The second Mortal Online.
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Tag: Diaries From
Diaries From Shadow Arena: Passing Time With Bots
The game might be dead but I’m having fun?
Continue reading “Diaries From Shadow Arena: Passing Time With Bots”
Diaries From Gielinor: The Yak Track Made Me Hate RuneScape
I’ve made several comments over the years about how Jagex seems to struggle with conflicting priorities, and nothing really exemplifies that in recent history more than the Yak Track.
For those of you who play RuneScape, the Yak Track ends today (January 5). I liked the idea of the Yak Track in theory; an alternative to the battle pass that was given away for free to those who shelled out additional money for the Premier Pack. It’s pure selfishness, but for people like me who are still grandfathered in at the $5 monthly subscription you kinda have to give us something in the bundle to make that price difference worth it.
The Yak Track was such an exercise in tedium that it made me resent RuneScape. I managed to swallow 25 of the 50 levels and theoretically can’t really “quit” the game because I have 600+ days accumulated in excess membership thanks to various giveaways over the past 15 years. I’ve just spent the last couple of months playing the Twisted League in Old School RuneScape.
Contextually the Yak Track couldn’t come out at a more ridiculous and dare I say stupidly contradictory time in RuneScape history. It represents a mind-numbing tedium that Jagex has gone back and forth on in terms of stamping out in the game.
The Yak Track is a battle pass that presents players with 50 tiers of rewards with each tier having its own option of one of two tasks. Some of the tiers are joke tasks, like collect 28 cabbages or talk to an NPC, something you can do it 5 minutes. The majority of the tasks however are ridiculously tedious. Fletch thousands of bows, make thousands of potions, invest endless hours into slayer, etc. It isn’t fun and it’s a stark reminder of one of Jagex’s worst business practices that the company has admitted it is trying to push away from.
Jagex, like Ubisoft, has a habit of creating a problem and then selling players the solution. Don’t want to slog through 30+ tiers of godawful grind for this time-limited event and cosmetics you’ll never be able to obtain again? Well Jagex will sell you bonds to skip the content that they artificially inflated the tedium for in order to sell you bonds to skip the grind that they artificially inflated to make you pay real cash to skip. Nothing stokes resentment quite like the company that has had numerous apology videos over the past few months about their predatory monetization practices doing exactly what they are apologizing for, while they are apologizing.
It also dampens the fact that two weeks after the Yak Track launched, Jagex overhauled the way daily quests in RuneScape work because they saw players getting indignant about the tedium of taking excessive time away every day for dailies that didn’t really reward them. Yep, Jagex will overhaul a system so you don’t need to talk to an NPC to turn in a daily task while at the same time instituting another system that forces you to mine three thousand coal for 1/50th of a reward tier.
I’d like to believe Jagex’s thousandth apology and promise to do better when it comes to predatory microtransactions, but they could at least wipe the crumbs off of their face before promising that they’ll stop stealing from the cookie jar.
Diaries From Washington DC: The Division 2 First Ten Levels
The Division 2 is a very Division-esque title, which is going to be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you approach the franchise. If you like your sequels to take the prior title and expand upon it, you’re golden. If you hated everything about The Division down to its core mechanics, you’re not going to find much to love here.
I want to talk about some immediately obvious positives in The Division 2, and particularly that the game is a whole lot less jank than its predecessor. The Division was pretty great when it came to movement and it’s kind of amazing to think back to the trailers when we were mostly all in awe at the simple idea that your character would close a car door automatically while taking cover behind it. That said, movement in the original game was kind of rough in spots and your character felt like he was walking on a treadmill leading to more confined areas being a real pain to get through. Additionally, while enemy AI wasn’t terrible it wasn’t exactly intelligent, and Ubisoft balanced this by making the game into a bullet sponge festival.
Thankfully The Division 2 has mostly fixed all of this.
Enemy AI is going to surprise you quite a bit as you experience what this game has to offer. Evidently the Washington DC wasteland still has plenty of brain food, as raiders will intelligently flank you, use grenades to push you out of hiding, send in suicide melee squads to force you from your cover, and just generally utilize more coordinated tactics than you might anticipate from such a game. It’s almost unfair at times when you get pitted against a dozen or so baddies in an open space and suddenly find yourself knocked out of cover while the sniper forcing your attention made way for the two guys who just appeared behind you. Unlike its predecessor, I have rarely come out of a death concluding that the game was cheating me.
On the other side of this coin the bullet sponge enemies are mostly gone and good riddance to them. I would say that The Division lands mostly on the realistic side of the Tom Clancy media spectrum so the idea of having gang leaders walking around with no noticeable body armor but somehow still needing two full reloads of shotgun shells from close range in order to kill is just ridiculous. The Division 2 still has named enemies, and they are more powerful than their low-tier mook buddies, but they aren’t sponges. They might have armored vests or helmets, and take a couple more shots to put down. There are a few enemies scattered about during missions that are covered in full body SWAT-tier bomb squad armor that take a lot of bullets to kill. They are far less present and can be dealt with easier than their predecessors.
It’s also nice to be able to walk around the various locations without your character bumping into everything like a drunken bumper car operator.
The game itself is freaking gorgeous. Obviously I’m saying this from the stance of someone with a computer good enough to run the game on its highest settings but boy did Ubisoft put a lot into making the DC wasteland look beautiful and create a living world in the process. The city itself tells a story and everywhere you look you can see the remains of failed quarantines, rescue efforts, and people just trying to survive. You come across a regular bounty of random events including public executions, propaganda broadcasts, and more, that can be easy targets for some quick loot. My personal favorite are the supply drops, where you’ll come across three supply crates that you can salvage for gear and resources. The caveat to this is that the various other factions are also out for these and can actually steal them from you. As far as random encounters go, the supply crates offered the most varied fun for me.
Gear, at least in the first ten levels, has been pretty great. The Division has been throwing enough stuff at me via the main missions, side missions, and generally tracking down and looting stuff in the wilderness that I haven’t felt bereft of new toys to play with.
The first ten levels of Division 2 have taken up around five and a half hours of gameplay, and so far I have to say I am enjoying this far more than I did with The Division. I am looking forward to discussing the game more as I continue playing.
MMOments: Big Farm
(Disclosure: This is a collaboration between MMO Fallout and Poki.com.)
When I look at games like Big Farm, I see a genre soured by the greedy actions of a monolithic developer that tried and miraculously failed to build an empire out of monetizing its own property at the cost of public relations and long term success. I am, of course, referring to Zynga, the least threatening cash vampire since Uwe Boll started his directorial career, and the only company capable of collapsing the public relations of an entire genre.
There really is nothing inherently wrong with time management games. They know what they are and they don’t claim to be what they aren’t, and they don’t spend much time reaching outside the demographic. On the spectrum of gaming, you can’t get much more casual without going into the territory of games that play themselves, or perhaps a pedometer, but they certainly have a wide audience who enjoy them daily.
Big Farm, as its name implies, is a game that starts the player off with a small farm that inevitably grows into a big farm. This is accomplished by building fields out to grow plants and raise animals which are then sold to the market for money or used as resources to grow further goods.
The process does get pretty involved later on. Eventually you’ll be doing things like growing corn to turn into chicken feed in order to raise chickens to collect their dung to turn into fertilizer to grow apples in your orchard and compost the fallen leaves from the trees into humus which can be used on your corn seeds. That’s a mouthful.
The number of buildings, what you can grow, and how much you can store is all governed by an overall level which raises as you complete simple quests (gather x, build y) and gain experience. Higher levels allow for more buildings, expanding the farm, upgrades, and new plants. Along the way you’ll have to worry about factors like population, happiness, and space. You need more houses to hire workers, but more houses decreases happiness which increases production costs. To make your workers happy, you need to build decorations which take up precious farm space. It’s a balance of cost vs efficiency that is completely up to the player.
As far as the cash shop goes, Big Farm primarily sells convenience goods. What few non-decorative buildings you can buy are pretty cheap and offer little bonus as an alternative. Luckily you can amass a small fortune in gold through the game’s level up rewards, by completing quests, and through email promotions by Good Game Studios that are constantly being sent out.
Players can compete against each other in blue ribbon missions that usually involve harvesting more of a certain plant than everyone else, with rewards going out regardless of what place you end up in. Big Farm’s version of a guild is called a cooperative, where players can collaborate on missions with big payoffs, and contribute towards bonuses that reward the entire cooperative.
Big Farm’s ultra-casual nature is sure to drive many gamers away, but for those who enjoy time management games, it’s a decent looking game without the overbearing cash shop butting in. If you take it as a race to the finish, you’re going to see a lot more popups asking you to fork over for some gold, but for those of you who recognize that it is something to be cultivated over months instead of days, you’ll have a much more enjoyable time.
If you do decide to check out Big Farm, you can find it and other MMOs (as well as other games) on poki.com.
Diaries From Marvel Heroes: Arrow Turrets Galore
It’s time again for another Diaries From series, and it just so happens that the week that I planned on discussing Marvel Heroes was the week of another big update. There is no winning in this world.
First, a disclosure. I talk a lot about how great Marvel Heroes is because of how much content you can access for free, so before I blow into my latest experiences, I feel the need to disclose how much I have spent on Marvel Heroes and what exactly I have purchased with that money. The answer is I have no clue. My account history (which goes back to its creation) shows one purchase of gs, $5 worth, back in May, but I have no idea what I spent it on. My best guess is that I spent it on fortune cards, because I know for sure they weren’t used to buy heroes or costumes, and I have nothing to show for it. Money well spent, obviously.
I also have four random hero unlocks that were obtained through in-game events, with two of those resulting in duplicates heroes. So out of my roster of eight, one was unlocked by default, two were unlocked by promotional hero codes, meaning I have unlocked five heroes through obtaining eternity crystals in regular gameplay. 175 crystals per random hero box, with twelve hours of total game time on my account. Not bad.
So let’s talk about Marvel Heroes, a game closer to my heart than it is to my wallet. It isn’t that I don’t like the game enough to pay money into it, but I promised way back when Marvel Heroes launched that I would see if it was feasible to unlock all of the characters without sinking a single penny into buying them. At launch, it was evident that that was not the case, so I stopped playing for a while until Gazillion Entertainment introduced eternity shards and made it a whole lot more possible. My plan is to get to a point where the random hero token unlocks a duplicate three times, after which I will start buying heroes directly at a more expensive price.
Marvel Heroes is one of those games that markets itself toward a very specific group of players, specifically those who favor the loot treadmill. It is a game of getting up to level 60 by smashing endless waves of enemies on a rather linear track, collecting shinies with slowly increasing stats, and ticking boxes on a skill tree to give your character additional powers. The shinies you don’t need can be sold or donated to vendors for gold or experience respectively, with the latter leveling them up to offer better shinies. This is a genre that people either love or hate, there doesn’t seem to be much in between.
What sets Marvel Heroes apart from your Diablo and Torchlight is that the game has nearly forty to unlock, with more added every few months, and yet (in my experience) none of them feel like clones. Captain America handles differently from Hawkeye, who handles differently from Moon Knight, who handles differently from Iron Man. It may not be as drastic as it was back at launch, where some characters were effectively useless in certain situations, and every character can generally handle their own, but everyone has their own groove. I actually laughed when I found that Colossus has a special move that throws Wolverine at an enemy, who then fights with you for a few seconds.
If you haven’t played Marvel Heroes since it looked like this, give it another go.
My current roster:
- Black Panther (level 1)
- Captain America (level 12)
- Cyclops (level 3)
- Hawkeye (level 54)
- Iron Man (level 9)
- Moon Knight (level 20)
- Storm (level 4)
- Taskmaster (level 10)
This list doesn’t include the heroes that were added up to level 10 for trial purposes: Black Widow, Collossus, Human Torch, Luke Cage, Punisher, and Rocket Racoon.
Diaries From The Old Republice: Fly Me To Coruscant
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I haven’t played The Old Republic in a very, very long time. Before strongholds, before legacy, before achievements, before just about any of that stuff. I think I might have logged in once or twice after the game went free to play, but aside from that all I have to show for my pre-order is a level 26 smuggler. Those of you who have read my playthrough pieces know that I level slow, in fact even with the 12x experience boost, I can’t guarantee that I will get my current character to level 55 before the expansion hits…in December. Yea, I’m that pathetic.
For the sake of figuring out just how far I could outlevel the content, I decided to make a new character and go for a Jedi Knight. The 12x experience boost only applies to story missions, which is a good thing. At the rate that story missions are propelling me through my levels, side missions don’t offer much outside of some equipment or planetary tokens. I’ve told myself that I should be focusing on story missions for now, and that I can always come back and mop up missed side missions once my speed run is over and done with. Since each story mission provides at least one level, I am currently at level 22 running a level 16 story mission.
The Old Republic is supposed to be several KOTOR sequels wrapped into one, and with that in mind I am going to play the story and enjoy it. So far the Jedi story is pretty cut and dry, but the characters are interesting and the overall plot manages to seamlessly change from planet to planet. The story is basic Star Wars: There is a sith doing bad things, and you kill him only to find out that there is a badder sith somewhere else controlling his strings. Rinse and repeat. The side missions that appear in the middle are where the creative minds at Bioware really shine through.
For instance, you arrive on Coruscant to find that not a whole lot of people particularly like you. The Republic troops on Coruscant don’t trust the Jedi because they up and left when the Jedi temple was sacked by the Sith, leaving the planet to be overrun by criminal cartels. While the resource-starved Republic was forced to withdraw its forces, a militia called the Justicars formed up to fight the various crime syndicates only to find that their efforts too would not be enough. Many have lost hope in the Republic, and some are even considering switching over to the Empire who seem more willing to stamp out crime on the planet. It seems that even in the old Republic, there is no shortage of misery caused by the inaction of the Jedi order.
One small aspect that I enjoy is the crew affection rating. In conversations, you can gain or lose affection rating with your companion based on what you say. As a jedi, my companions are better tuned toward feats of courage and compassion than malice and revenge. They call it the Jedi Order for a reason.
While I wouldn’t describe my feelings as overenthusiastic, I am having some fun playing through The Old Republic. Who knows, maybe by the time the December deadline comes around, I’ll be on my second character. I doubt it.
MMO Fallout 
