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Feb 20th, 2014 at 18:43:55 - MASQ (Web) |
Interesting "choose your own adventure" type game. I found out about this from PC Gamer's Top 100 Games of All Time list from some issue like 6 months ago that I just got around to reading. Apparently it's been around since 2002 and the purpose is to tell a compelling narrative in a nontraditional gaming format. So it's like a comic book style game that just plays out in scenes. You make dialogue decisions that advance the plot. The plot will also advance on its own. If you don't select an option, other characters will continue acting.
Pretty much every dialogue choice affects story events. I played through 5 times (it's really quick) and made it to the "end" the last time. I wound up in jail a couple times, a successful fashion designer one time, I may have died once...There's a really complex narrative behind what you see. Each time I played through, I learned different things about relationships among characters, like who Nikki was, what my wife was up to late at night, why Carlos was killed, how to get money from the bank and from an investor...I'm sure there are a hundred other scenes I didn't see yet. It's pretty cool.
Obviously, since 2002 this kind of branching storyline has been done in The Witcher series and a bunch of Bioware games and other more notable stuff. This game is still really interesting and surprisingly engaging even though it's (mostly) black and white, just comic book pictures, and has no sound. Worth playing through a couple times if you're interested in a unique approach to storytelling style in games. And it's so short, you can go through it a few times in an hour.
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Feb 19th, 2014 at 11:42:31 - Path of Exile (PC) |
Ok, just finished Path of Exile on normal difficulty with my witch. I played solo the entire game up until the last boss. I didn't have a waypoint to the area, so I had to make sure I kept town portals open so when I died I could teleport back. Well, one time I forgot to make a town portal and died and I didn't have a waypoint but for like 3 areas away. That's bad. Let me explain waypoints and area maps real quick.
Waypoints are stones that you activate. Once you activate the waypoint in an area, you can insta-travel to waypoints you've activated in other areas. Don't have a waypoint for an area? Then you have to run there. Why are waypoints good besides traveling convenience? Because the areas RESET after you've been out of them for 8-15 minutes. If you haven't been in an area for 15 minutes, you can be sure all the monsters are back, the map is cleared and reset. Any exits you may have found will be randomized again. You essentially have to re-do the area.
Back to my story. Since I died without creating a town portal (which I had to do because I hadn't found the waypoint), then I had to begin again from the nearest waypoint I had, which was like 3 areas away, and was actually where I had started this final session in the first place. Since it had been over an hour since I'd been there, that area was reset. Since I would have had to fight my way through it all over again, then for sure by the time I found the next area, that area would be reset too. Since I hadn't been there for an hour, by the time I fought my way through it, the following area would be reset as well. Continue the chain of reset areas and what you have is me playing what I just played all over again, and finally getting back to the last boss to find all my progress on him erased and reset too. Lame. It is SCARY to have areas reset! Also that means if you take a town portal to town to clear your inventory or return quests or whatever, you have like 8 minutes to do your business and get back or the area you were in might completely reset. When I play again, I will not be leaving (important) areas without scouring them for the waypoints because I got stuck with reset areas more than a few times while playing.
So, I decided not to trek all the way back to the last boss. It's a multiplayer game too, so maybe there was a party forming to kill Dominus, the last boss. I found the party tab and sure enough, there were a couple going. I joined up and took someone's town portal to the boss. I died immediately. Enemies get...way...harder as more people join! Then everyone else died, and after a while we tried again. I died again, but just sat there dead this time and watched everyone else whittle down the boss's health. Victory! Achievements! Quest complete! Since I was dead I couldn't loot anything, but whatever, Normal difficulty completed.
Here's an interesting thing. Path of Exile is largely multiplayer. After the game finished, I looked at my achievements, since I got like 6 this last session. One of the achievements was for joining a public group, like I did to kill Dominus. It's an easy achievement. Just click "join" on a party. Certainly that helped me out in the end, and I imagine that soloing becomes really difficult in the next difficulty level. Anyway, what percentage of players have the achievement for joining a public group? 2.1%! Only 2.1% of all players have ever joined a public group. That seems extremely low. Granted, many others may have joined private groups. But then again, the % of people who have completed the game once on normal is only 13% right now, which also seems pretty low. I guess what I interpret this as is...maybe...most people who finish the game do it solo since only 1/6 or so have grouped (assuming all the people who have grouped have finished). Then in Cruel difficulty (the next harder one), only 5.4% of players have finished it, so (assuming again that everyone who grouped has gone this far), then only half those players did it solo, versus 5/6 in Normal mode. Grouping becomes very effective, perhaps for getting loot or staying alive, or it's more fun, I have no idea. In Merciless difficulty (the hardest) 2.3% of players have finished, so practically everyone must group to complete it.
I hope to lure some friends into this game. I want to give it another play through with a new class, probably the Scion, who you can rescue at the end of Act III and who then becomes a playable character class that begins smack in the middle of the skill grid. I'm thinking some sort of mostly strength/some dexterity character, basically the opposite as the Witch. I'd also like to try and go through Cruel solo with my Witch and just see what that difficulty is like and play with some of the items and equipment and generally try to figure the game out some more. There's a LOT of replayability here. I want to play more with other people and learn a bit about the economy. I want to plan out a build with the Scion. I want to learn more about item statistics and elemental attributes and resistances and what all these terms mean and how they are calculated.
One more thing -- I mentioned previously that the game wasn't that interesting to look at. Well, I take my words back. While some areas really are bland, others are richly detailed and beautiful, especially later in the game. Piety's labs are especially amazing (and disgusting!) with blood rivers and corpses and torture victims strung up all over the place on a Holocaust scale. I stand by my comment that the map is ugly though, although I have learned to see through its messiness and utilize it better.
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Feb 18th, 2014 at 11:14:23 - Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (PS2) |
Didn't expect to beat it so fast, but uh, I played the hell out of this in the past week, including an unexpected marathon on Sunday. Sooo yeah. Turns out I got one of the BAD endings. I won't spoil plot points, but I punished the wrong person for the murders and ended the game early. I watched another ~3 hours of dialogue scenes on Youtube to see the real ending. That's some serious extra play time I cut out by my decision! 3 hours of dialogue PLUS an extra dungeon and more random side quests and social links...Probably ended 10 hours early, haha. And there's even ANOTHER ending that you can get after that.
I don't really know how I got the bad ending. I kind of think the bad ones are the default ones. To get the real ending, you had to make these specific dialogue choices, which I obviously did not make. I chose "wrong." Although I made the dialogue decisions on purpose according to what I really thought, I can't help but feel a little...cheated? Like, how was I supposed to know? Maybe it would be better if my ending wasn't called the BAD ending. Why is it bad? It's an ending. Anyway, if you get one of the bad endings, do go on Youtube and watch the real ending. It was pretty awesome and had some scathing social commentary on modern life, consumption, ideas and images, religion, TV and other entertainment media...very pomo.
A couple things I decided I didn't like toward the end that I have to mention are a lot of the side quests. 90% of them are fetch quests. They feel mostly like busy work. You can also go back through all the dungeons a second time to fight special bosses (who aren't very difficult) and get a special weapon for each. This sort of makes it more worth it to do some of the side quests in the dungeons, but all of it felt like busy work, yet I was compelled to do it to some extent. In such a long game, I guess I sort of resent that I spent however much longer doing busy work side quests that are ridiculously simple and force you to rely largely on chance for specific enemy spawns and item drops.
One thing that made revisiting old dungeons way more monotonous was the Arcana Chance stuff. So when going back to old dungeons, they are super easy, so you go through lots of quick battles. You don't want any of the arcana cards that drop because they are way low level, but the game still keeps doing the arcana cards, which last like as long as these short battles. Then when I choose the "no card" card, because I don't want a card, it so often would give me "Another Chance!" or do the "Arcana Chance!" thing, which made me shuffle cards AGAIN. Massive waste of time in those low level dungeons. And even in the high level ones, I quit wanting to take arcana chances. I wish I could have just turned that off.
Anyway, this game was pretty incredible. I loved Persona 3 and 4 is even better. I'm sure I've enunciated most of the reasons in other entries. I just think how different from the norm the Persona games are and it makes me hopeful that developers are being so creative. I mean this game is a mix between a JRPG and a social sim game. Weird, right? It just does such a great job of making you care about characters, of crafting excellent and detailed stories.
So. Persona 5?
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Feb 12th, 2014 at 08:11:37 - Path of Exile (PC) |
Path of Exile, sweet! This is basically what Diablo 2 would look like in 2014. It wouldn't look like Diablo 3. It would look like Path of Exile. PoE is a free-to-play game on Steam supported by "ethical micro-transactions," which means you can pay for cosmetic enhancements only -- nothing that actually affects your character's performance. Therefore no player is coerced or manipulated into purchasing crap like experience boosts or super weapons or faster movement speed or whatever. This makes me very happy on principle. I have also played enough "free-to-play" MMOs that I have some in-depth first-hand experience with these nefarious micro-transactions. I remember dropping like $10 in Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic so all my characters could run faster. Not that I don't want to pay to play. I'm happy to buy the game, although I tend to only buy games around $15 or less, but when developers say the game is free-to-play, it seems to me it should be free to play on equal footing with everyone else and there shouldn't be any pay-to-win elements. No one should feel disadvantaged for not coughing up as much money as the next player.
Aaaanyway, why else am I enjoying PoE so much? Choices, choices, choices! They've done some very cool things with the genre. There are no skill trees. Instead, there is a MASSIVE passive skill grid, sort of like what the Final Fantasy games (single-player ones at least) have been doing. Except MASSIVE. I mean like 1500 nodes in the grid to put points into. And every character can move throughout the whole grid. This allows for an insane variety of character builds. INSANE. Seriously. Go look at this thing: http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMA
My character is a Witch class. Different classes begin at different locations in the skill grid. So I guess obviously the witch begins with high intelligence and low strength and dexterity, and she's in an area that has all intelligence boosts, boosts to max mana, spell damage, each type of elemental damage, wand damage, mana shield, and other witchy things. But like, if I want to, I can go over and pick up some strength, begin using massive scepter weapons (that I assume are more for a paladin/priest type class) that usually have a bunch of + elemental damage on them, and hybridize my character. I mean, I can go literally wherever I want in that skill tree. I'm purposefully not trying to map out a character beforehand. I'm not scouring the skill tree. I'm just trying to go organically to what I see and what I want. I started off thinking I would be like a fire-heavy witch, but I've since decided that summoning zombies and skeletons is pretty badass so I'm adding skill points to those nodes that increase minion health/life/number. I'm also still getting some fire and AoE skills because it is a lot of fun and mayhem slinging AoE fireballs and exploding corpses while my zombies and skeletons run wild through hordes of enemies.
PoE does more interesting things. There is NO money. Currency is any of the various scrolls and orbs, and fragments of those, that you find. You also get these items from selling equipment in your inventory. There are the typical scrolls of wisdom (identify an item) and town portal, but also items that let you add sockets to items, modify socket colors, upgrade items from normal to rare, forge links between sockets and on and on. The sockets are cool too. There are three colors, and you insert skill gems into them. These don't just add +strength or whatever like normal, but they actually ARE your skills and abilities. So to raise zombies, I have a raise zombie gem slotted into the appropriate color slot in a piece of armor. There are also support gems that modify abilities. You have to put these in a linked slot to the skill you want to modify. So some slots are just there next to each other and other slots are linked together. So I have +45% attack linked to my summon zombies gem and in another piece of armor I have +health linked to my summon skeletons gem. You get gems from drops and from completing quests. The gems level up as you kill enemies while the gem is equipped.
Items have random properties, and the slots are also random. This means that while you might find a totally badass new weapon, it doesn't have but one gem slot. Or it might have more slots, but maybe a red, blue and green one instead of 2 linked blues. All these slots/gems/scrolls, as with the massive skill grid, force you to make difficult choices all the time, and most importantly, force you to think and strategize. You cannot have all the gems you want. There are 7 ability hotkeys, so you can't have more active abilities than that equipped (or, you can have them equipped, but only use 7 at a time). You cannot link all the gems you want. You have to choose among them, be smart in using the available slots to link and level gems you want or need.
My experience so far has been pretty good. The game's atmosphere is dark and dreary, the story is pretty interesting and there is a real element of discovery and exploration. They really make you feel like you're this exile washed up in a desolate place who has to contend with all this madness in order to...to what? Get home? Seek revenge? I dunno exactly. Importantly, the game runs fine on my 5-year-old laptop, so that's been amazing. I guess consequently, it's not that pretty to look at. The art isn't particularly exciting, the environments are actually pretty drab looking and dull. But you know, if it's going to be Diablo 2 reborn, the important thing is that it plays like it, not looks like a modern AAA blockbuster. One thing that totally needs fixing though is the map. It is horrendous to look at. Also, I assume the level layouts are randomly generated. Since I've never played before, I don't know what's up and what's down. I've gotten lost and turned around and not been able to find exits a handful of times, which has been somewhat frustrating. Playing as a witch who summons things so far, I find fighting hordes of enemies is the best and most fun. I have gotten a bit stuck one time on a boss because I was out of corpses to raise into zombies and my skeletons are weak. Without my undead horde, my witch alone is pretty hopeless!
Anyway, there's a ton left to see and do in the game. I'm like 10 hours into the campaign on normal. There are all these other game modes and challenges, and PvP and co-op and like 5 other character classes....if I really like PoE by the end of the story, I will likely be all about trying another character or trying to get some friends to play with me. More later!
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