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Blaugust Games of Week – Week 1

August 5, 2015July 31, 2015 by Belghast

Pre-emptive Thank You

Yesterday I freaked a lot of people out by calling it the Blaugust Eve. As I have explained on twitter, I was accounting for my amazing time travelling Aussie and Kiwi friends for whom… right now IS the start of Blaugust. For the rest of us at the time of posting this we have a little more wiggle room before the festivities kick off. I have to say last year was an insane ride for me, as much as it was for the contestants. The intent was to run everything through the Blaugust Nook but that didn’t exactly happen, and it quite literally made my life hell. I ended up spending a couple of hours a day trying to sort out who posted what when and in what time zone they were posting from… and then the people who posted after midnight in their own time zone… only served to add to the complication. There were numerous times I tried to track down people on twitter or IM to ask if they meant X post to be on Y day or not.

This year it seems like most everyone has registered on the Nook which is going to help, but what is going to be even more important is advertising your daily posts there with the day number you are intending it to be. On your side that is a small amount of work, but on my side that is saving me literally hours of scouring… and is hopefully going to allow me to actually read blogs during the course of the event. As soon as things start I have to flip into book keeper mode, and while I might be “reading” posts I was not necessarily enjoying them last year because of all of the technical foibles. So I am thanking you ahead of time for complying with the list of rules, because it is going to make my life not horrible over the next thirty one days. I’ve been a fan of Anook for awhile, so much so apparently that yesterday someone thought I worked for them. I just think they do a great job of giving me guild forum like functionality but also giving the ability to interact with other gamers. I am amped this year about them sponsoring the Community Award, and we will ultimately sort out the specifics of that as the event goes on.

Games of the Week – Week 1

Yesterday we launched the writing prompts forum, and I thought it was pretty amazing that Void spent a good chunk of the day yesterday populating it with a bunch of ideas. I plan on adding a new writing prompt to this post every day during the course of this event, but I wanted to go a little bit further. Nothing makes more interesting posts than exploring a new game, or revisiting one that you have been fond of in the past. As such I plan on highlighting three free to play games a week, with an attempt to mix up the styles a bit. My hope is that if you are lacking inspiration, you can download and install one of these games and find plenty of things to write about. Lets get on with the games!

Dirty Bomb – Nexon/Splash Damage

This is a game I played a bit in beta but have not really played much after it officially launched, and I am actually looking forward to playing it some more. I have long been a huge fan of games by Splash Damage, and I spent many an hour playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Hell I even joined a competitive clan while playing it, but never really did much more than scrimmage other teams. Splash Damage creates a shooter quite unlike anyone else makes, and they tend to focus on these complex objectives that require multiple classes of players to complete them. I always focused on the “Engineer” archetype because it made the game play more enjoyable for me as it gave me a higher purpose. I am not big into “death matching” but I loved rushing headlong into a firefight trying to stay alive long enough to build a bridge or repair a tank. This game is the logical extension of Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Quake Wars Enemy Territory and even to some extent the critical failure Brink. I think I am one of the few people out there that wholeheartedly enjoyed Brink, and lately I have been feeling the itch to play some FPS action… and Dirty Bomb seems like it is going to fit that bill perfectly.

Download From Steam – Download From Nexon

Everquest II – Daybreak Games

I will always hold a special place in my heart for Norrath, the setting of the Everquest universe. When World of Warcraft launched I was torn because part of me wanted to be playing Everquest II. Instead I went where the bulk of my friends went, but continued to periodically visit the setting of EQ2 throughout the years. It has some of the best world building I have seen in any game, and the scope of the zones just feel so massive compared to almost anything else on the market. They innovated in so many ways, and had so many rich systems like one of the best Mentoring systems out there for the time. As the years have ticked by the game has felt more and more like a dated relic, however there is a simple nostalgic charm to it that I still find appealing. They seem to be banking on taking this nostalgia to market, as they have opened a time locked progression server allowing players to go back and experience the world as it was during the early days. This is making me seriously consider re-rolling and starting fresh on this new server, but I have had so many other competing goals that I just have not done it yet. My goal is this week to roll a character and check it out, but unfortunately that means I am going to have to buy a new character slot on my already loaded account. If you are looking for a world loaded with inspiration… this is a good place to start.

Download From Steam – Download from Daybreak

Marvel Heroes 2015 – Gazillion

Another game that I really enjoy but find myself not playing a lot of right now is Marvel Heroes. This game provides Diablo II style game play, with a rich class based system in the form of all of the different heroes that you can play. One of the coolest features of this game is the way that the you pick your first hero to level. The game allows you to play a long list of champions to level 10, and then you get to unlock one of them and take it all the way to level 60. This gives you plenty of time to get a feel for how they each play and their different abilities. I personally tend to be a Captain America player, but there are heroes that fit just about any imagined play style. The other thing that I really appreciate is the way that for the most part, the game gives me a pathway to unlock the things that I might want without hiding it behind an overly painful grind. Champions are purchased with Eternity Splinters which drop fairly frequently while doing content in the world. One of the complaints I have seen from friends is that the game play is extremely easy, and this is absolutely the case while you are playing on normal mode. However after defeating the main storyline you can ratchet up the difficulty much in the same way as you can in Diablo 3. This is absolutely a really fun game and the freemium nature is not egregious in any fashion, so if you want some old school Diablo game play with MOBA inspired style character design… you might check this one out.

Download From Steam – Download From Gazillion

Daily Prompt

Since I more or less posted a series of games that I have some connection to, or would like to have a better connection with. The writing prompt for the day is somewhat connected to that.

What game that you are not playing, do you still have a deeply nostalgic connection to and why?

Let us hear what game you keep returning to even if you aren’t really actively playing it… or likely will never play it with quite the same fervor. For me personally that game is absolutely Everquest II, and I still hold a torch for it even though at this moment I have not really played it over the course of the last two years.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Blaugust Games of Week – Week 1

Tam Tries: SAO RE: Hollow Fragment (PS4)

August 5, 2015July 30, 2015 by Tamrielo

Good translation makes a huge difference. Honestly, it can make or break the experience, and it’s genuinely hard to do.

I picked up Hollow Fragment a few months back on the Vita. It was a really, really interesting game mechanically set in a world that I find really compelling. I can’t talk much about the story because if you haven’t seen any of SAO it drops enormous spoilers within the first five minutes or so of the game, but the game’s concept is a sort of extended “what-if” sequence, which is really interesting and something I haven’t seen in game tie-ins.

I put a solid 15-20 hours into the game before quitting– as much as I loved the gameplay, the translation for the Vita version was atrocious, so much so that I didn’t really have a clear picture as to what I was doing wrong in particular sections nor did I have any idea what was happening in the story. I was fighting exceptionally difficult enemies and dying frequently, and didn’t have a lot of intelligible feedback on what I could do to improve. At the same time, the dialogue was garbled to the point of being incomprehensible, so I could get a vague emotional tone but very little else. It made it difficult to figure out where to go and what to do.

Don’t do this.

Loading up the new (retranslated) PS4 version was stark. I had a clear picture of what was going on almost immediately, and I suddenly understood how a bunch of game mechanics worked before even leaving the tutorial. One of the big things that the retranslated version did was clarify how the game is structured. There are two separate areas that you can progress through, and it wasn’t clear to me which the right one was. On the Vita, I had this helpful hint:

“For ready players, advance through floors of Aincrad. If still collecting loot and exp, try the Hollow Area.”

Based on that, I jumped into the Hollow Area straightaway. Why not collect loot and exp until I feel “ready”? The PS4 version translates that line a little differently:

“If you’re still getting used to the game, try some of the early floors of Aincrad. If you’re an advanced player and want to test your skill and get rewarded with loot and lots of exp, try the Hollow Area.”

SLIGHTLY different. It explained why I was getting pummeled in my entire Vita playthrough– I was basically trying to advance through the special advanced bonus dungeon right from the start. This playthrough, I started playing through the ‘appropriate’ sections first, and wound up basically crushing my way through the first few sections, largely thanks to the skills I’d honed fighting things way out of my weight class on the Vita.

What I’ve discovered is that the game is much, much more nuanced than I’d realized, mechanically. I can’t talk much about the story, but it does a really good job of interspersing the ensemble cast and keeping all of the characters at the forefront (which the show didn’t do quite as much) and keeping the story relevant– there are a ton of events that occur in between going out and beating up monsters, but you can spend quite a bit of time just doing that if you like, and you have a ton of characters you can level up.

Because the game drops you in the middle of the action, you start at a pretty advanced level with quite a few skills and resources– it’s a little odd to start a game at level 97, but it works pretty well in this context. You’ve got enough abilities to start to make things interesting and you can slowly explore them, but because you’re so overleveled for the starting point (a thematic staple of the series), you can ease into things. It also doesn’t waste any time with introducing things you’ve already covered in the series– the only catch-up it does is letting you know how the game diverges. This probably isn’t great for anyone who hasn’t seen the series, but it’s kind of an obscure title to pick up if you haven’t watched Sword Art Online. Cutting to the chase as far as establishing story and characters lets them get detailed and personal with interactions very quickly, as well as occasionally very silly.

Overall, I’m having a lot of fun with it, especially with a translation that lets me make sense of the story. Because the game’s story diverges hugely from a major plot point in the series, I’m interested to see where they go with things. I like the idea of the game building out into conceptual space rather than simply retreading the ground covered by the series, and I’d like to see more of that in game tie-ins. It makes me think of KOTOR, which created a whole new space for Star Wars that’s proven to be incredibly fertile ground.

Source: Digital Initiative
Tam Tries: SAO RE: Hollow Fragment (PS4)

Twas Night Before Blaugust

August 5, 2015July 30, 2015 by Belghast

It’s Almost Time

I know I have said this many times… but I have to say it again. I am completely overwhelmed by the amount of support I have gotten for the path of madness known as Blaugust. As of this morning when I compiled the list I will be posting shortly… we had 47 people signed up on the Blaugust Nook. I absolutely suggest that you get out there and mingle with your fellow Blaugustians, because you are all embarking upon a mission together that will be challenging for many of you. There is a shared spirit of struggle that binds us all, in our mission of creating thirty one days of content. These events that we hold serve to galvanize our community, and create cohesion where it may or may not already exist. More than anything however… this event is about tricking each and every one of you into realizing that you can in fact write content on a schedule. Inspiration is a fickle muse… but I am here to tell you that you don’t need her anyways!

The Blaugustians

Without anymore rambling on my part… I introduce to you the challengers in the second running of the Blaugust games… may the content ever be in your favor.

This is a pretty damned impressive group of blogs if I do say so myself. During this years Blaugust I will be taking special note for the folks who also competed last year and will be coming up with some special recognition for repeat winners and survivors. Remember it is not too late to join in the madness, and you can sign up on the Blaugust Nook thread at any point during the month and play catch up. Lets make this the best Blaugust yet!

A First Prompt

What are you hoping to get out of Blaugust this year?

To make things a little easier on the Blaugustians I will be providing a writing prompt each day during the month of August in my morning posts. These are of course completely optional, but if you find yourself stuck you can go to the writing prompt thread and hopefully find some ideas. I highly suggest that we make the writing prompts a collaborative experience, and if you think of something good even if you are not going to use it yourself… post it to the thread to help your fellow challengers. I look forward to seeing all of the awesome stuff you fine folks create tomorrow. I mentioned this yesterday but I also plan on suggesting some games of the week, in case you are struggling to find purpose. Nothing creates content like your first time experiencing a new game, or even returning to a game you had forgotten about. That said I don’t really want to roll these out today, but will instead include them in tomorrows post.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Twas Night Before Blaugust

Value

August 5, 2015July 29, 2015 by Tamrielo

If something provides value, it’s worth paying for. I’ve talked before about follow-the-money problems, and one of the key things to remember is that nothing is free to create. If you’re not paying any money for something, there’s a reason. If something costs more than you think it should, it’s worth looking into why that is. Sometimes there’s a very good reason.

Possibly it’s cynical, but TANSTAAFL is one of those resonant concepts for me. It stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”, and comes from Heinlein, as a sci-fi slang word. If you’re getting something for free, it’s because the cost is being taken from somewhere other than your wallet. Sometimes it’s some other obligation you have (buying lunch next time), sometimes it’s some other inconvenience (sitting through ads), sometimes it’s coming out of someone else’s wallet. The one that always gets me is “free to play” games. Yep, you can absolutely install and play in some capacity for free. Pretty much every monetization effectiveness study out there shows that players who do actually pay money wind up paying rather more on average in a free-to-play game than in an equivalent game that uses a box sale, or a subscription, or what have you.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are a ton of creators who sell their goods for a pittance, way less than they’re worth, and that skews the system rather badly. The rise of predatory free-to-play games came from the slew of early indie game devs who gave their work out for free just for “exposure”, and you can see the same kind of thing in other creative industries. By undercharging for a good or service, the overall availability and quality of that good or service drops– people who paint minis for a dollar or two per model work out to usually less than a dollar an hour of work, making professional services that charge a more reasonable amount (even at a minimum wage of $7.50/hour, an individual mini can take 2-5 hours of work; $15-30/mini is entirely reasonable, cost-wise) look outrageous by comparison.

I’d actually be interested in chasing down studies on how the hobbyist market that’s arisen in the last 5-10 years impacts traditional economics models– I suspect it’s incredibly disruptive to the usual models and throws everything off. It’s certainly the case with a lot of creative industries where independent creators can get a foothold– the increased volatility and wildly changing pricing schemes for video games showcases that quite nicely, even as hobbyist shop centers like Etsy put items on the market that probably wouldn’t have existed before.

We’ve shifted from a society where value is dictated by the seller to one where value is negotiable, like the barter systems of old. It creates a situation where value is a moving target, and different people put different values on things. At the same time, we’re so accustomed to the idea of “fairness” that the idea of different people being charged differently based on how much they value the good or service is anathema. The idea that one person might play a video game for five dollars while someone else pays a hundred to play it at the same time would make a lot of people angry, but it’s a reality of the negotiable value proposition. The only difference is we’re very good at masking it– we look at games that are “free”, but behind the scenes people are looking at the ‘whales’ and seeing how best to keep them around. Who is willing to pay more for something and how are they convinced to stick around?

We can’t have it both ways, though. If you’re willing to accept that you can talk a price down when commissioning an artist, you have to be willing to accept that a chef might talk your meal price up for your favorite dish. In the meantime, if you’ve gotten some fun out of a game that you didn’t pay for, kick a few bucks to the developers. Try to pay what something is worth to you, not just the cheapest amount you can get away with. It’ll make the stuff you’re able to get that much better in the long run.

Source: Digital Initiative
Value