Tales of Xillia/Graces f

Getting lazy again and doing two games at once! Well, there's that, and the fact these are quite similar in many ways. It's a normal series thing, kind of like Final Fantasy before FFX and later games started messing around with things more. So yes, both of these games have the same fundamental game mechanics and core systems. The biggest differences can be found in character development, combat system details and various subsystems. Tales seems to be one of those series that are kind of reliable, but nothing truly amazing ever seems to come out of it. That's just my impression, and I might be terribly wrong. It does, however, definitely hold true for these two games I have played. One distinctive feature of the series is that you can play battles with up to four players. This makes it ideal for social RPG marathons because there is no need for taking turns holding the controller. Which is why I picked Xillia up initially in fact.

I don't feel like doing a complete analysis. I'll just go off on random tangents instead. Wherever that may lead.

1. Detour gaming

Rant time! This applies especially to Tales of Xillia, as the game is my source of inspiration for writing about this phenomenon. The point is still valid for many games, and even other works of fiction. Xillia is just particularly obnoxious. There's some minor spoilers about the game's structure, but nothing specific really. The game starts with Milla trying to destroy a device. She fails and has to retreat. Then we get to follow how she attempts to get back to the lab, to destroy the device once more. However, there's a but. One does not simply walk into... well, might as well call it Mordor. The next twenty or something hours of the game are basically spent running into yet another obstacle that ruins yet another way of reaching Mordor. When we're finally down to the very last option, the game still manages to throw several hours' worth of hoops for us to jump through.

In other words, the story does not actually proceed anywhere in the first twenty or more hours of the game. There is literally no progress in the plot. There's just an endless ball of side plot threads, all of which are incredibly pointless. They just have to get the player to visit every corner of the world, no matter how lame the excuses to do so are. The first half of Tales of Graces f feels a bit like the same in the sense that it too has the player run across the world map before the plot truly starts moving ahead, but at least it moves. Xillia just kind of spins in place. Ironically, once it actually gets somewhere, Xillia's plot is fairly good. Naturally once it gets to the good bits, it starts to move too quickly. It's kind of the same for Graces f, but at least it is somewhat more balanced with its pacing.

I stopped watching The X-Files because the series just throws bucketloads of fillers at the viewer. Same thing happens in anime a lot. Typically, not only does the main plot stand still for the duration of an entire episode, often interpersonal relations of the main cast do not develop either. Even if the individual filler episodes are great from time to time, it is still really annoying when the fiction does not grow. I love growth. These days I very rarely watch movies at all because they're hardly comparable to the massive arc of growth offered by extended works of fiction. I also expect this growth from such fiction, and get upset when it fails to deliver, choosing to unload filler after filler instead. That said, I haven't really found anyone who actually likes the kind of structure Tales of Xillia offers. So perhaps this is not just a personal quirk of mine at work in this rant.

The incredibly subtle parallel here is that I consider the hoops (subplots) in Xillia as something very similar to filler episodes. I think it's a fair comparison. In both cases, the main characters get diverted from their primary task into doing something less important (although technically it supports their main goal because it's an obstacle). The subplot often carries no weight beyond its own time frame either, which makes it a completely irrelevant event once it is over. It also often involves grinding down a horde of enemies that otherwise would have been left untouched. Yes, I do realize that by playing JRPGs I literally signed up for killing endless legions of enemies, but I'd rather encounter them while getting towards a worthy goal - otherwise it feels like I'm eradicating them just so that marketers can claim another +10 hours of gameplay in the box.

Games don't even need to necessarily have any stupid detours. Taking forever to get anywhere is just as frustrating, but it's a subject for another entry. Overall, I do admit my reaction to detour gaming these days is a lot stronger than it used to be in the past. The key factor here is time, or rather the ever-ironic relationship of time and money. Way back when I had all the time in the world, my ability to actually buy new games was rather limited. Back then a game had to offer a significant amount of gameplay hours to justify paying a full price. This made me a lot more tolerant. These days as I have a stable source of income and money to spend, the very fact of my employment kind of cuts into my gaming time. This has lead me to value my time all the more, and I have started to expect the same respect for my time from games. So, I feel a bit offended when they do not.

Perhaps it's a sign that I should finally ditch my long-lasting love for JRPGs. Or at least stop playing the titles that seem okayish, not great.

2. Real-time battle, almost there

The Tales franchise sports real-time battles, and they have been doing so for quite some time. At some point they switched to 3D battle fields, but to my knowledge the basics have stayed roughly the same throughout the series. As we have discussed in previous entries, real-time battle systems generally need to somehow control the flow of battle so that players cannot just mash buttons and hold enemies in stagger infinitely. In this regard Tales is a bit chaotic. Basic attacks generally don't offer much stagger and the stagger resistance of enemies didn't seem constant, or was dependent on their own state (e.g. they cannot be staggered mid-animation). I am not sure how exactly stagger worked in these two games - the system wasn't really all that transparent.

Of these two games, Graces f felt a bit more fast-paced, with more emphasis on tempo control. Although the games feel very similar on the surface, a number of differences contribute the difference in feel. For instance, Xillia controls ability spam through the equivalent of mana. Graces f does no such thing; instead it has a different point mechanic that controls the length of combos. It's quite similar to the system in Star Ocean 3. The end result is that while it's possible to hold an enemy staggered for the duration of an entire combo, at some point you'll simply run out of steam and have to wait a few seconds to regenerate combo capacity. This is the battle flow control mechanism that puts forces the player to play defense for a bit instead of brainlessly mashing combos in. In Xillia mana kind of acts as a similar mechanism: although repeatedly casting spells can hold enemies in place, you'll eventually run out of mana.

I did play most of Xillia as a caster so I cannot attest how it works for other character types. Overall I felt that the amount of control players can have over enemies is in similar levels; perhaps slightly stronger in Graces f. On the other hand, the amount of control players have over their allies is slightly higher in Xillia. In Graces f all other party members are almost completely autonomous; in Xillia, the player can choose to link their character with another character to have them work as a pair. Since we were playing with two players, we both had a link partner, whereas I'd imagine there would be more switching involved when playing solo because links between different characters provide different benefits and combination attacks. Both games have the option to bind a few abilities of non-controlled characters to buttons, allowing the player to invoke them when needed.

Overall I feel there's a bit of a redundancy problem in both games. They have a lot of depth, but fall short in utilizing it. With 3 AI controlled characters in the battle field, a lot of stuff is simply out of the player's hands. For instance, in Graces f you get quite significant bonus damage if you hit all of an enemy's weaknesses in one combo. There are so many different weaknesses that a single character can rarely do so, which means you have to hope that your allies have the sense to fill in the one's you cannot hit. It also requires a lot of memorization because attacks can have up to four different attributes, and the player has a combo tree of 16 attacks and another 4 attacks on top of that. You can always check the attributes in a pause menu, but it gets tedious. Xillia reduces the amount of available attacks drastically, and it also simplifies the weakness system to a more familiar element based one.

Another difference that may seem small but vastly influences the battle flow is free run. An interesting feature in Tales is that normally characters move in a 2D line in respect to their target (i.e. just near or far). Free run can be activated with a button, and it allows a character to move freely. In Graces f, free running depletes combo capacity, limiting it use heavily while in Xillia it's free. It follows rather naturally that you'll be using it a lot more, because it's the best way to avoid enemy attacks. In fact, since Graces f has a quick step dodge (also costs cc), there is very little use for free running. The end result is that Xillia involves a lot more running around and crossing distances is fairly quick. In Graces f evasions are done in a tighter space, and covering larger distances actually takes quite a bit of time. Xillia also has jumping which Graces f does not, and it seems very useless and mostly annoying. Jumps are slow, which makes accidental jumps quite dangerous.

I slightly preferred Graces f's gameplay, primarily because its controls are more stable. Accidental jumps aside, Xillia also has an annoying habit of characters not facing the right way after free running, which results in a lot of spells cast off-target. Neither of the games get to the same level of enjoyment as my long time favorite Star Ocean 3. Tales combat feels quite entertaining, and most of the time it's fast - a massively important factor in a game with hundreds of battles. Unfortunately enemies do not vary all that much, which makes stuff a bit repetitive. There are some alleviating factors however, and we're about to move on to them.


3. Character design musings

In both games, all characters have their own unique mechanics. I find this commendable, as opposed to games where all characters can be made into carbon copies of each other. These mechanics felt more emphasized in Xillia though, and were not that big of a factor in Graces f. There clearly had to be a reason why I chose to play just one character though, so let's look into this a bit. First of all, one problem I have with both games is that all character upgrades come in very small pieces from a system that has hundreds of nodes to activate (the systems are a bit different, but the rewards are not). A +3% conditional bonus here, a +2 stat bonus there etc. This means it's really hard to actually make any sense of a character's play style and advantages in just a glance, and it takes quite a lot of fights to grasp it in practice too. Arguably this could also been seen as a strength.

There is however something to be said about the actual impacts of different playstyles on characters. If you look at Dota 2, there's 108 different heroes and all of them have a distinct impact on how the game plays out. Meanwhile, in tales, it felt like I could have any party of four characters and the combat experience was no different - unless I would have purposefully avoided taking a healer with me, but that's just stupid. So, while each character may feel a bit different to play, the overall combat flow remains largely unchanged. I acknowledge that I did not particularly explore my options, because I largely had a "whatever works" attitude. The reason for this is the lack of variety in enemy design - the game very rarely forces its player to adapt. In Graces f I also didn't feel like memorizing a new combo tree too often so I stuck with the main character.

I don't often change characters just for variety. I only change when the game throws a curve ball my standard roster cannot handle, or if I feel combats are going too slowly. Sticking with the main character usually works well enough, because they're generally designed to be quite straightforward to play and still effective, and also the most well-rounded. I don't like playing healers or supports that cast buffs in real-time combat systems, because usually the AI is actually better at these roles (healing a low HP character or refreshing an expired buff are both very simple rules) - and it's usually more boring. In a cast of six characters there's typically one healer, one buffer and four others who usually do either physical or magical damage (or very rarely both but they're usually worse than focused characters). This leaves four feasible options to choose from.  

Because I don't trust AI in these games, I generally aim to play the character that is the most crucial for my strategy to work. Admittedly it's a bit unfair to make comparisons to Star Ocean 3 because I sank some three hundred hours into that game and experimented with everything. However, even on my first playthrough I felt more pressured to change my controlled character throughout the game. It would seem that for all their unique mechanics, characters in either of these two Tales games don't really have that different impact - some are just more tedious to play than others. It kinda comes down to the fact that there are just multiple ways of doing the exact same thing. If you compare to something I have hyped less, like Xenoblade, even that game had more pressing selection criteria for characters because they actually did different things.

Might be this is just my impression, and the system actually offers more than I got out of it. I also do commend the effort. It just really feels like - as long as you've got the basic requirements covered - there really isn't much of a difference between party configurations. It's also worthwhile to remember that it's not necessarily a problem with character design; it could just as well be a problem with enemy design. Ultimately it's always the game's challenge that drives players to adapt and make good use of their options. Certainly there are players out there who appreciate options just for the sake of having variety, but for me it feels like waste of interesting character design. In one regard Tales does fine: non-active party members still receive a lion's share of experience, so they at least do not fall behind.

Conclusion

Although there are a lot of individual minisystems in both games that are kind of curious, I will cut this post short here. Overall both games are decent JRPGs, but not really special in any regard. This really hurts them a lot, because mediocre JRPGs seem to be all we're getting these days - especially on home consoles. They're hurt by sloppy storytelling. All of their good ideas also kind of blend into a grey mix where nothing seems to really matter a whole lot. The end result is an experience that is kind of bland until you have put enough hours behind to develop some affection for the characters and their antics. This is actually another commendable thing about the series: it has a lot of (optional) banter between characters. Although it's quite cliched, it's highly entertaining and brings life to the otherwise mediocre characters. Some scenes - particularly in Xillia - are just downright absurd.

Overall, I might have loved this series a lot more had I played it like ten years ago. It was entertaining enough for these two games, but I'm not really dying to get more. Maybe for a full 4 player cooperative experience? Xillia 2 is out there, but it seems like yet another mediocre game, with just one benefit: recurring characters - but that's a topic for another day.

As a final note, maybe I should re-visit Star Ocean 3 and see if it's actually as good as I remember it to be.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

This game swallowed up must of my autumn. As of now, I haven't touched it for a month, my subscription has expired and I have no real desire to go back anyway. Therefore it's a good time to make a writeup about the first and (probably) last MMORPG (just MMO from now on) I have played. First one I have played properly anyway; I did play one and half starting areas of World of Warcraft, mostly for the same reason I started this game - it was easier for me to justify starting an MMO when I did with a friend or two. On the one hand, playing an MMO alone is not that much fun at all. On the other hand, limiting playing time to playing with friends helps against sinking too much time to the game (that's wishful thinking, just so you know). This post is likely to be a long one because I want to go through some game mechanics (and dynamics) and talk about my own experiences, including the reason I quit playing.

1. FFXIV - the game

As an MMO, this game's pretty traditional. Game mechanics wise it follows in the footsteps of World of Warcraft and as such I'm not going to delve too deeply into the basics. It's a Final Fantasy game, clearly made for fans of the series - it has everything people expect to see in FF. For me personally the biggest deciding factor in choosing to play this over other MMOs was entirely technical: it was released for the PS3. On top of my office work and my daily Dota 2 dose, I really cannot sit in front of a computer much more. Not that sitting on a couch with a pad is super healthy, but the ergonomy is just way better. Anyway, the combat mechanics are cooldown-based with some abilities on shared cooldown (called global cooldown) while others on their individual cooldowns (these abilities are referred to as cooldowns... because that's not confusing at all). 

All in all, the mechanics are pretty slow-paced and not challenging in the least to execute. Gameplay decisions revolve more around positioning, rotations (the order in which different abilities are used) and timing of cooldowns. It's honestly not that interesting, which is why I always find it weird when single player RPGs choose to adopt similar mechanics (e.g. Xenoblade). Based on what I heard from people who have played other games, positioning matters slightly more in FFXIV - at least with some classes - because certain abilities have different effects when they hit the enemy from the side or behind. It makes melee damage dealers (DD) more interesting to play - or at least there's a bit more to do than just walk next to the enemy and start pushing buttons in a predetermined order. When playing solo, combat is still pretty damn static. Basically solo playing goes back to easy fun, a topic I brought up in my post about Amalur. 

The overall game concept is very familiar. The game progresses through a long series of plot-related quests, and of course includes an insane amount of sidequests. I'm not a big fan because the vast majority of these quests are not interesting in the least - another point I brought up when writing about Amalur (which just goes to show how accurate it is to describe Amalur as a single player MMO). Could we have an MMO with less sidequests? I'll write a separate section about the plot, so let's move on. Equipment is also very standard and for me the biggest disappointment - or would be if I had expected anything more. All you ever get is more numbers and typically the next piece of equipment is only very marginally better than the last. So although new stuff is gotten fairly often, it doesn't really seem to do anything. In a way the biggest win is when you get rid of an ugly piece of gear. 

As a game, the one thing FFXIV has going for it is its class system. Unlike most MMOs, there's no need for alts (alternative characters) because characters can freely change their class by changing their primary weapon (or tool) anytime outside of combat. Each class is leveled independently and any class lower than your highest gets an experience bonus (so they level up a bit faster). Not that remarkable in itself, but in true FF style classes can borrow skills from other classes. Honestly though it sounds cooler on paper because each class only has a few skills that others can borrow. Furthermore, advanced classes (jobs) are even more limited because they can only borrow from two predefined classes. The usefulness of this system depends on which job you're playing - playing paladin I found absolutely no reason to level up other classes for skills. 

Crafting is a bit different from what I've heard about other games. Crafts are full classes with their own skills and mechanics. They're divided into disciplines of the hand (DOH) and disciplines of the land (DOL). DOH mechanics are the most interesting and for them, it actually makes a lot of sense to level up other crafts to get more skills. Crafting rotations are a bit different from combat rotations, because they depend on several factors: primarily what is being crafted and how many crafting points (CP) the character has. Each skill costs either CP or durability (or both). Durability is basically an indicator for how many operations can be done to the item being crafted. Generally speaking operations raise either progress or quality. Progress defines whether the crafting succeeds (inability to fill the progress bar leads to failure) while quality defines the odds of getting a high quality item. DOL mechanics are mostly about playing around with odds of getting items and hq items from nodes. 

2. Fail

There are a couple of pretty big faults. One is more specific to FFXIV while the other feels like it applies more broadly. Let's talk about the main plot. As such the plot is pretty standard Final Fantasy (or any RPG), - nothing really special to it really. If plots are salvaged at all, it usually happens through interesting characters. Herein comes a bit of a problem because in MMOs, the player's character has no personality - and in FFXIV at least they don't even have any lines. This feels a bit off, because the player is supposed to control the central character in the story, it doesn't really feel like it at any point because the only slivers of personality have been granted to NPCs. I guess the intention is for the player to fill in the blanks inside their head but it just doesn't work at all (it works in Persona 3/4 though). The fact that story quests are almost indistinguishable from sidequests doesn't help. 

All in all, it feels like the player's role is to be a task-completing robot. A lot of these tasks also feel like they're there only to make the experience longer - which is understandable from the business point of view what with FFXIV being a subscription game and all. Every time you go to see someone to get a piece of equipment or information, you can bet they send you on an errand or ten before allowing you to proceed with the actual story. The story just drowns in a sea of errands. It also bothers me that MMOs basically just ask you to look away from the fact that there are thousands of characters doing the exactly same plot... which kind of retracts from the idea of being the "only hope" or whatever. There's a very half-assed attempt to explain all the other player characters but it doesn't really work. Could we get an MMO that actually takes this into account? 

It's painstakingly clear that the story is there just to give you something to do on your way to level 50 and the endgame. Leveling up is the other sore point in FFXIV, and here's why: quests aside, the hands down best way to get experience is to do Fates (well, FATEs really but I don't even remember what the acronym was for). These are events (read: fights) that pop on the map periodically, and they can involve any number of players. They give much higher experience rewards than killing enemies or doing dungeons. What this means is that the best way to level up other classes (and at some points your main too) is to go to an area that has a lot of fates for roughly your level, then just wait for one to appear, go do it and... rinse and repeat. The waiting part is already annoying, as is doing the same fates all over again but that's not the biggest problem. 

The biggest problem with fates is lazy-ass programming and lag. Because popular fate areas contain a lot of players, each fate has a ridiculous amount of players trying to get enough contribution for the highest rank. That causes a ton of lag, and at times makes the game entirely unplayable because for some reason the programmers decided to prioritize loading of other players above loading monsters. Because you cannot target unloaded objects and almost every attack in the game is unit target... good luck trying to do some damage. The contribution mechanics are also bonkers because whoever hits a monster first gets full credit for killing it even if that's the only attack they contribute while others have to do significant percentage of the total damage to get credit. Which means people are just spamming aoe attacks to "claim" enemies as fast as possible, then leave them for someone else to kill. 

I was actually quite happy I didn't need any high level skills from other classes because leveling up in this game sucks balls so hard. Even in the main quest there are moments where you are asked to grind a couple of levels before proceeding. Wow. Such design. Very grind. Leveling up crafts is actually a lot faster (or at least it was, they nerfed it a bit after I stopped playing). I actually found it quite fun to level up my crafts alongside my main class because it allowed me to create my own equipment, primarily because leveling up crafts wasn't nowhere near the insane grind that adventuring classes needed. The game also has a bunch of minor issues here and there like non-sortable inventory (dafuq?), but these two things are the major issues.  

3. Dungeons and... more dungeons

FFXIV uses the standard paradigm for its dungeons. A basic party consists of one tank, one healer and two damage dealers with each of these having its own distinctive role. It ain't broken so there's no real need to fix it. Guild Wars 2 tried to break the paradigm but it only resulted in dungeons being more boring than ever (they basically gave every class a heal etc. so anyone could do any role). I started the game with a DD, but when my friends stopped playing I switched to tank. The reason for the swap was simple enough: most players want to play DD which puts tanks and healers in higher demand. Each role has its own challenges so I think in general all should be interesting to play. In addition to keeping enemies agroed to themselves, tanks are also expected to lead - which includes choosing and prioritizing targets. I enjoyed that part, because it allowed me to be an active player in dungeons. 

Dungeons can be roughly divided into mob and boss phases. For tanks, mobs are often the more challenging part - keeping multiple enemies targeting you is harder than keeping just one. For damage dealers bosses are often more interesting because they usually need to take care of adds (reinforcements) and other smaller details, while the tank just sits there toe-to-toe with the boss. This varies from boss to boss, and some designs are clearly better than others. Worst designs are pretty much slugfests while best ones require active participation from everyone (e.g. tanks need to kite the boss around instead of tanking in one spot). Mostly these bosses are not that hard. Before the endgame there are only very few show-stoppers. There's nothing particularly hard about mobs in dungeons as long as the tank doesn't pull (engage) too many at once. Of course, later on, speedrun tactics involve pulling quite a bit more than standard runners are used to.  

Dungeons and other party instances feel like the essence of MMOs. Even with random people they are way more fun than solo gameplay - with friends they are of course even better. FFXIV is rare in one respect considering dungeons: the main story includes most of the game's dungeons as mandatory stops. I actually like this decision because it gets all players involved with dungeoneering way before the endgame - after all, playing in a party is the only thing in the entire game that is actually challenging. To make things easier for players, the game contains the dreaded Duty Finder (DF), which is the equivalent of matchmaking for multiplayer games. Instead of trying to get parties by shouting in area chat, players just register to DF alone or with friends, and DF forms complete parties and sends them off to the dungeon. Because DDs are rather abundant, it takes a while for them to find a party. I was usually DFing with one friend who played healer, so we basically got parties instantly. 

DF is honestly just fine until harder dungeons and instances start to appear. After that, well, you get to deal with the usual matchmaking problems: some people are undergeared while others don't seem to have any idea about how to play. Considering how easy and intuitive I found most of the things in this game, I can only wonder how people cannot grasp the basic concepts... oh well. I didn't experience many problems at all, probably because I was always queueing as a tank and usually had my own healer too. Most of the time poor DDs only make things slower, not impossible. Some bosses in the game do require a healthy pace from DDs at which point those with poor gear or rotations become a hindrance. One of the biggest show-stoppers in the game is especially obnoxious for DF because it always creates parties with the same 1:1:2 formula. For this particular boss, there is absolutely no use for a second tank, and there's a phase that is highly dependent on damage output where a fifth DD would really help. 

For the record I didn't make it through that one particular boss because - DF issues aside - it's fricking hard. Therefore I also haven't experienced any of the endgame raids but it's pretty safe to assume they are still mostly like any other dungeon. The endgame in general is mostly about speedrunning dungeons - the faster the better - and although it's pretty damn repetitive in the long run, I found it quite fun to try and shave off minutes from completion times. For the record, the difference between DF parties and premade parties is pretty staggering here. 

4. Reasons to play

I guess I covered the game itself to as much detail as I had planned. As a game, it really is not that great. Most single player RPGs - even ones that suffer from the MMO syndrome - are better as games. But playing an MMO is not like playing other games really. It's more like a project. A project where success is pretty much guaranteed if you put enough time into it. Likewise, it's much easier to pick up than any real project. It's easy to see how this makes these games highly attractive - and addictive. Like I said, I started off with a couple of friends but they didn't last very long. I had however already put significant amount of time into the game and felt like at least playing through the main story. At that time I had plenty of things to do besides progressing in the story: I enjoyed gathering, crafting and playing the market (i.e. capitalism). In short, the project was already well underway, and every day I reached a milestone or few. 

There's also the social aspect. It got me into the game in the first place. Although my friends quit, I discovered a linkshell (kind of a chat channel) for Finnish players which helped me actually stay in the game. Being able to chat (or follow one) while doing whatever seemingly boring task turns the game into a fine passtime. Occasionally, especially in the endgame, we would also form full parties to speedrun and tackle some of the hardest bosses, usually as a favor to newer players in the linkshell. I always enjoy helping people out in games, so although there wasn't anything for me to gain (other than good karma I guess) these were fun times. It's once again a bit like any actual project - being involved with people makes it so much easier to make it through one. Although dungeons were mostly fun from a pure gameplay perspective, I feel it's the project angle that really keeps players like myself in these games.

Come to think of it, I seem to like my games (even) more when they become projects. For RPGs this happens after beating the game, when I start to tackle all the post-game content (optional dungeons, bosses, achievements and such). After beating the game, I'm armed with much more knowledge about it not just because I have been playing it for 30+ hours, but also because I allow myself to look at guides at this point to see what I've missed. I never use any additional information while playing the game because I want to surprise me and I don't want to know about any possible overpowered skills, weapons and such beforehand. It is half the fun to tackle the game with what you manage to find. However after it is done, that's when the other kind of fun - the project fun - begins. 

5. Reasons to quit

I did stop playing FFXIV before completing the project largely because it no longer felt worth doing - at least considering the time investment it would have required. For the last four weeks I was more or less just doing one thing: speedrunning the same two dungeons over and over again to farm tomes (needed for endgame gear). What had happened was that I had leveled up all the crafts I wanted and I didn't feel like leveling up another adventuring class (for reasons mentioned earlier). There was literally nothing left except two things: the speedrun, and waiting for an opportunity to tackle hard mode Titan in order to proceed to the final endgame stage. The latter never happened because although I was interacting with a lot of people, getting a Titan party together was pretty rare.

I didn't really feel like getting into an FC that would focus the endgame content. I don't really feel like having social obligations in my games - especially not weekly. Still it seemed like the only real way of getting anywhere with the endgame. I was pretty much playing on my own, unable to schedule anything so I was just reliant on being in the game when someone started to put together a party for a speedrun or Titan. I only logged in to do my weekly speedruns anyway so I didn't spend too much time in the game for the last couple of weeks. Christmas holidays came around and it was then when I decided to take a break from the game and see if I would feel like getting back to it come new year. I started to play other games (Remember Me and Valkyrie Profile 2 at the time) and didn't feel like getting back into the time sink.

There was another thing that really bothered me about the endgame. Unless you have a full party of friends who want to tackle unknown challenges, it is pretty much mandatory to look up boss strategies etc. beforehand. For me figuring out strategies is the reason to play games in general so it felt really lame. I wasn't really looking forward to the final endgame phase for this reason. Even if I got there, I would still be just repeating someone else's strats more or less. MMOs like this one don't really have that much challenge in executing a strategy, at least not on individual level. It's really more like a communication effort. That's fine and all, but really only works with a group of people you know.

Conclusion

The big question considering the entire experience is: was it worth the three months I spent on it? From a pure gameplay perspective... probably not. Although I clearly enjoyed playing the game, something about it definitely rubbed me the wrong way in the long run. I don't think it was FFXIV specifically was the problem either - while the game had its flaws, I honestly don't think any other MMO would have made much of a difference. However as a game dev and as a researcher I think it was valuable to really get into an MMO to see what's it all about. It was also nice to notice that this genre works just fine with a pad. The only real difficulty is with typing - it's ridiculously slow. I did bear with it for like two months but I eventually got a bluetooth keyboard for my PS3 just to type.

The game was already remade once, and I think Square-Enix still has some work to do with it - mainly fix the braindead loading priority and lag issues. There's not much wrong in the game compared to the competition (based on hearsay). From a thematic perspective it definitely feels like a Final Fantasy game, but the gameplay is very standard MMO stuff - sure, the class system brings some FF spice into the mix, but it doesn't do quite as much as it could. The crafting system is probably the biggest distinguishing factor, but its impact is ultimately a bit too small. Whether the game is worth trying really depends on what you're looking for. There is one thing it does superbly though: it's the best MMO you can play on a PS3 (FYI: the PC version also supports pad, and some people seemed to prefer it to ye olde keyboard+mouse combo).

I'm glad I played it, I'm glad I quit it, and - unless a really game-changing MMO comes around - now I can safely say "never again". 

Dota 2 (Overview)

OK. So my friend - who has been going on and on about Dota 2 ever since its release - decided to do me a "favor" by giving me a beta access key. Suddenly the pace at which my "games to play" used to get shorter came to a near-halt. Instead my Steam profile tells me that during the past three months, I have played Dota 2 for something like 400 hours. This outcome was not exactly unpredictable; there is a very good reason I have limited myself to single player games for a very long time (the occasional fighting game aside). As you might have guessed, I get engrossed in my games a lot. This is a good trait for a game designer to be sure but it is also a very dangerous trait. It's easy enough to control with single player games because they ultimately end. Either I reach the end, or I get all the achievements - it doesn't matter which, there is always a point where I can put the game away and mark it as "done". The problem with multiplayer games is that they don't really have an endpoint.

In this article I have decided to ramble about random things that pop into my mind. Mostly about Dota 2. I am not going to explain the MOBA concept. Go play one or read a Wiki article. This article is more overview-y. I might do some more detailed pieces about game mechanics. Maybe.

1. Studying as a way to play

I'm a scholar type gamer. Let's face it: my execution sucks. I have never been able to do the really tricky things in fighters even though I have played them for quite a long time and have been somewhat successful on a national level. My reaction time and my manual dexterity are just not up to the task. That is why I play a lot of slow-paced or turn-based games where the advantage lies in knowledge and cunning. I used to be a regular GameFAQs junkie, even reading guides that had no real relevance to my own playing. I wanted to know how others play the games I have just completed; I also wanted to know stuff that the game failed to reveal to me. I used to write guides myself too. I would discuss this stuff with anyone willing to participate. I still do. For a scholar gamer, playing the game is just half of the fun. If I look at my all-time favorite games, they are all games that inspire studying.

Being an extremely complex game, Dota 2 demands study. At first the huge amount of information is just overwhelming. At the time of writing there are almost a hundred heroes in the game, each with their unique abilities and varying attributes. On top of that there's even more items, a lot of them with their own distinct purpose. Sorting all this out takes time and experience, but even more so, it requires studying. I was at about 300 games when I could finally tell what every hero and item in the game can do from memory. I still check details almost daily. But it is not the amount of information that makes studying Dota 2 so compelling. The real complexity is in the way all this information interacts. There are five heroes on each side of a match, and every other hero in the game affects how you should play yours. The beauty of this is that the complexity here is so immense that there is no guide you can read that could cover your situation.

Unlike MMORPG's that have their loathed cookie-cutter builds, these do not largely exist in Dota 2. Therefore even a rather new player like myself is compelled to theory-craft. The fluid nature of Dota 2 can be witnessed by following tournament and league matches between professional teams. The list of most played heroes is living constantly, and new surprising lineups come up all the time. Teams figure out entirely new ways to play some heroes and suddenly those heroes are the new thing. Because everything is so situational, there are basically endless possibilities for a scholar gamer to improve their game simply by studying, theory-crafting and experimenting. When watching pro matches, I find myself constantly trying to figure out why they did what they just did (e.g. why did they pick hero X and not Y).

Because of this constant evolution, most written information is not up to date. It is often useful, but you can usually theory-craft beyond it. Likewise, the most current information comes from watching tournament and league matches, but it is often situational; again with the theory-crafting. The beauty of all this of course that it really pays off. You can easily tell when players have only played the game and never bothered to study it. They go for their standard builds and have very little concern for overall strategy. They choose their heroes based on what they want to play without paying any attention to picks made by other players. They fail to grasp when they have a massive disadvantage in a particular matchup. They even struggle with very basic concepts. Any player in the know will immediately take advantage of this. Although Dota 2 has some degree of technical skill, it is easy to outplay opponents with pure strategy.

It is the studying aspect that really keeps me interested in Dota 2. It also is linked to enjoyability of the game.

2. Goals of playing

Enjoying the studying has a very strong psychological background. The brain is simply wired to reward learning, and Dota 2 is excellent at showing results. At least my experienced rate of improvement has been very high. Reality may or may not agree, but it doesn't really matter to the brain. Another psychological concept that I have experienced is the difference in orientation. On the very highest level of orientation, there are two modes to do things: task-oriented and ego-oriented. The former happens whenever I play with a practice mindset, e.g. learning a new hero, practicing to use a certain skill, trying out a new build or figuring out a counter to a hero I lose a lot to.The latter happens whenever I get too obsessed about my own performance scores or winrates. I am most vulnerable to this when I'm "just playing" with no real goal. Let's just say that when playing a game like Dota 2 you should never ever play for no reason.

Being task-oriented means paying attention to the thing that you have set out to do and simply getting better at it. Basically this means that whatever happens, you will never be disappointed with the outcome. Either you have realized a new flaw or - better scenario - witnessed some clear improvement. Note that this is not the same as playing with "just do your best" mentality. Whatever you are doing should still be aimed ultimately at winning the game. You just shouldn't be obsessed about the outcome: this will only make you cranky and, most importantly, play worse. Whenever someone gest a rage fit in the game, they are very likely playing with an ego-orientation. When you are ego-oriented towards a task, your sense of self-worth hinges on the outcome of the activity. This makes you likely to take a loss personally and blame others in your team for playing poorly.

I have found it really useful to always ask myself "what will I get out of playing this match". It is really easy to become ego-involved in the game if you are "just playing" it. This does a lot to explain the bad reputation of MOBA communities in general (they are considered largely not friendly towards new players; I'll get back to this). Always practice something, and you will always get something out of every game. Although I will very likely never be good enough to play in a serious team (I am playing the "I'm too old for this shit" card here), I nevertheless try to practice towards the goal. Playing occasional matches with four friends also boosts motivation considerably because that is when all your knowledge and skill is really put to use. In public games with random team mates the unwillingness of others to cooperate often results in some weird ways to play the game that are not really viable in real team vs team matches. When it is you and four of your firends you get to practice the most important aspect of the game: effective teamwork.

3. About the players...

What you usually hear about MOBA games is that they are hard games to learn and while you are learning, everyone will cosntantly tell you exactly how much you suck. I also went into the game in a "brace for impact" mode but it turns out this is largely a dated stereotype. True, players do rage from time to time but it is in no way as common as it could seem from the talk. As we just speculated, this raging could happen largely because a lot of players are rather ego-oriented about the entire thing. Another problem with ego-oriented players is that they tend to be rather ignorant too. I think it is essential to make a clear distinction between two types of "bad" players: inexperienced and ignorant players. Although I do not openly flame people, I am not above getting really annoyed at one of these groups: the ignorant players.

I have no complaints about playing with inexperienced players who are willing to learn and communicate. Even if we directly lose the game because of an inexperienced player, there is no reason to rage at them really. If they are someone I know I usually point out later how they can improve their game. I will take an inexperienced communicating player over an experienced ignorant one any day. I don't even rage at ignorant players unless they start raging at either me or another team mate. Well, I don't rage really, just snark at obvious flaws in their play. Still it's not constructive criticism, just a snide remark that their own play wasn't particularly shining either. But I do rage about ignorant players, like right now in this blog. There used to be this joke about how our game design study group gathered weekly to rant about bad players. Let's just face it: I don't like ignorant players in any game. Not very adult of me, but whatever.

I find it impossible to fathom how some people can play a game for hundreds of hours without giving a shit about even the most basic concepts. To me it seems like a big waste because they are not improving at all. Why play a game if you are doomed to suck? Even worse, they don't even realize how bad they are playing. Dota 2 is tricky that way. If you don't stop to think, it is easy to find a lot of explanations how losing the game was not your fault. Your team mates can be noobs, the opposing team has OP (overpowered) heroes etc. At least there is no randomness in this game to blame (there is a clever trick, I might cover it in another post). The problem of course is that when players fail to notice how they failed, they really cannot improve either. It is very hard to admit failure for players who are ego-oriented, because admitting failure hurts their self-esteem.

This is usually when I get told "but we are having fun". To this my response is to find someone else to play with. Still, this casual attitude is more understandable than the attitude of the most obnoxious players. In Dota 2 these are largely ignorant players who think they are good in the game, and their primary reason for playing is to "pwn" (get a lot of kills). Whereas a casual player will just shrug at a loss, this obnoxious type will get on with the raging. Obviously they are not taking the game casually, but they also show no interest in actually trying to improve their game. This is what truly perplexes me. To me it seems like being stuck in an infinite loop of un-fun where over 50% of the matches you play will suck (because you lose). I guess to each his own, but judging by my own ego-oriented streaks, the un-fun part really rings true. There are also the occasional trolls, who I have equal difficulty understanding.

One tricky thing about team-based games is that the development of an individual player's matchmaking rating is always to some degree dependent on their team mates. This is particularly true in Dota 2 because a bad teammate not only fails to contribute anything, they actually hurt the team because enemies get experience and gold for killing them. Although statistically the chance of getting bad teams is equal to getting decent teams, games that are lost in hero selection are not very couraging (it is quite possible to pick a lineup that has no chance at all). Another problem with the matchmaking system is that a lot of matches are rather lopsided. Either your team loses so badly nothing you do can affect the outcome, or your team steamrolls over the opponent with no challenge at all. Both types of games are rather bland. Overall this is a problem that cannot be really avoided when matchmaking among so many players.

4. The hidden lore

What makes Dota 2 hard is that the game is not exactly what it seems like on the surface. Or, rather, it is about many more things than it might initially seem. A very simplistic initial impression might be something like this: you get to choose a hero, then you proceed to farm levels and items to become a killing machine, then you take your enemies out. This is not exactly false, but it is definitely not true either. Let's just walk through over game phases to get some insight into what is not immediately apparent from playing the game.

Hero selection is the very first thing to do in a game. The most commonly played mode is All Pick, where every player gets to freely choose whatever hero they desire (exception: the same hero cannot be picked twice). So you just choose a hero you like and everything is go, right? Well, obviously, no. If everyone does this, it is entirely up to chance whether the lineup makes any sense at all. In truth, every pick should serve some purpose. For instance, there is only limited amount of farm available in the course of the game. If everyone wants an equal share of the farm, no one will come out strong. The problem in picking heroes in public games is that picking a really effective lineup requires communication before anyone picks anything. Why? Let's take a look.

Heroes are divided into several roles. Most importantly, there are more roles than there are players in the team. This means all roles will not be covered. As it should be, most heroes are at their best when played as part of particular strategy. Another important variable about heroes is their time frame. Put simply, this indicates which phase of the game that hero will be the most powerful at. This has very serious implications on overall strategy: a team consisting of mid-game heroes has to play aggressively to secure victory before their heroes run out of potency. There is also another role system, the 1-5 roles. The number means farm priority: role 1 gets majority of the farm, while role 5 gets practically nothing. While this may sound bad for the role 5 player, what it really means that a team should always pick heroes that do not need farm.

On top of all this, counter-picking needs to be considered too. You also need to consider lanes: these are positions that the heroes take at the early stages of the game. Not all heroes are suitable for all lanes so that's another thing that needs to be considered. The trickiest heroes in this sense are those that absolutely need to get into a given lane. If one of those is already on the team, picking another is simply stupid. In a sense All Pick is a stupid mode because there is no forced pick order and, theoretically, the team that picks last has the advantage of seeing what their opponents are going to play. This doesn't really show though, because in public games picking resembles a rather unstructured random process. I highly dislike players who wait and wait before picking and then make some really dumb pick that has no synergy with the rest of the team. Whereas if they had actually picked first, the rest of the team could have reacted to the pick.

So we are not even in the game yet and already there have been a lot of ways to screw up. Welcome to Dota 2. Laning is the next phase. This is a relatively static phase in the game where teams face each other in the game's three lanes, usually 1-2 heroes per lane. It is important to consider who goes where, as we just discussed. Laning two heroes who need farm together for instance is a bad idea, because they will be stealing from each other. Heroes who need farm should instead always lane with heroes who don't. Another thing that can go wrong in the early game is the purchase of starting items. There are a few items that help the entire team, but does not buff the hero who buys them. As you might have guessed, no one really wants to buy these. Someone usually buys the courier, because the little critter is criticial (otherwise heroes would need to run back to base to buy stuff).

There are also wards. They sound rather unimpressive: all they do is sit in a position where you put them and provide vision of the area. The importance of vision seems to be one of the hardest concepts for many players to grasp. Another type of ward is used to reveal wards placed by the other team; they also reveal invisible units in their vicinity. If there are heroes who use invisibility then these wards may get bought, but the more important, vision granting ones often go unbought. It is actually somewhat hard to truly realize the importance of vision at first. I bought wards because my friend told me that it is a thing I should do when playing a support hero. But it really took me quite some time to actually see why wards are important. The importance of vision in a game that features a fog of war may not be shocking news to strategy game folks but somehow it is quite hard to grasp in Dota 2.

But here is the thing: if you have no vision of where the enemy is moving, the only sensible thing is to assume that they are coming to kill you right now. If you don't assume this, you have no way to prepare for it and you die. Preparing for it usually means having to retreat from your farm and do nothing. Both options are really bad. Vision also works the other way around. There is no way to go and kill a "lone" enemy hero if you cannot be sure that his four friends are not hiding nearby (does not prevent people from trying - they usually die). But as soon as you see where they actually are - boom, dead enemy hero. Overall, the fact that you "saved" money by not buying wards is not much of a consolation when the enemy team can just roam freely all over the map killing whoever they want and there is nothing you can do about it. The problem with buying wards is that it should always be done by heroes who don't need farm. If they don't do it, the team is basically screwed because either they go without vision or someone who really needs money has to spend it on wards.

The game still hasn't even started and there are yet more ways that we can have screwed up. Fun times. The next opportunity to screp up consists roughly of the first ten minutes into the game. This is called the laning phase, and it involves killing a lot of creeps (small squads of AI controlled units that march along the lanes to fight enemy creeps). The mind-boggling thing about creeps in the laning phase is that you do not want to kill the enemy creeps as quickly as possible. No matter who makes the kill, everyone in range will get their share of the experience, but the money - the actual farm - goes to however got in the hit that killed the creep. So there is no benefit in killing the creeps quickly. Instead, it hurts your team a lot. There are towers in the lane, and in the early game these things are deadly to heroes. The closer you are to your own tower the better. The lane gets pushed or pulled based on whose creeps die faster, so in fact you want your own creeps to die faster. You even want to finish them off yourself to deny farm from the enemy.

This logic is kind of counter-intuitive, so I get it that not all players grasp it. However constantly attacking the lane creeps is way too common. Yes the whole concept is rather mind-boggling but it's the very basics of the game. Yet it is one of the most common screw-ups (on my skill level). Another thing that has to be kept in mind during laning is: who gets farm and, more importantly, who does not. It is not enough to secure farm for the team; farm needs to be secured for the heroes who actually need it, and at the same time should be denied from enemy heroes who need it. To put it simply, heroes have different bang-for-buck factors. So by taking farm from a hero who needs it more, you are effectively stealing from your own team. It is not as simple as "I get money, we get money". This again is very hard for some players to grasp.

There are several obscure concepts in the early phase of the game too. Fortunately it does get more intuitive towards the end. Not easy, but more intuitive. As we discussed, the team should have some idea when they are at their strongest. If the lineup is heavily early game focused, then they need to start pushing - attacking enemy structures - early. A late game lineup on the other hand will want to keep their structures up while their key hero is farming. A typical late game carry needs to farm 30 or even 40 minutes to become really effective. Basically this means the rest of the team needs to be able to fight one man down. Involving the late game carry in too many fights is risky because they can die and also because they lose precious farming time. They are typically quite useless early on too and will be the focus of enemy aggression.

All this requires quite a bit of knowledge of all the heroes in the game. Another thing the game requires is carefulness, but not too much of it. Because of the way hero respawn mechanics work, dying late in the game causes a hero to be out of the game for a very substantial amount of time. If someone dies solo in the endgame, the rest of the team has to fight 4 versus 5, and if they lose that fight it is usually game over regardless of how the game has been going until that point. Although some people criticize the game because it feels like the outcome is often decided early, this is not accurate exactly because of the way the endgame plays out. Even a great start can be wasted by not realizing the time frame where that advantage is useful, or by stupid deaths in the end game.

The game also has its share of obscure information and exceptions to rules (much like the English language). However this has gone on for quite a bit so let's leave something for another time.

Conclusion

There are plenty of reasons for me to like Dota 2. As far as competitive games go, it is one of the few I can actually play because it does not require too much execution. It also goes very well with my study-heavy attitude towards games because not only is there a lot to study, there is also a lot of room for theory-crafting. What I really like about the game is its context-dependency; basically the answer to most questions about the game start with "well, it depends". Players need to use their own brains to figure out what they should do. Or at least one player needs to, if there is very good team communication. However because the team captain also has to mind his own play, it is far more optimal if all players have a good grasp of what they are supposed to be doing.

It is a game I actually don't recommend if you are not willing to put a lot of time and effort into it. Although the chance of getting yelled at in the beginner level has diminished quite a bit, going into the game with no research is going to be a very confusing experience, involving a lot of dying. The game doesn't have any built-in tutorial because it is still in beta (which it has been for what, two or more years?), but players have written an assortment of guides for understanding the basic concepts and also hero-specific guides (usefulness can vary). If you have the willingness to put yourself into the game, then I think Dota 2 is a really rewarding game. Just keep what I said about playing attitude in mind.

Global Game Jam 2012 Post Mortem

Having participated in three game jams last year, I didn't quite feel like doing a full-scale project this time so I kind of pre-decided to make a board game instead. This year the theme was a picture instead of a word: 

The Concept


I had lots of thoughts about infinity and cycles after seeing the theme. The snake is eating its tail - i.e. it is feeding itself. This was pretty much what I wanted to do. A short game that is played repeatedly, and each time the game is played the game itself grows. The game feeds itself. After viewing the keynote and getting the theme into my head, I bounced some ideas with other jammers and then I went home for a while to gather inspiration. Well, actually I went to eat and watch How I Met Your Mother, but hey, same difference right? When I got to the actual jam site (we had the introduction elsewhere) I had three options: a game where player powers are retained from session to session, a game where world state is retained from session to session or a game where game rules change but are retained from session to session. The game should also be impossible to win on the first playthroughs. So far so good, but where's the game?

My friend, who was in my team in the last two game jams, had an idea about a rogue-like where upon finishing the game, the player's character would become the new boss. "What about the players that don't finish?" I asked - and suddenly I had a game concept. Here it is:

The game is a cooperative board game, which takes a very short time to play. It starts as a one player game. The first player dies very quickly, but in death they gain powers depending on what killed them. The game is then started again, but now with two players: the first player is a ghost aiding the second player. The second player will inevitably die quite quickly. Enter third player, now aided by two ghosts. This will go on until there's enough ghosts to get the last player through the game. The game is meant for gaming conventions as a social game that will gather people together and serve as great passtime between longer games. Ending up with this idea was most likely influenced by the local gaming con that was going on in the same building.



The Design


So I had my killer concept. What I didn't have was a team. I really didn't have any idea for the actual game mechanics either, but I knew it needed to be fast and easy to learn, since new players would be arriving into the table every five minutes or so. Faced with these problems I actually just thought "screw this", went home and watched some more How I Met Your Mother.

The designer never sleeps. Well, not until he is satisfied with his design, or really exhausted. I wasn't actually expecting to make a game this year at all at this point. Sure enough, ideas started to come about as soon as I closed my eyes. By the time I fell asleep I had the game mechanics mostly figured out. On Saturday morning I got off my bed feeling a lot better, and did the component math while taking a shower. I had just pretty much solved all my problems and went back to the jam site, hooked my laptop and started working.



The Game 


The game's working title was Ghost Legion Death Dungeon, which is pretty much the worst name I've come up in a long time. The players explore a dungeon made of square tiles, which will look eerily familiar to anyone who's played Labyrinth. The end conditions are simple: if the players manage to defeat the dungeon boss by pushing through 9 layers of dungeon tiles and spending a bucketload of power tokens, they win. The players lose if they don't find a new hero after the previous one dies.

Gameplay ended up being really simple: monsters, switches and power-ups are printed on some of the tiles. Cubes (stolen from El Grande) of five colors represent power tokens which are the only player resource. Monsters have four statistics: the amount of power tokens that need to be spent to challenge the monster (survive its initial attack), the monster's weakness - spending power tokens of this color boosts attacks against it, kill reward - a small power token reward for defeating the monster, and finally, death reward - the larger amount of power tokens granted to the hero's ghost they die against this monster. Power-ups are simple, they just grant free power tokens for the hero.

Finally since my dungeons would be randomly generated, there was a real chance of getting stuck. To combat this issue I introduced switches. These allow the hero to rotate tiles in the dungeon to create new paths or optimize existing ones. Most switches are trapped though, killing the hero in the process of triggering - such is the life of heroes. Heroes do receive power tokens when killed by traps. Finally to prevent cheap play, I had some rules against backtracking and running into dead ends.

As you can see, I went with abstract power tokens instead of anything specific. Remember, this is a game where new players enter every round and the expectation is that none of these players have played this game before. Can't take forever to explain the rules. Overall, the game is really really simple. The players simply gather resources as a team by 1) killing monsters and 2) guiding the hero to profitable death. A round ends when the hero dies, at which point all players regain their spent power tokens and all monsters in the dungeon respawn. Since players can also freely spend their power as a team, the mechanic is really not different from gathering those tokens into a collective pool.

The fun in this game is not in the finer mechanics of how enemies are fought and defeated but in the higher level mechanic of adding new players to the game. To ensure that players would not have as much reservations, I added a rule that allows players to simply leave the game. All their power tokens are lost so it's  a big loss for the team, but the game can go on if new players are found.

Playtesting


The cool thing about analog prototypes is that they are often much faster to produce. My prototype was finished in about four hours. I ran three playtests on Saturday. I started with a solo playtest just to see how the game would roll out. It wasn't half bad. Okay, it was pretty lame playing alone, but the mechanics were really fast to play.

The next playtest involved other jammers. A game jam can be a tough environment for testing board games - especially ones that require a lot of players! At this point I had no idea how many players it would take to win the game but I guessed that it would be at least ten. I started the game, took the first player position, went into the dungeon and died. Then I invited the next player, explained very quickly what the game's about and in we went together. After a few more rounds there were a bunch of us standing around the table discussing which paths to clear and how the hero should die this time... It was actually really fun! When we hit nine or so players, we started to have deserters what with people being busy with their own projects. We decided to forfeit since it didn't look like we could find enough new players to cope with the loss of power tokens.

My goal was to playtest the game in an authentic target environment: a gaming con! And we had one next door, what luck! In I went, set my prototype, started the game and started to search for new players. At first I had a hard time finding the second player, but then one card game ended and I promptly abducted all the players. With a bunch of players around the table it was much easier to find more players on the following rounds, and this time we managed to beat the game with eleven players. Go us! The game took about an hour and involved all players pretty well. Looked like everyone was having fun and, most importantly, they got a gaming experience like no other. It's not every day that you are invited to play a game and then told "These guys went into the dungeon before you, and we are expecting you to die next. Just try to do so in a profitable way."

Overall I the test sessions were enjoyable. The mechanics were a bit messy with ten players but that's pretty much the only negative feedback I got. I also explained my idea to, well, anyone willing to listen and people were really curious about it. With feedback this encouraging I'll be sure to polish the game for the next event I participate in. With better components the game should be even easier to understand.

Submit... Failed


You won't find this game on the Global Game Jam site. I made my components using a pencil. I intended to make printable components available for download, but I grossly underestimated the time it would take me to do so. I didn't really have any good tools for it, and by the time I realized this I didn't have the time to write a script that would help me with the task. I also spent some time testing another jammer's board game prototype. However, I don't really mind lacking a submit this year. Testing my game requires a lot of people and I honestly don't believe many players are even willing to print board game prototypes.


The Aftermath


Although I didn't +1 to the number of games made this year, it was a successful and far more relaxing game jam than any of the previous ones. Furthermore, my game was true to the jamming spirit: something experimental with no guarantee of it working at all. To my delight it did work. It was fun to watch new players' expressions when they entered the table and also to see how they actively participated in the ghost team's play after their death.This game has the potential to bring new people together, and you don't even need a group to start it. Moreover, it doesn't even require long-time commitment.

I'm not particularly proud of the finer mechanics of the game or its strategic depth. There really isn't much of the latter. The game's difficulty is mostly dictated by the number of available players.However, the finer mechanics are fairly easy to polish with solo testing. Most importantly the core idea works and that alone makes me more than happy for my weekend's achievement.

The game was finally titled Ghost Brigade after one of the best Finnish metal bands. So, to end this lengthy post with hopeful thoughts: "Ghost Brigade - coming soon to a gaming convention near you!"

ps. Anyone want to do dungeon themed art?

Lord of the Rings Living Card Game

Now that we got the LCG concept out of the way, it's time to dig into my current favorite. The new LotR LCG does a lot of interesting things. Let's take a look.

1. Co-operative play with constructed decks made possible

This I find a rather interesting combination. Usually co-op games are pretty tightly tuned packages to ensure a certain level of challenge, although they do differ quite a lot in randomness (usually there's lots of it, to retain replay value). The interesting twist in Lord of the Rings is that players play with constructed decks just like in any other LCG (or CCG for that matter). But wait, doesn't this mean that balance gets thrown out of the window? In short, yes, in many ways it does. However, there is not just one game, but as of writing there are 7 different quests available. Three quests are in the basic sets, and each expansion pack has its own.

These quests have different grades of difficulty. The most difficult quests are in fact designed to be tough enough to actually require quite optimized decks. Especially the notorious Escape from Dol Guldur, the toughest quest of the basic set, is pretty much impossible to beat without customized decks. There is enough freedom left for quest designers, which means that the challenge provided by each quest is not only of varying difficulty, it is also of different kind. A deck optimized against one quest may fail miserably in another. In the end, when each player has a very good deck and they all play together nicely, the quests do become kind of easy though.

The fact that they can keep releasing new quests is what I think keeps the game alive and interesting. Just like expansions keep traditional games fresh, but more often. Although I do think they should definitely make them harder and harder with each expansion, because players are piling up more customization options and playing experience. In a way the experience is actually quite similar to certain types of computer roleplaying games. Players make character builds (= decks), and test them against the game's challenges. New expansions come with new build options and new challenges.

Of course, since it is an analog game people play with their friends, nothing stops them from making it more difficult if their hypercustomized decks breeze through every challenge. Looking for good ideas myself.

2. Interesting solo play

Another curious thing about the game is that it's the first analog game I have greatly enjoyed playing just by myself. Tuning my deck so that it can beat all the quests solo without any changes is surprisingly satisfying. For the record, at least as of now, most quests are in fact much harder solo than with 2 or more players, especially, again, the notorious Escape from Dol Guldur. This is actually an interesting side effect of co-operative play because one downside of living/collectible card games has always been deck testing. The only way to really test a deck is to find a lot of opponents who play different decks. The nature of LotR makes deck testing easy because all the possible challenges are always available to be tested against.

3. Multidimensional challenge

The game is out to get you in many ways. There are always two main sources of trouble: on the one hand, encounter cards on the staging area make it difficult to progress in the game; on the other hand, engaging enemies is troublesome as they need to be defended against, or risk taking damage. Every conflict in the game, be it questing or combat, has an element of uncertainty. For example, in combat, enemies have shadow cards dealt to them. Often these do nothing, but they can have highly devastating effects, especially if the attack goes undefended. For this reason it's usually best to defend against all attacks, but defending exhausts characters. A lot of things in this game does, which means that players have to carefully consider what to do with each character.

It doesn't stop there either, because quests can have their own unique challenges. One quest has a rather strict timer in the form of an ally that takes damage each round and is quite hard to heal. The game itself has a rather slow timer as well, because each player's threat rises every round by one.

4. Careful with the card design!

Balancing a game like Lord of the Rings is really hard work. The people at FFG have done quite a good job, but they're not quite there yet. The problem is that there is one clear path to victory: a deck that is able to produce a lot of resources and a lot of card draw can pretty much handle everything, regardless of what strategy it plays. No quest so far punishes these types of decks. This is of course a quite standard CCG convention, where more is more. The problem I think is that especially in terms of resources, there is one clearly superior way of getting a big resource boost in the form of one card. Since this card is from one particular sphere of influence (the 'colors' of this game), being able to play cards from this sphere tends to make decks a lot stronger. At least the card is unique which means there can be only one on the table (between all players).

The same is almost true for card draw, but at least here two spheres have quite feasible options for drawing, and all have some means. Fortunately the designers have included fairly feasible ways to include cards from any sphere to any deck, but nevertheless I do feel a little disappointed that to play a solid solo deck, I am pretty much forced to include this one particular card in my deck (and a maximum number of copies of it, of course). However, I think the issue is fixable by including similar acceleration cards (with different mechanics) to other spheres. Although each sphere does have its own thing, I think resource boosting should be available in many forms instead of just one that is clearly superior.

I don't think that resource boosting are card draw should be the "thing" of any particular sphere, because to me these are more like the prerequirements for a functioning solo deck. It's also a bit nasty that in multiplayer, the one and only really good resource boost can only be used by one player. Besides, the sphere that has this card, also has another "thing", buffing the players as a team. So while I'm all for having highly distinctive spheres/whatever in games, it should be not so that one sphere is practically irreplaceable. I'm going to try to make a deck without that one particular card though just to see how it goes.

Conclusion

As a concept, the Lord of the Rings Living Card Game is very clever, and mostly superbly executed. The game is still taking its baby steps with "only" four expansion packs out. It will remain to be seen how the game changes, especially with the upcoming bigger expansion.