Update: EA is now promising a free game to everyone who has activated their game by March 18th. At least that’s how I’m reading it. Details here. It’s not as good as a refund but it’s at least an acknowledgement that they screwed up and owe their customers something.
According to a post on CNET Amazon is making an exception to their normal “no refunds for digital content” policy in the case of SimCity.
Leave it to Amazon to show EA how it’s done, though. You’re in luck if you ordered a digital version of SimCity through Amazon and want to return the game. CNET spoke to an Amazon customer service representative who said the company currently allows refunds of the digital download of SimCity, which actually goes against company policy, but the massive influx of refund inquiries left Amazon with little choice. This move follows Amazon’s temporary closure of SimCity digital download sales yesterday, which lasted for nearly half a day — Amazon now sells the game again but warns users about server stability problems.
At the time of this writing, consumers posted over 1,500 reviews of SimCity on Amazon; over 1,350 of those reviews contained very critical comments and rated the game as one star, the lowest rating possible.
The Amazon rep indicated that the green light for refunds of the SimCity download could end at any point. “People are pretty upset [about SimCity],” said the rep, who has worked with Amazon for several years. “I haven’t seen anything like this before, even when people were upset with Diablo III.”
(Emphasis mine.)
If you purchased from Origin, your only recourse is to ride out the server storm and wait for things to settle. It can’t be much longer at this point.
Closing comments because this really is just an info share. I’m way sick and tired of arguing about this launch.
I’m excited about the SyFy show Defiance, coming in April. And I’m excited about the Trion game of the same name. I can’t talk a lot about why due to an NDA but I have been in a beta weekend and I’ll leave it at that. I have the game pre-ordered.
But today came news that is giving me second thoughts.
Defiance is an MMO shooter. It costs $60 but has no subscription fee. All indications are that it’ll have some kind of cash shop. I’m basing this on the fact that pre-ordering Deluxe versions get you bonus items like
+5 Increased inventory space
30-Day scrip boost
30-Day XP boost
Those sound like things you’ll be able to buy in the cash shop, don’t they? And that’s fair… with no sub fee Trion and SyFy need some way to pay for keeping the servers up, right?
But all along we’ve heard a ton about ‘transmedia’ and how events might start in the TV show and end in the game, or vice versa. That suggests an ongoing stream of new content in the game based on advances in the TV show. I was pretty excited about seeing how that works out.
Today however, we got word of a Season Pass for DLC. $40 gets you the first 5 DLC packages. Here’s what they say about DLC:
Join the fight and save big on 5 DLC packs with the Defiance Season Pass. Enjoy a new playable alien species, new weapons and vehicles, missions, and rewards – plus a bonus Hellbug Combat Cap and Lock Box – a 20% savings!* This is the ultimate package for the true Ark Hunter!
And now I’m concerned. If we’re getting new missions and species via DLC, does that mean all this ‘transmedia’ stuff is going to be in the DLC that we have to pay for? At that point, isn’t this just a subscription, basically? If you watch the show and some big event happens and then you log into the game and find out to access this new content you have to pay $10 for the DLC to get it… I mean it isn’t literally a subscription… you could just skip out on that new content. But the transmedia aspect is one of the unique things that Defiance is bringing to the table.
Now, let’s be fair. It might be that there will be plenty of new content dished out in addition to the DLC, and if that’s the case I’ll be less concerned. But right now it isn’t clear.
I think Trion needs to be a lot more transparent about what sorts of content we will get outside of paid DLC, and exactly what that $40 is going to get us.
$60 box price (standard edition) + $40 Season Pass + cash shop to upgrade things like inventory slots… suddenly Defiance is sounding pretty damned expensive.
In general we gamers need to make more noise about this kind of thing. Publishers urge us to pre-order or buy season passes and they often are very light on the details about what exactly we’re paying for. Even looking up at that list above… +5 Inventory Slots. What does that mean? Does a basic account have 100 slots, in which case +5 is a mere 5% bonus? Or does a basic account have 5 slots, in which case +5 is a 100% bonus. We don’t know, but we’re supposed to trust the publishers and pre-order anyway.
Publishers: If you have faith in your game, give us all the information we need in order to make informed decisions.
Of course as I said, I’ve pre-ordered… so clearly I am part of the problem.
I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line I hit a point where all my gaming was being tracked by someone, somewhere. If I played an Xbox game, my Xbox Live friends knew it. If I played a PS3 or Vita title, my PSN friends knew. On the PC, Steam and Raptr both paid attention to what I was playing and let my friends know.
But when I start playing a 3DS game it’s like I drop off the radar. Sure, I have exchanged Friend Codes with some of my 3DS owning friends but Nintendo kind of shuffles the Friends stuff off to the side. I do think I can see when a friend is online but I don’t think I can see what they’re playing. I’m not 100% positive though since it’s so cumbersome to check that I’ve never bothered to do so.
All of which is just a rambling waste of space before sharing the fact that I’m still playing Fire Emblem: Awakening and still loving it. I’m moving through the story very slowly and spending a lot of time leveling up my troops via bringing in Bonus Armies and fighting on DLC maps. I realize it’s only March but Fire Emblem is an early contender for my personal game of the year. If you have any interest at all in strategy-RPGs, get this game, even if it means buying a 3DS to play it on. Yup, it is a system seller, in my opinion.
I’m still poking at Ni No Kuni too. I sometimes let it sit for as much as a week before I go back in and grind a little bit more. It’s such an un-even game. Long passages of mindlessly grinding mobs followed by short bursts of interesting boss battles. I seem to remember there was some kind of a story but it’s dished out in such tiny, infrequent morsels that I kind of forget what it was all about. Probably if I could stomach boring grinding night after night I’d remember.
I’m not against grinding, really. I’m grinding in Fire Emblem honestly. The different is that Fire Emblem has a combat system that makes grinding fun, while Ni No Kuni has a combat system that just feels sloppy and imprecise to me. Most of the time spent in grinding battles is taken up in getting into and out of the battle system. The actual fights take seconds and usually I just spam the attack key until everything falls down. Mana potions are so expensive that I rarely use magic unless I’m right outside town (so I can hit the Inn and recharge my mana).
Part of this is my own fault. I switch up Familiars too often so now my characters are in their 30s but my highest level familiars are closer to 20, which means I have a lot of work to do catching them up. And random mobs tend to run away now which adds to my frustration.
But I’m going to keep soldiering on! I’m determined not to give up on this game!
I just wanted to follow up on something I got completely wrong on my last post about Sword of the Stars: The Pit.
I griped about not knowing what statistic impacts which skills. I was looking for some kind of textual pop-up menu or something to explain this to me, but developer Kerberos Productions reached out to me on Twitter to point out I wasn’t seeing what was right in front of my face. Stats and skills each have an icon that indicates how they’re connected. I’ve highlighted the column of icons in this screenshot.
Turns out I was way off! Next time I dive into The Pit I’ll be better prepared!
When a game contains “Sword of the Stars” in the title, the first thing you think of is space, right? Ships and planets and mining and tech upgrades…SotS is an established space-based 4X IP.
So the first thing I have to tell you about Sword of the Stars: The Pit is to forget all about that. The Pit is actually a sci-fi based roguelike. It is set in the SotS universe, but don’t worry if you’ve never played those games (disclaimer: I haven’t… crazy right?); that’s all just for flavor. The story, if you must know, is that a plague is turning the entire population of a planet into ghouls and the only hope for a cure lies at the bottom of a fabled pit in the Feldspar Mountains where the Suul’ka (I guess if you’re a SotS player you know who the Suul’ka are) once had a base.
So off you go, you brave Scout or Marine or Engineer you, to delve deep in an attempt to find the cure.
This is an old school rogue game. Turn-based combat, random effects on consumables, permadeath (actually I haven’t died yet but I’m assuming it has permadeath) and a constant tension between your two primary resources: health and food. Health slowly regenerates over time, but as it does, hunger grows, and food is scare in the pit.
If you don’t like Roguelikes, stop here. There’s nothing about The Pit that is going to change your mind. If you do like them, read on.
The Pit has a ton of stuff in it. You’re constantly scrounging resources and finding machines that you can use to craft those resources into something usable, in theory. Your first problem (besides all the beasties and bots that want to end you) is that many of these machines are damaged. Luckily you have a chance to repair them. I’ve been playing a Scout and she’s not great at repairing these things and more often than not they go from “Damaged” to “Ruined” when she tries. I suspect the Engineer is better at this, and I fear the Marine is probably damned near hopeless.
Which brings me immediately to my biggest gripe with The Pit. Your stats are never explained. You can guess that Strength influences melee attacks. Brains probably helps with all the crafting skills, which leaves Finesse to control how accurate you are. But I’m just guessing and I’d like to know for sure. Update: I got this bit completely wrong. See this post for details but the short version is that stats and skills all have icons to indicate how they are inter-connected.
Same with Skills. Does the Melee skill only influence bare-fisted punching, or does it also enhance the Knife and Blade skills. Speaking of which, what’s the different between “Knife” and “Blade” anyway? I was ‘born’ with a Knife..maybe there are swords in the game only I haven’t found one yet?
Not a deal breaker but it’d be nice to know this stuff.
I like a good Roguelike and so far I’m liking The Pit an awful lot. I’ve only gotten down to level 7 (of 30) and my Scout is level 6, and I’m playing on Normal level (2nd of 4 in increasing order of difficulty). The first couple of levels were a little easy but I still had my moments.
There’s nothing quite like the heartache of having your weapons and armor damaged badly, finding a broken repair station and, in attempting to bring it online, ruining it completely. After that happened I took to using my fists on a lot of the easier enemies since I’ve only got this one knife and if it breaks I’m screwed. I do have a couple of pistols of course, and so far ammo isn’t a huge concern, but as a roguelike player, your instinct is to hoard things.
Like grenades. I was hoarding every frag grenade I found. Then I stepped on a trap that destroyed my entire supply of frag grenades? Fiendish! What kind of evil mind came up with that? Stranger still, some traps have beneficial effects, like speed boosts or even heals.
For the more ‘serious’ roguelike players, there might actually be too much stuff going on. You have to collect or discover recipes to craft with (I’m guessing those are the same from game to game) and in addition to the potions with random effects that most roguelikes have (here called serums) there are bio mods for both weapons and armor that likewise have random effects. In my game so far I’ve consumed a purple serum that knocked my Brain stat down two points permanently, a black armor bio mod that bumped up the armor rating of a piece of gear by 10%, and a black weapon bio mode that improved the weapon’s durability by 20%.
A few aspects do set The Pit apart from the other roguelikes I’ve played. First, when you level (at least on Normal difficulty) your health returns to 100%. That makes things a lot easier. Every time you level you also get points to use to increase your main attributes (Strength, Precision, Brains) and your many skills.
Second, the game incorporates a field of view mechanic. Monsters can sneak up on you if they approach from your blind spot (which is fairly small). The tried old roguelike mechanic of running away gets more tense when you can’t see if the monster is still chasing you, and if it’s gaining on you!
If I’ve piqued your interest, there’s a six level demo that you can try out, or if you want to jump right in, the game is only $8.99 on GamersGate. That’s an introductory price that’s good for a week. After that it’ll be $9.99.
Oh, and there’s a tutorial that’ll teach you how to play. It features an annoyingly abrasive ‘drill sargent’ and mostly you won’t need it to learn how to play, but it does give you a glimpse of what you can expect as you venture deeper into The Pit. The first couple levels are pretty basic.
A few tips:
C brings up the stat page
Escape aborts rest mode
Hey, I tried making a video… this is the first time I’ve every tried to narrate a game I’m playing and I had both technical and performance problems (turns out I don’t multi-task well) but dammit, I made it, I’m gonna post it!
I was really looking forward to the release of Fire Emblem: Awakening and so far I haven’t been the least bit disappointed. I’m loving it!
This time out Fire Emblem has two modes: Classic and Casual. In Classic mode, any unit that is killed in battle is gone for good (unless it’s one of the main two characters in which case it’s Game Over). In Casual mode, they’re just out for the battle and bounce back up after you win. I first started playing in Classic mode but got to a point where I couldn’t get through a fight without losing a ‘major’ character. I thought I’d spread my experience around too thin and that I didn’t have a powerful enough party to get through the next fight, so I decided to start over.
And in so doing, I decided to go with Casual Mode. I knew if I picked Classic mode and got in the same jam and had to start over a third time, I probably wouldn’t. So I restarted, got to the same point as in my Classic game and beat the battle I was stuck on, even though my characters were about the same level.
So then I went back to my Classic game, tried one more time, and got through the battle without losing anyone. So now I have 2 games running concurrently, which makes me feel a bit more brave about my Classic game. I decided I’m going to move forward with it and if a character dies, he or she dies. No more bailing out on a game because a soldier has fallen.
But I can’t just let them die without commemorating them in some way…but that’s what my blog is for!
He shouldn’t have been with us. Chrom had ordered him to stay back at Headquarters to guard it, but young Ricken had other plans. When we accompanied the Exalt to confront the King of Plegia, Ricken secretly followed us, and it was a good thing he did. It was Ricken who rescued Mirabelle, though in truth we nearly lost them both, cut off as they were. But our forces prevailed, the Plegians routed, and we headed home.
Had we only stayed true to our path.
Instead we wandered the countryside a bit, visiting shops in an attempt to restock our gear. It was while doing this that we came upon a Merchant Caravan being attacked by Barbarians. We rushed in to help. It was a chaotic battle, with some of our troops headed to the entrance of a nearby village to help a lone defender and others picking off straggler Barbarians in preparation for confronting their boss. In all the confusion, Ricken paused for a rest within range of several enemy archers. They skirted past our armored defenders and peppered him with arrows. Tragically, Ricken fell. The archers paid the ultimate price but alas, that won’t bring Ricken back. His youthful enthusiasm will be missed.
At least the village, and the mysterious woman who was defending it, were both saved. Ricken would be pleased to know that much, at least.
Your sacrifice will be remembered, Ricken! You were the first of us to fall but I fear you will not be the last. We have a long and bloody war ahead of us.
I’m still messing around with LeapDay and learning a little more all the time. The goal, as developer Danc pointed out in the comments to my last post, is to save the land from evil ghosts. In order to do that you have to (as step 1 anyway) defrost towers and then deliver a specific item to them. I’ve gotten a tower defrosted and found it needed Polished Gems, made with 1 water, 1 stone, and 1 wildcard (anything as the 3rd component).
I set up a track and a factory to build polished gems easily enough but actually getting the gems to the tower is going to be a bigger challenge. The Flans that travel the roads will pick up any resource they walk past. So I can’t run this deliver road past anything but the factory pick-up spot and the tower where I’m delivering the gems. Otherwise the Flan will pick up some other resource and just circle around with it endlessly (the tower will only accept Polished Gems). I solved this issue with an elaborate series of 3 cranes, as shown here (you might want to click to get the full sized version):
The problem now is I need 5 houses (at least) to spawn Flans. 1 for the Polished Gem making track, one for the delivery track, and one each for all 3 of those little 1 square sections of road (these will span a Flan who just sits in one place accepting a Polished Gem from one crane and passing it along to the next crane, I hope.
Sadly I don’t have the $$ to do that yet so I have to put my project on hold until later tonight. I still have really big questions around whether or not I’ll get a Polished Gem to that tower before the day runs out. I might have to add additional Flans to the builder track and/or upgrade from the cheap dirt roads to faster stone ones.
What a compelling game… you really need to try it. But be prepared to do a lot of thinking and trial and error when you do. For instance you might wonder why I don’t move the factory closer to the Tower. If I did that I’d pass more water resources and would be in danger of getting 3 water in my factory which would then produce (I think) a barrel of water, which the delivery system would hand off to the delivery Flan and the tower wouldn’t accept, thus gumming up the whole works.
Things I learned:
After your first game (which takes 4 days of real time) you’ll unlock trains and train tracks.
This is 100% a co-operative game. You and the other 7 people on your map all win or you all lose. There’s no ‘score’ to compare yourself to other players so there’s no incentive to trying to ‘beat out’ the other guy. Quite the contrary.
Let’s get one thing clear. I don’t know squat about LeapDay, a game from SpryFox that entered beta this week. I spent maybe 45 minutes figuring it out before I knew I had to share it with my friends.
LeapDay is a browser-based game that tasks you with gathering resources by way of laying down little tracks that your vaguely Gumdrop-shaped workers will follow. As a worker passes a resource he grabs a chunk of it. When he finds a place to put it, he drops it. That place could be your HQ (in which case you’ll get some gold) or a factory. When a factory fills up with resources it generates another, presumably more valuable resource. At that point you need a worker to come past the factory and pick up this more valuable resource to deliver somewhere.
That’s the basic gameplay. I’m not clear what the ultimate goal is… I know I was playing on a map with 7 other people and we had 3 days to beat a boss or unlock a final item or something. I was fixated on the basics, frankly. So before I go any farther, here’s LeadDay in action. Remember I’m still a noob and only have a few tools and a small amount to space to work in:
Every day your workers leave their little houses and start following their tracks and doing their thing. When night comes along they despawn, and resources all renew. Soon enough it’s morning and things start again. As items make it to HQ your town generates gold that you can spend on creating new loops to collect more resources. Your town will collect $$ even when you’re not playing, so there’s a bit of ‘time management’ gameplay here too. Eventually you’ll be able to buy towers that expand your usable area (I have one right next to the crane). I’m not sure what happens when you connect your playable area with another players; perhaps your tracks can mingle.
Here’s a crappy screenshot identifying a few parts of my ‘town.’ Sorry I didn’t do a better job with this… I wasn’t planning on using it for a blog post when I created it. Click through for the full size version:
For as cute as it is, I’m finding LeapDay pretty hard. Your workers only turn to the right and available space is cramped. If a track is too long the worker won’t make many circuits before the day ends. If it’s too short the worker might clear out all resources and just be running in circles doing nothing. The nice thing is you can sell parts back for full value so trial-and-error is definitely encouraged (though I do wish you could just move an item rather than selling it and re-purchasing it to place it in a new spot).
In that screenshot my main loop up top drops 4 workers (1 per house) into the track that feeds the factory. You can see all 4 going past the factor as I snapped the shot. The first two have dropped water in the first 2 factory slots. In a second the 3rd worker will also drop water into the last slot and the factory will generate an item. That lone worker on the loop to the right will come around and pick up that finished item and carry it to the HQ. Over on the left is a loop where a worker is feeding the main loop via a crane. Eventually the 4 workers will exhaust their resources and they’ll need more. The crane helps feed them. Towards the bottom right are 2 tracks that are just gathering basic resources and taking them to the HQ. Nothing fancy there.
As you can see my space is pretty cramped and it’s going to be hard for me to get more tracks to run next to the HQ in order to feed items into it.
Anyway, it’s a nifty game. It runs in a browser (you’ll need the Unity plugin) and is free to play. It won’t be for everyone, but it’s unlike anything I’ve played in recent memory and is definitely worth checking out, IMO.
The Level-5/Studio Ghibli collaboration Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, has been out for a week as of today. It’s been my main gaming focus since it arrived last Tuesday evening and I thought it was time to share some thoughts. I’ll try to avoid any major spoilers but you may be able to work out when certain game systems unlock. I’ll try to stay as vague as possible. As of last night my main character was around level 20 and I’m somewhere in the 15-20 hour range.
When I first booted up Ni No Kuni my jaw dropped. It is a gorgeous game with a killer soundtrack. Early on in the game you get lots of FMV cut-scenes animated by Studio Ghibli and it feels like you’re playing an anime. I’m using the English voice talent and they’ve been pretty good so far. Little Oliver (the main character) shouts “NEATO!” a bit too often for my tastes but that’s really nit-picking. For the first evening I played Angela was happy to sit next to me and just watch the game. It’s one of those kinds of experiences.
Sadly that richness doesn’t last and pretty soon you’re in a typical (though still beautiful) JRPG, running from battle to battle to level everyone up. The FMV stuff takes a back seat to button-press driven text conversations. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: this is a game, not a movie after all. But personally I could use a bit more animation.
Ni No Kuni is filled with lore, much of it delivered via an in-game manual called The Wizard’s Companion. In addition to practical information about the game world it has a ton of ‘flavor’ info including some fables from this land. I’ve really enjoyed browsing through the Companion and I even took the time to decipher some of the runes sprinkled through it (yes, the Ni No Kuni designers went so far as to develop an alphabet for this world). For gameplay questions you can turn to The Answering Stone which helps you out with questions you have about the actual game mechanics. So much more fun than just a plain help menu.
The main focus of Ni No Kuni is collecting and developing Familiars. The main character, Oliver (you can re-name him if you like) is a young boy who (so far at least) always uses a wand. In practice most of the time you’ll be controlling one of the many Familiars that he can take into battle. These creatures cover all kinds of play styles; your first one is a sword and board fighter for instance. Others lean towards magic using, either offensive, support, or healing. Human characters like Oliver (and the friends he eventually makes) can ‘equip’ up to 3 Familiars each. A few more can be carried in inventory and swapped out between battles. Finally there’s a Familiar Shelter that can hold up to 400 (!) of the creatures.
A Familiar can be customized/progressed in several ways. First they level up and gain new abilities. At certain times they can metamorph into a new form by using an item. From Form 1 to Form 2 is a fixed change, but from Form 2 you can choose from two versions of Form 3 (I haven’t gotten this far yet). When a Familiar changes forms he returns to level 1 and has to be re-leveled but he is potentially more powerful. You can also feed a familiar Treats to improved specific stats. Ice Cream might increase magic defense while chocolate increases physical offense, for example. There seems to be a limit of +10 points in this stat buffing system. [Update: Thanks to Wiqd for pointing out that this limit is tied to a Familiar’s Familiarity rating with you… it can go higher once you’re better frineds with them.] And finally, Familiars can be given gear to improve their abilities. Some use Swords, others use Fangs or Claws. Some use Shield and some used Cloaks…and so on.
In practice what this all boils down to is lots and lots of leveling. I generally have 2 Familiars equipped to fight with and one per/character that is along for the ride getting free experience and it isn’t unusual for someone or something to be leveling up after every battle. In general I like leveling characters, thank goodness.
The problem, for me, is that I’m not finding the combat all that satisfying and as is typical in an JRPG there’s a LOT of combat. During a fight you can control one entity. That can be Oliver or one of his friends, or it can be a Familiar. Only 1 Familiar per character can be on the battlefield at a time, and the human characters share their health and mana pools with their Familiars. I’m finding that the mana pools are pretty small which means I’m doing a lot of melee combat and mostly just clicking Attack over and over for random battles.
Boss Fights are much more interesting. They go on for long enough that you’ll have to swap out Familiars (they get tired as a battle rages on) or pop onto your Human characters to use items. However I find the whole process of changing characters to be kind of awkward and in general the battle system feels more frantic than I’d like. I don’t mind action-combat and I don’t mind turn-based combat but Ni No Kuni feels like “frantic menu selection” combat that just leaves me feeling kind of frazzled.
Once you have a 2nd human character in your party you can assign tactics to the AI. These are fairly ‘coarse’ assignments and the AI isn’t at all smart about conserving resources. So if you tell a friend “Keep us Healed” that friend will spam heals and be out of mana in no time. I really miss being able to say, y’know, “If my health drops below 50% heal me.” You can change tactics in the middle of a battle but it takes a long time to do and means you’ll miss at least one attack in doing so.
So yeah, this isn’t my favorite combat system ever. I don’t hate it, but it’s not my favorite. And there’s a lot of combat. So that’s wearing on me a little, but I think there’s more that’s bothering me about Ni No Kuni.
Part of it is Oliver. When I play an RPG in some sense I’m always trying to RP the main character. But Oliver is a 10 year old boy and there’s not a lot in him for me to relate to. So I remain an observer to the action. Also the Familiars are all very cute. If you find a bad-ass sword and give it to your familiar…he’ll still look very cute. His appearance doesn’t seem to change except when he advances in form. These aren’t faults with the game; they’re just aspects that don’t sit well with me, personally. I really like for a game to visually reflect my character’s advancing levels/bad-assitude.
The other issue I have is with pacing. After a brisk start the story just bogs down pretty quickly. There are a lot of side-quests you’ll want to do in order to level up your Familiars (and earn some perks for Oliver) but none of them are very compelling. There’s this heart system where you have to borrow some ’emotion’ from one character and give it to another (this guy needs courage, that gal has a ton of courage, let’s borrow some from her) which seems really cool at first but then you realize these are just FedEx quests really. The characters who have ‘heart’ to spare are indicated on the map so you just run and find the one who has the aspect you need, click through a conversation to get some goodness, and go dump it on the quest-giver. Other sidequests are of the Kill Ten Rats variety, or collect 5 pelts. You know the drill.
So that’s where I stand. After my first night of playing Ni No Kuni I probably would’ve called it a 9 or 10 out of 10 game, but after a week of playing I’m thinking it’s more of a 7 or so. It’s still a solid, lengthy JRPG with lots of leveling and sub-systems like Crafting (via Alchemy) and tweaking Familiars via treats. But while the game is beautiful to look at, there’s nothing really revolutionary here and the story is dribbled out to us at such a slow pace that it kind of loses impact.
I think part of my problem is I’m focusing on it too heavily. I think I need to mix in some other games while playing Ni No Kuni. That’s how I’ve been playing Harvest Moon and it’s helping me to really enjoy that game. Fire Emblem comes out next Tuesday and that might be just the ticket to breaking up the grindy parts of Ni No Kuni.
I’m surprised that Ni No Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch has been getting such awesome reviews, to be honest. I’m wondering if I’m the only one feeling slightly disappointed in it. I mean I really WANT to love it, and for a few days I was lying to myself about loving it, but the truth is that while I do absolutely like it, that’s as far as we go. Me & Ni No Kuni are just good friends. I have no regrets about buying the game but (unless things change in the latter parts of the game) it’s not going to end up in my list of all-time favorite games or my personal ‘game of the year’ awards or anything like that.
[Update: I just found out Defiance, which I reference as a free-to-play title in this post, is going to have a shelf price of $60. So scratch that one from the list.]
A recent experience has me wondering what the long-term impact of so many free-to-play games will have on the industry. Now to be fair I’m doing that thing where I assume my experience reflects that of most gamers, so keep that in mind while you read this post.
I’m a casual shooter fan. I don’t play many shooters; the last one I picked up was Halo 4 I guess. I don’t play them competitively. But every so often I get in the mood where I want to run around shooting stuff and seeing things explode. In Ye Olden Tymes that would’be meant heading to the game store and seeing what’s available.
Not any more.
Friday night I was in the Defiance stress test. There’s an NDA on that game but it’s no secret that it’s an MMO shooter. The stress test was only a few hours and when it finished I found myself still in the mood to shoot stuff. So on Saturday I patched up Firefall and I spent Saturday and Sunday having fun in that beta. Firefall is also an MMO shooter. It has PVP but I was doing PVE and co-op PVE activities in it while I played.
Monday came around and I decided to change things up and play Borderlands 2. I think it’s safe to call BL2 a good game. I’ve seen it on some ‘game of the year’ ballets and most people seem to like it. I like it too. But it costs $50-$60 (or did when it launched anyway).
If I had it all to do over again, I probably wouldn’t buy Borderlands 2 at that price. Now I have to tread gingerly here. BL2 is priced competitively in the traditional gaming space. Compared to Halo 4 or Call of Duty its pricing is perfect. I’m not trying to knock BL2 in any way.
But for a casual shooter fan like me, I can really get just as much fun out of free games like Firefall, Planetside 2, Defiance or maybe even Dust 514 as I can out of BL2.
For people who take their shooters seriously I’m sure this isn’t the case, but I wonder if there are enough serious shooter fans to support many big budget $60 games. It is my understanding (and I may be wrong) that game publishers need casual gamers to purchase their titles in order to thrive.
So in the future, how will these publishers lure in casuals like me? What are they going to offer me that I can’t get for free?
