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Oct 30th, 2010 at 04:08:29 - Disciples 3 (PC) |
I've downloaded a handful of demos the last couple weeks for some games that looked neat but got bad reviews, or that I've heard about in the past and am curious to try out first before committing cash. Last weekend I tried out Disciples 3, a strategy RPG like Heroes of Might & Magic. I played some of a HMM game maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and thought it was cool, but boring. I get a similar sense here after toying a few hours with the demo.
The graphics are very nice, especially for a strategy game. The maps are colorful and full of treasure, buildings, and enemies. Your characters are quite detailed, and the battlefields, spell animations, and so on look pretty nice. I also liked the music and sounds, though I imagine they will quickly get repetitive.
Another thing that already became repetitive after clearing like half of one map in the first Human level was the fighting. This is very, very, very unfortunate because fighting, and the thinking about the fighting, should be the most important thing in a strategy game. There's an 'auto-resolve' or something button that will finish out the battle for you, but the AI is apparently really dumb. I put auto-resolve on a few times and my ranged archers or casters would mysteriously die, when they didn't come anywhere near death while I was controlling them.
There are three interwoven story lines for three races, and they seem very unbalanced in the first level. In the demo you can play the first level of each race's story arc. I first played the Legion, and was stunned at how difficult the battles were. I had enemies killing my characters in two hits, and I seemed very outmatched. I died miserably a few times before switching to the Human campaign, which was surprisingly much more forgiving. I completed half the map before dying, a process begun by the auto-resolve system killing off my ranged. Ranged, by the way, seems the way to go since they can attack anyone on the battlefield from anywhere on the battlefield. The computer regularly would just huddle their ranged into a far corner and make my melee chase them down while being pelted with spells and arrows. It felt both cheap and tedious.
So, there are various objectives on the maps, like rescuing some peasants or whatever, just like any normal quest objectives in an RPG or RTS. You control a unit, which is a main story line character and a few support characters. You can equip armor and things on the main character, which is cool, and everyone can level up and get stronger. You also have a castle, which is like your base, and you can spend money, of which you get a certain amount of the various resource types per turn, to upgrade it. Upgrading is very RTS-tech-tree-like. You can build a Mage Tower to learn spells, build buildings to upgrade your squires to knights, your clerics to archbishops (not exact names, but same idea), etc. You can perform one action at your castle per turn, including training troops and deploying new leaders. Instead of one army running around the map, you can have more.
I really like the idea behind the game, like the general design principles it follows, like exploring giant maps with all sorts of unknown treasure and peril, leveling a main character and support army, going through a tech tree, using spells, fighting battles on a grid, and so on, but the game just feels flat and dull. The same thing happened with HMM all those years ago. I specifically remember at first being like, Oh cool, this is so awesome!, and then a week later having become incredibly tired of its repetitiveness. Disciples 3 just seems like a lesser version of HMM, but with so much potential.
Oh, and the voice acting is atrocious. I am willing to bet my savings that they got someone from the dev team, or some friends who are really into fantasy, to do the voice acting, specifically the story exposition. It's that bad. And the voice volume changes from normal to really quiet on loading screens. It doesn't make sense.
I won't be buying this one, but it looked interesting enough to try.
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Oct 19th, 2010 at 06:32:58 - Darkfall (PC) |
Downloaded, began and ended the 14-day Darkfall trial yesterday. Darkfall is a sandbox MMO with a heavy focus on PvP. A sandbox MMO here means that you're given a world filled with other players and you just...go. I began the game naked with just a cheap sword. There is no tutorial and absolutely minimal help. There are no levels and no real classes. I naively thought that not having to level would let me play with others faster and not have to grind, but this was not the case. As a naked dark elf, I was dropped at the gate of a starter city with no story, no cinematic, no nothing explaining who I was or what I was doing there. Sounds kind of like role-player's paradise. The world is what you and others make of it. So what did I make of it?
I did what anyone would do in an MMO: went into town to get a quest or a clue as to the story. I didn't find any story, but I did find a couple quests. There is no notification that an NPC has something for you to do. There are no glowing exclamation marks or question marks, no map markers. You must interact (F key) with the NPC and then select the Quests tab, and see if there's anything there. I get some quests to go kill goblins, so off I run into the marshes outside town.
One thing the game does explain to you at the beginning is the "newbie protection." This put me off a bit because what kind of game has to give new players invincibility against PvP for the first hour of play? What kinds of deranged people are going to come after me, a brand new player? Am I going to be corpse camped for hours? Newbie protection sure sounds like Darkfall is a scary place.
As I learned, it isn't the players to be afraid of at first, but the NPC enemies like goblins and werewolves. There is no targeting in Darkfall. Combat is skill-based, meaning you have a reticule that you move in real time over the target and left-click as fast as possible to swing your sword. If you do it right, you hit. If not, you miss. It felt very Diablo-esque, left-clicking frantically on enemies to kill them. As you use an ability, it increases, so as I swing my sword, my 1-handed sword skill increases, and I do more damage with that weapon type. All skills are like this, including sprinting, resting, various magics, archery, gathering skills, and so on. You buy spells and other specialty skills from vendors. The combat and the skill leveling system are very much like Oblivion, which I recently quit out of frustration, not with those two systems in particular though. I quite like twitch combat and leveling skills by use as it opens up possibilities for building your character. He turns into whatever I play like, and the better I get at fighting, the better results I see. I quickly gained points in 1-handed sword fighting, sprint and rest. I did a lot of resting and even more sprinting, aka, running for my life from groups of goblins and werewolves.
Enemies are ferocious. They attack you from far away and the graphics are, in most places, so unbelievably poor for a commercial subscription-based MMO in 2009 that I had trouble looking in the field and finding who was shooting me. What would happen is I would get sprayed by some green spell. I'd look to see where the goblin shooting me was. Scan the field once, scan it again, not see anything. Finally I'd notice a goblin waaaay off in the distance making a jumping animation or something a few seconds before the spell hit me. There's no green coming out of the goblin's hands, and remember there's no targeting system so no enemy portrait appears to let me know what's going on. Assuming you don't die before you find your attacker, you run over to hack at him, but when you get there, 3 more goblins come running from like 1/2 mile away. So then you turn and run for it. You rest to recover HP and try again. Enemies ganged up on me so often in overwhelming numbers that I was getting pretty frustrated. And when I did manage to actually fight one or two at a time, their animations were so bad I couldn't tell what they were doing half the time, and the other half they spend just trying to circle around behind you, so you attack in circles to prevent them from backstabbing. Enemies also glitch into the ground, can walk up 90 degree angle cliffs, can attack you from halfway up a tree trunk such that you have trouble hitting them, and other stupid things that make the game feel cheap.
Targeting, general getting around, using skills, and so on - everything basically - would be better if the UI was comprehensible. There's an action bar, your health/mana/stamina bars, and chat windows on display. You can also open your bags, spell list, and various other things. That's not the problem. The problem is that any time you want to interact with a menu, an NPC, or bags you have to right click to enter like 'menu mode,' which stops all action and puts you completely in bags and menus to click around in. First of all, this is confusing because in about every PC game ever, right clicking interacts with stuff or makes you move. It doesn't enter menu mode. Why the designers chose this, I will never know. Thus, you can't manage anything in battle or even in the field because you might get attacked while in menu mode. Then you'd have to right click to switch out of it, but then you just can't attack. See, your weapon is always either sheathed or unsheathed, and to attack it's got to be unsheathed obviously, but to be in menus it needs to be sheathed. These steps are so cumbersome and pointless and make things so needlessly difficult. Here's another one. Want to loot a corpse? Sheath your weapon. Push F on the monster's tombstone. Right click to enter menu mode. Open your bags. Manually move each piece of loot from the tombstone to your bag. There are no 'bag slots,' but bags are just a bit square jumble of stuff with overlapping icons of loot. It's an utter mess. And 9 times out of 10, you'll be attacked while looting, so you can't kill, loot, kill, loot. You've got to kill everything around, make sure it's safe, then loot everything.
That's all why the UI sucks. Why it doesn't suck is I think I understand the reason behind it, and if I'm right, then I love the idea, but think the implementation either is bad all around or just isn't for me. I think that since Darkfall is all about PvP and all about realism, (fantasy aside) as evidenced by the low, low number of mob spawns in the world, actually having an open bag space, gathering slowly, working at skills, and so on, all the slowness of looting and tediousness of sheathing and unsheathing, and some of the rest, are implemented purposefully to make you feel at risk. Even though I never was attacked by a player, I kept looking over my shoulder, and this was usually for mobs in my case. The player has got to make a choice: Okay, should I loot these corpses now or clear the area first? I can't mine ore with my sword, so I've got to equip a pickaxe, unsheath it, and get to mining. All gathering skills take a long time, which is incredibly boring, but it's a tradeoff. If I sit here mining, I'm an easy target. In Darkfall, all your gear drops if you're killed in PvP and your killer can take your stuff, reminiscent again of Diablo 2, or EVE Online.
Just a couple other points I noted. I finished my goblin quest and picked up another to run some supplies to an NPC in another town. After running literally for 10 minutes in a straight line, I arrived, turned it in, and got another to kill as many werewolves as I could in an hour. I was doing pretty good for about 5 minutes before 5 or so came at me in a row and I just didn't have enough health to live and stamina to run, so I died. In my last log on Age of Conan, I commented that death doesn't matter because there's no penalty. In Darkfall, death is a huge deal. You have to wait for an agonizing minute or two before respawning, naked, at your spawn point, which in my case was all the way at the first village, 10 minutes' run down the road. You get a 5 or 10 minute invulnerability to allow you to go get your corpse and recover your stuff (if no one has absconded with it). It was absolutely brutal. I quit at this point after I ran back and was promptly killed by a werewolf inside a tree. Not being able to see attackers on a portrait is really unfortunate when that mob is attacking you from up a 90 degree cliff or the inside of a tree and you can't see them because you don't think to look IN the tree for a werewolf claw emerging every few seconds.
Darkfall is for the dedicated among us. It is not a nice world for any type of casual game player. Following Hobbes, life here is nasty, brutish and short. NPCs will kill you easily. Supposedly players will too, though I didn't experience that. I found it boring, tedious, exhausting, confusing, and a lot of other negative adjectives, and that's bad when those are my thoughts after just a few hours of gameplay. I bet I would get a great feeling of accomplishment if I persevered and learned this game, got over the beginning, and leveled my skills, met some other players, joined a clan, and experienced the PvP. I imagine I could potentially even enjoy this game, maybe in some other life. For now, I will stay far, far away and be happy in more friendly places. The player chat itself was uncontrolled. I've rarely seen more immature conversation, cursing, vulgarity, and so on. Like, it was not pretty and if that's any representation of what typically goes on on the social side of the game, then I've no desire at all to be there. So, Darkfall: some neat ideas, and really unfriendly implementation.
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Oct 17th, 2010 at 03:57:09 - Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (PC) |
Just finished the AoC trial, which is the first 20 levels and is contained on the starter island with a great cohesive story arc. The city is ruled by the oppressive Strom and his Red Hand guards who are brutal to the commoners. There's a prosperous and deadly slave trade. You wash up on the island mysteriously, with no knowledge of who you are. You've got to try and remember. Through completing the 20-level story arc, you get bits and pieces of information about your past and your future.
I used to laugh when I'd read about AoC being, according to the devs, "the most savage, sexy, and brutal MMO ever" because the claims sound ridiculous. They certainly did make an adult game, and you can tell they tried to make it savage and sexy and brutal, and some of it comes across as convincing, and some of it really is laughable. One thing I liked about this is that it's not high fantasy for a change. Like 90+% of MMOs are high fantasy. This one was more about bad people and wild beasts. Sure, there's magic and curses and gods and stuff, but the Conan universe was well done and made the game feel relatively realistic. I am surprised I liked it so much. The realism helped their savage and brutal claims, but the sexy claim is not cool. This is a male's game. The male characters are all idealized versions of masculinity, and the attitude of the game is as well. Everyone's got sharp tongues, there's a lot of cursing and threats tossed around. The females all have huge breasts and it seemed like about half the female NPCs are involved with a brothel or flirt with you anyway. And your character (if male at least, I'd be interested to see how playing a female works here) always has some remark to make to female NPCs about sleeping with them, and they always show interest. In dialogue, males always refer to females they don't like as bitches and whores, and refer to some they do like as whores too. Males call each other bastards and sons of whores, or my favorite, "whoreson." While I understand what they were trying to do with the language, I think it takes away from the game because it's just unnecessary and ends up being quite sexist. It's almost misogynistic.
Speaking of dialogue, all of it is voiced. It's well done too. The dialogue flows like a single-player RPG with several response choices and ability to ask for extra information. The quest are generally very relevant to the story line, which I liked a lot, and the NPCs' presentations are quite good. In fact, the whole game so far (20 levels) feels closer to a single-player RPG than an MMO. Besides the fact that the server was barren of other players, the feel of the action, the personalized story, the quests and NPCs, all made the game feel like it was just for me. I rather enjoyed it. There's a daytime/nighttime mode for actually playing the single-player storyline. Day time is for doing normal quests and is where players coexist in space. You can switch to nighttime for your personalized training, which is the single-player only stuff. You begin helping the Resistance against Strom, and you become more aligned with their goals as events happen and he goes mad and blockades the island so no one can leave. Since your character is on a personal journey, you need to leave, so Strom is a problem. Nighttime is for subversive quests that move the story of finding out about yourself along. Along the way to level 20, you'll infiltrate a volcano fortress to prevent a ritual that leads to the volcano exploding, which is an awesome, awesome action escape sequence with burning rocks raining down as you run for it. You'll help various resistance members do various things that couldn't be done during the day under the watch of guards. It all leads up to the end, another amazing, amazing sequence where the Resistance and you are finally prepared and ready to kill Strom and end his tyranny. You run through the city at night liberating sections of it, with Resistance members helping, and finally confront Strom on his ship and kill him. All these action parts are in the single-player nighttime, so it feels like people are just there to help you grind quests during the daytime. I grouped up once because we were in the same area trying to do the same quests. That was it. Supposedly the game is all about large-scale PvP later on with castle sieges and all kinds of massive battles, but I never saw any PvP nor could I join a battleground of sorts or anything.
Visually, the game is fantastic. There were a lot of little graphical glitches, but it really didn't take away from the total look. On this high-end machine, the water, the trees, the views, the characters, shadows, lighting, was all just gorgeous to look at. One negative are all the load times. Every time you go in a building it has to load. When you begin a session, it has to scan all your files for some reason, so I would have to turn it on, wait 5 or 10 minutes, and then play.
The level, gear, and skill progression is quite nice. There's a sweet spot I like and AoC about hit it. Games bug me when you get really powerful feeling gear very quickly. I personally enjoy beginning in rags and really feeling like I'm working my way up to nicer rewards. I'm only level 20 and should not look like a badass yet. I should feel like one relative to my level 5 or 10 character, but it should be clear that I'm wearing junk. Skills also increased at a good pace. I didn't have 50 spells by level 20. I recently played EQ2 a bit and it seemed like every level I got 2 new skills, which was way more than I needed. With AoC, it was more like 1 every 2 levels, so I used most of what I had and it was all more manageable.
One final note is the death system, which does nothing to prevent one from dying. In most MMOs I've played you're penalized with XP loss or a resurrection sickness of some sort, or at the very least, you go back to get your corpse. In AoC, all that happens is when you die you leave a tombstone and then you're resurrected at the nearest spawn point, which was usually not far away and pretty convenient. The tombstone gives you a debuff that is -1% damage dealt and +1% damage taken. Find your tombstone to remove the debuff. It stacks up to 3 times (3 death and 3 stones), so at worst, you can have -3% damage dealt and +3% damage received. This is nothing. Death does not matter, and I often died on purpose to get closer to where I wanted to go. In contrast, EQ2 gives you an XP deficit to repay that can be annoying and WoW gives you -75% stats for 10 minutes, which makes doing anything but traveling after you resurrect a bad idea. If you go get your corpse, nothing bad happens, but you've still got to run and you're still where you died. AoC does not deter risky play.
All in all, I quite enjoyed the game. It felt more single-player than multi, and I feel pretty much like I just played a short RPG since the whole 20 levels is integrated in a nice story arc and location. I'm not interested in playing it further, maybe because it's supposed to be PvP heavy and I didn't even see any PvP, or maybe because it was good enough, but nothing I'd want to subject myself to for another however many levels. Glad I tried it out and got the experience.
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Oct 12th, 2010 at 07:57:03 - Champions Online (PC) |
Tried out this Champions Online demo that's the beginner section through level 5 or 6. Champions Online is a superhero themed MMO. It's been a long time since I played a superhero game, but I remember watching Daniel play City of Heroes off and on for a summer maybe 5 years ago. It was certainly novel just for that, and I was wondering whether or not it was just MMO as usual with a cel-shaded superhero skin. I'm still unsure, but I saw some unusual things going on that set it apart from the majority.
First of all, character creation is amazing. There are no classes. You completely customize your character, including every facet of their appearance you can think of. Characters appear truly individual. I made the biggest, fattest man with the smallest head and the biggest chin, deer antlers, reptile fins, and blue and yellow lightning patterned tights. I named him Unpossible and he was pretty funny to look at. I saw demon-type characters in-game, some generic looking female and male superheroes, and several modeled and named after popular characters like Preacher. And you also customize your skills. You can choose a set 'archetype' like Lightning or Brawler or Telekinesis, or you can just build your own. I took something like the Engineer archetype, so my two abilities to start were to channel a ray gun, and then use a charge attack for a big ray gun blast.
Abilities were interesting. You can either 'tap' the hotkey, 'maintain' it or one other one...maybe just push. My two abilities were maintained, like charge abilities. Instead of just pushing 1 to shoot my gun, I hold it down to channel it. When you use your channeling type ability, it builds the blue bar, energy of some type, and you use your more powerful ability to blast the enemy with the energy that builds up. Pretty neat, but got a little boring by 5 levels, especially when you don't get any new abilities until after the first mission, which is after level 5. I also had some trouble with buttons responding. Holding the hotkey didn't always channel correctly and there were a lot of hiccups like this. One irritating thing was interacting with NPCs. Instead of just right- or left-clicking like any normal game, Champions's default is Z. It's kind of awkward, but you can't just push Z either. You've got to move close enough and wait for this context box to pop up that tells you to push Z. Then you can push Z. And if you cancel the interaction, the context menu won't just pop up again. You have to run out of range of the NPC first, then run back in and make it pop again.
The art is pretty cool, looks very superhero comic-style, cel-shaded, colorful, nice animations. There are lots of destructible objects and tossable objects, like lampposts, cars, mailboxes, and so on. It was fun uprooting lamps and hurling them at enemies. The objects are a little hard to target. It's the same as with the NPCs. You can see your icon change from far away, but the icon's got to be on a very specific spot on the object, and so you'll see the icon change far away, run closer, the icon disappears because you moved the mouse a little, then try to find it again. Not a huge issue, and I'm sure something anyone would get used to, but just weird selecting objects.
Quests were basic kill this and fetch that, just set in the context of an alien invasion. The tutorial area though was pretty neat. Instead of your typical "Go kill some boars. Great, go kill some level 2 boars now" the first 5 levels Millennium City is under alien invasion! They've cordoned off the city with a forcefield and are destroying everything. It's up to the superheroes to save the citizens, help the police, and stop the mastermind behind the invasion. The game is very action-oriented, almost made me feel like I wasn't playing an MMO because it wasn't so slow and lifeless in the beginning. It reminds me of Warhammer Online in this regard. There are alien ships shooting lasers overhead, the constant sight of the forcefield in the distance, aliens running all over the streets attacking citizens, police holed up in alleys, ambulance sirens wailing, people shouting. The atmosphere was great.
Near the end of the trial, you participate in an open quest, which is like the public quests in Warhammer, where anyone nearby can join in. In this case, you have to defend a giant cannon from an assault so it can remain operational and hold aliens off a critical human area. Then you go into a personal instance to meet an NPC superhero. He reveals the mastermind villain behind the invasion and the two of you take him on together. Afterward, you take a quest called "It's a Celebration!" and when you exit where the super villain was, the police, the mayor, every person you did a quest for, are all lined up cheering for you and standing at attention. The NPC citizens you helped all start telling each other what you did for them, like "He saved my little Timmy!" and "He got my travel documents back so I can catch my flight to Canada!" It was pretty neat. Then you get a choice to go to Canada or the Southwest US desert to fight some more mutants and stuff if you buy the game.
Neat tutorial, neat demo, superhero thing is intriguing. Oh, and I got to look through the abilities at level 5 even though I couldn't buy one. You can spend ability points to fly, get rocket boots, burrow and travel underground, and like 10 other travel powers. I wouldn't buy it because it doesn't seem like too deep of a game and I'm not real into comics or superheros, but it looks like it would be fun.
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