Yesterday marked the launch of (yet another) new MMORPG. This one is based on the old Wizardry franchise of single player dungeon crawl RPGs. I've only every played one Wizardry game (Wizardry V for the SNES) and it was brutal but fun. From the sounds of things Wizardry Online is aiming to nail down the brutal half of the equation. If it'll hit the fun half remains to be seen. Some of the taglines in the FAQ really get my blood burning...
"This hardcore MMO will be the ultimate challenge for even the best RPG players in the world."
It then goes on to talk about how the game claims to be the hardest MMO ever. You don't automatically heal. Or level. There are no safe zones, and the world is flagged entirely PvP. Oh, and death can be permanent. You can steal from other players and there's some sort of crime/bounty system that comes from that. It claims to have lots of dungeons, puzzles, and traps...
This all sounds very interesting to start. I can remember losing my party in Wizardry V and having to restart a level 1 team from town. Who then had to enter a dungeon with most of the low level quests and stuff done, so I pretty much just walked in a circle grinding levels. Until I reached the point where 5 of the new people were strong enough to venture down to where my original party had died... Search up the corpse of one of them, bring them back to town. Pay to resurrect them in the temple. Repeat. Oh, and your guys all got older and lost stats as time went on. Oh, and sometimes the priests in the temple would fail the resurrection spell and reduce your people to ashes. You could try a super resurrection on the ashes but if that failed your guy was gone. Kaput. And you couldn't use any save/reload shenanigans! So my memories of Wizardry are definitely pretty hardcore. I did eventually beat the game, and I remember needing to draw maps because this was mostly in the ancient time before internets. It was a good feeling to win through all the frustrating obstacles the game threw at me, and I wonder if Wizardry Online can pull off the same feeling.
I'm always wary of MMO launches (or I should be... I still buy in on the first day way too often) but Wizardry Online is free, so it can't hurt to give it a spin, can it?
About being free... There's been a recent trend for games to go 'free to play' with the ability to pay money for extra things in game. League of Legends works this way where you can pay money for faster leveling, a wider variety of champions to play, or new costumes for the champions you have. League of Legends is definitely 'free to play' and avoids being 'pay to win' since someone who doesn't pay a cent isn't disadvantaged while playing the actual game. They may have fewer champions to play each week, and it may take longer before they can start playing ranked games, and they don't get to wear a Megaman costume, Slash's top hat, or dress Olaf up as Brolaf but they're just as good at playing the game. Will Wizardry Online be 'pay to win'?
The first clue is in their banner at the bottom. The game is not 'free to play'. It's 'free to die'. On the surface this is probably just a clever little banner bringing to light the fact the game is hard and you're going to die a lot. But in a game that advertises the possibility of permanent death I don't know that you want to link 'free' with 'die'. The website doesn't list the contents of the in game item shop so I can't tell for sure if you're paying to be pretty or paying to win but there are some clues...
Here are the three example items they list for things in the shop: a healing potion, a bag, and a talisman of security. The healing potion calls out that people will need healing potions since the game has no ambient healing. That's probably a bad sign, but maybe that just means you need to group with a priest. The bag just lets you hold more stuff and is probably a fair/standard MMO item shop item. As long as the free bag space is small but reasonable it should be fine. If you can't feasibly carry any loot without the item shop bag then it's worse. The talisman is really scary. It claims to let you spend it to prevent an item from being stolen when you die. The implication to me is that I'm going to get ganked by some high level dudes and then be presented with the choice of giving them my best item or giving Sony some money.
Talk about lose-lose! If I give them my best item they now know I don't have any of these talismans and am therefore fresh meat. Gank me over and over for pure profit! And since the game description implies there's absolutely no safe place to go it's possible they'll just follow me around until they have everything I own or I give up. On the other hand if I pay Sony money I get to keep my item and these thugs might even leave me alone (potentially no tangible benefit from ganking me when they could get loot out of someone else) but I'm now fallaciously pot committed. Every time I die I need to spend another one of these talismans or the first one will have been wasted. Depending on how much these things cost (and I guess on how valuable loot is) I could be looking at a huge cash sink!
Beyond the cash shop you can also buy a more standard MMO subscription. It does actually list everything you get for doing so. In particular, you and your party get an xp and stat bonus for each of you with a membership. You get a free bag. You make more money and things are cheaper to buy. You get a real money discount on something called a 'Dimento Medal' which gives you xp, stats, better drop rates, and titles. Oh, and a free one of those talismans of security just to make sure you know how they work to entice you to buy more.
Titles are definitely 'pay to be pretty' and I'm on the fence about xp and drop rate boosts. On the one hand the game is probably about leveling and finding loot so someone with a boost to those definitely has an advantage over someone who doesn't, but those just replace time with money. I don't know that I care how someone hits max level (time or money). Stats are more on the 'pay to win' side of things. No matter how much I play for free or how good I am the person with paid for stats will just be better. In a PvE game that wouldn't really matter, it would just frustrate me. In a worldwide PvP game it seems like it could be a real problem. Especially when the winner of the fight gets to steal items from the loser! Especially when the loser might suffer permanent death!
Now, scale might well matter here. Maybe the stats on those Dimento Medals are actually pretty small. Something to reward people who pay without being unbalancing. The Aardwolf MUD I played on many years ago had little donation pins with a small amount of stats for people who paid to keep the game going. Those seemed fine. But you could actually opt out of brutal PvP in that game! And maybe PvP in Wizardry Online can't actually cause the permanent death they're espousing. Maybe stealing items after a fight is a rarity. Maybe they get a random item and not your best item (which would make buying bigger bags potentially a good investment!) Or maybe this is just a game for griefers with deep wallets.
I think I may install the client and give it a try to see what it's like even though it just launched. Get a feel for how often ganking happens and what the stealing mechanics actually are. Actually find out what the costs of these things in the item shop are. But on the surface I really, really suspect this is a huge 'pay to win' game and I won't actually be happy playing it for long. 'Free to die' indeed.
Maybe I have to keep myself from getting attached to my character or my stuff. But just like with my Blood Bowl team I don't know how feasible this will be. The MMO market is pretty much founded entirely on the idea that people grow attached to their characters and their stuff. I haven't really played my gnome warrior in World of Warcraft in many years but I'll always hold on to his wrath gear, his Quel'Serrar, and his gladiator mount. Those things have meaning to me, and I don't know that I'll be able to play another MMO without becoming similarly attached. Which is probably Sony's plan all along with the talismans of security...
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Blood Bowl League Progress
The second week of the Blood Bowl league I'm playing in has finished up. My dwarves are 1-1 thanks to snowballing in both games. The first one saw my chaos opponent get the early hitting lead and it ended up with him getting 5 casualties to my 0 and barely winning the game 2-1. The second game featured my undead opponent making a 2 die block on the line on the first turn, having to reroll it, and still falling down. He was badly hurt. He didn't regenerate. So already, before I even took an action, I'd got more casualties than in my first game. The turnover from falling down coupled with a kick close to the line let me pick up the ball on his turn to receive, and him being down a man right away meant I was able to use my numbers to keep hitting his guys. The end result was a 5-0 casualty swing the other way and a 2-0 victory.
I was pretty frustrated after the first game because the dice just weren't going my way. Even with his early numbers disadvantage I was still able to set up way more advantageous attacks than he was. I threw 128 block dice to his 89, and knocked him down 32 times to his 29. But I only pierced his armour 8 times to his 15 and didn't get a 10+ on any of the injury rolls. When looking at 10+ rolls he had 15 of his 44 2d6 rolls as 10+ while I had 4 of my 40. So I felt really unlucky and was getting frustrated. I tried to keep from going on tilt but a little more luck my way and I think I could/should have had a draw.
On the flip side the second game was tilted in my favour. I threw 180 block dice to his 63. I knocked him down 63 times to his 12. I pierced his armour 28 times to his 2. He was 2 for 14 rolling 10+, I was 13 for 91. Which, actually, still is below average. The big difference this time, it looks like, is I rolled a lot of 9s and undead have low armour. Also it actually helped a lot that my whole team starts with block since we both rolled a lot of 'both down' results which helped me and hurt him. Like the turnover on the opening drive.
I could tell from his voice that he was getting frustrated similar to the way I was in the first game. I watched some guys play earlier today and the one who fell behind (by rolling a lot of 1s) got really frustrated as well. In this case he actually rolled a lower than expected number of 1s, he just rolled a lot of dice dodging/leaping/going for it and failed a few times as a result. I mean, he did fail 13 dodge rolls which is a lot of failed dodges, but he tried to dodge 34 times. That's a lot of dodging. There was one play in particular that he was frustrated about failing where he rolled blood lust, dodge, dodge, reroll dodge, leap, dodge, reroll dodge, dodge. He finally fell down on that last dodge. Now, this guy did have 5 agility but some of those dodges were into 2 tackle zones. The probability calculator in BBM indicates he had about a 65% chance to pull it off. Not terrible odds by any stretch but failing isn't that unexpected. But he was already on tilt and this seemed to throw him over the edge.
I don't really know that I have a point in here at all. It seems like the game has small numbers of dice and it's very easy to fail things, especially when throwing a lot of dice. On the flip side it's also pretty easy to go a whole game without any catastrophes at all. My second game I was ending halves with 3 rerolls left because I never had to use them. When your bad game lines up with your opponent's good game it's so easy to get frustrated and get tilted. Which itself will cause bad decisions to happen and let things spiral out of control.
I also get really attached to my guys. None have suffered a serious injury thus far in the league but I'm dreading when it will happen. Because it will happen, eventually. I take such glee in watching other people's guys die (especially when spectating a game) so I think I need to relax a little and cheer my own deaths too. And approach each turn as a new puzzle to solve instead of dwelling on the dice that caused a given puzzle to arise. Easier said than done, though.
I was pretty frustrated after the first game because the dice just weren't going my way. Even with his early numbers disadvantage I was still able to set up way more advantageous attacks than he was. I threw 128 block dice to his 89, and knocked him down 32 times to his 29. But I only pierced his armour 8 times to his 15 and didn't get a 10+ on any of the injury rolls. When looking at 10+ rolls he had 15 of his 44 2d6 rolls as 10+ while I had 4 of my 40. So I felt really unlucky and was getting frustrated. I tried to keep from going on tilt but a little more luck my way and I think I could/should have had a draw.
On the flip side the second game was tilted in my favour. I threw 180 block dice to his 63. I knocked him down 63 times to his 12. I pierced his armour 28 times to his 2. He was 2 for 14 rolling 10+, I was 13 for 91. Which, actually, still is below average. The big difference this time, it looks like, is I rolled a lot of 9s and undead have low armour. Also it actually helped a lot that my whole team starts with block since we both rolled a lot of 'both down' results which helped me and hurt him. Like the turnover on the opening drive.
I could tell from his voice that he was getting frustrated similar to the way I was in the first game. I watched some guys play earlier today and the one who fell behind (by rolling a lot of 1s) got really frustrated as well. In this case he actually rolled a lower than expected number of 1s, he just rolled a lot of dice dodging/leaping/going for it and failed a few times as a result. I mean, he did fail 13 dodge rolls which is a lot of failed dodges, but he tried to dodge 34 times. That's a lot of dodging. There was one play in particular that he was frustrated about failing where he rolled blood lust, dodge, dodge, reroll dodge, leap, dodge, reroll dodge, dodge. He finally fell down on that last dodge. Now, this guy did have 5 agility but some of those dodges were into 2 tackle zones. The probability calculator in BBM indicates he had about a 65% chance to pull it off. Not terrible odds by any stretch but failing isn't that unexpected. But he was already on tilt and this seemed to throw him over the edge.
I don't really know that I have a point in here at all. It seems like the game has small numbers of dice and it's very easy to fail things, especially when throwing a lot of dice. On the flip side it's also pretty easy to go a whole game without any catastrophes at all. My second game I was ending halves with 3 rerolls left because I never had to use them. When your bad game lines up with your opponent's good game it's so easy to get frustrated and get tilted. Which itself will cause bad decisions to happen and let things spiral out of control.
I also get really attached to my guys. None have suffered a serious injury thus far in the league but I'm dreading when it will happen. Because it will happen, eventually. I take such glee in watching other people's guys die (especially when spectating a game) so I think I need to relax a little and cheer my own deaths too. And approach each turn as a new puzzle to solve instead of dwelling on the dice that caused a given puzzle to arise. Easier said than done, though.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
FTL Anti-Cheating
The other day I was playing FTL and had a chance to buy a transporter device. This would let me send a couple members of my crew to board an enemy ship. I had some spare dudes so I figured I'd give it a shot. It didn't work out very well and my guys died. I killed the ship with normal weapons and considered my options. Even though I didn't need those guys I didn't like the idea of losing them. I'd just started playing for the day and had save/quit the night before right before buying the transporter so I figured I'd just quit without saving, restart the game, and reload my old save. Maybe it's a sketchy plan to save/reload when you get an outcome you don't like? But that's what I've been doing in Final Fantasy Tactics in order to keep from permanently losing some of my guys so it seems like I think it's a reasonable enough thing to do...
The guy who made FTL, on the other hand, disagrees. In fact, I didn't even have a saved game to reload. There is no save/reload in this game. You can save when you're done for the day and load to pick up where you left off, but doing so deletes your old saved game. Just like in old roguelike games! If you die to bad play or bad luck, well, guess you get to restart from the beginning.
I unlocked a second ship type and have been playing games with it, but it seems weaker than the first one. Or maybe I'm just playing it wrong, but I can't seem to make it very far at all. I find when things go downhill with the Engi ship they go downhill fast. I think the difference is the Human ship starts with missiles to keep fights from getting out of control right at the start (can take out enemy weapons with the first volley) while the Engi ship has to ionize the shields first before it can ionize the weapons which seems to buy the enemies enough time to land a hit or two on me. Damage the right systems and I'm boned. I wasn't dying every fight or anything like that, but every now and then I'd just lose. And in a game with permanent loss, well, that's a bad plan.
I think I'm going to play one more with the Engi ship and try to get an achievement and then move on to some other ship type. Without trying to cheat!
The guy who made FTL, on the other hand, disagrees. In fact, I didn't even have a saved game to reload. There is no save/reload in this game. You can save when you're done for the day and load to pick up where you left off, but doing so deletes your old saved game. Just like in old roguelike games! If you die to bad play or bad luck, well, guess you get to restart from the beginning.
I unlocked a second ship type and have been playing games with it, but it seems weaker than the first one. Or maybe I'm just playing it wrong, but I can't seem to make it very far at all. I find when things go downhill with the Engi ship they go downhill fast. I think the difference is the Human ship starts with missiles to keep fights from getting out of control right at the start (can take out enemy weapons with the first volley) while the Engi ship has to ionize the shields first before it can ionize the weapons which seems to buy the enemies enough time to land a hit or two on me. Damage the right systems and I'm boned. I wasn't dying every fight or anything like that, but every now and then I'd just lose. And in a game with permanent loss, well, that's a bad plan.
I think I'm going to play one more with the Engi ship and try to get an achievement and then move on to some other ship type. Without trying to cheat!
Monday, January 28, 2013
Niagara Games Played
I played a fair number of games over the four day weekend in Niagara. Maybe not as many as one might expect for the length of time, but still a good number of games. Some old, many new. In particular:
new:
Gingkopolis x4
Trajan
Dungeon Petz x2
High Society
old:
Shipyard
Battlestar Galactica
Tichu
Space Alert
Dungeon Petz was definitely my favourite of the new (to me) games. It has the same sort of campy flavour as Dungeon Lords while leaving out most of the brutal punishing mechanics. In particular it isn't an uncommon occurrence in Dungeon Lords to have at least one person get locked out of a card they played due to lack of room on the space (all 4 people played the same card) or due to the uncertainty of the gold costs on some of the early spaces. Am I spending money when I play the food card? Am I gaining money? It can be hard to impossible to work that out on some turns and people can get badly punished as a result. Dungeon Petz, on the other hand, has a pseudo-auction system for the action spaces so you can likely ensure you get what you need by paying extra for it. And if all the spaces you wanted go away your guys aren't wasted. You can pretty much just delay using them until the next turn instead. Scoring also made way more immediate sense to me. Dungeon Lords I still don't have a good handle on turning actions into points while Dungeon Petz just worked for my strange little brain.
Gingkopolis, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. I say that despite having played it 4 times. I'll probably dig into the reasons more later but my current feeling is the game has an easy to implement dominant strategy that only works if you get dealt the right cards. So it's a bit of a crap shoot to see who wins. At least it's pretty short and it's obvious when you've already lost.
Battlestar Galactica was great. We played with most of the expansion rules including pretty much all of the ones that hurt the humans. We kept going out of our way to try to satisfy the conditions on the 'conflicted loyalty' not a cylon cards and I think it screwed us. One guy was acting sketchy because he wanted to get thrown in the brig to satisfy his card. Mine wanted me to collect titles (something I like to do anyway) so as Admiral Colonel Saul Tigh I declared martial law to become Mr President Admiral Colonel Saul Tigh. No CAG this game, though. This did make sense because I was convinced the current president was a cylon (he made a _terrible_ choice on a president chooses card) and didn't want that to happen again. Also, Baltar had previously looked at my loyalty card and knew what I had so I knew I'd have backing for my action. Baltar then executive ordersed me so I could get rid of my loyalty card and then play an action card. I intended to play an action to scout for fuel since we were down to 4 fuel at distance 3 but got dealt a new loyalty card that turned me into a cylon. Instead of revealing I launched a raptor scout and buried a planet that was 1 fuel for distance 2. A couple turns later I sabotaged what I thought was an important crisis card (pretty sure it was to subtract a jump prep instead of getting one while there were cylon ships in play) and got thrown in the brig for my hard work. Right before my turn to reveal, however, we jumped and hit the sleeper phase. I was dealt the sympathetic cylon card which let me escape the brig (and respawn on the cylon board) AND hand off my unrevealed cylon card to the new admiral/CAG. With Boomer as the other pilot in the brig the humans had no one to actually kill the cylon ships. And since I was the next player I went to the cylon fleet space and hooked us up with a cylon jump prep and flooded the board with enemies. My conflicted loyalty card needed the cylons to win with Galactica taking 2 or less damage. Not long after the cylons won, with Galactica at 1 damage and Pegasus at 2 damage. Is that a win? We went with yes since the card could easily had spelled out Pegasus being undamaged too if it mattered.
new:
Gingkopolis x4
Trajan
Dungeon Petz x2
High Society
old:
Shipyard
Battlestar Galactica
Tichu
Space Alert
Dungeon Petz was definitely my favourite of the new (to me) games. It has the same sort of campy flavour as Dungeon Lords while leaving out most of the brutal punishing mechanics. In particular it isn't an uncommon occurrence in Dungeon Lords to have at least one person get locked out of a card they played due to lack of room on the space (all 4 people played the same card) or due to the uncertainty of the gold costs on some of the early spaces. Am I spending money when I play the food card? Am I gaining money? It can be hard to impossible to work that out on some turns and people can get badly punished as a result. Dungeon Petz, on the other hand, has a pseudo-auction system for the action spaces so you can likely ensure you get what you need by paying extra for it. And if all the spaces you wanted go away your guys aren't wasted. You can pretty much just delay using them until the next turn instead. Scoring also made way more immediate sense to me. Dungeon Lords I still don't have a good handle on turning actions into points while Dungeon Petz just worked for my strange little brain.
Gingkopolis, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. I say that despite having played it 4 times. I'll probably dig into the reasons more later but my current feeling is the game has an easy to implement dominant strategy that only works if you get dealt the right cards. So it's a bit of a crap shoot to see who wins. At least it's pretty short and it's obvious when you've already lost.
Battlestar Galactica was great. We played with most of the expansion rules including pretty much all of the ones that hurt the humans. We kept going out of our way to try to satisfy the conditions on the 'conflicted loyalty' not a cylon cards and I think it screwed us. One guy was acting sketchy because he wanted to get thrown in the brig to satisfy his card. Mine wanted me to collect titles (something I like to do anyway) so as Admiral Colonel Saul Tigh I declared martial law to become Mr President Admiral Colonel Saul Tigh. No CAG this game, though. This did make sense because I was convinced the current president was a cylon (he made a _terrible_ choice on a president chooses card) and didn't want that to happen again. Also, Baltar had previously looked at my loyalty card and knew what I had so I knew I'd have backing for my action. Baltar then executive ordersed me so I could get rid of my loyalty card and then play an action card. I intended to play an action to scout for fuel since we were down to 4 fuel at distance 3 but got dealt a new loyalty card that turned me into a cylon. Instead of revealing I launched a raptor scout and buried a planet that was 1 fuel for distance 2. A couple turns later I sabotaged what I thought was an important crisis card (pretty sure it was to subtract a jump prep instead of getting one while there were cylon ships in play) and got thrown in the brig for my hard work. Right before my turn to reveal, however, we jumped and hit the sleeper phase. I was dealt the sympathetic cylon card which let me escape the brig (and respawn on the cylon board) AND hand off my unrevealed cylon card to the new admiral/CAG. With Boomer as the other pilot in the brig the humans had no one to actually kill the cylon ships. And since I was the next player I went to the cylon fleet space and hooked us up with a cylon jump prep and flooded the board with enemies. My conflicted loyalty card needed the cylons to win with Galactica taking 2 or less damage. Not long after the cylons won, with Galactica at 1 damage and Pegasus at 2 damage. Is that a win? We went with yes since the card could easily had spelled out Pegasus being undamaged too if it mattered.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Final Fantasy: All The Bravest
An anonymous user left a cryptic comment on a recent post with a link to a youtube video. It didn't look like typical spambot spam so I went and checked it out. It turns out to be a trailer for a new Final Fantasy game that looks to be completely ludicrous.
The name is Final Fantasy: All The Bravest, or FF:ATB. ATB also being the acronym for the Active Time Battle system introduced in Final Fantasy IV where your characters got to take actions when their individual turns were ready instead of everyone getting one action per round. From the video I don't think that's a coincidence. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but this game looks to be more in line with Progress Quest than with an actual game since it seems like you don't make choices in combat and instead your characters just attack when their turn is ready. Which is probably a good thing since in some of the clips your party has FOURTY characters. 40! There's a clip at the end where the party was 40 dragoons, all jumping in a sequence. WHAT?!? This seems simultaneously awesome and mind blowingly stupid. Just like Progress Quest!
I took a quick search for information on Google and found some very cynical reviews. It sounds like your characters actually attack when their bar fills up and when you tap them on your iPod's touch screen, so it's a frantic screen mashing game. Ok, sounds reasonable. It is also, apparently a complete cash hog. It sounds like Square Enix took a page out of Zynga's playbook. First you pay $4 for the game. Then you can get iconic FF characters to join your party, but only if you pay a dollar first. And you get one of 35 at random. So while I really want Squall, I'm probably shelling out $18 to get him. Or maybe the full $35 if I'm unlucky. Then there are different iconic worlds to play in, but only if you pay $4 each. Oh, and in combat when the enemy attacks he knocks a guy out and you get to rez one character every 3 minutes. Or you can pay $3 to full rez your party 20 times.
Commenters who like the game point out that your party always rezzes to full at the start of a fight and you can run from any fight at any time. So really you only need to pay to rez your team if you really want to burn a boss down RIGHT NOW. If it actually works like that then it doesn't seem so bad. I don't know what you get when you buy extra worlds but that could be something worth paying extra for. Paying for a random iconic character seems super sketchy but if you think of it like a CCG then it's only pretty sketchy.
I donno. I don't have an iOS device so I couldn't play it even if I wanted to. I think if it has a good selection of FF music that I'd probably enjoy tooling around with it but would get bitter that I couldn't use Squall and would get frustrated with the potential 'pay to remove timers' aspect. That said, I think when I get to the end of the line I will have to borrow an iPod from someone to give this a spin. Even with all the bad points it seems tailor made for me so I'd have to give it a try.
The name is Final Fantasy: All The Bravest, or FF:ATB. ATB also being the acronym for the Active Time Battle system introduced in Final Fantasy IV where your characters got to take actions when their individual turns were ready instead of everyone getting one action per round. From the video I don't think that's a coincidence. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but this game looks to be more in line with Progress Quest than with an actual game since it seems like you don't make choices in combat and instead your characters just attack when their turn is ready. Which is probably a good thing since in some of the clips your party has FOURTY characters. 40! There's a clip at the end where the party was 40 dragoons, all jumping in a sequence. WHAT?!? This seems simultaneously awesome and mind blowingly stupid. Just like Progress Quest!
I took a quick search for information on Google and found some very cynical reviews. It sounds like your characters actually attack when their bar fills up and when you tap them on your iPod's touch screen, so it's a frantic screen mashing game. Ok, sounds reasonable. It is also, apparently a complete cash hog. It sounds like Square Enix took a page out of Zynga's playbook. First you pay $4 for the game. Then you can get iconic FF characters to join your party, but only if you pay a dollar first. And you get one of 35 at random. So while I really want Squall, I'm probably shelling out $18 to get him. Or maybe the full $35 if I'm unlucky. Then there are different iconic worlds to play in, but only if you pay $4 each. Oh, and in combat when the enemy attacks he knocks a guy out and you get to rez one character every 3 minutes. Or you can pay $3 to full rez your party 20 times.
Commenters who like the game point out that your party always rezzes to full at the start of a fight and you can run from any fight at any time. So really you only need to pay to rez your team if you really want to burn a boss down RIGHT NOW. If it actually works like that then it doesn't seem so bad. I don't know what you get when you buy extra worlds but that could be something worth paying extra for. Paying for a random iconic character seems super sketchy but if you think of it like a CCG then it's only pretty sketchy.
I donno. I don't have an iOS device so I couldn't play it even if I wanted to. I think if it has a good selection of FF music that I'd probably enjoy tooling around with it but would get bitter that I couldn't use Squall and would get frustrated with the potential 'pay to remove timers' aspect. That said, I think when I get to the end of the line I will have to borrow an iPod from someone to give this a spin. Even with all the bad points it seems tailor made for me so I'd have to give it a try.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Niagara Boardgaming Weekend
Two years ago I went to a board game weekend thing in Niagara that was pretty fun. 4 days of pure open gaming. It was a lot of fun, but I didn't have the vacation time to go back last year. Well, I'm up to 3 weeks of vacation this year and it's been a while since I've had any time off (Mists of Pandaria launch in Sept) so despite the hotel cost I'm heading back again this year. Today, actually, since it's running in January this year.
Last time around I brought a whole bunch of games which just kind of sat around unused since most people brought tons of games and I'm not assertive enough to get specific things played. Not that I really have a strong opinion one way or the other in terms of what I play. I've been rewatching Battlestar Galactica and it's pretty much the only game I have a strong desire to play. And I don't even own it, so it's not like I could bring it along even if I wanted to. I'm pretty sure Sara is bringing it though! As such, I'm bringing nothing at all except some clothes and my old laptop in case I really get a hankering for the internet. My tolerance for being around people seems to be dropping recently (and it started pretty low to begin with) so maybe I'll end up hiding in the hotel room for a good chunk of the time. I'm certainly looking forward to a lot of sleep!
I expect to be out of contact from now until late Sunday. No League of Legends, no Blood Bowl. Just board games, sleep, and maybe some Final Fantasy Tactics. I have posts all set up and (hopefully) scheduled to post automatically on the weekend so regular service here should go uninterrupted. Woo?
Last time around I brought a whole bunch of games which just kind of sat around unused since most people brought tons of games and I'm not assertive enough to get specific things played. Not that I really have a strong opinion one way or the other in terms of what I play. I've been rewatching Battlestar Galactica and it's pretty much the only game I have a strong desire to play. And I don't even own it, so it's not like I could bring it along even if I wanted to. I'm pretty sure Sara is bringing it though! As such, I'm bringing nothing at all except some clothes and my old laptop in case I really get a hankering for the internet. My tolerance for being around people seems to be dropping recently (and it started pretty low to begin with) so maybe I'll end up hiding in the hotel room for a good chunk of the time. I'm certainly looking forward to a lot of sleep!
I expect to be out of contact from now until late Sunday. No League of Legends, no Blood Bowl. Just board games, sleep, and maybe some Final Fantasy Tactics. I have posts all set up and (hopefully) scheduled to post automatically on the weekend so regular service here should go uninterrupted. Woo?
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Final Fantasy Tactics: Shout
Two weeks ago I looked a bit at Ramza's tailwind skill which can be used to increases someone's speed by one. Using it gave up short term power for long term power but in a way that wasn't terribly action efficient. In a long fight, or if you had nothing better to do, then it was certainly good. But if you could actually go and chop someone in a relevant manner that was probably going to be a better plan. I did make one error in that post (your turn counter is not actually truncated at 100, so extra speed which results in ending up at, say 105 will leave you at 25 after taking a non-move action instead of at 20) which removed the need to hit specific breakpoints but is otherwise a fairly minor deal. Tailwind was good as a first action when the enemies are still far away, and is a great way to power level, but in terms of just winning fights it wasn't stupidly good or anything.
It turns out when you get to chapter IV in the game Ramza learns a new ability which trivializes tailwind. This ability (shout) can only be used on Ramza himself and gives +10 brave, +1 physical attack, and +1 magical attack on top of giving +1 speed. Now I can make future actions come faster and be more powerful. Does this change things in any way? Well, I've also been rotating Ramza through different jobs to see what I can unlock (I could just look it up but I mostly play on the bus and figure it'll be easy enough to unlock them all this way regardless) and I happened to have him as a black mage during a random encounter in a river. The enemies all spawned far away and slowly made their way up the river. Rather than run up to meet them I just stood around shouting at myself while my other characters cast buffs on each other for experience. After 4 or 5 shouts an enemy finally got into range, and I killed him in one shot with a black magic spell. Not just killed him, massively overkilled him. Kaboom! The next fight I was playing as a chemist, shouted 4 or 5 times, and then was able to autoattack with my gun for about 12% of the enemy's max health. Huh.
Do black magic spells scale in a stupid way with extra magic attack? Are guns just really bad? Would a dragoon scale up to one-shot land faster than a chemist? Is it worth just shouting up at the start of every fight in order to become an awesome killing machine? One thing to note is that the extra speed actually didn't help my black mage very much at all. I'd start charging a spell and then get 2 more turns before it would resolve. Taking an action during one of those turns would have cancelled the charging spell. So maybe the solution there would be to learn the really fast spells and scale up my magic attack more? Or find the ability which removes charge time on spells!
The formula for spell damage is MA*Q*{faith modifiers}. The faith modifiers are basically a reduction in damage based on both your faith and the enemy faith. Multiply the two together and divide by 10000. Since faith goes from 0 to 100 this can't be an increase and will almost certainly be a decrease. Especially for non-Ramza characters since if they get a faith of 95 or higher they quit your party and run off to join a monastery or something. Q is a constant depending on the spell you're casting. It ranges from 14 to 32 for the basic series of damage spells. Comparing Q to the charge time makes it seem like the high level spells are actually worse damage per time than the lowest level spell. Fire 4 does hit a bigger area, but that's dangerous given how long it takes to charge anyway. So if I'm boosting up my speed it seems like going back a tier or two makes sense. Assuming I use tier 2, Q will be 18. Assume I have 90 faith and my target has 50 faith and every point of magic attack will add 8 damage to my attack. So I don't really see how I was scaling so absurdly... Maybe the enemies in that fight just had really high faith, or were the right zodiac sign? I do think I was using an ice staff which multiplies my MA by 1.25 when casting ice spells, and I was casting ice 4 with the 32 Q. So I guess each MA was adding 18. It doesn't take too many 18's before you start exploding enemies with 200 health! Especially if the spell starts doing 144 on its own. Or if they have high faith.
Looking at guns the formula for damage done is WP*WP where WP is the listed weapon power of the weapon. So neither the physical attack stat or the magical attack stat are used here. No wonder it didn't seem to scale very well with shout!
Spears, on the other hand, do damage of WP*PA, so every point of PA will do an extra WP damage. My current spear has 11 WP, so this will scale better than black magic spells do at high speed values where the 4th tier won't resolve before you get another turn. Jumping does an extra 50% damage with a spear, and charges based on your speed instead of a flat value, so a dragoon seems pretty absurd with shout.
Punching, it turns out, is even more absurd. It does damage of PA*PA*{brave modifier}. Brave modifier in this case being 1 because shout maxes brave. So going bare handed will quickly scale into stupidity. For the most part it would require you to be in melee range which is worse than the dragoon but it turns out if you jump without a weapon you do PA*PA damage anyway. You do lose the 50% bonus for using a spear, though. Oh, and all the monk abilities do PA*PA damage too... And the monk heal scales off of PA. So being a shouted monk just seems really good. (It's no surprise this may be the best path to beating chapter 3 Wiegraf... There you have to use different abilities to get +1 speed or +1PA or +5brave but you can totally do it.)
But is it worth doing all this or should I just shout once to start the fight like I used to do with tailwind? Well, assuming you never move you'll be spending 80 speed every action you take. Assuming a base speed of 8 (it does go up as you level) and a base PA of 12 (just a guess) then a monk with X applications of shout will do how much damage per clock tick?
(12+X)*(12+X)/(80/(8+X))=(12+X)*(12+X)*(8+X)/80=(1152+336X+32X^2+X^3)/80
In order to use shout X times you need to spend 80*X speed worth, but the number of ticks that'll take is complicated because your speed changes as you progress and does work in discrete chunks. So I just did a spreadsheet to work out the damage done in Y total ticks given X shouts. I used increments of 10 ticks (the time to take one action with no shout stacks) and looked to see what value of X maximized the damage done for that value of Y.
Of course, some of these values are just silly. 25 stacks of shout means you're punching for 1369 damage per go. I'm pretty sure damage in this game is actually capped at 999, even! And even if it wasn't, most enemies seem to have max health in the 200-400 range. 8 stacks alone is enough to one shot someone with 400 health. And really there's not much difference, if any, between an attack that hits for 50% of the enemy health bar and one that hits for 98%. Either way it takes two hits to kill them. Getting from killing them in 2 hits to killing them in one hit is a big help though, and if I only had one character killing the enemies it probably makes sense to shout them up to that point. I do get to bring 5 people into each fight so in a sense it seems like I shouldn't only have one killer but in practice it often feels that way. Ramza is high level thanks to the Wiegraf fight but the rest of my team is pretty weak. This means the enemies tend to be able to kill my other guys in 1 or 2 hits themselves. My plan for the most part involves three people standing around casting raise spells on each other, Ramza being awesome, and a dragoon/thief who just kinda stands around and sometimes jumps for a third of an enemy's health bar. And I'm not sure what else to do at this point. I could make Ramza into a dedicated rezzer and just whittle the enemies down with someone else but that'll probably take way more time than just shouting 8 times and then killing off the enemies!
It turns out when you get to chapter IV in the game Ramza learns a new ability which trivializes tailwind. This ability (shout) can only be used on Ramza himself and gives +10 brave, +1 physical attack, and +1 magical attack on top of giving +1 speed. Now I can make future actions come faster and be more powerful. Does this change things in any way? Well, I've also been rotating Ramza through different jobs to see what I can unlock (I could just look it up but I mostly play on the bus and figure it'll be easy enough to unlock them all this way regardless) and I happened to have him as a black mage during a random encounter in a river. The enemies all spawned far away and slowly made their way up the river. Rather than run up to meet them I just stood around shouting at myself while my other characters cast buffs on each other for experience. After 4 or 5 shouts an enemy finally got into range, and I killed him in one shot with a black magic spell. Not just killed him, massively overkilled him. Kaboom! The next fight I was playing as a chemist, shouted 4 or 5 times, and then was able to autoattack with my gun for about 12% of the enemy's max health. Huh.
Do black magic spells scale in a stupid way with extra magic attack? Are guns just really bad? Would a dragoon scale up to one-shot land faster than a chemist? Is it worth just shouting up at the start of every fight in order to become an awesome killing machine? One thing to note is that the extra speed actually didn't help my black mage very much at all. I'd start charging a spell and then get 2 more turns before it would resolve. Taking an action during one of those turns would have cancelled the charging spell. So maybe the solution there would be to learn the really fast spells and scale up my magic attack more? Or find the ability which removes charge time on spells!
The formula for spell damage is MA*Q*{faith modifiers}. The faith modifiers are basically a reduction in damage based on both your faith and the enemy faith. Multiply the two together and divide by 10000. Since faith goes from 0 to 100 this can't be an increase and will almost certainly be a decrease. Especially for non-Ramza characters since if they get a faith of 95 or higher they quit your party and run off to join a monastery or something. Q is a constant depending on the spell you're casting. It ranges from 14 to 32 for the basic series of damage spells. Comparing Q to the charge time makes it seem like the high level spells are actually worse damage per time than the lowest level spell. Fire 4 does hit a bigger area, but that's dangerous given how long it takes to charge anyway. So if I'm boosting up my speed it seems like going back a tier or two makes sense. Assuming I use tier 2, Q will be 18. Assume I have 90 faith and my target has 50 faith and every point of magic attack will add 8 damage to my attack. So I don't really see how I was scaling so absurdly... Maybe the enemies in that fight just had really high faith, or were the right zodiac sign? I do think I was using an ice staff which multiplies my MA by 1.25 when casting ice spells, and I was casting ice 4 with the 32 Q. So I guess each MA was adding 18. It doesn't take too many 18's before you start exploding enemies with 200 health! Especially if the spell starts doing 144 on its own. Or if they have high faith.
Looking at guns the formula for damage done is WP*WP where WP is the listed weapon power of the weapon. So neither the physical attack stat or the magical attack stat are used here. No wonder it didn't seem to scale very well with shout!
Spears, on the other hand, do damage of WP*PA, so every point of PA will do an extra WP damage. My current spear has 11 WP, so this will scale better than black magic spells do at high speed values where the 4th tier won't resolve before you get another turn. Jumping does an extra 50% damage with a spear, and charges based on your speed instead of a flat value, so a dragoon seems pretty absurd with shout.
Punching, it turns out, is even more absurd. It does damage of PA*PA*{brave modifier}. Brave modifier in this case being 1 because shout maxes brave. So going bare handed will quickly scale into stupidity. For the most part it would require you to be in melee range which is worse than the dragoon but it turns out if you jump without a weapon you do PA*PA damage anyway. You do lose the 50% bonus for using a spear, though. Oh, and all the monk abilities do PA*PA damage too... And the monk heal scales off of PA. So being a shouted monk just seems really good. (It's no surprise this may be the best path to beating chapter 3 Wiegraf... There you have to use different abilities to get +1 speed or +1PA or +5brave but you can totally do it.)
But is it worth doing all this or should I just shout once to start the fight like I used to do with tailwind? Well, assuming you never move you'll be spending 80 speed every action you take. Assuming a base speed of 8 (it does go up as you level) and a base PA of 12 (just a guess) then a monk with X applications of shout will do how much damage per clock tick?
(12+X)*(12+X)/(80/(8+X))=(12+X)*(12+X)*(8+X)/80=(1152+336X+32X^2+X^3)/80
In order to use shout X times you need to spend 80*X speed worth, but the number of ticks that'll take is complicated because your speed changes as you progress and does work in discrete chunks. So I just did a spreadsheet to work out the damage done in Y total ticks given X shouts. I used increments of 10 ticks (the time to take one action with no shout stacks) and looked to see what value of X maximized the damage done for that value of Y.
| Number of Ticks | Optimal Number of Shouts |
|---|---|
| 10, 20, 30 | 0 |
| 40 | 1 |
| 50 | 2 |
| 60 | 4 |
| 70 | 6 |
| 80 | 7 |
| 90 | 9 |
| 100 | 12 |
| 110 | 15 |
| 120 | 18 |
| 130 | 22 |
| 140 | 24 |
| 150+ | 25 (or more) |
Of course, some of these values are just silly. 25 stacks of shout means you're punching for 1369 damage per go. I'm pretty sure damage in this game is actually capped at 999, even! And even if it wasn't, most enemies seem to have max health in the 200-400 range. 8 stacks alone is enough to one shot someone with 400 health. And really there's not much difference, if any, between an attack that hits for 50% of the enemy health bar and one that hits for 98%. Either way it takes two hits to kill them. Getting from killing them in 2 hits to killing them in one hit is a big help though, and if I only had one character killing the enemies it probably makes sense to shout them up to that point. I do get to bring 5 people into each fight so in a sense it seems like I shouldn't only have one killer but in practice it often feels that way. Ramza is high level thanks to the Wiegraf fight but the rest of my team is pretty weak. This means the enemies tend to be able to kill my other guys in 1 or 2 hits themselves. My plan for the most part involves three people standing around casting raise spells on each other, Ramza being awesome, and a dragoon/thief who just kinda stands around and sometimes jumps for a third of an enemy's health bar. And I'm not sure what else to do at this point. I could make Ramza into a dedicated rezzer and just whittle the enemies down with someone else but that'll probably take way more time than just shouting 8 times and then killing off the enemies!
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
FTL
I'd heard some pretty good things about the game FTL: Faster Than Light in general and Sceadeau had recommended it on Vent while playing Blood Bowl at some point so when it went on sale a couple weeks ago I picked it up. I'd heard it was a roguelike in space and I like both space and ZAngband so maybe I'd like this too? I finally got around to giving it a go this morning (I woke up early with a sharp pain in my eye and couldn't get back to sleep).
Now, after playing it a bit, I'm not sure it's really a roguelike game. But it's definitely a fun game. The basic idea is you own a ship with a small crew and you fly around space blowing up bad guys for loot. You use that loot to upgrade different pieces of your ship, or to buy new modules for your ship, or to repair the permanent damage your ship takes. Your crew gains experience with different tasks (shooting the weapons, repairing things, punching boarding parties, etc...) as they perform them. So it is very much roguelike in that way. You kill things, eat them, and take their stuff.
The difference, to me at least, is in how combat presents itself. My idea of a roguelike has you opening doors in a dungeon and fighting gobs of enemies at a time. In FTL it seems like you only fight one thing at a time, and combat is more strategic. You choose where your guys stand, you choose where to aim your guns, and fights last a while. There's no standing behind a doorway chopping kobold after kobold. There's no shooting fireballs into a crowd of orcs. FTL seems more like a series of encounters than a full on dungeon crawl, and I'm ok with that. It actually reminds me a little of an old Win 3.1 Star Trek game I used to play way back in the day but I can't remember the name of it. Whatever.
At any rate, FTL seems pretty good on the surface, and I'm looking forward to sinking some more hours into it. I discovered an interesting aspect of Steam today, too, where it's willing to show you how much time all of your friends have spent playing a game. I have a friend with 97 hours of FTL played, and 4 more with over 30 hours played. If you consider I only have 11 Steam friends (Ziggyny is my name there) that's pretty impressive. Clearly FTL is a reasonable fun game according to my friends. It's no Civ V (398 hours, 388 hours, 267 hours...) but it's got a lot of playability.
Now, after playing it a bit, I'm not sure it's really a roguelike game. But it's definitely a fun game. The basic idea is you own a ship with a small crew and you fly around space blowing up bad guys for loot. You use that loot to upgrade different pieces of your ship, or to buy new modules for your ship, or to repair the permanent damage your ship takes. Your crew gains experience with different tasks (shooting the weapons, repairing things, punching boarding parties, etc...) as they perform them. So it is very much roguelike in that way. You kill things, eat them, and take their stuff.
The difference, to me at least, is in how combat presents itself. My idea of a roguelike has you opening doors in a dungeon and fighting gobs of enemies at a time. In FTL it seems like you only fight one thing at a time, and combat is more strategic. You choose where your guys stand, you choose where to aim your guns, and fights last a while. There's no standing behind a doorway chopping kobold after kobold. There's no shooting fireballs into a crowd of orcs. FTL seems more like a series of encounters than a full on dungeon crawl, and I'm ok with that. It actually reminds me a little of an old Win 3.1 Star Trek game I used to play way back in the day but I can't remember the name of it. Whatever.
At any rate, FTL seems pretty good on the surface, and I'm looking forward to sinking some more hours into it. I discovered an interesting aspect of Steam today, too, where it's willing to show you how much time all of your friends have spent playing a game. I have a friend with 97 hours of FTL played, and 4 more with over 30 hours played. If you consider I only have 11 Steam friends (Ziggyny is my name there) that's pretty impressive. Clearly FTL is a reasonable fun game according to my friends. It's no Civ V (398 hours, 388 hours, 267 hours...) but it's got a lot of playability.
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