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On 2015

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I had an interesting time over the holidays, and I was going to write a highly personal post about it that I decided not to finish. 2015 was an interesting year for games in general, so I’d like to focus on that first.

AAA where?

Personally, I did a whole lot of not playing AAA games this year. The GOTY contenders I keep seeing mentioned by big publications are Witcher 3, Bloodborne, and Undertale, and I haven’t played any of them (and I only own the last one). Other big releases I ignored include Splatoon, MGS 5, The Order: 1886, Batman Arkham Knight, and Star Wars Battlefront. I did pick up Dragon Quest Heroes, and we played Fallout 4 for our Game of the Month(s) for November/December. Xenoblade Chronicles X is probably the only other $60 release I devoted a lot of time to, so I didn’t miss all of the big games, just most of them.

On 2015
Part of this is because I played quite a lot of portable games this year, some of which weren’t even released this year. Radiant Historia, Breath of Fire 3 (which I still haven’t beaten), LBX, Puzzle and Dragons Z, and Majora’s Mask all saw playtime this year. Another reason is definitely the Game of the month, which saw me play some things I definitely would not have tried. Secrets of Grindea is probably a game I would have picked up after it came out, but I’m not sure I would have ever acquired Tron 2.0 or Hatoful Boyfriend on my own. A third factor is the MMO Factor, I spent a lot of time playing Final Fantasy 14, and poked my head into a few other games too (Marvel Heroes, Wildstar, Star Wars: The Old Republic).

Posting

My posting remained pretty sporadic. I did Blaugust, and wrote a bunch of posts for that while on the plane to Seattle for PAX Prime. Outside of Blaugust, I still haven’t quite gotten it through my head that not everything I write needs to be a well-researched article, or a guide I put a bunch of work into, or a short novel. I have 2,942 screenshots of Evoland 2 that I intended to use in a post at some point (I still might). Just figuring out where to start on that kept me from saying much about it here at all.

I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I’m saying whenever I hit publish. I’m kind of just throwing my words out and seeing where they stick. I tend to like it if someone finds what I’m writing helpful, but I realize that won’t always be the case and it doesn’t necessarily need to be. Just getting thoughts on screen is helpful to me personally, and sometimes that’s what matters.

On 2015

On 仮名

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Blaugust Post #25

At this point Tam probably knows more Japanese than I do, and I took a quarter of it in college to fulfill a communication requirement. (The options were sign language, a foreign language, or a selection of classes that would make me re-live high school English. It wasn’t a difficult choice.) One of the things that brings back memories is learning to read Hiragana/Katakana, and more importantly, how to write using them.

This was actually the part of learning a language that I was pretty good at. I came up with somewhat odd ways of remembering what meant what. It actually helped me that several of them have extremely similar shapes, because then I could easily pick out the differences and remember them that way. わ, ね, and れ are a good example of this. Over time, I got faster, and through repetition I learned to write them too.

I had the same textbook Tam is using, but also a workbook for practice. I also had classmates for practice speaking and understanding, and I begin to realize the importance of that too. Maybe I’ll start falling back down this rabbit hole, if only so I understand when people near me say and write otherwise incomprehensible things.

On Tam’s 11 Questions

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Blaugust Post #14

I realize this isn’t how this is supposed to work, but I found his pretty thought-provoking.

1. What is the best spell to cast?
If I were to be practical, a healing spell, but that’s boring. My actual answer is Shapechange. I feel like there are a lot of problems that have easy solutions if you can turn into a dragon, you just need to watch out for hero-types that get the wrong ideas.

2. What food item(s) from a game do you want to eat above any others?
Dirge’s Kickin’ Chimaerok Chops seem like something that has to be tried. It took me a lot of work to get the recipe for those, and chimaeroks went nearly extinct with the Cataclysm, making this an incredibly rare delicacy. The only part that bothers me is that it requires Goblin Rocket Fuel.

3. You’ve got an infinite supply of one consumable, and can never carry any others. Which consumable do you choose?
Teleport Scrolls seem like they would be handy, especially if it’s one of the types that lets you go to any familiar place, not just somewhere you mark as “home”.

On Tam’s 11 Questions

4. You have to choose a race and class that you’re never played seriously before. What do you pick?
I pretty much only play humans in games where there are no other options at all, and I tend not to play straightforward mage-types, but I really don’t see either of these changing anytime soon. I haven’t really ever played Orcs, so I might give something like an Orc Bard a shot.

5. What game did you think you would hate but actually loved?
It took a lot of convincing to get me to play the first Borderlands, as it released when I was in a state of thinking I hated First-Person Shooters. (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 came out the same year, and I wasn’t a fan of that series.) Borderlands was amusing, and fun to play, and the wide variety of weapons made it awesome for me (even if Vladov is the best manufacturer). Co-op also helped in a big way.

6. What game did you think you would love but actually hated?
Darkest Dungeon. This seemed like it should be the kind of game that I liked, being a party-based roguelike with a unique art style, but I couldn’t stand actually playing it. In addition to my other problems with it, it bothers me on a few levels that characters develop mental afflictions from stress.

7. Pick a zone from any game to live in. Why?
I’d probably get annoyed by the elves eventually, but Gridania seems like it would be a pretty nice place to be. It’s nice and foresty without being quite as potentially lethal as the non-city shroud zones.

On Tam’s 11 Questions

8. You can excise one class from every future game. Which? Why?
I believe Thalen and Tam are correct in identifying that Warriors are an issue, but I think the class that needs to go is Barbarian/Berserker because classes like that limit what warriors can do. Making a class that is “like warrior, but gets mad” doesn’t do anyone any favors, just give warriors actual options, one of which might include “gets mad”.

9. What’s your favorite story?
The Odyssey. This is one of the few pieces of classic literature that High School English didn’t make me hate.

10. What hobby does no one (yet) know you have?
A few people do know this, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it to a wider audience. I’m a bit of a musician and played trombone throughout most of high school and all of college. I’m currently in a location where practicing that is something that just isn’t going to happen, and I’m (slowly) learning to play bass.

11. What’s your favorite secret shame?
I have a general fondness for musicals. I have the soundtracks to several (including Rent, Wicked, and Starlight Express) in my music library. This has resulted in some really odd reactions from roommates and family members.

12. Why can’t Ashgar count to 11?
I’m a programmer, and off-by-one errors are one of the 2 hard things in computer science.

On Tam’s 11 Questions

On Levels

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Blaugust Post #11

Not too long ago, Tam wrote a post (and a follow-up) about why we should get rid of levels. SAO contains hints of this, mentioning how a level-based system isn’t really fair in PVP contexts, with a subtler hint at the same idea explaining why the second arc doesn’t have levels. In general, I don’t disagree with the arguments presented, but I still think levels are worth keeping.

Progression

It’s possible to have progression without using levels, but I feel that having a level as a symbol of how far you’ve come is more important than any actual increases you get from it. Diablo 3 is a good example of this, as each paragon level doesn’t get you much, but it still feels good to get the level up animation and sound. Skyrim likewise gives you a small power boost as you level, but a large part of your power is based on your skill levels, which might be somewhat far removed from your actual level. (A system was introduced after Dragonborn came out that even lets you reset your skill levels and level indefinitely.) I haven’t played a lot of SAO: Hollow Fragment yet, but it seems to work similarly. (It also has the somewhat ridiculous level cap of 250, and Kirito starts at level 100. These numbers are kind of just there.) Tam kind of dismisses this point, but I feel like it’s relatively important. Even at max level in games with vertical gear progression, you tend to make a different number go up (since both WoW and FF14 tell you your average item level). Admittedly, there’s no “ding” noise for hitting ilevel 170.

Yes, I hit 70 on my first character from desecrating a fire.

Baby + Bathwater

I think more than that, my problem is that most level-less systems that I’ve seen so far either aren’t (TSW) or are 100 times worse (Destiny), with a few exceptions. EVE seems to have figured this out, but it has the problem of being EVE. TSW claims not to have levels, but that’s a big fat lie, as your power is 90% based on your talisman levels. If the big skill wheel was all there was, that game could still be compelling, but they felt the need to add a power gating mechanism on top of it. Contrast this with Guild Wars (the first one), which had actual levels, but intended you to hit the level cap (20) about a third of the way through the campaign. The bulk of your time is spent acquiring additional options, especially Elite Skills, which had to be acquired from bosses out in the world. It’s not a level-less system, but it acts like one, and I find it one of the better examples of such.

On Levels
There are… other problems with this wheel.

Destiny tried to be like Guild Wars, but is structured more like WoW or FF14. The story is enough to take you to about level 20, and you have “light levels” after that. Most options for getting additional light relied on random drops, and your light level still restricted what you could do, so this ended up being worse in almost all cases than having normal levels. Bungie seems to agree, and is going to normal levels with their first real expansion. Most systems I’ve seen so far that attempt to gate power in a way that isn’t related to level don’t actually fix any of the problems Tam outlined. As a consumer of games and not a designer, levels are easy to understand and mostly work, so I think I’ll stick with them. Changes have to do better than “mostly work”, and so far I can’t think of any that have.