Faction of Last Resort

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Racial Enemies

Some mornings the inspiration for a blog post takes longer than others.  This morning I have been faffing about on the web and on twitter desperately searching for inspiration.  Then a brief interaction with the amazing @HeyHeatherBee spawned a topic that started spinning in my head.  She was talking about taking the Horde decal off of her car because she had switched over to Alliance and I simply chimed in with the fact that I largely play Alliance because they have Dwarves.  However I have always secretly had a desire for the Horde to get Dark Iron Dwarves as a playable race so that I would finally have a race that I enjoyed playing on that side of the fence.  This was just enough to plant the seed of an idea for a post.  I have long secretly wished that the “enemy” faction that each race has throughout their storyline, would actually be aligned with the opposite player faction.

defiasbrotherhood What I mean by this is that in each racial story there are a number of “enemy” factions that get set up as sock puppet bad guys, but for the most part carry over through the entire main story.  This to some extent breaks apart when you get out of the original races.  Draenei and Blood Elves are set up as foils for each other, and Goblins are set up as their own worst enemy, and the Undead as the antagonist for the Worgen.  These expansions aside there is a nice clean “racial enemy” for each other race in the game.  Here is just a quick rundown of what we have to work with.

More Player Races

magatha So the idea is what if all of these third party enemy factions were somehow swayed by their hatred of the group they oppose the most… to join the opposite faction.  What if the Grimtotems decided that the best way to kill the Taurens is to join the Alliance, and similarly if the Leper Gnomes and Dark Iron and Defias cut deals with the Horde.  That would allow for the creation of characters of essentially any race on either side of the Red/Blue boundary.  The biggest problem I have with the horde in all honesty is that I don’t really like playing “monstrous humanoids” to borrow the term from Dungeons and Dragons.  Worgen are probably the one exception to that rule… but that only exists because I have a love of all things Werewolf.  Had they made them cat people… I probably wouldn’t have had the same attraction to them.

There are a lot of problems however with this idea.  First with the Trolls, when I say all other trolls are their enemies… I mean all of the other troll tribes other than the three that I mentioned.  The problem there is that ALL of those tribes hate everyone else on the face of Azeroth that is not also a Troll.  I cannot see them aligning with anyone.  Similar the “Dark Horde” pretty much hates anyone that is not Blackrock Clan, and have been doing their best to exterminate anyone that gets within their vicinity for a decade.  Same goes for the undead as far as the Scourge goes, then the Scarlet Crusade has already been aligned with the Alliance in a few examples, but their batshit crazy zealotry makes them pretty much the enemy of everyone.  So that already whittles down the list to a point where it just isn’t realizing to introduce all races to both Horde and Alliance.

Faction of Last Resort

blackrock-depths So in a conversation with Jaedia she planted another seed in my head…  what if instead of joining the Horde or Alliance, that these enemy groups became a third faction.  Alternative Chat has long championed the cause of a neutral faction, but I think this would end up being a literal third group to act as a foil to both the Horde and Alliance.  When you rule out the groupings that simply do not work you end up with a list that looks a little something like this.

  • Defias Brotherhood
  • Dark Iron Clan
  • Satyr
  • Naga
  • Leper Gnomes
  • Grimtotems

There are currently six unique races in a faction, with Pandaren making up the seventh race that can choose their own side.  This list that I whittled down to fits that pattern, and looks like a pretty damned fun faction to play.  You might ask about the Satyr and the Naga, but in theory they are both races that player characters have reasoned with in the past during quests.  Both of them are essentially two different variants of “corrupted night elves”.  Finally having both in a faction gives players a really unique reason to decide to go for that third faction.  Players have been begging for both as playable races for years.

The combination makes no less sense than the original Horde does.  I still cannot figure out how the Tauren ended up throwing in with the rest of the races that make up the Horde.  Similarly the Undead seem to be thrown in there “by default” and have no real connection back to the group as a whole, and are lead by Sylvanas who is always off doing her own thing anyways.  My theory is these races decided to join together because they were consistently losing their battle with whatever force they happened to be engaged in.  This ends up being the “Faction of Last Resort” as it were, and of course there would be natural tensions between the members.  Mostly I feel like it is time to revive some of these classic themes that they let die in the expansions.  The Defias Brotherhood for example was one of the best quest sequences that we have seen in game, and it is a shame that it essentially dies at the Deadmines.  I doubt Blizzard would ever do something like this, but wouldn’t it be cool if they did.  Would also finally give them three faction combat in player versus player.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Faction of Last Resort

Tam Tries: Archeage (levels 1-10)

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I picked up Archeage (by which I mean, hit “install” on the Steam client) the other day because it came up in conversation. I’d picked it up originally when it launched in the US and quit within fifteen seconds when I realized the game lacked an inverted Y mouse setting. Couldn’t play it, wasn’t going to go to the effort of hacking in some kind of fix, done with the game. Easy.

ArcheAge_Logo

I loaded it up recently, mostly to check to see if they’d added that feature. A Google search suggested they had, so I booted it up, patched, and hopped in. To my very great surprise, I’m having a surprising amount of fun with it, enough so that I want to put the brakes on playing until I have a chance to run around with Kodra and Thalen.

There’s a nasty catch-22 I’ve noticed in MMOs over the past few years. The bar for content and systemic density is so high right now, and people so invested in their existing MMOs (or not playing any at all), that there’s essentially no hope for a new MMO to compete at the same level as existing games when it’s released. On day one, before there’s been any chance for anyone to hit the servers, for kinks and bugs to be worked out, and so on, most MMOs are pretty rocky. Our standards for “acceptable” rockiness have changed over the years, but so has our expectation for a new entry into the genre as well as the skill of the teams creating them. Put simply, we no longer have MMOs that brick your motherboard on day one, but we’re also no longer willing to tolerate that sort of thing, nor would that sort of thing happen in a modern MMO team.

tamrielunlimited

I say all of this to say that, like a good steak, an MMO isn’t quite finished the moment it leaves the pan. It cooks a little bit more after release, and it’s that little bit of extra that turns an okay game into an excellent one. A year after its release, Elder Scrolls Online is getting rave reviews– all of the changes, fixes, and additions in the game have brought people back, not to mention a shift to free-to-play which, far from the herald of doom the internet pundit crowd likes to crow about, is often a new lease on life for an MMO that has stabilized.

So, Archeage. I hopped in, and after confirming that yes, I can in fact turn on inverted Y and actually play the game, I started running around. A few things stood out to me very quickly:

— This game is built like FFXIV; I can master every class, I just can’t use them all at once.

— There’s a pseudo-deckbuilding component, like Rift, in which I combine various classes to form a custom build. Presumably some of these are better than others, but there’s a lot of potential room for experimentation, and it’s easy to move them around.

— The visuals are impressive and not overwrought, especially the animations.

— There is an absolutely insane level of content density, from random interactable activities to hidden quests to standard quests that I can overachieve in, to detailed story quests, to fully integrated climbing and boating systems… all of which I’m not only allowed to do, but the game encourages me to do very early on.

ArcheAge Cleric Build

I like the idea of mastering every class, provided there’s some tangible benefit to me doing so. It’s something that’s stopped me from playing all of the classes up to max level in FFXIV– not just the time involved, but that I already have my favorite classes to play, which fit any role I might want to fill, and there’s very little I would get from leveling up another class. The only thing that gets me really excited about leveling a new class in FFXIV is if it has some really fun gameplay elements or suits a theme I like a lot. I leveled Ninja, and I’ll likely level Dark Knight as a replacement for my Paladin. In Archeage, my “build” is comprised of three classes, so there’s a lot of benefit to me having focused on a few and slowly increasing my repertoire to be more flexible and be able to create more builds. I’ll need to spend more time with it, but at least what I’ve seen is promising. At some point I’ll sit down and start theorycrafting good, functional builds, but I want a better handle on how the game feels before I do so. It feels a lot less contrived and unwieldy than Rift, which is a very good thing in my book. I loved the concept in that game, but not the execution.

The animations are really impressive, and I find them a lot of fun. I have never enjoyed warrior-style classes, because I feel bulky and inelegant, wielding a huge weapon with brute force and no finesse. I’m currently playing a warrior in Archeage, because the dual wielding style is graceful and feels powerful, even though the two-handed weapon animations feel brute-force-focused and smashy. At least as far as I’ve gotten, the game feels like it’s going to let me play the skillful swordsman type of character that I’ve always enjoyed but rarely gotten to play, substituting speed and finesse for brute force, and actually making it feel that way in the character animations. When I hit a mob with a warrior ability, I FEEL it, and that’s incredibly satisfying to me.

archeagetam

I’ve played through the first ten levels of the game thus far, and it’s striking to me how much there seems to be to do. There are entire systems that the game hasn’t introduced to me yet but that I can see portions of as I play. There’s a currency that accrues over time spent in game that I use to access my loot drops, which is a clever system for a variety of reasons but also ties in with crafting and gathering, as far as I can tell. The game is very open, and while I’ve spent a bunch of time simply following the main quests, every time I venture off the beaten path I find something at least somewhat interesting. The game seems tuned to give you key systems early on, then expand them as time goes on. I’ve raised my own horse and can ride around mounted now, but my horse has levels and can get attacked by enemies– I have a follower who benefits from watching me fight but is a potential liability. It’s an interesting trade-off that adds just a bit of interesting flow to gameplay.

Right now I’ve gone the path of the fast, agile swordsman, taking Warrior, Rogue, and a secondary skillset called Auramancy, which seems to be focused on resistances and shedding debuffs but importantly includes a Blink-style teleport spell, one of my favorite tools in any MMO. We’ll see if the content density continues to be compelling, but I get the impression the game hasn’t finished showing me what it’s got to offer.

It may be a bit before I continue updating, but I’ll continue talking about Archeage as long as I continue playing it. I’ve already made it past the point where a lot of people quit in disgust due to the initially toxic community, but a year on, things seem to have settled down. The odds that I’ll be able to ever have my own property seem slim, because space for that sort of thing seems to be in short supply, but we’ll see if that’s something I care about.



Source: Digital Initiative
Tam Tries: Archeage (levels 1-10)

Storm Surge

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Wall Jumping

Wow-64 2015-06-04 19-41-58-49 World of Warcraft feels really damned weird when you have not logged in for over a week.  What I mean by this is that some is strange with the perspective of that game as compared to most other games.  I have noticed this a few times when swapping between the various games I have been playing, but never quite so strongly as last night.  I have no clue what it is, or how to describe it better but something is just “different” with the way the world spreads out around me.  It always takes me a few minutes to get adjusted to the perspective as my eyes freak out a little bit.  I am really hoping someone out there understands what I am talking about… because otherwise I just sound like a mad man.  Life had conspired against me, and for various sundry reasons I missed the last two raid sessions, and even more troubling was that it had been two weeks since I had actually taken a shot at Blackhand.  I would really love to be able to close the Blackrock Foundry chapter of my raiding life with a a kill, and last night we got close.

The biggest adjustment for me is the fact that we were really short on melee dps… which is an odd problem for our group to have.  This meant I got to be on the wall group during phase two.  Every so often Blackhand smashes the current tank, and the wall jumpers need to get behind the tank… but also in the circle of impact so they get knocked up in the same direction the tank is going.  This works similar to the Bladefist crowd group, and the end result being kill as many things as you can and then jump down when your health gets low or you have cleared the entire group.  In the grand scheme of things I guess I am a decent choice for the job because of my self regen and tanky cooldowns.  We have phases one and two down solidly, and right now it is just phase three where everything is falling apart.  On our best attempt we managed to get him to 11% so I am thinking next week given another full night of attempts we might kill us a Blackhand, and there will be much rejoicing.

Storm Surge

HeroesOfTheStorm_x64 2015-06-04 19-14-22-89 Since it had been over a week since I had actually logged into WoW last night, I had to go through the song and dance of making sure I had consuming and collect my “disappointment tokens” to allow me to re-roll on the loot that will never actually drop.  After doing all of that I parked my butt at the entrance to the raid and took up the offer of Damai and Mor to join them in some Heroes of the Storm fun.  Last night my quest was to play two matches as a Starcraft Hero, and at that point I realized… that quite honestly I don’t play a lot of Starcraft heroes in this game.  Probably my favorite of all of the Starcraft Heroes is Sergeant Hammer, but unfortunately I do not “own” her yet because she is a truly silly amount of gold.  Instead I have Raynor, a Hero that I played quite a bit in early alpha so I opted to use him.  The problem being he no longer plays quite like I remember him playing.  Just like my disconnect I had with Muradin, they have changed the way he feels and made him significantly less sturdy.  The end result was me taking a lot of deaths and doing a generally piss poor job playing the game.

Part of the disconnect also was that last night we were playing with actual human beings, and the night before we were playing bots.  Essentially one of our trio had been playing quite a bit that day and managed to cap out on the amount of gold you can earn from bot games, thus pushing him into the solo queue to keep slowly earning gold.  Our first match we managed to win, and then in our second match… we ended up with a team that actually knew how to play together.  This is probably a side effect of the fact that three of us queued together.  Even though we were on voice, this really didn’t make much of a difference in the outcome because we are all not exactly amazing players yet.  I took a screenshot of my defeat screen because it was my very first so far in post release play.  Unfortunately before I had a chance to switch back to my beloved Sonya…  it was time to log out for the raid.  Even though we made a lot of progress on Blackhand I have to admit I probably would have rather been playing Heroes of the Storm.

Who Needs Sleep

WildStar64 2015-05-01 23-46-03-53 Shockingly last night I did not log into Final Fantasy XIV at all, in part because of the other things I had going on like the WoW raid.  Lately I have had two real world friends of mine start playing Wildstar again, and this has caused me to want to try and sort out exactly where I was in questing.  It had been several weeks since I had logged in and I could not remember the level or even what zone I was in, so I wanted to know at least that so I could adequately communicate it.  I am apparently seventeen and in Galeras, in fact as of last nights play session I have just made the transition to the second area of the zone and have picked up that taxi point.  I want to play this game some more, and I am thinking next week while my wife is travelling I might stream it off and on throughout the week.  Last night unfortunately I managed to get sucked into questing and once again did not end up heading to bed until midnight.  I had not played the game much since the last drop, and I think a few of my addons might have broken because I was suffering from all manner of UI issues last night.

All of this aside I had quite a bit of fun running around and causing mayhem on my warrior.  There is part of me that wonders about going over and completing Celeston instead of digging too far into Galeras, but I am managing to stay a few levels ahead of my quest mobs right now so there isn’t much of a problem yet.  I kinda feel bad for joining the Black Dagger Society and then simply not being terribly active.  They seem like a really great guild lead by a great group of people.  This is the problem when you are pulled in so many different directions, and with playing a game that is ultimately not your “main game”.  Right now Final Fantasy XIV is the game I care the most about, and I am absolutely in love with the guild we have there.  They keep me logging in on an almost daily basis if for no reason other than to see them.  Wildstar I feel could be a similar environment, but with the sensory overload that is the world and the user interface… I find it exceptionally hard to follow the chat window.  There is just so much stuff going competing for my attention that I have not figured out how to dial things down enough to where I can actually watch chat.  I hope to get to know more of my guildies however because they really do seem like awesome people.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Storm Surge

On RNG

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It’s interesting to see the level of randomness we’ll accept in our games. This post is somewhat inspired by the running jokes regarding the luck of Bel and Tam.

One of the complaints Tam and I shared about Darkest Dungeon was the tendency toward “cascading failure”. It was my experience that an enemy crit might lead to your entire team getting stressed, which might make one go crazy and start attacking a party member who would then get more stressed and go crazy, until your entire party is dead. This remains a problem even if the enemies aren’t much of a threat otherwise. Darkest dungeon revels in its randomness, and it was a bit much for me. I figured it would be a good opportunity to examine how other games use randomness.

Two Extremes

On one side, we have roguelikes. On the other hand, there are a lot of examples of games with no randomness whatsoever, like Super Mario Brothers. For the purposes of this conversation, I’m ignoring the second category, but there are a lot more of them than you might think at first. Most scrolling shooters, bullet hell or otherwise, have fixed patterns, with the only changes coming from reaction to the player’s position. Most platformers are similar, even modern ones like Rayman, Ori, and Super Meat Boy. (As an aside, Super Meat Boy is such a wonderful example of a lot of game concepts that I’m probably not going to stop comparing things to it until people no longer remember what it is.) Instead of talking about those, let’s start somewhere else familiar.

More Super Meat Boy

Ultimate Illusion

It’s not hard to see where the Final Fantasy series took its original inspiration from, and so it’s not a large surprise that it ended up with random elements to replace the dice rolling that tabletop RPGs use. As a result, there’s turn order, damage variance, spell effectiveness, enemy target selection, enemy attack selection, encounter rate, encounter type, and probably other things that I’m forgetting that are randomly determined. Even with all of this, Final Fantasy is not random enough that it feels unfair. You know that your fighter or monk is going to reliably do a certain amount of damage, enough to kill an enemy in X number of hits. You know that if you use fire spells on undead enemies, most of them will take more damage than usual. You can even have a good idea of how much damage enemies do, so you know when you need to heal. Even though there’s some amount of randomness inherent in all of these things, it isn’t overwhelming.

Final Fantasy 1

Genre-Defining

Roguelikes (so-named because of the game Rogue) feel like the above does not go far enough. Some of my favorite games fall into this category, like Risk of Rain, the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series, and Diablo (think about it). Hallmarks here include all of the above, plus random (or semi-random) level design, random items, and getting set back dramatically if you die. The goal in this is to ensure that every time you play the game it’s a little different. The large death penalty also encourages learning, instead of memorization; your growing skill as a player is supposed to be the driving factor behind making further progress. There are enough games calling themselves roguelikes with progression systems that this isn’t always true.

My problem with some games like this is that it’s possible to get an RNG overdose. Using Risk of Rain as an example, if you’re playing one of the close-range characters and don’t have a decent source of healing by about 20 minutes (on normal), you might be doomed due to circumstances that are mostly outside of your control. Likewise if you’re the commando (the character you start with) and haven’t found something that helps you deal with groups, you’re going to have a hard time. Roguelikes in general tend to be somewhat bad about this, it’s possible to have lost and not even know for a period of time. In Risk of Rain in particular, this time is unlikely to be longer than about 10 minutes. In Darkest Dungeon, it sometimes wasn’t as kind. (Ex: “You didn’t bring enough shovels, but you don’t know that yet!”) They also have the problem outlined in the opening, where defeat comes from a series of unlucky rolls in a very short amount of time.

Risk of Rain
Then there’s the engineer, in which case you don’t care about items.

Sliding Scale

This doesn’t seem like an easy problem to solve. In games of this style, things have to vary enough to be interesting, without screwing the player over completely. You might argue that “screwing the player over completely” is the point, but I don’t buy that, and that mentality is why most of these games struggle to expand their audience. I think one of the best solutions is the ability to choose how difficult the game is, but this isn’t perfect. Diablo doesn’t make you play on Hardcore mode, but it’s there as an option. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon only makes you start at square one (Level 1, no items) for the bonus dungeons.

I haven’t given up on roguelikes as a whole, and I’m always interested to see how the next one handles some of these issues. The fact that other people like even the games I think are too random proves that there’s an audience that enjoys that. Steam certainly has plenty to choose from.



Source: Ashs Adventures
On RNG