Well, a tweet from Alex Afrasiabi just dropped a big ol' bombshell regarding the lore of Warcraft:
" Archimonde is a demon whose demon soul is anchored to the Nether. The Nether transcends all realities. That is all."
In other words, if I interpret this correctly - the Archimonde that we are fighting in Hellfire Citadel is the Archimonde - the very same one that was defeated at the end of the Third War.
This has massive implications for the lore of the Burning Legion and the nature of this alternate Draenor. I'm also, frankly, not sure it entirely makes sense - but let's see if we can figure out a way that it will!
We've known since WCIII (which is when the Legion was introduced if I recall correctly) that demons - at least the most powerful ones - tend not to actually enter the physical world when they appear. Instead, the demons we face when defending our homeworlds are really a sort of Avatar - the demon's soul remains within the Twisting Nether, and what we are seeing is really a kind of physical projection. Thus, when we kill a demon, what we're really doing is shattering the construct that they've been using to fight us, forcing them to build a new one. Essentially, the demons have been using drone warfare against us - you can blow up the drone, but the pilot is sitting comfortably within the twisting nether. It's still a victory, just as it would be victory to shoot down a multi-million-dollar aircraft, but the mind behind it doesn't suffer any longterm injury.
Notably, this also seems to be the way that Elementals work. We killed Ragnaros in Molten Core, but his true essence remained in the Firelands. We were only able to destroy him for good by entering his realm.
This raises an interesting question: Have we actually managed to kill a demon? Like, ever?
In Felwood during the Third War, Illidan was leading Night Elf forces to oppose the Legion's advance, but the dreadlord Tichondrius kept coming back. Arthas then appeared to him and suggested that he use the Skull of Gul'dan to become a demon himself, which we're told allowed him to permanently kill the dreadlord.
So far, this has seemed permanent. But another event, earlier in WCIII, seemed pretty permanent too. Arthas, immediately after getting Frostmourne, used the cursed sword to kill Mal'ganis - and given that Frostmourne's whole deal was that anyone killed by it would have their soul drawn into the sword, you'd think that Mal'ganis would be gone for good (or at least until the shattering of Frostmourne at the end of Wrath of the Lich King.) Yet we see Mal'ganis in Northrend, definitely before Arthas' death, as the dreadlord has possessed the corpse of the Scarlet Crusade's Grand Admiral, bringing about the Scarlet Onslaught.
It's here that I do have to sit back and remember that sometimes, Blizzard just fumbles the lore a bit. I'm glad they did when it comes to the history of the Eredar, as they gave us one of my favorite playable races, but it happens.
The point is, these demons are apparently the same ones - Archimonde, Kil'jaeden, Mannoroth. I'd also guess this applies to Titans as well, given that there's probably just the one Sargeras.
This does make the stakes a bit higher. Yes, there's an infintie multiverse, but the Legion is capable of being a threat across its entirety. It means that, maybe, a defeat of the Legion on Draenor B will actually help us on Azeroth A.
But it's also a bit confusing. First off: when are Draenor B's Archimonde & Co from? Let's say we didn't actually travel through time, but Draenor B just kind of started 35 years later, and we've been running along parallel, but misaligned timelines. That means that Kil'jaeden, Archimonde, and Mannoroth would remember all of our past interactions with them. It means that when we meet Archimonde in Tanaan Jungle, he should remember us as those time-travelers who helped defeat him at Mount Hyjal. It means the Mannoroth who died in the opening cinematic also remembers Grom killing him during the Third War, and probably has a pretty frustrating flashback when he sees the big ol' orc flying through the air with Gorehowl about to go into his head.
If we have time-traveled for real, then they wouldn't remember these things happening, but it would also mean that there's two versions of events going on in their heads at once - one in which a shriveled Horde is fending off an attack on Tanaan Jungle, and another in which everything's going according to plan and their Horde is invading Stormwind as we speak.
But either way, the demons are currently dealing with many different realities at once. How? Well, if you think about it, it's not that hard. If they can create one demon avatar, why not two? Why not a dozen? Why not one for every single universe. Each avatar of Archimonde is being controlled by the same demonic mind (which is a hell of a multitasker,) but expressing the demon's will in multiple universes.
This is a real trade-off kind of revelation. On one hand, we haven't really gotten any in-game hints that these demons already know us, but it also suggests that the multiple universes are fundamentally connected, and that our efforts on Draenor might not just be irrelevant when we get home.
(Now as an afterthought - consider that a lot of these demons, if not all of them, were once mortals. Archimonde was presumably physiologically the same as the modern Draenei before he became a demon. Are there mortal Archimondes out there who declined Sargeras' gift? Or was Archimonde's first task to go around and wipe out every other version of himself, like Jet Li in "The One?")
(Second postscript: Afrasiabi explicitly said that the Old Gods are a different sort of thing, and so this presumably does not apply to them.)
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Friday, June 5, 2015
Should Open-World Games Have a "Main Quest?"
Fallout is, unsurprisingly, a game that is coming up in my thoughts more recently - not only was Fallout 4 just announced, set in my own hometown no less, but I also saw Mad Max: Fury Road not too long ago, so the idea of a post-apocalyptic landscape is kind of... not really zeitgeisty, but something that I've been thinking about.
Fallout 3 was a great game, but it had its flaws. And one of the biggest flaws (spoilers for a rather old game) was the way it ended. After tracking down your father's water-purification project, the Enclave tries to sabotage you and you basically are forced to sacrifice yourself in order for the project to start up - you're bathed in radiation and die. This was made all the more frustrating by the presence of a supermutant follower, who is immune to radiation. Wouldn't it be far easier to just have him enter the code?
I'm led to understand that some DLC fixed this - allowing you to recover afterward - but it's really an odd idea in the first place - to have an open-world game... well, end. Games often have linear narratives, but this makes sense for some genres more than others. In linear games, it makes sense to have a story that hits plot points in a straight line. But the open-world game is more about setting than plot. Plot and characters inform that setting, to be sure (all the elements of storytelling are pretty inextricably linked anyway,) but the core engagement with your open-world games is a sense of freedom and exploration. The danger of having a main quest is that you essentially tell players "you can do anything here! But remember that if you aren't on this single path, you're on a side quest."
Now perhaps that isn't so bad. In Skyrim, I've created assassin-type characters who really just do the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves' Guild chains and basically feel complete (Dark Brotherhood especially.) But I think there are ways to tell compelling stories that don't push a single one to the forefront.
Probably the most culturally relevant fantasy work at the moment is George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, which you probably already know is the series of books upon which HBO's Game of Thrones is based (though the show and books are deviating more as the show has caught up to or passed Martin's writing.) While there's every possibility that the various plot threads will ultimately entwine to give us the series' endgame, for much of its run there have been wildly different events going on - all of which are certainly important.
The two most important supernatural forces in the story are separated by thousands of miles. Jon Snow, up at the Wall, is desperately trying to work out a peace deal with the Wildlings because of the necromantic Others (White Walkers in the show.) Meanwhile, Daenerys Targaryen achieved a miracle in bringing three fossilized dragon eggs back to life, and has her legitimacy as a conqueror and liberator backed by her status as "Mother of Dragons."
These are both hugely important things happening in the world, but the meat of the series has been more concerned with political intrigue in King's Landing. But that's not all - you've also got the chaos in the Riverlands, possible treachery in the Iron Isles (something the show hasn't dealt with all that much,) and a religious order of badass, terrifying assassins across the sea in Braavos.
The point is, Game of Thrones isn't just one big fantasy epic - it's like ten of them all happening at once.
And an open-world game could work that way.
World of Warcraft actually manages this, somewhat as a consequence of its periodic structure. Each expansion has focused the story somewhat, but generally, we move on to fairly different threats each time we go somewhere new. The Lich King and Deathwing were both existential threats to life on Azeroth, yet they felt very different and involved totally different "major players."
The leveling experience in the old world, even post-Cataclysm, really embodies this idea - you'll start in your own racial starting zone (and the fact that there are so many allows you to have quite different experiences even early on,) and while you can see how the various plot threads are connected, you can have a pretty different kind of adventure depending on where you go.
Is this all that different from how games like Skyrim work already? Perhaps not. The question is whether games would work if the makers tore up the signs that said "this way to most important plot." Does the main quest act as a crutch - a little linear game to provide structure lest people be overwhelmed by the freedom they're given? And would taking that crutch away make them fall? It's certainly possible, and I'm definitely an armchair game designer here.
But it might be cool to play a game where you really don't know which of the world-ending threats that pop up is the biggest one.
Fallout 3 was a great game, but it had its flaws. And one of the biggest flaws (spoilers for a rather old game) was the way it ended. After tracking down your father's water-purification project, the Enclave tries to sabotage you and you basically are forced to sacrifice yourself in order for the project to start up - you're bathed in radiation and die. This was made all the more frustrating by the presence of a supermutant follower, who is immune to radiation. Wouldn't it be far easier to just have him enter the code?
I'm led to understand that some DLC fixed this - allowing you to recover afterward - but it's really an odd idea in the first place - to have an open-world game... well, end. Games often have linear narratives, but this makes sense for some genres more than others. In linear games, it makes sense to have a story that hits plot points in a straight line. But the open-world game is more about setting than plot. Plot and characters inform that setting, to be sure (all the elements of storytelling are pretty inextricably linked anyway,) but the core engagement with your open-world games is a sense of freedom and exploration. The danger of having a main quest is that you essentially tell players "you can do anything here! But remember that if you aren't on this single path, you're on a side quest."
Now perhaps that isn't so bad. In Skyrim, I've created assassin-type characters who really just do the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves' Guild chains and basically feel complete (Dark Brotherhood especially.) But I think there are ways to tell compelling stories that don't push a single one to the forefront.
Probably the most culturally relevant fantasy work at the moment is George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, which you probably already know is the series of books upon which HBO's Game of Thrones is based (though the show and books are deviating more as the show has caught up to or passed Martin's writing.) While there's every possibility that the various plot threads will ultimately entwine to give us the series' endgame, for much of its run there have been wildly different events going on - all of which are certainly important.
The two most important supernatural forces in the story are separated by thousands of miles. Jon Snow, up at the Wall, is desperately trying to work out a peace deal with the Wildlings because of the necromantic Others (White Walkers in the show.) Meanwhile, Daenerys Targaryen achieved a miracle in bringing three fossilized dragon eggs back to life, and has her legitimacy as a conqueror and liberator backed by her status as "Mother of Dragons."
These are both hugely important things happening in the world, but the meat of the series has been more concerned with political intrigue in King's Landing. But that's not all - you've also got the chaos in the Riverlands, possible treachery in the Iron Isles (something the show hasn't dealt with all that much,) and a religious order of badass, terrifying assassins across the sea in Braavos.
The point is, Game of Thrones isn't just one big fantasy epic - it's like ten of them all happening at once.
And an open-world game could work that way.
World of Warcraft actually manages this, somewhat as a consequence of its periodic structure. Each expansion has focused the story somewhat, but generally, we move on to fairly different threats each time we go somewhere new. The Lich King and Deathwing were both existential threats to life on Azeroth, yet they felt very different and involved totally different "major players."
The leveling experience in the old world, even post-Cataclysm, really embodies this idea - you'll start in your own racial starting zone (and the fact that there are so many allows you to have quite different experiences even early on,) and while you can see how the various plot threads are connected, you can have a pretty different kind of adventure depending on where you go.
Is this all that different from how games like Skyrim work already? Perhaps not. The question is whether games would work if the makers tore up the signs that said "this way to most important plot." Does the main quest act as a crutch - a little linear game to provide structure lest people be overwhelmed by the freedom they're given? And would taking that crutch away make them fall? It's certainly possible, and I'm definitely an armchair game designer here.
But it might be cool to play a game where you really don't know which of the world-ending threats that pop up is the biggest one.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Fallout 4 Officially Announced
Like many, I'm sure, my experience with Fallout started with Fallout 3 - the game that came about after the title came into the hands of Bethesda, the makers of the Elder Scrolls games. Now, I'm no expert - I never played New Vegas, the quasi-sequel (akin to Brotherhood and Revelations to Assassin's Creed II - essentially a huge expansion pack, as I understand.)
I enjoyed Fallout 3 a lot, though it never felt like it had the depth of the Elder Scrolls games. There was plenty of exploration to be done, but not a lot in the way of major quest lines. Now admittedly, there's something kind of freeing and exciting about a world in which there's no quest marker pointing you where you should go, but instead just discovering little things along the way (the Vault that was nothing but "Gary" clones was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. The one with the "Blue Gas" was just pants-crappingly terrifying.)
Still, the world definitely didn't feel as large as Cyrodiil or Skyrim, but given that we know this company is capable of doing such things, I have high hopes for the next entry.
Fallout 4 will be set in the ruins of Boston, which is really exciting for me as I grew up in a Boston suburb. Two things immediately stand out to me: The first is that there's a lot of footage in the trailer that shows the world before the nuclear war. It's even possible that the player character lived through that war, which I believe would mean that this game takes place earlier than the other games. Given that the trailer shows events occuring in that pre-war time, some have been led to speculate that we may, in fact, get to play through some of that - though whether it would use time-travel or flashbacks or what is anyone's guess.
The other thing that could be exciting is that the area seems better populated than the Capital Wasteland. In the Fallout timeline, MIT became "The Institute," which seems to have become a beacon of continued scientific progress within the post-apocalyptic world, and I imagine that if that's the case, they probably have a relatively safe perimeter to work within.
Fallout 3 was a lot of fun, but it was also a poster-child for the frustrating "brown is real" trope in art design. Everything had a kind of desaturated quality to it, and while that may be true of a real post-nuclear wasteland, I firmly believe that colors are good.
Indeed, ruins are all well and good, but I think what's exciting about the post-apocalyptic genre is not the misery and death, but the idea that new structures and cultures would rise up out of the ashes. Fallout of course derives a lot of its aesthetics from the Mad Max series, and I think what's appealing about that series is seeing the new social structures that grow out of the breakdown of the old ones. A lot of stuff might have been cobbled together out of old parts, but there's a human urge to create new things, and with the old rules broken down, people have the freedom to be very creative.
Another notable aspect of the trailer is that good old Dogmeat is greeted by the presumed player character, and he greets the dog before they head out on the road, and we hear his voice. I wonder, then, if this will be a game in which the player we control is a predetermined one rather than one we create ourselves. I generally like being able to create my own character, but I also recognize that having a set character opens up a lot more dramatic options for telling the story. Just having a voice is kind of a big deal (Mass Effect I think did a good job of hybridizing between total character creation control and a predetermined personality.)
Anyway, if this can be the Skyrim to Fallout 3's Oblivion, I'm super, super excited to see how it turns out (at some point I'm going to have to buy one of the new consoles other than my Wii U.)
I enjoyed Fallout 3 a lot, though it never felt like it had the depth of the Elder Scrolls games. There was plenty of exploration to be done, but not a lot in the way of major quest lines. Now admittedly, there's something kind of freeing and exciting about a world in which there's no quest marker pointing you where you should go, but instead just discovering little things along the way (the Vault that was nothing but "Gary" clones was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. The one with the "Blue Gas" was just pants-crappingly terrifying.)
Still, the world definitely didn't feel as large as Cyrodiil or Skyrim, but given that we know this company is capable of doing such things, I have high hopes for the next entry.
Fallout 4 will be set in the ruins of Boston, which is really exciting for me as I grew up in a Boston suburb. Two things immediately stand out to me: The first is that there's a lot of footage in the trailer that shows the world before the nuclear war. It's even possible that the player character lived through that war, which I believe would mean that this game takes place earlier than the other games. Given that the trailer shows events occuring in that pre-war time, some have been led to speculate that we may, in fact, get to play through some of that - though whether it would use time-travel or flashbacks or what is anyone's guess.
The other thing that could be exciting is that the area seems better populated than the Capital Wasteland. In the Fallout timeline, MIT became "The Institute," which seems to have become a beacon of continued scientific progress within the post-apocalyptic world, and I imagine that if that's the case, they probably have a relatively safe perimeter to work within.
Fallout 3 was a lot of fun, but it was also a poster-child for the frustrating "brown is real" trope in art design. Everything had a kind of desaturated quality to it, and while that may be true of a real post-nuclear wasteland, I firmly believe that colors are good.
Indeed, ruins are all well and good, but I think what's exciting about the post-apocalyptic genre is not the misery and death, but the idea that new structures and cultures would rise up out of the ashes. Fallout of course derives a lot of its aesthetics from the Mad Max series, and I think what's appealing about that series is seeing the new social structures that grow out of the breakdown of the old ones. A lot of stuff might have been cobbled together out of old parts, but there's a human urge to create new things, and with the old rules broken down, people have the freedom to be very creative.
Another notable aspect of the trailer is that good old Dogmeat is greeted by the presumed player character, and he greets the dog before they head out on the road, and we hear his voice. I wonder, then, if this will be a game in which the player we control is a predetermined one rather than one we create ourselves. I generally like being able to create my own character, but I also recognize that having a set character opens up a lot more dramatic options for telling the story. Just having a voice is kind of a big deal (Mass Effect I think did a good job of hybridizing between total character creation control and a predetermined personality.)
Anyway, if this can be the Skyrim to Fallout 3's Oblivion, I'm super, super excited to see how it turns out (at some point I'm going to have to buy one of the new consoles other than my Wii U.)
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Monetization in Heroes of the Storm
Despite myself, I've actually been enjoying HotS quite a bit. It's nowhere near the complexity of a game like WoW, but it has that Smash-Bros-style elegance that makes it fun to play multiple games.
Now, I'm on the record as someone who detests microtransaction-based free-to-play models, as I think the games' makers are incentivized to make the game frustrating in order to get you to pour money into them. HotS (and to be fair, this could be true of other MOBAs as well) does certainly want you to pour money into it - and frankly, the prices on a lot of the options are kind of absurd - but what I appreciate is that unlocking characters is all doable with in-game gold. It will take you a while to grind said gold, and I think the number of matches you'd have to play to unlock every character is enormous, but at least the option is there.
It is a bit of a frustration-feature, but with the hero rotation (and actually a feature in the store that lets you test out heroes as well as skins, though this only lets you play versus a simple AI,) you get to see which heroes call out to you and then worry about purchasing those. And there's never a sense that buying stuff will make progression faster - except for the stimpak, which explicitly does that - so once you find a hero you like, you can usually grind out what you want from there.
Cosmetic things appear to be largely money-based, but if I find myself with more than a passing interest in the game, I might toss them a chunk of change for the "Crown Prince Arthas" variant - after all, it's not that I'm opposed to paying people to play the game they've made. Really, my beef with F2P is that these games often get you to pay more than you would normally for a similar game by just having you pay in quick bursts. I believe there is a giant bundle you can buy that unlocks everything (or at least a ton of things,) but it's over a hundred dollars - and that's the discount, buying-in-bulk price! (EDIT: Actually, my bad. The big Nexus Bundle is discounted at about 40 bucks, which isn't so bad.)
Anyway, the reason it's not so bad is that the only thing that really alters gameplay - control of characters - is all available for gold.
Now, I'm on the record as someone who detests microtransaction-based free-to-play models, as I think the games' makers are incentivized to make the game frustrating in order to get you to pour money into them. HotS (and to be fair, this could be true of other MOBAs as well) does certainly want you to pour money into it - and frankly, the prices on a lot of the options are kind of absurd - but what I appreciate is that unlocking characters is all doable with in-game gold. It will take you a while to grind said gold, and I think the number of matches you'd have to play to unlock every character is enormous, but at least the option is there.
It is a bit of a frustration-feature, but with the hero rotation (and actually a feature in the store that lets you test out heroes as well as skins, though this only lets you play versus a simple AI,) you get to see which heroes call out to you and then worry about purchasing those. And there's never a sense that buying stuff will make progression faster - except for the stimpak, which explicitly does that - so once you find a hero you like, you can usually grind out what you want from there.
Cosmetic things appear to be largely money-based, but if I find myself with more than a passing interest in the game, I might toss them a chunk of change for the "Crown Prince Arthas" variant - after all, it's not that I'm opposed to paying people to play the game they've made. Really, my beef with F2P is that these games often get you to pay more than you would normally for a similar game by just having you pay in quick bursts. I believe there is a giant bundle you can buy that unlocks everything (or at least a ton of things,) but it's over a hundred dollars - and that's the discount, buying-in-bulk price! (EDIT: Actually, my bad. The big Nexus Bundle is discounted at about 40 bucks, which isn't so bad.)
Anyway, the reason it's not so bad is that the only thing that really alters gameplay - control of characters - is all available for gold.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
First Impressions of Heroes of the Storm
Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's own DOTA/MOBA game (I think MOBA has become the preferred nomenclature, given that Valve has got the trademark on DOTA, despite the fact that Defense of the Ancients was a mod for Warcraft III, a Blizzard game) is now in an open Beta, so anyone who wants can download it and try it out. In fact, this "Beta" is really just an early patch of the game in practice, as you can already purchase game elements that will carry over into the "live" game, which is the only way the game is monetized - it is... free to play. (Queue thunderclap sound effect.)
Anyway, this is the first time I've ever played this sort of game, so I'm coming at this from the angle of a 100% newbie. If you already know how these games work, feel free to skim, because a lot of what is totally new to me is old hat to someone who knows these games.
HotS is basically Blizzard's Smash Bros. It takes an existing genre and throws characters from its own IPs into the mix. There's a pretty tongue-in-cheek tutorial where you fight as Jim Raynor under the tutelage of Uther the Lightbringer in order to fight Diablo. Yep, that's a solid mix!
Right off the bat, one of the things that stands out to me is that this is a game designed for the microtransaction era, which immediately puts a nasty taste in my mouth.
That said, like Hearthstone, you'll be able to earn things by playing, albeit at a fairly slow rate.
There is a, I believe, weekly rotation of heroes that are available for free. Build up enough gold or take out your wallet, and you can permanently purchase the hero of your choice (I'll stick to the former.)
Pretty much everything else you buy with real money is purely cosmetic, and many of these can also be earned through in-game gold. The game encourages you to pick a favorite hero and focus on him or her (or it,) because as you level up your hero, you'll unlock new talent options (and at level 10, which I assume is the max, you'll get a "Master" cosmetic skin.)
After some brief experimentation, I picked Arthas, who focuses on melee attacks and is great at dealing with large swarms of minions due to a toggled AoE attack that burns mana as long as it's on.
Given how it grew out of WCIII, you can see a lot of the DNA of the RTS genre within the MOBA. Your goal in each game is to destroy the "Core" at the enemy's base. However, this will take a lot of time to do, as there are serious obstacles in place, not to mention the enemy team. You can play against AI, but at least for a new player like me, the bots pose a pretty significant challenge. I expect a well-coordinated team with voice chat would do better, though. I was playing with strangers.
Each map is mirrored, with a red team and a blue team (I don't know if it was luck, but I was always on the blue team - the superior color.) Bases will have a Core, as well as Forts, healing Fountains, and Gates.
Forts will periodically spawn small minions (I believe they're called "Creeps") who will automatically head off toward the enemy base. They'll clash with one another, but with the imbalance created by the players, they'll eventually start hitting the gates and bases.
Gates are protected by a pair of turrets, and these will hurt your hero significantly, but they will always prefer to hit your team's creeps, meaning that you'll need to wait for your army to get there before you storm them. The turrets can run out of ammo, but I'm not sure if they recover ammo over time (or if this is a mechanism to keep the game from going on forever.)
Fountains in your base can be right-clicked to give yourself a significant heal over time, but they'll go on cooldown for a minute afterward.
As you defeat enemies, you'll earn XP for your team. You'll level up, gaining talents as you go - and the higher you've "leveled up" your character through repeated matches, the more options you'll have at each talent tier. To clarify, there are two "leveling" systems. Over the course of a game, your team will level up as they kill creeps and enemy players (the team levels up together,) but over the course of several games, your personal skill with a character will level up. This won't make you unstoppable, but it will give your more talent options, as well as things like gold to spend on new characters, skins, and mounts.
One of the fun features of the game is that each arena is somewhat different. All of the areas have a very "Blizzard" design without technically belonging to any of the existing franchises. The arenas will typically have a special item that you can collect by defeating certain enemies or doing certain tasks, and then these can be translated into some large attack that will significantly harm the enemy team. For example, in the Haunted Mines map, there will be a mine area that opens up filled with zombies. Killing the zombies will allow you to collect their skulls, and later on, a Grave Golem will be spawned for each side, with power proportional to the number of skulls the respective team has collected. The Luxoria arena, which has a whole Egyptian thing going on, has various altars that will blast away at your enemy's structures while you occupy them, but you'll have to fend off guardian statues that activate while the altar is active.
Most of the arenas will also have mercenaries who, once defeated, will join your side as extra-powerful Creeps.
As always, Blizzard's art direction is wonderfully colorful, and you get that Smash Bros. joy of seeing figures from different franchises duking it out. This is a game designed for the eSports world, though, and if you're looking for stories, don't look here. I'm thankful that one can face off against AI, but fundamentally, this is a game built around PVP, so you can expect that the gameplay isn't going to undergo any big changes, and your first match won't be fundamentally different from your hundredth (except you'll probably be a better player by then.)
Anyway, this is the first time I've ever played this sort of game, so I'm coming at this from the angle of a 100% newbie. If you already know how these games work, feel free to skim, because a lot of what is totally new to me is old hat to someone who knows these games.
HotS is basically Blizzard's Smash Bros. It takes an existing genre and throws characters from its own IPs into the mix. There's a pretty tongue-in-cheek tutorial where you fight as Jim Raynor under the tutelage of Uther the Lightbringer in order to fight Diablo. Yep, that's a solid mix!
Right off the bat, one of the things that stands out to me is that this is a game designed for the microtransaction era, which immediately puts a nasty taste in my mouth.
That said, like Hearthstone, you'll be able to earn things by playing, albeit at a fairly slow rate.
There is a, I believe, weekly rotation of heroes that are available for free. Build up enough gold or take out your wallet, and you can permanently purchase the hero of your choice (I'll stick to the former.)
Pretty much everything else you buy with real money is purely cosmetic, and many of these can also be earned through in-game gold. The game encourages you to pick a favorite hero and focus on him or her (or it,) because as you level up your hero, you'll unlock new talent options (and at level 10, which I assume is the max, you'll get a "Master" cosmetic skin.)
After some brief experimentation, I picked Arthas, who focuses on melee attacks and is great at dealing with large swarms of minions due to a toggled AoE attack that burns mana as long as it's on.
Given how it grew out of WCIII, you can see a lot of the DNA of the RTS genre within the MOBA. Your goal in each game is to destroy the "Core" at the enemy's base. However, this will take a lot of time to do, as there are serious obstacles in place, not to mention the enemy team. You can play against AI, but at least for a new player like me, the bots pose a pretty significant challenge. I expect a well-coordinated team with voice chat would do better, though. I was playing with strangers.
Each map is mirrored, with a red team and a blue team (I don't know if it was luck, but I was always on the blue team - the superior color.) Bases will have a Core, as well as Forts, healing Fountains, and Gates.
Forts will periodically spawn small minions (I believe they're called "Creeps") who will automatically head off toward the enemy base. They'll clash with one another, but with the imbalance created by the players, they'll eventually start hitting the gates and bases.
Gates are protected by a pair of turrets, and these will hurt your hero significantly, but they will always prefer to hit your team's creeps, meaning that you'll need to wait for your army to get there before you storm them. The turrets can run out of ammo, but I'm not sure if they recover ammo over time (or if this is a mechanism to keep the game from going on forever.)
Fountains in your base can be right-clicked to give yourself a significant heal over time, but they'll go on cooldown for a minute afterward.
As you defeat enemies, you'll earn XP for your team. You'll level up, gaining talents as you go - and the higher you've "leveled up" your character through repeated matches, the more options you'll have at each talent tier. To clarify, there are two "leveling" systems. Over the course of a game, your team will level up as they kill creeps and enemy players (the team levels up together,) but over the course of several games, your personal skill with a character will level up. This won't make you unstoppable, but it will give your more talent options, as well as things like gold to spend on new characters, skins, and mounts.
One of the fun features of the game is that each arena is somewhat different. All of the areas have a very "Blizzard" design without technically belonging to any of the existing franchises. The arenas will typically have a special item that you can collect by defeating certain enemies or doing certain tasks, and then these can be translated into some large attack that will significantly harm the enemy team. For example, in the Haunted Mines map, there will be a mine area that opens up filled with zombies. Killing the zombies will allow you to collect their skulls, and later on, a Grave Golem will be spawned for each side, with power proportional to the number of skulls the respective team has collected. The Luxoria arena, which has a whole Egyptian thing going on, has various altars that will blast away at your enemy's structures while you occupy them, but you'll have to fend off guardian statues that activate while the altar is active.
Most of the arenas will also have mercenaries who, once defeated, will join your side as extra-powerful Creeps.
As always, Blizzard's art direction is wonderfully colorful, and you get that Smash Bros. joy of seeing figures from different franchises duking it out. This is a game designed for the eSports world, though, and if you're looking for stories, don't look here. I'm thankful that one can face off against AI, but fundamentally, this is a game built around PVP, so you can expect that the gameplay isn't going to undergo any big changes, and your first match won't be fundamentally different from your hundredth (except you'll probably be a better player by then.)
Monday, May 25, 2015
Shadows of Mordor... Review, I guess?
With a pretty horrifying number of orcs burned, exploded, decaptitated, or stabbed, my playthrough of Shadows of Mordor has reached its conclusion.
I enjoyed the game, overall, and would recommend it, especially now that it's gone down in price - though I'd recommend playing it on a gaming PC or next-gen console, as the old 360 sometimes had a bit of huffing and puffing to do (textures especially would sometimes go super-low resolution until the game could catch its breath.)
One of the things that's a little odd about the game is that it feels fairly short. Now, that could very well be a result of my having been playing Skyrim just before starting in on Mordor. Shadows of Mordor is sort of an open-world game, but almost more in an old-fashioned, Metroid kind of way. I think the main reason for this is that there really isn't any "safe" area. You're in Mordor the entire game, and while there are certainly places to run around with relative freedom, the whole game map is basically swarming with Orcs.
This is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you've always got Uruks somewhere nearby that you can mess with. But it also kind of flattens the game world. You will encounter new, tougher classes of grunt orcs as you go, but once you figure out the combat system (or level up enough to have a nice complement of stat boosts, abilities, and weapon runes) you're basically not going to have to worry about any big surprises in your travels.
The nemesis system, with named enemy Captains and Warchiefs, is pretty cool, but it feels like it could be more central and dynamic within the game.
One problem is that there's basically only three ranks - Grunt, Captain, and Warchief. You'll see Captains getting promoted from one of the three tiers in the Captains' ranks to the next constantly, but if there's any value to that promotion, I don't really know what it is. Warchiefs will only come out when certain conditions are met, and it doesn't seem like you ever see Orcs who aren't under your influence back-stabbing their Warchiefs. I think the promise of the nemesis system is that the politics of the Orcs give you a constant need to readjust your strategy, but in practice, with a bit of intel, you can just zero in on the Orcs you need to take down.
That said, intel is actually fairly rare. While you can, with diligence, get the skinny on every captain and warchief out there, chances are you're going to be running into Captains you've never heard of, and you'll have to rely on your standard combat to beat them - but the thing is, once you get the hang of said combat, most of these guys won't feel like much of a threat, even if they do have certain immunities.
Another problem with the system that could be dealt with in a sequel or something, is that the orc officers actually get less interesting and unique as their power levels increase. When you're dealing with officers in the lower levels, you'll find that some can be killed instantly with stealth attacks, or ranged attacks. Now, yes, instant kills would make them a little dull, but when you start to deal with high-level opponents, you often find ones that are totally immune to ranged attacks, stealth attacks, and beast attacks. And what that means is that you've just got to go fight them the old fashioned way.
Occasionally, an orc you've "killed" will come back to life, and awesomely, they'll usually have some scar or metal prosthetic to indicate how you defeated them the first time. The thing is, this doesn't happen very often. Usually, if they do come back, you'll have - for example - already killed their Warchief, making them just a nuisance. I'd have liked for there to be a bit more of a real rivalry built up between Talion and these orcs.
Orcs will permanently die if you behead them, but this is kind of determined randomly as far as I can tell - sometimes your "Execute" attack will take their heads off, and sometimes you'll just super-stab them.
Still, it's a really cool feature that I think could use some refinement.
The game world has some great positives and some great negatives. On the positive side, the game does a good job recapturing the dirty aesthetic of the LOTR movies. This definitely feels like the version of Tolkien brought to us by Peter Jackson. The voice acting is also quite good. Storywise, it's... tantalyzing. There's tons of backstory (the Elf-Wraith who is bonded to Talion is a pretty important figure in Middle-Earth's history,) but the characters we deal with are a little thin. There is a human refugee kingdom that has for some reason decided Mordor would be a good place to live (in fairness, they were there before the Orcs came back,) but their story doesn't really go that far beyond "we need to get the hell out of Mordor."
There's also something weirdly unsatisfying about the fact that there are two large game areas, rather than three. As I played through the Udun section of the game, I actually began to suspect I might spend the entire time there. But upon entering the Sea of Nurnen area, the game seemed like it was going to open up into a much larger expanse. However, in the end, other than a couple of areas you only go to when dealing with the major bosses, that's it. Now, each of these areas has districts that vary somewhat. You'll get to know the various towns and fortresses with larger populations of orcs and contrast those with the open spaces.
The major "boss fights" are also not really that. The Hammer is the only one that you fight in open combat, and he's definitely a challenge (especially with a constant stream of Orc grunts joining him.) The Tower, however, is an attempt at a "Stealth Boss." Obviously, SoM is a game that allows you to do things stealthily, and thus it would be weird for every major enemy to be fought in open combat. The problem is that adjusting difficulty in stealth gameplay is always tricky, as it tends to operate on a scale of "do I see you or not?" (Actually, there's an idea for game developers - is there a way to make a type of stealth gameplay with more variation.) The final boss, rather than involving the Bow, as you might guess, is actually just an old-school "Quick Time Event," where you have to press the buttons that pop up on the screen.
Before summing up, let's talk combat. Stealth really works just like in a game like Assassin's Creed, though you have other options than just killing an enemy if you can nab them. The psychology of the orcs plays a role here - in the second half of the game you can "brand" orcs so that they'll fight for you (and obey your commands without resisting.) You can also "brutalize" enemies from stealth, which is actually a pretty clever alternative to the old "pick them off one at a time" style of stealth from similar games. Brutalizing will have you stab the target multiple times. This is useful when attacking a group of orcs, as it will cause at least one of them to run away screaming, and it will also charge up your hit-streak before you engage the remaining orcs.
Melee combat is pretty fun when you get the hang of it. Each time you strike an enemy (with any weapon,) your hit counter will go up by one, and will continue to climb as long as you don't miss, get hit by an attack, or go for a long enough time without hitting anything. When you get up to eight, the counter will turn red, allowing you to use a powerful finisher (such as Execute, which instant-kills grunts and does significant damage to captains and warchiefs.) There are plenty of abilities you can unlock as you go that will make it easier to rack up this counter and pull off more of those moves. Oddly, though this might be just me, and potentially a result of the default control scheme, but parrying can be tough to pull off. When an enemy tries to strike you, you'll have a brief moment to respond, and it can be difficult to pull this off when trying to keep on the offensive. There aren't really any "counter-kills" like in Assassin's Creed, and enemies will often attack at the same time, so you'll need to be quick to respond - though thankfully, if you strike a guy while they're winding up for an attack, you will interrupt them (except the shield-carrying guardians, I believe.)
Ranged combat has cleverly been designed so that you can fight like Legolas pretty effectively. Unlike the sword and dagger (the latter actually being the remains of a broken sword,) the Bow is an ethereal extension of the Elf Wraith. This means you'll go into Wraith mode automatically when firing the bow. Additionally, by default you'll also start using Focus (a regenerating resource) to slow down time while firing. This allows you to get off multiple charged headshots before the orcs you're fighting can react, or allowing you to shoot an orc in the head right in the middle of a grand melee. Arrows, or "Elf-Shot" can be recovered either by finding the ghostly projectiles in the walls and floors of the many ruins in the area, or by "draining" poor orcs who get in your way (this attack cleverly employs a dutch angle for the camera to sell how unsettling it is.)
There is a story through which to progress here, and there's a structure to the game's quests, but I think the main selling point is that it's truly fun to get in there and mess it up with some Uruks. Some gameplay features could definitely have been more emphasized, particularly the nemesis system (I'm still not entirely sure how useful it is to "terrify" my targets,) and while the two main game areas did feel relatively different, I think they could have done more to vary the environment. But any of the problems I might have had with the game could be fixed in a sequel, and given that it ends with an utterly shameless sequel hook, I expect we'll see one before too long.
I enjoyed the game, overall, and would recommend it, especially now that it's gone down in price - though I'd recommend playing it on a gaming PC or next-gen console, as the old 360 sometimes had a bit of huffing and puffing to do (textures especially would sometimes go super-low resolution until the game could catch its breath.)
One of the things that's a little odd about the game is that it feels fairly short. Now, that could very well be a result of my having been playing Skyrim just before starting in on Mordor. Shadows of Mordor is sort of an open-world game, but almost more in an old-fashioned, Metroid kind of way. I think the main reason for this is that there really isn't any "safe" area. You're in Mordor the entire game, and while there are certainly places to run around with relative freedom, the whole game map is basically swarming with Orcs.
This is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you've always got Uruks somewhere nearby that you can mess with. But it also kind of flattens the game world. You will encounter new, tougher classes of grunt orcs as you go, but once you figure out the combat system (or level up enough to have a nice complement of stat boosts, abilities, and weapon runes) you're basically not going to have to worry about any big surprises in your travels.
The nemesis system, with named enemy Captains and Warchiefs, is pretty cool, but it feels like it could be more central and dynamic within the game.
One problem is that there's basically only three ranks - Grunt, Captain, and Warchief. You'll see Captains getting promoted from one of the three tiers in the Captains' ranks to the next constantly, but if there's any value to that promotion, I don't really know what it is. Warchiefs will only come out when certain conditions are met, and it doesn't seem like you ever see Orcs who aren't under your influence back-stabbing their Warchiefs. I think the promise of the nemesis system is that the politics of the Orcs give you a constant need to readjust your strategy, but in practice, with a bit of intel, you can just zero in on the Orcs you need to take down.
That said, intel is actually fairly rare. While you can, with diligence, get the skinny on every captain and warchief out there, chances are you're going to be running into Captains you've never heard of, and you'll have to rely on your standard combat to beat them - but the thing is, once you get the hang of said combat, most of these guys won't feel like much of a threat, even if they do have certain immunities.
Another problem with the system that could be dealt with in a sequel or something, is that the orc officers actually get less interesting and unique as their power levels increase. When you're dealing with officers in the lower levels, you'll find that some can be killed instantly with stealth attacks, or ranged attacks. Now, yes, instant kills would make them a little dull, but when you start to deal with high-level opponents, you often find ones that are totally immune to ranged attacks, stealth attacks, and beast attacks. And what that means is that you've just got to go fight them the old fashioned way.
Occasionally, an orc you've "killed" will come back to life, and awesomely, they'll usually have some scar or metal prosthetic to indicate how you defeated them the first time. The thing is, this doesn't happen very often. Usually, if they do come back, you'll have - for example - already killed their Warchief, making them just a nuisance. I'd have liked for there to be a bit more of a real rivalry built up between Talion and these orcs.
Orcs will permanently die if you behead them, but this is kind of determined randomly as far as I can tell - sometimes your "Execute" attack will take their heads off, and sometimes you'll just super-stab them.
Still, it's a really cool feature that I think could use some refinement.
The game world has some great positives and some great negatives. On the positive side, the game does a good job recapturing the dirty aesthetic of the LOTR movies. This definitely feels like the version of Tolkien brought to us by Peter Jackson. The voice acting is also quite good. Storywise, it's... tantalyzing. There's tons of backstory (the Elf-Wraith who is bonded to Talion is a pretty important figure in Middle-Earth's history,) but the characters we deal with are a little thin. There is a human refugee kingdom that has for some reason decided Mordor would be a good place to live (in fairness, they were there before the Orcs came back,) but their story doesn't really go that far beyond "we need to get the hell out of Mordor."
There's also something weirdly unsatisfying about the fact that there are two large game areas, rather than three. As I played through the Udun section of the game, I actually began to suspect I might spend the entire time there. But upon entering the Sea of Nurnen area, the game seemed like it was going to open up into a much larger expanse. However, in the end, other than a couple of areas you only go to when dealing with the major bosses, that's it. Now, each of these areas has districts that vary somewhat. You'll get to know the various towns and fortresses with larger populations of orcs and contrast those with the open spaces.
The major "boss fights" are also not really that. The Hammer is the only one that you fight in open combat, and he's definitely a challenge (especially with a constant stream of Orc grunts joining him.) The Tower, however, is an attempt at a "Stealth Boss." Obviously, SoM is a game that allows you to do things stealthily, and thus it would be weird for every major enemy to be fought in open combat. The problem is that adjusting difficulty in stealth gameplay is always tricky, as it tends to operate on a scale of "do I see you or not?" (Actually, there's an idea for game developers - is there a way to make a type of stealth gameplay with more variation.) The final boss, rather than involving the Bow, as you might guess, is actually just an old-school "Quick Time Event," where you have to press the buttons that pop up on the screen.
Before summing up, let's talk combat. Stealth really works just like in a game like Assassin's Creed, though you have other options than just killing an enemy if you can nab them. The psychology of the orcs plays a role here - in the second half of the game you can "brand" orcs so that they'll fight for you (and obey your commands without resisting.) You can also "brutalize" enemies from stealth, which is actually a pretty clever alternative to the old "pick them off one at a time" style of stealth from similar games. Brutalizing will have you stab the target multiple times. This is useful when attacking a group of orcs, as it will cause at least one of them to run away screaming, and it will also charge up your hit-streak before you engage the remaining orcs.
Melee combat is pretty fun when you get the hang of it. Each time you strike an enemy (with any weapon,) your hit counter will go up by one, and will continue to climb as long as you don't miss, get hit by an attack, or go for a long enough time without hitting anything. When you get up to eight, the counter will turn red, allowing you to use a powerful finisher (such as Execute, which instant-kills grunts and does significant damage to captains and warchiefs.) There are plenty of abilities you can unlock as you go that will make it easier to rack up this counter and pull off more of those moves. Oddly, though this might be just me, and potentially a result of the default control scheme, but parrying can be tough to pull off. When an enemy tries to strike you, you'll have a brief moment to respond, and it can be difficult to pull this off when trying to keep on the offensive. There aren't really any "counter-kills" like in Assassin's Creed, and enemies will often attack at the same time, so you'll need to be quick to respond - though thankfully, if you strike a guy while they're winding up for an attack, you will interrupt them (except the shield-carrying guardians, I believe.)
Ranged combat has cleverly been designed so that you can fight like Legolas pretty effectively. Unlike the sword and dagger (the latter actually being the remains of a broken sword,) the Bow is an ethereal extension of the Elf Wraith. This means you'll go into Wraith mode automatically when firing the bow. Additionally, by default you'll also start using Focus (a regenerating resource) to slow down time while firing. This allows you to get off multiple charged headshots before the orcs you're fighting can react, or allowing you to shoot an orc in the head right in the middle of a grand melee. Arrows, or "Elf-Shot" can be recovered either by finding the ghostly projectiles in the walls and floors of the many ruins in the area, or by "draining" poor orcs who get in your way (this attack cleverly employs a dutch angle for the camera to sell how unsettling it is.)
There is a story through which to progress here, and there's a structure to the game's quests, but I think the main selling point is that it's truly fun to get in there and mess it up with some Uruks. Some gameplay features could definitely have been more emphasized, particularly the nemesis system (I'm still not entirely sure how useful it is to "terrify" my targets,) and while the two main game areas did feel relatively different, I think they could have done more to vary the environment. But any of the problems I might have had with the game could be fixed in a sequel, and given that it ends with an utterly shameless sequel hook, I expect we'll see one before too long.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Archimonde Fight Spoilers
Archimonde is the final boss of the Hellfire Citadel raid (Archimonde B, that is, given that our version died in WCIII, but I'll trust everyone to understand the whole "alternate universe" thing.) The fight looks pretty intense, and it definitely looks like a pretty big epic culmination of the raid, and potentially the expansion (though recent news makes me doubt that a bit.)
However, one major detail of the fight is actually a pretty big spoiler for the fate of a certain character - I'm trying to be vague here to give anyone trying to avoid the spoilers a chance to read the warning.
Got it? Ok. Spoiler Town:
However, one major detail of the fight is actually a pretty big spoiler for the fate of a certain character - I'm trying to be vague here to give anyone trying to avoid the spoilers a chance to read the warning.
Got it? Ok. Spoiler Town:
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