Monthly Archives: August 2015

Meta, MMO

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.

Ding 70
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.

There are... other problems with this wheel.
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.

Gaming, MMO

On Dancing

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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).

Ravana

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.

Meta

On Fantasy

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Blaugust Post #9

One of the experiences from my childhood that I remember strongly is during a neighborhood block party, my mom rented a projector and a whole bunch of people watched Star Wars in our basement. I was always fascinated with the planets, and space, and astronauts; I even went to Space Camp when I was 10. It might come as a bit of a surprise that at this point in my life, I vastly prefer Fantasy to Sci-fi.

Irony

Really, it’s the Dragons

I know Medieval Fantasy is standard and boring to a lot of people, but if it has swords and magic, I’m still interested. I just like the concept of doing things that don’t really need an explanation. Magic in most settings is internally consistent, but doesn’t work based on any real world principles, and I actually enjoy that. Likewise, fantasy opens up possibilities for things that can’t exist according to physics. Dragons are chief among these, but most of the monster manual qualifies. My initial qualifier, “has swords and magic”, doesn’t lock down medieval settings, as Shadowrun and The Dresden Files also qualify.

More Irony

Like a Marshmallow

There are exceptions, of course. I’m a big fan of both Star Wars and Mass effect, but neither of those really fits into the realm of hard Sci-Fi. (In fact, both of these settings qualify as “has swords and magic”.) Things like 2001: A Space Odyssey or even Ghost in the Shell tend to lose me after a bit. Star Trek is somewhere in between, because it chooses to disregard odd parts of reality while still feeling like Sci-Fi.

Meta

On the Liebster Award

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Blaugust Post #8

liebster-award
Grace called it a blogging disease, I think of it as more of a chain letter. Either way, thanks for the Liebster award!

Here are my 11 random facts:

  1. I am the youngest person on the regular cast of Aggrochat.
  2. I’m a decent ice skater, and used to play hockey.
  3. However, if you put me on roller skates, I just fall down a lot.
  4. I will admit to liking a single song by N’SYNC. Said song is produced by one of my favorite EDM artists.
  5. I was given my first computer (a laptop the size of a briefcase) when I was 4. I could barely carry it.
  6. I have beaten Mega Man 8 more times than I can count. While in school, I beat it every time I came home, which meant about twice a year.
  7. WoW was technically my first MMO (and like Grace I didn’t play before Burning Crusade), but before WoW I was in the beta for Wish.
  8. I have an irrational love for shapeshifter characters. This has manifested in me playing a Druid whenever it comes up, but it isn’t limited to just that.
  9. I buy rulebooks for Pen and Paper RPGs I’ll likely never play, just to see what’s interesting in them.
  10. As far as food goes, I believe that cinnamon makes almost everything better.
  11. Despite claims to the contrary, I’m not a robot.

And here are Grace’s Questions:

1.Why do you blog?
I blog to get my thoughts out to whoever might be interested in reading them. In some ways the podcast serves as this, but the blog helps for more long-form thoughts.

2. What was your favorite childhood cartoon show?
The answer to this question depends on how you’d like to define “childhood”. I remember really liking the Powerpuff Girls when I was younger (It premiered when I was 7). Later, I was part of the Toonami generation, and really liked Dragonball Z.

3. Fantasy or Sci-Fi?
Fantasy, full stop. Exceptions are made for Sci-fi that’s really just pretending to not be Fantasy, like Star Wars or Mass Effect.

4. What’s the most amazing place you’ve ever been? I was too young to gamble (or anything else, really) when I was there, but I really loved Las Vegas. It’s just an amazing spectacle, and I haven’t seen the like anywhere else.

5. Pizza: Chicago or New York?
In general, Chicago Pizza is better than New York Pizza. However, it’s nearly impossible to actually get good Chicago-style pizza outside of Chicago while a bunch of places do a decent imitation of New York-style pizza around the country, so in most locations the opposite is true.

6. If you could only pick one game genre to play for the rest of your life, what would it be?
I’m a big fan of Action-RPGs. If I can stretch that definition far enough to fit Diablo, Kingdom Hearts, and Elder Scrolls under the same umbrella, so much the better.

7. What inspired your character name?
This one’s easy. There’s some more story there, but that’s the name I took for my Druid in WoW when we started playing Horde-side, and it ended up sticking.

8. What is your greatest gaming moment or achievement?
I like soloing ridiculous content, and every so often I drag other people into it. I managed to solo the first boss of AQ40 at level 80 (it required a silly amount of Nature Resist gear), but I’m more proud of getting enough people in to clear the instance. I’d previously had groups that even at level 80, could not get past Twin Emperors, so doing it with a few guildies was a pretty awesome experience.

9. Do you share your love of games with your real-world friends and family, or keep it to the internet?
I keep a Pikachu Amiibo on my desk at work, so my love of games isn’t exactly a secret. I’ve gotten into discussions about games with family and co-workers, but a lot of my current co-workers play World of Tanks, which I don’t have a lot of interest in.

10. Have you ever had a really weird pet?
Nope. I had a dog once, and when I move somewhere that allows them, probably will again.

11. What is your favorite type of environment/biome in-game and IRL?
I’ve always been a big fan of forests. I grew up in a location where nature trails were readily available, so I spent a decent amount of time walking and riding through shaded areas in the summer. In games, forests (but not jungles) tend to be relatively quiet and mysterious, but they sometimes have the “twisty little maze of passages” thing going on. My tolerance for that trope depends on how much you’re expected to rely on trial-and-error.

And 11 more questions:

  1. Why do you blog? Yes, I know it’s a repeat. Deal with it.
  2. What’s the first game you remember playing?
  3. Dogs or Cats?
  4. Do you have a favorite villain?
  5. What are your thoughts on escort missions?
  6. Borrowing from the “stereotypical interview questions” list, What would you say is your biggest weakness? (I did actually get this question a lot last year.)
  7. What character archetype do you find yourself playing most often?
  8. Other than games and the means to play them, do you own any gaming-related items?
  9. Because I know who these questions are going to, I can ask this one: What’s your favorite system for Tabletop RPGs?
  10. What upcoming games (if any) are you looking forward to?

Because Thalen hasn’t beaten me to it, Tamrielo and Kodra, have fun with this one.

MMO

On Revenge

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Blaugust Post #7

I still don’t take enough screenshots.

FF14 recently added an option where you can go into dungeons as an “undersized party” which is the only way to enter with fewer than the required number of people, and also skips the level sync portion. In all honesty I’m not sure what the intent is, but we’ve used it for two things: Entering level 50 raids at 60 and soloing old content.

Tam-Tara (Hard)

Into Darkness

Before I even properly leveled anything, one of the first things I did was go into Dzemael Darkhold on my warrior (at 50) and see if I could solo the thing. DD is a level 44 dungeon, and at the time I needed a relic drop from there and was quite tired of running it at the proper level.Turns out that except for the final boss, not only is it possible, it’s easy. The final boss is also possible, but considerably less easy. I always liked doing similar things in WoW, so I think this got me hooked on trying to solo things here.

goring blade

Further Endeavors

Fast Forward about a month, and I have a level 60 Paladin, ready to try my hand at some tougher content. Still needing Relic drops, I decided to start with Amdapor Keep, one of the “starting” level 50 dungeons. This took a bit more doing than Dzemael Darkhold, especially because the final boss has a healing debuff. I’ve been working my way down the list since then. I haven’t had any success with Copperbell (Can’t keep up DPS on the boss and do mechanics), or Lost City (The first boss just eats you, which is fatal with no party members). I did manage to solo Wanderer’s Palace and Halatali. I still have quite a few to go, so we’ll see where the brick wall is. I suspect that if I run into issues as a tank, I could always come back as one of the Arcanist classes once I get to 60.

MMO

On Ships that have Sailed

1 Comment

Blaugust Post #6

It’s interesting seeing things about a game that I’m done playing. If you are unaware, WoW: Legion was announced today, with the addition of Artifact Weapons (among other things). With this, they finally, finally have a weapon that feral druids give a damn about because it looks cool. (Ok, there was one other.) The Druid relic weapon enables form customization for feral and guardian druids, something that has been a complaint since I started playing and was kind of, sort of, not really addressed in Wrath, with the addition of forms based on hair/skin color.

Fangs of the First Nightsaber
It’s taken me a while of not playing WoW to realize that I care more than I thought about how my character looks when playing MMOs, and going back to the same cat/bear forms is kind of a drag. The transmog system was a great step in the right direction, but no matter what my normal armor looked like, I still turned into the same bear. No matter how awesome that weapon upgrade was, I sure couldn’t see it in cat form. Really I’m glad that they’re doing something about this, but it’s maybe too little, too late.

Ashbringer Upgrades
Other things they’re adding sound cool, like the class hangouts for all of the classes (Monks, Druids, and DKs pretty much already had these, but it’s nice to spread the love). The Artifact weapons look a lot like the weapon upgrades in Destiny (which despite my overall thoughts on Destiny, is a cool system) so I hope they work out here too. If MMO-Champion’s writeup is to be believed, they might even understand why 5-person dungeons are worth keeping around. It’ll be interesting to see where this one goes. WoW can be a successful, sustainable MMO even at numbers far below its current ones, so I think players of the game have a lot to look forward to. I just don’t think I’ll count myself among that number in the near future.

Also, I’m not sure anyone needed Demon Hunters.

Gaming

On the Most Awkward Scene in Videogames

3 Comments

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.

Gaming, MMO

On Success

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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.

Out of a Bind I

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.

Angry Red Ball

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.

Alexander

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.

Other Media

On Knowledge vs. Experience

1 Comment

Blaugust Post #3

For a while now, Tam and Kodra have been talking on the podcast and otherwise about Sword Art Online, an anime which at this point is actually 3 years old. Yesterday I decided that maybe I should become more familiar with it, and watched the first 15 episodes. Prior to this, I was familiar with the premise and the two main characters. I’ll avoid specific spoilers in this post, but some basic plot info follows. If that’s too much for you, tomorrow’s post is likely to be about something else.

SAO_logo

All Fun and Games

Sword Art Online (SAO from here on out) is an anime about an MMO. Its central conceit is that the players are all trapped in the game, and if they die in the game they die for real. SAO takes this premise seriously, because there’s not point in making such a threat if no one actually dies. This much I knew before Tam and Kodra even started talking about it. I learned prior to watching it that it does focus more on relationships than I originally thought, and it’s not really an “action” show. I figured that this would tell me what to expect.

sword-art-online

…

I was not prepared. SAO knows how to deliver the emotional punches really hard. The first arc of SAO is probably a good 8 sads out of 10, and the lead-in to the second arc doesn’t make it look like it’ll be happy either (although Episode 15 also inspires other feelings). It starts early, as one of the most memorable moments is in episode 3. It doesn’t stop there, but that’s really the first hint that not everything is going to be okay. Even knowing that bad things were likely to happen, it hit me pretty hard.

I will say that SAO got me very interested in its world and characters, and I see why certain other people have been going on about it. I did pick up the game (It’s pretty cheap at $20), so you may hear about that in a little while.

Gaming

On Ninjas

3 Comments

Blaugust Post #2

N++ was announced before the PS4 came out, and released this past week on PS4. It’s the sequel of sorts to N+, which was on the PSP, DS, and 360, which was itself the successor to the flash game N. (Note: I don’t think the original holds up terribly well.) The basic concept remains as it did from the beginning: You are a ninja, get through the levels with as much time left on the clock as possible. Levels contain gold, and each piece picked up adds two seconds. For the 360 version of N+ and for N++, the game tracks your time against other players automatically. Levels are simple, single-screen affairs but there are a very large number of them, ranging in difficulty from 1-1 to Super Meat Boy.

n++

Newton’s First Law

One of the key concepts in the N series is one that was in the kind of Sonic games Sega doesn’t make anymore: Momentum is key. Standard movement speed is pretty fast, but use of ramps and wall jumps can speed things up dramatically, or let you get to jump higher than you can from level ground. N++ in particular begins with levels attempting to teach this, and I’d say it does a pretty good job. I’m not the best judge, because I played a lot of N+. I will say that the level “Intro to accepting your limitations?” is a bit of a dirty trick, because it’s the third level in the tutorial but requires you to grasp the concepts from later tutorial levels to 100% it.

Profanity, Usage by Cause:

One of the areas where N+ really shined was in multiplayer. You could play in the single player levels, but there were also special co-op levels that require at least two people. I’ve referred to the New Super Mario Series as “divorce mode” multiplayer, but this is almost as bad. (Almost, because at least you don’t have collision with your partners.) You will likely have moments of stress where someone is leading a rocket around and you are a little too close, or when someone hits the bounce block you were aiming at causing you to fall into a minefield. It happens. Restarting a level is always only a button press away. If you’re going into it with the intent to break up your friendships, there’s also a race mode.

N++ is one of those sequels that is “the same, but more”, and I’m okay with that. More levels, more obstacles, more colors, and more features make this a worthwhile pickup, and I really like what I’ve played of it so far. I recommend this game if you like relatively difficult platformers and/or games that are better when you add people.