On Steam’s Worst Game

August 11, 2014 Ashgar

Sometimes a game will release where users and reviewers disagree on how good it is. There are usually a few reasons for this whenever it happens. Recent games with server problems (Sim City, Battlefield 4) have resulted in the user scores getting review-bombed. Cult classics sometimes review poorly but are well-liked by players later (like Nier or God Hand). And then they’re this. Sacred 3 Released (in the US) last Tuesday, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. According to reviewers it’s somewhat mediocre (a few really liked it), but according to players it’s the worst thing since The War Z.

Bait And Switch

It’s absolutely worth mentioning that the game is a giant bait and switch, being named as the third game in the series but playing nothing like the previous games. Sacred (and Sacred 2) are dungeon crawlers reminiscent of Diablo, with randomized loot and an “open” world and everything else that goes with the genre. Sacred 3 is not like this. Instead, it’s similar to Gauntlet, but with some additional features. This means that you only have access to two abilities at a time, there is no random loot, and the levels are fairly linear with hidden secrets. Personally, I like 3 (so far) more than I liked 2, but this is clearly an uncommon opinion.

Two Steps Forward

That’s not to say there’s no character development whatsoever. Characters gain levels and can unlock additional skills or skill variations to buy. Weapon Spirits are (so far) unlocked via the storyline and provide some additional benefit and drawback to your character, that is the same across all character options. The first one you find (The Battlemage) decreases your energy earned but gives your hits a chance to generate chain lightning. Different primary weapons can change the effects of your normal attack, and all of these can be upgraded with gold and experience.

One Step Back

However, the writing is Bad. There was a constant attempt to be funny, and it doesn’t really work (maybe because I’m not 12 anymore). The dialogue is particularly bad from the main villain, and his voice acting is even worse. Your constant NPC help has a better voice actor, but still terrible (and frequently, annoying) lines. This is my largest complaint about the game by far, and I might see if I like it more by turning off the voice entirely.

I’m only a few hours in (most of which is trying the characters to see which one I liked best), so perhaps my opinion about the game will change, but as of right now I’d call it a good, but not great game. I’d recommend it if you like fighting lots of enemies, looking for secrets, and co-op (which I’m hoping to talk some people into soon).

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For something I can relate to, see Simcha’s day 10 post. With this post I’m a third of the way through, with 20 posts to go.

Tabletop

On Terrible Ideas

August 10, 2014 Ashgar 2 Comments

D&D had always been fairly good at allowing this, but the new edition does seem to have a lot of potential for amusing bad ideas. The new edition is no different, and maybe even better. A lot of these were in playtests or teasers, so I hope there’s no problem with me posting them here.

My personal favorite by far I mentioned yesterday, the Wild Magic Sorcerer. I’m not the biggest fan of tables for loot, but this table for wild magic effects is awesome My personal favorites are “07-08 You cast fireball as a 3rd level spell centered on yourself” and “53-54 You are immune to being intoxicated by alcohol for the next 5d6 days”.

Also worth of mention is the overchannel feature for Wizards specializing in Evocation that reads as follows:

…When you cast a wizard spell of 5th level or lower that deals damage, you can deal maximum damage with that spell. The first time you do so, you suffer no adverse effect. If you use this feature again before you finish a long rest, you take 2d12 necrotic damage for each level of the spell, immediately after you cast it. Each time you use this feature again before finishing a long rest, the necrotic damage per spell level increases by 1d12. This damage ignores resistance and immunity.

This is the only printed way of accessing the maximize spell effect. I know at least one player who would abuse this, mostly to their detriment.

An Honorable mention goes to the Warlock class, for being entirely based on a questionable idea. I feel like this class is just asking for your DM to inflict you (and your party) with a variety of unfortunate encounters courtesy of (or tangentially related to) your choice of patron.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. I’m a slacker and don’t have another post to highlight for today.

Tabletop

On D&D Next

August 9, 2014 Ashgar 2 Comments

For those who have not heard, the Player’s Manual for the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons released yesterday. I don’t know what the official term for this edition is, but since they’re no longer calling it D&D Next I’m just going to call it 5e. I played a bit with the playtest packets that were out near the end of last year, but there were some balance issues there. I look forward to giving the full rule set a bit of a workout.

Something Old

5e is a return to the ways before 4e in most cases. There’s a mostly familiar set of classes (Warlock is the only class that wasn’t in the 3.5 Player’s Handbook), although there are some changes I’ll mention later. Gone are the encounter/daily/at-will powers from 4e, returned are the concepts of spell slots and spell levels (although these don’t work exactly like they used to either). Also gone are fort/ref/will defenses, but the saves that they were replacing are a bit different now. It’s a return of familiar things, without just being 3.5++, like Pathfinder.

Something New

A completely new concept (for D&D anyway) is the advantage/disadvantage system, where you can roll 2 d20s and take the higher or lower of the two depending on which one you have. Things like Sneak Attacks and various bonuses and penalties were reworked to use this system. The action system is also changed up a bit, in that (generally speaking) players get to take an action and a bonus action per turn, with movement being separated from that system. (This means that you can do things like move in between attacks if you have more than one, or move, attack, and move again, etc.) Advancement is also a bit different, since feats are semi-removed from the normal level progression.

Something Borrowed

A concept from 4e that did stick around is the concept of class variants. Most classes get to make a decision at level 3 that affects the rest of their progression; A few classes (like Clerics) make this decision before then. There’s a lot of variation locked in these, including an option for the Fighter that adds spellcasting progression, a Druid option that makes wildshape far more powerful, and this Sorcerer option which looks like a terrible (but awesome) idea.

Something Blue

I’m a bit sad about the staggered release of the books, since the player’s handbook doesn’t contain much about magical items (probably in the Dungeon Master’s Guide) and had only a tiny list of creatures (which is unfortunate for both Druids and DMs). I like what’s there, and I especially like the variety of class options available, but I just with there was a bit more.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For an interesting look at what solving an ARG is like, check out Kodra’s post about The Secret World launch ARG.

MMO

On Getting Carried

August 8, 2014 Ashgar

…be sure to make yourself as light as possible.

That’s advice I heard about League of Legends, but it clearly has wider implications. As you may have heard from Belghast, we finished our respective relic quests yesterday, earning himself a Bravura and myself a Curtana (with accompanying Holy Shield). I was dreading having to tank Garuda, which was a somewhat difficult encounter in 4-man form. On the advice of Kodra, I queued up for it anyway, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as anticipated. The other tank was massively more geared than I was, so my entire function was to be a cheerleader. It took one try, and I’m pretty sure the group would have succeeded if I’d somehow dropped dead on the pull, rather than contributing my meager tank DPS.

Titan was a different sort of carry. Through sheer dumb luck, the other tank was also someone looking to complete his relic quest. As a result, I was the MT for that fight. I had severe aggro issues simply due to gear differences, but I did all I could to keep up. The first attempt we failed to kill the heart (several DPS had been knocked off, and I died during that phase). Second attempt looked like it was going better, but we wiped late in the fight when both healers got Venn diagrammed. On the third attempt, we lost the Scholar very early, and I saw the other healer’s ridiculous ability to carry a group given enough gear and skill. I came out of it suitably awed and with a fancy new sword+shield.

I guess I was light enough. I’m probably going to do it again soon for my own Bravura, as I got the raw crafted weapon ready before we left the game, so I just have to do all of the bosses again. Hopefully I’ll get to do my own carrying once I get enough gear.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For a look at how the Lego games manage to retell complex stories without words, check out Hello Cynical Badger’s post from yesterday.

MMO

On Stupid CNJ Tricks

August 7, 2014 Ashgar

I joked yesterday that Eorzea Roulette was like Russian Roulette, but instead of bullets you had Stone Vigil. (Stone Vigil isn’t actually that bad, I find Toto-Rak far more annoying to get randomed into.) As luck would have it when I went for my daily random on my Warrior, I got Stone Vigil. Stone vigil has some very annoying patrols, and some enemies that spawn directly on top of the group. Without prior knowledge of this (or if you’ve forgotten exactly where they are, like I did), it’s likely that some pulls are going to get very rough. Fortunately, the White Mage in the group was very good and used a tactic I’ve never seen before to help keep mobs under control. I’m going to share this (and some other tricks) that can be extremely helpful for a group.

1. Get Swiftcast

Swiftcast is a cross-class ability for CNJ/WHM (requires 26 Thaumaturge), but it’s probably the most important one you can get and has myriad uses. The first and most obvious is that at level 22 conjurers get a trait that allows Raise to be cast in combat, but the 8 second casting time makes that difficult. Swiftcast can make it instant. If you’re personally swarmed by enemies, Blizzard II (another cross-class skill, but you pick it up on the way to Swiftcast anyway) can be swiftcast for a pseudo-frost nova, Holy works even better for this when you get it. Swiftcasting cure spells seems like a good idea, but since most of them don’t have longer cast times than the GCD, you don’t save much time overall doing it. It does allow you to cast a cure spell while moving, which is useful in a number of situations.

2. Fluid Aura Tricks

When you get Fluid Aura at 15, it serves primarily as a tool to annoy your tank, or for survivability (and a bit of extra damage) when soloing. It also has use in getting a mob that the tank won’t pick up for whatever reason to leave you alone for a few seconds. (While I have done this, being on the other side of it is a bit frustrating. Give your tanks some opportunity to pick up mobs before resorting to this.) The clever use for it I saw yesterday was as a spell right before casting Repose, to take something completely out of the fight for 30+ seconds. (Repose can be recast, but it does have diminishing returns.)

3. Get Surecast

While far less important than Swiftcast, Surecast mostly has applications when the group is going to take predictable heavy AOE damage (Geocrush, Primal signature spells). Normally, these spells do enough damage to interrupt any cast in progress. Surecast can allow you to time a group spell to go off just after the damage lands without being interrupted. While this could also be accomplished with Swiftcast, this can be doubled up on (Surecast+heal -> Swiftcast+heal) for additional healing if necessary.

My White Mage is now 41, and healing isn’t my usual role, so I’m sure I still have a lot to learn. I still don’t have a DPS class higher than 35, but I have both tanks at the cap and a healer quickly approaching it. Maybe someday I’ll get a clue.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For an experience I can somewhat relate to, Isey wrote about tracking down pet skills.

Meta, MMO

On What’s In a Name

August 6, 2014 Ashgar

Names are Hard. I’ve been playing a series of Tabletop games, and it’s pretty much always the hardest part. My general online handle, HiddenWings, came about shortly after high school. It’s taken directly from a song title posted to an online music site that I’m surprised to see still exists. (When I found it, there was literally no artist name posted.) I’ve been using it since 2007 on forums, and since 2008 in games on PSN and Steam. It’s become my go-to default username ever since.

Even less creative is my go-to character name. Ashgar was a character in the GBA game Magi-Nation, and also a card in the related TCG (which I knew very little about at the time). In the game, Ashgar is the not-very-bright elder of Cald, the fire region. He does have in his possession a key that opens almost every door in the entire game; you have to steal it as part of the plot. (As a side note, there are severe penalties for not returning it before a certain point when he notices it’s missing.) The idea that “Ashgar’s Key” could open everything was fascinating to me, and so I remembered the name. It became the name of my horde-side druid in the summer of 2007, and since that was my first character to see serious play, the name stuck. When I transferred to Argent Dawn the name was taken, and so the name Ashfang came about.

Other names come from other places. When I need a full name (especially for a human), I tend to look up name meanings and pick something that has the right feeling, even if these names have completely different origins, or would be unlikely to occur together due to being popular in different parts of the world. Zane Dimetrius is from a variation on my actual name, and a surname meaning “Earth-lover”, an appropriate name for the earth mage that the name represented. Another example is Trevor Lowell, a name for a werewolf of sorts from nowhere special. This one’s a bit of a joke, as the names mean “big town” and “little wolf”. I liked that one enough that it became the name of my TSW character. As I play more things my stable of names slowly expands, but I’ll probably keep using a lot of the same ones whenever I can make similar characters.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. This post is inspired by Tyluroth’s post on his names from yesterday.

Gaming

On The Price of Everything

August 5, 2014 Ashgar 7 Comments

John Watson, one of the developers of The Banner Saga, had this to say about iOS pricing:

Apple is frustrated, along with everybody else, about the mentality that’s gone rampant in mobile app markets, where people don’t want to pay anything… They want to pay as little as possible. They think that four dollars is an exorbitant amount to pay for a game, which is very illogical considering most people’s lifestyles. They’ll spend $600 on an iPad, and $4 on a coffee, drop $20 on lunch, but when it comes to spending four or five dollars on a game, it’s this life-altering decision. I’m frustrated with that too.

Personally, I understand where he’s coming from, and I’m not even a game developer. It’s absurd to me that people call out things like Monument Valley at $4 as “expensive”. Taking it up a bit, we have Chrono Trigger at $10. Chrono Trigger is generally considered to be one of the best RPGs ever, and I’m personally glad that Square keeps re-releasing it for people to play that missed it the first time around (or the second or third at this point). Currently, the ways you can play chrono trigger are in a super nintendo, assuming you still have one. this’ll run you over $100 now, and it would have been about $80 then, not adjusted for inflation. It’s on the Wii’s Virtual Console for $8. The next version was for the Playstation, and that one can be had for $10 on PSN. When it came out, it was a full-priced release ($40-50) packaged with Final Fantasy 4. Up next was the version I played, on the DS. This one had some additional content, and was again a full-priced game ($35), this time by itself. If you want this one now, it’s still about $30.

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The iOS version has the expanded content of the DS version, and is still $10. in terms of value per dollar (if you think that way), it beats probably every AAA release of the past 2-3 years. It’s certainly longer lasting than a trip to the movies, and costs less, to boot.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For an alternate opinion about this in particular, see Doone’s post about retro games.

MMO

On A Slap In The Face

August 4, 2014 Ashgar 1 Comment

I had a different (and generally more accurate) title for this post earlier, but I like this one better. Today’s post is about the gradual nerfing of content over time, also known as “catering to the casuals”. I’m here to say that this is a Good Thing.

Final Fantasy XIV launched with some relatively difficult endgame content in the Hard Mode Primal fights and the Binding Coil of Bahamut (which actually remained unbeaten until the final boss was fixed in a minor patch). Three major patches later, these aren’t the most difficult or rewarding content in the game, but they’re still mechanically unchanged. What has changed is that wiping in these instances gives you a buff that increases your stats, stacking up to five times. Also, there are some alternative paths to gear so these don’t have to be a bottleneck anymore. The Hard Mode Primals are still specifically required for the Relic Quest, which is how you get your continually up-gradable relic weapon for each class.

Bracing For Impact

Possibly because I’m convinced the player base in FF14 is from Bizzaro World, reaction to the nerfing of these instances has been mostly positive. They still require people to generally not stand in things, although it provides a bit of a buffer (Except on one fight in particular, because falling off of a small platform kills you no matter how much health you have). More importantly, all of the mechanics that would wipe the raid will still wipe the raid, so general knowledge and execution is still required. Usually (in other games), the reaction to something like this is a lot of whining that the people who beat it have their achievement invalidated, and that “casuals ruin everything”.

As a filthy casual: I hope developers keep ignoring the people who say this. It’s nice not to see the people who are joining the game now not struggling for money (because earning it was extremely difficult) or levels (because simply keeping up with the story quest was problematic at times). There’s a lot of space between effortless and overly punitive, and games don’t need to always go toward the latter.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. I think I’m going to highlight a post per day, Thalen’s post about Marvel Heroes is today’s.

Gaming

On Digging Implements

August 3, 2014 Ashgar 1 Comment

Shovel Knight was a game that hit Kickstarter right around when “Kickstarter Fatigue” was setting in for me. I took note of it, saw that it looked mildly interesting, and resolved to get it if it ever came out. Fast forward about a year, and I found myself in possession of Shovel Knight on Steam. this became a bit of a topic for conversation in the podcast, which you can find below.

Thoughts, Extended

But that’s not the end of the story. Shovel Knight is a pretty awesome game, playing like a strange cross between Mega Man and Ducktales. Kodra also would throw in Zelda 2, but that’s before my time. The world map looks (and in some cases acts) like Super Mario Bros. 3. The game proper involves traveling to 8 stages and defeating the ~~robot masters~~ Order of No Quarter by hitting them and bouncing on their heads with a ~~pogo stick~~ shovel. After doing so, you can travel to the final stages and defeat the final boss and beat the game.

Meanwhile, there’s a bit of progression in a Zelda sort of sense. You get an inventory of relics that can be used for both combat and traversal. You can buy health upgrades, and different colored armors that grant different bonuses. You can even get two ~~bottles~~ Troupple Chalices that you can store ~~potions~~ichor in. Relics are used in the same manner as subweapons in Castlevania.

References to games you may or may not have played aside, the game is incredibly fun. Learning how to use the shovel drop and the normal swing (and later, the charged swing) makes for compelling gameplay. The platforming asked of you during the levels (especially the final one) is very reminiscent of the early mega man games, including a tendency to put insta-kill spikes in unfortunate places. I highly recommend picking up Shovel Knight if you like any of the games I mentioned in the opening, or old-school games in general.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative.

On Obstacles

August 2, 2014 Ashgar

It’s interesting to consider the things that keep me from posting a blog post every day. I try to maintain a twice a week posting rate, although I haven’t done a good job of keeping to any particular schedule. There have been several times when I wrote most of a post and it hasn’t gone up until the next day, even though I spent probably under an hour on the actual writing part. This is examining the things that cause delays, in order to help me (and perhaps others) better avoid them this month.

1. Not Enough Pretty Pictures

I try to include some imagery with almost everything I post, but I’m not in the practice of taking screenshots much. I used to take more when I was playing WoW, but I got out of the habit when I started tanking raids. The boss’s feet and legs usually don’t make for a good screenshot, and I had other things in mind anyway.

What usually happens here is that I start to write something, realize I have no relevant screenshots, and delay the post until I can take some. I’m getting better at taking screenshots as I play (this is really easy for Steam games) so hopefully this one won’t happen as much in the future.

2. Not Interesting Enough

I originally had some grand standard in mind for my posts, that they should inform and entertain all at once, and also be on whatever the current hot topic is. Unfortunately, this isn’t really compatible with how I think or how I play games, so the posting schedule suffered. Some cool things did come out of it though, like the post about Transistor.

This venture is to teach me that there’s a middle ground between writing War and Peace and writing about my breakfast. It’s okay to post about random adventures in the things I’m doing. That’s what the blog’s allegedly about anyway.

3. Too Personal

This one doesn’t come up as much, but it has stopped me a few times. I attempted to write the post that became about podcasting a few times, but stopped because it primarily discusses me. This is a bigger hurdle than the others, for me. What I said there is true, I’m a fairly reserved person.

There’s time to fix that, I suppose. I have 29 more of these to write after this, and I can’t imagine I’ll keep myself out of all of them.

Edit:
I forgot to mention this when it went up, but for more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative.

Ash's Adventures

Monthly Archives: August 2014