January 2014 - Dragonchasers

First look: Echo Prime

Posted on January 30, 2014January 31, 2014 by Nimgimli

Early this week Robot Entertainment’s Echo Prime hit Steam. Between the fact that I’ve really enjoyed Robot’s earlier titles, Hero Academy and the two Orcs Must Die games, plus the fact I know someone who works there, I had to jump in and take it for a spin. Echo Prime is $7.99 until February 9th, $9.99 after that.

Echo Prime is a port from mobile platforms (iOS only, I think) and there are times when it really shows. For one thing, there’s a Gamecenter icon linking to the (non-working, as far as I can tell) social function, at times you’re given instructions like “swipe to dodge!” and the game feels designed to be playing in 10 minute chunks. There’s essentially no narrative to trip you up. You just jump in and start shooting things.

Basic gameplay has you blasting and slicing up bad guys with sword and laser. The levels are super short and tend to be fairly two dimensional (corridors running left to right). You run through a mission, level up your character some, get some coin to buy better gear, and repeat. It’s simple but pretty fun. The “Echos” of the title are entities who lend you special abilities during fights. You equip them, fight while being BFFs with them, and they seem to level up too. There also a system where you can ‘borrow’ Echos from Friends but I had no Friends and wasn’t sure how to get one. For me, I could rent a friend for 100 credits (pretty cheap).

It’s not super deep, but a game doesn’t have to be super deep to be fun, particularly an $8-$10 game.

Obviously on iOS you controlled Echo Prime by tapping or swiping. On the PC you can use keyboard and mouse, or controller.

With keyboard and mouse, you click to move, click on enemies to either melee or fire at them (depending on their range) and either click on skill icons, or tap the number keys, to fire off Echo Skills. WASD are used to dodge, right mouse button is used to block. Holding down Shift will lock your character in place while he shoots; a MUCH needed feature since gameplay is fast-paced enough that it’s easy to miss when trying to click on enemies. This all works, but I couldn’t help but wish I had direct control of the character using WASD. But I feel the same way about Diablo, so take that into consideration.

Steam doesn’t list controller support, but Echo Prime does support a controller and it plays much, MUCH better with one, with the exception of a few issues. Controls are (using an Xbox Controller’s iconography):

A: Melee
B: Shield/Block
X: Ranged attack
Right analog to dodge
Left analog to move
Echo Skills are bound to the D-pad, with Skill 1 triggered by pushing left, Skill 2 by pushing down, and then presumably around the dial.

With a controller you choose if you want to shoot a guy in the face even though he’s punching you. There’s some aim assistance going on to keep the pace of the game up. Dodging with the right analog stick feels much more intuitive to me than using the WASD keys.

The only problem is that some Echo Powers require you to draw a line on the ground. When you trigger one of these powers, the game slows way down, giving you time to draw your line. It’s pretty easy to do with a mouse (and probably really easy with your finger on a touch screen!) but feels super clumsy with the controller (you draw using the analog stick). I mean, technically, yes it works, but it’s more frustrating than fun. I quickly decided I’d just ignore any Echo Powers that required me to draw a line.

Worse, I eventually came to a mission where I had to capture, rather than kill, enemies. You use the Space bar to capture and I couldn’t find a way to do it using the controller. We need a way to map that to a shoulder button or pressing down an analog stick or something.

Basically I think Echo needs a patch or two before it’s really ready for Prime time. (See what I did there?) I’d like to see Robot work on polishing controller support, and totally rethink mouse and keyboard support. Give us direct movement controls via WASD and let us melee and shoot with the mouse, fire skills with number keys and block with the F key or something. I think it’d be a lot more fun to play that way. I’d like to see the difficulty curve tweaked (it needs to get harder earlier) and perhaps re-do the ‘line-drawing’ Echo powers so they just through out a straight line perpendicular to the player.

Ahhh, the joys of armchair game designing!

But don’t get me wrong, it’s already fun to play and c’mon, it’s $10 at launch. It’s probably not going to become your primary game, but it’s a great game to fire up when you have 10 minutes to kill and just want to run around and clobber bad guys for a few minutes. And then a few more to get one more level. And then a few more because you almost have enough for that flaming sword. And maybe just one more level because your favorite Echo is going to level, too.

You get the drift.

LOTRO is a harsh mistress

Posted on January 28, 2014January 28, 2014 by Nimgimli

I’m still back in LOTRO, kind of deeply in fact. Raptr said I spent something like 16 hours playing last week, and it stopped tracking for a few days so it was probably over 20 hours, which is a LOT of gaming for me. I haven’t been writing about it because someone pointed out that no one wants to read about old games we’ve all played, and I couldn’t really argue with that.

But I’m having one problem. LOTRO (and every other MMO on the market) is SUCH a time sink. I have a bunch of single player games I want to check out, other older titles I’ve been itching to get back to, and my DVR is filling up with TV shows I want to watch. But…but… MUST GO TO MIDDLE EARTH!

Among my friends it feels like most of us are either MMO players or we’re non-MMO players. Sure there’s some dabbling back and forth but we all seem to have a primary focus. I’m trying to straddle the line and play both but I’m really struggling trying to find balance. I keep booting up a single player game and then thinking I need to log in to get my Hobbit Gift or how I should finish up that Journeyman Farming tier or that there are orcs what need killin’! So I shut down the single player game and log into LOTRO.

But then bedtime comes and I’m kind of sad that another day has passed without checking out Blackguards, or getting further in my Assassins Creed IV adventure. or going back to 7 Days to Die, or watching that Bonnie and Clyde mini-series I recorded last fall.

I’m almost looking forward to the day I log into LOTRO and go “Meh, I’m just not feeling this anymore.” Which is a weird thing to think. But of course, I’m never going to “finish” LOTRO and my lifestyle is such that I’m never going to have so much gaming time that I ‘play my fill’ of the game for the day and move on to something else. Every time I log off, I do it reluctantly because there was that one more thing I wanted to finish before calling it a night.

And I remember now that this is part of why I drifted away from MMOs for a time. They sort of demand that you be monogamous, and by nature I’m sort of promiscuous when it comes to gaming. There are so many great games out there waiting to be played, and life is short.

I have no solution to this dilemma. Well, I do. I know that my “Meh” day is coming. I just don’t know when. But it happens with every MMO. One day I’m thinking of using up vacation time just to play, and the next day I’m suddenly completely off the game. With me, it happens just like that. I don’t normally drift away slowly. I just suddenly stop playing.

I wish I could learn balance though. Maybe if I did, I’d actually stick with an MMO for a while.

Hendrake looks on as Saruman�s army of Uruk-hai approaches Helm�s Dike.

A quick look at the Divinity: Original Sin alpha

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Nimgimli

Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin is billed as an epic RPG with tactical turn-based combat, support for co-op play, a classless character system and rich crafting. That’s the vision anyway, and the game has gone from a successful Kickstarter campaign that was funded just last April to arriving on Steam as an Early Access title.

In the PC gaming world, alpha is the new beta (I’m not really sure what that means but it sounded catchy) and that’s where Divinity: Original Sin is in its development cycle: alpha. It’s not balanced or bug free, and it certainly isn’t all there (they say the first 15 hours are available) but there’s enough to get a feel for what they’re aiming at.

Tonight I had a chance to jump in and noodle around a bit. Mostly I wanted to see what combat was like and just get a feel for how the game works.

You start your adventure with a pair of characters and can pick a “class.” Didn’t I say it was a classless system? It is, but a starting character has a package of skills and abilities that puts them into what we think of as a class (Warrior, Mage, Ranger). As characters level they can become whatever they like. You can play alone, switching between characters and running them all in combat, or you can play with a friend. I was playing solo.

You see the world from an isometric viewpoint using “click to move” to order the character you’re controlling around. It feels like a real time game until you enter combat. Then everything stops and becomes turn-based. I recorded part of an early combat encounter:

The guys with green circles around their feet I’m not controlling. The orcs with the red circles are the bad guys and the two with the blue circles are my party. You can see the skills listed across the bottom in a hot bar, and above that, when a playable character is active, you can see a series of small circles that represent Action Points. You seem to be able to attack only twice per turn (as far as I could tell) and moving uses Action Points depending on how far you travel. At the top of the screen is the turn order for all combatants. Now you know about as much about combat as I do!

After this fight finished I wandered around the village, talking to people and finding quests. For now at least, you have to look for quests. There’s no “!” over a quest giver’s head. It’s the kind of game where you need to be willing to spend time talking to NPCs and figuring out what’s going on. If you’re playing co-op, your partner can get involved too, and in fact you can use skills (Intimidate, Charm, Reason) on your partner’s character, which should lead to some fun interactions.

When you get a quest, it goes into your Journal in a fairly vague way. In the alpha one of the first things you need to do is meet up with a mage in the second floor of the barracks. Easy enough to do, once you find the barracks. There’s a map but none of the buildings are labeled. I finally had to resort to reading street signs. (I was thinking about looking for a pad of graph paper to make a map on!) It’s not clear yet if this is the game being deliberately old school or if things like labels and quest helpers aren’t in the game yet. I kind of like it the way it is now, personally.

I was also happy to encounter, very early on, a task that couldn’t be solved via violence. Instead it was more like a puzzle. No spoilers though!

When a character levels up you get points to add to attributes (Strength, Dexterity, etc) as well as points for skills (crossbows, fire magic, lockpicking) and there don’t seem to be any limits on who can take what. It’ll be interesting to build different characters and see if specialists are always better than generalists.

Early on in the alpha a third character joined my party; I’m not sure what maximum party size is. Time will tell.

And that’s about all I have for now. I only played for about an hour tonight. I’m going to try to walk the fine line of keeping up with how the alpha is shaping up, without burning myself out on the content in this section of the game. So look forward to more posts about Divinity: Original Sin as it moves through alpha, beta and finally into launch.

Disclosure: Access to the alpha was provided to me by Larian Studios.

I’m in a LOTRO state of mind

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Nimgimli

So there I was, back in LOTRO and pleased as punch, fighting for the good people of Archet and feeling like a Big Damned Hero. And then it happened.

“YOU HAVE A NEW DEED.”

OMG I’d forgotten DEEDS. If you’ve never played LOTRO, deeds are a feature similar to dropping a cement block on your toe over and over. They are THAT fun! Deeds give you some task to do, and in exchange you get a reward like a title or a trait. Traits in turn give you some kind of permanent stat increase.

Now some Deeds are fine. Deeds that task you with finding landmarks actually can be fun. Deeds that reward you for using your skills are kind of transparent.. you earn them in the course of playing. But the deeds I’m talking about are the Slayer deeds. Kill X of Monster Type Y.

My first Slayer Deed was Spider Slayer. I had to kill 30 spiders in Bree. That wasn’t so bad…I killed 15 or so in the course of doing quests. So I hung out and killed another 15. But then I was ‘rewarded’ with the Advanced Spider Slayer Deed, where I had to kill 60 more spiders. Even this isn’t bad but a shudder ran down my spine as I remembered deeds where I had to kill hundreds of a certain type of creature.

I started thinking about playing “7 Days to Die” instead of LOTRO.

But then I whined about deeds on Google+ and my buddy Scott slapped me a few times to calm me down and said “You’re not some uber raider… let go of the completionist mentality. You don’t need to worry about deeds.” (I’m paraphrasing some…my ears were still ringing from the slaps.)

And for once in my stubborn life, I listened. I immediately quit worrying about kill deeds. And then I took the advice and ran with it. The reason I was playing LOTRO was to experience the world, not squeeze it dry. So now I’m playing LOTRO for the Epic Questline (a series of quests that tell an ongoing Story about your adventures that revolve roughly around the Fellowship of the Ring).

In practice, this means I’m doing enough ‘side’ quests to keep my level high enough to do the Epic Questline. I did pretty much all the quests in Archet and Combe, but by the time I got to Staddle I started skipping quests because I was high enough level to press on with the Story quests.

While I felt a little guilty as I left Staddle with so many sad little hobbit eyes turned my way in hopes of assistance, I had bigger fish to fry than trying to sort out the love life of this one, and harvest the pipeweed of that one. The Enemy is stirring! Pick your own damned pipeweed!

I do have the advantage of being familiar with these quests, so I can pick the most interesting ones. I’ve spent very little time out in the fields killing boars and bears, preferring instead to drive the Blackwolds and Sharkey’s Men out of their lairs and into early graves.

This means all the quests I’m doing are Blue or White, so the experience rewards give me healthy chunks of progress. I remember too well trying to do everything and winding up over-level and doing Green, or even Gray, quests and watching that experience bar barely move as I grew more and more bored with the area I was questing in.

I’m also trying to do quests in chunks. So rather than grabbing half a dozen quests, I’ll grab one and then do the follow up to it and the follow-up to that, following a quest line and enjoying the story that way. In the past I’d just always do whatever the lowest level quest in my log was, and the side-stories would wind up fragmented.

So this is keeping LOTRO feeling fresh for me this go around. It’s a constant struggle for me to not fall back into that “must do everything” mind-set (which always kills me because I get bored and quit the game completely) but so far I’m doing OK.

Though I did slip up and buy a house. I probably shouldn’t have put down roots…

Back to LOTRO

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Nimgimli

Last week there was a news item hitting the blogs saying LOTRO wouldn’t be getting any more instances or raid content in the near future. That led to some speculation about the future, or lack thereof, of the game. While Turbine’s Rick Heaton was quick to point out that Turbine and Warner Brothers have renewed the license and they have an agreement that runs through 2017, the seed was planted in my brain.

Online games have a lifetime and they’re all going to go away eventually. As a long-time Tolkien fanboy, no MMO world has captivated me like Turbine’s rendition of Middle Earth has. I’m not necessarily a fan of all the game systems, but the environment makes me geek out, so I decided to revisit the game while it and I were both still around.

It’s been a long time since I played LOTRO and much has changed. It went free-to-play of course, and I’m not sure I’ve played it seriously since then. I bought a Lifetime Membership way back in 2007 so I’m a VIP member, which you should keep in mind as you read this post.

I remember feeling like the Turbine Store was being shoved in my face every 5 minutes, so I guess I must’ve played some since the transition. This time around I haven’t felt that the Store was being promoted too heavily; I’m not sure if the game has changed or if I’ve just gotten more used to In-Game Stores.

The first order of business was overcoming the “WTF do all these skills do? What’s all this crap in my inventory?” mountain. Or alternatively, side-step it all by rolling a new character, so that’s what I did.

The very very first tutorial seemed unchanged, but as soon as I got to Archet (I rolled a Man) I started noticing differences. The quest lines seem to have been tweaked/streamlined a bit so there’s less running back and forth, which was a nice discovery.

Also through the magic of the Turbine Store, you can purchase the ability to ride a horse at level 5. You are also given a “Welcome Package” that includes a horse whistle that lasts for some limited time (I think it was a day, real time). I bought the skill and super-sized it so my mounts run a bit faster. While I was shopping I also purchased an account-wide upgrade to 6 inventory bags and some extra shared vault space.

Another interesting change is that you no longer have to loot corpses. All your loot goes into a “Pending Loot” interface where it stays for as long as an hour. At any time you can open this interface and take out any and everything you like. This seems like a small change but in fact it makes a HUGE difference in the pace of playing at low levels. You can move from mob to mob, being a whirling dervish of blades, and never have to pause unless your health or power is low. I LOVE this system! I have no idea how it works in groups though.

Other changes I noticed right away: You no longer have to purchase skills, and in fact the whole skill system has been overhauled. Each class has 3 specialties to choose from. For my Guardian I choose to be a sword and board DPS role. I could’ve also picked a 2-handed weapon wielding role, or a more pure tank role. I *think* you can re-specialize at any time.

There’ve been some small but nice tweaks to combat. You can now turn on features that move your character to the opponent, as well as turning to face him. No longer will your hero swing his axe into thin air and say “Oops, I need to be nearer to and/or facing him.” Your hero is smart enough to turn towards his target and close the range, if needed.

All in all I’m finding the pace of the game is faster and less frustrating than it used to be. I’m enjoying it so far!

Next time: The changes I’ve made to myself to help me enjoy LOTRO

Goodbye 2013, hello 2014

Posted on January 1, 2014January 1, 2014 by Nimgimli

A few of my friends have been doing annual recap posts so I decided to get in on the fun. I’ve been so terrible at writing posts here this year…maybe this will start a new trend.

2013 was a good gaming year for me! When Sony and Microsoft announced their new gaming consoles I immediately pre-ordered them both then got to work making extra $$ to pay for them. So when launch came I had the cash tucked away in an account ear-marked for consoles and nothing else. Sure, working 3 jobs for a while over the summer sucked, but to me it was worth it to have guilt-free next gen gaming when the time came.

It’s been over a month now and I still can’t decide which of the new consoles I like more, though the Xbox One gets a lot more use as a tool since the cable box is hooked up through it. Both systems have a bright future once development ramps up for them, and I’m glad I have ’em both.

At the same time I feel like I’m getting a lot more picky about the “big” games I play. My favorite games this year were The Last of Us and Grand Theft Auto 5. I don’t know if I can choose between them since they’re so apples and oranges. TLOU was some heavy shit while GTA5 was mostly just crazy capers.

Looking past those two games though, nothing else much stands out. I played a lot of games but none of them made a huge impression.

My favorite genre these days is the survival/building genre. Games like Minecraft, Terraria and Starbound. I just like creating things in games, but if there’s no struggle to do it, I lose interest. Unfortunately technology hasn’t seemed to keep up with game developers and all these games are decidedly retro in look and feel. I daydream of the time when we have a game like this done up in a AAA game engine.

As for MMOs, my love/hate relationship with them persists. I think I love the genre except I really don’t. What I really want is a ‘virtual world’ that I can roam around and be a loner in, but what we have are mostly theme park MMOs that are designed for folks who want to play with others and socialize while doing so. There are exceptions, but then I run into time issues. Games like Wurm Online should be perfect for me, but they require so much time that I can’t really enjoy them.

I’m looking forward to Trove and Everquest Next Landmark as possible games that fit my play style. I’ve been fortunate enough to get into betas of the other high profile MMOs heading our way and found that they don’t really excite me much. Nor can I find much motivation to follow my friends who’ve been returning to and enjoying older games like WoW or LOTRO.

Gaming aside, I’ve been started to read more again, and have been dabbling in watching anime for the first time in a few years.

My resolution for 2014 is to learn more and game less. Some days I look back at the amount of time I’ve spent gaming with really not much to show for it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…gaming is a way to relax and re-charge, after all. But if I set aside say 25% of the time I spend gaming and spend it learning something…I think it’d be good for my mental well-being. It doesn’t matter if I’m learning about building catapults or home dentistry or a new programming language or how to read Japanese. Just the process of learning something and keeping the mind sharp will be a good thing for me.

I hope everyone who comes cruising past this blog now and then had a great holiday season and I hope you’ll all have a prosperous and peaceful 2014!