I guess writing a blog is one of those things that once you fall out of the habit, it's hard to get back into it. Lately though, the urge the start writing has been itching at me again, so here we are, and here I am. I want to get back into updating this blog fairly regularly; I doubt I'll get to it on a daily basis, but a few times a week would be optimal. As for my mission goal, it'll be more-or-less the same as before. I wanna post about what I'm up to; including gaming, movie watching, and otherwise; post reviews of the games I play, and make blogs talking about my thoughts on game design theory.
Looking at my older posts, I noticed I got started on some rules for good game design, and I'd like to keep on that list; expanding it with more habits to be avoided to engaged; things I notice that tend to consistently make a game better or worse; as well as maybe clarifying on any rules that I find people consistently misunderstand. Heck, maybe I'll even find, with feedback, that a rule or two should be scratched.
As for what I've been up to lately, mostly Dead Island Riptide and Fire Emblem: Awakening. In fact, with May being Zombie Awareness Month, I was thinking I'd probably start-out the reboot of Idle Thinking by talking about the under-appreciated gem that is the Dead Island series. I wanna get a couple reviews up for each game, as well as a post or two talking about what I do and don't like about both games. Maybe next month I'll talk a bit about Fire Emblem and my history with the Strategy/RPG genre.
As for what I've been up to the past 4 years, mostly just life. Working, sleeping, gaming, forgetting that I had a blog on which I wanted to post, that kinda thing. I've somehow shaken-off my addiction to World of Warcraft in that time. Not to say that I was specifically trying to quit, just that it ran its course and now... I dunno, just not as much drive to play it anymore. I guess that the guild stopped raiding would be part of the reason, and getting a new job that made it so I couldn't make the raid hours anyway is another factor.
So here goes, hopefully this time I actually keep-up with something of a schedule on here. Until then, game happy.
Showing posts with label About the Author. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About the Author. Show all posts
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Friday, August 21, 2009
Good Game Design Rule I: Everything has a Purpose
It's one of my pet peeves when I'm playing a game, is when I see something that I would really like to use (be it a stat or a weapon), but it was implemented into the game (or something else was implemented into the game that renders it useless) in such a way that you have to bend-over backwards to find a use for it, and even then it's very weak at serving it's purpose. So why did the developers take the time adding that item when they could have spent a little more time on other aspects of the game? I'm all for things being included for the sake of novelty, but sometimes it's less obvious that the thing you're aiming for is a novelty, so before you know it you're at a really high level in an RPG, and you find-out you've been pouring your points into a stat that is completely useless or has a much lesser effect later in the game than you'd think it would.
A lot of times I chalk this up to a lack of play testing. Many times when playing a game that lets you allot stats to your (mostly RPGs of course), there will be that one stat that looks very tempting. Upon putting points into the stat, you find that you like the effects given by this stat, say Magic as an example. So you spend your time playing this game putting all of your points into Magic (most of them anyway), but then you run into a problem. Closer to the end of the game you're having a much harder time playing the game, possibly even finding it impossible. So you decide to research it, you find some forums that discuss the game, and low and behold, everyone giving advice says to stay away from Magic because it becomes highly useless at the end of the game due to a large number of enemies that have a high resistance to Magic.
This is actually a true story, to some extent. Diablo II. In this game there are 8 classes to choose from, and each class has 3 skill trees you can work down. In theory, this leads to 24 possible character builds to choose from. In reality, you have roughly 20 potential builds that are great for the first stretch of the game, and a handful of builds that can continue to be as useful when playing in the higher-level content. So why bother with those 20-some other character builds? Why put them into the game? For flavor? Well, that's great, but now I have to start a new character because I've hit a sudden road block where my current character just struggles too much to get even one enemy down, and he spawned with 10 friends all right next to him that I still have to deal with.
Don't get me wrong, I love Diablo 2, and I even play a couple of those 20-some builds that are near-useless in the later game. The problem is though, I have to really dance around to make kills on those characters, meanwhile someone else will come along with one of those 5 builds and rips the enemies apart in mere seconds. If it's even a plural number of seconds. It's good to know that I'm skilled enough to play one of the lesser builds at a higher-level dungeon, but it's disheartening to be spending a good 10 minutes working on clearing my way through one hallway of a dungeon, then someone joins the game and they basically just walk through the place, barely breaking stride as the enemies seemingly drop to their knees in awe of his damage potential.
Which is basically what Rule 1 of my Design Philosophy is about. It asks the question when something is included into the game: "Who would want to use this, for what purpose, and is it a viable answer to that purpose to the same degree as other available answers?" If any of those questions cannot be answered properly, then it's back to the drawing board. Novelty is nice, but it should be saved for situations where it's more obviously a novelty.
A lot of times I chalk this up to a lack of play testing. Many times when playing a game that lets you allot stats to your (mostly RPGs of course), there will be that one stat that looks very tempting. Upon putting points into the stat, you find that you like the effects given by this stat, say Magic as an example. So you spend your time playing this game putting all of your points into Magic (most of them anyway), but then you run into a problem. Closer to the end of the game you're having a much harder time playing the game, possibly even finding it impossible. So you decide to research it, you find some forums that discuss the game, and low and behold, everyone giving advice says to stay away from Magic because it becomes highly useless at the end of the game due to a large number of enemies that have a high resistance to Magic.
This is actually a true story, to some extent. Diablo II. In this game there are 8 classes to choose from, and each class has 3 skill trees you can work down. In theory, this leads to 24 possible character builds to choose from. In reality, you have roughly 20 potential builds that are great for the first stretch of the game, and a handful of builds that can continue to be as useful when playing in the higher-level content. So why bother with those 20-some other character builds? Why put them into the game? For flavor? Well, that's great, but now I have to start a new character because I've hit a sudden road block where my current character just struggles too much to get even one enemy down, and he spawned with 10 friends all right next to him that I still have to deal with.
Don't get me wrong, I love Diablo 2, and I even play a couple of those 20-some builds that are near-useless in the later game. The problem is though, I have to really dance around to make kills on those characters, meanwhile someone else will come along with one of those 5 builds and rips the enemies apart in mere seconds. If it's even a plural number of seconds. It's good to know that I'm skilled enough to play one of the lesser builds at a higher-level dungeon, but it's disheartening to be spending a good 10 minutes working on clearing my way through one hallway of a dungeon, then someone joins the game and they basically just walk through the place, barely breaking stride as the enemies seemingly drop to their knees in awe of his damage potential.
Which is basically what Rule 1 of my Design Philosophy is about. It asks the question when something is included into the game: "Who would want to use this, for what purpose, and is it a viable answer to that purpose to the same degree as other available answers?" If any of those questions cannot be answered properly, then it's back to the drawing board. Novelty is nice, but it should be saved for situations where it's more obviously a novelty.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Shiro's Brief WoW History
My main character is a Blood Elf Mage named Balthior. I started-up a guild there named "Silence the Discord" - a quote from the hybrid enemies of System Shock 2 - shortly after Burning Crusade was released. Having started the guild when I was around Level 30, it started as a leveling guild. After some waffling about (PvP vs PvE), I decided I wanted to take the guild into raiding, and given the hours I play games most often, a late-night raiding guild.
We started in Karazhan as most guilds did in the day. Actually no. We started in 5-man content, working to gear-up our freshly-leveled players, while also trying to recruit whom we could. From there we finally worked-up 10 decently geared people, and on a whim we decided to head into Karazhan for the first time to take a shot at the first boss and see how things went. From there, we slowly worked our way from barely being able to kill some of the bosses after a full night's worth of attempting, to eventually cleaning the instance out in a single night, with two groups of 10 people going at it.
The next step was the rough one. We had to work our way from Karazhan which required 10 people, upto the other raid instances that required 25. This is when we teamed-up with another guild, who's name unfortuneately escapes me at the moment. One of our recruits was friends with the leader of the guild (and in fact, came directly from that guild because he couldn't make their raid times). We set-up a date and time when we'd pool our resources together to tackle the first 25-man raid, Gruul's Lair. It was a semi-success.
After a number of raids together, the other guild started wanting to merge with us to make it easier to coordinate the raids. After some thought, I agreed to the matter, but things didn't turn-out quite so well as we would have hoped. Shortly after the merger, we tried to integrate them into the guild community, but they just seemed distant, as-if they didn't care that they were in the guild despite having been so adamant about wanting to merge. Slowly but surely, everyone from the guild funneled-out one by one, followed by one big purge as the last half-dozen or so of them left all at once.
It was a slight hit, but since they'd been slacking on attending raids anyway, we'd mostly been working to recruit anyway, so recovery was fairly quick. After their departure, we finally broke into the 25-man content, finally killing Gruul and eventually moving into Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. From there the guild had it's highs and lows, I'm sure I could right a whole novel on our Level 70 raiding history. Our Level 70 achievements, to keep it short, include killing such bosses as Magtheridon and Lady Vashj before they were nerfed into obselescence, and making good progress into Black Temple.
Unfortunately for the guild though, progress was dragged to a hault. See, pretty much right from the start of the guild, I always had a hard time nailing-down officers. I'd promote some, of course, and they'd do their job for a while, but seldom stuck around for long. They never left the guild mind you, just vanished, stopped playing the game. For the most part we'd eventually regain contact with them and find out what happened with them, but it still left the guild with basically one leader through it's entire Level 70 endgame process. So what happened was... I took a vacation.
Despite having left an Officer specifically in charge of leading the raids during the week I'd be out of town, raids apparently screeched to a halt the instant I was gone (despite them having done raids just fine in the past during nights I was unable to be online, with that same officer leading in my stead). So I return, and the guild is in shambles. I tried to get raids back on the calendar, but no one showed for the raids anymore, and one by one, everyone except for a tightly-knit group of friends all trickled out. Were it not for the fact that Wrath of the Lich King was around the corner, I'd have probably just recruited to rebuild the raid, but pre-Expansion season is hell to recruit for if you don't already have a static group.
So that was that. The raid group had all but fallen apart, and the next Expansion that would raise the level cap to 80 was just a few months away. Around this time, one of the guild members had invited his friend who plays as a Warrior into the guild (a guild member who was in this group of friends who stuck around). He was green as hell, having not played the game at all in a year or so, so he quickly got a knack for how things worked at Level 70. Before long I decided he would make a good officer for the guild, and currently him and one other officer are the only two to stick around for more than a week without dropping off the face of the Earth.
So here we are now, at Level 80 and raiding Ulduar with something of a council in charge of the raids. Instead of just me trying to keep everyone coordinated, we have the afformentioned Warrior leading the tanks, the other officer leading the healers, and myself trying to keep the DPS and Crowd Control coordinated. It's been a slow climb (partially caused by a surge of apathy on my part), but our new raid group is starting to gel and reach the same level of performance that I was proud to say our old Level 70 raid group had. A lot of it due to the fact that we have fewer raiders leaving. High turn-over and successful raids just don't go hand-in-hand unless you're lucky enough to be recruiting natural pros with said turn-over.
Lately I've been putting a lot of thought into World of Warcraft. Still waffling-about on whether or not I want to pass-on the mantle of leadership to someone else, if I want to continue raiding, or if I want to even continue playing the game even on a casual basis. Were it a single-player game I'd probably just stop playing it for a while, but when you meet and bond with other people while playing a game, it can be hard to just stop.
We started in Karazhan as most guilds did in the day. Actually no. We started in 5-man content, working to gear-up our freshly-leveled players, while also trying to recruit whom we could. From there we finally worked-up 10 decently geared people, and on a whim we decided to head into Karazhan for the first time to take a shot at the first boss and see how things went. From there, we slowly worked our way from barely being able to kill some of the bosses after a full night's worth of attempting, to eventually cleaning the instance out in a single night, with two groups of 10 people going at it.
The next step was the rough one. We had to work our way from Karazhan which required 10 people, upto the other raid instances that required 25. This is when we teamed-up with another guild, who's name unfortuneately escapes me at the moment. One of our recruits was friends with the leader of the guild (and in fact, came directly from that guild because he couldn't make their raid times). We set-up a date and time when we'd pool our resources together to tackle the first 25-man raid, Gruul's Lair. It was a semi-success.
After a number of raids together, the other guild started wanting to merge with us to make it easier to coordinate the raids. After some thought, I agreed to the matter, but things didn't turn-out quite so well as we would have hoped. Shortly after the merger, we tried to integrate them into the guild community, but they just seemed distant, as-if they didn't care that they were in the guild despite having been so adamant about wanting to merge. Slowly but surely, everyone from the guild funneled-out one by one, followed by one big purge as the last half-dozen or so of them left all at once.
It was a slight hit, but since they'd been slacking on attending raids anyway, we'd mostly been working to recruit anyway, so recovery was fairly quick. After their departure, we finally broke into the 25-man content, finally killing Gruul and eventually moving into Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. From there the guild had it's highs and lows, I'm sure I could right a whole novel on our Level 70 raiding history. Our Level 70 achievements, to keep it short, include killing such bosses as Magtheridon and Lady Vashj before they were nerfed into obselescence, and making good progress into Black Temple.
Unfortunately for the guild though, progress was dragged to a hault. See, pretty much right from the start of the guild, I always had a hard time nailing-down officers. I'd promote some, of course, and they'd do their job for a while, but seldom stuck around for long. They never left the guild mind you, just vanished, stopped playing the game. For the most part we'd eventually regain contact with them and find out what happened with them, but it still left the guild with basically one leader through it's entire Level 70 endgame process. So what happened was... I took a vacation.
Despite having left an Officer specifically in charge of leading the raids during the week I'd be out of town, raids apparently screeched to a halt the instant I was gone (despite them having done raids just fine in the past during nights I was unable to be online, with that same officer leading in my stead). So I return, and the guild is in shambles. I tried to get raids back on the calendar, but no one showed for the raids anymore, and one by one, everyone except for a tightly-knit group of friends all trickled out. Were it not for the fact that Wrath of the Lich King was around the corner, I'd have probably just recruited to rebuild the raid, but pre-Expansion season is hell to recruit for if you don't already have a static group.
So that was that. The raid group had all but fallen apart, and the next Expansion that would raise the level cap to 80 was just a few months away. Around this time, one of the guild members had invited his friend who plays as a Warrior into the guild (a guild member who was in this group of friends who stuck around). He was green as hell, having not played the game at all in a year or so, so he quickly got a knack for how things worked at Level 70. Before long I decided he would make a good officer for the guild, and currently him and one other officer are the only two to stick around for more than a week without dropping off the face of the Earth.
So here we are now, at Level 80 and raiding Ulduar with something of a council in charge of the raids. Instead of just me trying to keep everyone coordinated, we have the afformentioned Warrior leading the tanks, the other officer leading the healers, and myself trying to keep the DPS and Crowd Control coordinated. It's been a slow climb (partially caused by a surge of apathy on my part), but our new raid group is starting to gel and reach the same level of performance that I was proud to say our old Level 70 raid group had. A lot of it due to the fact that we have fewer raiders leaving. High turn-over and successful raids just don't go hand-in-hand unless you're lucky enough to be recruiting natural pros with said turn-over.
Lately I've been putting a lot of thought into World of Warcraft. Still waffling-about on whether or not I want to pass-on the mantle of leadership to someone else, if I want to continue raiding, or if I want to even continue playing the game even on a casual basis. Were it a single-player game I'd probably just stop playing it for a while, but when you meet and bond with other people while playing a game, it can be hard to just stop.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Idle Thinking: Day One
Greetings all, and welcome to Idle Thinking, my new blog. Posted here will be my random musings, mostly things that pass through my mind while I'm working. My current job being pizza delievery, I tend to have a lot of time to think as I from Point A to Point B, then back to Point A again, hence the name of my blog. My goals for this blog are to work on my writing skills, hopefully to the point where I can maybe make a job of it. I will talk about various things from what I've been playing lately, news bits that I've read about recently, and probably a rant or two... or three or four.
As for me, I am WhiteTigerShiro as many people know me, Shiro or WTS for short. I play World of Warcraft (but who doesn't play it these days?) on the Mal'Ganis server. Outside of WoW, I play a variety of games. I often referred to myself as being a "wandering gamer" (or The Wandering Sage when I joined a community called the RPG Elite) in that I seldom would play a game for more than a few weeks before deciding to move-on and play something else. It's part of why my favorite quote is from Tolkien: Not all who wander are lost. I was never looking for a "favorite" game to nestle into, I just enjoyed such a variety of games that I could never tie myself down to just one.
The result is that I met with a lot of communities, most of them localized on the GameFAQs forums, though perhaps my favorite was the Samus.Co.Uk forums, or SCU as we quickly came to call it. As the name would imply, it was a Metroid community, a nice and tightly-knit group of Metroid fans, but we talked about everything from here to there on those forums. I made a lot of friends there, maybe a couple enemies. The community sadly dissolved when the web host grew disillusioned with a series of sub-par Metrioid releases and decided to move onto greener pastures. It's unfortunate that he was unable to keep the site up for the sake of the community, but such is life.
So here I am now, rambling-on to (hopefully) a bunch of strangers. I suppose that will do for one day, honestly it's more than I thought I'd write, but that's part of what I wanted with this blog, someplace where I can just wind-up and be set-down to see what interesting trick I do while the dial turns. No saying how frequently I'll be updating the blog, but I'll certainly try and keep it updated more often than VG Cats. Hm... no, that doesn't narrow it down enough. I'll try and keep her updated at least once a week though. ;)
-Shiro
PS: This is a blog that I want for people to read, and enjoy reading. So I welcome any input anyone has for me. Be it how the blog appears, things I talk about (or should talk about), etc. No guarantees that I'll do everything everyone sends, but it's good to see what people are thinking so that I can take it into consideration.
Edit: I cropped my tangent on my history on Mal'Ganis and made it into a new post.
As for me, I am WhiteTigerShiro as many people know me, Shiro or WTS for short. I play World of Warcraft (but who doesn't play it these days?) on the Mal'Ganis server. Outside of WoW, I play a variety of games. I often referred to myself as being a "wandering gamer" (or The Wandering Sage when I joined a community called the RPG Elite) in that I seldom would play a game for more than a few weeks before deciding to move-on and play something else. It's part of why my favorite quote is from Tolkien: Not all who wander are lost. I was never looking for a "favorite" game to nestle into, I just enjoyed such a variety of games that I could never tie myself down to just one.
The result is that I met with a lot of communities, most of them localized on the GameFAQs forums, though perhaps my favorite was the Samus.Co.Uk forums, or SCU as we quickly came to call it. As the name would imply, it was a Metroid community, a nice and tightly-knit group of Metroid fans, but we talked about everything from here to there on those forums. I made a lot of friends there, maybe a couple enemies. The community sadly dissolved when the web host grew disillusioned with a series of sub-par Metrioid releases and decided to move onto greener pastures. It's unfortunate that he was unable to keep the site up for the sake of the community, but such is life.
So here I am now, rambling-on to (hopefully) a bunch of strangers. I suppose that will do for one day, honestly it's more than I thought I'd write, but that's part of what I wanted with this blog, someplace where I can just wind-up and be set-down to see what interesting trick I do while the dial turns. No saying how frequently I'll be updating the blog, but I'll certainly try and keep it updated more often than VG Cats. Hm... no, that doesn't narrow it down enough. I'll try and keep her updated at least once a week though. ;)
-Shiro
PS: This is a blog that I want for people to read, and enjoy reading. So I welcome any input anyone has for me. Be it how the blog appears, things I talk about (or should talk about), etc. No guarantees that I'll do everything everyone sends, but it's good to see what people are thinking so that I can take it into consideration.
Edit: I cropped my tangent on my history on Mal'Ganis and made it into a new post.
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