Category: Gaming

In defense of the PS4 launch library

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Playstation 4 is here and I have mine. I’m a happy camper! (No fanyboyism…my Xbox One should be arriving next Friday and I’m excited for that, too.)

A lot has been said about how weak the PS4 launch library is, and I’m here, at the risk of damning with faint praise, to say it isn’t as bad as some of the gaming blogs would lead you to believe, particularly if you’re already a Playstation customer.

I’ve owned the PS4 for 24 hours and here’s what my library looks like:

Need For Speed Rivals: $60 (I paid $40): This is the game I’ve been playing the most. I like it a lot. It isn’t a system seller (it’s available on last gen too) but it’s a solid arcade racer.
Killzone: Shadow Fall: $60 (I paid $40): Haven’t touched it yet
Assassin’s Creed IV: $60 (I paid $40): Haven’t touched it yet

I got these 3 in an Amazon “Buy 2 get 1 free deal”

Knack: $60 (I paid $50): Haven’t touched it yet

I bought this one digitally in October when Sony was giving you $10 back for every $50 you spent.

So far, this is what game sites are talking about when they talk about the weak launch. But they don’t mention:

Sound Shapes: $15?? (I paid $0) A PS3/Vita title that has been ported to the PS4. If you own it there, you own it here
Flower: $15?? (I paid $0) Same as Sound Shapes. I already owned it so d/led it for free.

Resogun: $0 Take an old school shooter and pump it full of steroids. This is the game I’ve put the 2nd most time into. Love it!
Contrast: $0 Haven’t touched it yet

These two are free to ‘lease’ for as long as you’re a Playstation Plus member, and since every PS4 comes with a 1-month free trial of PS+, everyone has access to them free for the first month of their console ownership

DC Universe Online $0
Warframe $0
Blacklight: Retribution $0

Haven’t tried any of them yet (well I’ve played DCUO on the PS3) but all are free-to-play games available for anyone to download and enjoy.

So no, the PS4 doesn’t have the strongest launch library ever, but it does have a lot of options that you can sample without spending a lot of money. I kind of wish I hadn’t purchased so many games so soon; the free offerings could have carried me a long ways, I think.

Of course the big question is what happens on Tuesday and the Tuesday after that and the Tuesday after that. Will the library sit stagnant until March or will we get a continuous stream of new content? I think that’s the important question that we need an answer to.

That which does not destroy us: My battle with motion sickness

Posted on by Nimgimli

i2_ScreenShot_Cole_GrindI’m pretty excited about the Playstation 4 that is headed our way in a couple of months, and I’ve been gearing up for it by trying to cut down my ‘pile of shame’ of PS3 titles I’ve wanted to get to.

One of these in Infamous 2. I played through the first Infamous and enjoyed it a lot, and one of the big early releases for the PS4 is Infamous: Second Son, coming some time in early 2014. I bought Infamous 2 when it first came out but somehow got distracted and never got very far.

So when I picked it up again a few weeks ago, I was stoked for another great gaming experience. But I had to bail out of my first session with the game early when motion sickness kicked in hard. I broke out in a sweat and my stomach was threatening to expel i’s contents. I had to go lie down for a while and wait for the feeling to pass.

Infamous 2, in case you haven’t played it, is a really twitchy game. The controls are super-sensitive with a very small dead area on the sticks. Plus there’s a lot of parkour-like climbing that’s made really easy by giving the character feet that tend to stick to anything remotely resembling a rail or a ledge. This means that sometimes your character will jerk a little in one way or another to help you stick a landing, even if you weren’t intending to land.

It makes the game really fun because you can easily do crazy things like jump off a tall building and land on the tip of a light pole, but I think it really aggravated my motion sickness. Just that little lack of control was enough to throw my inner ear into fits.

But I a) really wanted to play the game and b) was really annoyed at this motion sickness thing. As you get older you lose the ability to do more and more of the things you enjoy and dammit, I wasn’t going to lose the ability to play a video game!

So the next day I went back to Infamous 2 and played for all of 5 minutes or so. As soon as I felt a bit of discomfort, I stopped. And I did that again the following night, and the night after. By about the 4th night I was up to 15 minutes or so. At this point if I started to feel a little queasy I’d pause and look away for a few minutes before continuing.

The nice thing about Infamous 2 for this ‘regime’ is that there’s tons of collecting items and simple side quests to do, so I could play for 15 minutes and still feel like I made a little bit of progress.

The body, or at least my body, adapts quickly and now, a few weeks later, I can play as much Infamous 2 as I want without feeling bad. Sometimes after a really intense battle I do have to pause, get up for a drink or to pet the dog or do something other than look at that moving screen for a few minutes, just to let my eyes and stomach ‘settle’ a little, but it’s no biggie now.

I’m just sharing this story in case anyone else out there suffers from motion sickness in gaming. You can overcome it through regular, short-duration play sessions. Don’t let yourself get sick…stop before you do. You don’t want your sub-conscious to develop negative associations to gaming (though that would probably save you a lot of $$)!

I will admit that I now make sure to play at least a little Infamous 2 every other night or so. I’m afraid if I leave it for a week I might back-slide. So even on busy nights I’ll log in and chase now a blast core or break-up a robbery or an abduction or something. Just to stay ‘video game fit.’ 🙂

And I’m glad I did this because Infamous 2 is pretty good so far, and there’ll little references to things I’ve seen mentioned in previews of Infamous: Second Son. By the time that game launches I’ll be ready!

First Look: Don’t Starve

Posted on by Nimgimli

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Over the weekend I returned to Don’t Starve, the strange little survival game from Klei Entertainment. I’d played Don’t Starve back when it was in beta and liked it quite a bit but as with so many games it got pushed to the back of my brain and forgotten.

Now the game is launched and Klei is constantly updating it, adding new things to discover. I love that a game I paid about $10 for (beta price, it lists for $16 but is frequently on sale on Steam) gets this kind of continuous support. It probably helps that Don’t Starve is going to come out on the Playstation 4, too.

The other day I had my most successful run in a game, making it 20 days before I succumbed to the dangers of the world. I wanted to tell you about that run, but I realized I’d never talked about the game so here’s a belated First Look.

When a game of Don’t Starve begins, you find yourself empty handed and alone in an alien world. Your first order of business is to find food and the tools to make fire. If night falls and you have no light source you’re pretty much doomed. There are beasties in the dark, and the dark is pitch black.

So you start scrounging. There are emaciated bushes that you can get sticks from, tufts of dry grass to pluck and chunks of flint strewn about. You can combine these basic materials to create shovels, mining picks and axes. You can also make a torch, but torches burn out pretty quickly.

With an axe you can chop down trees to get logs (and pine cones which you can use to grow more trees). With a flint and logs you can build a campfire which should get you through your first night. Later you’ll want to gather some rocks to make a fire pit which will burn your wood more efficiently (and safely).

Now that you have light it’s time to address the grumbling in your belly. Food is a major motivator in Don’t Starve. You can scrounge for wild carrots and berry bushes at first but they offer poor sustenance. You might find seeds and you can eat those too if you get desperate. All these items can be cooked over your campfire which seems to make them slightly more filling, though that could be my imagination.

Soon enough night falls and the dark closes around you and your little fire. You munch your berries, keep feeding logs into the fire, and wait for dawn. There’s a bit of downtime here, it must be said, though later in the game you’ll have chores to do at night.

At this point you might notice you have 3 gauges. One is health, one is hunger, and the third is sanity. When your hunger gauge is empty you’ll start taking health damage, and you can also take health damage in battle. Your sanity goes down as you go more hours without sleeping.

As your sanity drops, the game starts to represent this loss by throwing various artifacts on screen. Things shake, shadows appear, harmless bunnies start to look like fierce creatures. Hands reach into your fire and steal the light. Being crazy isn’t fun, but skipping sleep for that first night won’t have too bad an impact.

When dawn breaks it’s time to get to work again. You can choose to scrounge for more food, or perhaps build traps out of grass to try to capture those bunnies I mentioned. One of your first big goals is to gather the materials (chunks of gold being the hard-to-find component) for a “Science Machine” which provides you with recipes for more craftable items. The day goes by quickly and there never seems to be enough time.

Once you get a science machine your options open a lot. You can build basic weapons and go hunting. If there’s a herd of beefalo nearby you can collect their manure and build gardens where you can grow crops. And you can craft bedrolls…those are important.

When it gets dark, you can use a bedroll to skip the night hours. This helps to ‘heal’ your sanity, but you take a big hit on your hunger meter. So there’s a constant balancing act between having enough food and getting enough sleep to stay sane.

As the days pass and you wander farther from your origin point you’ll encounter all kinds of weird things. There are different biomes like grasslands, forest, swamps, rocky plains and even graveyards. There are sentient, or at least semi-sentient, creatures living in the world. There are monsters to avoid and animals to hunt. There are more machines to build that unlock more tools to craft, as well as walls to help keep you safe.

But when you die, it’s pretty much Game Over. There are ways to prevent death but they’re pretty elaborate for beginners like me.

Don’t Starve is a game like The Sims in that it can spawn some interesting stories. I’d like to eventually tell some of my stories but I think I’ve rambled on for long enough for now.

Game Watch: Citadels

Posted on by Nimgimli

Citadelsresized.103515Here’s an upcoming game that caught my eye: Citadels. Reminds me of the good old days and games like The Settlers. This video (which has a really ill-fitting translated voice-over!) just shows one aspect of the game. Beyond that all I know is what the PR email said:

Citadels relates a spellbinding story from a time of kings, noble knights, and impenetrable castles, offering medieval battles with extraordinary characters and numerous tactical possibilities. In order to survive enemy onslaughts, players must construct mighty castles and fortify them with moats, walls of spears, and defensive units. But, building a powerful army requires the extraction and production of resources, making the delicate balance between economy and battle a critical decision in every engagement.

Key Features

  • Experience medieval England at the time of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table with detailed graphics and painstakingly designed environments – and rewrite history in the process!
  • Good or evil? Decide for yourself whether you will fight on the side of King Arthur or Mordred and his allies from the Northlands.
  • Construct impregnable fortresses and fortify them with units, moats, and spear walls. Your strategy will determine your success or failure.
  • A castle alone does not ensure victory! The right combination of defensive structures and units, as well as resource extraction and production are decisive for the outcome of a siege.
  • Fight medieval battles with an army of all kinds of units and siege weapons. When assembling your army, you will have access to archers, crossbowmen, swordsmen, mounted units, ladder carriers, catapults, trebuchets, ballistae, and siege towers.
  • Realistic projectile ballistics enables a tactical advantage for higher positions, and falling objects and rubble cause damage.
  • By fulfilling certain tasks, you can acquire legendary characters that will give you a bonus for your missions.

I like to Move it Move it!

Posted on by Nimgimli

51BnFAf-WlL._SX385_A lot of gamers, myself included, have a dim view of motion controls in gaming, and with good reason. The Nintendo Wii shipped with Wii Sports and those games were pretty fun for a while, but the motions needed were very artificial. Sure people did Wii Bowling by stepping up as if they were at a bowling alley, but you could also just pivot the WiiMote with your wrist and accomplish the same thing.

Still Wii Sports was fun, but what followed were all kinds of crappy shovel-ware games that relied on just ‘waggling’ the remote in a way sure to give you carpal tunnel. Most of us moved past the Wii motion controls pretty quickly.

Microsoft’s answer to the Wii is the Kinect. The problem with it, for many of us, is that it requires way too much empty space in front of the TV. (The new Kinect shipping with Xbox One is supposed to address that problem.) If there are great Kinect games I don’t know anything about them because I never had room to get the Kinect working properly. I’d appreciate comments sharing the best Kinect games, though.

Sony has the Move for the PS3, a lighted ball on a stick that, upon being announced, was immediately ridiculed for looking like some kind of weird sex toy (to some people) or at the very least just looking like a toy. The Move works a lot like the Nintendo Wii only with more fidelity. It uses a camera instead of a sensor bar, though.

This year’s E3 has reinvigorated my love of consoles and it has me revisiting some old titles that I played lightly if at all. In the midst of this I decided to give my Move controllers another spin. I mean, I’ve used them in games like The Unfinished Swan recently…games like this use the Move almost like a mouse pointer (and it works pretty well like that). But I wanted to revisit “motion controlled” games.

I’ve been messing around with Sports Champions and the demo for Sports Champions 2 and I have to say, I’d forgotten how well the Move actually works for sports-y games. I’ve played the tennis game on the SC2 demo and a lot of Frisbee Golf in SC1. Both ‘feel’ natural to me. Frisbee Golf in particular…there’s a HUD on screen to help judge how far you’re going to throw, but I don’t need it or pay attention to it. I’ve flung enough Frisbees to know how to throw one soft or hard and the Move translates my ‘natural Frisbee skills’ to the game very nicely.

But the game that really knocks me off my feet is Gladiator Duel. In this one you’re armed with melee weapon and shield, and ideally you play it with 2 Move controllers. One is your shield and the other your melee weapon. This is pretty much the coolest fighting game experience I’ve ever had. You hold up your shield arm and swing it to block attacks while your weapon arm is drawn back, looking for an opening. When you see one, you take your shot. You can do a quick swing for a low power hit to keep the opponent off guard, or you can really haul back and swing as hard as you can…assuming he doesn’t block that can knock him sprawling. And that’s the central game play.

There are some ‘tricks’ to learn. Holding the T button and shoving your shield fowards results in a shield bash, for instance, and when your opponent is on his back, shoving both Moves into the air triggers a scripted jump attack that can do serious damage before he gets up. Worst is the Super Attack mechanic where you fill a gauge by blocking and when you do, hit X and land a blow to do a Super Attack where you have to follow indicators on-screen to do big bonus damage. It’s the Move equivalent of a QTE and it feels cheap.

And the game isn’t perfect… every so often it’ll think your weapon isn’t where you think it is and things get confused. But when it’s working… when you’re standing in your living room in a gentle crouch, left arm holding up your shield while you probe for weaknesees in your opponent’s defense…it can feel pretty damned magical. And it feels even better when you finally land a crushing blow on your opponent’s shield and you shatter it, leaving him or her defenseless.

So I think there’s actually hope for motion controls in a certain context. Or there would be if enough gamers were interested to support this style of game. I’m not sure Sony sold very many Move controllers. We’ll see how Kinect 2 works but somehow I feel better holding something (plus you have button to help supplement the motion controls.. in Gladiator Duel holding a certain button and flicking the control causes you do dodge to one side, for instance).

I’d be playing a lot more Sports Champions except for 2 issues. First is I’m so out of shape that I end up sweating and tired after half an hour or so (of Gladiators and Tennis anyway… Frisbee Golf is pretty mellow). Second, for some reason the dog is TERRIFIED of the Move. Whenever she sees me flailing around with those controllers she runs and hides and when I go find her she is shaking like a leaf! So I have to pick my play times carefully..when she’s on a walk with Angela or is off sleeping in her bed or something. LOL

King Julian

Spartacus Legends

Posted on by Nimgimli

legends_logo_215x120Spartacus Legends is a free-to-play fighting game from Ubisoft that hit XBLA and PSN recently. It’s based on the Starz gladiator series. Already all kinds of alarm bells should be going off in your head, right? A F2P game based on a TV show!? Yegads.

I’m not sure why I downloaded it but I did and tonight I fired it up and surprise! It’s actually not too bad. The core here is a gladiator fighting game, with all the gore you’d expect, plus plenty of salty language just in case we were confused about whether or not a game where you can slice your enemy’s face off their head is meant for children.

The fighting engine… well listen, I’m not a fighting game guy. I can’t remember combos and when I can remember them I don’t have the dexterity to pull them off. But I can play Spartacus Legends, which probably means if you’re serious about fighting games than this is going to be way too basic for you. But for this kind of game/audience, going a bit more casual was probably the right move. Your face buttons are light attack, heavy attack, a block breaker and a grab. Left shoulder button is block, right shoulder button, along with analog stick, let’s you roll. There are combos here if you can figure them out. I felt like after a while my fingers had figured out a few without my brain really parsing what they were.

What I like about Spartacus Legends is the strategy/rpg wrapper around the fighting game. You’re trying to build up your stable of gladiators to make your house/school/ludus famous once again. You start with one poor bastard armed with a piece of junk sword, a busted up shield and a loin cloth. As you win fights you’ll gain both coin and fame. You use coin to buy better armor and weapons, additional gladiators and cells for them to sleep in (more cells = more potential gladiators).

As you gain fame, you (you as in the faceless guy/gal running the ludus) can access more and more lucrative (and dangerous) venues to have your gladiators fight in. I just dipped my toe in the second area after an evening’s play. Early battles are non-lethal (through the magic of Hollywood I guess) but as you advance the “Lethality Meter” increases. It’s probably going to suck when one of my favorite gladiators gets killed. 🙁

Your gladiators also earn Perks for winning battles. One of the earliest for instance is “Hard Headed” which gives that Gladiator +10 defense.

Of course things get expensive pretty fast, and that’s where the F2P stuff comes in. Instead of earning coin you can just buy it with real money. Gold coins, in particular, are pretty hard to earn and some of the better gear can only be purchased with gold coins. Also each Gladiator has a finite number of Perk Slots (1 to start) and replacing a Perk with a new one costs Gold coins.

There’s an Online Battle component that I stayed far away from. With a game where real $$ can get you the best gear I don’t want to have anything to do with PvP. But if you stick to the PvE side of the game, you can have a pretty good time without spending any money. I may buy some Gold Coins just to support Ubisoft if I play for much longer.

Spartacus Legends isn’t going to win any game of the year awards or anything, but it’s worth downloading some evening when you just feel like something a little different. And gory. And foul-mouthed.

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Ping! I’m still alive

Posted on by Nimgimli

I popped into the blog today to update the backend and realized I’d let over 2 months slip past without a blog post! At my age you have to make some noise every now and then or people start planning your funeral, so I figured I’d best post something.

Thing is, E3 came around and kind of knocked my gaming habits out of whack. I got pretty excited about the next generation of consoles, then looked at my stack of unplayed games for my current consoles and figured I’d better start working through them. I haven’t done any significant PC gaming in quite some time, and I’m in one of my ‘Ugh, MMOs’ phases that I go through from time to time.

Plus working a LOT. Plus the days are so long that we wind up eating dinner late and so my evenings feel really short.

Really I’ve mostly been dabbling. My only ‘serious’ gaming in the past month or so has been The Last of Us which I crammed through in about 4 days (20 hours or so of gameplay). Man, that game got its hooks into me… one of my two favorite games of this generation, the other being Red Dead Redemption. I guess when it comes to games I really like somber, strongly narrative-driven titles.

Whenever I turn on the PS3 though, I feel guilt about not finishing Ni No Kuni. I swore I’d finish that game but DAMN is it ever BORING. On the Xbox I popped in, and threw aside, a series of games before I decided that maybe playing games for the sole purpose of having played them so you can get rid of them isn’t the best way to sample games. So I’m back to slowly working through the Halo 4 Spartan Missions. When the Xbox 360 gets thrown into the Gaming Collection Closet I guess a bunch of unplayed games will go with it.

Been spending a lot of time with the handhelds too. Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a great ‘before bed’ game since it’s so slow and mellow it puts me to sleep. On the Vita I’ve been messing around with Toro’s Friend Garden though I have no idea why; it’s the most pointless piece of software ever invented. Been dinking around with Escape Plan too, which is a nifty puzzle game that takes a while to get interesting.

And that’s it! Mostly I’m waiting for November and new silicon! Though Shadowrun Returns is about a month out and I’m looking forward to it, too.

Fire Emblem Awakening: Classic vs Casual

Posted on by Nimgimli

fire_emblemI’m still playing turn-based, tactical, strategy-RPG Fire Emblem: Awakening on the 3DS. Have been, off and on, since it launched. Suffice to say I love the game.

I’ve actually got two games running at the same time. The one I started first is in “Classic Mode.” Fire Emblem traditionally has had a perma-death feature. If a character dies in a battle, that character is dead forever. The only exception to this (in FE:A) are two of the main characters. If either of them dies it’s an immediate Game Over. If a character who dies is important to the story, he or she will still appear in cut-scenes (when they ‘die’ they leave with a snippet of conversation saying something about needing to withdraw) but you can never use them in battle again.

This, we’re told by the nebulous entity known as gamers, is how we “should” play Fire Emblem and I agreed with that. Perma-death definitely adds a lot of weight to the decisions you make in the game. Of course the reality is that if a truly beloved character falls in battle, you can always reset the 3DS and avoid the dire consequences. I suspect many people play this way. In fact at times I think you have to. Losing 1 character is heart-breaking, yes, but if a battle goes south and you lose 4 or 5, you’re going to be in a world of hurt trying to advance through the game.

At one point in my first game I felt like I had played myself into a corner, so I restarted in Casual Mode. As of now I’ve put about 17 or 18 hours into my Casual game and 10 in my Classic game.

And *drum roll please* I’ve determined that Casual is (for me anyway) actually a more exciting way to play! And here’s why.

In my Classic game I am EXTREMELY cautious. I grind constantly, taking on easy challenges over and over again to level up my characters so every ‘real’ battle is a cake-walk. I haven’t lost a character since Ricken bit it back in February. It’s all rather boring but I can’t help myself; these are my friends, I can’t needlessly risk their lives in battle!

In my Casual game, though, I take chances all the time. I’ve had battles where I went in with a dozen warriors and came stumbling out with 3 barely standing, but victorious. The fights sometimes come down to the wire and I find myself almost holding my breath. I think for me having to re-play the battle if I lose is enough to make me really want to win.

Now on the other hand…in my Casual game I have too many characters. I really only need a core team. With no risk of death there’s no reason to have ‘spare’ characters, so to speak. But for me, I find leveling these characters to be fun so I’m still doing extra quests to level everyone up. But the game is clearly designed around the idea that you’ll lose characters and will need to replenish your army, so there are way more characters than you ‘need’ (or at least can be…many of them come from the DLC or the random armies that pop up via the Wireless menu).

I think if I was King of the World I’d decree that Fire Emblem had some ‘middle road’ mode. Basically it would be Classic Mode but the player would have some kind of (onerous) way to resurrect fallen characters. It’d either be expensive or would incorporate a mini-quest-line that you had to play through, or something. So that when that character who you really, really love fell in battle you could decide to overcome the required obstacle to bring him or her back. But when Vaike fell, you’d just move on. Because really, nobody likes Vaike.

vaike

Defiance: Main quests finished, and I’m feeling grumpy

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night I finished the “Main Storyline” for Defiance. Or at least the main storyline as it stands now; I expect we’ll see more in the months to come. I still have lots of side quests to do, pursuits to finish, weapons and vehicles to level… and hopefully starting next Monday, Episode Quests.

But today I want to talk more about the main storyline quests. I was not at all pleased with how this series of quests ended, so warning: one of my rants is incoming.

There are a couple ways to finish difficult quests in Defiance:
1) You can be a hardcore shooter player and then probably none of the quests are difficult to begin with.

2) You can fight the best you can until the cavalry arrives in the form of another player (or players). This is my favorite thing to have happen. I’ll be running around, slowly grinding my way through the quest, and suddenly another purple dot shows up on the radar. Help has arrived! Two players are way WAY more powerful than one since with two players you can flank, which becomes important against certain enemies later in the game. Also, this is an MMO…if we wanted to play a solo game we’d play a single player game, right?

3) You can brute force it. I’ve had to do this a few times. You take out a few guys, die, respawn, take out a few more, and eventually you’ll whittle them down and win. It just takes persistence. The ‘death penalty’ is 180 scrip (Defiance’s currency). My character has something like 34,000 scrip and I buy everything that looks remotely interesting, so 180 scrip is so low that there may as well not be a death penalty.

But there are 2 main quests where these rules don’t apply. (Well, Rule 1 still applies.) In these quests you enter a solo instance so there’s no hope of friends, and if you die, the mission enemies reset and you have to start all over again. To add insult to injury, your ammo will be depleted so the first thing you’ll have to do on your next try is sprint for an ammo box and replenish.

The final Main Mission is one of these two missions. [Gameplay, but not story, spoilers incoming.] It’s a multi-phase mission. First you have to clear a bunker with the help of some NPC friends. Then you have to enter a solo instance and fight an enemy, three times. It’s that old-school ‘boss that keeps getting back up’ system. I don’t play modern shooters so I don’t know if they still do that, but it’s how designers used to finish their games: one last frustrating battle where the difficulty spikes.

Each of the three phases is different and at least if you die you respawn at the start of the current phase (thank heaven for small favors). But this being an MMO, you can’t save your game and walk away for a while. I -assume- that if you log out and come back in, you’ll have to restart the mission from the very beginning. I wasn’t about to test this but this seems to be normally how Defiance works. And there’s no Pause button.

So once you get into this last mission, you’re going to want to complete it in one sitting. It is far, far harder than anything else the game has thrown at you up to that point. Or at least it was for me. Invariably when someone says the mission is hard on a forum there’ll be ‘that guy’ who says “Hard? I finished the mission using only my starter weapon and it took me 5 minutes.” But my ‘straw poll research’ tells me I’m not alone in finding the mission to be difficult.

I did it, eventually. Died about 8 times altogether I think. There’s nothing like having the baddie down to a sliver of health and taking an unlucky hit and having to start all over again. Eight deaths doesn’t sound bad but I was trying to be careful. The mission, start to finish, took me about two hours and when I finally finished it, I felt more angry than satisfied.

It didn’t help that I encountered a couple of bugs. A couple times my Self-Revive refused to work (the message to hold E to revive was on-screen but holding E did nothing) and a few times when I died the Extract feature didn’t work so I had to sit around and wait for the timer to count down to auto-extract me. The first one was by far more infuriating but it only happened twice.

So two hours later, I was finished. I glowered at the following cut scene, flipped the bird at the crappy weapon I got as a reward (a freakin pistol? REALLY?) and dumped out of the game and stormed off to bed. Now that’s just me. I’m sure some players finished the battle, did a fist pump and a cheer and were elated. If you were one of those, I’m sincerely happy for you. In my opinion, though, this mission needs to be changed. We’re playing an MMO because we want to play with other people. Let us bring in help if we’re stuck. If that’s asking too much, at least tweak the difficulty so it is more in-line with the rest of the missions.

I’m not against hard games, but Defiance, overall, is a pretty casual game. (There’s one other mission that is a bit difficult but you can go online and research ‘tricks’ to make it easier. I couldn’t find any tricks for this one.) In my opinion it’s a game design mistake to spike the difficulty so drastically at the very end of a quest line like this (particularly since you probably want players to stick around after the final quest finishes). I’m hoping Trion decides to tone this one down a bit. Maybe after a certain amount of time or deaths they can spawn a powerful weapon or something to help those players who came to Defiance from other MMOs rather than from Shooters.

I’m just glad to have it behind me. I’m actually looking forward to going back to cruising around the world, doing side missions and helping other players clear their main missions. That’s what makes Defiance so fun. Not being trapped in a solo instance with a boss that doesn’t have the sense to stay dead after you kill him!

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!