Category: MMO

Defiance at 19 days

Posted on by Nimgimli

Defiance has been out for 19 days as of today. I don’t think there’s been a day when I didn’t log in, which is pretty unusual for me. Raptr says I’m at 57 hours but for the first few days of launch week I wasn’t running Raptr since I was ‘hiding.’ I was logging in before work and on my lunch hour and didn’t want any co-workers to notice and think I was playing on company time or something (yeah, I’m paranoid). So I’m guessing that my real figure is somewhere around 65 hours.

Over-compensating So clearly I enjoy the game, a lot, but anyone looking at it objectively will tell you its buggy/quirky as hell. Somehow the issues don’t impact my fun significantly, though. This week saw the first major client-side patch, but even though the list of fixes went on and on, the game didn’t feel significantly different when I logged in. Also some new bugs were introduced. I’m looking forward to the next big patch which should be in a couple of weeks.

I play Defiance solo, which means I side-step a lot of the major issues which have to do with chat, both text and voice. Friends who’re trying to put clans together are, I think, experiencing more frustration there. Grouping for missions can be problematic, too. There seem to be 3 types of main missions: open world missions that everyone can jump in and help on, ‘instanced’ missions where you have to activate a portal to enter, and the confusing ones: phased open world missions. With this last type, you don’t see any loading screen or anything, but you can be grouped with someone and you’ll each be in a different ‘universe’ so to speak. The person with the quest will see enemies to fight and objects to activate, the other person will see an empty landscape. This has led to a lot of frustrations among friends who like to Group to play these games. Unfortunately I don’t think this issue is a bug so much as a design decision but I still hope Trion eventually changes things so you can help out a friend in need.

Mutants in San FranAs I said, I play solo, but I don’t play alone, and that’s a lot of what I love about Defiance. I spend a lot of time just helping strangers complete missions; there’ve been missions I’ve done 8 or 10 times by now even though I only ‘had’ the mission once. I don’t really play Defiance for rewards…I don’t play it like a Roll Playing Game. I play it like a Role Playing Game (and to be clear, Defiance is a third person shooter, pure and simple, not an RPG of any sort). So I help people out because that’s what heroes do! And I’m trying to be a hero this time around.

Then there are the massive ArkFall events, which I find fun now and then. They’re not my favorite aspect of Defiance since they start to feel pretty generic after a while. And last night I did my first Co-op Mission via the Matchmaking feature, which put me in a PUG. It was surprisingly fun, but when the leaderboard came up and I saw I came in 4th I felt like I’d only held the team back. In my dubious defense, they all seemed to know where to go and what to do so that may have hampered my efforts somewhat.

Earlier this week, Defiance the TV Show premiered. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I’m looking forward to more. I was expecting actual Episode Missions to debut in-game after the show aired, but instead we got Episode Pursuits. Pursuits are essentially clusters of Achievements. “Find these 4 items, kill 10 of that kind of enemy, do this mission.” These “Episode Pursuits” are only in-game for a limited time, so I felt a lot of pressure to complete them quickly. Since one of them revolves around completing events that spawn randomly, it meant (for me at least) 3 nights of driving around semi-aimlessly, completing random events to ‘clear them’ so the ones I needed would pop. This was, by far, the least amount of fun I’ve had in Defiance and for the first time since the game launched I found myself logging out frustrated and looking for something else to do. Last night I finally finished them (well, all of them except for the one that involves PvP…I’m no PvPer) so hopefully I can get back to the good stuff.

In a Raptr Q&A earlier this week, Trion mentioned a few times that since so many people are frustrated by having time-limited content, they might decide to just leave it in. They were talking more about the Episode Missions that were in game from April 2nd – April 15th before being removed, but I hope they do the same thing for these Pursuits. They would’ve been more fun if I felt like I could’ve searched a bit, then gone to do something else, then searched a bit more at a later date.

Anyway I also hope we see more actual Episode Missions in weeks to come. Pursuits are a nice ‘side line’ activity but I love the real missions. Speaking of which, at 60-ish hours and EGO rating of 650 or something, I still haven’t finished the main storyline. I keep getting distracted by helping strangers and doing side-missions, which is weird because I’m actually enjoying the storyline quite a bit.

Trion seems committed to Defiance (and they sound as frustrated as the players are with the number of bugs and issues) so I’m hopeful the game will have a long life. 5 DLC packs are planned and they’re scheduled to roll out between Seasons 1 & 2 of the TV series. (I got this info from the Raptr Q&A.) At that point Trion gets to move the story forward on their own, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. While the DLC will have a paid component, my understanding is that all the world content (which I assume means the story stuff) will be free to everyone since Trion doesn’t want to fragment the playerbase.

Free is always good but I’m wondering how they’ll sustain the game financially. There’s no subscription fee. There’s a cash shop but nothing in it seems all that compelling. I did buy some ‘Bits’ (the cash shop currency) to expand my character’s inventory space but nothing else is really calling to me. Anyway, hopefully they have some ideas; I’m sure they’re pretty much 100% focused on killing bugs and polishing rough spots for now.

Anyway, so that’s what I’ve been doing the past few weeks. Defiance, Defiance and more Defiance, with a short break to watch Defiance. LOL I’ve even had to set Fire Emblem aside since I keep getting to bed much too late (Fire Emblem has been ‘play a mission before bed’ game until Defiance came along). It’s still buggy so I’d still suggest that if bugs make you crazy you should continue to hold off, but I’m having more fun than I’ve had in years.
Coop!

I can’t blog about Defiance

Posted on by Nimgimli

I keep meaning to write up a big fat blog post about Defiance, but every time I think about doing so, I realize I could instead spend that time playing, so that’s what I do. That’s the mark of a game that’s an excellent fit for me; I play it every time I get a free moment.

You can find plenty of things to complain about in this game. It’s still fairly buggy, the UI is kind of awful (maybe less so if you’re using a controller, but I’m not 100% convinced of that) and it overall lacks polish. In spite of all that, I’m head over heel in love with it, at least for this week. (You know me and my gaming ADD.)

On the bright side, they’ve had a decent launch week on the PC. Decent, not super. Servers still come down too often for emergency patches and stuff, but to the best of my knowledge the PC servers haven’t had any extended outages or outrageous queue times. I guess the Xbox 360 version hasn’t fared as well, though.

But playing the game is a hell of a lot of fun and you always have many options. You can follow the main questline or the episode questline (and I assume we’re getting a new episode quest once a week one the show starts up on April 15th). You can do side quests. You can explore in an attempt to complete Pursuits or to learn about the lore and backstory of the game (Pursuits also give EGO levels). You can race vehicles. You can roam around taking on random spawns alone. You can jump into ArkFalls and join a mass of players taking on huge encounters. You can do structured PvP or open world PvP. [Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tried the PvP…hopefully it’s all up and working!] You can join with friends to do co-op instances. You can do solo instance challenges. You can complete Contracts to earn favor with one faction or another. Taking a page from Guild Wars 2, almost everything you do in Defiance earns you some kind of boon.

(This one looks best in HD.)

The problem is that almost none of this (except completing quests) is obvious when you first start playing. Well, the main quest and side quests are pretty obvious, but a lot of this stuff is tucked into the Goals system and the game never points you at that as a source of things to do. It should. In the same way it never really tells you to check out the Intel system for more about the world (a lot of lore is fed to you via audio transmissions).

Here’s an audio log example. Not one of the best, but I chose it because it has no spoilers in it:

A couple of warnings: Defiance is a shooter, not an RPG. You don’t have stats and you do need to be able to aim. In theory you could set yourself up as a kind of healer but I’m not sure there’s enough there to make that a rewarding career path. Basically you really need to want to shoot stuff to get much out of the game. It’s also still rough. If bugs, server crashes and a lack of polish is going to drive you nuts, give this one a pass for now.

As an MMO there’s a lot we expect that isn’t there: banks, a mail system, an auction house. “Levels” are here in the form of an EGO Rating and that’s mostly just there to gate content. Some weapons require a minimum EGO Rating, and as your rating goes up you unlock inventory slots, loadout slots and things like that. You do ‘rank up’ in weapons and vehicles; when you do you’ll get a minor adjustment. Extra boost time in vehicles, slightly less ‘bloom’ (bullet spread) with weapons…things like that. Nothing all that over-powering. There are only 4 skills and you can only equip 1 at a time. There are lots of passive ‘perks’ to earn, though.

Honestly it’s hard for me to quantify what I love about Defiance, but I’ll try. I love that I can jump in and play for 10 minutes and feel like I got something done, but if I have 3 hours I don’t get bored. I love how I can help (or be helped by) people without forming a Group. I love that it’s a shooter that is casual enough to be fun for me…someone not a serious shooter fan. And I feel like I’m pretty good at it (I’m perhaps delusional…but the important thing is I FEEL good about my progress, rather than feeling frustrated). I love that I can get involved in a gloriously chaotic Arkfall event with 50 other players…or go off all by myself and see what I can accomplish on my own. When I get tired of shooting, I try the races. If I get tired of those too, I just go and explore. I’m always feeling like I have more to do than I have time for, which is, to me, a good thing.

Anyway I wasn’t going to blog about Defiance and now I’ve gone on and on and I could be playing so.. off I go to play!

Played Rift lately?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m super excited for the launch of Defiance on Tuesday, but that excitement put me in a kind of gaming no-man’s land this weekend. I felt like playing an MMO but knew that come Tuesday I’d be moving to Defiance in a major way. I just needed a short-term diversion.

Rift sprang to mind, probably because I’ve been spending so much time on Trion pages and watching Trion webcasts on Twitch. I haven’t played Rift in a good long while but my strongest recollection is a constant struggle with inventory space. My highest level character has his bags and bank packed full of veteran reward potions and appearance gear, and crafting-related stuff that I’m too stubborn to just sell off to NPCs (stuff is so low level that it won’t move on the auction house).

So I decided to create a new character to be a mule, and that’s what led me to a bunch of surprises. None of these changes are new (as far as I know) but if you’ve been away as long as I have they’ll probably be new to you too.

build_windowFirst big change… when creating a character you still pick an archetype (Warrior, Cleric, Mage, or Rogue) but after that you’re offered a selection of builds. Now before anyone freaks out, you still CAN pick and choose the souls you want if you care to, and advanced players will probably want to do so. But as a virtual newbie (it’d been so long since I created a character) who didn’t want to spend a lot of time reading build guides, I loved this feature. I’d chosen a warrior, and then choose “Pathfinder” which is a support role based primarily on Beastmaster (54 points) and Paragon (22 points) with Riftblade as the 3rd soul (with no points). If you enlarge this screenshot you can see an example of the info you’re given on the various builds.

As you level up and earn skill points you can just auto-spend them to follow the template of the build you’ve chosen, or you can decide to make your own choices. Again, it’s a brilliant system that makes getting into the game super-easy for newcomers (I didn’t have to fret that I was gimping my character) but which gets out of the way for more serious players.

Once I got past character creation and hopped into the tutorial zone I got another huge surprise. The tutorial bit (before you get to that first rift) has been super-streamlined. All the sidequests have been eliminated, as has any and all backtracking. You’ll zip through the tutorial zone so fast your head will spin. Maybe too quickly for a newcomer, to be honest. I can’t help but think a new player will wonder what all these monsters and features are for since you just run past them (most have been made non-aggro). As a returning player though, I was really happy to get to the ‘real’ game very quickly. And I think I was level 6 or 7 by the time I was done (which took me 20 minutes maybe, and would’ve been faster if I hadn’t been stopping to tweak my UI and running around wondering how I was missing so many of the old quests.)

Once I got to present day Telara it seemed like most (but maybe not all) quests were intact, but still some streamlining has been done. There’s a new feature where you can turn in some quests without returning to the quest giver, which cuts down on back-tracking. There’s also a pop-up window telling you about all the buffs you have as a subscriber. Rift has an ‘endless trial’ that lets you play to level 20 for free; I’m assuming these ‘subscriber buffs’ end at 20.

By the end of a casual evening of playing, I’d gotten my ‘mule’ to level 9, and if I’d been focusing instead of stopping to chat with Angela or popping over to read email I’m sure I could’ve gotten a lot farther. I’m guessing that whole sped-up leveling will taper off at 20 (where the free trial ends) but we’ll see.

As for my mule, well, the joke is on me. The character had a mailbox full of Veteran and other rewards that essentially filled her inventory right up. So she’ll have to keep working for now until she gathers materials for my crafter to use to make some bigger bags. That’s my excuse anyway… actually she’s just pretty fun to play.

Defiance, transmedia and DLC

Posted on by Nimgimli

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post title Defiance and I are having our first fight. You can go read it if you’re got time to kill but the gist of it was that I was concerned about their announcement of DLC for the game, and here’s why:

My logic was that if a big part of Defiance is the ‘transmedia’ aspects (in which events in the game and events in the tv show will intermingle in some way) then, assuming the transmedia ‘updates’ were packed into the DLC, we’d all need the DLC to get the full game experience, and so if that’s the case why not just charge a sub fee and be done with it.

Anyway, I reached out to Trion to get the straight dope on what’s going on here. It took a few weeks for them to get back to me, and the news is brief, but good. Here’s a quote of everything they were willing to share:

“Crossover stuff is NOT part of paid DLC. As a matter of fact there is a good amount of content updates that are not paid DLC dependent.”

So there you have it. You can buy the game, watch the show, enjoy the transmedia aspects, and not feel pressured to buy the DLC.

Personally I’m thinking I’ll buy it anyway since I enjoy the game so much, but it’s nice not to feel like I ‘have’ to buy it in order to get the full experience.

Random: Gamersfirst using SimCity problems to tempt us back to Fallen Earth

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t even know what to think of this. Here’s part of an email that hit my inbox last night:

We know you’ve been unfaithful. You’ve been dallying with that new game; you know, that one that’s technically a single player game but you’re being forced to play it online because PIRATES or whatever. And yet, try as you might, that other game just won’t return your affections. With all the “challenges”, disabled features, and random performance issues, it’s nice to know you can return to the warm, loving embrace of that game you’ve always loved, Fallen Earth. And what’s better, Fallen Earth won’t even hold it against you! Not forever, anyway.

Bonus points for the image in the email:

broken_image

There’s something delightfully ironic about sending out an email calling out the technical difficulties another game is having, and managing to do it with a big fat broken image link in your email.

Defiance and I are having our first fight

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m excited about the SyFy show Defiance, coming in April. And I’m excited about the Trion game of the same name. I can’t talk a lot about why due to an NDA but I have been in a beta weekend and I’ll leave it at that. I have the game pre-ordered.

But today came news that is giving me second thoughts.

Defiance is an MMO shooter. It costs $60 but has no subscription fee. All indications are that it’ll have some kind of cash shop. I’m basing this on the fact that pre-ordering Deluxe versions get you bonus items like

  • +5 Increased inventory space
  • 30-Day scrip boost
  • 30-Day XP boost

Those sound like things you’ll be able to buy in the cash shop, don’t they? And that’s fair… with no sub fee Trion and SyFy need some way to pay for keeping the servers up, right?

But all along we’ve heard a ton about ‘transmedia’ and how events might start in the TV show and end in the game, or vice versa. That suggests an ongoing stream of new content in the game based on advances in the TV show. I was pretty excited about seeing how that works out.

Today however, we got word of a Season Pass for DLC. $40 gets you the first 5 DLC packages. Here’s what they say about DLC:

Join the fight and save big on 5 DLC packs with the Defiance Season Pass. Enjoy a new playable alien species, new weapons and vehicles, missions, and rewards � plus a bonus Hellbug Combat Cap and Lock Box � a 20% savings!* This is the ultimate package for the true Ark Hunter!

And now I’m concerned. If we’re getting new missions and species via DLC, does that mean all this ‘transmedia’ stuff is going to be in the DLC that we have to pay for? At that point, isn’t this just a subscription, basically? If you watch the show and some big event happens and then you log into the game and find out to access this new content you have to pay $10 for the DLC to get it… I mean it isn’t literally a subscription… you could just skip out on that new content. But the transmedia aspect is one of the unique things that Defiance is bringing to the table.

Now, let’s be fair. It might be that there will be plenty of new content dished out in addition to the DLC, and if that’s the case I’ll be less concerned. But right now it isn’t clear.

I think Trion needs to be a lot more transparent about what sorts of content we will get outside of paid DLC, and exactly what that $40 is going to get us.

$60 box price (standard edition) + $40 Season Pass + cash shop to upgrade things like inventory slots… suddenly Defiance is sounding pretty damned expensive.

In general we gamers need to make more noise about this kind of thing. Publishers urge us to pre-order or buy season passes and they often are very light on the details about what exactly we’re paying for. Even looking up at that list above… +5 Inventory Slots. What does that mean? Does a basic account have 100 slots, in which case +5 is a mere 5% bonus? Or does a basic account have 5 slots, in which case +5 is a 100% bonus. We don’t know, but we’re supposed to trust the publishers and pre-order anyway.

Publishers: If you have faith in your game, give us all the information we need in order to make informed decisions.

Of course as I said, I’ve pre-ordered… so clearly I am part of the problem.

EQ2: Heroes’ Festival

Posted on by Nimgimli

I decided to pop into EQ2 last night, something I’ve been doing at random times recently. At this point I’m mostly still re-exploring Qeynos and doing the quests involved with that (which scale to your level). Anyway I found out something called the Heroes’ Festival is going on. I normally ignore events in EQ2 since the stuff that’s always there is overwhelming enough but after a little nudging from Angela I decided to poke around and see what was going on.

I found one quest that I really enjoyed. (Sorry, I’m telling this story from the Good side..not sure how it works if you’re evil). It’s called Thumore’s Absence and it starts with an NPC named Milupet Cogsory who is near the big Claymore Monument in what used to be North Qeynos. Milupet is looking for Thumore D’armer who is apparently something of a legend at the Festival; you’re sent to locate him.

Well it turns out that Thumore is, well, sleeping. But a bunch of mages are preventing anyone from waking him up. When you investigate you’re told that anyone who touches Thumore also falls asleep and doesn’t wake up, so the mages are keeping people away from Thumore’s sleeping body. Of course, you agree to help by entering Thumore’s dream in order to see what’s going on. If you want to do a good quest, just go do it, but otherwise read on for spoilers.

[SPOILERS BEGIN]
When you enter the dreamworld there’s not much for you to do other than speak to Thumore, who needs you to recover shards of memory in order to wake up. This takes the form of a linked series of quests. For each one you’ll go through a portal and into a ‘slice’ of some high level (well to me and other noobs, anyway) zone where you’ll have to defeat some even-level mobs in order to collect the memories. I thought this was really neat, since I got a taste of a bunch of places I’ve never been, and got to fight a bunch of monsters I’ve yet to encounter, all without spending too much time traveling.

Once you’ve recovered all the memory shards, Thumore thanks you but then implies that the memories you’ve retrieved are not his. Hmm. With no other choices open you leave the dream world to find…the mages are still there but Thumore is gone. If you talk to the mages they’re feeling groggy and out of sorts and they say they’ve never heard of anyone named Thumore. In fact no one has. Before the quest everyone was wondering where he was. After the quest no one has ever heard of him.

Eventually you find him in a ghostly form and he sends you off to help others trapped in their dreams, and that’s as far as I got. But I can’t wait to learn who or what Thumore is. It’s a mystery!

Now if you don’t read quest text then this whole series would be a lot less interesting but this time around I’m soaking up the EQ2 lore and quests like this series make me glad I am!

Planetside 2 launch day

Posted on by Nimgimli

Planetside 2 is here, yay! I played the beta of this one a bit and liked it enough to know I’d be playing the released version (it’s “free to play” so that was no bold decision) so I opted to not play the beta very much so the game would be ‘fresh’ when it launched.

That might have been a mistake because Planetside 2 can be brutal to newbies. I seem to remember that when I played beta you first spawned in some central hub that was a safe zone. Not in release. In release you’re dropped right into a firefight. I opened my settings menu to check things out and BLAM! Headshot. Dead. Oh well, it gave me time to look through the settings.

But damn is this game fun! I am absolutely rubbish at it but I generally play a medic. No one hates a medic. If I die 19 times but the 20th time I get to you to heal you up, then I’m OK, right? I just need to go into the game with a light heart and not get angry and frustrated at dying a lot while I’m getting used to the game controls and such. There’ll be time to be competitive later and remember, it isn’t costing me anything to play.

What I love about the game is the scope of it. When you’re running across the field and there’re like 20-25 other guys and gals on foot, plus a few tanks and troop transports rolling along beside you, and fighter planes screaming over head, and suddenly the tank off to one side goes up in an explosion from a direct hit from somewhere.. it just feels like what would be the opening cut scene in any other game. But this is all real gameplay.

Of course other times things are a lot quieter. You gotta take the good with the bad.

Unfortunately tonight their servers are slammed. I keep winding up in a Queue that never moves…never even manages to give me my position in the queue. I finally created another character on a West Coast server with only a “High” population just to be sure the game was actually working. While I was in there I grabbed some video using the in-game video capture tools. It doesn’t do a great job, and then once I upload it to YouTube I fear it’s going to look even worse (it’s uploading as I type this).

Switching to Windows 8? Read this before you fire up any game apps!

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I took the plunge and installed Windows 8 on my laptop today. Windows 8 allows you to log into your device using a Microsoft Account (formerly called a Windows Live Account). I had one I created back when outlook.com opened up, so I logged in. Everything was going great.

Then I downloaded a free game app, Jetpack Joyride. As soon as I started it up, Windows 8 announced that it had generated a temporary gamertag for my Microsoft Account.

Ha, I hadn’t even been thinking about Xbox Live. I do have an Xbox Live account of course, but it’s associated with a different Windows Live Account.

I did some research and I can “migrate” my gamertag from one email address to another, so I decided to migrate my ‘real’ Xbox Live Gamer Tag to the Microsoft Account I’m using on Windows 8. But I can’t, because now there’s already a gamertag associated with that account. So first I have to migrate the gamertag that Windows auto-generated for me off to another Microsoft account. This is an account I’m creating just for this purpose. Dumb right?

But wait! It gets worse. Since my temporary gamertag was just created today, I can’t migrate it for 30 days. You can only move these things once every 30 days.

So basically I have to wait 30 days before I’m willing to buy any gaming apps from the Windows 8 store, because if I do so before then they’ll be associated with this gamertag I’m trying my best to throw away.

I’m generally happy with Windows 8 so far, but MS really blew it with this one detail. I can’t believe they don’t prompt the user before generating a gamertag….

If you only have one Microsoft account this won’t impact you, but I’m sure I’m not the only one that had an old cruddy hotmail account for my Xbox Live account and would rather use a swanky new outlook.com account for my new system.