Step Backwards part 2

One added note to my Step Backwards post regarding the Dungeons & Dragons Next playtest: consider Diablo 3's Barbarian, Monk, & Demon Hunter. All three of these classes feature some sort of resource generation & management system in addition to health, and none of them ever use a "basic attack" unless you're swapping abilities and get into a fight during the five second cooldown - an unlikely situation.

The D&D Next Fighter (and in my experience at PAX East, the Warlord too) has no resource management system. He attacks. Exciting.

Step Backwards

So I finally was able to download my D&D playtest kit (the Wizards of the Coast servers have, shockingly, been less reliable than the Diablo 3 servers), and I was heartily disappointed with what I saw.

In 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons (and probably earlier editions, but I haven't tried them), the non-magical classes had virtually nothing to do in combat except attack and move, and they certainly had little choice in attacks. One or two feats might give yoga  small added ability, but at the end of the day, you were still doing a basic attack every round (or, if you don't have to move far, a "full-round attack" and attack up to four times; whoop de doo!).

The fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons made several major changes from previous editions, but one that I absolutely loved was that basic attacks were deemphasized. Fighters & Barbarians have "powers" just like Wizards, with things to do in each round other than "attack". They might push an enemy with Tide of Iron, or shield an ally, or swap places with an enemy, or mark them to act like a taunt. Fighters & Wizards had the same number of abilities, so that neither class felt like the superior class.

In the recent play test, Fighters have lost their powers. This seems like a serious step backwards in game design. Fighters again feel like a second-tier class, with limited options in combat. They can't even properly "taunt" foes like you might expect the beefy armoured guy to do. This means that to properly make use of their high armour and hit points, the Dungeon Master needs to make monsters attack the Fighter, even though it's usually the better option to attack the Wizard & Cleric. The 4th edition Fighter had the ability to "mark" enemies to act as a taunt as well as shield his allies; the D&D Next Fighter can make basic attacks with his axe.

Seems like a step backward to me.

Exquisite

My dear, Carcassonne for iOS is absolutely exquisite on a retina display iPad.

So glad Diablo 3 requires an internet connection to play!

EDIT: This wouldn't be such a fucking pain if a queue or auto-reconnect option was implemented. Instead, I have to sit with Diablo 3 at the frontmost screen, pasting my password into the password box and hitting Enter. If I get Error 37, I hit Enter and re-paste. Error 35 leaves my password in the box, so if I paste my password, I have to delete it and paste again. So I have to sit at the login screen and actually read error messages to retry. What a fucking stupid system.

Wouldn't it work better to have a setup that automatically retries?

To be clear, I'm not blaming Blizzard for their server issues. Diablo 3 is a big fucking launch. That said, if the Eastern time zone players like myself had logged in at 12:00AM Eastern rather than 3AM Pacific, maybe the servers would have been hammered less.

But like I said, it's not the server issues that bother me, it's the shitty system to begin with. I shouldn't need to log in to Battle.net to play with my girlfriend in the same room, and I shouldn't have to slave myself to the Diablo 3 login screen; just drop me in a queue or have an auto-reconnect option like most games with server lists (see BF3, Team Fortress 2, etc). This isn't new: it's been done before, I see no reason why it can be done again.

Draw Something Losing Players - The End Is Nigh?

Over the past day or so many of my RSS feeds have been lighting up with the shocking news that Draw Something seems to be in a bit of a decline (source: Destructoid).

To be honest, I'm really not sure why people are surprised about this. Don't take that as an insult on Draw Something - despite the app being atrocious from an iOS design perspective, the core gameplay is brilliant.

The issue with Draw Something is that it doesn't raise the stakes or provide fresh gameplay. While the list of words is getting larger all the time, that's not the real problem: the main issue is that after 100ish drawings, most people find they've drawn enough.

I got heavily into Draw Something in mid-March despite my inability to draw anything more complicated than stick figures, but after about two weeks, I stopped completely. I had drawn well over 200 sketches and guessed approximately the same amount. And I realized something: I had gotten what I wanted out of Draw Something. I had drawn something - many things, in fact. The game wasn't getting more difficult, or presenting me with more interesting drawing challenges. I certainly wasn't getting better at drawing. So why should I play more Draw Something, when I could play a new game instead?

Almost every game we enjoy provides some sort of progression. Angry Birds gets more difficult. Super Mario presents weirder levels. You unlock more weapons in Battlefield. Even for games without a progression model, you can at least progress in your level of skill & talent. I'm much better at Scrabble now than I was five years ago.

In the case of Draw Something, it presents users with all of the possibilities right out of the gate, and most people don't really get better at sketching, because the app rewards simplistic sketches with few colours. And of course they're drawn with fingertips on a 4 inch screen. A small segment of the population can draw totally awesome stuff but most people sketch the bare minimum needed to make a sketch recognizable and they're done. There's no self-improvement there.

This issue is only made worse by the fact that the app itself is just painful. It loses piles of my games, had no Undo until recently, and it needs a skip button for people who draw slowly. Oh, and Bombs need a confirmation button, as I've used all my bombs my accident.

Now, if Zynga wanted to pull people back into Draw Something, I'd recommend a few changes. First, fix the app. It's painful to use. Second, fix the unlock structure. Right now, it's a simple coin structure, where you earn 1-3 coins per drawing. This takes a realllllly long time to unlock new colours, and while that makes sense from a business perspective (more coins are of course available via in-app purchase), I think it's just too long to make it addictive. I'd recommend a sliding scale, allowing people to access a few new colours quickly, with it ramping up to the old cost after two or three colour pack purchases. This would have the side effect of making everyone's drawings more interesting, since people would have colours other than red, blue, & black. Oh, and there should be bonuses for long combos. Before I stopped playing, I realized there was no point to keeping a combo going, so if I couldn't guess a drawing in 3 minutes, I'd just give up and move onto the 15 other people waiting for my response.

Third, Zynga could provide other forms of unlocks. This is up to them - perhaps unlocking interesting or funny words to use (imagine spending ten coins to "save" a word I see until I'm playing with a friend who I think will find it particularly funny), allowing you to write your own words with your friends, weird colours (brushes that paint in gradients or rainbows, glowing brushes, etc), and more.

Finally, they should add new modes of play - I don't really care what. Here's a quick brainstorm: they should look to Scribblenauts, or maybe consider adding random adjectives to 3 coin words ("Flaming Rose").

Another idea I like is theme challenges. Each theme could have a set number of theme words, and rather than a shared combo, theme challenges are done as a competition. Themes could be timed to holidays or even used for advertising (imagine a Marvel theme to celebrate the Avengers!). So across a theme set I would compete with a single friend to see who gets the most words right, or who has the fastest average guess, etc.

Finally, the last thing I want to mention about Draw Something is that it went so huge so fast, it seemed obvious to me that it was a fad. It's still brilliant, but the amount of people playing it was unsustainably large, especially considering that art is not a universal skill. I don't think the community withering is necessarily a bad thing for Draw Something - at my cap I had about 20 people playing at least once a day, and it's impossible for me to keep up with that. But I could see myself diving back in and playing with two or three people. So no, the end is not necessarily nigh, but I think it will be unless Zynga fixes & improves Draw Something in the near future.

League of Silence

In the most recent patch, Riot silenced cross-team chat in League of Legends. Essentially, this means that during a game, you can only chat with your team unless you explicitly opt-in to cross-team chat. They did not provide much rationale for this move, save in the patch notes: “If you enjoy competitive banter, opt-in using the new toggle in the ‘More Options’ menu!”.

Most of these players can no longer speak to each other, because they don’t know how to opt-in to cross-team chat!

Based on that patch note, I infer that they feel the “competitive banter” (an euphemism if there ever was one) is a turn-off to the majority of League players. So Riot Games opted for the “nuke it” approach: they changed this for all League of Legends players, not just new players. Presumably they feel that this will make the game more pleasant, because hey, the community will feel nice if you can’t hear them, right?

I really don’t think that this will help. This is like an angry middle school teacher punishing a class: if you can’t chat politely, you can’t chat at all!

Riot Games is faced with a difficult problem: League of Legends is an extremely competitive game where mistakes are brutally punished. In Halo, if I’m killed, I hand the enemy team a point, and I’m playing in 10 seconds. In League, the guy who kills me gets a huge gold and experience bonus, and he gets to push his lane further and deal damage to my turret, or go and help crush one of my allies while the numbers are uneven. And because of the gold / experience bonus, he becomes more likely to kill me and my allies in the future. In Halo, we’ll still be on equal footing next time we tussle. Dying hurts your entire team in League of Legends, and to a much greater extent than it does in most other games.

This results in teams becoming very unaccepting of mistakes and risks, so when a player dies, they get very angry. This type of chat is the most toxic - you sort of expect the enemy team to be mean to you - and it hasn’t been shut down at all. New or unskilled players are just as likely to be harassed by their own team.

Furthermore, cross-team chat is the only way for a game to be less toxic. If a game starts and four members from each team toss out “gl hf” in the first 30 seconds, the other people are less likely to start cursing. And this might be unique to me, but when I get beaten in my lane by a polite player who I have a nice chat with before minions spawn, I feel happy for them. Sad that I died, but I don’t dislike the guy. But with cross-team chat disabled, he’s just a silent, phantom menace. You can’t be happy for a nameless Morgana.

Finally, disabling cross-team chat for all players with a patch is silly. Changing expected behaviour is something developers should always be careful of. I imagine a large portion of casual players will have no idea cross-team is disabled and will simply assume other players are quiet, or that the chat functionality is broken for some reason. When the game begins, players are shown a small message indicating the change, but in my experience, nobody reads those messages. Players are already chatting, discussing who takes which lane, or getting pregame snacks. If League had shipped with this behaviour it would be more understandable, but disabling it now will only cause confusion.

Riot needs to improve the community of League of Legends, no question. But I feel the biggest issue with the community is being harassed by your own team, not by the other team. This change does nothing to address that, and I feel it will actually make things worse, because you have no chance to connect with the opposing team. This cuts off both “good luck” as well as “screw you n00b”, and it introduces an unnecessary element of confusion to the game and it’s chat interface.

But hey, maybe nobody else can read this, because they haven’t turned on cross-blog chat.

Priorities

Not too long ago, I was thinking to myself “I can’t wait until I’m out of school, I’ll have to much more time to play video games! No more homework, and I’ll have the money to buy every game I want!”.

Now that I’m graduated University and I’m trying to find my way in the working world, I find myself wishing I was back in school, when my only impediment to gaming was homework and I had more money to spend on games. While gaming is still my primary hobby, I have so many other things in my life that are more important, I find it difficult to fit in any gaming time at all.

And when I do game, I find that length has suddenly become a turnoff, not an attraction. Five years ago, Skyrim being 60+ hours was wonderful. Now? I’m lucky that I finished Skyrim, and if I hadn’t played it during the Christmas holidays I’m not sure I would have finished it. 

I’m in a similar boat with difficult games. I appreciate difficulty - I really do - but I used to feel ashamed if I needed to turn down the difficulty on a new game. Now, I’d rather dial down the difficulty and actually finish the game, rather than toil and struggle prior to finishing it. 

And games that waste my time? Forget it. I have almost zero interest in MMOs, click counting social games, and other time wasters.

Like I said, I wish I had more time to game and more games to play. But at the same time, my priorities have changed, albeit in a way I never expected they would.

Firewater

Not sure if drinking firewater out of a Firefall branded shot glass is a metaphor or just me being cheap.

Proving Grounds - Bastion Retrospective

So this weekend I finished Bastion. Yeah, yeah, I know, it takes me a long time to finish games. I earned two Bastion trophies early last year, and this weekend, I finished the rest of the game with my girlfriend. Why the sudden interest?

Credit to Supergiant Games for this image. Click for link.

Weirdly, it had to do with PAX. See, Supergiant Games had a booth showing Bastion’s initial prototype, just to show how the world building and movement might work. It was massively unfinished in so many ways, but I thought this was utterly delightful. They told me that they just had random images from sprites (D&D monsters, etc) just to get the game playable and moving.

Despite the early point in development, I was shocked at how smoothly it played. The basic idea of Bastion was there, recognizable. My girlfriend was curious about how the game turned out, so I promised her we’d play it. Bastion’s chances only went up when the talented Video Game Orchestra sang Build That Wall, although tragically, I hadn't actually heard it in-game yet. So we sort of had to play it.

We picked up Friday night from where I had left off, an hour or two into the game. We finished it after two more long sessions. And we loved it. I’m disappointed in myself for not finishing it until now. (We then started Fez, and I have an eerie feeling it’s going to be unfinished until next year, but we’ll see how things go). Now I’m going to talk about it, and I will spoil a few things. If you don’t want spoilers, just go and buy it, then come back. It’s that good.

SPOILER WARNING! 

Bastion

The weird thing about writing about Bastion is that I don’t really care to talk about the gameplay. It’s not that the gameplay was bad: it was excellent. It’s an isometric beat ‘em up where you play as The Kid and are tasked with retrieving pieces of your Bastion after a Calamity wiped out your world. Along the way, you get to play with a wide variety of steampunk guns and melee weapons as you fight the monsters that still inhabit the broken landscape. Combat and movement is super-tight, and is difficult without being punishing. You can bring two weapons (plus your glorious shield) with you on each level, and you can mix & match to your heart’s content. And if length is what you’re worried about, don’t be: Bastion has a large number of levels & weaponry, weapon-specific challenges and three longer challenge stages, plus a New Game+. But you shouldn’t be worried about length, and gameplay isn’t what interests me the most about Bastion, so let’s move on.

Talking ‘bout Talking

You can’t talk about Bastion without talking about it’s talking. The narration pretty much makes Bastion, and it uses a technique I haven’t seen used much since Star Fox 64. Bastion’s cutscenes are few and far between, and they’re short. Yet Bastion tells an incredibly compelling story, details all the areas you travel to, and presents interesting characters, because the entire story is told while you play. This can occasionally be distracting, and I know I missed some parts of the narration during particularly hairy fights, which is slightly disconcerting. But I was incredibly hooked by the narration, the premise that this Stranger is telling you the story. Is he leaving parts out? Why is he telling this story, and who is he telling it to? And why is his voice so perfect for this narrative? 

The narration didn’t just tell the story. It also detailed the characters, but also the levels. When you enter the Mines, the Stranger would talk about the mines, what they were used for, how critical they were to Caelondia. Entering Colford’s Cauldron would prompt stories about the cauldron, philosophizing about what goes wrong with man plays with nature, and musings on the bothersome enemies there. Each level was a chunk of interesting stuff to listen to.

In short, Bastion’s narration is utterly fantastic. If you have to play it muted for whatever reason, don’t even bother.

On a more technical level, I was impressed by the variety of narration. I never heard a repeated line, and on the few times where I had to retry levels, I heard unused lines of narration. And the narration didn’t “run out of steam” near the end: the Stranger is with you the entire way through. The sheer amount of recorded audio is impressive, as is the fact that you never hear duplication.

Oh, and yes, Bastion is absolutely beautiful. It’s almost like playing a painting. Some people think post-apocalyptic is all grey and musty, and while it probably would be, Bastion shows that it can be incredibly colourful. The art style is utterly gorgeous, and the trick of having parts of the world build themselves around you never got old. I really can’t say any more about it, except with an image:

Credit to Supergiant Games for the screenshot of The Kid fighting Windbags. Click for a link.

See? Beautiful. Told you. Moving along.

Build That Wall

Another thing I noticed about Bastion is how sad it is. This might be a surprise, if you haven’t played much of it. After all, you’re working to rebuild the Bastion, right? Pieces of the world are falling all around you. How cool is that? How could it be sad?

Everything else, really. The narration isn’t an excited movie-voice, or even a funny Prince of Persia; it’s a world weary Stranger. Someone who is tired, grieving for his lost world, and guilty about his role what happened. There’s virtually no other voice work in the whole game, except for the music (and she isn’t exactly singing about peace and happiness, either). All the characters have had tough lives: the Kid taking repeated shifts on the Wall, then returning home to find his mother dead and his money gone. Zulf’s marriage beginning minutes before the Calamity. Zia’s father, forced to work to destroy his own people. Even the ending of the game doesn’t provide a lot of happiness: should you be optimistic and possibly let the Calamity happen again, or leave the city wiped out and simply move on? The story told is a sad one, and the ending doesn’t necessarily end on an optimistic note. That said, I picked Evacuation (move on), and I think it was the right choice. 

Bastion immediately presented me with a New Game+ option, but even if I had the time for that, I’d still decline it. To me, Bastion told it’s story, and told it perfectly. I was hanging on to every scrap of information I could get from the Stranger, and inferring quite a bit more. But it’s done, it’s over, and while I’m sad that it ended, I’m sad in a good way. And it’s concluded, so I probably won’t play again. One of the ending options sort of builds in New Game+ in a very logical way ("rebooting" Caeldonia), but in my game, The Kid chose to move on and explore new territory. And so that's what I'll do.

I will, however, be listening to the soundtrack again. And again. And again. I recommend that you not listen to it until after you’ve beaten Bastion. None of it will spoil the game, but the music fits the areas and atmosphere of the game so perfectly it’s best to let them be tied together naturally before enjoying the music independently. And trust me, you will enjoy the music afterwards.

Credit to Supergiant Games for the screenshot of The Kid firing his Scrap Musket, my favourite weapon in Bastion. Click for a link.

Questions

Bastion is often an ambiguous game, and a lot of things are left up to the player to decide for themselves. When I was talking about Zulf to my girlfriend, I had a realization about him. Zulf’s story (Calamity kills his new wife, he goes and finds those responsible, then destroys them) could easily be the plot to a number of games, including Bastion. The fact that he is portrayed as a villain is only because we’re in control of The Kid and we hear The Stranger as our narrator, even though Caelondia was the initial aggressor in the war, even though Caelondia caused the Calamity. Zulf’s initial actions were not those of a villain, but rather of somebody who experienced extreme loss. It’s hard to consider him a villain, which is why I saved him at the end of the game.

The Stranger’s story is also ambiguous as well. He’s clearly a scientist of some sort (he can fashion a Calamity Cannon from spare parts, after all), and he helps rebuild the Bastion. He also designed the Wall which The Kid served. Still, his exact role in the story is ambiguous. What role did he play in the Calamity? Was he responsible, directly or indirectly? And how does he know so much about The Kid? Some theories state that they have no connection, while others state that he’s The Kid’s absentee father. I like that theory, but there’s also the theory that The Stranger somehow represents The Kid having made the choice for the Bastion to perform Restoration and essentially go back in time. There’s no real evidence to support this (even if the Bastion did restore an earlier time, why would The Kid go back and then age to The Stranger’s age?) but I have a fondness for that theory, probably due to my love of Lost. 

Coming Home

This wasn’t intended to be a long review like this: I sort of wanted to just spout about how much I enjoyed Bastion, and then go to sleep. But here I am, ~1500 words laster, still writing about it. And I have more to say, but it’s 4AM, so I’d rather you play it and say it yourself.

So go! You can pick it up on the Xbox Live Marketplace, nab it from Steam ($15), or even play it in your Chrome web browser from the Chrome App Store Marketplace Doodad. I really don’t see why you’re still here. 

Edit (April 22, 9:08PM): I have one other thing to say about Bastion, and the fine people who make it. Weirdly, their Twitter bio states "Our goal is to make games spark your imagination like the games you played as a kid". They certainly did that: playing Bastion instills a sense of wonder and curiosity and exploration I don't feel in a lot of modern games.

At the same time, I think that understates the beauty of Bastion. It felt oddly adult, despite the bright colours and the playable Kid. The themes, narrative, and even the ending: Bastion has no final boss. But it still ends. It takes courage to do that. Anyways, I don't have a central point to this final postscript, other than to say that their Twitter bio definitely undersells Bastion.

Music of the Day: Video Game Orchestra's Big Blue

By far the highlight of the concerts for me was the Video Game Orchestra’s rendition of the classic F-Zero song Big Blue. I’ve embedded it below. Sadly, this is NOT my video. That said, out of the various uploads I’ve seen, this has the best audio.

I’m head over heels in love with this rendition of Big Blue. Make sure to check out the dueling guitars at around 3:00: total insanity. It really shows the vibe these guys had going for them: amazing talent, but also really playful. They looked like they were having a lot of fun when they were playing!