review – Page 8 – MMO Fallout

[Rant] How To Defeat Evil Game Scores Forever

Overwatch 2016-05-06 05-39-24-40

If you haven’t been paying attention to the news, the Washington Post has taken quite a bit of heat over its review of Uncharted 4 published just a few days ago. Some of you might be confused, since stating one’s opinion on video games isn’t known for inciting vitriol while others might not detect the sarcasm in this sentence. The rest of you are probably thinking “Washington Post reviews video games?”

Before we go on, the usual statement needs to be repeated: Given that we are talking about opinions on video games, and not how to go about convicting a serial killer, the people who have been posting death threats and death wishes to Michael Thomsen, the guy who wrote the review, can kindly see yourselves out of any further discussion. The same goes for the people spouting a variety of hate speech, a population that does not include the readers of this website who are in my opinion the cream of the crop in terms of netizens.

So with that in mind, I’ve decided to write a guide on how to beat game review scores.

The first step is to find a publication that reviews games, or even more than one, that you believe you can trust. You might have to stick with one or two websites for a while in order to get a feel for how the editors work, what they look for in games, and how they evaluate titles. In fact, these sources can easily be Youtubers, streamers, or just simple bloggers. Find the people whose interests and focus meshes with your own.

I say this because I can say with relative certainty that 90% (hyperbole) of the people piling onto the Washington Post review either have never read, or don’t generally use, the paper as a source for their game reviews. In fact, I’ll go further and say that the majority probably don’t read the Washington Post straight out. The opinion of their staff, let alone one guy writing a game review, didn’t matter until he gave this game a bad score. And by the time the Washington Post publishes its next game review, most of the people in the comments section will have returned to not reading the Washington Post.

And for the record, Michael Thomsen isn’t exactly an unknown entity in games media. Thomsen is known for taking a contrarian approach, slamming popular titles by giving them low review scores. Does it make him an expert on games? No, and the review itself isn’t particularly insightful when it comes to convincing the reader why the game isn’t good.

The second step is to avoid making your purchasing decisions based off of the aggregated opinions of a small handful of people you don’t know and whose opinions you probably don’t agree with or respect. This goes hand in hand with the step above, if you go to Metacritic and see that Uncharted 4 only has one review below an 80, from a guy at the Washington Post, and you decide not to buy the game…well that’s on you.

The problem with scores is that each publication has its own system on how it scores games. You can’t compare different metrics and aggregate a mean score, but Metacritic does it anyway. The problem isn’t with the reviewers, it exists solely on Metacritic’s side, determining arbitrarily who deserves representation.

This also goes for developers and publishers who make deals based on the game’s aggregate review score. Publishers who force developers into contracts that hold multi-million dollar bonuses ransom behind the opinions of a few editors. I’ll echo Adam Sessler when I say that publishers have a great way of figuring out how a game performed, it’s called the sales charts, you have access to them. Withholding bonuses because a game sold great but scored less-than-perfect is about as asinine as giving a bonus when a game tanks but scored really high.

And finally, the best step is to stop feeding the clickbait machine that is the internet. Let me be completely frank, the sponsored post you saw on Facebook about the dog that grabs a stick and you wouldn’t believe what happens next? Odds are you will, in fact, believe what happens next. Unbelievable, surely.

For everyone who fell into clickbait in order to leave a post complaining about clickbait or share the post to attract more traffic to said clickbait, well you’re feeding the monster. Without you, clickbait articles would be…well they’d still be easy money makers, but they’d be making less money. If you were to go by the ratio of “this is clickbait” comments, they’d be making no money at all.

The thing about clickbaity headlines is that they work, and the thing about review scores is that they work. If The Washington Post hadn’t scored Uncharted 4, would anyone be talking about their review? Yes, but it would be a small handful of people shaking their head and tutting “oh that Washington Post, they don’t really play games do they?” And that would be it. No wide attention, no Troy Baker, no nothing.

They work, and I say this as someone whose website doesn’t run ads, I still look at metrics. The more sensational a headline is, the more people pay attention to it, and the more likely they will share it.

But let’s stick in reality land, shall we? Ultimately Metacritic made the mistake in not treating the review as an outlier and ignoring it, something that any aggregator worth its salt does. It is the job of Metacritic to properly curate its list of reviewers and the job of readers to take Metacritic to task when it fails at its job.

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.

MMOments: Blade & Soul

Blade & Soul is one of those games that we’ve been impatiently waiting to come westward for a few years now, and like any game that we are regularly told we can’t have, the hype train has gotten out of hand at one point or another. I think that the majority of gamers saw NCSoft’s “you can’t have this yet” attitude and recognized it as an issue of lengthy localization rather than an evil corporation withholding the greatest creation since sliced bread, but you know that there is someone out there that took the lengthy development delay as a sign that the game was being advertised as the second coming of Jesus.

If there is one thing you can expect from Korean MMOs it is that character features will be exaggerated and heavily sexualized, so naturally I created my character was created with the kind of booty you could rest a stereo on. I’m not entirely sure if the gliding and camera controls exist primarily to serve for gratuitous panty shots, but I’m not willing to rule it out at this time. Also, you should expect that all of the female characters have breasts that more closely resemble free hanging piles of Jello brand gelatin than actual human flesh, bouncing and bobbing with every small breeze.

That said, there are a lot of options for the character creator, honestly you could spend hours working on every little detail of your character’s physique.

The characters of Blade & Soul are rather charming, even though I can’t remember their names and they have a tendency to die ala Game of Thrones not long after you meet them. Still, the characters are drawn from the anime school of ridiculous features, like the grandpa dog, the obnoxious kid who takes credit for everything, and whatever this is. The world looks beautiful, even with the parade of very well oiled men and women running about, reminiscent of a higher quality TERA or a more polished looking ArcheAge.

Combat in Blade & Soul is well paced, relying equally on mouse clicks and key presses. Your left mouse button is tied to a resource building attack while the right mouse button uses said resources. As you level up, you start to be able to use combos like, in the case of my sword-wielding character, knocking your opponent to the ground and stomping them while they are down. The rate at which you learn new techniques is just slow enough that you’ve mastered the previous lesson by the time the game is ready to teach you something new. It’s spaced out enough so that the player doesn’t get overwhelmed but (at least in the opening acts) hopefully doesn’t feel like the combat is growing stagnant.

The game throws in little things that keep the game flowing, like enemies that randomly drop bombs that can be used to take out or stun another mob. Ultimately, however, this is your standard MMO fare: You go into a village, take a bunch of quests, complete those quests, then move on to the next village. In no sense does the game feel like an open world, with players being ushered down what is effectively a single hallway ala Final Fantasy XIII, with a few dungeons hanging off to the side.

What impressed me is how the game handles equipment. For starters, your beginner weapon is supposed to stay with you for most, if not all of the game. Imagine the upgradeable epic weapons you get during end-game raids in other MMOs, and then picture getting that weapon right from the start. The weapons that you pick up along the way are more useful as upgrade materials. In addition, there isn’t much of an equipment selection. Instead of grinding for your usual selection of gloves, boots, legs, chest, and head pieces, you’ll gather accessories and soul shards. Soul shards come in one shape and fit into a wheel, offering various stat bonuses. Complete a wheel with a single soul shard set and you’ll unlock even more powerful bonuses.

One small feature that I find myself appreciating is on logout, where the game tells you exactly what you’ve accomplished during that play session. It isn’t a major feature by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a handy tool nonetheless. You also have access to a “daily dash,” a board game of sorts where you spin a wheel and obtain items the further you get. It appears to reset every month, and falls into the Korean MMO trope of throwing shinies at the player to keep them going.

Now let’s get to some grievances. Blade & Soul is heavily instanced, with areas separated by portals that cause the game to hiccup whenever you pass through. While the drastic changes that some areas go through between and following quests are nice, it serves to highlight just how linear the game is, and how ultimately unimportant and forgettable each zone is, almost as if each one is an episode of a serialized anime.

The most obvious and present issue with Blade & Soul is the constant, endless, gold spam. The fact that it is insanely present on a Korean import title doesn’t surprise me, nor does NCSoft’s complete ineptitude at combating said spam despite operating MMOs for nearly twenty years. I would be less harsh were it not for the fact that Blade & Soul launched in 2012, yet still hasn’t figured out the most basic of bot protections. Let’s go over a few, shall we?

Severe limitations on chat for new/free accounts.
Level limitations on global chat channels.
A filter that can detect when the same message is being repeated across multiple accounts.
Safeguards at account creation that would prevent mass throwaway accounts.
A limitation on how often characters can be created/deleted.
A cooldown on sending messages to global chat channels.
Banning the use of proxies.
Banning Chinese IP addresses.
Making ignores account-wide instead of character-specific.
Having actual customer support.
The ability to easily report people in chat.

And finally, you need to squash the shit early, pardon my language, and start banning some Twitch streamers. Allowing popular streamers like Reckful to partner with illegal gold farming websites and make money off of a community form of cancer will do nothing but push away customers and make your company look feckless and corrupt. Generally I wouldn’t harp on gold spam in a game this close to launch, but Blade & Soul has had years to figure this stuff out and yet the spam is worse than pretty much any other MMO that I have ever played.

There is still a lot of ground to break in Blade & Soul, which I intend to do in the coming weeks. Despite the negative stuff I’ve said, the stuff that sets Blade & Soul apart, like how the game deals with loot and upgrading equipment, is keeping me playing.

MMO Fallout Says Goodbye To 2015’s Dearly Departed

2015 is over and that means paying respect to the recently departed, games with no servers and developers without jobs. While the year brought with it plenty of new games, it also marked the end of others and whether or not those games continue to live on through unofficial, community-run private servers is another story.

Let’s reminisce on a few of them.

1. Face of Mankind

Seeing games like Face of Mankind never become truly popular and then die out due to the venom of its own design is disappointing, but alas 2015 was the year that the crowd funded reboot to the sandbox title was finally put to rest and given its proper burial: Six feet under. In theory, it was a great idea: Factions made up entirely of players that would function as a working society with police, miners, terrorists, etc. In practice, however, the game quickly devolved into a free for all deathmatch with no limit to the drama of “you broke the ceasefire,” “no you broke it first” on the forums.

Games like this tend to work, in theory, until you enter the troll factor and compensate for the idea that player vs player deathmatch is the easiest form of emergent gameplay in a sandbox environment. Combine it with a system that both allows players to endlessly respawn and try to take out as many people as they can before they are killed, and the inability of players tasked with enforcing the peace to have any real stopping power, and you have a title that new players could log into, find little more than random grenade spam, and subsequently log out and uninstall.

Ultimately, Face of Mankind was an old game with a niche audience. Not even Steam could change that.

2. Dragon’s Prophet (North America)

This is one of a few on our list this year that shut down not due to the game itself but because of the publisher. Dragon’s Prophet is still alive and not-exactly kicking in Europe and Asia, however when Sony Online Entertainment transitioned into Daybreak Game Company and refused to place Dragon’s Prophet on the All Access list, it was pretty obvious that the publisher was looking to cut ties. As part of its cost cutting measures, Daybreak brought everything in house, laid off a bunch of employees, and fired Storybricks. Later on we learned that the two companies would be cutting ties and that Dragon’s Prophet would be shutting down in North America.

So by that measure, Dragon’s Prophet is the only one of this list that can still be played in an official capacity. Creating an account and playing on the European servers is feasible and, in my experience, doesn’t come with any lag.

3. RaiderZ

Again, a victim of corporate play. In this case, Perfect World Entertainment was unable to do anything with the game due to the closure of the game’s developer MAIET. Rather than go through the process of hiring another studio or bringing some people on board to continue development, costs that would have likely outweighed any potential income that the game might receive due to the extra attention, Perfect World decided to call it a day and shut the game down.

As far its library was concerned, Perfect World had a lot higher quality games to invest its money into rather than pouring it into what was an enjoyable but otherwise generic Korean import with a lot of grind and not a big audience. At least they had the decency to reimburse players who’d spent money on it.

4. Archlord 2

If you haven’t noticed, this list every year has a majority stake of Korean imports, and is also severely incomplete. If I took the time to track down every MMO imported from China or Korea that shut down months after launch, I’d have to start this list in January and there would probably be closer to 100 titles. If I included every MMO in China and Korea that shut down this year, it’d probably be closer to a thousand. So instead, I keep the list confined to the games that were released westward, noteworthy enough to be covered here and on other major western gaming websites, meaning you won’t see any one of the numerous titles that R2 Games or Steparu quietly launched and just as quietly shut down.

So while Dragon’s Prophet is the result of publisher bailout and RaiderZ is the victim of developer absence, Archlord 2 went down due to the simple lack of community interest. We knew this was going to be an issue back when the game was still bound to Korea and was already merging servers during beta with players still having trouble forming public groups. The game wasn’t well received in Korea and it wasn’t well received here. Before they had the chance to bury Archlord, its successor was already on its death bed.

5. Transformers Universe

Not an MMO, but worthy of mention because it is Jagex and this is a game that I had marginally more optimism for than their usual new game announcements. The idea of Jagex working on a game based on a third party IP, ideally, meant that there would be an outside force pushing and prodding and ensuring that the game was being developed efficiently and without the waffling that usually ends up delaying and tanking Jagex’s other projects. Ultimately, however, it seems that the addition of a second player just meant one more hand to pull the plug.

But Transformers Universe is a perfect example of a popular game killer, when a title sees a dramatic turn in development focus and jumps genres halfway through development (or in this case less than a year before it was initially supposed to launch), forcing the team to scramble to effectively start over while still driving toward that initial launch date. It’s like being assigned to cook a lasagna with the expectation that it will be done before noon, only to be told at 11:30 when it’s already in the oven that instead the task is to make bolognese. You’ll get it done, late, and it won’t be as good as making it from scratch because all you have is the ingredients for lasagna, plus some half cooked lasagna, and some stuff left over in the cabinet.

6. Infinite Crisis

Again, not an MMO, but noteworthy regardless. Similar to Transformers Universe, the demise of Infinite Crisis is an important reminder on two fronts: First, that the MOBA market is saturated to the point where your game has to be something special or noteworthy on a design or monetary level in order to maintain the healthy userbase required to keep it going. Second, that big IPs mean absolutely nothing in the ‘games as a service’ genres of MOBA and MMO where you rely on long term revenue rather than the first month.

I wrote an editorial at the time of Infinite Crisis shutting down and its bullet points are still applicable today, probably even more so.

The Park Is A Decidedly Creepy Game Appetizer

(Editor’s Note: The screenshots in this review are provided by Funcom to the press. While I wanted to provide my own shots, none of my screenshot grabbing tools or even Steam were able to capture screenshots for some unknown reason)

With all the news about Funcom’s death spiral, being one of the few game developers to actually be charged and convicted for misleading the public (specifically investors) about their game, the recent flop that was Lego Minifigures Online, and the company’s ongoing and increasingly seemingly desperate financial situation, it’s nice to finally be able to talk about the Funcom that you and I know and love most: The one that tells a really good story.

The Park is, as previously discussed, the first in a line of experimental products by Funcom to put out games on a very low budget, at higher frequency, and to allow the team to gauge community reactions and see what works. Funcom’s first dive into the experimental market comes in the form of a $10 atmospheric walking simulator along the lines of Dear Esther or The Stanley Parable. If I had to sum the game up solely by it’s functions, it would be this: You walk around, get spooked, read things, ride rides, and get spooked.

Players take the role of Lorraine, self professed worst mother ever, as she goes searching for her lost son Callum in the spooky Atlantic Island Park that will be very familiar to those who have played The Secret World. In order to uncover the truth behind Callum’s disappearance, you’re going to need to dive into the deepest recesses of Lorraine’s disturbed mind, not to mention dig into the bloody past of the park itself. Not only does the park have a lot of secrets to hide, so does Lorraine as it becomes evident from the start that your narrator isn’t exactly reliable.

Like most good horror sets, The Park holds off on the spooky just long enough to lull you into a false sense of security, in the form of a long and (looking at the forums) divisive scene where the game tells the entire story of Hansel and Gretel while you ride through a spooky tunnel of love. It is at this point where the game starts to play the spooky dial like an instrument, turning it up and down at just the right moments before breaking the knob off at 11 for a final crescendo.

Now, those of you who know me are aware that I tend to be pretty hard on the horror genre, I regard a majority of horror media as lazy and uninspired, and have very little patience or regard for games/movies that consider sudden, loud screaming noises and spooky pictures as “scary.” Good horror involves getting into the player’s head, making them afraid to continue rather than simply being anxious in anticipation of the next loud noise/spooky image jump scare.

With that, I have to say that The Park has a lot of great, genuinely creepy scenes in it. Yes, the game does have a few jump scares and they are lame, easily spotted, and predictable, but they’re overshadowed by the park’s other attractions, each one given a fair amount of buildup and prolonged fright that is lacking even in other horror “walking simulator” games. I’d even go as far as comparing The Park to Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

One place where the game falls short, but not really, is in the danger zone, the fact that the game doesn’t have a fail state or any real threat to pile on to the player. Ultimately, it’s like a haunted house at a theme park. You’re spooked but there’s the lingering thought in the back of your mind that nothing you encounter will actually harm you. Hopefully.

The pendulum swings both ways, as going back to my previous comparison, while the monsters in Amnesia added heavily to the immersion and terror, hunting down the player and rattling endlessly, death also tended to break the flow that the game had taken so long to establish and build up. It’s an issue that has supporters on both sides, but The Park will play towards those that don’t want to worry about having to reload a level multiple times in order to progress.

Where the game truly shines is in the voice acting of Lorraine, whose demeanor swiftly cycles through frightened, terrified, and downright deranged over the course of the game’s events. Her internal monologues err on the side of hit or miss, some offering useful missives about whatever is going on on-screen, the others apparently being the random thoughts of a questionable mind. The “right click to call Callum” function, as hyped as it was in the game’s advertising run, is functionally useless and serves no purpose to the game other than to break immersion. It does, however, highlight the relatively poor voice acting of Callum and probably spoil the ending for those of you steeped in horror tropes.

While Lorraine’s voice actress does an impeccable job, I simply couldn’t get involved in the story of the duo, and in this sense the story writers at Funcom might be insane geniuses. The entire plot revolves around Lorraine’s apparent desperate attempt to save her son, a narrative that doesn’t exactly work when you’re constantly stopping to play in the park. It doesn’t help that Callum immediately presents himself as a character worth hating, leaving me to wonder several times why anyone would bear this nightmare in order to save his useless and evidently ungrateful ass. As it turns out, that’s exactly what the game is going for, as Lorraine actually doesn’t seem to be in too much of a rush to save her son and even contemplates leaving him there.

And that’s where it all comes full circle into The Park being a narrative about the nightmare that is parenthood, sacrificing your life and sanity all for a being that isn’t grateful and is never satisfied. I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to Silent Hill and I get it, the two share a lot in common thematically. The Park, like Silent Hill, isn’t centered on the spooky location, that’s basically a side character in the whole plot. The real plot is in the head of the protagonist, and how the world changes to mirror their experiences.

While The Park is a pretty full experience, those who haven’t played The Secret World will be let down by an ending that doesn’t wrap things up as much as it should. In order to fully understand the plot, you’ll need to play through the area as it exists in the MMO.

For a one hour, $10 game, I found The Park to be well worth its money. It looks good, plays decently, and makes me look forward to Funcom’s next experiment.

Direct 2 Netflix Episode 3: Bad Asses on the Bayou

For those of you who don’t follow this website regularly, Direct 2 Netflix is a podcast project I’m working on with a few of my friends where we watch and talk about movies that came out this year and bypassed the theater (or at least were not widely released). As you know, I’ve talked about adding more media content and likely branching outside of the realm of MMOs. The movies we talk about aren’t inherently bad, although most didn’t miss the theaters because they were just that good.

Each new episode is expected to come out on Saturday.

This week we looked at the third movie in the Bad Ass series, Bad Asses on the Bayou starring Danny Trejo, Danny Glover, and John Amos.

Weekend Wrapper: Still Not E3 Edition

This week marks a special occasion here at MMO Fallout, in that once again I am branching out. Check out the first episode of my weekly movie review podcast, Direct 2 Netflix. If you enjoy it, please subscribe and keep listening. We’ll have new episodes out hopefully every Monday.

As usual, the weekend wrapper looks at new games, news, and editorials from all over the web. If you have any articles to share, shoot it to us in an email to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com.

MMO News:

APB Reloaded is getting a server merge and new engine.
Lego Universe was hindered by dong detection software and high costs of customer support.
ArcheAge’s ongoing server FAQ isn’t complete, nor are the answers final.
Jagex details RuneScape’s upcoming updates.
Daybreak Game Company is focusing its development on Everquest Next over Landmark.

In Other News:

Steam introduces 14 day refund policy.
Xbox One 1gb bundle leaked. (Via Eurogamer)
Lucas hits Smash Bros on June 14th (Via Eurogamer)
XCOM 2 is PC exclusive and won’t support gamepads at launch. (Via Polygon)
Fallout 4 confirmed. (Via Giant Bomb)
Dota 2 prize pool tops $11 million. (Via IGN)

Opinion Section:

How FFXIV is about to get more accessible. (Via MMORPG.com)
Shovelware makers on Steam should be afraid. (Via MMO Fallout)
Interview with Chris Kluwe. (Via MMORPG.com)
How to make money without being evil. (Via Gamesindustry.biz)

Notable Releases:

Lego Worlds – Early Access ($14.99)
Hatred – ($19.99)

[Less Massive] Direct 2 Netflix Episode 1: It’s A Podcast!

This is a bit of self-promotion.

I’d like to divert your attention to a project I’m doing on the side, to test the whole podcasting waters. The show is called Direct 2 Netflix, hosted by myself and two of my acquaintances, where we review bad movies that are already on Netflix DVD.

The goal is to have a new episode out every Monday (meaning the next one will come out in a few days). The microphone is a bit shaky in some areas, but we’ll have a better one for next week. In this podcast, we look at the film The Intruders, starring Miranda Cosgrove and Donal Logue.

If you like it, subscribe and share!

Early Access: Szone – You Have Left The Zone

If gaming has suffered in any way from the MMO industry shift to free to play, it is through the saturation of what I’ve referred to as mass-market shovelware, MMOs that seem to exist for no other reason than to show up, exist for a while, and then hopefully leave with a little profit. These are games piled out by the thousands, mostly by devs in Russia, China, and Korea of no reputation and no discernible talent, throwing out games riddled with bugs, unfinished content, hackers, gold farmers, and a surprisingly filled out and functional cash shop.

The latest genre to be tied down and mercilessly tortured comes in the form of online clones of the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R, by GSC Game World, and while my patience with the developers of these games is growing thin, I will gladly admit that I have enjoyed one or two of their offerings. I genuinely enjoyed, and continue to play, Survarium.

You get an idea on just what kind of experience Szone Online is when you first load into the world and find that you are weaponless. The first NPC you meet, the blacksmith, tells you to come back later once you’ve gotten more experience and he’ll give you some stuff. Head inside the closest building, talk to an NPC, and he’ll give you some rusted weapons. Now the real frust-fun starts.

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Try to shoot the gun and you’ll get an error saying “no ammo.” Double click on the ammo and see the message “this ammo is already loaded.” What you need to do, and I figured this out through trial and error, is to unequip your gun and use a magazine on it in the inventory. Go through the long list of Steam reviews and you’ll see this issue pop up a lot, with new players put off by the simple lack of explanation on how to initially load your gun, disregarding a needlessly complex and convoluted method.

Szone Online is the first game I’ve seen where it is conceivable to “lose,” in that you’ll run out of ammunition and money, rendering you useless in combat and unable to make that money back. That being said, I don’t see myself playing long enough to fall into this trap because the game itself just isn’t fun.

The four hours of Szone that I managed to get in consisted mainly of me running from NPC to NPC, killing large swaths of dogs and rats, in what feels like bad fanfiction of the GSC STALKER universe. Just read a bit of the description.

This is a story of human pride. Time is at hand when, in their utter desire to study the world, people will start destroying it. Tests of high-energy heavy particles accelerators will result in billions of microscopic black hole rupturing the structure of time and space. This will become the point of no return. The Earth as we know it will cease to exist.

Szone isn’t a STALKER game, it just happens to be set in a post apocalypse, specifically in a “zone” in the Ukraine where players, or ‘stalkers’ seek out artifacts for the sake of science, glory, and profit.

The game plays about as poorly as it reads, likely owing to a combination of inexperienced programmers and a poor engine. Characters are clunky and will occasionally get stuck on geometry that they shouldn’t get stuck on. Jumping is a frustrating experience that will get you killed more than once since your character will simply not jump if you’re too close to whatever you’re jumping on. Animals seem to be able to reach you from distances they shouldn’t. Gun handling feels directly pulled from the numerous free to play shooters built partially to look and feel like Counter Strike 1.6, except without iron sights.

I don’t know which to blame for Szone’s combat, poor AI or bad netcode. Hit detection is horrible, with animals either often dying a few seconds after you shot them or just ignoring your bullets despite the splats of blood indicating a hit. Dogs are easy to pop off with one or two bullets, but once they start moving they become difficult to hit without spraying your automatic weapon everywhere. Shoddy netcode and poor hit detection often mean missing shots that should have hit, hitting with shots that should have missed, and dying because NPCs are warping around the map.

And don’t be confused by the fact that the game is in early access, Szone has been up and running for years. I originally played this game back in 2012 partially to aid in my Russian language courses, when the game was known as Stalker Online. Crucial issues like the netcode, lag, weapons, etc, haven’t had any noticeable change in three years.

If Szone is with us for the long haul, it’ll likely be because the game survives not off of massive income but by maintaining a cost of living that is near nothing, similar to Alganon. You won’t lose anything for playing it, other than your time, but I’d be willing to bet you won’t come out ready to dive back in.

Beta Perspective: Triad Wars

Disclosure: I haven’t played Sleeping Dogs, to which Triad Wars is set in the same universe, so this series is new to me. MMO Fallout should be taking part in a beta key giveaway at some point in the near future.

(Correction: Triad Wars is set in the same world as Sleeping Dogs, it is not a sequel)

Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat: Triad Wars is an asynchronous single player game where the only interaction you have with other players is via AI recreations of them. At some point, the devs intend on adding in cooperative play, but that’s it. If you came in expecting Grand Theft Auto Online in the Sleeping Dogs universe, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

I try to reserve the “Beta Perspective” column for games that fit the traditional sense of a beta, that being a game that is definitively a work in progress rather than a mostly completed product that is in the bug testing phase. The game isn’t being wiped, but that doesn’t change the fact that many of the systems are still very much incomplete.

The main goal of Triad Wars is to build up your criminal empire while simultaneously knocking down those of your rivals (Ie: every other criminal), in modern day China. You’ll do this by operating a turf and raiding the homes of others to steal their stuff and embarrass them in front of their mothers.

Thus we get to the current meat of the game: Raiding. Raids are something of an endurance run, tasking you with taking down each of the player’s resource pools (counterfeiting, cock fighting, etc) guarded by various NPC mobs before ultimately taking on the big guy himself. All you really need to complete a raid is to take out one building, but you get more rewards if you bring down the whole shebang.

You are limited by time and health, and the game recommends that if you don’t think you can do it, it’s best to cut your losses and run. You can always hightail it and make off with what you’ve got, lest you die/run out of time and lose everything. Your timer can be extended by performing a number of intel operations prior to assaulting the base, these involving breaking up deals, stealing merchandise, and beating up thugs.

Ultimately you end up with a lot more time than you’d probably ever need, an additional four minutes presently (giving ten total). It’s amazing how much an extra few minutes can dramatically reduce the tension and thus the mistakes a player makes while trying to beat the clock, and the whole process of collecting intel gives the game a bit more to do.

There’s also a bit of strategy in the whole symmetry between melee and ranged weaponry. The game is balanced in the sense that you can’t just walk in with a pistol (which you get very early on) and wipe everything out. Aiming is a pain and your avatar has all the accuracy of a drunkard, so in most cases you’re really better off saving your bullets for the guys who also have guns.

As you level up, you gain points that can be put into improving your character and your gang, improving health, mitigating damage, boosting power, etc. The other big part of the game comes in the form of favors, cards that you unlock through gameplay and buy through the cash shop that offer different bonuses. Some cards offer temporary guns, others permanent, some give you boosts to production and others protection on certain areas of your turf. You can buy packs of random cards through the cash shop, however the game supplies them in pretty good quantities via daily cards and acquiring through missions.

The two most glaring problems with Triad Wars are, I’m told, completely unfinished and the dev team is aware of their shortcomings: Controls and AI. The quality of controls in Triad Wars seems to go up and down as you play, where sometimes you’ll be pulling off amazing fighting stunts (melee combat is very similar to the Arkham series) and parkour moves, and other times you’ll be gunned down because your character simply refused to respond to key presses. I’m keeping count how many times I’ve been killed because no matter how many times I’ve pressed the button, my guy won’t draw his pistol. Right now it’s five. Five times.

Maneuvering while in sprint mode is also a massive pain, with my character making sudden and random movements while seeming sprinting everywhere except where I wanted him to go most of the time. I had a particularly frustrating time with the simple process of getting him in front of a shop counter to buy a health drink, because he kept automatically jumping over the counter.

The AI also makes it really easy to go through raids where your enemy doesn’t have a gun but you do. The AI’s method of dealing with an armed intruder is to take cover, wait until he gets close enough, and then bum-rush and tackle. A nice idea, but you can usually get close enough to fire off a headshot before they take their chance. It’s fun when you’re on the offensive, but then you realize that these guys are defending your base too.

I’ll end this with a suggestion that really popped out at me while playing:

You need to change the description on the cash shop. A fair amount of items sold for gold (cs currency) are rotated out and therefore only available for a limited time. The game isn’t clear that this is what the timers on the shop pages are for, and given the habit of cash shops to sell temporary cosmetics, I assumed that the devs were selling clothing and vehicles that lasted only a day or two, and immediately wrote the shop off since they cost in the realm of $10. It wasn’t until I actually bought something with the gold the game gives you that I realized my mistake. This needs to be communicated better, otherwise you might be putting players off.

Otherwise I’m having a lot of fun in Triad Wars. It’s definitely in need of a lot of work, and there isn’t an incredibly diverse range of content in the game, but you should check it out if you get the opportunity, and you will get the opportunity because MMO Fallout will be running a beta key giveaway at some point in the future.

Beta Perspective: RuneScape Death Mechanics

Now that Jagex has joined the rest of the MMO industry with the launch of a test server for major updates, I figured I’d use the opportunity to take a quick look at the upcoming new death mechanic as it currently stands. RuneScape’s death system has been a hot topic for years, as it started out with the player dropping everything except for their three most valuable items before moving on to a gravestone system that would eventually expire and make the player’s loot available for everyone.

It strikes of casual-izing, but it has more to do with the player base itself. Those who play RuneScape likely are aware that death for most has become a trivial affair, it’s rare to actually lose something when you have a half hour to get your stuff. Jagex realized that the only people who are losing things are people dying unfairly, whether it be from bugs, shoddy servers, or if someone hits your car backing out of the apartment parking lot while you’re fighting a boss and you have to go take down the license plate number before they drive off. But I digress.

RuneScape’s death changes have been a long time coming, and I say this as someone who never dies in the game.

For the purpose of seeing the new death interface, I made an exception.

I immediately grabbed my better gear and threw myself at the fires of one of RuneScape’s bosses. Death now teleports you to Death himself, who keeps hold of your items for 24 hours or until you can pay him off. My set of Bandos armor (the three cheapest pieces) plus an amulet of fury wound up costing me just over a hundred grand to replace, with my food and grand potions cutting a rather small fraction of the cost.

You can sacrifice some of the stuff you don’t want to cut a bit of the cost off, but by my figures it won’t do much. The addition of the 24 hour timer gives you the chance to hit the bank in case you don’t have any cash on you, or to go farm some stuff to sell if you don’t have the cash at all. The timer also allows players ample time to get their goods back, god forbid either your internet go down or the servers are unstable for multiple hours at a time.

The actual economic impact will have to be seen when the update goes live, but the goal is to introduce an item and gold sink through the cost of retaining items and the loss of those sacrificed or unable to retain. As someone who rarely dies, I don’t expect to see much of an impact from this update, but the knowledge that server disconnections are easier to deal with goes a long way to changing attitude while playing.

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