choices depend on how much reputation you have. I feel like this is a much improved situation compared to ME2, because your ability to impress people depends, more than anything else, on how much you’ve done. Choosing the “nice” options doesn’t later lock you out of the “jerk” options. This is important, because some people are absolutely worth being a jerk to.

And what fun is it if you can’t indulge, sometimes?