Defiance is almost entirely about shooting stuff, and therefore the gear grind is almost entirely about the guns. So why then does it get gun progression so horribly wrong?
After the jump, this was my gun Continue reading →
Microsoft’s unlikely high-definition remaster of Age of Kings II is available today on Steam. It’s an interesting historical relic, but some genres stand the test of time better than others. I’m not sure I’d ever choose to play this over more recent RTSs. In theory, I love that there are walls. In practice, walls are always a tough balance to strike. I don’t get the sense that Age II fussed much with striking that balance. I also love the relic victory condition, whereby your monks can set out to collect all the relics on the map and ensconce them in a monastery for 200 years. I was particularly delighted when the AI did this, which meant I had to go kick over his monastery. It’s nice to have a compelling reason to do that sort of thing.
But the interface is killing me. For instance, is there really no attack move? Lord knows, I complained bitterly about the lack of attack move in Age III during the time that it was cut. If I’d known it was a tradition, I might have been a little more understanding. And can I not shift queue certain orders in Age II? If it’s an option, I haven’t figured it out yet. Once my villagers are done building a lumber yard, they then stand around it instead of going to chop trees like I thought I told them to do. And I don’t miss having to replant farms one whit.
But what really kills it for me is the pacing. So little happens for so long. Modern RTSs have worked wonders at dropping you into important decisions early on (Starcraft II) or at least giving you some engaging busywork before the important decisions come along (Age of Empires III). If I wanted a drawn-out build up, I’d play a turn-based game! I love that Microsoft has made this game available again for hardcore retro RTS fans. But I’m afraid I’m not a hardcore retro RTS fan.
From the screenshots, you might mistake Sang-froid: Tales of Werewolves for an action game. You can play it that way, but you’ll discover a not very good action game. You’ll get through a few early missions easily enough. But you’re Doing It Wrong. This isn’t an action game. It’s barely even a real time strategy game. This is mostly a cerebral strategy game about studying a map, considering your resources, setting up traps, and then executing your plan carefully. If you’re flailing around with your axe, it’s because plans A, B, and C have failed. Sang-froid has more in common with the early Rainbow Six games than with the typical tower defense game.
Also, there are wolves. Sang-froid has a lot of wolves.
After the jump, good moon rising Continue reading →
This week, the French studio that made the Trackmania games releases Shootmania Storm. As much as I’d like to commend the community support and wild track construction that made Trackmania stand out, I don’t see how that’s supposed to work for an online multiplayer shooter that looks like pretty much any other generic shooter since Unreal Tournament. The only other threat to your wallet this week is a map pack for Halo 4. I nearly fell asleep while typing that.
This week we see the R-rated, CG-less, soul-swallowing, horror reboot, Evil Dead. At the 54-minute mark, this week’s 3×3 is about smoke.
Next week: The Place beyond the Pines
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I remember hearing an odd sound in the wind at certain points in Tomb Raider, as if the wind was blowing over broken glass pipes, as if someone was running a wetted finger along the rim of a wineglass. It sounded almost like stringed instruments playing a single keening note, but very faintly. It was off somehow, unresolved, eerie. It didn’t belong. It might have even been a music cue. So much of Tomb Raider’s music is subtle.
And what I most remember about that sound is that I’d heard it before. It was from some other movie or game. Where did I hear that? I couldn’t figure it out. Until today.
After the jump, mystery solved Continue reading →
And the results are in for the Nemo’s War Tom vs Bruce, in which me and Bruce Geryk played a year in the life of Captain Nemo. The graphics (pictured) may not look like much, but the soundtrack is amazing. The game starts here.
When you die in Defiance, you can rez yourself every so often. If you’ve self-rezzed recently, then other players can rez you so you don’t lose any of your spacebucks. It’s very forgiving. Death is a non-event, partly because it happens so rarely and partly because it doesn’t matter one whit when it happens. Basically, if you have any questions about how Defiance works, just imagine Borderlands as an MMO without a subscription fee and without Gearbox’s loving care.
So there I am, doing one of the story missions alongside the creepy Grant Bowler character model (pictured), fighting more of those bugs — there are only about two or three kinds of things you shoot in the first 20 hours of Defiance — and I get killed. I’m crawling around on the ground, bleeding out, my vision fading. And there’s Grant Bowler. Grant Bowler played Richard Burton next to Lindsey Lohan’s Elizabeth Taylor. Grant Bowler played Randian hero slash steel baron Hank Rearden in the Atlas Shrugged movie that no one saw. Grant Bowler played someone named “Cooter” in True Blood. And now Grant Bowler is standing on top of me, plinking away at bugs, not rezzing me. I bleed out and die and have to pay 180 spacebucks to rez myself.
In Gears of War: Judgement, even Colonel Loomis, the a-hole officer who all but twirls his mustache as he court-martials the pluckily heroic gears, will rez you during the last mission. But Grant Bowler? He can’t be bothered. Thanks, Grant. I hope you’re more helpful to your companions on the Defiance TV show, which starts next week.
The more important thing I learned in the Defiance game is that you can make an entire open world around shooting a gun and not much else. As long as there’s enough shooter, and enough guns, you don’t really need anything else. Defiance is, in many ways, an absolutely miserable half-assed amateurish attempt at game design that I can’t stop playing.
The remarkable thing about the Battleblock Theater trailer is that it does nothing to make me want to play the game — egad, that looks like a lot of pointless jumping about — but it’s nevertheless hilarious. It makes me want to get the game on goodwill for the trailer alone.
Of course, I already want to get the game because developer Behemoth amply proved themselves with Castle Crashers, so the trailer’s effectiveness is redundant.
Tom Chick, Nick Diamon, and Jason “It’s a-me, Luigi!” McMaster discuss whether the marketing for Bioshock Infinite hurt some of the sense of discovery. If you’ve seen the trailers and read the previews, don’t worry about spoilers. And if you haven’t, Tom Chick From the Future shows up to tell you how to skip past spoilers. We also talk about the death of LucasArts, the potential death of id, the ongoing life of Castle Crashers developer Behemoth, the multiplayer delights of Luigi’s Mansion, the non-delights of a new game about depression, and something vaguely French called Sang-Froid: A Tale of Werewolves.
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One of the reasons I love GDC is that it’s a forum for the most valuable voices and the least heard voices in the conversation about videogames: the developers who make them, who struggle with how to make them better, and who see first-hand the violence when ideas meet execution. For instance, this important observation about Bioshock Infinite’s opening comes from someone who makes videogames:
When I reach the second floor of the lighthouse, I am supposed to have a moment there. A moment of shock, I assume. A tortured man, apparently dead, is sitting in a chair. But my first thought is…
“Oooh shiny!”
Because when you enter the room with the corpse, two big shiny coins are winking at you from the nearby table. The table right next to the corpse.
Adrian Chmielarz neatly dissects how Bioshock Infinite is a brilliant exercise in storytelling, but a disappointing world design, especially compared to its predecessors. And it’s particularly apt coming from Mr. Chmielarz, whose Painkiller is a brilliant exercise in good game design, and an absolute non-entity when it comes to world design. You can — and should — read his comments here.
“I beg you, game,” he asks, “please do not reward me for not doing the right thing and for doing the silly thing of playing the game instead of behaving like I am in a different world.” When this happens in God of War: Ascension — walk to places the camera doesn’t show to find treasure — it’s no great loss. But when this happens in a narrative powerhouse like Bioshock Infinite, or Deus Ex, or Mass Effect, the damage done is considerable. Eating cotton candy out of the trash is no big deal in a Mario game. Doing it in front of Elizabeth just feels weird.
I wish more people who made videogames also talked publicly and frankly about videogames other than the ones they’re making.
(Thanks, Edge!)
Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, which might be one of the shrewdest indie stratey games I’ve played since Atom Zombie Smasher, comes out this Friday. The game was supposedly created by a Canadian studio. Supposedly.
After the jump, I have my doubts. Continue reading →
An upcoming 1.08 update for Diablo III — there’s no ETA yet, but it’s available now on the pubic test servers — will recalculate the value of co-op sessions by providing an incentive to team up with other players: extra experience points! This will presumably make up for the inherent inefficiency of multiple players not being able to get their acts together. From technical designer Wyatt Cheng’s developer journal entry:
We’re still working on the details of what that buff is going to be, but at the moment we’re looking at 10% more XP per extra player in the game for a maximum bonus of 30% more XP in a 4-player game. This bonus will be multiplicative with MP bonuses. For example: suppose you are playing on MP10 with an XP bonus in Inferno of 510%. This means a monster is worth 610% of its normal XP (510% more). If you are playing in a 4-player game the monster will be worth 793% as much XP as normal. On top of this, you will also earn a flat 10% Gold Find and 10% Magic Find for each additional player in the game, and this bonus can exceed the 300% Gold Find and Magic Find caps.
Furthermore, when I’ve found something worth attacking, folks will know even though they’re back in town breaking down their blues with Haedrig.
Starting in 1.0.8, when a player deals damage to or takes damage from an Elite pack or Treasure Goblin for the first time, a notification will be sent out to the entire party to let your teammates know what you’ve found. This will be accompanied by a “combat” icon on the mini-map so other players in your group can locate those enemies. On top of that, we’re also going to put a combat icon over your banner in town. This way, players who are in town will know that you’re fighting an Elite pack or Treasure Goblin and be able to quickly determine whose banner to take to get right into the action.
I’d love to check out Defiance, but until they let me invert my mouse, I can’t hit anything. That’s not a good problem to have in a shooter.
In what might be one of the oddest launch bugs I’ve ever seen, Defiance apparently won’t let you change any settings if you’re using a monitor that runs at a refresh rate higher than 100Mhz, even if you drop the refresh rate. As soon as I try to access the settings screen, the game drops to the desktop. I can’t rebind keys, change graphics settings, or invert my mouse as God intended. I mean, seriously, who pushes up to look up? What is this, a desktop cursor?
The latest Tom vs Bruce has just gone live. The game is a solitaire boardgame called Nemo’s War.
…games tell the best stories when they don’t overtly try to tell any story at all, and cushions it with the background of a great story you can conjure up in your mind any time you want, which is Verne’s book about a mysterious captain who travels the seas in a futuristic submarine and has adventures while pretty much being a badass.
Part one is available here, with parts two and three tomorrow and Thursday. May the best Nemo win!
