2008: My Year in Games

Posted on by Nimgimli

So it’s about time to put 2008 to bed, and I thought I’d take a few moments to sum up my year in gaming terms.

From an MMO point of view, its been a year of disappointments: Pirates of the Burning Seas didn’t sit at all well with me after a brief fling of romantic night-time sea battles. Age of Conan was amazing for 20 levels then fell flat on its face. Warhammer Online was awesome in beta but didn’t hold me in launch for reasons I’m still stirring around in my head. It feels like every day I find a new reason for why Warhammer and I didn’t click, and each new reason nullifies the last one. Anyway that’s recent enough news not to dwell on.

Oddly, where I had the most fun in MMOs is with older titles. EQ2 (via a free ‘welcome back’ month) and particularly LOTRO filled the gaps between Age of Conan and Warhammer. It was the first time I really got traction in LOTRO and started doing a lot of Fellowship PUGs that actually didn’t suck. In retrospect, I almost wish Warhammer hadn’t come out and that I’d stuck with LOTRO.

After I fizzled on Warhammer, I went back to WoW and did my usual “This is great!” two-week stint before getting bored with it for the umpteenth time. Not to disparage WOW; I just played it (and loved it) for so long during its alpha, beta and early launch years that it feels old hat now. Currently I’m dabbling in EQ2 again, but not very seriously.

2008 was the year that Free2Play MMOs got good, though, and I’m looking forward to exploring Wizard 101, Mabinogi, Dream of Mirror Online, Florensia and a few others in 2009.

But my really amazing gaming experiences in 2008 have been single player games. Early in the year I played through Jeanne d’Arc on the PSP, and that was a great strategy-RPG (one of my favorite genres) that made the PSP worth owning. After that I spent a lot of time playing Etrian Odyssey II on the Nintendo DS. I was so hooked on that one that I’d slip out to my car at lunchtime to play a bit. Classic turn-based first-person dungeon crawling; brought back memories of Wizardry and Dungeon Master.

But the two games that truly left me breathless this year were Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for the PS3, and Fable 2 for the XBox 360. Uncharted perfectly captured the Saturday matinee vibe that the devs were going for. I was swept along in the story, gleefully exploring these old ruins and uncovering the mystery.

Fable 2, however, gets my personal Game of The Year. Molyneaux finally pulled it off; I really cared about the characters and felt like my actions had a very real impact on the world. The ending left me staring slack-jawed at the screen for long moments, contemplating what I’d just done and wondering whether I’d done the right thing (and this after I panicked and undid my initial choice). After the game “ended” (and really, you can keep playing and playing) I immediately rolled a new character and started all over again, just to see what would happen if I played things differently: I can’t remember the last time I did something like that. So yeah, Fable 2 was awesome.

Going into 2009, I’m really hot on Valkyria Chronicles right now, and I’ve been enjoying Izuna 2, a rogue-like on the Nintendo DS. I’m tepid at best on MMOs. As mentioned, I’ve been dabbling in EQ2 lately. I’ve logged into Warhammer exactly twice since I re-activated the account about 10 days ago. I still want to play LOTRO more, and the only reason I don’t is because I’m paying for War and EQ2 and feel like I “should” be playing one of those if I’m playing an MMO (and instead, I end up going back to single-player games…yes, I’m a freak).

I’m semi-interested in Chronicles of Spellborn, but beyond that 2009 doesn’t have anything I’m all that jazzed about in the world of “AAA” MMOs (not sure Chronicles is in that category). I’m not a super-hero fan so Champions Online and DC Universe don’t have me excited. I doubt SW:TOR will ship this year and even if it did, I’m not much of a Star Wars fan, either. I am rather interested in Bioware’s Dragon Age game, and hope I live long enough to see Blizzard release Diablo 3.

I don’t know, maybe 2009 will be a year of single-player gaming for me??

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.

Valkyria Chronicles First Look, Part 1

Posted on by Nimgimli

As mentioned, I received Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3 as a Christmas present this year. So far I’ve put 4-5 hours into it, and my initial reaction is very favorable indeed.

This game is probably classified as a Strategy-RPG but I’m going to coin a new genre here: Storybook Strategy. A Storybook Strategy game is a strongly narrative-driven game that uses strategy battles to move a story forward. In the case of Valkyria Chronicles, the term applies literally since rather than a world map or other device, you literally move through the game via a book.

The book tells the story of the small country of Gallia, caught between two super-powers in an alternate-world World War II (called the Second Europa War here). The Empire in East are the ‘bad guys’ while the Federation to the West are…well, less bad anyway. The Empire were the initial aggressors. Gallia sits on the coast of the North Sea roughly where Estonia and Latvia are in our world (geography isn’t exactly the same as the real world) but the little country feels more western than that. At the start of the story, the Empire is invading Gallia to get at the Ragnite that lies unmined under Gallian soil. (Ragnite, in this world, is the chief energy source; kind of oil and coal and dynamite — even medicine — wrapped into one resource.) The story revolves around Squad 7, a rag-tag militia squad doing their best to contribute to the defense of their country.

Anyway, back to the book, which looks like a richly illustrated history book, where each illustration or map triggers a cut-scene or battle (the actual text surrounding these panels isn’t readable). So you turn pages and work your way through chapters uncovering the story via cut-scene, and moving things along by winning battles. The ‘watercolor’ art style is very bright and peppy, but already there are some dark themes manifesting. The Empire has no qualms about killing civilians, even shooting them in the back as they flee. And among your squad there are issues of extreme racism and hate between members. Quite different from the usual “Good guys are GOOD” angle that most games take.

In Part 2 of my First Look, I’ll get into the RPG aspects of the game, which are fairly unique in a number of ways. I know that “linear” is a bad-word in the gaming nomenclature, but I really enjoy a linear game if it tells a compelling story, and so far Valkyria Chronicles’ story has me hooked.

Giantslayer

Posted on by Nimgimli

Giantslayer is the last Gotrek & Felix book written by William King before he handed off the series to Nathan Long. Reports are that Long really stumbles with our mighty duo of Gotrek the Dwarf Slayer and Felix the Warrior-Scholar, but sadly I found that King did some stumbling of his own.

After the wonderful Omnibus Volume. 2 I was really excited to dive into Giantslayer and find out who the Giant is and how the duo will slay it. And as with all series books, the first few chapters felt like a ‘warm up’ to the real action. So I dutifully slogged through them, and after a few nights of reading I started to wonder when the action was going to heat up. And then I noticed I was two-thirds of the way through the book!

This one just never comes together as a Gotrek & Felix book; I suspect this was a story King wanted to tell and he just wedged the pair into it. They don’t even feel like main characters, and via a Deus Ex Machina device they’re not even in the Empire anymore. All their companions get left behind very early on and they’re just kind of adrift in a new (to them) world.

It’s true that as the title suggests, they’ll have to slay a giant, but that’s a side plot and the giant isn’t the main Foozle of the book. Gotrek (who, let’s face it, is a fairly ‘thin’ character at the best of times) is a total cardboard cut-out here, and I think his axe gets more attention than he does. He grumbles now and then (in a very predictable fashion) but otherwise is just swept along. Felix is handled a bit better and has some sub-plot ‘stubs’ but they’re never fleshed out and never come to anything.

The focus of the book is Teclis, a high-elf they meet early on in their adventures (giving Gotrek his single schtick throughout the book, grumbling about how much he hates and mistrusts elves). I’m a Warhammer novice so I don’t know for sure, but I suspect Teclis is a ‘known hero’ in the Warhammer universe. If I already knew about and liked Teclis, this novel might have been more interesting to me, but I signed on for Gotrek & Felix being mighty warriors, not to see them as often-ineffectual sidekicks to a potent elf mage.

The one saving grace is that some long-running plotlines get tied up here, but overall I kind of wish I’d finished my Gotrek & Felix adventure with the Second Omnibus. I can’t in good faith recommend Giantslayer unless you’re a fan of Teclis. Gotrek & Felix deserved a better final novel from William King.

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?

I wish you a Merry Christmas

Posted on by Nimgimli

Sorry the blog has been so empty lately, and when it hasn’t been empty it’s been depressing. I’ve had a couple of bad weeks, job wise, health wise (nothing serious there, just a miserable lingering cold) and personal wise. That’s left very little time/energy for gaming or blogging.

But today is Christmas Eve day, and when I leave work I won’t be back until Jan 5th, 2009! Woot! Plenty of time to de-stress, rest up, and play some games.

I actually don’t consider myself Christian but I do celebrate Christmas, not as a religious holiday but as a holiday of Good Will. I’ve been trying to keep up my Christmas Spirit over the past weeks, listening to carols and intending to watch Christmas specials (but never quite getting around to them)!

Tomorrow will be the first Christmas Angela and I spend together, and she’s surprised me by voicing the desire to do up a Christmas feast. My traditional Christmas dinner for the last few decades has been Chinese take out, in honor of A Christmas Story and since the last time I spent Christmas with someone was probably somewhere around 1993. My tradition (by choice, mind you) was to spend Christmas peacefully alone; a day to reflect on life and play some games. But tomorrow it’ll be Angela and I, accompanied by roast turkey, potatoes and all the fixins, or so I’m told. Woot! And a tree! And presents under it! It’s like I’m 8 again!

Anyway, the point I’m rambling towards is that I hope you all have a very nice holiday and I hope you’re all as fortunate as I am. Good food, warm shelter, and company you enjoy, even if it is only your own (nothing at all wrong with that). Merry Christmas, everyone!!

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.

Warden at last

Posted on by Nimgimli

I had planned to roll a Warden when Moria came out; I knew nothing about the class aside from the name when I made that decision. Visions of ‘friend of nature’ style gameplay and all that. Then when Moria finally launched, well, it seemed like *everyone* was rolling a Warden and I was playing 35 other games so I just let it slide, until tonight.

Look, I’m all of level four, but I’m going to join the chorus praising the class (which isn’t even remotely tree-huggerish, I might add). Or at least, Gambits (the gameplay system that comes with it). At level 4 I have 3 basic skills I’ve learned, each of them doing a different style of damage. As you string these types of damage together, you activate your “Gambit” skill. There are a bunch of Gambits, all triggered by 1 hotkey, and which Gambit triggers depends on the order of skills you’ve used.

Examples might help. Doing two “thrust” skills lets you do a gambit that just does extra damage. Doing two “shield block” skills lets you do a gambit that short-terms buffs your shield blocking. Doing a “thrust” then a “shield block” lets you do a gambit that does damage with a chance to stun. And so on. Apparently at higher levels you get gambit ‘strings’ of more than 2 skills.

The system isn’t totally unique: in a way its very similar to EQ2’s Heroic Opportunities, with two exceptions. First, as far as I can tell all Gambits are done ‘solo’ in that what the rest of your party is doing won’t impact your Gambit. Second and more importantly, the end effect isn’t random (EQ2’s Heroic Opportunities do involve the whole group and have randomness in their results.)

I can see the Warden being a class that is very powerful in the hands of a skilled player, and less so in the hands of a button masher. I suspect it’ll be a hard class to come back to after an extended break. As you learn more and more gambits and skills it’s going to take a lot of concentration to look ahead and determine what you’re going to want to do and then how to do it.

I’m looking forward to playing the class more. Again, I’m all of level four, so I very much welcome corrections from people who’ve gotten their Wardens to higher levels.

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.