MMORPG – Page 251

DAW2016: Square Enix

April 29, 2016 by Belghast

Developer Appreciation Week is here! For the uninitiated the concept of Developer Appreciation week dates back to 2010 and was started by Couture Gaming the Blogger formerly known as Scarybooster. The idea was simple, spend a week talking about all of the things you love about various game development companies and studios. As a blogger we spend plenty of time pointing out what is wrong in the games we love, and talking about ways that they could be better. That said it is important to understand that for most of us this critique comes from being a huge fan of the games and genres as a whole. So during this week we point out the things that are going right and make a point of mentioning all the things we really appreciate out there. If you too are a blogger please feel free to join in by posting your own Developer Appreciation Week ideas.

I knew sooner or later I would end up needing to do Square Enix because at various times during my life they played a huge role in shaping how I looked at games. Lets go back to a time and a place where the only gaming news I got was through Nintendo Power magazine. In one of those issues I was first introduced to a game called Final Fantasy. For ages I had been looking for the personification of Dungeons and Dragons in game form, and while the gold box games did a decent job of doing just that… there was always something missing. Final Fantasy bridged the gap and gave me precisely that, along with a story line that made me care about all of the dungeon crawling. I remember being so insanely excited when I went to a nearby Walmart and they had this game in stock. The only negative was that within a short few days I would be heading to Boy Scout camp for an entire week. While I normally loved camp, this was quite possibly the most miserable week of camp I have ever experienced. All that I really wanted to be doing was playing Final Fantasy from the comfort of my bedroom… and instead I was making campfires, and hiking up sharp flint rock strewn paths. When I finally got home, firing up that Nintendo and playing Final Fantasy was quite literally the best feeling ever. Regardless of how exhausted I was from a week of camp, I still ended up pulling an all nighter and getting through that damned Marsh cave.

When Final Fantasy 2 was released… aka Final Fantasy IV for the rest of the world… it once again dominated my life for a period of time. I was completely blown away by the graphics at the time, and also amazed at how much more complex the story line of that game was. This was also the point at which I learned the hard lesson of save at every single save point, because of a bad mishap with the Magus Sisters. The game also introduced the term “Spoony Bard” into my vocabulary and for that I will always be grateful. This was also the first game that gave me characters I had no interest in playing… I am looking at you Edward and your inability to do any real damage. The game also gave my quite possibly my favorite goofy archetype of character… the Dragoon, with its amazing but also sometimes frustrating jump attack. I was completely hooked on the notion of having this huge cast of characters that I could switch between at will… but then ultimately only ever seemed to play with the same party ever. For the most part that party was Cecil, Rydia, Kain, Rosa, and Edge… with that last spot being highly variable as I went through the play session. This is really something I do even today when I play for example a Bioware game. In Dragon Age Inquisition, my party is pretty much permanently Cassandra, Dorian, Sera and my character.

It wasn’t until High School that Final Fantasy 3 was released… or Final Fantasy VI for the rest of the world. I remember it coming out around Christmas break and at first I rented it… which was a truly dumb idea given that the Super Nintendo didn’t have memory cards. The main reason for this was because the game itself was something stupid like $85 when it released, which was an awful lot of my limited resources at the time. However after a few days of playing the game I was making a trek to the big city to try and find a copy. After searching a dozen different stores I finally found a copy at Target, and much to my shock it was on sale for only $65. I am not sure exactly sure what it is about Final Fantasy VI, but for whatever reason I think this game will always be my favorite. I tend to love games that pull a bait and switch on me, when you think you are nearing the end of the game… only to realize that the world just got much larger and instead of being nearly done… I was just barely starting. I also have a soft spot for a lot of the characters in this game, because it managed to make me feel things that video games had not really succeeded in doing up to this point. Ashgar and I have had a conversation about this… and for me the game that did all of these things was Final Fantasy V. However for me… that game was not available and didn’t even receive a fan translation until I was well into college. The two games do a lot of the same things, I just happened to experience six first.

Over the years there has been a string of Final Fantasy titles always in my life, and several non-FF series games that I loved as well. For example I love beyond love Vagrant Story, and I remember playing the hell out of it when it came out on the PSX. I also spent more than my fair share of time playing Chrono Trigger, and the subsequent follow up games. Then there are games that I wish would get a reboot like Parasite Eve that were so amazing for the time in which they came out. Essentially there has always been some Square Enix game somewhere in my life, be it Bravely Default that I am slowly working my way through on my 3DS downstairs on my bedside table, or the Kingdom Hearts collection I have sitting beside my PS3 ready to start in earnest. All of these are in fact great experiences, but the one I feel like I really need to talk about is the miraculous rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV. This game was released in 2010 and was essentially universally despised. I remember getting into the beta for it and finding it just largely uninteresting more than anything. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t really feel anything about it. So I was more than happy to return to World of Warcraft, and forget that the game existed.

However in August of 2013 the game relaunched as A Realm Reborn, and I have to say I was shocked at just how much I liked the title. We played for a handful of months until our group ran out of content that we could realistically complete. Then July of 2014 I decided to fire the game up again, because I wanted to see how it had progressed in our absence. Final Fantasy XIV was one of those games that our group left on good terms. What I found waiting on me was this rich cache of content that laid untapped. Over the next several months we had what could only be termed as a renaissance of MMO gaming all centered around this game. I was happy to raid once again, and happy to be doing pretty much all of the tropes of a MMORPG. What made all the difference was the loving way in which this game was being crafted. I have to give huge shouts to the localization team and namely Koji Fox. Final Fantasy XIV is so amazingly well written and is packed full of more feels than most games ever manage to muster. There is content that will make you painfully belly laugh, and other times infuriate you for all of the right reasons. Then there are moments that will make you cry… and there are certain cut scenes in this game that even the mere thought of will summon up the waterworks.

While I am currently on a break from the game after burning myself out again with the launch of Heavensward, I know sooner or later I will return and be happy to do so. Heavensward was quite possibly the expansion I have looked forward to the most from any MMORPG that I have played, since maybe the launch of Trials of Atlantis in Dark Age of Camelot. Unfortunately much like ToA… I got my expectations up way too high, and the content drought that followed the launch ultimately ended up with me stopping playing. However as a couple of patches have built up for me, I plan on returning soon… probably after I get the upcoming Diablo 3 season out of my system. I am happy to know that there is still a very thriving guild presence in this game waiting on me. I have a feeling that sooner or later we will all return for yet another renaissance of MMO gaming and when it happens… it will be in huge part to just how great Final Fantasy XIV turned out.

DAW2016: Bioware

April 27, 2016 by Belghast

This is going to be a difficult one to tackle, especially since I didn’t get a ton of sleep thanks to the tornado warnings. However I am going to give it to good college try, and hope that the end result turns out at least not too shabby. I first became aware as Bioware as a company with the release of Baldur’s Gate, or more so the existence of what I later came to know as the “Infinity Engine”. I have been a fan of Dungeons and Dragons since I first found a players manual abandoned in a locker on the last day of school in second grade. Finding that book spawned a lot of things, not the least of which was trying to hungrily gobble up anything TSR related. I played the “gold box” series of games, namely because I had read the novels behind a lot of the stories. There was just something missing with the game, and while I enjoyed them at the time they never really felt that good. The story that was being told felt limited by the meager technology, and while I was happy enough with the end product… that only lasted until I had played my first Final Fantasy game. Baldur’s Gate was the title that brought me back from my console days into once again believing that the PC was a great platform for role-playing games.

Subsequent games were released… Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate II and even one of my all time favorites… Planescape Torment… all using this “Infinity Engine” I have to admit I got a bit of the wrong idea behind what exactly the company Bioware really was. In my mind it seemed like Bioware was the tools company, and Interplay, Black Isle, or later the reboot Obsidian were the game creator. It wasn’t until Neverwinter Nights was released that I really started to understand that Bioware was both the tools division and a lot of great storytelling wrapped into one package. Neverwinter Nights was one of those revolutionary games for me personally. While the original campaign was awesome… it was the inclusion of the aurora toolset that set my mind on fire. At this time I was playing a lot of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot so I tried to replicate some of my favorite features of those games using the Neverwinter engine. I learned the C Script language and figured out how to code things like randomly generated loot from tables when you opened chests or killed mobs. I also eventually figured out how to create a token based system along the lines of the one that allowed you to purchase armor in the Darkness Falls dungeon. The end result was this amalgam of the EQ Plane of Hate and DAoC Darkness Falls that I called the “Plane of Spite”. While I never did anything really interesting with it, I loved every single moment of working on it and figuring out the inner machinations of this engine.

It was not really until Knights of the Old Republic that I hopped back on the Bioware fandom, and I remember being crushingly disappointed when I learned that the title was going to be Xbox Exclusive. Thankfully later that year it came out for the PC and I was absolutely thrilled to be dissecting that game world as well. I loved Neverwinter Nights for its technical precision, and the Aurora and Infinity engines for giving me this awesome framework to go out and explore worlds in. However KOTOR was the first time from Bioware that I was completely stunned by the storyline. Last week we went into a discussion on AggroChat about the best Star Wars stories, and by the end of that show all of us pretty much came to the consensus that Knights of the Old Republic was if not the absolute best story, it was at least among them. There are moments in this game that had shocking revelations that I have never quite recovered from. Even though the engine is dated, and the graphics look like crap compared to what I am used to… I can still play this game happily over and over just because it was so damned well crafted. I’ve bought it for others, and even own the mobile port of the game. I feel like this game more than any set the tone for the modern incarnation of Bioware.

I ultimately for one reason or another skilled Mass Effect at launch, and instead picked up the Bioware banner once again with the release of Dragon Age: Origins. During this period of time I was raiding in World of Warcraft rabidly… but there were a few weeks where I completely dropped off the face of the planet, and it was thanks to this game. I was just completely enthralled with the world and the setting, and the concept of the dark spawn and deep roads. I am a Dwarf at heart, so I loved every single moment of Orzammar. My first play through was as a Dwarven Noble, and I have to say after all of the subsequent play sessions that is still the one I cherish the most. Much the same as KOTOR, it was ultimately the characters that set this game apart from the others I had played. They felt so fleshed out and three dimensional, and I actually cared about interacting with them. I am a huge proponent of smashing things with a big weapon, and games that allow me to slaughter by the hundreds… but it is significantly harder to find a game that makes me feel. Dragon Age made me feel so much, and during this time I had a really interesting encounter. One of my guildies invited me to tank for some friends of his, and when I popped onto voice chat we had some of the usual getting to know a new person discussion. I mentioned that I had been playing a ton of Dragon Age… and it was at this point that they started grilling me about this character or that, or what decision I made where. It turns out that I was ultimately raiding that night with a bunch of the writers, and you could almost hear them beaming as they proudly chimed in that they wrote this or that as I gushed about various details.

With the release of Mass Effect 2, I later went back and became an addict of that series as well. I still wish that someone would make that into a Walking Dead style serialized television show, because the story that is being told is among the best science fiction tales ever. It just seems a crime that the only folks that will ever see the story, are the ones who have played through the game. Then you of course have the release of Star Wars the Old Republic, that my friends and I tore through rabidly when it launched. I burnt myself out on that game but recently a bunch of us ended up going back and remembering just how damned well written all of the story arcs really are. At some point soon I want to go back and finish where I left off which is the start of the Revan content, and try out the new experience fallen empire content that I have heard so much about. For sake of time though I am going to wrap things up, because otherwise I could probably carry on for a dozen more paragraphs talking about all of the things from Bioware games that I love. It is a great studio, and while I was scared that EA would destroy its spirit… I have been pleasantly surprised that the core values of the company and the creative might seem to keep trucking along happily. I look forward to more adventures be it with Andromedia or the next great IP that we have yet to experience.

Blizzard: WoW and Overwatch

April 23, 2016 by Belghast

Puppy Love

This is admittedly going to be a bit of a bummer of a post, but I feel like I want to get it out of me and onto paper. I started this discussion yesterday on twitter but the 140 character limit of that medium kept me from really expressing any sense of nuance. What happened is as the day wound down I ended up watching a really great video from Curse talking about the road to Overwatch, and the first video was talking about the failure of Titan. It really is a great video because while Blizzard refuses to really talk about what happened with Titan, they do a pretty good job of trying to interpret and read between the lines, and managed to get an awful lot of candid commentary from the Overwatch team. However while watching this video I was struck by something. As you watch folks like Metzen and Kaplan talk about Overwatch you see this unbridled love and excitement in the way they express everything. You can tell just how much they are enjoying this game and how excited about the future of Overwatch they feel. This is just something I have not really seen from Blizzard in years in pretty much ANY game. Sure there are standouts like Terran Gregory that are amazing, and every time he talks you can tell he quite literally is living his dream each and every day. However the bulk of the World of Warcraft folks at Blizzard tend to come across with almost a sense of resentment that they are working on that product.

To go even further if you watch some of the Blizzcon Q/A sessions, there is almost a sense of condescension towards the players from the folks up on stage. It goes beyond the “we know better” thing that every IT professional is guilty of doing. It seems at times that they simply are not having fun with World of Warcraft anymore, and when you watch the same folks like Chris Metzen talking about Overwatch it is just such a stark difference. On some level I absolutely get it. There are things that I wrote a decade ago that I am still forced to maintain… and every single time I open them all I can see are the mistakes I made in the past. After a point I began to resent that code, and it is almost painful every single time I have to work in it. I am figuring that in many ways the folks who work on World of Warcraft, and have for a very long time… feel that same way about that game. They see this Weasley House of a game that is knitted together out of several different generations development, and just want to start over. I think this attitude is evidenced in the vast number of game system uproots that have happened during the course of its lifespan. Instead of just fixing the problems of the past, they nuke from orbit things like the talent system and try and rebuild something completely different on the rubble of the past system.

Nostalgia Not Hope

Now when I started down this path yesterday, a friend of mine brought up the Looking For Group documentary. The problem is I see something completely different there when folks talk about the origins of World of Warcraft than I do in the current Overwatch videos. I see a nostalgia for the way things used to be. I see a reminiscing of folks who remember the good times the game had and how excited they used to be about everything relating to the game. Ultimately I see a lot of living off of the whiffs of former glory, and what I see missing is the unbridled hope about what could be and is just over the horizon. In Overwatch the sky is the limit and everything is magical still, because they have yet to actually ship the product. In World of Warcraft, every single turn is dictated by a past decision and often times colored by past mistakes. As a player I want to know that the best days of the franchise are still ahead of me, and not something to be remembered fondly from the past. The development team has not made me feel that way since Wrath of the Lich King, and I realize that is entirely my fault as well. What the game needs now however is exuberance to turn back the tide of negativity and get the ship moving in the right direction, and I see that sort of positive spirit working through the Overwatch team and wish I could somehow bottle it and force feed it to the folks working on Warcraft.

It just makes me wonder if at this point the current team working on World of Warcraft is too tired of the game to really take it to the places it needs to go. The funny thing is… there is a team at Blizzard that is doing precisely the sort of job that the WoW team should be doing. Diablo 3 feels like the property that is largely ignored and was even left out of the “things going on at blizzard” video from Blizzcon 2015. However they are doing this amazing job of slowly and quietly improving the way Diablo 3 feels to play it. The whole seasonal concept has revolutionized the way I play the game and has created this moment that happens every few months where me and my friends get extremely excited to be playing the game again. We need that sort of an approach at World of Warcraft, rather than the slash and burn experience that keeps happening with every expansion. We need someone to take an approach that is constantly refining and moving the franchise forward rather than trying to re-invent itself and often floundering. SOE was the master of this methodoloy, and each Everquest and Everquest II expansion felt like it was pushing the boundaries of what the old tech could do, and the team seemed genuinely excited to be doing each new batch of content. Ultimately the truth is… how are we the players supposed to be excited about a product when the folks creating it seem to be going through the motions. I want Blizzard to love World of Warcraft the way that they seem to love Overwatch right now, and I wish I knew how to make that happen.

Scattered Gaming

March 28, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was an odd one. After a string of relatively nice weekends, we ended up getting one that was either cold and windy… or cold and rainy, both of which drove my instinct to stay inside and hibernate. The only problem is… with all this play time I largely squandered it and spent more time staring without purpose at games… than actually playing them. It feels like I am starting to go through another one of my “funks” because nothing seemed to fit “just right” as far as games go. I flitted between lots of different titles, playing them for a bit before shifting to something else… often times ending right back up in the game I started in. For a good chunk of the weekend I had the desire to play Destiny… but wanted to instead be hanging out downstairs which only left me the unofficial remote play app as a solution. Then there were games that I felt like I needed to make progress in like Division where I am still not at the level cap. Friday was largely devoted to Undertale, and I think after forcing myself to play that game… it maybe soured the rest of my weekend. So this morning I thought I would run down some of the progress I made in various games.

Undertale

I wrote about this at length but after hanging up my controller as it were… I opted to instead watch several of the different endings. I still feel fine in my decision to just abandon this game in an undefeated state. I guess I don’t have a primal urge to finish games, and more often than not I get to the ending and just don’t finish. I reach this point where I have gotten out of the game what I wanted, and I don’t see the point in expending that effort to push it across the finish line. In the case of Undertale the thing that was driving me forward was to understand the story, and now between the podcast and the various youtube ending videos… I feel like I do. Once that carrot was gone, the game play itself doesn’t make me want to ever touch this game again. On the podcast folks talked about ways to lower the impact of the mechanics, like the Temmie armor… but that isn’t even really an interesting option to me.

Destiny

I really did not do much in Destiny other than a little bit of Crucible. I am constantly amazed at how much I actually enjoy player versus player content in this game, when traditionally that is just not my thing. I think a lot of it is that in this game it feels like there is zero negative impact on the rest of the game. It is just another option I have to play, and gives me the same sort of PVE rewards that I expect to receive elsewhere. Other than specialty modes like Trials of Osiris it feels like I am rewarded equally for just doing whatever I happen to want to do at the time. I started down the path of the crucible simply as a way to get more Legendary marks, and then recently when I was grinding out sword kills I came to realize… I was actually legitimately enjoying myself. What is great about the crucible is that I get the central game play loop that I enjoy of shooting awesome weapons and charging around… without zero downtime. It seems like it is easier to get Three of Coins to proc on Crucible than it is while doing strikes… or it might simply be that Crucible itself is just about the perfect amount of time per coin use. While I have not actually gotten any of the really cool PVP drops… I do get a fair amount of strange coins, motes and random pieces of armor that end up getting deconstructed. Tonight I will hopefully be finishing up the rest of the Kings Fall raid that we had to abandon on Oryx last Tuesday, and beforehand it is my goal to hang out upstairs and run some more Crucible.

The Division

This weekend I managed to push Division a little harder than the rest of the games and caught up with my friend Tamrielo at least. At the start of the weekend I was sitting at roughly level 20, and as of this morning I am just about a third into 22. While I absolutely could play this and only give it partial attention at lower levels, as I have gotten into the twenties this is not really the case. As a result this weekend I managed to die probably more than I actually managed to accomplish anything. There are two missions that I know I attempted at least a half dozen times before finally giving it my full attention and pushing through. My standard operating procedure while hanging out with my wife downstairs is that I essentially have one eye on the game and one eye on whatever we happen to be watching… not literally but you know what I mean. The problem with this is that in doing so I am not exactly paying attention to the best possible tactical spot that I could be in while shooting incoming mobs. The addition of snipers really changed how the game works, and now that I have guys that rush me with shotguns as well.. I am having to be way more careful about how I take on content. That said I feel like I made some decent progress, but most of it was in short bursts of me playing for thirty minutes to an hour… and then logging out and doing something else. Thankfully much like Destiny… short batches of play time feel just as rewarding to me as multiple hour long sessions.

World of Warcraft

The other major happening of the weekend was me poking around on my Forsaken Hunter in World of Warcraft. Recently Blizzard added an achievement that you could unlock by leveling a character in WoW to 20, aka the free mode level cap. For doing this you end up getting Lady Liadrin as an alternate Paladin hero in Hearthstone. Not that I really play Hearthstone… and even more so… not that I really like playing Paladins in Hearthstone… I have this drive to get the achievement and unlock the extra shiny bits. The negative of this achievement is that it only counts if you have recently leveled to twenty after the launch of the achievement, that means my army of level 100s are doing me zero good for this goal. As a result I opted to level something on The Scryers Horde side since that is where the bulk of my lower leveled characters are these days. I largely played during the podcast on Saturday night, and as a result managed to get to I believe 18 before giving it up for the night. The goal is to spend some time this week pushing it over the line, so that I at least can feel like I got this out of the way. I honestly think this whole promotion is a brilliant idea to try and cross pollinate some of the players actively playing Hearthstone and get them to try World of Warcraft. I know Hearthstone is a major nostalgia bomb for me… but I wonder if it is the same for a player who has ONLY played Hearthstone, now being able to see where those cards they love are actually from.