MMORPG – Page 260

DAW2016: Bioware

April 27, 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.

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.

Space Goats and Paid Content

March 22, 2016 by Belghast

WoW Chronicles

Last Friday I managed to find a copy of the regularly back ordered… World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1. One of the huge problems World of Warcraft has had to date is that a lot of the lore just feels somewhat tacked on. I feel like much of the story was written during some late night unbridled “wouldn’t it be cool if” sessions, and there was a lot of hand waving going on from about Burning Crusade onward. What the chronicles project is trying to do is to set in stone a true canon about the world, and how all of the interlinking pieces actually fit together. I wholeheartedly support this notion… I just wish someone had the foresight to do it a decade ago, or at least when they decided to start really mixing things up with the first expansion. I am sure there has been a penciled together napkin sketch of what the world was intended to look like, that at least partially exists in the minds still of the people working at Blizzard. The problem is when something is not written down and set into print… it becomes too easy to erase a line here and graft on a new segment of lore there that really conflicts with something that came before.

What I am wondering is how much narrative cleanup are they committed to do to make this canon really a living document? While this project doesn’t exactly burn down what was in place before… it does invalidate a lot of things that happened and in other cases it simply explains things that already exist. For example… the book indicates that the Spirit Healers that we have used for years are essentially a rogue faction of Val’kyr. The book goes into depth about the relationship between the void lords, the titans, the old gods, and classifies things that lacked classification like the wild gods which now include the pantheon of August Celestials. What I really hope to see is some of these lore fixes making their way into the game in either the form of new quests, or old quest revisions. I will say that having some sort of concrete font of lore that they can keep going back to, makes me at least somewhat excited for the future of the game. Lore has always been one of the big problems I had with World of Warcraft, and how confused and messy…. and downright incomplete it always seemed. Hopefully we will start to see the fruits of this project with the coming expansion Legion… which even before this seemed like it was going to be a complete loregasm.

Paid Promotional Content

I am going to take the tail end of this mornings post to complain about something that has been bothering me. Granted I know it will do absolutely zero good since it is quite obvious the forces in question are not even reading my blog. For years I have gotten messages from various companies wanting to place paid content on my blog. There is a practice that is frighteningly common that gets called by a bunch of names… but essentially marketers want to pay established blogs to place pre-written and pre-approved articles which serve as a sort of advertising for a product. Essentially the practice makes me feel dirty inside that they are even targeting my blog… but most end up getting caught in the spam filter. Here lately several have made it through on my About page, and I have taken to responding to them directly. I realize I should just brush these off as the byproduct of having blogged for as long as I have, but it really sticks in my craw.

I get super excited about products, and games… and the other things that interest me in the world. I’m a geek and a lot of geekdom is geeking out about something. That said I want to make sure it is understood that when I get excited about something… it is because I am legitimately excited and that there is not some nefarious force behind the curtain pulling my strings. Sure I would love to make money on my blog, or at least love to reach a point where it is self sustaining… the problem is every option to monetize means I am giving up some of my control. For example if I were to install advertisements… I wouldn’t be able to curate WHICH advertisements I allowed onto the site, I would have to accept anything the ad network wanted to place there. So the notion of “supporting” products that I don’t necessarily believe in, really bothers me. As a result I have shunned pretty much all advertising, and while I freely accept alphas and betas to games… I only end up writing about the ones that really interest me. I have friends in the gaming industry, and it is awesome… but no one is paying me to like their product.

Basically what it all boils down to is that my opinion is not for sale. None of the folks that have been approaching me will actually read these lines, but I still feel like it is important to say it loud and publicly. Tales of the Aggronaut has been a work of love for going on seven years now, and while my opinions shift and change based on new data… they are still very much my opinions and not carefully scripted speaking points. That said I will always be open to reviewing products if someone wants me to do so. That said I will only write about the product when I feel like I have had enough time to see the entire picture, and when I have something interesting to say about it. I also will never guarantee a positive review. I am not really a ranty blogger, but I do talk about the points that disappoint me in games or products and that is likely to happen. If someone finds this in a search later on… hopefully they will actually read it before asking me to do something shifty like accepting payola for content. I am extremely luck in that I have a day job that can support my blogging shenanigans, and that I don’t need to somehow turn this into a profit center. I don’t begrudge those who are trying to monetize their content, but I can’t ever really condone shillery.