In case you didn’t know (and I’m betting that’s most of
you), this fall we were hit with Game-ageddon. No, it’s not the end of video
games (a fate worse than death), nor was it the end of the world brought about
by video games (not a bad way to go). It was that we saw the release of such
good games in such a narrow timeframe that it might herald the end of the
world. Or something like that.
The last time we had such a good period for games was
probably 2011, when we had Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings,
RIFT, Deus Ex: Human revolution, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Star Wars:
The Old Republic. If you want to read more of those, I wrote a column about the
magnificent three year span when we had awesome RPG’s rolling out every two
months or so.
This fall we had four games. Well, there were more, but I’m
not going to count Assassin’s Creed: Unity or Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
because those franchises put out games every fall. I’ll just note that Unity is
so buggy they had to offer a free game to apologize (in return for the buyers
not suing Ubisoft). And Advanced Warfare is selling less than its predecessors.
It’s the first Call of Duty game I bought, because one of the reviewers said
it’s like playing through an action game, which sound like my kind of jam.
Game-ageddon got a prelude on October 14, with the landing
of Borderlands: The Presequel. You might be wondering what that word is. Well,
it’s for a game that take place before the sequel. Borderlands came along and
was pretty good, and then Borderlands 2 came along and kicked ass, so that was
cool. But what do you call a game that takes place in between? Borderlands 1.5?
Well, no. See, Borderlands The Presequel was made based on the Borderlands 2 engine,
so they didn’t really want to associate it with Borderlands 1. Or maybe they
just wanted to associate it more with
Borderlands 2. Regardless, they invented a word and slapped it on their title,
which is pretty standard for their sense of humor.
The Presequel takes place at an indeterminate time in the
five years between Borderlands and Borderlands 2. Borderlands 2 had a fantastic
villain named Handsome Jack, and like all good prequels, the Presequel tells
the tale of how he started as a hero and fell from grace. Mostly through
violence and Douchebaggery.
Being built on the Borderlands 2 engine, the Presequel plays
mostly like its predecessor that comes afterwards (prequel timelines are
weird), with a few notable differences. Firstly, new game = new classes. Which
is good and bad. It’s nice to try out new things, but I had played the first
two games as Roland and Axton, both of whom had turrets to deploy. No turrets
in this one, although one PC, Wilhelm, has deployable drones. However, I chose
to play as Athena, because she has a shield that absorbs damage (which is a
nice “oh crap” button) and then can hurl it at her attackers (so defense and damage at once). It’s usable more
frequently than the turret for Axton, but I kept on forgetting to use it except
when I really needed to. I suppose I’ll have to work on that.
Secondly, I had to worry about oxygen. Both because I was
hyperventilating in real life, but also because it’s a mechanic in the game.
The moon most of the game takes place on has no atmosphere. Soon after I
landed, I got a oxygen kit, aka an O2 kit, aka an Oz kit (the game was made by
2K Australia ,
so some inside humor there. Also, most of the voice actors use Australian
accents, which I seldom hear in video games). The Oz kit held enough oxygen for
a minute or two. Refilling it could be done inside any building with an
atmosphere, or any oxygen creating machine outside (they put up house-sized domes that refill the Oz kit), or by circles on the ground where oxygen
is produced naturally (the circles are fairly common, but only a meter or so in
diameter) or by oxygen capsules that are dropped by enemies or found in any
number of containers I broke open. Oxygen depletes steadily over time, but can
also be used to butt-stomp people.
Butt-stomping is a result of the third change: Gravity.
Gravity on the moon is lower, allowing jumping to go much higher and further.
By crouching in midair, I could rocket to the ground, using up some oxygen and
damaging any enemy who had the misfortune to be beneath me. Thus, the
butt-stomp. Oxygen could also be used to double-jump, which was kind of
annoying, actually. In most games, double-jumping would get you twice as high
as normal. In this game, double-jumps sent me no higher, and only a little
further than usual. Needed for some puzzles, but not necessarily the greatest
use of a common mechanic.
Fourthly, there’s a new element to kill all the enemies
with: Cryo. Has the chance to freeze enemies solid, which I’ve seen before in
Mass Effect by using the Cryo ammo power. Pretty much the exact same thing.
Still, not a bad thing. If I have a Cryo nova shield, when it’s depleted, it
send out a cryo explosion, freezing all the enemies that have been beating on
me, and letting me escape. So that was useful, until I found a better shield.
Finally, the Presequel introduces lasers to the game.
They’re an entirely new ammo type (like shotguns, or sniper rifles), but they
can mimic other ammo types. I had one laser gun that was like a pistol. Another
one was like a shotgun, which was incredibly fun, and which I kept for quite a
while. Lasers also set enemies on fire, but only when there’s atmosphere
present (Fire needs oxygen to burn. Thus concludes Grade 1 science).
Other than that, things are more-or-less the same as
Borderlands 2. Run around and shoot things in a darkly humorous manner, with
smatterings of lighter humor scattered about. Some characters cameo from
previous games, some people have hilarious dialogue, some people have quests.
Go shoot stuff! Only this time, go butt-stomp stuff.
The next salvo in Game-ageddon hit like an atom bomb. Not in
the literal sense, but in the figurative sense, and also in the virtual sense.
Warlords of Draenor landed on Thursday, November 13. During the wee hours of
the morning, it was fine, but by the evening, Blizzard’s flagship had been hit
with a massive DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service). This had a bit of a
knock-on effect. The DDoS attack caused huge lag. To combat this, Blizzard
lowered caps on its servers, reducing the amount of players able to log on at
once, and thereby increasing the number of people who were waiting in line to
play. Combining this with a large increase in the number of players wanting to
play, plus the number of players who
hadn’t played in a while (years, in some cases) returning, and queues reached
into the thousands. People on heavily populated servers had to wait 12 hours or
more to play.
I could only play late in the evenings, when I was out of
sync with the rest of the server due to time zones (I play on an EST server
while living on Mountain time). I took Friday off and ended up having to play
SWTOR most of the time. Saturday I was lucky and managed to play most of the
day (I logged on after a maintenance patch before almost everybody else).
Sunday I got to play a bit, but I logged off to watch football. As soon as I
logged off, I hopped back in the queue, because I knew it would take a while.
It did. After 6 hours, I was back in. Anyway, things settled down on Monday
after Blizzard did some technical wizardry, and there have only been brief
queues on heavily populated servers ever since. Blizzard apologized and gave
everyone five free days of gametime. Some entitled brats thought it wasn’t enough,
but most of us were pleasantly surprised, as Blizzard was under absolutely no
obligation to do that. Good PR for a great company.
Warlords of Draenor itself is incredibly impressive.
Blizzard really stepped it up. We had to wait 14 months with no content at all,
so we were getting antsy, and our expectations were sky high. Blizzard
delivered. I wasn’t sure what I was blown away by more: the graphics, the
music, or the gameplay. All of it’s tremendous.
The big mechanic this time around is a player’s Garrison. A
lot of MMORPG’s have player housing, but Blizzard did it their way. Harkening
back to the original RTS’s, we get to build up our garrisons. We get a town
hall and a building or two to start off with. As we do quests throughout the
expansion, we’re occasionally rewarded with garrison resourses, which can be
spent on leveling up our garrisons. At level two, we can put down more
buildings. Level three, even more. Not only that, but we can level up each of
our building too. Currently, I have a level three garrison with a level three
barracks, jewelcrafter (because I’m a jewelcrafter, and it pays to double up
professions with profession buildings) and alchemical building (ditto), a level
two salvage yard and inn, and a level one stable. I could swap in and out
several different buildings, should I choose (although I’d have to have the
resources to build them, and then the time to level them up). I also have
access to a mine, herb garden, and fishing shack, which decreases my dependence
on other players for the materials for my professions, and answers the prayers
of players world-wide.
The story for Warlords of Draenor is that Garrosh
Hellscream, the villain of the previous expansion, escaped from his trail and
through a complicated set of timey-wimey shenanigans, wound up on an alternate
universe version of Draenor some time ago. He convinced the orcs there to
invade our Azeroth, we got wind of it, and now we’ve counter-invaded (or
something like that) to shut down Garrosh’s forces, although it seems he’s
ceded leadership to someone else.
So, we run around this AU-Draenor, meeting people who should
be dead, and killing people who die much later, or don’t die at all, and you
know what? Alternate Universes are much easier to understand if we just pretend
this is a brand new world that we don’t know anything about.
I leveled up to the level cap – 100 – and it didn’t take
that long and wasn’t that hard, but it was incredibly fun. Questing generally
did away with the “go here, kill some x” types of quests, although they did pop
up occasionally. Most of the “kill large numbers of x” were limited to optional
encounters that aren’t even listed as quests. They pop up if I’m in the area
and reward a large amount of experience and some gold. Solid rewards for tedious
activities. If they’re not your cup of tea, you can skip them.
While running around Draenor (there is no flying so we were
generally on foot or on mounts that couldn’t fly), I met up with a few NPC’s
whom I help, and who thought I was pretty awesome (because I am. In real life
too), and because I was commanding the local garrison, they decided to work for
me. They became my followers, whom I could send out on missions from a table in
my town hall. These missions reward all sorts of things, and take place in real
time, so players can send their followers on missions and then log out for the
night. The next morning, there the rewards are. Followers can also level up if
they get sent on enough missions, and have a cap of 100. Past that, they also
have a quality similar to gear players have. Green for uncommon, blue for rare,
purple for epic. Epic followers aren’t statistically better than uncommon ones,
but they can do more things, so they can be sent on a wider variety of
missions. Acquiring as many followers as possible (20 or 25 active at one time)
and then sending them all on missions is a nifty minigame that gives players
who don’t really have anything else to do at the level cap something to do.
Don’t want to raid or do dungeons? Manage your followers. It’s not for
everyone, but man, is it addicting.
Besides that, it’s all the little things that make Warlords
of Draenor awesome. Quest rewards have a small chance to be better than
expected (ie an ilevel 550 mace might actually wind up being a 570 mace, or
rarely, a 580 mace, giving me more head-bashing power). At a burial ground, a
wolf was staring at a gravestone; you can interact with him, but he doesn’t
acknowledge you; and I was made heartbreakingly aware of the bond between orcs
and their wolves. Building outposts (a microgarrison) gave me the power to call
down an artillery strike in one specific zone. Little treasures all over.
Stumbling upon a massive creature that decided I should die, and me eventually
winning a hard-fought battle that may have left me sweaty and panting in real
life. Climbing into an Iron Star and rolling over the many enemies on my way to the
quest objective. Watching an NPC grow up throughout the entire expansion, from
zone to zone, and wondering if she’ll have the worst case of survivor’s guilt
ever.
Everything involved makes Warlords of Draenor the finest
expansion for World of Warcraft. Blizzard went out and made the best thing they
could. No wonder it took so long.
Merely five days after Warlords of Draenor landed and left
chaos in its wake, Dragon Age: Inquisition was released. If there’s a reason
why I don’t have more than one level 100 character in World of Warcraft right
now, that reason would be Inquisition.
Dragon Age 2 wasn’t a bad game, but if you listen to some
fans who played the game, it murdered their mother and gave their dog cancer.
To me, it was a good game with a fatal flaw (recycled environments. It quickly
got old, poking through the same nooks and crannies in the same houses, or the
same caves, over and over again).
Still, because of the fan backlash against it, and against
the ending of Mass Effect 3, and against Star Wars: The Old Republic (it didn’t
have a lot of end-game content at first, and it went free-to-play), many people think
that Bioware has a lot to make up for. And that Inquisition should be the game
to make up for it.
Me, I’m of a different mind. I think that Bioware
consistently make good games with great characters and story. I look forward to
everything they have to make, because they hit so many of my sweet spots.
Anyway, getting into Inquisition took some time. First, it’s
because customizing my playable character took a while. There’s a lot to do.
Which way do my ears point? What color are my inner irises? My outer irises? How noticeable
is my double-chin? What voice do I want? (They have the game fully voiced by
American and British male and female voice actors). They seem to have taken
customization to the extreme, which means getting the perfect character takes a
while. Getting one I could live with and watch for hundreds of hours took a bit
less time.
The second obstacle getting to the game was that it felt
different. Every left-click was the swing of my weapon, which made the game
seem more like The Elder Scrolls than Dragon Age. And of course, they changed
the interface again, so I had to get used to that. It wasn’t until I was past
the introduction and well into the first area that I started to feel I had a
good handle on how to play the game.
The game itself is huge. It’s not truly open world, but they
plunked me down in vast, open areas that very well could have been open world, for how large and frankly, filled they
were. The first area after the intro is The Hinterlands. The first quest
objective is a quick jaunt West of where I was put down, but I found myself
halfway across the map, heading East, and wondering what the hell just
happened. I call this the “Skyrim” problem, because that happened to me too
many times while playing that game. It happens a lot playing this one as well.
It’s almost as if Bioware looked as Skyrim and said “Yeah, we can make that too.”
The story follows an explosion at a peace conference between
Mages and Templars for the war that was kicked off in Dragon Age 2. What or who caused the
explosion, and can we stop the breach in the sky it left in the explosions wake
that happens to be raining demons? That would be nice.
It wouldn’t take too long to play through the whole story.
Maybe as long as the previous games. 25 to 30 hours or so. But Inquisition
packs in so much more. There are tons of sidequests, and even more doodads to
collect. Each zone has a number of shiny shards that eventually open up a
temple that gave me magic resistances of different types. Each zone has pieces
of a mosaic. Each zone has areas to be discovered, and landmarks to find.
Across all the zones, I could find bottles of alcohol that each had brief,
often funny descriptions.
Should I so choose, I could go and hunt all 10 dragons in the
game. So I went and killed all 10 dragons, and all the fights were pretty tough
unless I outleveled them by a bunch. I could do all the personal quests of all
the companions (by Bioware tradition, back and bantering better than ever).
Some where pretty personal, and some were just generic “go here and kill stuff”
quests. Most companions had both the former and the latter.
Currency in this game is treated differently than before.
Instead of having silver and gold, there’s only gold. In previous games, I’d be
lucky to end up with over 100 gold by the time the game ended. I ended my time
in Inquisition with over 100,000 gold. Of course, I was supposed to spend it in
stores, but I rarely do that in any Dragon Age game. It’s too easy to find
something better by killing stuff. However, in this game, it’s also easier to
go ahead and make stuff.
Crafting is a minigame unto itself. Once I found a recipe, I
could craft it with different material types, either cloth, leather, or metal.
Each type of material had different properties. Iron might give me +1 strength,
whereas Onyx might give me +1 constitution. I could decide what I wanted on the
piece I was making. Not only that, but the stats they give depend on the slot
they’re put into. Iron might give me +1 strength in a utility slot, but it
might give me +10% chance to stun enemies if put in an offensive slot. Not only
that, but all types come in three
different tiers. Iron is a tier 1 metal. Sunstone is a tier 2 level, and thus
would give more stats than Iron; maybe +1.5 strength. Silverite is a tier 3
metal, and gives the best stats (well, almost the best stats; killing dragons
nets tier 4 materials, but since there’s a limited number of dragons, there’s a
limited number of tier four materials). Not only that, but recipes are divided into tiers as well, with tier 3 recipes
allowing more materials than previous tiers. For instance, a tier 3 sword might
allow 18 metal in the utility slot (with silverite, that could give me a +36 strength!) but a tier 1 sword might
limit me to 10 (with iron, giving me only +10 strength). Not only that, but weapons and armors can be
added onto in basic ways. Armors can have arms and legs added onto them, and
weapons can have different grips, pommels, hafts, and staff blades added onto
them, depending on if they have that specific slot open or not. All in all,
find the right recipe, and I can make some incredibly powerful gear. Of course,
it takes a ton of resources, which is another thing I will be scouring the
landscape to find.
But crafting doesn’t end with weapons and armor. No, I can craft
potions as well. Potions are important because there’s very little other
healing in this game. There’s only one healing spell, and it can’t be used that
often. So healing potions are needed. I could only carry eight at once (later,
12 with a perk), so I couldn’t really explore dangerous places that long
without returning to a camp, at which point my healing potions were refilled
automatically, and for free. All other potions cost herbs of some sort. So
herbs can be used to refill potions, but if I was willing to spend a lot of
herbs at once (yes, I was), I could upgrade the potions too. So the healing
potions healed for more, and the rejuvenation potions (heals a bit at a time
for a while) healed for more, longer, and with the final upgrade, also healed
my companions as well. I also had access to tonics (resistance to specific
schools of magic) and grenades (Fire damage, confusion, healing for my
companions and I, a jar of bees), all of which could be upgraded with various
types and amounts of herbs. So again, I spent quite a bit of the game scouring
the landscape.
Companions are back and better than ever. Well, as good as
ever. I spent so much time in the game world that it seemed like I spent less
time, proportionally, just having conversations with them compared to previous
games. Anyway, Varric returns from Dragon Age 2, although he looks different. A
different engine will do that. Everyone who comes back looks a little
different, but that’s not a bad thing. It takes a while to get used to, but
then it’s fine. In fact, it’s pretty good. These graphics for people are
probably the best I’ve seen in a video game, outside of cutscenes. Besides
that, the graphics for everything else are very good as well. There’s some
occasional pop-in for long distances, but most of that’s taken care of by the
admittedly long loading times for each area. However, the areas are big enough
that I didn’t go bouncing back and forth between them, reducing the amount of
times I saw loading screens.
Talent trees are similar to Dragon Age 2, with more
branching and joining than the straight lines of Dragon Age: Origins. Leveling
up, I couldn’t choose attributes, though. I couldn’t increase my strength or
constitution, which took a bit of getting used to. Stats could be increased by
gear, or by passive talents. Passive talents generally always provide a
benefit, or provide a benefit in conjunction with another talent or ability.
For instance, a passive talent might increase the amount of guard a warrior
can have. It might also increase the warrior’s constitution by 3. So I had to
make a careful decision between active talents (to have more buttons to push)
and passive talents (to boost my stats). Having too many buttons to push
doesn’t turn into a problem, because I was limited to 8 at the most. Which is
actually kind of annoying, because I really liked more than 8.
Guard is a new type of thing. Warriors can use one or two
abilities that give them guard. Guard must be whittled down before it starts to
affect the warriors health, so it’s sort of like extra health for warriors.
Mages can cast barriers, which are effectively the same thing, except that
barriers can be cast on the whole group (it’s basically anyone who’s standing
on the ground where the mage casts it) and they decay slowly over time. Guard
stays up until it’s beaten to pieces by enemies, or the warrior returns to
camp. So I liked the abilities that gave me guard, or extra guard, because they
kept me alive with the scarcity of healing.
I think I’ve touched on most of the things in the game, so
let me bury the lede a bit and say that Bioware’s done a masterful job with
this game. Everything about it is fantastic. I could pick nits, but there are
very few. This isn’t a perfect game, but it’s probably as close as I’ll ever play.
Game-Ageddon had its final barrage on December 2nd.
Technically, Shadows of Revan actually released on December 9th, but
active subscribers who pre-ordered got it December 2nd, so you can
bet I was there when the ball dropped.
SWTOR has a different view on expansions than World of
Warcraft. WoW takes expansions as an opportunity to revamp things. Maybe not
change things completely, but to add in significant differences than previous
gameplay. Thus, garrisons and huge changes to professions.
SWTOR’s view is essentially “More of the same”. They give us
more story, higher levels, and increased crafting. Level caps are 60, crew
skills go up to 500 (from 450), and we played through two new planets, Rishi
and Yavin 4 (the one that had the rebel base in the original Star Wars).
The story continues on from the prelude built up from the
flashpoints (essentially, dungeons) introduced during the patches that came in
the summer and fall. We follow the villain’s machinations through Rishi, then
finally confront him or her on Yavin 4. There are a few twists near the end,
but that’s about it for story.
The rest of the content is filled with thankfully (daily)
repeatable quests. These quests provide a majority of the XP as we do them two
or three times. My first character I leveled through the expansion has already
done the flashpoints, so I was able to go directly to Rishi at level 55. I went
through there and then onto Yavin, and beat the final boss, and was only about halfway
through level 59. Call me crazy (actually, don’t. Call me by my real name) but
it seems to me that expansions should have enough content to hit the max level.
I think I’m just used to World of Warcraft, though, because I didn’t hit level
50 during the main game story, and I didn’t hit 55 during Rise of the Hutt
Cartel’s story. I’ve always had to go back and do daily or weekly quests to hit
the level cap, which is a bit frustrating, but by no means a deal breaker.
The second character I leveled through hadn’t done the flashpoints, so I did them as Solo missions.
Because these flashpoints are so important to the story, Bioware implemented a
system whereby a droid will accompany solo players for these types of things,
and either do damage, heal, or tank. Sometimes all three. I was in good hands
with this droid, and got through all four flashpoints and surrounding story in
a few hours. I was halfway through level 56 when I was done and went to Rishi.
And it still wasn’t enough. After
beating the final boss, I was almost level 60, but not quite. I had to beat the
final boss again (as part of a weekly quest) to hit the level cap.
Luckily, by that time, Bioware had implemented another small
change: removing skill training costs. My first time through, I started with
around 700,000 credits and ended with 300,000 (and that was before I hit level 60. Luckily, I hit it after they had removed the costs). My second time through, I started
with around 250,000 and wound up with about 1.5 million. So there are a lot of
credits to be had, which is nice, because I have the feeling I’m going to need
a bunch to level up all my crew skills. I have 10 more characters at level 55,
and they all need to be leveled up and geared out, and the best way of doing
that is leveling up the crew skills on all of them and crafting the best gear
I can. Which means lots and lots of credits on the auction house, buying the
mats I need. So I’m pretty thankful they removed skill costs.
The only problem with that is that there goes one of the
credit sinks in the game. Credits sinks are important to control the economy,
but I’m not sure how important that is due to free-to-play and preferred
players having a currency cap. Subscribers have none, so I can rake in all I
want. In WoW, it might be more important to have gold sinks because everyone
playing can have as much gold as they can acquire.
Anyway, the other major change is that of disciplines.
They’ve removed the talent tree for each spec and replaced it with a talent
path called a Discipline. Every few levels, we get the choice of one of a few options from a pool.
Occasionally, we can choose from a new pool. I don’t like it that much (I enjoy
getting new talent points every level), but I think Bioware came to the same
conclusion that Blizzard did when they revamped talent trees for Mists of
Pandaria. Each expansion adds levels, which add more complexity to talent
trees. Soon, players are finding unique ways to bend the system beyond what it
was meant to do, and get unfair advantages, and then all the rest of the
players follow suit or risk getting left in the dust. Limiting choices is
drastic, but necessary.
In conclusion, Shadows of Revan isn’t quite the game-changer
that Warlords of Draenor is. It didn’t try to be, but I can’t quite give it
full marks for hitting a mediocre target. Sure, it’s fine, but nothing
spectacular.
Anyway, that was an overly long post on Game-ageddon. Now,
if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear the end of the world in the distance, and I
want to get one more character to the level cap before I go to the great big
digital distribution system in the sky.
