I'm doing two games at once because they are pretty similar in many ways and it also makes it easier for me to compare them. I actually played Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth quite some time ago - like, two years or more ago. It was the first game I bought for my PSP, and one of the main reasons for buying the console in the first place. I finished it once and started another playthrough in order to get the true ending but then I bought Persona 3 Portable and couldn't resist starting it. I bought Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria also quite a while ago but given that my PS2 has mostly been gathering dust I hadn't gotten around to actually playing it. However, there's an old TV in my room at my parents' so I took my PS2 with me for Christmas holidays - and of course, Silmeria. After finishing it I felt like giving VP: Lenneth another go.
1. "It shall be engraved upon your soul..."
Both games have a Valkyrie as a central character and they take place in the same timeline (kind of, it's a bit complicated...) Silmeria as a game is more akin to traditional RPGs as it shares their basic structure: the player follows a linear plot, traveling from one dungeon to another in a world map. Lenneth is a bit different: the player is tasked with collecting souls of the dead to fight in Ragnarok. Each action the player takes brings Ragnarok a step closer. There is no real plot progression, because the premise holds throughout the game. Most dialogue in the game concerns how the recruitable souls died. It's worth notice that the player is not forced to make any choices in the game; there's enough time to do everything in each chapter. Maybe forcing the player to make some actual choices would have increased the game's replayability and made the coming of Ragnarok feel a bit more urgent but honestly the structure works just fine as it stands. The game has a hidden storyline which progresses alongside the Ragnarok plot, but we're going into that a bit later.
As the terminology suggests, both games are a bastardization of Norse mythology. I did like the setting because it's an interesting mess of standard issue JRPG stuff and respects its mythology a bit more than the average JRPG. The games also share a lot of mechanical stuff. This here is a quick overview of their similarities - I will go into detail about some of these systems in a moment. Dungeons in both games are basically sidescrolling 2D platformers and - especially certain hard mode dungeons in Lenneth - pretty puzzle-oriented. The player even has enough tools at their disposal to make some actual platformers pale in comparison. In both games souls of the dead - einherjar - are meaningful to gameplay. They differ from typical NPCs in one important way: the player is expected to release them from their service. In Lenneth, the game ends badly if the player doesn't send quality souls to Valhalla in each chapter. In Silmeria there is no pressing need to release einherjar but upon release they leave behind pretty delicious stat boost items.
Of the two games, Lenneth has a much faster pace. Battles are shorter, and the protagonist runs much faster in dungeons. There's also less dialogue, again largely because the Ragnarok plot itself has nothing to talk about. Lenneth (the character) talks very little. In most scenes she only appears at the end to claim the einherjer's soul. Like the game itself, she's pretty much the no-nonsense, all-business type of heroine. Once recruited the einherjar don't talk much either (it would be kinda tricky too because there's no telling which ones the player has in their party given that most are optional to recruit and almost any of them can be sent to Valhalla). The games are of similar length though, because there are more dungeons in Lenneth. Another big difference is the main character. Lenneth is the heroine of her own game, but Silmeria's situation is a bit different - she shares a body with Alicia, a human princess. Therefore it is Alicia the player is controlling. It was a bit of letdown honestly because instead of a badass Valkyrie we get a whiny princess.
The change in perspective does give Silmeria a more human feeling and the central characters are overall fleshed out fairly well. Still it feels like just another JRPG whereas Lenneth felt like a more unique game in its genre. Besides, the plot in Silmeria makes next to zero sense. Coming to think of it, that's something it shares with Tri-Ace's another PS2 JRPG... (Star Ocean 3). Storywriting really isn't Tri-Ace's strong suit anyway.
2. "I shall cleave into your flesh..."
Fun gameplay on the other hand is definitely Tri-Ace's strongest suit. Both games share the same attack mechanic: in combat, each of the party's four characters is assigned to a button. Each character has a sequence of one to three attacks. When their button is pressed, they release an attack from the sequence. This happens in real time, allowing two or more characters to attack at the same time. On the surface it sounds like a button mashing festival but there's a bit more depth to it. On top of regular attacks, each character has a special attack that can only be used if the energy meter reaches 100 in a combo. Each attack raises the meter but it also decreases quickly if the combo is dropped. Therefore timing attacks is essential to keep the combo going. To make matters a bit trickier, attacks can launch the enemy into the air or knock them down - and a lot of attacks only hit a certain height. The order and timing of attacks is therefore crucial to get right because poorly timed ones will just whiff. Attacks also have all kinds of delays to make things more fun.
I really like this combo system for a couple of reasons. First of all, I like figuring out combos in general. Most of the time when I'm in the practice mode of a fighting game I play around with different combos. Unfortunately my technical execution sucks so I'm really bad at the most combo-oriented fighting games like Guilty Gear. The system in Valkyrie Profile is really easy to execute because the player just presses a button. The challenge is in figuring out the combo and it's not enough to figure out one combo either because, especially in Lenneth, the party changes in every chapter. Enemies are also different. Small ones in particular are tricky to combo against because timing is much stricter. Second, the system does allow for mid-combo adaptation. Attacks are pretty fast but not too fast. Assuming the player is aware which attacks from each character have not yet been used, some correctional measures can be taken to salvage a combo that is about to fail. At least the player can clearly see which attacks did not connect and can adapt in the future.
In terms of finer details, Lenneth puts a bit more emphasis on sparing attacks - especially special attacks. Using just enough attacks to finish an enemy allows the rest to be used against another one, possibly taking more than one enemy out in a single turn. Special attacks have a varying charge time and they cannot be used while being charged. The characters also cannot use items or spells while they have CT. The dynamics are a bit different in Silmeria. While Lenneth has one battle screen where all the enemies are, Silmeria's battles are divided between two modes. In map mode, the party moves freely in a 3D view. When an attack is initiated the game moves to an attack screen that is similar to Lenneth's battle screen (which I just described). There is only one enemy at a time. In addition to the number of attacks each character has, attacking is also limited by a meter that is regained by spending time on the movement view and also through killing enemies and obtaining purple crystals from them. Special attacks can be used every time the combo allows.
A big part of battles in Silmeria is avoiding enemy attacks in the movement screen. All attacks have a visible area of effect. It becomes visible as soon as the enemy starts charging the attack, giving the player time to move away from the AoE. If any character is inside the AoE when the attack is ready, it is immediately carried out. This sounds very confusing when explained like this but it's a fairly functional system. For the record, attacks in both games *hurt*. It is often crucial to get the jump on the enemy. We've been through this time and again: it's usually better for enemies to die quickly but dish out serious hurt if given the chance. It keeps the game going. Anyway, back to the movement system in Silmeria. In addition to just moving, the player can use speed bursts to move quicker and finally divide the party in two. The game is paused whenever the player doesn't do anything so there's no rush.
Although the system in itself is fine and clearly has some tactical depth, its big downside is making battles much longer than in Lenneth. Fortunately the player doesn't need to kill all enemies - killing the leader ends the battle immediately and gives the experience rewards of any unkilled enemies. Most of the time, if the player is able to get to the leader without problems, battles are over fairly swiftly. Other times though they can take quite a while. What makes this particularly aggravating is the fact that enemies respawn whenever the player re-enters a screen in the dungeon (in Lenneth they stay dead). Party splitting is not that useful either because moving two parties spends twice as much time, allowing enemies to attack more. Small tricks can still be done, like making a one member party to run into an AoE to absord all the damage from it instead of exposing weaker members to damage.
Although the mechanics in Silmeria are more complex and even better on paper, the fact that they slow the game down so much makes me prefer Lenneth's gameplay. With another iteration it could work really well because in a way, Silmeria is a tactical RPG where enemy attacks can be entirely avoided with positioning. Almost entirely anyway, because some attacks are still very hard to avoid. Then again, some enemies can be kited forever.
3. "I shall purify you"
Boss battles tip the scales in Silmeria's favor. This is largely because Lenneth's mechanics don't work very well in prolonged battles. The combo mechanic works phenomenally in normal battles where whittling down enemy numbers quickly is a high priority because a) one enemy can be killed in a turn and b) if they stay alive, their damage output is pretty hard to stand against. Having to dedicate characters to healing is quite catastrophic in Lenneth because it's harder to build energy to 100 and gain access to special attacks when one or two characters are not attacking. Against bosses there is no way to reduce incoming damage beyond killing possible minions. More often, incoming damage increases when the boss gets low enough. Either way, the system tends to become a bit slugfesty because of its emphasis on normal attacks. Support spells and items are used very rarely because they waste precious time.
Silmeria treats things a bit differently. Support spells, items and healing use the same meter as attacks do. This means that if you heal and then immediately attack, less attacks can be made and it's harder to get a full combo. Another restriction is a stricter one: using any of these has a global cooldown. When one character heals, no one can heal until the cooldown has passed. This means that support spells and items are just as useless as in Lenneth because usually whenever they could be used, it's time to heal. The only times they are useful are battles where enemies can be kited for a long time (e.g. heal, run to the other side of the map, cast spells, run around, cast more spells etc.). This dynamic makes resurrection in particular very costly and often not worth the trouble. Healing spells are also single target. Only rather expensive items are capable of healing the entire party.
All in all, AoE damage against the player's party in Silmeria is very devastating. This causes some quirky boss strategies to emerge. I found most bosses in the game much easier when I left the entire party behind and went in only with Alicia because she did the most damage and was able to heal herself. The remaining party of three could come in and throw a resurrect or dispel if needed. Other than that, they were there to avoid damage because most boss attacks dealth huge AoE damage. When taking healing limitations into consideration, the outcome is problematic. Put simply, healing cannot keep up with incoming damage unless there is only one character taking damage. I think the menu cooldown is too strict. It's fine to limit the use of items because item spam would be truly OP, but limiting spells is not a good call (spells are still expensive to use). For instance, Star Ocean 3 uses a similar cooldown mechanic, but only for items - and it works fine.
It's not like any of the components of this equation are bad - the combination itself is. Ideally I'd prefer it if bosses dealt less AoE damage and more single target damage. Either that or the suggestion in the previous paragraph. Healing is a tricky concept in general because too powerful heals tend to polarize damage. Either damage is negligible (because it can be fully healed with a single heal) or it is deadly (exceeds target HP). In a way Silmeria's attempt is commendable but the implementation was screwed up somewhere along the line. It would be better if the game was clearer about how enemy attacks work - avoiding them seems pretty random at times. For instance, sometimes when the player attacks, the enemy can counter even if no one was in the attack's area (implying that they get certain amount of time after the attack to turn) but sometimes they can't. Agro mechanics are also opaque so using party splitting to direct damage to tanky characters seems impossible.
Nevertheless, the fact that positioning matters a lot in boss battles makes them more interesting than slugfests in Lenneth. The first form of the last boss was pretty horrible though and I was very happy I didn't have to redo it. I think the system could be fine with slight adjustments or more transparency/consistency.
4. "Behold my godlike power"
Character development is overall more complex in Silmeria than it is in Lenneth. They share the basic concept: in addition to leveling up, characters gain access to skills. Both games also limit the amount of skills that can be equipped but they do so with different methods. Lenneth allows characteres to equip four skills total in three different categories. Silmeria uses capacity points - a familiar mechanic from multiple games - with each skill having its own CP cost. The bigger difference in complexity considering skills is the way they are learned. In Lenneth, the player simply uses tomes to learn skills and spells. Silmeria uses a rune system that I need to explain in some detail. Another aspect that is way more complex in Silmeria is equipment. The two are also linked.
Each piece of equipment has a rune and a color. Equipment consists of 5 gear slots and 4 accessory slots that are laid out on a 3x3 grid. The runes on gear are fixed - each weapon type has its own rune while head piece always has a head piece rune etc. Accessories can have any rune. If a certain rune combination is linked, the skill corresponding to that combination is being learned (takes a few fights). Runes are linked as long as they are on a continuous area of one color and not just any color because each color has its own rune combinations that result in skills. There's also stat bonuses for equipping as much of one color as possible. After skills are learned they can be used freely. Basically the system is a more complex version of a common one (e.g. in Final Fantasy IX): skills are learned from equipment. It adds another dimension to choosing equipment for each character.
Furthermore, particularly due to weapon runes, it's easier for some characters to gain access to certain skills than others. All weapons are also much more available in one color than the rest which further dictates what skills can be learned. It's very confusing at first and skills are pretty hard to learn at first because many of the runes are rare. Overall it scales pretty well, allowing weaker skills to be learned early on and more powerful ones towards the end. It also means that most accessories stay useful for the purposes of learning skills even if they do nothing. There's also a certain joy in finding new accessories because you never know when a new rune becomes available in this more flexible form. It's a bit tedious however because the same accessories need to be rotated through the entire party.
The equipment system in itself is fine in Silmeria, but obtaining the more powerful pieces is obnoxious. Higher tier equipment is "crafted" from components that are obtained from killing enemies. Sounds fairly normal, but there's a but: each enemy is made up of a varying amount of body parts and each fucking body part drops different items. Drop rates can also be frustratingly low. As a result, you may be fucked over twice by rotten luck when trying to obtain small drop rate components from tiny body parts. Actually, make it thrice: you also need to find the enemy that can drop the item. The game gives no hints whatsoever. Fortunately the game can be completed without any of this bullshit but the fact it exists makes me mad. In Lenneth matters are much simpler: the player can divine (buy) items, find stuff from dungeons and transmute some items. Most of the best gear is just found in dungeons.
Lenneth does have its own quirk in character development though. The game has a couple of accessories that give bonuses on level up. Most notably there's an accessory that gives more HP on level up. This is quirky because it encourages leveling your chosen endgame characters only after receiving these accessories. It was the same way in Final Fantasy VIII and its level up bonus skills. Early in the game, it's better to use characters you don't want to end up in your final party. This is further encouraged by event experience which can be freely used to level up any character in your party. Because of this, it's highly recommended to play the game on hard because all characters start on level 1 when you get them. For the record, characters in Lenneth are imbalanced as hell so it really matters which ones you choose to use for the endgame.
"Divine assault - Nibelung Valesti"
Although Silmeria has more complex mechanics and its systems show a lot of promise, ultimately all comes down to the fact that Lenneth is just more fun to play. The game has a very powerful aesthetic (in the sense it is understood in the MDA framework), and is very pleasing to play. Silmeria stumbles mostly because it feels more like a pretty regular RPG, but even more because it feels so slow. There are a lot of additional annoyances that simply don't exist in Lenneth. Although Lenneth's combat is not massively challenging in any tactical sense, battles are fun - and they are over quickly. All in all, Lenneth is simply the better game. I would still pick up Silmeria to experience its combat system though. I feel like it could have been something amazing and could serve as inspiration for a great RPG in the future. Lenneth on the other hand definitely takes its place as one of the legendary PSX JRPGs, alongside the likes of Xenogears and Vagrant Story.
Fun fact: I fell in love with Lenneth (the character) when her chibi version kicked my ass for the first time in Star Ocean 3.
Bonus: JRPG bullshit rant part 2
This is actually not the sequel I promised earlier - that will have to wait for (quite) a while longer. The topic is somewhat similar anyway. I want to talk about the true ending of VP: Lenneth. The game has three endings, one of which is just a glorified game over really (but it drops a hint). The existence of the true ending is not kept secret at least but actually fulfilling the requirements for it is some arcane fucking lore. It's not that complex to be honest but it's nigh impossible without a guide. In principle it's mostly about staring at one number: Valkyrie's seal rating (can only be seen in her status window, the one place players don't really need to ever look in the menu). More precisely, this number needs to be 37 or lower at a certain point in the game (the game doesn't tell either of these). The game also doesn't inform the player when this number changes which makes it harder to keep track of.
The biggest problem with this number is that there are only limited events in the game that lower it and majority of these events are available to the player from the beginning. However, if the player actually does them too early, they're screwed! Sending einherjar to Valhalla raises the seal rating by quite a lot, and is almost mandatory (the player loses rewards and possibly the game by not sending einherjar). In case you're wondering, the correct timing to do everything that reduces the seal is in chapter 4... the only reason I know this is, well, I read it in a guide. On top of keeping the seal rating low, there's a couple of places that need to be visited in certain chapters and once again nothing hints towards it. It's pretty much impossible to discover how to get everything correctly by just playing the game. The player might be able to figure out the seal rating bit (but not its target value or timing) but beyond that... just, no.
Endings with obscure conditions are disturbingly common in Japanese games in general. Silent Hill as a series springs to mind for instance, or the first Shadow Hearts. The fact that the seal rating is at all visible in Lenneth is actually generous. More often than not, similar variables are entirely hidden from the player. Star Ocean 3's character endings are another good example: a lot of things in the game affect the protagonist's relationship with each of the other characters, but the outcomes are nowhere near predictable. I guess they often call these endings "hidden" for a reason. Hidden in the sense that you'd actually need to look at the game's code to figure out how all the variables work - or if you're lazy like most players, just look up a guide. There could be some joy of discovery if players were somehow able to actually discover these things. Right now there just doesn't seem to be any point beyond selling guides... which most people get from GameFAQs for free anyway.
Friday, February 7, 2014
Monday, February 3, 2014
Remember Me
When previews about this game started to appear, I put it on my "looking forward to" list. The Last of Us took priority though and I forgot about this game - mostly because everyone else seemed to do so. I also had my month long summer vacation which I spent chasing geocaches all around. The game popped up again as a PS+ freebie later last year - around the time I was getting a bit tired of FFXIV - and this time I chose not to ignore it. After pressing buttons at a slow pace for three months, I was thirsty for some hand-to-hand action.
1. Tying it all together with a theme
As far as merits go, Remember Me has most of them in visual design and theme. The setting makes for pretty delicious sci-fi - a corporation has found a way to manipulate memories, allowing people to get rid of bad ones and replace them with custom-made good memories. Naturally this has led to a dystopian society, as things developed by corporations are wont to do. The game being about memory and all, it's no big surprise the protagonist Nilin has lost hers. Fortunately this game here is one of the few cases where this actually doesn't feel cheap. The fact that there's a female protagonist in a dystopian future immediately draws comparisons to Mirror's Edge. The game is also reminiscent of Mirror's Edge because of its distinctive visual style. The aesthetic is very different from ME's exceedingly white visual style but the overall atmosphere is very similar.
Remember Me uses a lot of visual effects and filters to achieve its visual style. Generally overuse of filters and glitchy effects might be frowned upon, but it works in RM. Why? It's thematically appropriate. Overall, the game makes full use of the Sensen technology (that would be the memory manipulation tech). Through Sensen, information can be conveniently projected into the game world - and because everything is perceived through it, all sorts of distortions and visual glitches fit in just perfectly. It also extends its reach into gameplay in few segments of the game. By copying the memories of another, the protagonist is able to follow in their footsteps through memory projection. One example use for this mechanic is navigating through a minefield. Finally some of the protagonist's superpowers work by manipulating enemies' Sensen nodes - enemies without one are therefore immune.
Story also works well with the theme. It's not a nobel worth masterpiece by a long shot but better than most any way. It works better as an overall documentary of consequences of technology than it does as a story about people - much like the Joss Whedon's Dollhouse actually. So the plot in itself is not all that great, but the way it portrays how Sensen technology has affected everyone's lives is pretty solid. The moments when the game explores the darkest sides of Sensen are definitely the strongest. I recommend playing it through just for the atmosphere. It's not a long game either.
2. Finishing off with gameplay
While I'd mostly recommend this game for its atmosphere, gameplay in Remember Me ain't half bad either. It's not very original though. The game can roughly be divided into three types of segments: the aforementioned memory projection segments, climbing segments and of course combat. Climbing is heavily railroaded: usually there's exactly one option for moving forward - pretty much what is typical in heavily scripted games already. There's nothing difficult about it either because controls are accurate enough so mostly it's just mindless execution of a predetermined obstacle course. The saving grace is scenery. Although immersion is way weaker than in Mirror's Edge, at least the views are great. There's not really much else to say about climbing in this game.
Nilin cannot use weapons so she has to rely on her fists and feet to do the dirty work for her. The game uses a combo system that sounds interesting on paper: The player is granted two chains to start off with, and can assign Pressens to each attack in a combo. These affect what the attack does. Unfortunately the options are rather limited. The choice is basically between damage, healing and cooldown reduction. The fourth Pressen type is a more powerful version of whatever Pressen preceded it. Regardless of Pressens, attack animations for combos don't change. With more varied Pressens this system might have been much cooler, but as it stands it's very simplistic. As soon as I opened a third combo, I simply had one combo for each purpose: dishing out the hurt, healing and reducing cooldowns. Normal attacks aside, Nilin gains access to a total of five superpowers.
Although the mechanic is simple, it does grant some tactical depth. Much of this is due to clever encounter and enemy design. Nilin's superpowers are not just to make fights go faster - each and every one of them is truly required. Especially towards the endgame battles become dances around tougher enemies while the player tries to build up meter for Nilin's superpowers and at the same time use cooldown reduction combos to make them available in decent time (default cooldowns are *long*). Finally, because healing is also only possible through attacking, the player really needs to stay on the offensive. Delightfully the game heavily punishes mashing - each attack in a combo needs to be timed correctly. It is also worth learning which combos include area of effect damage. Controls are not perfect, but overall encounters are fun to play precisely because they feel different from each other.
The game also has a few memory remixing scenes, which are kind of interesting. They involve manipulating a memory like a recording, skimming back and forward and changing small things like the position of a table in hopes of altering the outcome. It's mostly a more elaborate version of "try everything" puzzles in some adventure games, but thematically they're cool. There's not that many things to try in each memory either. Fine additions to the game, but not much else really.
Conclusion
Remember Me is a solid action adventure game that is strong in atmosphere but otherwise not all that special. Although combat and climbing mechanics are not very original or interesting on their own, both are enhanced by auxiliary means: battle encounters are designed surprisingly well, and scenery in the game is amazing. Nilin's story is not that great either, but the way the game handles its sci-fi makes it worth playing. If you choose to pick it up, do yourself a favor and play on the highest difficulty.
1. Tying it all together with a theme
As far as merits go, Remember Me has most of them in visual design and theme. The setting makes for pretty delicious sci-fi - a corporation has found a way to manipulate memories, allowing people to get rid of bad ones and replace them with custom-made good memories. Naturally this has led to a dystopian society, as things developed by corporations are wont to do. The game being about memory and all, it's no big surprise the protagonist Nilin has lost hers. Fortunately this game here is one of the few cases where this actually doesn't feel cheap. The fact that there's a female protagonist in a dystopian future immediately draws comparisons to Mirror's Edge. The game is also reminiscent of Mirror's Edge because of its distinctive visual style. The aesthetic is very different from ME's exceedingly white visual style but the overall atmosphere is very similar.
Remember Me uses a lot of visual effects and filters to achieve its visual style. Generally overuse of filters and glitchy effects might be frowned upon, but it works in RM. Why? It's thematically appropriate. Overall, the game makes full use of the Sensen technology (that would be the memory manipulation tech). Through Sensen, information can be conveniently projected into the game world - and because everything is perceived through it, all sorts of distortions and visual glitches fit in just perfectly. It also extends its reach into gameplay in few segments of the game. By copying the memories of another, the protagonist is able to follow in their footsteps through memory projection. One example use for this mechanic is navigating through a minefield. Finally some of the protagonist's superpowers work by manipulating enemies' Sensen nodes - enemies without one are therefore immune.
Story also works well with the theme. It's not a nobel worth masterpiece by a long shot but better than most any way. It works better as an overall documentary of consequences of technology than it does as a story about people - much like the Joss Whedon's Dollhouse actually. So the plot in itself is not all that great, but the way it portrays how Sensen technology has affected everyone's lives is pretty solid. The moments when the game explores the darkest sides of Sensen are definitely the strongest. I recommend playing it through just for the atmosphere. It's not a long game either.
2. Finishing off with gameplay
While I'd mostly recommend this game for its atmosphere, gameplay in Remember Me ain't half bad either. It's not very original though. The game can roughly be divided into three types of segments: the aforementioned memory projection segments, climbing segments and of course combat. Climbing is heavily railroaded: usually there's exactly one option for moving forward - pretty much what is typical in heavily scripted games already. There's nothing difficult about it either because controls are accurate enough so mostly it's just mindless execution of a predetermined obstacle course. The saving grace is scenery. Although immersion is way weaker than in Mirror's Edge, at least the views are great. There's not really much else to say about climbing in this game.
Nilin cannot use weapons so she has to rely on her fists and feet to do the dirty work for her. The game uses a combo system that sounds interesting on paper: The player is granted two chains to start off with, and can assign Pressens to each attack in a combo. These affect what the attack does. Unfortunately the options are rather limited. The choice is basically between damage, healing and cooldown reduction. The fourth Pressen type is a more powerful version of whatever Pressen preceded it. Regardless of Pressens, attack animations for combos don't change. With more varied Pressens this system might have been much cooler, but as it stands it's very simplistic. As soon as I opened a third combo, I simply had one combo for each purpose: dishing out the hurt, healing and reducing cooldowns. Normal attacks aside, Nilin gains access to a total of five superpowers.
Although the mechanic is simple, it does grant some tactical depth. Much of this is due to clever encounter and enemy design. Nilin's superpowers are not just to make fights go faster - each and every one of them is truly required. Especially towards the endgame battles become dances around tougher enemies while the player tries to build up meter for Nilin's superpowers and at the same time use cooldown reduction combos to make them available in decent time (default cooldowns are *long*). Finally, because healing is also only possible through attacking, the player really needs to stay on the offensive. Delightfully the game heavily punishes mashing - each attack in a combo needs to be timed correctly. It is also worth learning which combos include area of effect damage. Controls are not perfect, but overall encounters are fun to play precisely because they feel different from each other.
The game also has a few memory remixing scenes, which are kind of interesting. They involve manipulating a memory like a recording, skimming back and forward and changing small things like the position of a table in hopes of altering the outcome. It's mostly a more elaborate version of "try everything" puzzles in some adventure games, but thematically they're cool. There's not that many things to try in each memory either. Fine additions to the game, but not much else really.
Conclusion
Remember Me is a solid action adventure game that is strong in atmosphere but otherwise not all that special. Although combat and climbing mechanics are not very original or interesting on their own, both are enhanced by auxiliary means: battle encounters are designed surprisingly well, and scenery in the game is amazing. Nilin's story is not that great either, but the way the game handles its sci-fi makes it worth playing. If you choose to pick it up, do yourself a favor and play on the highest difficulty.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Global Game Jam 2014: Squared Interactions
I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about this year's GGJ because I have been so tired lately. Something to do with the Finnish winter perhaps. At least I went there, and even finished a project. I have skipped a few game jams due to various reasons from lack of energy to health problems in the past year and I think the last one I actually went to was last year's GGJ. Once again I had grandeur plans of joining someone else's project to save myself some headache...
Here's the game (webkit browsers recommended)
Conclusion
Although I didn't spend even half of the allocated time, I'd call this GGJ a success. The game I made is not much to talk about, but as an experiment it was successful. In a way this game is truer to the GGJ spirit than any of my previous games (well, excluding this) because I really tried something different with no fear of failing. It's hard to break free of doing games with familiar mechanics. Especially in your first game jams, you probably want to really make a game that's fun to play instead of some crazy experiment. Familiar mechanics are easy to implement, and they have been proven to work. Experimental mechanics might be easy to implement like in this case, but making a functional game with them is another story. It is however worth trying.
As a final note: it's not always necessary to tire yourself out using every minute you humanly can in game jam. It's perfectly okay to have a shorter project and get more sleep. After all, most game jam games are done for their creators and will be forgotten by everyone else anyway. Just do whatever you want.
Here's the game (webkit browsers recommended)
1. Theme and concept
This year's theme was a phrase: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." My mind was pretty much screaming to do something artistic, something with a healthy dose of mindfuck if at all possible. I was chatting with some random people about possible concepts and among the more interesting ones was a bureaucracy game in the spirit of Papers Please but it was deemed too content-intensive. In my head the concept was somewhat reminiscent of Brenda Romero's Train - can the player see through all the paperwork what harm will befall the applicants if he follows the rules blindly. Other concepts I thought of were somewhat similar; the general idea was: it would be up to the player to decide what the game is about. The final piece of the brainstorm puzzle came from the diversifiers.
The diversifiers were published a few days before the jam. Initially I was thinking one of them felt like it didn't belong to a jam: the Bechdel test one. I felt that way because dialogue is very rarely something you want in a jam game. Naturally I chose to pursue this diversifier but not through written dialogue: I wanted to make a game that's an abstraction of a conversation. My inspiration was The Marriage and I also wanted to use nothing but simple boxes for my graphics. I figured the game would have two squares representing two women (originally pink boxes) and one representing a man (blue box). The squares would move based on some rules that allowed the player to guide the conversation. If either pink box ever hit the blue box, the game would end. I wasn't entirely sure what the exact mechanics would be but I felt it was a concept worth pitching.
Pitch we did. Once again I was slightly disappointed at how ordinary most of the concepts were. Platformer, point-and-click, area control... some sounded also a bit too ambitious. There were two other concepts I considered working on instead of my own: a fridge magnet poetry game and a button mashing game that where the idea was to use player inputs throughout the game to produce a song or something like that in the end. We had some plans to form an art game coalition but nothing game out of it ultimately. At this point I was still not sure if I really wanted to even do this jam but I stayed on the site to see what people were up to. I didn't even take out my computer - I just worked inside my head and shared some design ideas with one organizer who I recruited as a co-designer.
In the final design I actually combined all three of the more artistic game concepts. Unfortunately I didn't find the person who pitched the poetry game idea earlier but I proceeded to assimilate the mechanic anyway. So the final design: the squares would move independently to depict the living nature of a conversation. The player would influence the behavior of the squares by dragging words from a word pool into the topic area. Placing a word would change something: size of a square (ego) or its speed (enthusiasm). Finally I decided that ego-inflating words would also push the other square away. Likewise, ego-reducing words would attract the other square. Enthusiasm was affected by discussion topics - each square liked a random set of topics and disliked the rest. The dynamics I planned were quite a bit more complicated than what you'll see in the outcome but the concepts of ego and enthusiasm are there.
2. Development
I once again chose to use CraftyJS. I have tried a few other JS game libraries in the past year but there has been no real advantage over Crafty with any of them. Best stick to what I know. I worked with a rather lazy pace on this one. The concept itself was very easy to implement but like always, I managed to create some hard to detect bugs. I had great plans for how the squares would move, including having them connected to each other with a rubber band. Ultimately I didn't feel like dealing with all that math and went for something very simple. Honestly it doesn't matter that much in the outcome. There's really not that much to talk about development this year. I was done in about ten hours which is like twice as much as a project of this scale should have taken. I took the laziest possible path in every turn and my code was really sloppy.
I didn't use any obvious color does for the squares and it's probably very hard to figure out how the game works or what it's all about. I dropped some hints like the game ending in failure if any word that somehow means a man is chosen. When the game ends through one of the squares touching the third one, the end screen has another hint: "The third party interrupted". The fact that I ticked the "The Ultimate Bechdel Test Survivor" diversifier is another hint for those who actually look at the game's GGJ page.
3. Hindsight
The game turned out very hard to really control so to a casual player it will seem completely random. It was not intended but it doesn't really bother me that much either. In a way it's a meta-commentary about by jam games in general... they are always too hard to get. In a sense the real focus of this project is the word game. When the game ends, the words the player put on the topic area are brough to focus and it can read as a very weird poem. There's a lot of room for creativity because words can be placed freely, and there are a lot of words for each game mechanical meaning. As a mechanic it feels new. It's also a different perspective into game outcomes: the outcome is not the final game state in itself - it's made of the player's input history instead. I think it was crucial to bring the "poem" into focus when the game ends. This draws the player's attention to it, and makes it feel more like their creation.
I really liked this dynamic between gameplay and creativity. If I were to do this game again, I would change what the game is about to something less abstract and random in order to give the player more incentive to think about which words to choose. This word mechanic is also excellent soil for all kinds of easter eggs. For example, choosing the word "end" actually ends the game. Similar hidden meanings could be attached to more words which would make the game more delightful to explore. In a sense there would be two layers to the word game instead of one: each word represents a category, but they also occasionally do something else. Whatever the game concept for this control dynamic would be, it definitely needs to be slower than what I did in this jam. Choosing words is a ponderous action, but the squares move constantly and pretty fast too.
I once again chose to use CraftyJS. I have tried a few other JS game libraries in the past year but there has been no real advantage over Crafty with any of them. Best stick to what I know. I worked with a rather lazy pace on this one. The concept itself was very easy to implement but like always, I managed to create some hard to detect bugs. I had great plans for how the squares would move, including having them connected to each other with a rubber band. Ultimately I didn't feel like dealing with all that math and went for something very simple. Honestly it doesn't matter that much in the outcome. There's really not that much to talk about development this year. I was done in about ten hours which is like twice as much as a project of this scale should have taken. I took the laziest possible path in every turn and my code was really sloppy.
I didn't use any obvious color does for the squares and it's probably very hard to figure out how the game works or what it's all about. I dropped some hints like the game ending in failure if any word that somehow means a man is chosen. When the game ends through one of the squares touching the third one, the end screen has another hint: "The third party interrupted". The fact that I ticked the "The Ultimate Bechdel Test Survivor" diversifier is another hint for those who actually look at the game's GGJ page.
3. Hindsight
The game turned out very hard to really control so to a casual player it will seem completely random. It was not intended but it doesn't really bother me that much either. In a way it's a meta-commentary about by jam games in general... they are always too hard to get. In a sense the real focus of this project is the word game. When the game ends, the words the player put on the topic area are brough to focus and it can read as a very weird poem. There's a lot of room for creativity because words can be placed freely, and there are a lot of words for each game mechanical meaning. As a mechanic it feels new. It's also a different perspective into game outcomes: the outcome is not the final game state in itself - it's made of the player's input history instead. I think it was crucial to bring the "poem" into focus when the game ends. This draws the player's attention to it, and makes it feel more like their creation.
I really liked this dynamic between gameplay and creativity. If I were to do this game again, I would change what the game is about to something less abstract and random in order to give the player more incentive to think about which words to choose. This word mechanic is also excellent soil for all kinds of easter eggs. For example, choosing the word "end" actually ends the game. Similar hidden meanings could be attached to more words which would make the game more delightful to explore. In a sense there would be two layers to the word game instead of one: each word represents a category, but they also occasionally do something else. Whatever the game concept for this control dynamic would be, it definitely needs to be slower than what I did in this jam. Choosing words is a ponderous action, but the squares move constantly and pretty fast too.
Conclusion
Although I didn't spend even half of the allocated time, I'd call this GGJ a success. The game I made is not much to talk about, but as an experiment it was successful. In a way this game is truer to the GGJ spirit than any of my previous games (well, excluding this) because I really tried something different with no fear of failing. It's hard to break free of doing games with familiar mechanics. Especially in your first game jams, you probably want to really make a game that's fun to play instead of some crazy experiment. Familiar mechanics are easy to implement, and they have been proven to work. Experimental mechanics might be easy to implement like in this case, but making a functional game with them is another story. It is however worth trying.
As a final note: it's not always necessary to tire yourself out using every minute you humanly can in game jam. It's perfectly okay to have a shorter project and get more sleep. After all, most game jam games are done for their creators and will be forgotten by everyone else anyway. Just do whatever you want.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
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.
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".
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".
Friday, January 3, 2014
Dota 2: Casting
What do you do when you're just not fit to play a game professionally? Start casting it!
Joking aside, I have (somewhat) recently been part of the casting crew in two Dota 2 tournaments. The first one was in August and the second one was in November. Since I still have no new games to write about, I decided to share some thoughts about casting.
1. Casting? Dafuq?
To start things off, here's an overview of what a Dota 2 caster does. This is mostly applicable to all eSports, but I have no experience outside Dota 2 so I'll just stick with what I know. On the basic level, casters follow the game and commentate what is going on. Since stream viewers will only see what the caster sees in-game, it is important for the caster to have their camera where the action is. Another important task is commentating continuously. This includes simply describing what is happening on the screen and more importantly giving some more insight on what might be going on - what the teams could do next, what is commonly done in similar situations etc. Beyond that, the primary caster's job is to raise enthusiasm, typically by being enthusiastic. They should also be able to inject bits of knowledge about the scene, teams and players into the cast.
This sets certain minimum requirements for casting. In order to show meaningful things about the game, the caster needs to know the game pretty well. Understanding hero abilities, items, roles and lanes is pretty much mandatory. Some of this knowledge must be obtained through playing the game; the rest must be obtained from following the scene (i.e. watching professional matches). Knowing what teams typically do helps in making predictions and overall evaluating the game situation. Even if the teams currently playing are entirely unknown, casters can draw a lot of interesting information from the current meta game. It is worth noting that a caster need now know these things as deeply as professional players do - after all, most of their audience doesn't know either.
Besides, the role of the main caster is to be the enthusiastic commentator. Typically casters also have co-casters - often professional players - who are more intimately familiar with both the game itself and strategy. Co-casters typically lack the verbal expression skills required to be a good main caster and also because they are not constantly talking, they have more time to think about what's happening in the game. They can give more specific details about how a particular skill or item works, and they are better in predicting strategy and answering questions like "how can they come back from this situation?". Having a co-caster also allows the main caster to have some dialogue in the cast which generally makes it more interesting to follow than if it was just pure monologue. Sometimes co-casters can also be personally acquianted with the players, and have more intimate knowledge about how they approach the game.
2. More personal view
The previous chapter is a rough summary of casting in general, and something that is pretty obvious after watching a few casts. I want to talk more about my personal casting experience. First of all, without any doubt I am much more suitable to the role of a co-caster. In case you haven't noticed, I love analysis and I study games - especially Dota 2 - with due diligence. I'm certainly not a professional player but I have pretty good knowledge of high level play (I just lack the execution). While my verbal expression is solid, I find it really hard to bring the required level of enthusiasm into the cast. Unfortunately our entire casting crew on both occasions has been made of people who should be co-casters.
Whether you are a co-caster or main caster, the experience is quite significantly different from playing (obviously) but also from mere viewing. When watching a stream, you have the caster(s) to help you focus on the most important things. When casting, it is you who should not only figure out the important bits but also draw viewers' attention to it. The level of awareness required is almost on par with what the players need to have - but as a caster you have more information to process thanks to being privileged to lot of stuff the players cannot see. I mean you see both teams of course, but can also look at all kinds of neat graphs and statistics.
Combat situations in Dota 2 can be very chaotic and these are the toughest moments to cast. When a teamfight involves all 10 heroes on the map, each throwing their abilities, processing everything quickly enough to actually say something intelligent about what's going on is not easy. Sometimes it's not even possible and here's where a co-caster is really helpful: they may have noticed other things and can fill in more details after the fight is done - usually nothing significant happens after a big fight for a while so there's time to recap a bit. Of course in order to do that, decent short term memory is required. Memory also helps when casting a longer series of games - a caster can recall similarities between drafts etc.
3. Advantages
In my experience, casting is a great way to improve your ability to read the game. When playing a single hero, it is too often okay to just pay attention to things that have direct impact to you. It doesn't give optimal results, but there is nothing in particular forcing the player to pay attention to peripheral things. When casting, every single one of the 10 heroes on the map are equally important to follow. Likewise, keeping an eye on the minimap is crucial in order to be able to react to action anywhere on the map quickly enough. This widened awareness can transfer into gameplay as reduced tunnel vision, especially during fights. It's not an unexpected outcome really - in this sense casting is a lot like teaching: through teaching, the teacher also improves their own understanding.
All in all it goes to show that as a player, it is advantageous to approach a game from multiple perspectives. Although playing the game is the main activity, peripheral activities like spectating and casting can provide advantages that cannot be gained through gameplay alone. The experience closest to casting is most likely viewing replays and preferably analyzing them with another player. Overlooking things is much more common when viewing alone largely because our brains tend to fill gaps in thought quite sneakily. To put it another way, gaps in understanding tend to become apparent only when explaining things to another person. If something is truly understood, it should be possible to put it into words. When everything happens in the mind, it's easy to nod in understanding, although no real understanding takes place.
Conclusion
I started writing this article like a month ago, but kinda run out of things to say and left it to hang. Since I still don't have anything more to say about the subject, I'm just gonna put this out there as it is. The bottom line is: casting is yet another way to appreciate a game you love - and it can also make you a better player. I will definitely be looking for more opportunities to cast tournaments this year, maybe even work on that enthusiasm a bit. I could also try casting in English when I feel confident enough.
Joking aside, I have (somewhat) recently been part of the casting crew in two Dota 2 tournaments. The first one was in August and the second one was in November. Since I still have no new games to write about, I decided to share some thoughts about casting.
1. Casting? Dafuq?
To start things off, here's an overview of what a Dota 2 caster does. This is mostly applicable to all eSports, but I have no experience outside Dota 2 so I'll just stick with what I know. On the basic level, casters follow the game and commentate what is going on. Since stream viewers will only see what the caster sees in-game, it is important for the caster to have their camera where the action is. Another important task is commentating continuously. This includes simply describing what is happening on the screen and more importantly giving some more insight on what might be going on - what the teams could do next, what is commonly done in similar situations etc. Beyond that, the primary caster's job is to raise enthusiasm, typically by being enthusiastic. They should also be able to inject bits of knowledge about the scene, teams and players into the cast.
This sets certain minimum requirements for casting. In order to show meaningful things about the game, the caster needs to know the game pretty well. Understanding hero abilities, items, roles and lanes is pretty much mandatory. Some of this knowledge must be obtained through playing the game; the rest must be obtained from following the scene (i.e. watching professional matches). Knowing what teams typically do helps in making predictions and overall evaluating the game situation. Even if the teams currently playing are entirely unknown, casters can draw a lot of interesting information from the current meta game. It is worth noting that a caster need now know these things as deeply as professional players do - after all, most of their audience doesn't know either.
Besides, the role of the main caster is to be the enthusiastic commentator. Typically casters also have co-casters - often professional players - who are more intimately familiar with both the game itself and strategy. Co-casters typically lack the verbal expression skills required to be a good main caster and also because they are not constantly talking, they have more time to think about what's happening in the game. They can give more specific details about how a particular skill or item works, and they are better in predicting strategy and answering questions like "how can they come back from this situation?". Having a co-caster also allows the main caster to have some dialogue in the cast which generally makes it more interesting to follow than if it was just pure monologue. Sometimes co-casters can also be personally acquianted with the players, and have more intimate knowledge about how they approach the game.
2. More personal view
The previous chapter is a rough summary of casting in general, and something that is pretty obvious after watching a few casts. I want to talk more about my personal casting experience. First of all, without any doubt I am much more suitable to the role of a co-caster. In case you haven't noticed, I love analysis and I study games - especially Dota 2 - with due diligence. I'm certainly not a professional player but I have pretty good knowledge of high level play (I just lack the execution). While my verbal expression is solid, I find it really hard to bring the required level of enthusiasm into the cast. Unfortunately our entire casting crew on both occasions has been made of people who should be co-casters.
Whether you are a co-caster or main caster, the experience is quite significantly different from playing (obviously) but also from mere viewing. When watching a stream, you have the caster(s) to help you focus on the most important things. When casting, it is you who should not only figure out the important bits but also draw viewers' attention to it. The level of awareness required is almost on par with what the players need to have - but as a caster you have more information to process thanks to being privileged to lot of stuff the players cannot see. I mean you see both teams of course, but can also look at all kinds of neat graphs and statistics.
Combat situations in Dota 2 can be very chaotic and these are the toughest moments to cast. When a teamfight involves all 10 heroes on the map, each throwing their abilities, processing everything quickly enough to actually say something intelligent about what's going on is not easy. Sometimes it's not even possible and here's where a co-caster is really helpful: they may have noticed other things and can fill in more details after the fight is done - usually nothing significant happens after a big fight for a while so there's time to recap a bit. Of course in order to do that, decent short term memory is required. Memory also helps when casting a longer series of games - a caster can recall similarities between drafts etc.
3. Advantages
In my experience, casting is a great way to improve your ability to read the game. When playing a single hero, it is too often okay to just pay attention to things that have direct impact to you. It doesn't give optimal results, but there is nothing in particular forcing the player to pay attention to peripheral things. When casting, every single one of the 10 heroes on the map are equally important to follow. Likewise, keeping an eye on the minimap is crucial in order to be able to react to action anywhere on the map quickly enough. This widened awareness can transfer into gameplay as reduced tunnel vision, especially during fights. It's not an unexpected outcome really - in this sense casting is a lot like teaching: through teaching, the teacher also improves their own understanding.
All in all it goes to show that as a player, it is advantageous to approach a game from multiple perspectives. Although playing the game is the main activity, peripheral activities like spectating and casting can provide advantages that cannot be gained through gameplay alone. The experience closest to casting is most likely viewing replays and preferably analyzing them with another player. Overlooking things is much more common when viewing alone largely because our brains tend to fill gaps in thought quite sneakily. To put it another way, gaps in understanding tend to become apparent only when explaining things to another person. If something is truly understood, it should be possible to put it into words. When everything happens in the mind, it's easy to nod in understanding, although no real understanding takes place.
Conclusion
I started writing this article like a month ago, but kinda run out of things to say and left it to hang. Since I still don't have anything more to say about the subject, I'm just gonna put this out there as it is. The bottom line is: casting is yet another way to appreciate a game you love - and it can also make you a better player. I will definitely be looking for more opportunities to cast tournaments this year, maybe even work on that enthusiasm a bit. I could also try casting in English when I feel confident enough.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Android: Netrunner
Back from the dead...
As has been said, I am currently playing one really long game (Agarest) which means no video game analyses for a while. Especially since on top of that I started another - very likely even longer - game, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Agarest is actually on a break now, so... Not to worry, there's more to gaming than digital games. Analog games have not received any mention in this blog since ancient times; now it is time for them to make a comeback. The game I want to talk about is Android: Netrunner, a game I have been getting into lately.
2. Tricks and deceit
3. Factions
The game has factions on each side: three runner types and four corporations, each with their own characteristics. Criminal runners are basically massive dicks who have pretty straightforward gameplay. They can go with early aggression and lay a lot of waste on the corporation's resources. Shapers on the other hand rely more on finesse and table development, eventually coming up with cards to cover every situation and then just go from there. Anarchists are my current favorite - they go for less orthodox tactics, trying to disrupt the game with viruses and other cards that really mess things up. Playing with and against each of these runner factions is a pretty different experience. It sets the premise for the matchup and gives away a bit about what can be expected.
On the corporation side there are two that rely more on having a heavy economy and two that rely more on being crafty. Haas-Bioroid is ideal for players who just want to build an impregnable fortress and eventually win from within its walls. Wayland has brutally efficient economy, but it often comes at the cost of bad publicity which makes it generally easier to run against them - they also have a lot of means to outright kill the runner with meat damage. Jinteki decks often go poor, but they specialize in traps and other sorts of mind games - and often win games through massive net damage from their traps, ICE and other cards. NBN is another corporation that doesn't swim in money, but they have means to score agendas rapidly and control the game by tagging the runner (if the runner is tagged, the corporation can obliterate their resources pretty easily and do other nasty things).
The factions alone give twelve different matchups but on top of that each faction has multiple identities to choose from. Each identity has a special power, and the identity also defines the minimum deck size for the player. It also defines how many influence points the player gets to spend - these points are used in deck-building to include cards from other factions. The influence system means that although you know the identity and faction of your opponent, there will always be cards that are atypical to their faction in the mix. This can cause a ton of nasty surprises which can turn the game around. Of course the effect is gone after playing against the same deck a couple of times but even then you still have to deal with everything.
All in all, there's plenty to choose from, and factions don't have just one playstyle. It is entirely possible to play a more conservative Jinteki deck for instance, protecting cards with ICE like normal people - or you can just go loose and play with a deck that's based on gambit after gambit. It just really depends on what's your cup of tea. I like NBN and Jinteki because they give more room to crafty plays - perhaps with higher risk, but also higher reward. Both factions can easily win in a single turn if the runner makes a mistake - and naturally they have the means to bait out that mistake. Most of the time it leads to wildly unpredictable games which I think is always fun. Sure games of Netrunner are by average pretty unpredictable already, but with these two corporations it just gets way more so.
4. Dynamics and stuff
When all the pieces come together, the design is simply brilliant. The fact that one side plays with hidden information is what truly defines the game for what it is, and it is supplemented by the nature of economy. The basic resource everything comes down to is time, because time can be converted into anything but players can influence the ratio. Cards and credits are pretty straightforward derivatives, but one resource in the game is much harder to evaluate: information. This sits very well with the game's theme: ultimately it's about information being taken from the corporation by the runner. Sometimes risks must be taken simply in order to reveal a few cards. The more knowledge the runner has, the better they can plan the use of their resources.
On the corporation side, the player has to worry about different vectors of attack. It is usually important to protect your R&D (draw deck) because that's the most unpredictable element in the game for the corporation. A lucky runner can win in one turn if they get free access to R&D. Then there's HQ (hand of cards) to worry about, especially if it contains agendas. The corporation should also be able to protect at least one remote server to have at least one place to play agendas. It doesn't help that some runner decks are insanely harrowing to play against because they seem to have ways to deal with everything - these ways will exhaust eventually, but surviving that long can be quite a challenge. In a way the corporation has somewhat more control over the game. It is much easier for corporations to only take risks they can afford while at the same time being able to force the runner to take huge risks.
A lot of times optimal plays also depend on the opponent. Corporations can play pretty balls-y moves against risk-averse runners, like dropping agendas on servers with little or no protection. A card with no protection and no advancement tokens pretty much reeks of waste of time or even a trap. However if it is just left there and it's an agenda that requires three advancement, the corporation can outright score it on their next turn. On the other hand if you are playing against a less timid or downright aggressive runner (that would be me), there's just no way you're getting away with plays like this. As the runner you have to evaluate how huge balls the corp player really has. Misjudgements to either direction can be pretty damn costly.
With all this going on, the game is just really dynamic. Although decks are typically built around one strategy, players should always be prepared to adapt their play style on a game-to-game basis. Both sides can make it impossible for their opponent to play their strategy, but this usually opens up other opportunities. Recognizing and capitalizing these opportunities is an important skill.
Conclusion
Android: Netrunner is not your typical deck construction game. Its asymmetrical nature, reliance on hidden information and resource system keep the game interesting to play - as opposed to some other games where the real game is deck-building and actually playing the game is just a formality (a bit polarized view admittedly, but the difference between e.g. MtG and Netrunner is just huge honestly). As a game it simply allows way more opportunities for the player to shine. All the mind games and unpredictability mean that games are almost never over before the end conditions have been met. It can literally take just one mistake to make or break a game - and not taking risks can be a mistake in itself.
I have not yet played enough to really tell how balanced the game is. There are some runner cards that do feel pretty overpowered and playing against them is really frustrating. They are still manageable but do put quite a strain on corporation deck-building. A definite con is the price. Although I guess it is possible to not buy every single expansion, I'd still say it's not the cheapest game to play. I think at the moment it's my second or third most expensive game, but I do have all or most of the expansions (the leader is by far Lord of the Rings living card game).
So, play it if you get the chance.
As has been said, I am currently playing one really long game (Agarest) which means no video game analyses for a while. Especially since on top of that I started another - very likely even longer - game, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Agarest is actually on a break now, so... Not to worry, there's more to gaming than digital games. Analog games have not received any mention in this blog since ancient times; now it is time for them to make a comeback. The game I want to talk about is Android: Netrunner, a game I have been getting into lately.
1. A quick introduction
This game right here would be a perfect topic for an entire article or two of its own. It's basically a rerun of an old collectible card game by Richard Garfield, resurrected by Fantasy Flight Games as a living card game. We already know that LCG is one clever concept, and Netrunner is perhaps the most clever of them all. Being strictly a two player game, it pits one lonely hacker against a massive mega corporation. The setting may sound a bit asymmetrical and this is no coincidence, because that is exactly what the game is. The corporation is building servers to advance its agendas while the hacker is constantly trying to breach through security and grab those agendas for themselves. The first player to score seven points from agendas is the winner. The corporation can also win by killing the hacker either through net damage or by more direct means of physical damage while the hacker wins if the corporation runs out of cards to draw.
The asymmetrical setting alone makes Netrunner stand out, but it's just icing on the cake. The cake is a lie - or rather a massive web of deceit. The corporation plays all its cards face-down and only has to pay for them when they are revealed (or rezzed as the game's hacker lingo likes to call it). Cards installed on servers can be rezzed at any time if their conditions are met but protective cards (ICE) can only be rezzed when they are encountered by the hacker. Most of the time the only way for the hacker to find out what's what is to run head first into it. What is the corporation hiding behind three pieces of ICE - and what kind of ICE are those anyway? In short, the corporation's job is to deceive the hacker into wasting resources on wild goose chases while tha hacker tries to figure out what risks are worth taking. Running into really aggravating ICE can literally end the hacker's life and even if all ICE is breached, there might be a trap waiting on the server. It really doesn't help that traps look a lot like agendas.
There are two factors that drive the game forward: the corporation must draw one card every turn, and in addition to servers, agendas can be stolen from the corporate player's hand, top of their deck and from their discard pile. It is impossible to protect everything, and once agendas start piling up on the corporate player's hand, they have to do something with them - but the means to get those agendas scored are up to the player and their deck's design. Some players may favor stacking ICE after ICE to create the ultimate server to guard their agendas while others may choose to play agendas on unprotected servers - only these "agendas" are as often traps as they are the real thing. What looks like an agenda? Cards that can be advanced while face-down. Advancing costs time and money, both of which are limited, and it is mostly impossible to fully advance an agenda on the same turn it is played. Once advancement tokens start to pile up on it, the hacker knows something is up.
2. Tricks and deceit
All in all, the game is far more dependent on player skill and turn-to-turn decision making than other popular deck construction games. This is especially true when playing against a deck you have never played against - for instance in a tournament. Although there are some hard counters in the game, most solid decks should be okay against the majority of decks and games are often pretty close. The corp-plays-hidden nature of the game makes it so that cards can have surprising uses and the winner is more often the player who makes the best use of their cards rather than the player who has the better deck. Some cards still feel like garbage but that just happens with every game. Sometimes it matters more what the card looks like than what it actually is. Let's take a quick example.
Most of the traps in game do nothing if they have not been advanced. This means that it is usually more safe for the runner to go for cards that have not been advanced if they feel like they could be facing traps. I do this a lot, especially if it is not too costly to check out a card before it has been advanced. One game I was having some issues and could not afford to play and advance a card on the same turn. I had traps that would win me the game if the runner hit them while they were advanced, but I simply did not have the resources to do that. Instead, I just put one out on a somewhat protected server with no advancement. Against my deck, it is 100% safe to check cards that have not been advanced, so the runner went for it, burning some resources (time and money) on my ICE. Effectively I just bought a lot of time with a useless card. The runner had to check it because if it had been an agenda, I could have very probably scored it on my next turn.
I actually repeated the trick a few turns later and bought more time, and I eventually won the game - on a play with a card I was unable to use properly. All kinds of plays can be made, and the game affords huge swings and comebacks. This basically happens because of the resource system: there are very few resource cards that provide constant benefit (like lands in MtG). Most economy cards are good for limited time, or require the player to spend precious time to get credits. Time can always be exchanged for credits (it's an action) but the economy cards make the ratio more efficient. This makes it much harder to snowball because a few misplays can quickly even the economic scales. If a player is able to buy enough time, they can recover from pretty dire situations.
Most of the traps in game do nothing if they have not been advanced. This means that it is usually more safe for the runner to go for cards that have not been advanced if they feel like they could be facing traps. I do this a lot, especially if it is not too costly to check out a card before it has been advanced. One game I was having some issues and could not afford to play and advance a card on the same turn. I had traps that would win me the game if the runner hit them while they were advanced, but I simply did not have the resources to do that. Instead, I just put one out on a somewhat protected server with no advancement. Against my deck, it is 100% safe to check cards that have not been advanced, so the runner went for it, burning some resources (time and money) on my ICE. Effectively I just bought a lot of time with a useless card. The runner had to check it because if it had been an agenda, I could have very probably scored it on my next turn.
I actually repeated the trick a few turns later and bought more time, and I eventually won the game - on a play with a card I was unable to use properly. All kinds of plays can be made, and the game affords huge swings and comebacks. This basically happens because of the resource system: there are very few resource cards that provide constant benefit (like lands in MtG). Most economy cards are good for limited time, or require the player to spend precious time to get credits. Time can always be exchanged for credits (it's an action) but the economy cards make the ratio more efficient. This makes it much harder to snowball because a few misplays can quickly even the economic scales. If a player is able to buy enough time, they can recover from pretty dire situations.
3. Factions
The game has factions on each side: three runner types and four corporations, each with their own characteristics. Criminal runners are basically massive dicks who have pretty straightforward gameplay. They can go with early aggression and lay a lot of waste on the corporation's resources. Shapers on the other hand rely more on finesse and table development, eventually coming up with cards to cover every situation and then just go from there. Anarchists are my current favorite - they go for less orthodox tactics, trying to disrupt the game with viruses and other cards that really mess things up. Playing with and against each of these runner factions is a pretty different experience. It sets the premise for the matchup and gives away a bit about what can be expected.
On the corporation side there are two that rely more on having a heavy economy and two that rely more on being crafty. Haas-Bioroid is ideal for players who just want to build an impregnable fortress and eventually win from within its walls. Wayland has brutally efficient economy, but it often comes at the cost of bad publicity which makes it generally easier to run against them - they also have a lot of means to outright kill the runner with meat damage. Jinteki decks often go poor, but they specialize in traps and other sorts of mind games - and often win games through massive net damage from their traps, ICE and other cards. NBN is another corporation that doesn't swim in money, but they have means to score agendas rapidly and control the game by tagging the runner (if the runner is tagged, the corporation can obliterate their resources pretty easily and do other nasty things).
The factions alone give twelve different matchups but on top of that each faction has multiple identities to choose from. Each identity has a special power, and the identity also defines the minimum deck size for the player. It also defines how many influence points the player gets to spend - these points are used in deck-building to include cards from other factions. The influence system means that although you know the identity and faction of your opponent, there will always be cards that are atypical to their faction in the mix. This can cause a ton of nasty surprises which can turn the game around. Of course the effect is gone after playing against the same deck a couple of times but even then you still have to deal with everything.
All in all, there's plenty to choose from, and factions don't have just one playstyle. It is entirely possible to play a more conservative Jinteki deck for instance, protecting cards with ICE like normal people - or you can just go loose and play with a deck that's based on gambit after gambit. It just really depends on what's your cup of tea. I like NBN and Jinteki because they give more room to crafty plays - perhaps with higher risk, but also higher reward. Both factions can easily win in a single turn if the runner makes a mistake - and naturally they have the means to bait out that mistake. Most of the time it leads to wildly unpredictable games which I think is always fun. Sure games of Netrunner are by average pretty unpredictable already, but with these two corporations it just gets way more so.
4. Dynamics and stuff
When all the pieces come together, the design is simply brilliant. The fact that one side plays with hidden information is what truly defines the game for what it is, and it is supplemented by the nature of economy. The basic resource everything comes down to is time, because time can be converted into anything but players can influence the ratio. Cards and credits are pretty straightforward derivatives, but one resource in the game is much harder to evaluate: information. This sits very well with the game's theme: ultimately it's about information being taken from the corporation by the runner. Sometimes risks must be taken simply in order to reveal a few cards. The more knowledge the runner has, the better they can plan the use of their resources.
On the corporation side, the player has to worry about different vectors of attack. It is usually important to protect your R&D (draw deck) because that's the most unpredictable element in the game for the corporation. A lucky runner can win in one turn if they get free access to R&D. Then there's HQ (hand of cards) to worry about, especially if it contains agendas. The corporation should also be able to protect at least one remote server to have at least one place to play agendas. It doesn't help that some runner decks are insanely harrowing to play against because they seem to have ways to deal with everything - these ways will exhaust eventually, but surviving that long can be quite a challenge. In a way the corporation has somewhat more control over the game. It is much easier for corporations to only take risks they can afford while at the same time being able to force the runner to take huge risks.
A lot of times optimal plays also depend on the opponent. Corporations can play pretty balls-y moves against risk-averse runners, like dropping agendas on servers with little or no protection. A card with no protection and no advancement tokens pretty much reeks of waste of time or even a trap. However if it is just left there and it's an agenda that requires three advancement, the corporation can outright score it on their next turn. On the other hand if you are playing against a less timid or downright aggressive runner (that would be me), there's just no way you're getting away with plays like this. As the runner you have to evaluate how huge balls the corp player really has. Misjudgements to either direction can be pretty damn costly.
With all this going on, the game is just really dynamic. Although decks are typically built around one strategy, players should always be prepared to adapt their play style on a game-to-game basis. Both sides can make it impossible for their opponent to play their strategy, but this usually opens up other opportunities. Recognizing and capitalizing these opportunities is an important skill.
Conclusion
Android: Netrunner is not your typical deck construction game. Its asymmetrical nature, reliance on hidden information and resource system keep the game interesting to play - as opposed to some other games where the real game is deck-building and actually playing the game is just a formality (a bit polarized view admittedly, but the difference between e.g. MtG and Netrunner is just huge honestly). As a game it simply allows way more opportunities for the player to shine. All the mind games and unpredictability mean that games are almost never over before the end conditions have been met. It can literally take just one mistake to make or break a game - and not taking risks can be a mistake in itself.
I have not yet played enough to really tell how balanced the game is. There are some runner cards that do feel pretty overpowered and playing against them is really frustrating. They are still manageable but do put quite a strain on corporation deck-building. A definite con is the price. Although I guess it is possible to not buy every single expansion, I'd still say it's not the cheapest game to play. I think at the moment it's my second or third most expensive game, but I do have all or most of the expansions (the leader is by far Lord of the Rings living card game).
So, play it if you get the chance.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Jeanne d'Arc
I'm continuing my excavation of JRPGs you have likely never heard of (still going through this list). The latest title in this series was Jeanne d'Arc, a tactical RPG from Level-5. As the name suggests, it's a heavily rearranged fantasy version of the famous historical figure's story - i.e. it probably has next to nothing to do with the actual Jeanne. No matter, I didn't come here for the plot anyway - I find this a rather health approach to most JRPGs unless they have been specifically lauded for their story (e.g. Nier). I want to get some stuff out of the way before diving into the game's mechanics: my opinion is probably slightly biased due to the game's artistic style which I found a bit repulsive. I also don't have much love for Level-5 RPGs.
1. Classes, rocks, papers and scissors
Since it's a tactical RPG, we should start by going through some of its core mechanics. The game has loosely classed characters - in other words, classes are primarily defined by the weapon they use and their stats. The classes bear a strong resemblance to Fire Emblem - each weapon has unique properties that defines where it shines. Swords are the bread-and-butter, the most average weapon there is - nothing special to them but no particular weaknesses either. Axes are less accurate but deal heavy damage - certain axe skills can also lower defense. Spears are less effective but they hit two squares in front of the wielder, and also have access to a wide variety of area-of-effect attacks and long range jump attacks. Bows are what you might expect from them while knives are more accurate and have a higher chance to crit. Whips are the only melee weapon in the game that can hit diagonally and so on.
Now, unlike Fire Emblem, there's no rock-paper-scissors between the types of weapons. Yet the game does have a very similar RPS system: spirit skills. These are passive skills that grant the bearer levels in either Sol, Stella or Luna. If you guessed that each of these is strong against one other and weak against the remaining one, you would be absolutely correct. In this case Sol beats Stella, Stella beats Luna and Luna beats Sol. Most enemies in the game have been assigned to one of these aspects. Since the aspect is tied to a skill that can be freely equipped by any class at the start of the battle, actual character classes do not play a role in the RPS system. It is kinda good and bad news for the game. On the one hand, the player can customize their favorite characters to suit each battle while on the other hand, there is no real need to ever level up any extra characters. In Jeanne d'Arc though, I feel this lands more on the plus side.
The reason is that - just like the Fire Emblem RPS - these aspects severely increase and decrease both damage and accuracy. Especially later in the game characters are next to useless against the aspect they are weak against. This means that the player needs to examine their enemies and choose characters that can best deal with each threat - and then distribute spirit skills accordingly. In some battles the player can get away with not having one particular spirit at all, and in most there will be one spirit that is generally more useful than the rest. It is also quite common for the boss of a level to be of an aspect that is different from rest of the monsters so that whoever is designated to take the boss down won't be as useful against the rest. Overall this effect is similar to what you get in Fire Emblem - a careful plan is needed to decide who goes where and who is going to fight who.
Although there are numerous similarities between Fire Emblem and this game, the cost of using things is more akin to Tactics Ogre. Skills are fueled by mana that starts at zero and then regenerates every round. In Fire Emblem every weapon and spell has a limited number of uses. This allows even powerful weapons to be given out sparingly early in the game and using one is always a decision with some consequences because eventually it will run out of uses. There is still a cost to using more powerful skills in Jeanne d'Arc, because only the most basic skills and spells can be spammed every turn. Missing with a costly skill usually hurts quite a bit. I am not saying that Jeanne d'Arc should use Fire Emblem's system (if it did, the games would be really similar) - just that there is a clear difference in how "resources" are used - and that it is caused by the game's economy model.
2. Heroes and heroines
One of the most interesting features in Jeanne d'Arc are armlet wielders - heroes and heroines with a bit of extra oomph. Armlet wielders can transform into more powerful forms during battle. It's not the transformation itself that makes this feature interesting though - it is one of the special abilities all these characters gain in their secondary form. The ability allows them to take a full extra turn every time they defeat an enemy. There's no limit to the number of these extra turns - as long as they can dish out enough damage, they can tear through an entire group of enemies. They can also conveniently "bounce" from one enemy to another to reach an otherwise unreachable foe. It is generally easy enough to figure out when this power should be used. Nevertheless it is that little something extra I feel these games often need to keep my attention.
In order to maximize the number of extra turns and thus the damage output of your entire party, other allies should weaken targets for the armlet wielder. There is a downside to this strategy though. Just like in Fire Emblem, in Jeanne d'Arc bulk of the experience is granted to whoever deals the finishing blow. Furthermore experience gains are scaled by level, which means that constantly finishing enemies off with armlet wielders is going to result in diminishing returns. Therefore mopping groups of enemies at once should be preserved for situations where it is absolutely necessary. Fortunately such situations do exist are even somewhat frequent as a result of quite solid level design. A downside to the armlet wielders is that they are quite simply superior to every other character in the game which makes them too obvious picks to pass. Perhaps it would have been better to limit this power to the main heroine who has to be in the party anyway.
The less-advertised benefit of armlet wielders is their ability to heal themselves to full HP through the transformation. Curiously enough, this is actually one of their strongest attributes. After all, healing always costs momentum - lots of it in Jeanne d'Arc - but transforming is free and subsequently increases momentum. Transforming also increases defensive attributes, thus increasing momentum even further. It is a definite tide-turner. Although it's just one feature, it defines much of the gameplay experience.
3. Formations
The importance of formations varies between tactical RPGs as do the mechanics involved. The basic concept of formations is to keep squishy characters protected and as much is true in most games. Jeanne d'Arc does go an extra mile to emphasize formations and positioning in general. This is achieved through two systems. The first and most useful of these systems is the unified guard. As long as characters are adjacent to each other they all gain a defense bonus that is relative to the total number of characters that are linked together. There is a drastic difference between being alone and standing somewhere in a chain of six characters in terms of damage taken. It even increases evasion, allowing characters to negate damage entirely. It is often more desirable to leave an action unused than it is to break a formation to down one extra enemy.
Another system that sees less use but is very powerful when it is used is called burning aura. Any normal melee attack against an enemy creates an aura directly behind the enemy. Attacking from this aura grants bonus damage. Auras only last until the end of the turn in which they were created which makes them sometimes hard to utilize - especially the super aura that is created when a character with an aura also makes a basic attack against an enemy. Once again the difference in damage output is quite drastic. This is especially useful against certain bosses in the game. Curiously enough, the AI of these bosses typically tries to put itself next to a wall to minimize the player's ability to surround it and make use of these auras. It is important to prevent them from doing so, because they typically have high HP regeneration.
As a side note, very high HP regeneration is an interesting mechanic to set the pace of a fight - the player needs to be able to sustain their damage output until the boss is dead. Basically all of the toughest fights in the game were reliant on this mechanic and I think it worked out fairly well.
4. JRPG bullshit rant part 1
As much as I love the genre, it has its share of bullshit. Jeanne d'Arc does not do any better. Let's talk about character development first because it's something the game shares with Fire Emblem. Here's the beef: stat growths are hidden information. Why this is bullshit? There's no way for the player to know the true potential of characters. Sure, there is a rule of thumb: the worse a character looks like when you get them, the more powerful they'll be by the end game. The problem is this is not a hard rule, and it is impossible to know when it holds. Even if this information was transparent this would still be bullshit because characters would not be very equal. Given that difficulty generally ramps towards the end or at least that's what you would expect (usually it's actually not the case - but in Jeanne d'Arc it is), choosing the characters who get most powerful by the end game is a no-brainer.
Then again, poor balance between characters is such a common problem that I've mostly given up on it - and I do prefer imbalance to too much balance any day. That said, hiding such crucial information from the player is just plain bullshit. At least the growth rates are granted in contrast to Fire Emblem where the rates are simply probabilities to have gains in a stat. Doesn't get much more bullshit than that. In Jeanne d'Arc I only learned about this by reading a guide after finishing the game and it turned out I had chosen my characters very poorly (more or less the worst wielder for each weapon). I still managed to beat the game but this still infuriates me because I could have just as well rolled a die to see how difficult the game is going to be for me. An uninformed decision is not any different from blind luck yet somehow I see this bullshit coming up in JRPGs time and again.
The nice thing about designing board games is that you cannot hide rules from the players because if you did, they could not play the freaking game at all. Here's another example from Jeanne d'Arc. There are several battles where enemies spawn and then get to act immediately. Naturally these are the very same battles where you have to protect a fragile NPC (one hit kills him). The game is giving you the finger, there's just no other way to describe this. There is no way to predict this happening at all, and if there was, there would be no information of when or where the new enemies will spawn. The only way is to take that guaranteed failure, wasting 15 minutes of your time and then doing the battle again from start. Fun times. This is like a douchebag board game owner who "remembers" a rule just before he is about to abuse the shit out of it. Seriously, game designers, some transparency plz.
This rant will get a sequel once I have finished what I'm currently playing. Stay tuned.
Conclusion
The usual JRPG bullshit and horrible graphical design aside, Jeanne d'Arc is tactical RPG that proudly stands on its own two feet. It has its share of distinctive mechanics, but most importantly its level design follows an optimal difficulty curve. Maybe, or maybe that was just because I had the worst possible characters in my party. The game does get a bit repetitive at times, largely because the pool of actually useful skills is very small, and most of the enemies can be dealt with using the same strategies. Still if you are looking for a solid TRPG and have already gone through the obvious choices, you could do a lot worse than Jeanne d'Arc.
There will be bit of a break in updates at least as far as digital game are concerned... the game I'm currently playing is effing long. I might write about some analog games next though!
1. Classes, rocks, papers and scissors
Since it's a tactical RPG, we should start by going through some of its core mechanics. The game has loosely classed characters - in other words, classes are primarily defined by the weapon they use and their stats. The classes bear a strong resemblance to Fire Emblem - each weapon has unique properties that defines where it shines. Swords are the bread-and-butter, the most average weapon there is - nothing special to them but no particular weaknesses either. Axes are less accurate but deal heavy damage - certain axe skills can also lower defense. Spears are less effective but they hit two squares in front of the wielder, and also have access to a wide variety of area-of-effect attacks and long range jump attacks. Bows are what you might expect from them while knives are more accurate and have a higher chance to crit. Whips are the only melee weapon in the game that can hit diagonally and so on.
Now, unlike Fire Emblem, there's no rock-paper-scissors between the types of weapons. Yet the game does have a very similar RPS system: spirit skills. These are passive skills that grant the bearer levels in either Sol, Stella or Luna. If you guessed that each of these is strong against one other and weak against the remaining one, you would be absolutely correct. In this case Sol beats Stella, Stella beats Luna and Luna beats Sol. Most enemies in the game have been assigned to one of these aspects. Since the aspect is tied to a skill that can be freely equipped by any class at the start of the battle, actual character classes do not play a role in the RPS system. It is kinda good and bad news for the game. On the one hand, the player can customize their favorite characters to suit each battle while on the other hand, there is no real need to ever level up any extra characters. In Jeanne d'Arc though, I feel this lands more on the plus side.
The reason is that - just like the Fire Emblem RPS - these aspects severely increase and decrease both damage and accuracy. Especially later in the game characters are next to useless against the aspect they are weak against. This means that the player needs to examine their enemies and choose characters that can best deal with each threat - and then distribute spirit skills accordingly. In some battles the player can get away with not having one particular spirit at all, and in most there will be one spirit that is generally more useful than the rest. It is also quite common for the boss of a level to be of an aspect that is different from rest of the monsters so that whoever is designated to take the boss down won't be as useful against the rest. Overall this effect is similar to what you get in Fire Emblem - a careful plan is needed to decide who goes where and who is going to fight who.
Although there are numerous similarities between Fire Emblem and this game, the cost of using things is more akin to Tactics Ogre. Skills are fueled by mana that starts at zero and then regenerates every round. In Fire Emblem every weapon and spell has a limited number of uses. This allows even powerful weapons to be given out sparingly early in the game and using one is always a decision with some consequences because eventually it will run out of uses. There is still a cost to using more powerful skills in Jeanne d'Arc, because only the most basic skills and spells can be spammed every turn. Missing with a costly skill usually hurts quite a bit. I am not saying that Jeanne d'Arc should use Fire Emblem's system (if it did, the games would be really similar) - just that there is a clear difference in how "resources" are used - and that it is caused by the game's economy model.
2. Heroes and heroines
One of the most interesting features in Jeanne d'Arc are armlet wielders - heroes and heroines with a bit of extra oomph. Armlet wielders can transform into more powerful forms during battle. It's not the transformation itself that makes this feature interesting though - it is one of the special abilities all these characters gain in their secondary form. The ability allows them to take a full extra turn every time they defeat an enemy. There's no limit to the number of these extra turns - as long as they can dish out enough damage, they can tear through an entire group of enemies. They can also conveniently "bounce" from one enemy to another to reach an otherwise unreachable foe. It is generally easy enough to figure out when this power should be used. Nevertheless it is that little something extra I feel these games often need to keep my attention.
In order to maximize the number of extra turns and thus the damage output of your entire party, other allies should weaken targets for the armlet wielder. There is a downside to this strategy though. Just like in Fire Emblem, in Jeanne d'Arc bulk of the experience is granted to whoever deals the finishing blow. Furthermore experience gains are scaled by level, which means that constantly finishing enemies off with armlet wielders is going to result in diminishing returns. Therefore mopping groups of enemies at once should be preserved for situations where it is absolutely necessary. Fortunately such situations do exist are even somewhat frequent as a result of quite solid level design. A downside to the armlet wielders is that they are quite simply superior to every other character in the game which makes them too obvious picks to pass. Perhaps it would have been better to limit this power to the main heroine who has to be in the party anyway.
The less-advertised benefit of armlet wielders is their ability to heal themselves to full HP through the transformation. Curiously enough, this is actually one of their strongest attributes. After all, healing always costs momentum - lots of it in Jeanne d'Arc - but transforming is free and subsequently increases momentum. Transforming also increases defensive attributes, thus increasing momentum even further. It is a definite tide-turner. Although it's just one feature, it defines much of the gameplay experience.
3. Formations
The importance of formations varies between tactical RPGs as do the mechanics involved. The basic concept of formations is to keep squishy characters protected and as much is true in most games. Jeanne d'Arc does go an extra mile to emphasize formations and positioning in general. This is achieved through two systems. The first and most useful of these systems is the unified guard. As long as characters are adjacent to each other they all gain a defense bonus that is relative to the total number of characters that are linked together. There is a drastic difference between being alone and standing somewhere in a chain of six characters in terms of damage taken. It even increases evasion, allowing characters to negate damage entirely. It is often more desirable to leave an action unused than it is to break a formation to down one extra enemy.
Another system that sees less use but is very powerful when it is used is called burning aura. Any normal melee attack against an enemy creates an aura directly behind the enemy. Attacking from this aura grants bonus damage. Auras only last until the end of the turn in which they were created which makes them sometimes hard to utilize - especially the super aura that is created when a character with an aura also makes a basic attack against an enemy. Once again the difference in damage output is quite drastic. This is especially useful against certain bosses in the game. Curiously enough, the AI of these bosses typically tries to put itself next to a wall to minimize the player's ability to surround it and make use of these auras. It is important to prevent them from doing so, because they typically have high HP regeneration.
As a side note, very high HP regeneration is an interesting mechanic to set the pace of a fight - the player needs to be able to sustain their damage output until the boss is dead. Basically all of the toughest fights in the game were reliant on this mechanic and I think it worked out fairly well.
4. JRPG bullshit rant part 1
As much as I love the genre, it has its share of bullshit. Jeanne d'Arc does not do any better. Let's talk about character development first because it's something the game shares with Fire Emblem. Here's the beef: stat growths are hidden information. Why this is bullshit? There's no way for the player to know the true potential of characters. Sure, there is a rule of thumb: the worse a character looks like when you get them, the more powerful they'll be by the end game. The problem is this is not a hard rule, and it is impossible to know when it holds. Even if this information was transparent this would still be bullshit because characters would not be very equal. Given that difficulty generally ramps towards the end or at least that's what you would expect (usually it's actually not the case - but in Jeanne d'Arc it is), choosing the characters who get most powerful by the end game is a no-brainer.
Then again, poor balance between characters is such a common problem that I've mostly given up on it - and I do prefer imbalance to too much balance any day. That said, hiding such crucial information from the player is just plain bullshit. At least the growth rates are granted in contrast to Fire Emblem where the rates are simply probabilities to have gains in a stat. Doesn't get much more bullshit than that. In Jeanne d'Arc I only learned about this by reading a guide after finishing the game and it turned out I had chosen my characters very poorly (more or less the worst wielder for each weapon). I still managed to beat the game but this still infuriates me because I could have just as well rolled a die to see how difficult the game is going to be for me. An uninformed decision is not any different from blind luck yet somehow I see this bullshit coming up in JRPGs time and again.
The nice thing about designing board games is that you cannot hide rules from the players because if you did, they could not play the freaking game at all. Here's another example from Jeanne d'Arc. There are several battles where enemies spawn and then get to act immediately. Naturally these are the very same battles where you have to protect a fragile NPC (one hit kills him). The game is giving you the finger, there's just no other way to describe this. There is no way to predict this happening at all, and if there was, there would be no information of when or where the new enemies will spawn. The only way is to take that guaranteed failure, wasting 15 minutes of your time and then doing the battle again from start. Fun times. This is like a douchebag board game owner who "remembers" a rule just before he is about to abuse the shit out of it. Seriously, game designers, some transparency plz.
This rant will get a sequel once I have finished what I'm currently playing. Stay tuned.
Conclusion
The usual JRPG bullshit and horrible graphical design aside, Jeanne d'Arc is tactical RPG that proudly stands on its own two feet. It has its share of distinctive mechanics, but most importantly its level design follows an optimal difficulty curve. Maybe, or maybe that was just because I had the worst possible characters in my party. The game does get a bit repetitive at times, largely because the pool of actually useful skills is very small, and most of the enemies can be dealt with using the same strategies. Still if you are looking for a solid TRPG and have already gone through the obvious choices, you could do a lot worse than Jeanne d'Arc.
There will be bit of a break in updates at least as far as digital game are concerned... the game I'm currently playing is effing long. I might write about some analog games next though!
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