Gaming

On Class Selection

by

Blaugust Post #12

Q: You can excise one class from every future game. Which? Why?

A: Warrior. Replace with something more interesting than ‘guy who hits people with sharp objects’.

Thalen wrote the above this morning, and it inspired this post. A while back, the developers of Mass Effect revealed various statistics about how people play their games. (Some spoilers for ME3 at that link.) It turns out that a very large number of people play the game as the basic Soldier, which was somewhat disappointing to me. In a game that has 6 class options with varying unique abilities, the one that “just shoots people” struck me as utterly boring. It remains one of two classes I haven’t played a Mass Effect game as (at least single-player).

Unexpected Brilliance

Mass Effect 3 wasn’t just a single player game; it has one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve ever played. It wasn’t quite so good at launch, but by the time I actually got into the game a year later, they’d added so much to the multiplayer that it was nearly unrecognizable. You have the same selection of classes from the main game, with a stripped down selection of abilities at the start (and honestly I don’t think I like most of the starting ability sets). What later patches brought was the ability to unlock additional characters with varied power sets. They’re still divided into Soldier, Engineer, etc., but some of them are different races with different strengths and weaknesses, and even the human unlockables tend to be pretty non-standard. The differences are pretty extreme in some cases, with the N7 Shadow infiltrator having a shadowstep and being more about murder with a sword than a sniper rifle (although it can do that too).

This brings me to my earlier point: Some of the soldiers in the multiplayer bring variety and interest to what would otherwise be the most boring class. (They’re still the class about shooting things.) There are two variations on slow, unstoppable powerhouse types in the Geth Juggernaut and the N7 Destroyer. The Juggernaut is large and slow with well above average health and shields, but comes with an immunity to instant kills and the highly damaging Siege Pulse power . The Destroyer is a mobile weapons platform, with the ability to slow its own movement in tradeoff for increased damage and accuracy, while also launching homing missiles at things that come too close. At the other end of the spectrum is the jetpack-equipped Turian Havok, capable of using its stimulant pack ability to run around the battlefield faster than any class that can’t teleport (i.e. the aforementioned Shadow and almost all of the Vanguards).

Lessons to Learn

I feel like certain other games are learning from examples like this. D&D5 comes to mind immediately, with subclass-like options for all of the base classes. Even Fighters get in on the game, with options I’m going to call “Standard”, “Battlemages are fun”, and “I liked 4e’s Warlord”. (On a semi-related note, there are a bunch of ways to make a character that can both hit things and cast spells, which one is primary mostly depends on what class you’re using to start.) I’d kind of like it if other games could use a bit of this, and make the “basics” not always so basic.

On Dancing

by

Blaugust Post #10

Last night, our Monday raid beat up Bismarck (Extreme). It helped a lot to have Belghast, who cleared it with the Wednesday group last week, but it was still the first kill for 5 of us. Bismarck is one long DPS check, but more than that it’s the kind of “controlled chaos” fight that the Monday group excels at with AOEs flying everywhere and weather changes that have to be reacted to appropriately. Clearing this fight opens up our way to Thok ast Thok (Extreme) and the hardest current encounter in the game outside of Alexander (Savage).

1-2-3

As suits his music, Ravana asks you to dance. It’s the kind of intensely structured encounter where you need to know what’s coming, as reacting to it is generally not going to be fast enough; it’s kind of like Titan in this sense. In addition to his normal abilities, Ravana has a series of attacks called “Liberations” (Prelude to Liberation, Liberation, Swift Liberation, and Final Liberation). Each of these is a 15 second cast (he takes bonus damage while using these) that ends with a very choreographed attack pattern. These vary in difficulty from “You remember Ifrit EX, right?” to “What madman came up with this nonsense?”.

Fortunately, all is not lost, and Someone came up with these simple animations to show one way of dealing with what’s going on. I love it when players do awesome things like this, because trying to explain Final Liberation in just text requires a lot longer than the 54 seconds of this video. Understanding how and why it works that way isn’t really something you can get from the video, so there are some drawbacks there too.

On the Most Awkward Scene in Videogames

by

Blaugust Post #5

Blaugust is pretty good at getting me to finish my drafts. This is a post about That Scene in Final Fantasy 10. It’s fairly early (a few hours in), and the game’s 13 years old, so this is all the spoiler warning you’re going to get. There is a scene fairly early on where Yuna is attempting to show Tidus how to laugh. It’s incredibly, unbelievably awkward, and it’s frequently pointed out as an example of bad writing, or localization. If you don’t believe me about this, see for yourself:

The thing is, I think this scene does exactly what it sets out to do, which is to demonstrate how Tidus is strange, and doesn’t fit in, and isn’t really adjusting well. Spira is not a terribly happy setting in FFX, and attempts to make it brighter are doomed to failure. In case you’re wondering, it’s also not any less awkward in Japanese. What might be worth arguing is the value of this. Tidus is the player avatar (for better or worse), I think and making him look stupid turns some players off the game. This is really part of a deeper JRPG vs. WRPG thing, but I won’t go into that here.

On Success

by

Blaugust Post #4

As you may have heard by now, our previous raid night was spent working on content that we were 10 levels above. For a bit now, our raid group has been working on clearing the last of the raid content from the 2.x series, the Final Coil of Bahamut. We finally beat the final boss on Monday, and I have to say it feels pretty good.

Months Behind

At no point in this game have we been raiding on the bleeding edge. We beat Turn 5 (The hardest boss in the game at release) shortly after the Final Coil of Bahamut (Turns 10-13) came out. We were stuck on Turn 9 for months (and the same phase of it, at that), despite making decent progress with every other raid we attempted. We finally beat it after Heavensward, and I was more happy that it was over than happy I’d beaten it. Things were a bit better moving into Final Coil, because the boss fights there are really cool. (I think T11 is mechanically one of my favorite fight concepts in the game.) As a result of being so drastically behind, we out-geared and/or out-leveled all of the content we’ve been doing.

On Success

And Loving It

It turns out that these raids are still pretty fun this way, and nothing was a pushover (except T10, which we got below 50% on the first pull without explaining things). Mechanics are still capable of wiping you if you mess up, and while the DPS numbers are now kind of easy, standing in things meant to kill you will usually still kill you. In the final dungeons (T5, T9, T13) there are still things that can kill you with no save, like Twisters, Divebombs, or messing up fire/ice. What really gets me are some of the numbers on things not meant to kill you. Akh Morn in Turn 13 is an attack meant to be shared between the tanks that does massive, increasingly large amounts of damage as the final phase goes on. I have no idea how anyone survived this at 50 (and especially in the first groups to clear, who didn’t have full loot from the rest of Final Coil). 10k+ damage through cooldowns is kind of intense. It was certainly a rush to actually beat it.

On Success

What the Future Holds

Currently we’re looking at participating in more current content next week, probably either continuing with Alexander or taking on The Limitless Blue (Extreme). The raiding experience in this game has been quite enjoyable, so I hope this continues.