Category: Gaming

Valkyria Chronicles First Look: Part 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today I want to talk about the somewhat unusual RPG aspects of Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3. Full disclosure: I’m now about 11 hours into the game and some aspects of it still haven’t “opened up” yet.

Individual characters in VC don’t gain experience or have inventories. Instead, characters (each of whom has a name and a background) are broken down into five classes: scouts have lots of mobility but not a lot of armor or firepower; shocktroopers carry machine guns for big short range damage; lancers are anti-tank foot soldiers with low mobility; engineers have low combat skills but can repair tanks and resupply everyone; snipers have high long-distance firepower but not a lot of mobility or armor. Finally your ‘main character’ is a tank commander, and he drives around in a custom tank named the Edelweiss – as far as I know this is the only tank you get in the game.

At the end of every mission you gain ducats and experience. Ducats are used to upgrade weapons, armor and parts for the Edelweiss. When a weapon is upgraded, every unit that carries that weapon immediately gets the upgraded model. So if you upgrade the sniper rifle, it means all your snipers get more powerful. Ducats can also be spent to finance the ongoing writings of an embedded reporter who travels with you. These unlock “side stories” to the main story, some of which come with extra missions, and some of which are just expository.

Experience is used to “level up” a class of soldier. You can spend experience points as you see fit, distributing it among the five classes, but I’d imagine most people are going to do what I’m doing and just distribute it more or less evenly so all classes stay about the same level. Frankly this takes a lot of the classic RPG decision making out of the game (which is part of why I’m calling this a Storybook Strategy game rather than a Strategy-RPG). There’s also a mysterious aged gentleman that you meet who can teach you new Commands in exchange for experience points. More about Commands in my next post.

So now you’ll be thinking that all your troops are more or less interchangeable, right? But no, each individual is in fact unique. First, their stats vary slightly, and with these, what you see is what you get. If you have a particular Shocktrooper with lower-than-usual HP, you just have to live with that. Also, each character has a set of other characters that he or she likes, and having characters who like each other fighting together gives some bonuses to combat.

More interesting though, are Potentials. Each character has a set of Potentials, which are either buffs or debuffs that trigger depending on the situation on the battlefield. Potentials can be environment related (some characters are country-bred and hate being in the city but get a bonus for being in the country, others might have allergies to pollen and are adversely affected by being in tall grass) and others are character-related. Lots of characters have Potentials such as “Likes Women” (potential for a bonus around females) or “Hates Men” (potential for a debuff around males) while others have Potentials related to how many people are around them. And it goes on and on… I’m still uncovering new Potentials all the time (as a class levels up they ‘unlock’ more Potentials for that class).

So this is where the real role-playing comes in: You’re about to go out on a mission. You check the terrain and the situation. First you decide what kinds of troops you’re going to need. Then you have to decide which individuals are going to work well in this environment, and further take into account their inter-personal Likes and Potentials in order maximize their chances for success. You can spend a lot of time building the perfect team for a particular mission.

A few last notes: when an individual’s health drops to zero hit points, he or she collapses. You now have three turns to get a friendly to the fallen unit in order to medivac them off the battlefield. Also, if an enemy gets to the fallen tropper first, the enemy will finish them off. Once an individual is dead, they’re gone for good. You have a good sized pool of soldiers to pick from, but remember that each has a different set of Potentials; you might really want that individual for a specific purpose later on. Plus you get to know all these people and it feels bad to let one die (assuming you’re any kind of role-player).

Lastly, if all this fiddling with Potentials and Likes and so forth sounds like too much of a pain, you can run “Skirmish” battles to earn ducats and experience and just level up your army, making them powerful enough that the edge given by careful team-building isn’t needed to win the day. I find choices in play-style like this to be a positive, but I know some people need to be forced into playing one way and will see this as a flaw. Do yourself a favor and don’t go crazy leveling up your army by grinding Skirmishes. The game is incredibly fun when the battles are challenging affairs.

Next time, I’ll finally get to Combat in Valkyria Chronicles.

Christmas ph8t lootz!

Posted on by Nimgimli

As if homemade pumpkin pie and fresh-baked cookies weren’t enough, apparently there’s some gift-giving tradition associated with Christmas. Didja get any gaming-related gifts?

I did. I got Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3 and Persona 4 for the PS2. Also a bunch of Warhammer books (Heldenhammer, Vampire Wars & Nagash the Sorcerer), just in time because I only have a bit of Giantslayer left. And a clip-on book light because my old eyes are having trouble reading in dim lighting and it’s a pain to constantly have to drag a light around to shine on my books.

Angela got Animal Crossing for the Wii (she’s never even seen an Animal Crossing, and she has a collector personality) and a cooking program for her DS that she wanted. And an IOU for Afrika for the PS3 if National Geographic ever gets around to releasing it. But her big gift was a 6×11 Wacom Graphics Tablet for doing her artwork.

The guinea pigs weren’t forgotten: they each got a timothy hay & herb tamale. 🙂

Get any geeky gifts this year?

Helpless in Nile Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve had some good things to say about Tilted Mill’s browser-based city-builder, Nile Online in the past, but today all that changed.

One of the things you can do in the game is build a monument. In order to accomplish this, you first have to fight some NPC bad guys who’re occupying a monument site, and then you have to dump tons of workers, bricks and food into the site in order to slowly, laboriously, build your monument. In return, you can mine Limestone and you get a bonus to prestige, though I have no idea what prestige is (in Nile Online terms) or even if it is implemented yet.

Fair enough. But another thing happens. Your site can be attacked by other players. Now given that there are ample empty plots in my area of the world, I wasn’t really worried about getting attacked. Then this morning, at 5 am local time, one of my neighbors attacked my site.

My defenders held, but just barely. And I hadn’t been creating more troops back in my cities since I didn’t see any reason anyone would attack me. So I had to shift production to generating troops to send to the defense of the site.

And then it struck me: that was *all* I could do. The person that attacked me had no monument site that I could retaliate against. And you can’t attack other cities. So all I could do is bolster my defenses and wait for the next attack to come. I felt utterly helpless. I checked the forums and the in-game chat room because it seemed *obvious* I was missing something, but nope. A person who has no monument site can attack you with impunity.

My reaction to this surprised me. I was furious, bitter, and sent off a message to my attacker asking why I’d been attacked. We exchanged messages with me just getting angrier and angrier to the point where I started to despise this person. (I never come to despise people who beat me in other online games, though…in fact that would never occur to me.) The reason for the attack was a stupid one: the person had decided I hadn’t been donating to the local deity enough (if everyone donates enough goods, the ‘segment’ of the game you occupy gets a 10% bonus to productivity). Out of the 15 or so cities in our area, I was #4 in donations, so that was a trumped up excuse.

But I digress. The point is, I’m fascinated at how strongly I’ve reacted to being totally helpless in a video game. Is it because I never feel that helpless in the real world? Or is it because I often do, but I expect a video game world to be more balanced? I think its the former…no matter how bad things get in real life, it always feels like there is *something* that we can do, if we can just figure out what it is, because choices in real life are effectively infinite. But in a game world, choices are tightly controlled by game rules.

As an armchair game designer, I’m pretty astounded that the devs at Tilted Mill fell so completely on their faces with this decision.

As to what I’m going to do next, I’m conflicted. What I’d love to do is “destroy” the monument and let it revert to some land occupied by marauders, essentially ignoring that aspect of the game from here on out. But that isn’t an option. So I’m either going to starve the workers and soldiers there until they all desert, or I’m just going to delete my account altogether. All I know is being this upset over a computer game isn’t healthy, so I need to do *something* and soon. The thing that has me hesitating over deleting my account is that I have trade partners that depend on me for certain goods, and I’d hate to let them down. In the same way my attacker has become a focus of hate and rage in my mind, my trade partners seem like they’re almost friends at this point; I’ve been wishing them all happy holidays and treating them like chums.

Runes of Magic

Posted on by Nimgimli

I finally got the client d/led the other night (left it downloading from the time I went to bed until I got home from work the next day) so today I installed and patched it.

Oh. My. God. What kind of idiot built this patching system!!? It downloads the patch, then as it applies it, it opens a window for each file it is patching, then closes that window and opens another for the next file. This essentially takes over your computer since these windows all pop to the foreground and become the active window, with a new one spawning every few seconds.

Get the basics down, people. Respect your customer should be the first rule you learn.

I’m too irritated to actually try to play the game; there’s no way I’d be able to give it a fair shake. So so far, downloading the client was a huge pain in the arse, and patching it was an even huger pain in the arse. On a scale of 1-10, RoM gets a 1 from me and I haven’t even started the game yet. Way to make a good first impression!

Warhammer Revisited

Posted on by Nimgimli

Maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to go back…

I re-upped, patched, and spent some time reconfiguring things (my UI seemed to have gotten reset to default) and started playing again.

And I just dunno… all the rough bits still feel rough. I do my Blessed Bullets of XXX spell, and the animation for it is the Witch Hunter kind of holds his pistol up and ‘cocks’ it. And my arm stays stuck up, so I’m running around with my hand over my head. That’s aesthetic, granted.

I log out to check some add-ons and when I get back in… my chat windows are back where they were before I fixed them. So I guess they *still* move around on their own.

I *did* get into some oRVR, defending the Monastery of Morr from Destruction. Getting into a Warband was a snap, there were healers healing and everything. Plenty of players around.

But the lag was *terrific* with people just vanishing and constantly getting “not in range” errors when visually the target was clearly in range. Once I died and ran around for a good 5 seconds with the “Respawn” graphic up, but my character running around as if he was still good to go. Morale abilities still seem dicey, too. I thought those got fixed?

And worst of all was that after a while it just got dull. Granted the Monastery is just a BO, not a Keep or anything. But the two sides squared off. Every so often someone would feint, and either draw a member of the opposing side into concentrated fire, or stumble into it themselves. Destruction would retreat to their camp when things started going badly for them, and we’d retreat into ours when things went bad for us.

So I decided to do some PvE, but from my station in Bohsenfels (right in the center of Ostland) all my quest markers were way on the far side of the map, which a) seemed like a long way to run and b) was probably going to be too tough for me. I guess I need to head to one of the other pairings and do some T2 PvE there to level up some?

I dunno, maybe subconsciously I’d already made up my mind, but after two hours I was pretty much ready to shut down and do something else. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow when I’m fresh and not all frazzled from a long week at work.

WAR for Christmas?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Ahhh. Feel that? It’s normalcy. Today is a normal day (well, quasi-normal anyway). Which means a lunch break. Which means pontificating!

So Angela is gone for the weekend and a major snow storm is rolling in. That means lots of potential gaming time. Next week I have 3 days of work than a solid 11 days off, between holidays, weekends, and spending my accrued vacation time. So even more gaming time!

My plan had been to activate Warhammer using that 60-day timecard I bought at Black Friday. I’ve heard good things about patch 1.1 and now there’s some kind of bonus experience thing happening. So it seems like the perfect time to do it: in-game perks and out-of-game free time.

And yet I find myself hesitating. I know that if I go back and War isn’t fun for me this time, that I’ll probably never go back again. So that’s part of it, but that kind of hesitation will be there no matter *when* I go back. There’s always another patch coming, right?

But another part of it is my fellow bloggers. I’m not seeing a lot of Warhammer excitement on blogs these days, and my two biggest bellweathers, Ysh and Bildo, *seem* (and I could just be reading them wrong) to be suffering a bit from the Warhammer Blahs.

And the last part is that I’m afraid my expectations no longer match the game. I continue to read and enjoy the Gotrek & Felix novels and I want to know: where are these great adventures in the game? Are they up there in the higher tiers? Will we fight vampires and giants and travel the paths of the old ones and visit Albion and those strange people? Or are we limited to mostly fighting the armies of the other pairings?

I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a better time to go back, but I feel like I should be more excited about the prospect. Am I just setting myself up for disappointment? Or do I just have cold feet that are keeping me from having a grand old time in War?

Class vs Skills

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesteday’s post about levels has spawned an interesting and long running conversation.

Today I want to look at a related issue. Class-based vs Skill-based character systems. This question dovetails nicely with some of the side-conversation of the levels discussion.

The first “mainstream” graphical internet-based MMO was Ultima Online, and it uses a skill-based system. In case you never played it, and going from more ancient memory, every character had the same bunch of skills, all level 0 when the character was created. By doing stuff, the character would improve the skill related to that activity. So fighting with a sword would increase your sword-fighting skill a lot, and your strength skill a little. Casting spells would improve your magic skill a lot, and your intelligence skill a little, and so on. The catch was, a character could only have a set number of skill points (I want to say it was 300). A skill maxed out at 100, at which point you would be a GrandMaster of that activity. If you were a grandmaster swordfighter then spent a ton of time doing Carpentry to get that skill to rise, your swordfighting skill would slowly drop (though they later added the ability to “lock” a skill so it would never atrophy).

This was a great system because everyone could be who they wanted to be. If you wanted to be a healer/archer, you could do that. If you wanted to be a Grandmaster Carpenter and Swordfighter, you could. But you could never be Grandmaster at more than 3 things, and realistically you could only be GM at 2 things (you needed some “extra” points for other stuff, like Magic Resistance).

Anyway, after UO came EQ and that was a class-based system. And so the epic battle between skill-based and class-based MMOs began. Back in those days, the proponents of Class Based systems said they were better because they limited players (I chaffed hard against the Class-based bit back in those days) which forced classes to work together to make up for each others’ deficiencies and to prevent everyone from Min/Maxing their way to cookie-cutter characters. The forum battles were bloody, bitter fights.

Fast forward a decade or so, and it feels to me like the pendulum is starting to swing back and that folks are getting tired of class-based systems (in part because class & Level – with a capital L – tend to go hand-in-hand) and starting to want skill-based systems.

So far I can’t think of any pure skill-based MMOs beyond UO. There are MMOs with Classes which contain sets of Skills that let the player sculpt a character within pre-set parameters, but have there been any other completely classless MMOs in recent years?

Should there be? In UO, the only way to determine if you could best an opponent (be it Mob or Player) was observing gear, engaging in battle or asking people how tough an ettin really was. Nothing had Levels and I don’t remember there being any kind of Con system (though maybe I’m forgetting). And since dying meant potentially losing everything (anyone coming along could loot your corpse) the world felt very dangerous indeed.

Are we ready for that again? In a purely skill-based system, how do you determine relative strength? If you’re a master swordsman and I’m a decent swordsman and a very good mage, who wins? Do we even *need* to know this ahead of time?

Runes of Magic client download woes

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I won’t be trying that Runes of Magic beta right away. The only 1-part d/l service is the aptly named Gamershell. D/Ling the client was going to take me over 24 hours! Alternative was a 5 part download from a European server, then stitch together.

Too many other shiny things to distract me. Runes of Magic can wait until they can provide a reasonable way to d/l the client.

Levels, what are they good for?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve noticed a growing contingent of MMO bloggers that say levels are an out-dated concept and should be gotten rid of. “Everyone races to cap anyway,” they say, “so levels are just a way for developers to slow us down and suck more money out of us.” “The real game doesn’t begin until cap anyway,” others say, “so why not let us just start at cap?”

I thought it was time I stuck my oar in for the opposition. I play these games for the levels (and my ego isn’t big enough to believe I’m unique in any fashion, this point included). There is something primally satisfying about gaining levels; its a way of building a character, and I enjoy building things, both physical and virtual. I enjoy in-game crafting too, and I wonder how much correlation there is between people who enjoying “leveling up” and people who enjoy crafting.

I should pause to point out that this is a different argument from the one between class-based and skill-based systems. I’m fine with skill-based systems, where instead of gaining levels you gain skills… same difference for the sake of today’s argument: you’re still progressing a character from weak to mighty.

This weekend in EQ2 I gained 4 levels on one character, which really clarified some of the reasons I find leveling so much fun. We generally start using skills in distinct patterns as we play these games (hypothetical example: we use a skill that debuff’s the target’s fire resistance, then follow it up with skill that buffs our fire offensive rating, and then finally a fire attack on the target) to the point where some folks actually make macros to do the same sequence of skills over and over again. But what happens when you level? You gain new skills. And that means you need to re-evaluate your ‘combat patterns’ to see if there’s a more efficient way to use those skills. It mixes things up and keeps the game interesting.

Then there’s the aspirational issue. We see dragons and giants and we’re, yeah, killing ten rats. But to me, that’s a huge part of the satisfaction of these games. I can’t fight a dragon *now* but if I keep at it, I’ll become strong enough that I can finally get out there and fight the big dramatic creatures. If I could fight dragons the day I created a character well…that wouldn’t feel all that special.

The MMO[not-RPG] blogging community might be yelling for a revolutionary change to the DikuMUD leveling scheme in the games we play, but there are those of us who *like* things the way they are. I do believe there’re enough players to support both the evolutionary products and some hypothetical revolutionary ones, but I’m going to hazard a guess there are a lot of rank & file, non-blogging gamers that are delighted by the systems they’re enjoying today in LOTRO, EQ2, WOW, and a host of other level-based, aspirational-driven games.

Game devs, let us keep growing our characters! That’s where all the fun is!!