March 2016 – Page 12

Why Division Wins

March 5, 2016 by Belghast

Hyperbole Away

This is going to be a needlessly inflammatory blog post, or at the very least the title is. Since The Division was announced back in E3 2013, there has been an immediate and constant comparison between it and Destiny. This speaks more to the problem of the games industry and games media being unable to talk about games without comparing them to something else that at least on the surface looks like it. Hell I am super guilty of this myself, because I am constantly tying games back to World of Warcraft or League of Legends or any of the other “progenitor” games of certain functionalities and features. If you have read my blog for very long you are going to know that I am a huge fan of Destiny, and that I have leaped so much praise upon Bungie for fixing the game in pretty much every possible area with the launch of The Taken King. If you have also read my blog within the last few months you will know that I also enjoyed my time spent playing The Division in beta. Now having played both games… I can tell you that they are very different experiences. That said however… if media continues to link these games then I will too for the purpose of this article.

Let’s Talk Destiny

The problem is that we the gamers and we the enthusiast media always want to declare a winner at something. So this morning I am going to talk about The Division and Destiny and go into why which game will do better. First however I am going to talk about Destiny for a bit and delve into what makes that game enjoyable for me personally. It is a member of an imagined genre that people seem to be calling the “Loot Shooter” which I guess includes the Borderlands family or pretty much anything where you pick up Diablo style loot while going through the world? The coining of this genre seems completely nonsensical but I will go with it for the time being. The important part of that statement is “Shooter” because Destiny at its very core is a shooter. It’s mechanics include the same sort of run and gun game play that we have experienced since Doom. This time however there is a RPG layer lumped onto it as you level your character, learn new abilities and acquire loot upgrades that strengthen your damage and survival. So if I were going to describe the game to someone else… I would do so as a Shooter with RPG elements… and lives in the vague MMOFPS genre.

As much as I love this game… I have had to realize that it is not for everyone. Regardless of how cool I think it is, or how great the moment to moment game play feels… if you are not a fan of shooters you will not be a fan of Destiny. More so than that it requires you to have a certain level of reactive game play to be able to function in it. Mobs come rushing at you and you need to be able to run and dodge and focus in on things while moving. It is a game that rewards precision shots, which means not only focusing in on the target but drawing a bead on whatever weak spot that unit has. Essentially if you do not have a certain level of FPS skills going into the game… or are at least familiar with that sort of movement… you are probably going to struggle and find it a generally “un-fun” experience. Sure you can get better, and the patrol zones are a great low pressure way of wandering around and killing things to hone those skills. However if you have a mental block against shooters then Destiny is not going to be the game for you.

Let’s Talk Division

I admit when I first fired up The Division I was expecting the same sort of game experience that I had playing Destiny. I expected to dodge and weave in and out of cover and charge gun nest to take out the bad guys. This sort of game play… will absolutely get you killed, and it did me quickly. I had to adjust to playing a cover based shooter and taking my time… lining up my shots, and forcing the mobs to come to me rather than charging up on them. Basically I had to slow down my pace and take the game at much more tactical level… and once I made the adjustment I loved it. So while I called Destiny a Shooter with RPG elements…. The Division is the polar opposite… a RPG with Shooter elements. The core of the game play reminds me at times of doing missions in Mass Effect 2 and 3, where you had to draw out the enemies from cover and then strike at the right moment for the largest effect. You can use things like grenades to draw the bad guys out into the open, or my personal favorite the Riot shield which allows me to get up close and personal with moving cover.

My fear however is that for many people they still see this game in the same broad genre as Call of Duty, when in truth it requires a completely different set of skills. Sure you are still aiming down the sight of a weapon and drawing a bead on mobs with a target reticle, but the pace is slowed down to the point where you can call your shots much easier and make them far more effective. There is still game play that rewards movement and a little bit of run and gun, but the vast majority is RPG Shooter where you wait things out from the safety of cover. This also leads itself to creating new kinds of team based game play where someone can really hang back and buff the team, instead of being in the front line vanguard. Essentially I feel like there is more room for different types of game play in Division, which will come in later as I wrap up my comments in the below section. For the longest time I thought the lack of “space guns” would be a nail in the coffin for me… but really the amount of customizing that I could do with the weapon attachments kept me happy and engaged even though the weapons themselves were “normal” and didn’t shoot pulses of plasma or anything cool like that.

Secrets of Success

So now comes the time where I start to wrap things up… and I am trying to set aside the fanboy in me for both of these games. Thing is while the launch of Division is impending and I plan on playing the hell out of it… there is always going to be room in my life for Destiny. The game play there just feels so damned good, and my ability to drop in for a few minutes and feel like I did something… is a huge bonus for me. Especially now that I have the ability to remote play to my laptop, I can pop in and do some bounties any time the mood hits me. However when talking about the success of a game I realize I am not exactly the Bellwether… pun intended. If World of Warcraft has shown us anything, the game that has the most modes of play… and that serves the most different kinds of players tends to win in the end. This is why I declared in my super hyperbolic title that “Division Wins”. Destiny is an amazing shooter, but at the end of the day it requires you to also be pretty good at playing said shooters to really reach the point where things feel enjoyable. The controls are so great, but you have to have played a lot of shitty shooters to really be able to appreciate them.

Division on the other hand really appeals to both the shooter players, but also the RPG players that are used to a much slower pace. I feel like anyone who has played Mass Effect 2/3 or even someone with roots in a game like Knights of the Old Republic might feel just fine playing this game. The fundamentals are the same… find a place of cover and attack from it until you whittle down the numbers of whatever is attacking you. There is also a heavy exploration aspect to this game that would appeal to folks that enjoy the trappings of a Dragon Age game, or someone who loves the Fallout and Elder Scrolls style of open world games. There is so much loot off the beaten path that I spent hours just wandering back alleyways and delving abandoned buildings. What I am painting as a picture as a picture here is that there is a broad range of types of players that I think would enjoy The Division experience, and that is not a statement I can really say for Destiny. You either like really tight shooters or you don’t and no amount of RPG aspect to the game is going to keep you there if you cannot stand run and gun. Ultimately I think Division will be a larger success because they are ultimately targeting several different potential audiences. In the meantime I am just hyped and ready to start…. but also hyped for Destiny because it seems like I might just have an in for a raid group!

Master of Orion Impressions

March 4, 2016 by Belghast

Indulging a Whim

Due to some strange glitch in my blog… I am apparently writing this blog post for the second time this morning. Unfortunately I am probably not going to be able to go into nearly as much depth as I did previously… because I am running out of time. Last night I indulged a whim and gave the Wargaming.net reboot of Master of Orion a spin. For years Master of Orion and Master of Orion II were those go to games when I wanted to spend an afternoon clicking the “next turn” button. They sit firmly in the 4X genre, so when I want to Xplore, Xpand, Xploit or Xterminate… they serve as a great way to destroy an entire day. I am not joking about that aspect because there are absolutely moments in the past where I have started playing Master of Orion II at around 1 pm… and then realized suddenly that it was apparently 1 am and I should really go to bed. I love this franchise… but previously I had to put an asterisk at the end of that statement. Master of Orion 3 was one of those games that I was looking forward to in 2003 more than pretty much anything else. The problem being when I finally got my hands on it… it was largely indistinguishable as a Master of Orion game. The aspects that existed… were buried beneath a horrible interface that made the game play itself a chore.

So imagine my glee last night when I booted up the Wargaming.net reboot and found that pretty much every single aspect of the game was instantly familiar to me. Those things that had changed were leaps of simple logic and not necessarily problems for me to figure out. Traditionally when I play Master of Orion I have always played the Silicoids, a race of rock creatures that have the interesting trait of being able to colonize quite literally any planet that is not a gas giant. This always allowed me to get an early lead on the total number of star systems… which would ultimately give me a lead in the ability to crank stuff out of my industrial complex. While I see the Silicoids on the website, they are apparently not yet available in game. So instead I went with the bugbear-like Bulrathi which started me with a significant military advantage… one which I tried to keep the entire game by denying the other races the technological increases they kept asking to buy from me.

Familiar Patterns

When I play one of these games I tend to play it in the same pattern, and it absolutely worked here once again. I am an early expansionist, devoting most of my resources to generating colony ships and a skeletal fleet to protect them and defend planets. While not as useful as the Silicoids, the Bulrathi do have the ability to colonize heavy gravity worlds… which allowed me to snap up a bunch of planets that the other races could not. From there I focused on improving each of the planets and cranking out as many tech advances as I could. There were many points in the game where the other races were one to three weapon grades behind me, which meant when the tables turned… and I shifted into my other game mode… it was a blood bath. Generally speaking when I play a 4X game I play extremely peacefully. I stick to my own worlds and build up my engine… and then whichever race makes the mistake of picking on one of my worlds… I flip everything from producing infrastructure to producing war machines. Last night it was the Psilons that had the poor decision making skills to pick a fight with me, at which point I sent a fleet of Carriers… which ended up being my high powered Capital Ships to destroy them. As soon as I could churn out new troop transports I was moving the fleet on to the next planet and conquering it.

Towards the end of my march across their star systems, the Humans got in on the act of bombing their planets from orbit. This is when I saw what might be the first significant glitch in the AI. I had no formal alliance with the humans, and they simply decided to start attacking the Psilons on their own as well. There was a period of time where I had to wait on a troop transport, and they easily could have landed their own and took over the world. The problem is… they never did… they just continued to bomb the populace from air. I am not sure if they simply lacked the technology to create troop transports… or if the AI was confused by having a contested planet. Ultimately I landed my own troops, took over the planet and the humans left orbit considering the planet was now being guarded by one of my cruisers. It was around this point when I realized that it was 11:30 pm and I really should be logging for the night. Once again I had frittered away an evening playing this game, and enjoyed every moment of it.

But Early Access

If you have ever loved Master of Orion in your past… then I highly suggest you check this game out. It does a great job of washing the bad taste of MOO3 out of my mouth, and making me forget it actually exists. I will go so far as to say that from this point on… the Wargaming.net reboot of Master of Orion is probably replacing MOO2 as my go to game for scratching that 4X itch. It is an Early Access game, and I have no clue when it will be “finished”. The game already looks extremely polished and I am guessing that most of the remaining development time is adding additional races to the available list, and multiplayer balancing. I’ve only played single player at the moment, but I would absolutely try playing this multiplayer… but I just have to find a time when me and several friends have entire afternoons to blow away as we furiously click that “next turn” button. The only concerns I have is how Wargaming might try and monetize this later. I could see them selling races, or selling various bits for the game… but at this very moment it feels a very good single player gaming experience. Time will tell but for the time being I am happy I picked it up. As far as playing it on a regular basis… I will probably finish the game I started last night and see just how it ends up, and then neatly pack the game away until it launches. This seems to be my current method for playing those early release titles… test it out, kick the tires… and then leave it along until launch.

Retellings (SAO: Hollow Fragment)

March 3, 2016 by Tamrielo

I just got through beating Sword Art Online: RE Hollow Fragment last night. Overall, I think it’s a reasonably solid game that suffers from being a bit too formulaic and not being quite responsive enough. There are some really interesting mechanics that you can more or less entirely ignore, because you start the game ludicrously overpowered and have very little need to get yet more powerful until very late in the game. The structure of the game is more than a little repetitive, with really predictable patterns.

The game has a lot of really detailed systems, like its damage types, weapon and skill trees, and other details that are almost entirely meaningless because, as Kirito, you start very nearly maxed out in a very strong, versatile skill tree, with just enough points spent in other trees to unlock the most useful stuff. As with a lot of the rest of the game, it’s very true to SAO’s narrative– Kirito is a relentless min-maxer, and when you’re put in control of him, you’ve already got a very nearly optimal character. As a result, there are entire weapon types and ability interactions that I never saw in the game because there didn’t seem to be a reason to bother.

Also in keeping with the series’ narrative, the other characters are scaled in power relative to what you’d expect, meaning that the obvious choice of partner — Asuna — is far and away the best party member to choose, especially because all of her skills more or less perfectly complement what you start with as Kirito. She has a lot of debuff power, which is exactly what Kirito’s dual-wield tree lacks. Because of this, there are entire weapons and partner character choices that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason to choose, ever, from a gameplay standpoint.

All of this is largely irrelevant, however, because it’s not what the game is trying to deliver. SAO: Hollow Fragment is giving you the chance to play in the SAO world, and to some extent explore the parts of it that you’re the most interested in. It’s your opportunity, as a player, to break canon and try stuff out that you wanted to see in the show but couldn’t. I wrote about it a few months ago, but the game opens up with this message pretty quickly– Hollow Fragment starts where the Aincrad arc of the show ends, but keeps on going in Aincrad. It’s why you start with a ludicrously powerful Kirito and why you play through “new” content despite knowing what happens in the show; the game makes a point of breaking from the show’s story and writing its own.

What I like about it is that it’s very thorough in its parallel storyline. Bits and pieces that don’t make a lot of sense initially ultimately get revealed as part of a complete retelling of the story, including events that happen after the show’s first arc, but play out differently in Hollow Fragment’s parallel story. The end result is broadly similar, but the details change, and it’s very interesting to see how the various alterations to the “real” story affect the rest of the narrative. Hollow Fragment effectively kicks off a reboot of the series starting from the end of the show’s first arc, and I think that’s a fascinating approach. I only wish the game went a little deeper into that, because the story is fairly light.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that I love reboots, particularly ones that retain as few of the specifics of the original as possible while still keeping the overall essence of the story. My favorite retelling of Romeo and Juliet is the frankly insane neo-90s Leonardo DiCaprio version set in a stylized present-day but using Shakespearean dialogue. I like to see how things could have played out differently with the same pieces. I’m a big fan of the sort of parallel storytelling that Hollow Fragment does because it provides a bunch of new conceptual space to explore that isn’t weighted down by the existing narrative.

Probably my biggest critique of Hollow Fragment is how formulaic it is– it feels less like a game version of the show than it probably should, because the structure of the game doesn’t follow the structure of the show. As much as SAO is about “reaching level 100 and beating the game”, very little of the show’s time is spent showcasing each individual floor, which is entirely what Hollow Fragment does. It makes the game feel both repetitive and frustratingly unlike the show itself, and I feel like the game would have been improved by going all-in on the narrative portions rather than building out level after level of formulaic gameplay.

What frustrates me the most about the game is that it shies away from really exploring this cool alternate narrative it’s created. A lot of the story scenes start to poke at some interesting ramifications of the parallel storyline they’ve set up, but all too often what appears to be a neat story point instead morphs into sudden, cheap fanservice. In the meantime, the game introduces new characters who are supposed to be compelling (and, indeed, who the game’s story centers around to some extent) but are kind of shoved in your face without preamble. It feels, more than anything, like a new player joining a long-running tabletop campaign and being inserted awkwardly into the party. Hey, here’s this random person around town oh look it turns out they know your name NOW THEY’RE YOUR BEST FRIEND no questions asked STOP ASKING QUESTIONS.

You may note that I haven’t talked about the “Hollow Fragment” part of the game, the separate (entire game) that’s added onto what was originally just a climb through Aincrad. As much as the game develops a compelling parallel storyline, it completely failed to hook me on its massive bonus area. My connection there was a character who, right off the bat, doesn’t like me very much, and who I honestly don’t really care much about. She’s probably got a pretty tragic backstory, but quite frankly I have half a dozen other, more developed characters with tragic backstories that I’m a lot more interested in exploring the game with, and the Hollow Area seems to be focused on developing characters that I honestly am not that interested in.

That all having been said, I like the idea of using tie-in games as a springboard for parallel storytelling. If I wanted just a straight retelling of the story I already know, I could watch the show/movie again, but letting me alter the world in a “safe” alternate storyline is really compelling, even as relatively underdeveloped as it is in Hollow Fragment. There’s a really interesting Star Wars game where Kenobi seeks out Leia and makes her a Jedi instead of Luke– completely non-canon, but an interesting space to explore, and a lot more interesting than a game that simply straight retells Star Wars without the pacing and with a hundred times as many stormtroopers to fight.

Also, much like the show did, SAO: Hollow Fragment makes me miss the now-long-gone days of early MMOs, when it was new for everyone and the games were full of surprises, that you shared with everyone you played with.

Hellfire Assault

March 3, 2016 by Belghast

Weekends are Bad

One strong constant in my life is that weekends are bad for me when it comes to making plans. This is counter-intuitive since for MOST of the living world… weekends are the time they can regularly commit to doing stuff. The truth is that weekends are really the only time that my wife and I are both together and pointed in the same direction for any lengthy period of time. During the week she has a mixture of responsibilities, commitments, and spur of the moment activities that often times keep her from getting home until eight or nine in the evening. Whereas I tend to have a fairly predictable schedule, that gets me home by 5 pm CST most nights. This means that the only time we actually get to do anything as a couple is on the weekends, and as a result I have tried really hard to be pretty sparse with committing myself to things that occur on Saturday or Sunday. I am already breaking that rule heavily with the recording of AggroChat Saturday nights… but generally speaking by the time our 9pm CST start time rolls around we are home anyway. There however have been a long list of activities that have happened on Sunday and Saturday afternoons that I have flaked like mad on. There was the whole pen and paper role-playing game that happened at 2pm CST, that by some freak occurrence I managed to make four or so of… before life caught up with me and I started being unavailable. Then similarly I thought “Sunday is TV Night” and started trying to raid with my friends Horde side… only to find that I am just barely making it into my chair some nights before Walking Dead. As it gets nicer outside… we push back our range of activity further… so pretty much the entire summer months are a no-go for planned activities on the weekend.

As a result I thought I was pretty much done raiding in World of Warcraft at least until Legion hits. Then my good friend Carth decided to pull together a casual raid group and after everyone voted on the best day of the week… I lucked out and it landed on Wednesday nights. This is pretty much the perfect raid night for me, given that my wife is already committed to church that evening and I can pretty much do whatever I want to do without causing a major imposition. Last night was the first official outing, and we planned on raiding from 7:30 pm cst to 10 pm cst but wound up going a little over due to the overall successes of the group. We absolutely had a few “ringer” dps in the mix, but even accounting for that… I think we did really well. For a bit we would end up having to pug some people… but we managed to pull together a 10+ player team. The roster was super comfortable and included so many long time friends: Carthuun (on Aalis), Tick (on Taavish), Giulietta, Kylana, Edana (@catinglasses), Jasmynne (Carth’s Wife), Bleddwen (@KerynWeylan)…. with myself and Damai tanking and a mixture of ringers that cycled through for which I don’t know all of the mains from Praetorian Guard.

Significant Progress

We did significantly better than I expected on our first outing. We managed to clear up to Iskar in a single evening, and the only boss we really struggled a bit at was Kilrogg. That is pretty much the first fight where the mechanics really start to matter, and as a result it took us two attempts for folks to get the whole visions thing down solidly. On the second go however everything seemed to just work like plan. It was a bit messy at the end, but any kill you walk away from with a victory is a good kill in my book. The awesome thing about all of this as well is that we got a lot of gear for people who needed it. Bleddwen one of the two healers… that was quite literally drafted last night on the spot… walked away with I believe eight pieces of gear. Our other healer walked away with three pieces, but one of those was a tier set piece. I managed to pick up my first piece of tier gear as well, and I am hoping next go round Kormrok will be nice and drop the Warrior piece so I can throw on that two piece bonus. As much as I loved raiding with my Horde side family, I have to say it felt good to be Belghast again in a raid. I mean I have done Gladiator dps for awhile now, and it is really fun… but what I mean is Belghast the tank. It kinda felt good to go back to my roots with the character that was my main through most of those really memorable fights.

It doesn’t hurt that the folks that we raided with… are for the most part the folks I play all of these games with. The two healers we had… have healed me many times in Final Fantasy XIV so it felt natural to see that relationship shift to World of Warcraft. The awesome thing about this as well is that it seems like we have two tanks and two healers locked down solidly. That means we probably need a shift healer and potentially a shift tank to fill in the gap, but otherwise we have a really solid team. There is a certain amount of learning mechanics on the fights, like Iskar… but I forsee us being able to start Heroic before too long. It would be amazing if we could push through it as well and get folks some Moose loving. In any case it was a nice, relaxing and casual raid night, with the folks I probably would have been hanging out with anyways. The only gotcha seemed to be that we were having trouble with our normal Teamspeak server, and as a result are probably going to be migrating to Discord for next week. I had been wanting to give Discord a real world trial, and this seems as good as any time. I love the concept, and I just wish that it were a slack plugin rather than a completely separate application. For text chat purposes, I still like Slack and their notification system just works better… however for voice… at least based on testing last night Discord is seeming to be the new way to go.