All posts by Ashgar

On Things Left Unfinish

May 16, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

This is a response to the second talkback topic for 2015’s Newbie Blogger Initiative.

There are really multiple parts to this, and I’d like to address them individually because I don’t see them as the same thing. The (somewhat loaded) question for this week is “Early Access and Kickstarter – Do you support unfinished games?”. As in a lot of things, the answer isn’t a simple yes or no.

Example A: Kickstarter

To date, I’ve backed a number of kickstarters, and only one has completely failed to deliver. Kickstarter is responsible for the watch I wear on a regular basis, and one of my favorite games of 2014. Kickstarter in some cases is a chance for products that wouldn’t normally see the light of day to get funding, usually because publishers aren’t willing to invest in those types of games anymore. (No one wants old-school RPGs or adventure games anymore, right?) In some cases there’s some publisher interest, and kickstarter serves as the proof that someone is willing to spend money on it. Either way, it’s a chance to quite literally vote with your dollar, even though sometimes people don’t keep their campaign promises.

That said, there are some major duds. There are a few examples of projects getting mismanaged so badly that the money runs out, and nothing gets made. Clang, Yogventures, and the Stomping Land all come to mind. In these cases, saying your paying for something “unfinished” is too kind. If I knew then what I know now about kickstarters likely to produce a quality product, I probably would not have backed Aura Tactics. Making games takes a fair bit of money, so you should be wary of campaigns not asking for a lot of it. Making games also takes a fair bit of experience, so you should look for some indication of this, either previous games shipped or a solid proof of concept. And finally, if anyone in the pitch has Molyneux Syndrome, you should probably steer clear.

Example B: Early Access

On the other hand, I pretty much universally distrust games in Early Access, and I’ve only paid for two directly (although I’ve gotten a few because of kickstarters). I also consider Founder’s Packs to fall into this category. In both cases a developer is asking for testers to give them money for an opportunity to see how the sausage is made. It turns out I’m okay not seeing how the sausage is made. Starbound is a nice example, I think I’ll like that game once it’s done, but I don’t have a whole lot of interest in playing all of the “incomplete” releases along the way. Jim Sterling has had a lot of success picking games from Early Access and telling you why you shouldn’t play them (there have been a few exceptions).

It seems like for every game like Warlocks, there are a bunch of other games trying to sell minimal effort projects that will never be “completed” on Early Access. Steam’s Early Access page currently only shows the best of these, filtering out games on some unknown criteria somehow. Steam currently has a bit of a curation problem, and while Early Access isn’t entirely to blame, it certainly isn’t helping.

Example C: MMOs

MMOs by their vary nature are unfinished games. No matter what the payment model is, there’s always an expectation of expanding content; the games that can’t do this are the ones that tend to fade away. We tend not to think of these as being unfinished, but several developers have mentioned that the real work on an MMO continues well past launch. In essence, they’re never finished (except in those few unfortunate cases where a game shuts down).

So going back to the original question, I absolutely support unfinished games. It’s just a question of how unfinished.

Gaming, MMO

On Giant Steps

May 12, 2015 Ashgar 2 Comments

It’s not exactly a secret that the most recent Trial in Final Fantasy 14, Steps of Faith, isn’t exactly popular. I think it would be a lie to say that this is because it requires coordination or punishes mistakes harshly, because there are actually a lot of trials (even ones required for the story) that do this, like Shiva or Ultros. Today’s patch, 2.57, brings some changes, mostly by reducing the damage that a lot of the hazards do and reducing the health of most enemies (including the main enemy, Vishap), which should make it a bit easier to finish the trial before you fail. What it doesn’t change is why I dislike the trial in the first place:

Even if you know you’ve failed, there’s no way to start over until all of the events “finish”.

Super Meat Boy Philosophy

If you’re not familiar with the platformer Super Meat Boy, it’s a game that’s filled with spikes and saws and missiles and other things that will kill you, and asks you to get to the goal as fast as possible without dying. You die in one hit, so it’s a pretty hard game. The thing that makes it playable at all is that there’s maybe two seconds between dying and restarting a level. (I mentioned this in the Darkest Dungeon podcast). As a result failure isn’t that big of a deal, because before you even have time to think about it you’re starting again.

Steps of Faith is not like that. It’s the only trial that doesn’t end if your entire group is dead, it has its own unique failure condition when the dragon makes it all the way to the end of the bridge. In addition, if you miss certain things (like the giant harpoons), your chances of victory are very low, and you still have to let the entire sequence play out. This results in the time it takes for a successful run to be comparable to the duration of the duty finder lockout for leaving (30 minutes), so people frequently leave when they get it via roulette. (I haven’t seen a case this bad since Oculus, which WoW eventually started bribing players into doing.)

Looking Forward

I don’t know if the nerfs are going to help this, but that’s really just a matter of magnitude. They may have reduced Vishap’s health to the point where you can beat on him the whole time and still win. I personally think the only required change would have been allowing the fight to reset if all party members were dead (or some other way to reset the fight). It’s a new day, and we have people in the Free Company approaching this fight again, so I suppose we’ll see in the future.

On Schedule Slip

May 6, 2015 Ashgar 2 Comments

It’s the first week of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, which means I’ve now been doing this for a year. I haven’t kept up nearly the schedule that Belghast does, or even my own personal goal of twice a week. It used to annoy me that people would post about missing posts in webcomics, but when you previously did something regularly, it kind of stays on your mind. Unless you plan out time every day to do something like this, Schedule Slip is probably going to happen. This remains true if you write your posts ahead of time, unless you are diligent enough to keep a buffer of more than one post.

Causes

For me, my posting got a lot more irregular when I moved, and lost the ability to write and publish things during lunch. Even before I started my new job (and I had actual free time), I didn’t realize how important it was to my posting to have a time period set aside every day to do it in. Other things I’ve written about already. I have 3 drafts that I could finish and publish half-written. There’s a lot of “not good enough” that I feel about these, but really, I shouldn’t have to.

Then there are the other reasons. Just this past week, Tam and I had technical issues. Travel happens, and personally, I’m not the biggest fan of writing a post on an iPad. Life gets in the way sometimes.

Solutions

For me the solution is going to be setting aside time on specific days to drop everything and write more. The blog posting is a nice supplement to Aggrochat, and appearing on the same website is an added bonus. Bel gets around it by posting every single morning. Tam does something similar, but on weeknights. I think that might work better for me, so I guess I’ll find out if I can have more output this month.

Gaming, Tabletop

On Abstraction

April 13, 2015 Ashgar 4 Comments

Shadowrun has done interesting things with hacking over the years. In the game I’m currently in, I am our decker, which is to say I’m called on whenever something needs to be hacked. Given the setting, having someone capable of doing this is almost required, although they don’t have to be a decker. Regardless, they’ll need access to the matrix (the internet, according to Shadowrun) and some way of doing things in a less-than-legitimate fashion.

The Way Things Were

In 4th edition, the section of the book that dealt with hacking was rather long and complex, and required a lot of knowledge of real-world networks to make any sense of. Actually using any of it in-game basically required the GM to be running two games at once, one for the hacker and one for everyone else. If complex enough, possibly the rest of the party could go out for lunch in the meantime. (As a side note, this is the real reason you never split the party.) The hacking in 4th was an attempt to make things “more realistic” but it wasn’t great for the pace of the game, or even really for good play.

The Way Things Are

5th decided to abandon that, and went for a system where hacking things depends on establishing marks which can be used to access/control/whatever a given matrix entity. It also established that the “inside” of a host should resemble the physical area, which means that if you need to provide on-the-fly support to a run, you can be presented in the same game space. This obviously has no relation to how actual networking works, but it’s a much better fit for the game system. If you also tack on things like an inability to do the required hacking ahead of time (because you can’t be logged in forever without consequence and marks fade when you log out) and the requirement to be somewhat physically close to whatever you’re hacking (because there are noise penalties for trying to hack a building from across town), suddenly the hacker is a member of the team again, and has to play the game along with everyone else.

“More Realistic”

That phrase I used seems to come up a lot, although usually in the context of video games and not Tabletop RPGs (although that might explain how it found its way into Shadowrun 4). It was the driving principle behind the failed Kickstarter, Clang. Yet when people get what they ask for, the result is often not what they expect.

When I was working at the MIT Game Lab (then called the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab), one of our projects looked at the (then relatively new) Wii Remote, to see what we could do in terms of using it as a motion control device. One of the first things we tried to simulate was the cracking of a whip. If you’ve ever done this in real life, you might know that it’s not quite as easy as it looks in media, and at first we attempted to require similar motions in the game we were building. We eventually found that this frustrated players, and eventually eased off and implemented a much simpler (but more intuitive) motion.

I think what’s desired isn’t to have more realism, but more believability. As long as this thing works this way, and always works this way, it doesn’t matter quite as much if reality doesn’t also work this way. Sometimes reality is boring, that’s why we play games in the first place.

Gaming, MMO

On Sword Oath

March 21, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

I’m already forgetting the lessons of Blaugust. I might be a bit busier than I was then, but I should keep in mind that I don’t need to write an entire book every time I hit post. With that in mind, here are a few things that came up this past week in FFXIV. While the game balance at 50 is generally somewhere between “good” and “excellent”, there are a few periods where skill order makes no sense whatsoever. Lancers, for example, do the most DPS between the levels of 12-25 by spamming Impulse Drive, and ignoring the 2-step combo that they have. The Black mage rotation doesn’t really make sense until you have both Fire III and Blizzard III, which isn’t until 38. But the worst case of this in my opinion is the Paladin.

Skill Order

When you get your Job Stone as a warrior, the skill you get at Level 30 is Defiance. It improves your survivability, helps you hold threat, and allows you to build stacks that you can’t spend for five more levels. Paladins instead get Sword Oath, which increases the auto-attack damage you do (admittedly by a decent amount). The skill they get that increases their threat and survivability (Shield Oath) is withheld until level 40. The level 35 skill is Cover, which does not assist in threat or survivability. This wouldn’t be such a big problem, except that dungeons at this point start getting quite a bit more challenging (Brayflox’s Longstop and The Sunken Temple of Qarn are a giant wake-up call) and all DPS jobs get a massive stat boost from their job stones (and some of them also get important damage skills at 30). Unfortunately, this means that Paladins are at a rather large disadvantage, and I know from enough times healing and tanking Brayflox that it isn’t just player perception.

Problem Resolution

All is not lost: Paladins are perfectly capable of doing the content in this level range, it just takes a bit more work. It comes down to two things, really: Cooldowns and Target Switching.

Paladins are blessed with an entire suite of damage reduction cooldowns, and they can even steal the Warrior’s best one at that level range. In addition, the pace of combat in FFXIV is such that you can use something with a cooldown of 90 seconds about every other fight if you want. My first instinct when I was playing was to save cooldowns for emergencies, but you will get some more suited to this purpose later. Things like Convalescence, Foresight, and Rampart are nice to use whenever they make the healer’s life easier. Making their life easier then makes your life easier.

This one was a bit unintuitive to me at first too, but it’s useful and nearly required in the 30s. The only Paladin Combo that matters 95% of the time (Fast Blade->Savage Blade->Rage of Halone) has a threat modifier on the second hit, and a larger threat modifier on the third hit. It can be extremely helpful when tanking multiple things to land the second or third hit on something that isn’t your primary target, because Flash starts to not be enough in some cases. (These cases are named Summoner and Black Mage) On the other hand, if you have a strong single-target DPS in the party (Monk, Dragoon, Ninja) you might lose aggro on the primary target if you switch, so know when not to. If your party contains a Summoner and a Dragoon, mark targets and hope.

At the end of the tunnel

At level 40, you finally get Shield Oath (and will forget to use it roughly once a day for the rest of your time playing this class). At 38, you get Sentinel, a cooldown actually worth saving for emergencies (which is why it’s not in my macro). The dark days of the 30s don’t last forever, and once you get through them you’ll (hopefully) know how to be a better tank with lessons that once again apply once you have to deal with the class that can cast Flare. Have fun!

Gaming, Tabletop

On Pink Mohawks

March 18, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

So as the D&D game is winding down (possibly involving both dungeons and actual dragons), I’m looking to the next thing that I’m likely to take part in, which is Shadowrun. For those who are unaware, Shadowrun is a cyberpunk setting that also happens to include magic and some “traditional fantasy races” although not in traditional roles, in some cases. For more info, play one of the recent Shadowrun Returns games.

The Shadowrun setting is a bit of a relic of the 80s, and has some weird things in it associated with that. Some of those have been touched on in later editions (4e and 5e decided that “everything is wireless”), but some have not. The New Age movement influenced the political landscape in Shadowrun, including a nation of hippie elves and Native Americans taking over most of the US. Megacorps are a product of the time the game was written (and the term itself is borrowed from William Gibson)*. Virtual reality did not quite take off like the writers expected**. The fall of the Soviet Union was unexpected, but the only effect in the setting is that the name is changed from USSR to “Russian Federation”***. In 2015, some of it is quite anachronistic for what’s supposed to be the future. On the other hand, they were prescient about a few things. The Internet wasn’t really a thing in the 80s, but it is in Shadowrun, and it absolutely is now. Everything having wireless capability can’t really be credited to the 80s (it was introduced in 4e, written in 2005). Drones that were part of Science Fiction in the 80s are a very real part of military technology now. Other things aren’t quite a reality, but we’re getting there, like cybernetics and brain interfaces.

*We can talk about Wal-Mart and GE and Google and Japan in general, but they aren’t quite there yet.

**We can talk about the current VR wave if you want, but I’m not yet convinced it’s going to go differently than the last few.

***This one I’m not going to talk about, sorry.

Black Trenchcoats

A major part of the way the game is assumed to go is that you are part of a team doing somewhat illegal things for a mysterious benefactor (called Mr. Johnson regardless of their actual name). Some players view this whole conceit more seriously than others, and the terms that have arisen to describe this are “Black Trenchcoat” and “Pink Mohawk”. The names play off of sterotypes: In a Black Trenchcoat game, everyone is wearing a black trenchcoat and trying not to attract attention and complete the mission, and so on. In a Pink Mohawk game, someone shows up with a Pink Mohawk, and everyone else is okay with that.

Personally I don’t see the distinction as quite so black and white, but that might be because I’m predisposed to the latter style anyway. Even if the tone of a game is entirely serious, I think things are more interesting with a bit of personality. Shadowrun mechanically encourages this somewhat with the addition of positive and negative qualities available during character creation. (For the curious, a pink mohawk would almost certainly fall under “Distinctive Style”, a negative quality worth 5 Karma.) Being serious, and competent and yes, even optimized doesn’t necessarily exclude having a bit of fun.

Interesting times

One of the best things to me in tabletop RPGs are what I’d like to call “Interesting Bad Ideas”. If everything goes as planned things can get boring (although a good GM won’t let this happen), and these provide nice hooks for things that are likely to be fun. While Kodra is usually a nice source of these in games we end up playing together, I’ve been known to make my fair share. Our previous D&D campaign was largely defined by a deal I attempted to make with a red dragon in the first session (It seemed like a good idea at the time). This is how we end up doing things like starting (and sometimes ending) wars and uncovering very odd artifacts and sometimes destroying large sections of the countryside and/or planets.

This Shadowrun campaign might be interesting, as there are two groups (one local to the GM and one through Roll20) running for similar goals. It’s yet to be seen if we’ll come into conflict, although I’m guessing we will, indirectly. My planned Shadowrun character is a bad idea personified (as well as the very incarnation of a running joke about a previous character of mine). Details of this aren’t exactly available to the rest of the party (the GM knows, of course), although a few of them would be able to quickly figure it out if they knew what to look for. From what I know so far of the other characters, I might not be the only one playing a disaster waiting to happen. It should be fun to see whose number comes up first.

Gaming

On Fine Particulate

March 7, 2015 Ashgar 2 Comments

Unlike most of the things I write about, which are either MMOs or fairly recent games, I’d like to take a moment to talk about one that is actually a few years old now. Dust: An Elysian Tail released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2012, and as these things tend to do, released for the PC the following year. It released on the PS4 last year, and was free as part of PS+ or Games With Gold at various points in the year depending on your choice of platform.

Dust is a Metroidvania with a bit of a surprising development history. The developer is Humble Hearts, but the vast majority of the work is credited to Dean Dodrill (Noogy), who is responsible for all of the design, art, programming, and most of the story. I did discover when looking things up for this post that he was also an artist on Jazz Jackrabbit 2, and one of the composers for Dust (Alexander Brandon) was also involved in the creation of that game.

Let’s just get this out of the way

Dust: An Elysian tail is a game where all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, and the art style resembles 90s cartoons in a lot of ways. I’ve seen a number of people mention they won’t play the game because of the characters or animation. (This is usually accompanied by a statement making fun of furries, DeviantArt, or both.) As someone who actually enjoyed the era of 90s platformers, I actually like the art style quite a bit. The experience with Jazz Jackrabbit shows, and Dust himself has a lot of nice animations for both movement and attacks. Things that aren’t Dust tend to not animate quite as well, however. The big versions of characters used for cutscenes are not quite as refined as the spritework.

A Winning Combination

You play primarily as Dust, an amnesiac (ok, maybe a bit cliché) cat who is accompanied by a talking sword (the Blade of Ahrah) and the sword’s flying nimbat guardian (named Fidget). There is a usual progression of abilities for a metroidvania, increasing your mobility to open up more areas, and the platforming is solid. Combat involves rather fanciful use of the sword, and Fidget can cast magic to support you (which by itself is very ineffective). One of the major elements of the game is that Dust can spin his sword to create a vacuum effect (called the Dust Storm), and this has uses in both combat and puzzles. The primary combat use is to amplify Fidget’s magic, which will become homing, or explosive, or possibly other things during this effect. Puzzles tend to make more use of the ability to pull things in. It’s also an attack by itself, capable of dealing lots of small hits at short-range, but it will damage you if you hold it for too long.

Using this combat system, the game rewards racking up large chains of hits, and even lets you get a few extra hits on enemies that have been killed before they fade in order to keep up a combo. This easily gets into the hundreds in the start of the game, and there are achievements for values up to a thousand. Getting hit drops the chain, but Dust has a very effective parry that can keep you (and your chain) alive when big hits are coming. There’s also an invincible dodge that can be performed in either direction, but your enemies can also do this in most cases, and will use it to flank you.

Eternally Retold

The story is a bit short on reliable narrators, but mostly involves intersecting tales of revenge, with Dust caught in the middle. It’s hard to say more without spoilers. I enjoyed the main story, but that might be a personality thing. I always want to know more about things, and this game plays some of its more important background elements very close to the vest. I find this compelling, but I’m aware that others find it annoying. Your most reliable source most of the time is the sword, and it seems to have incomplete knowledge.

There are also a lot of side quests, which are not all created equal. Some are interesting, and some are boring, and the rewards tend to be not great either way. Some of the NPCs are still interesting, like the old couple you meet near the start of the game, and the shopkeeper who somehow manages to be in places that he shouldn’t. The incidental writing (journals, item descriptions) is sometimes more entertaining than expected. One of the immediate examples here is “Mysterious Wall Chicken”, which is a reference to how Castlevania games tend to inexplicably put food inside of breakable walls. It’s not quite to a Final Fantasy 14 or a Divinity 2 level, but it’s certainly something that wasn’t ignored. (As an aside, the game that clearly put the most effort into its item descriptions that I’ve played is Sequence. No word yet on if There Came an Echo continues this tradition.)

Ashes to Ashes

In the end, Dust: An Elysian Tail is a game I highly recommend. It’s a solid metroidvania with an enjoyable combat system, great music, and an interesting story. I also have a few spare Steam copies, which I’m willing to give out to three people who show me an amusing item description. I’ll take submissions via twitter or in the comments section until 12:00 EDT (16:00 GMT) on March 13, and I’ll choose the winners randomly from among these. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Gaming, Meta, MMO

On Saving Time

February 17, 2015 Ashgar 4 Comments

At this point I’m not sure where I first heard it, but I find when it comes to dungeons in Final Fantasy 14, the following is quite true:

Nothing wastes more time than people trying to save time.

So to my tank in Aurum Vale this past week, this one’s dedicated to you. It’s a bit of a rant, so sorry ahead of time for that.

Slow Down

The nature of some of the high level content in FF14 means that you may end up doing some dungeons rather often, especially if you decide to continue the relic quest past the atma stage (I don’t recommend this if all you care about is having a good weapon). Sometimes this makes people a bit impatient. Recently I’ve noticed a trend in doing nonstandard things in an attempt to “save time” and finish the instance faster, particularly on the part of tanks. Strategies for this range from reasonable (pulling more things than intended), to ridiculous (ignore all mechanics and hope for the best), to mildly exploitative (skip pulls by sending someone, usually the tank, on a suicide run). The only reason I call that last one mildly exploitative is because Square Enix seems to have reduced or eliminated the ability to do this in some of the older instances, and designs most current instances to make it impossible.

The thing is, there are very few things that slow a run down more than a wipe, and some of these things lead to that very scenario. If your entire party isn’t on-board, a suicide run is a disaster waiting to happen (I’ve even seen this go bad in the first turn of Binding Coil). Speedpulling is well and fine, unless your healer isn’t aware of what it takes to keep up with such high damage on the tank (or worse, isn’t aware that they need to hold off on heals until things have some amount of aggro and get instantly murdered). As far as ignoring mechanics goes, almost all cases where this is viable require high DPS, and sometimes people try without being aware that it’s an issue. A wipe in the last phase of Howling Eye (Hard) takes a lot longer than simply killing the adds would have, and I encountered this when going for my Scholar relic recently. Other notable examples include the Bone Dragon and King Behemoth in Labyrinth of the Ancients.

Communication is Key

The most important thing is that your entire group is prepared and willing to go along with whatever you’re doing. If someone says that they’re not familiar with a particular instance, or doesn’t feel confident in their ability to do a speed run, don’t try it anyway. If your party’s DPS is a pair of dragoons, you’re not really saving time by pulling more things at a time. On the other hand, if you have a Bard and a Black Mage feel free to pull as many things as you can without giving your healer a heart attack. If you’re in an instance below level 50, it’s important to keep in mind that some classes are missing relatively important tools (Flare, Perfect Balance, and Medica II come to mind immediately) and if you’re in an instance low enough there are some classes that don’t have any AOE abilities at all (Monks get their only worthwhile one at 30, Summoners get vastly improved AOE ability at 30, Dragoons get their first at 42 and a better one at 46).

The one that really gets me is ignoring mechanics without warning the party, particularly when this requires healers to kite or tank something they were previously unaware of. I first encountered the “screw the healer” strategy in Cutter’s Cry, and I’ve since seen it in Copperbell Mines and a few other places. It also tends to be the go-to in the Crystal Tower instances, even though there are somewhere between 2-5 tanks who don’t really have anything better to do who could be picking up adds instead of fighting for aggro on a miniboss. (Mini-rant: If you’re a tank, and you’re in one of the 24-man instances without a real job, please don’t fight whoever’s tanking a boss for aggro. In fact, turn on Sword Oath/turn off Defiance, and you will help more by doing damage than you would by spinning the boss. The exception here is when there are adds that need to be handled, most notably on Glasya and Amon, but you can switch your tank stance on when you get there if you’re paying enough attention.) If your healer doesn’t know what they have to do, they’ll die, and you’ll wipe, and have to do the whole thing over again. There are many more examples of this, like not killing the pillars in the last boss of Qarn, or ignoring the Iron Giant in Labyrinth. More uptime on the boss doesn’t speed things along if it causes a wipe.

It’s the little things

THAT SAID, there are some genuine ways to save time in instances that don’t endanger the group. For DPS classes, the biggest one of these is knowing your own class. If you are a bard, and you don’t anticipate the need for TP or MP regen, Foe Requiem increases the damage of your dots and Flaming Arrow even if there are no magical DPS in the party. (It also pulls from a very long distance, so be careful with it.) For Monks, Perfect Balance can be used to get a lot of AOE damage out of spamming Rockbreaker. For Black Mages, Blizzard III and Fire III replace Transpose entirely (unless you mess up).

Another thing that can help as a healer is casting damage spells. In particular, Holy is one of the game’s best AOEs, and the associated stun helps to reduce incoming damage on the tank. For Scholars, Shadowflare is also very good and causes a slow on everything standing in it, again reducing incoming damage. Provided you keep an eye on MP (Holy is very expensive) and don’t neglect normal healing duties, a bit of healer DPS can go a long way.

If someone’s new, an explanation ahead of time is better than a wipe later. It’s ok to suggest other things, but make sure everyone’s prepared and willing to go along with whatever strategy you’re using. Otherwise you’re just wasting time.

Gaming

On 1812

February 12, 2015 Ashgar 3 Comments

If you heard the podcast from February 1, you may have already heard a bit about Overture (I mentioned it again on February 8). Since the podcasts I’ve learned a bit more about it, and I’d like to share. It’s an interesting game, if a bit basic, and I’ve lost several hours to it already.

Background

Overture is in many ways a real-time roguelike in a more traditional sense than that normally implies. It has somewhat randomly generated levels (although they all appear to be overall rectangular, so that part isn’t that interesting), random enemies, and swift death when you’re still learning what you’re doing. Play somewhat resembles games like Diablo, except you move with WASD and attack with the mouse. You move somewhat faster when moving in the direction you’re facing and not attacking, which it turns out is an important mechanic. The game asks you to defeat enemies in 10 levels while challenging a boss at the end of each. Beating a boss allows you to upgrade either your health or your mana, and you are also given the opportunity to spend gold on random chests.

When you inevitably die, you retain the gold your character finished with, and you can use it to upgrade characters or unlock new ones; it’s somewhat similar to Rogue Legacy in this sense. Upgrading only seems to improve your damage output, not your resources, so you still need to remain evasive or you’ll die pretty quickly. Items in the dungeon can improve your attack, defense, and mana regeneration, generally speaking. Weapons frequently have another effect that triggers on-hit, essences frequently have a similar effect on-kill. These can range from bursts of damage, to more gold, to potion drops.

Meet the Cast

The playable classes are divided into 4 groups of 5 classes: Warriors, Rogues, Mages, and Shamans, where that last one houses everything that didn’t fit neatly into the first 3 categories. Generally warriors have higher defense, rogues move faster, and mages have significantly faster mana regeneration. Most Shamans have one of these also (Paladins have the defense of warriors, Priests have the mana regen of mages, etc.), but a few are slightly different. There are both short-range and long-range classes in most categories, although mages tend toward long-range and warriors tend toward the opposite.

All classes have a “standard” attack on right-click, these vary in effectiveness and range by class. Some examples here are the Peltast (warrior) who throws spears that go through enemies, the Trickster (rogue) who can attack wherever the cursor is without a projectile, and the Invoker (mage), who has a very short-range, very low damage fireball. Right click is usually a secondary attack that costs mana, usually . The Barbarian (warrior) gains a stackable damage aura, the Witch (mage) has a very powerful spray attack, and the Bandit (rogue) has a fan of knives burst.

A few classes have a right-click that isn’t a one-off attack. The most notable case is the Invoker, who becomes a demon with a primary attack that shoots homing fireballs. This form drains mana and you revert to the very weak base form when it runs out. The Brute works similarly, turning into a hammer-throwing berserker, but the brute isn’t quite as helpless when not transformed and has some big disadvantages for transforming. There’s also a Druid (shaman), who only spends mana on switching forms, and doesn’t have a noticeably stronger one. The caster form has a long-ranged magic missile, but moves slowly. The wolf form is very fast (faster than most rogues) and has a high attack speed, but a very short-range. Departing from the transformation theme, there are also oddballs like the Arsonist (mage), who randomly lights fires when right-click is held, or the Necromancer (mage) who summons skeletons.

Meet the Opposition

There are a lot of enemies in this game, and depending on enemy type they seem to act slightly differently. A lot of them are fairly basic and will merely walk toward you, like most skeletons, and rats, and bats. Minotaurs are a special case because they also have this behavior, but are much, much faster than most other enemies, so they usually feel like they’re charging you. There are quite a few archer or mage-type enemies that will attempt to shoot at you from afar, most of them will try to avoid you if you approach them. Others will just continue trying to shoot you in the face. Behaviors seem to get more complex as you get further into the dungeon, and I haven’t seen the later floors yet.

There are also champion-type enemies that get a random name and more health and damage; if they have other properties I haven’t noticed. These aren’t usually a threat by themselves, but traps sometimes call 3-4 of them in addition to a swarm of normal enemies, and that can cause problems. There are also minibosses with somewhat more varied abilities, these are a threat on their own. Most levels have a large slime that thinks it’s a boss from a bullet hell game guarding the staircase. This was the cause of death for most of my first characters.

Of course, then there are the actual bosses. The “tutorial” warns you that you need to be able to move fast in boss fights, and that’s largely accurate. The game doesn’t pull punches, and sometimes has bosses that rush you in addition to their projectile attacks. Boss tactics don’t stop there, and they can also summon other enemies, lay traps, or interfere with you in other ways. Now that I’m getting more familiar with the game, the level bosses are my most common cause of death.

Apparently this is a thing you can do

I didn’t know about it when I mentioned it, and it ended before I could point it out, but Overture actually had a Kickstarter conclude recently, even though the game is “finished”. The goals of the campaign were to get it on more platforms (Mac & Linux), soundtrack improvements, and performance improvements. I had mixed feelings about this at first, but after a while I concluded that I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Nowhere are the developers misrepresenting the product currently for sale or what they wanted to do with the Kickstarter. It’s an interesting step in post-release support, but not an entirely unwelcome one. I’m just not sure I personally would buy the game again just to get my money added to the Kickstarter pool.

I do recommend Overture to anyone looking for a generally uncomplicated roguelike where things might get a little crazy. I’m certainly having fun with it.

Gaming

On Big Things

February 7, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

Let’s talk about Gigantic.

Not a MOBA

MOBA is joining RPG in that the meaning of the acronym applies to many games not included in the genre. “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena” is a good description, but Gigantic doesn’t have minions, it doesn’t really have lanes, and you can’t break your enemy’s base. Instead, it has capture points, and summons, and giant fighting creatures.

The goal in Gigantic is to destroy the enemy team’s Guardian while defending your own, but that is a bit like saying the goal in Football is to score more points than the other team. In Gigantic, this is accomplished by performing various actions that grant Energy to your guardian. When it has a full bar, it will go rampaging toward the enemy guardian, rendering it vulnerable to player attacks for a little while. Kills grant energy, as does attacking the opposing guardian when it’s not vulnerable (this actually steals energy, but requires getting through the enemy team without dying). I think the capture points have some effect on how quickly your bar fills, but I didn’t get a chance to see that during the playtest. Since only one guardian is on the offense at a time, it plays out a bit like a football game, with alternating attack and defense.

After enough times of this (or I think if one of the guardians is low enough on health?) The Clash begins, and the guardians adopt positions that are much closer to each other, effectively reducing the playable space. Points can no longer be captured once this happens, and kills are worth increased energy. This greatly accelerates the pace of the game, creating a definite “endgame” scenario. It remains to be seen (by me, anyway) if this prevents games from being drawn out unnecessarily.

Summon Creature

The mechanic for capturing points is also somewhat non-standard. Points are taken by summoning creatures on them while they’re neutral. Which creature you summon seems to have some effect on your team, one example is a treant that slowly healed the team members that were near it. There was also a cerberus that granted vision of the enemy team on the minimap, and a drake of some kind that I don’t know what it did. These creatures fight for you in any confrontation close enough to the summoning point, which makes defending one much easier (generally) than attacking one. I would say it takes a coordinated effort to take one out, but it’s possible that the character I was playing (Charnok) is too squishy for it. Belghast claimed that he came close to doing it with Margrave (who is a tank) and probably could have if he were more familiar with the game. These summoning points are the territory control mechanism, and they’re the points that fights tend to start around unless one of the guardians is currently on the offensive.

Motley Crew

One of the things I find very interesting about Gigantic (but unfortunately didn’t get a chance to personally explore) is that you are playing a very different game depending on which hero you’re currently playing as. The cast isn’t yet very large, but they seem to have a lot of archetypes covered. There are 14 revealed heroes, and Motiga mentioned that there are more in development. There seem to be a few characters for people who really like shooters (Voden, Roland, Imani, HK) who all focus on somewhat different roles. Imani for example is fragile, has a large crossbow, and is a sniper. HK is more durable and firmly believes in the Vladof philosophy, making his effective range somewhat shorter.

There are also a variety of characters who don’t rely on such careful aim, including most of the game’s melee characters. The already-mentioned Margrave is a tank, and can be quite disruptive while not dying. Tyto (the owl-dude who seems to be prominent in the game’s marketing) is very dangerous and fairly evasive, but can’t take much punishment. These characters rely much less on your aiming ability, and instead on your ability to navigate the map and get to where you can be the most effective.

There are characters that don’t fit neatly into either of these camps like Xenobia, who has a kit filled with debuffs and support via murder (or enabling murder), or Vadasi who is a more traditional supporting character and can power her abilities with her own health. (I’m told these two pair very well on the same team.) There are also a few mage-types, like Mozo and Charnok, who I got to play at PAX.

Categorizing this game is somewhat difficult, other than “surprisingly fun” and “competitive multiplayer”. I suppose it also has arenas in which you do battle online. I look forward to more coming out about this one, because I can’t wait to play more of it.