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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 potionsichor 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.
A while back, a friend posed a question to a group of us, asking what 15 games had most influenced us. Bel posted about it a while back, and I came up with my list around the same time. It’s now the first post of Blaugust. These are in roughly the order in which I encountered them, which means that they’re roughly arranged by date, but not quite. Trimming the list to 15 games is hard, and each of these led to other similar games in almost all cases.
Sonic 2 (1992)
This is the game I would credit with getting me into video games in general. My earliest memories of gaming are of me playing as Tails in this game. Tails is essentially invincible, but can be a valuable co-op partner if the person controlling him is good. Even if they’re not (and when this came out I certainly wasn’t), it’s not a real drawback. This being one of my first experiences is probably why I value co-op games so highly now.
Honorable Mention: Super Mario World
Overkill (1992)
I’ve talked about Overkill before, so I won’t expand here. This is the first game I “beat” on my own (Like a lot of games in the genre, Overkill starts again harder when you beat the last stage), and it established my love of scrolling shooters.
This is a bit of an odd case. I played Street Fighter 2 with friends before any of us knew what we were doing, or how to do a fireball motion or any of that, and found it fun. I learned what a Hadouken was too late to put any of it to practice in these matches or in the arcade, but memories of those experiences are why I found fighting games fun. I eventually enjoyed the more over-the-top games (BlazBlue, Marvel vs. Capcom) more than Street Fighter, but this one remains special.
Honorable Mention: Tekken 2
Illusion of Gaia (1994)
Illusion of Gaia (or Illusion of Time if you’re in Europe) was my first “Action-RPG” of sorts. This is the game that taught me that games could have actual stories beyond “rescue the princess” or “stop the bad guy”. This game in particular is somewhat difficult, so I didn’t actually beat it on a real SNES; I played it to completion on an emulator years later.
Mario Kart 64 (1997)
The joy of multiplayer, now with twice the players. Mario Kart 64 was my first 4-player game, and therefore the first game around which gatherings were specifically held. Prior to this, gaming was something my friends and I did while hanging out, this marked the start of hanging out specifically to play games.
Honorable Mention: Star Fox 64
Mega Man X4 / Mega Man 8 (1997)
These released in the same year, use almost the same sprite for the main character, and were played by me literally back to back, so they can share this slot. They also share terrible voice acting (but I didn’t know better back then) and relatively high difficulty (which is common to the series). This was the expansion of my earlier enjoyment of the Mario and Sonic games, but with an additional layer of complexity that wasn’t just “jump on enemies”. I went back and played a lot of the earlier games later, and they’re also great. The same can’t be said for what came after…
Pokemon Red/Blue (1998)
This might as well be My First JRPG, but it’s hiding some ridiculousness underneath. The simple nature of this game and ease of understanding the basics got me in, and trading with friends kept me in. As I got older, I grew to enjoy the complicated parts.
Legend of Dragoon (2000)
This game made me aware that JRPGs as a genre were a thing I was interested in. Legend of Dragoon grabbed me in a way Final Fantasy 7 did not*, and it became my life for a period of time in 2001. The story is a bit cliché, and the translation is terribad (they couldn’t keep things consistent). But the combat system requiring timed button presses is fun (others have described it as “tedious”) and it has beautiful backgrounds and animations for the PS1 era.
*I died to the guard scorpion because I didn’t know “Attack while the tail’s up” was a mistranslation and it’s the same ATB tutorial boss the series used since FF4. I was 10; I hadn’t played any of the SNES games yet.
Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001)
AKA the most fun I had with a multiplayer game since Mario Kart. Despite what some people say, this is a fighting game at its core, so a lot of the same principles of spacing and timing apply. At the same time, the simple nature of inputs and the chaotic nature of combat allow for people without much knowledge of the game to play and have fun. The skill ceiling is rather high, so it’s possible to see experienced players completely destroy beginners, but it can stay fun as long as the skill gap isn’t too wide.
Final Fantasy 5 (1992)
My favorite Final Fantasy, which is surprising when people learn I played this after 4 and 6, and it was the fan-translated version on an emulator. I’ve also talked about this one before. (As a reminder, you have exactly one month to finish/join the Fiesta.) My love of systems was established by this game, and it hasn’t worn off. Pieces of it still shine through in later Final Fantasy games, most notably in Tactics, X-2, and 14.
Shining Soul 2 (2004)
This is probably the game in the list that other people are least likely to have played. Shining Soul is a dungeon crawler of sorts for the Game Boy Advance, featuring a variety of characters and a very simple story. I picked this up because I liked the dragon, but I ended up playing more of the wolf. I’m fairly certain this was the start of my trend of playing non-humans in things that allow it, in addition to the start of me actually enjoying dungeon crawlers.
Honorable Mention: Diablo 2
World of Warcraft (2004)
I didn’t play WoW until 2007, right when Burning Crusade came out. By sheer virtue of the number of players it had at its peak, World of Warcraft was the first MMO for many people, and I count myself among that crowd. It’s thanks to WoW that I met a bunch of the people I now associate with, including Belghast and Kodra. It’s had ups, it’s had downs, but what I think of as an MMO is shaped almost entirely by World of Warcraft, from my preferred roles to what kinds of classes I like.
Mass Effect (2008)
Mostly what Mass Effect did was teach (or re-teach) that I didn’t dislike shooters. I played a bunch of Goldeneye when that was relevant, and a fair bit of Halo 2 in high school, but after that everything seemed to be Call of Duty and competitive multiplayer, and I wasn’t a big fan. Mass Effect brought me back in a number of ways, mostly thanks to RPG mechanics and abilities. Mass Effect 3 did even more, thanks to the greatly expanded abilities on show in the multiplayer.
Bastion (2011)
Bastion is a marvel of sound design. It’s also pretty and plays well, but those are honestly secondary to the music and the narration. This opened me up to the difference sound can make in a game. Without the work of Darren Korb and Logan Cunningham, Bastion would be a good, but not terribly special top-down action game, and it would draw unfavorable comparisons to things like Diablo or Sacred 2. The music and voice are what distinguish it. (My personal favorite track is Spike in a Rail.)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)
I played Oblivion when it came out and didn’t like it very much. I tried it again in 2008 and liked it more, but not enough to “finish” it. Skyrim engaged me in a way that Oblivion did not, and the streamlining of certain things (like attributes) made the experience much more enjoyable for me. Oblivion (and GTA) made me think I didn’t like Open World games, and Skyrim taught me otherwise.
Honorable Mention: Saint’s Row 3
Final Words
Now that I’m here at the end, this is kind of a ridiculous post. Expect most of my Blaugust posts to be about a 5th of this. Thanks to MobyGames for the vast majority of the screenshots.
Edit:
Forgot to mention this when it went up, but for more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative.
Now is an interesting time for MOBAs. League of Legends is the largest game in the world. The International (the largest Dota 2 tournament) had a payout rivaling many professional sporting events, and was shown on ESPN2. In light of this, it’s not surprising that other companies have been trying to take their own piece of the pie. Let’s examine some of these.
Two is better than Three
Dawngate, EA’s MOBA is unique in many ways, but follows similar gameplay as LoL or Dota. The primary draw is the 2-lane map (with a greatly expanded jungle), which forces the meta to develop differently from League or Dota. It otherwise plays somewhat similarly, although there is a decreased emphasis on last-hitting; you get fewer resources for not doing it, but more than the nothing you’d get in League or Dota. Speaking of League, the “Trinket” ward comes from here. The stats and items are completely different from League or Dota, so that’s an adjustment that’s necessary to make going into this game. it also contains my favorite MOBA character thus far, Moya.
Personally, I saw Dawngate really early, and I’m not sure it’s something I’m terribly interested in. Moya aside, I’m not interested in the game, and I don’t know anyone playing it. It also has the problem of not being different enough from LoL that I’m interested in playing it over LoL. The item system is different, and towers also serve the functions of inhibitors (and respawn accordingly), but this isn’t enough to get me to sign in regularly. Maybe someday in the future something will draw me in, but I’m passing for now.
If at first you don’t succeed
Also recently coming around is Strife, the second MOBA from S2 Games. Their first attempt is Heroes of Newerth, which did not change enough from Dota to become as popular as LoL, but changed too much to be as well-received as Dota 2. Strife is their attempt to make a MOBA that’s easier to get into, and also one that changes the mechanics that players tend to fight their own team over. The hero design is almost universally on the cute and cuddly side, in an attempt to appeal to a more casual crowd. The map itself is more open, but still has the familiar three-lane structure.
Despite that first paragraph, I’ve felt no need to really give this one a shot. It does very little to distinguish itself from the mountain of other MOBAs available now. From my perspective, it seems like another MOBA with slightly different mechanics with characters and items I’m not familiar with doing the same things I could be doing in any other game. This might be a little unfair as the game is still technically in closed beta, but so are the other two games on this list. As a newcomer, they have to demonstrate why I want to play their game over the other options, and Strife has not succeeded in that task.
The Great Regret
Since Dota started as a mod for Warcraft 3, and in turn was based on a Starcraft custom map, it’s a bit of a surprise that it took Blizzard this long to do anything formally in the genre. Heroes of the Storm is their entry into the MOBA field. Announced in 2012 as “Blizzard All-Stars”, I can only assume the name was changed when they realized it could be shortened to “BAllS”. This one changes the most from the standard format by having a number of different maps, doing away with individual progression in favor of team progression, and replacing items with talents. It’s also worth noting that this game stars familiar faces from other Blizzard games as heroes.
This one I like, mostly because of the maps. they’re varied mechanically and thematically, and none of them are quite the same as the “standard”. The major problem I have with it right now it that it’s in Closed Beta with no keys at all, so getting in is entirely luck-based. I’m also not completely sure about some of the out-of-game progression being hero-specific, making it hard to switch heroes as desired without some grinding. I hope this one opens up more soon.
Potentially winning awards for the least expected crossover in recent memory (Pokemon Conquest comes close), Hyrule Warriors was announced about a year ago and it’s gone gold recently, so I’m writing about it.
It’s a Secret to No One
Koei’s “Warriors” series has a relatively long history containing games of various qualities. The announcement that a game was going to be made based on the Zelda series was surprising, but it doesn’t make any less sense than One Piece or Fist of the North Star. Trailers showcasing the different characters and weapons have been releasing over the past couple of weeks. Since I’m a fan of both Zelda games and Warriors games, this seems like a game I absolutely want to play.
It’s a Secret to Everyone
The two most common comments I see about the series are about the enemies not attacking and the game being about button mashing, both of which have varying degrees of truth. The games are not actually about killing hundreds of enemies, although that’s certainly a thing that happens. The primary objective in most of these games is territory control, and mass destruction of basic troops is a means to an end. The player character is almost always the strongest force on the field, and figuring out where to apply that force is where the game is interesting. Frequently you will have to react to multiple developing situations at once, and dealing with these situations frequently involves killing one or more enemy officers, who are much more of a threat than the basic troops who are primarily there to extend your combo chain. In higher difficulties the normal enemies do pose more of a threat, but I think this makes the game tedious on the highest difficulty.
Most games in the series add more mechanics to the above framework, and I’m interested in seeing what Hyrule Warriors has in this department. There seems to be a Zelda-like inventory with traditional items in addition to the many weapons pulled from the series. These are used in creative ways, there’s a video of Midna using the hookshot to pull the moon from Majora’s Mask down on enemies. (Yes, it’s that kind of game.) I hope there’s a good game in all of the craziness.
Fiesta Status Check
As a final note, there are now 5 weeks left in the 2014 Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta. This is still plenty of time to finish the game in, even if you haven’t started yet. I know some of you who have started but not finished, so this is a friendly reminder that the event doesn’t last forever.
Since functionally quitting WoW during Cata, I’ve been a bit of an MMO nomad, wandering from game to game, looking at all of the shiny. Game companies have been more than happy to cater to this, offering plenty of new shininess at launch, and then eventually wearing out until I left. My relationship with all of these games isn’t the same, however. There are some games I’ll probably never go back to*, and some that I left on relatively good terms for some reason or another. Final Fantasy XIV is a game in the latter category. The group I was playing with gradually started playing it less and less, until eventually I stopped too. Also, FATE grinding was kind of terrible.
We Miss You!
Last weekend (Friday-Sunday) was a welcome back weekend, allowing previous players to log in without renewing their subscriptions. I patched the game up on Friday, even though I didn’t get a chance to play until Sunday due to the insanity that last weekend was. Apparently, Square has been quite busy since we left, and there’s a lot of content. The Duty Roulette (still the funniest and most accurate name for that concept I’ve seen) provides a way for players without pre-made groups to obtain decent rewards. Beast Tribe dailies provide other sources of XP and potential cosmetic rewards. There’s a really awesome bribe for tanks to do 8-man content (although it’s a bit grindy). In short, there are plenty of things to do, both with a group and without.
Instead of doing any of that, we ran an instance we were somewhat familiar with from before, Wanderer’s Palace. Just seeing this place again was enough to make me remember that I like playing this game. It’s WoW-style combat, but a bit more relaxed (mostly due to the much longer GCD). It doesn’t have my favorite character archetype, but it does have a pair of tank classes that I enjoy. It’s extremely pretty, and it’s one of the few games that I have a level-capped character in. Also, some of the music is awesome.
Happy Returns
I suppose you can congratulate Square Enix on a successful marketing promotion, because It got me to resubscribe to FF14. Unfortunately, the game to drop by the wayside here is WildStar, because not enough of the group I’m interested in playing with got into it. Once the new shininess wore off, I’m left with the same feeling I had before, that I want to like the game more than I actually do. Maybe they can have their chance to win me back later.
