Mmm, good ending. I expected basically what happened to happen, but without the twist Raynor pulled. I was pretty stunned, but man, very cool. Such an epic story and so well integrated with the missions. Too bad the Zerg campaign is going to be like a year from now! I expect many people will have become so good with the other two races in the interim between expansions that the missions will not present much of a challenge, on normal at least, like a few did early on this time before I became more proficient with Terran. Even some hard missions were getting easy towards the end. Luckily there's a brutal mode if hard is too easy. Stupid achievements are so fun to try and get but after I've beaten the campaign, much more campaign play is going to feel like wasting time chasing achievements. Fun time, but could be spent on other stuff. Ah, the tension I feel with achievements.
And I'm glad the multiplayer is such fun. I thought about it and realized I like the randomness of it. I've no idea who I'm going up against, or what race they are if they choose random (I always choose random for these reasons). I've no idea their strategy until I encounter them. Online games are so dynamic. I mean, you've generally got to prepare to attack or defend a rush at first, and then it gets more dynamic. The beginnings are where RTS games have always been purely mechanical, following build orders and such to maximize income or get the fastest rush or whatever. I prefer the middle stages of a match where the rushes are over and it's like, "Ok, so now what? What are they going to do and what am I going to do?" Poking around their base, scanning, sending overlords and observers, sending that marine or probe on a suicide mission to find out my Terran opponent has blocked his entrance, all so much fun and so important to gather intelligence to plan and enact my particular strategy.
I'm still in the learning stages of all the units, and definitely most comfortable with Terran because of the campaign. It's a little confusing having spent so much more time with the campaign than online because some of the units and abilities are different. I remember going into multiplayer games thinking I was going to amass an army of Marines, Firebats, and Medics to find out there are no Firebats or Medics in multiplayer. And then being so used to my bunkers always holding 6 Marines and realizing that's an upgrade now, and various other stuff. I'll get used to it sooner or later.
And one final thing...Since so many of the Terran troops are criminals, I wonder if the game is making fun of the idea of using ex-cons or current cons as cannon fodder. All the more normal citizens seem to be in command posts, although they are either pirates, mercenaries, corrupt and power-hungry emperors, strange delusional emperor's sons, or whatever. Some are normal. But the troops are mostly convicts. Is this funny or not? Is this a serious idea or not? In context of course, it's just the Starcraft universe, but that idea has been tossed around and employed forever by real armies. I wonder why they fight? Like Tychus, maybe some made deals for freedom. Maybe they have no choice. Maybe they just like killing. Maybe they want to die. Maybe they found something to believe in or something worth fighting for. Maybe they are only criminals from one perspective, like in the New Folsom mission, where Mengsk was holding all kinds of political dissidents, scientists, and other free-thinkers the Dominion called dangerous criminals. I like the tooltip on one of the unit upgrades or somewhere. It might be the Medivac ship. But anyway, the tooltip says something like "Led to a doubling increase in Marines' lifespans from 8 seconds to 16." It's a rough life.
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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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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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