I blame Torchlight

Posted on by Nimgimli

So here we are, all snug in our beds (or soon to be) with visions of sugar-darkspawn stuck in our heads.

It’s Dragon Age Eve. Tomorrow we’ll come home from work, bare our teeth at the family to warn them off, and settle in to enjoy Dragon Age: Origins. (Of course some lucky SOBs are already playing…sounds like some retailers broke the street date.)

I realized yesterday… I hadn’t finished Uncharted 2 yet, and here comes Dragon Age. I meant to finish it. I’m really close to the end (I think/hope…it’s getting to where if it goes much longer it’ll feel like its dragging on); who knew it was going to get hard(ish)?

But really I blame Runic Games. Torchlight grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go all last week and into the weekend. And I’m still feeling the itch to play more.

So yeah, backlog of great games piling it (let’s not forget Borderlands). I think Dragon Age will be my last purchase for a while. I need to get ahead of this wave!

This game will unlock in approximately 15 hours

Has Microsoft eased off exclusives?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was compiling a list of great (and potentially great) games for a holiday gift guide and was surprised to find that I’d listed 3 games that were PS3 exclusives and only 2 that were Xbox exclusive. That’s not enough of a difference to make a big deal about, but it did get me thinking about PS3 & Xbox 360 exclusives.

The way I see it, there are three types of exclusives:

1) Games developed by 1st and ‘2nd party’ devs (quotes because sometimes the company in question isn’t officially connected but may as well be, from the point of view of the game-buying audience). Examples from my list: Uncharted 2 from Naughty Dog for the PS3 and Forza Motorsport 3 from Turn 10 for the Xbox 360.

2) Games that 3rd party developers choose to only produce for one platform. Example from my list, Atlus’ Demon’s Souls for the PS3 and Bungie’s Halo 3: ODST for the Xbox 360. Bungie is almost a ‘quoted 2nd party’ dev but technically they’re now as independent as Rudolph and Hermey (with Halloween now behind us, let the Christmas references commence!).

3) Games with exclusive extras. Examples: playable Joker in the PS3 version of Batman Arkham Asylum or the exclusive (for a lengthy period at least) DLC for the Xbox 360 version of Fallout 3.

While the number of “Type 1” exclusives has remained steady, it seems like Types 2 and 3 are in decline. In the case of Type 2, presumably the PS3 is finally getting an install base that few 3rd party developers are willing to ignore. In prior years of this console generation, the vast majority of Type 2 exclusives have been Xbox 360 exclusives. Supporting the PS3 must just make financial sense at this point.

What’s really interesting, to me, is Microsoft backing off the Type 3 exclusives, which used to be a specialty of theirs. Drop by a dev’s office with a sack full of money and say “How about you take this and then keep your DLC off the PS3 for 6 months?” They did this with GTA IV, Fallout 3, even Netflix, and it seemed to work. People who owned both systems would naturally go Xbox in order to take advantage of the ‘exclusive’ DLC.

But Dragon Age: Origins and Modern Warfare 2 are launching in the next few weeks on both platforms and in neither case have we heard a peep about exclusive content for either system. Microsoft attended the MW2 event in LA (?) a month or so back as if it was a parent company, and they’re rolling out a MW2-branded Xbox 360, but as far as the game and following content goes, both platforms will get the same stuff.

Dragon Age: Origins, with its plans for years of DLC, seems like a perfect fit for Microsoft’s DLC lock-down strategy, but nope…nothing.

So I’m wondering why this is. Has Microsoft just decided that their market share is so dominant they don’t have to spend the money any more (and it’d be hard to argue with that logic). Or maybe there just aren’t enough dual-console owners to make it worth while? Or are the developers not willing to alienate PS3 owners in exchange for Microsoft’s offerings?

Whatever the reason, it’s good news for gamers, and particularly for PS3 owners, who used to so often be left on the outside looking in. But on the other hand, without exclusives, why do we need competing consoles? Are the 1st & 2nd party devs enough to make one system stand out over the other? Or is it the overall ecosystem (Xbox Live vs Playstation Network) enough? Reliability? Design?

A game is not a list of bullet points

Posted on by Nimgimli

Syp at Bio Break did a post today declaring Torchlight to be a carbon copy of Fate, and he has a list of bullet points to prove it. And looking at his list, I can’t disagree with a single point. In some cases I’m taking Syp’s word on the fact that the points match up, because I never got far enough in Fate to see how later parts of the game, like passing items on to other characters, worked.

Why? Because I found Fate tedious. A not-very-good Diablo clone with a vile copy protection scheme. It came pre-installed on one of my HP machines which allowed you to play a few sessions for free and then asked you to pay for the game. It never occurred to me to pay for it because I didn’t find the game the least bit compelling.

And yet my early hours with Torchlight have me enthralled. In fact I hesitated about writing this post because writing it is eating into my Torchlight time.

To really explain why I love Torchlight while I found Fate pretty ‘meh’ I’d have to re-install Fate, and that isn’t going to happen, so I’ll just have to look at the intangibles of Torchlight and make some guesses. And mostly I think it’s because the combat, simple as it is, feels so satisfying. Each attack lands with a solid impact. Each urn breaks with a satisfying crash. When dozens of creatures swarm out of a tunnel or a mine shaft it just sends a thrill up my spine… “To battle!!!”

Fate just felt like ‘click click click’ whereas Torchlight feels like ‘Slash! Bash! Pow!’ … even though the mechanics and bullet points match up so well. Torchlight has a soul. Fate was just a game. I guess you can’t capture ‘soul’ in a bullet point.

* * *

And while we’re talking Torchlight, GameInformer has a post up on how to rebind the keys. It isn’t as easy as it should be, but it ain’t rocket science either.

girltalk

Fresh batch of Dragon Age: Origin screens

Posted on by Nimgimli

Tonight I have another batch of Dragon Age: Origins screens, compliments of our friends at Bioware. There’s a mix of shots with and without hud elements. A few new baddies in here.

I have to be honest, I’m kind of tired of looking at screens and videos and am very much ready to play. I suspect the same is true of you, dear reader, but if there’s one person out there that finds something new to delight over, I figure they’re worth a quick post.

[Update: That lucky SOB Tom Chick is playing! I read this account of a battle and my anticipation ratcheted up another dozen notches. I also found it really interesting how much it sounded like an MMO battle in some ways.]

I also have a growing concern about the amount of gore that is in every batch of screenshots; I’m hoping you’ll be able to tone that down a bit when actually playing the game. I don’t mind gritty but some of the shots I’m seeing just seem a bit over the top…

Anyway, here’s tonights back of screenies!

Dragon Age commercials hit the web

Posted on by Nimgimli

Y’know if more ads looked this good, I’d be a lot more likely to pay attention to them! It’s all cgi and some of it we’ve seen before, but damn, does it look good. I love the “Not every hero is pure” tag line, too, referring to the taint that every Gray Warden takes inside his or herself in order to fight the Darkspawn. All of our heroes will be tragic figures, fated to die in battle or become that which we fight.

Torchlight is the love child of Diablo & Mythos

Posted on by Nimgimli

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. If you didn’t like Diablo, or in general don’t like the “click on a baddie until it dies” style of action RPG (if you didn’t play Diablo, maybe you played Titan Quest or even Fate?) then you won’t like Torchlight.

If you *did* like Diablo, or had a chance to play in the beta of Mythos and enjoyed soloing in it, then you MUST get Torchlight. It is very, very evocative of those earlier games. Even the controls are basically the same. Click to move, click on a baddie to attack, Shift-Click on a baddie to attack without moving, run over loot to pick it up, hold down Alt to ‘light up’ loot you might have missed, and so on.

New to Torchlight is your pet (you can have a dog or a cat) who’ll fight for you. You can teach the pet spells, give it certain items to use (haven’t discovered any yet) and it has its own inventory. You can send it to fetch dropped loot, or even send it back to town to sell off the stuff it’s carrying…such a handy companion!

Borrowed from Mythos is a shared stash (to transfer items between characters) and “Treasure Maps” purchased from vendors that’ll take you to new levels.

Looting and leveling; that’s what Torchlight is all about. Plus its cheap, runs like a dream on a modern gaming rig, and has great music.

Yes, this is breathless enthusiasm; heck I only played for a few hours and maybe by the weekend I’ll be bored. But at $20 it doesn’t have to last me months (actually I think I paid $17 thanks to a pre-order discount).

Anyway, how about some random screenshots and then I’ll call it a night.

Looking in from the outside

Posted on by Nimgimli

Remember all those blog posts about grouping vs soloing and how those of us who soloed in MMOs should “go play a single player game”?

Well, I finally did that. Not by choice, but due to a lingering injury that made playing PC games painful. And at first it really sucked. I was really hooked on Fallen Earth at the time and ached to play it (pun intended) but just couldn’t manage more than 10 minutes before my arm felt like it was on fire.

So I turned to my consoles for solace, and played some pretty fun games. Need For Speed: Shift, Demon’s Souls, Brutal Legends, Uncharted 2 and Borderlands. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped missing MMOs; or at least, the missing eased somewhat.

And what happened next was interesting. I started to notice how much MMO players complain about MMOs. I’m not talking about a scientific poll or anything, but it seems like MMO players are a lot unhappier with their games than non-MMO players are. I find myself thinking “Why are you playing this game if it is making you so unhappy?” fairly often now, even while acknowledging that I was the same way, and probably will be again someday.

I don’t want to come across like the alcoholic who gets all holier-than-thou once he stops drinking, but it is peculiar. I guess it has a lot to do with the amount of time invested. When you’ve established a ‘home’ in an MMO and you have friends there, the benefit of your social network outweighs the detriment of the aspects of the game that bug you. Meanwhile the non-MMOers have significantly fewer ties to any given game (and often, thanks to Friend lists and social networking, they can take their friends with them to the next game without a lot of hassle).

I can’t decide if this social connection to a specific game is ‘good’ or not (though I’m pretty sure I’m in no position to make that determination for anyone but myself). I will tell you that being a non-MMO gamer is a helluva lot more expensive than being an MMO gamer!

What’s strangest of all is this lure of re-labeling myself ‘MMO gamer’ just to be ‘part of the group’ again. Even though I was one of those anti-social soloers, I did feel part of the uber-group that is the MMO playing community. I kind of miss feeling passionately about the cost of a retcon in Champions Online or the problem of Radiance in LOTRO or whether the scarecrows are working right in Fallen Earth…

Maybe that’s why I still have my accounts active. I’m not ready to cut that final string yet.

Torchlight launch & a warning from Giant Bomb

Posted on by Nimgimli

I know I’m not the only one excited about the launch of Runic Games’ Torchlight tomorrow. This Diablo-like has a quality pedigree with a team that includes designers from the original Diablo, and then the very fun Mythos that fell when Flagship Studios imploded. A $20 price tag doesn’t hurt either.

The editor won’t release until later in the week so we have a couple of days to just loot & level in peace before we roll up our sleeves and start with the modding. But one word of warning. Giant Bomb did a quick look and in it Brad Shoemaker advises experienced Diablo players to play on the Hard difficulty setting because Normal is pretty easy.

Here’s the quick look and you can see he walks into a room stuffed full of baddies and doesn’t take much damage at all. So turn up that difficulty before you start playing!