review – Page 9 – MMO Fallout

[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.

Less Massive Review: Tales From The Borderlands Episode 1

(Note: This review contains spoilers for Borderlands 2.)

Telltale Games is easily one of my favorite game developers, proving the viability of AAA point and click adventure games in a world that had long since left the genre behind. The company spearheaded and successfully proved the viability of monthly episodic games, allowing players to buy the entire season with the added bonus of getting it all on dvd at the end for simply paying the shipping cost.

The idea of an episodic, intelligent, narrative take on the Borderlands universe is one that excited me greatly when it was announced earlier this year. I have a fondness for the Borderlands series, and while the series has progressed quite a bit since the first title, the games have never delved deep into the world in which your vault hunters live. All Borderlands needs to bring out its underbelly is a capable set of hands.

Tales From The Borderlands is set after the events of Borderlands 2. Handsome Jack is dead and the Hyperion Corporation is going through a bit of a power vacuum. Vault Hunters are on the prowl looking for the newly discovered vaults, and Hyperion wants a piece of the pie. The story is told by two narrators. Rhys, a Hyperion employee, finds himself demoted to janitor and heads down to Pandora in an effort to screw over his boss and secure a vault key (and hopefully cement his real promotion). Fiona, a con artist, works on Pandora with her sister and adoptive mentor who absolutely won’t betray them, Felix.

As far as narrators go, you won’t find a pair less reliable than Rhys and Fiona, a factor that the game makes readily apparent from the start. The story shifts between perspectives, often going back and retelling the same story from the other character’s point of view, with both sides regularly contradicting each other. Who is telling the truth? Did Rhys really stand up to that group of psychos or did he wet himself and cry while the machine gun wielding robot did all of the work? That’s up to you to decide.

In their travels, the characters meet a variety of insane locals including my current favorite: Shade. The characters in this version are a lot more tame than their Borderlands counterparts, a more subtle comedy to match the slower pace of the game. As with previous games in Telltale’s lineup, Tales From The Borderlands has more in common with an interactive movie than a full-fledged action title. There are a few actiony moments here and there, mostly fed through quick time events, but anyone familiar with the Telltale Games series knows that these games are all about strong characters, powerful dialogue, and (more recently) giving the player choice to shape their game.

The best part is that the episodic nature allows Telltale to shape future episodes based on features players didn’t like or suggest. I can’t wait for episode 2 of Tales From The Borderlands, not to mention the upcoming Game of Thrones. Check it out on just about any device. Episode one is available now, with new episodes coming in the next few months.

Diaries From RuneScape: November In Review

RuneScape is going to be a regular game for the Diaries From column, published on the last Thursday of each month and covering the entire month’s worth of updates.

1. Prifddinas Part 2 – 9/10

The elven city of Prifddinas has quickly become one of my favorite updates of 2014, and not just because I’ve been waiting for this update ever since it was teased way back in 2004. I went through high school and ended up one semester away from my bachelor’s degree in the time Jagex took to put this update out. There are kids playing RuneScape today who were still in diapers when the city was first teased. It was a really long time ago.

Prifddinas is a giant skilling hub, a place where high level players can theoretically go and virtually never have a reason to leave. There is a ton of content, from pickpocketing elves to finding hidden titles, unlocking pets and other rewards, and I have only managed to scratch the surface.

Clan Amlodd (Divination and Summoning) – Shadow creatures are useless as a divination training, since they don’t drop cores enough to be a viable alternative. The only time I’ve found myself killing shadow creatures is when a daily task dictates it. Otherwise this area has the convenience of an NPC to trade your summoning pouches in for a small amount of shards to make summoning less of a money sink.
Clan Ithell (Construction and Crafting) – This is my new favorite area in the game. The harps provide semi-afk crafting training with the bonus reward of harmonic dust that can be used to upgrade your dragon pickaxe and hatchet. Next to the harp room is a big rock containing soft clay next to a potter’s wheel and furnace, making crafting dailies much more convenient. When the area first released, mining the maximum fifty crystal stone per day and turning it into flasks was a great money maker before the market flooded.
Clan Hefin (Agility and Prayer) – If there is one skill I hate training more than crafting, it’s agility, and this area is right up my alley. I haven’t touched the new agility course, but I should since it is the fastest course and offers various rewards for completing laps. Generally I only have enough patience for agility to grab the twenty thousand (forty if you have bonus exp) agility experience for participating in the daily mini-game. The prayer section is a money sink, for 130,000 gold you can buy and clean crystals for prayer experience. If you are really rich, you can clean thirty stones per hour, spending 3.9 million for 279,000 experience. A much better alternative to buying and grinding bones, if for convenience over price.
Clan Meilyr (Dungeoneering and Herblore) – I don’t have 95 dungeoneering so I can’t comment on just about anything in this section. Harmony moss is interesting, you buy seeds for 50 thousand, and then plant them on skill-specific posts. The moss grows by gaining experience in the related skill, and the final product can be used in potions or sold for a small profit. I love combination potions since I can finally ditch my super sets, and I like the idea of certain potions requiring you to find the recipe in dungeoneering. It offers an extra incentive to go dungeon diving.

2. Treasure Trail & Community Tools – 8/10

Treasure trails are RuneScape’s treasure hunting mini-game, scrolls found from monsters and through other activities that offer puzzles and clues that must be followed to find rewards. If you’re lucky, you can find insanely expensive equipment/cosmetics. Otherwise you are 99% of the community and find a few low level items for a half hour or so of hunting. I don’t have the logistics to figure out if the rewards are statistically dropping at a better rate, but I like the idea of introducing new and better stuff while removing less desirable rewards.

I’ve found that the majority of players fall into two categories for the player examine feature: those who haven’t touched it and are at the default settings or those who have set their account to private.

3. Heart of Stone Quest – 6/10

I didn’t enjoy this month’s quest. RuneScape’s quest system has been rough ever since Jagex brought the world into the sixth age and made it so each quest set before then is a flashback or a memory or something. Heart of Stone is supposed to be an introductory quest to the elder gods, a topic that if you’ve been keeping up with the quests will seem out of place since your character has marinated in the topic for years. Every once in a while Jagex will go back and bring in a quest to introduce players to a certain idea, throwing consistency into the wind when your character who has known about these topics for years suddenly has no idea what they are.

As an introductory quest, it feels like everyone else is doing the fun stuff. You show up in the quest after all of this interesting stuff happens, and the quest is over before the really interesting stuff will happen, and knowing Jagex the sequel is at least six months away, if not a full year or more.

The first and second batches for Prifddinas are going to keep myself, and many other players, busy for a long time to come. By giving a more tolerable way to train the most intolerable skills, hitting end-game content is looking a lot more realistic.

Less Massive: Afterfall Insanity Is Free, And Still Costs Too Much

If you follow MMO Fallout on Twitter, or even if you don’t and simply catch my tweets on the sidebar of this website, you might have followed a link yesterday to redeem a free copy of Afterfall Insanity. Well, after putting about six hours into the game, I can honestly say that I got out of this exactly what I paid in: Absolutely nothing. The simple fact that I knew what the twist ending was going to be not even five minutes into the story should have been the first sign, and probably the only one I needed.

Afterfall Insanity is a third person game from Intoxicate Studios. The game takes place in a fictional timeline where nuclear war breaks out and most of the world is destroyed. Thankfully, a small portion of humanity managed to survive by living in underground Fallout© shelters. You play as Albert Tokaj, a psychiatrist specializing in confinement syndrome who notices that the mental and physical status of those in his shelter is growing increasingly unstable. Is everyone going insane around Tokaj, or is he the one who is truly crazy? Spoiler: It’s him.

In the world of “survival horror” games, Afterfall Insanity is on the level of Syfy original movie. Like many other low-budget horror flicks before it, Afterfall Insanity sets out to tell a serious story and, in the process, unintentionally creates something so schlocky that the horror element is replaced by bad comedy. Tokaj flips from “I’m a doctor, I have to help these people” to beating insane people to death so fast, the player is bound to get whiplash from the experience. There is less than a minute between Tokaj punching his guard for abusing an insane person and him wielding a fire axe and chopping off limbs.

It’s hard to get motivated for the horror aspect of Afterfall when the voice actor playing Albert has the emotional range of stale roadkill. Just about all of the voice actors provide the kind of enthusiasm you’d expect from a high school student being picked to read a passage from Shakespeare. It’s the kind of voice acting that makes you suddenly appreciate the works of Tommy Wiseau, or the dramatic chops of Nicolas Cage. Throw that voice acting in with copious amounts of broken cutscenes that clip through actors and the environment, and shake in some mediocre animation, and you have a recipe for gaming’s Asylum Film company with none of the self-awareness.

I have to assume that Intoxicate Games developed Afterfall by looking at popular survival and horror games and plucking concepts to use, albeit half-cocked and unfinished. The melee combat system, by which you’ll find all sorts of pipes and axes lying around, is clearly taken from Condemned, minus the unique feel of each weapon that set Condemned apart. Melee combat in Afterfall is clunky, Albert will often take another swing or two after you’ve stopped clicking. Enemies get in cheap shots often, hit detection is poor at best, and blocking seems mostly useless since it doesn’t do much to mitigate damage.

Afterfall grabs fear aspects from various other titles, and implements them in a manner that is just as woody and inauthentic as the acting. Albert will get spooked when scary things happen around him, leading to the picture going fuzzy and aiming a gun becomes difficult, effectively meaningless if you’re using the melee weapons. There are puzzles in the game, most of which consist of repeatedly hitting the same button, or hitting the directional arrows in a random order based on trial and error.

Which isn’t to say that the game falls completely flat. Afterfall is at its best when the developers aren’t trying as much. During the first half of the game, when your biggest adversary is the darkness and your limited flashlight, the game genuinely gets creepy. It is blatantly obvious from the beginning how the game is going to end, anyone who has played Spec Ops: The Line knows this tale back to front, but in that time where Albert loses his two bodyguards and must travel through the dark and creepy passageways alone, that is where the game hits its high points. Parts like silhouette children dancing in a circle are not scary.

There are so many better horror games on the market, and a lot of them come from indie developers like the Penumbra games and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Instead of going for a game that picks random elements from other games, why not just play those games directly? Amnesia, Dead Space, Eternal Darkness, etc.

MMOments: Destiny

Have you heard of the black garden? The greatest threat to us all lies there. I wish I could tell you all about Destiny’s rich story and lore, I really do, but frankly there isn’t much that I can remember that isn’t tied to a basic storytelling trope. Basically the story is that a giant construct called The Traveler came to Earth where it ushered in a new era of technology and innovation, taking humanity to the stars. In space, naturally, we encountered aliens hell bent on killing us for no apparent reason other than that they are evil and we have god on our side. A traveler named The Traveler, bad guys called The Darkness, and the guardians of light are Guardians? I’m rather surprised that Bungie didn’t go full force and have you taking missions from Goody McGooderson, aided of course by his eventually-outed-as-evil assistant, Badguy McBackstabby.

It’s hard to remember much about Destiny with such groundbreaking writing like “the Vex are so evil that they despise other evil beings.” Most of this is narrated by a Peter Dinklage who sounds suspiciously like he found a copy of the Destiny script while bored at the doctor’s office and Bungie stealthily recorded him narrating it out loud. The rest is told through grimoire cards, but you’re going to have to go to Bungie.net in order to read what they are because there is no in-game lore book like in, well, every other RPG with some form of lore book. I mentioned my hope in the beta that this would be fully implemented on release, count that as a disappointment.

It’s hard to not make comparisons to games like Borderlands, when the two are so similar. Destiny is a solid shooter and a fun time, and yet it will deserve every single one of the disappointed reviews that are currently making their way to press, and that is a shame because Destiny is a very fun game. When all is said and done, Bungie’s greatest sin in all of this will be that they gave too much hype to a generic game, like when McDonald’s would treat the return of the McRib as if it were a brand new discovery when it was the same sandwich we’d been having for years. We get it, Ronald, you put boneless rib on a sandwich and added some onion and a pickle. Twenty marketing campaigns later, and it’s the same sandwich.

Make no mistake, Destiny is an impressive looking game both in the graphical department as well as taking relatively small environments and making them look gigantic. It is also a solid shooter with solid RPG mechanics and progression system with some loot on the side. As with games like Borderlands and Diablo before it, part of Destiny’s draw is the never-ending quest for more loot, higher levels, and progressively more powerful weapons and armor to shoot a lot of bad guys who have committed the crime of carrying your loot. The shooting, Destiny does well. Weapons feel like they have real weight and especially handcannons pack a punch that feels like it could knock the controller out of your hands.

Combat against the AI varies in nature, and as with Borderlands can eventually feel like a chore. Devoid of any intelligent AI, Bungie’s take on difficulty is to employ the same cheap tricks used in similar games, and use them in intolerable numbers and combinations that make me think Bungie missed a course on how combat is balanced in RPGs. You see, in standard mobs there is a balance between power, defense, and speed. You can have mobs that are invisible, mobs that have high health, and mobs that run incredibly fast in large numbers and deal heavy melee damage. Creating a creature that mobs in packs, has a lot of health and does heavy damage, and runs around invisible? Ridiculous. Snipers using invisibility is a pretty common trope in gaming, but snipers that remain invisible while they’re shooting you? That’s just sadistic.

Bosses carry the same poor AI, considering that they merely serve as walking tanks. They aren’t difficult as much as they are unfair, merely large hitboxes with a lot of health carrying a weapon with ridiculously high damage and splash radius, which makes them very easy to defeat if you can keep moving. I think I died by one boss so far, and it’s because his area had a constant stream of mid-tier creatures whose guns all had lock-on bullets. Oh yea, enemies have guns with bullets that change course and follow you through the air. Otherwise, I can guarantee that your death will almost always come when the game goes “screw it” and just throws so many mobs at you at once that there is no way to kill them fast enough and nowhere to use cover to regenerate.

One problem Destiny faces is that Bungie’s take on sociability is, well, odd to say the least. On one hand, partying and getting into impromptu groups with random players and friends alike is seamless and enjoyable. I’ve taken on numerous boss dungeons where I suddenly found two other players by my side, and while none of them talked, everyone seemed to know what to do. Chat is handled through emoticons as well as through local voice chat if you can find anyone else with a headset plugged in.

On the other hand, the social aspect is essentially nonexistent outside of the off chance you manage to stumble upon one of the game’s exceedingly rare public events. The trade hub, the center for social contact, has little promise for social activity. Chat is nonexistent in both its vocal and keyboard form, there are no social mini-games, and trade doesn’t exist at all in Destiny so you can’t even go into town to sell off or give away your loot. Bungie’s official statement is that this is because they want every weapon to have a personal story behind it. This is a pretty heavy order, since it assumes that your combat moments will be memorable enough for players to actually remember how they got their weapons. I remember how I got each and every one of my weapons: I killed a bunch of unmemorable mobs until an orb popped out and then I picked that up.

PvP is a mess, and a real heavy step back considering we’re talking about the company that made Halo 2. The one thing Bungie did right was to consolidate stats in the Crucible, meaning you are no better than any other player just because you are a higher level or have better gear. Everyone is the same. Well, mostly. Maps are far too small and close-quartered, there is no segregation between competitive and noncompetitive players, you can’t vote on what map or mode you want to play next, there is no punishment for abandoning your team, no playlists, no private matches, and no matchmaking by pvp rank.

If there is one thing to be said about Destiny, it’s the knowledge that Bungie’s alleged dedication to the title means that all of these problems could be a thing of the past when you’re reading our updated review months from now. For now, though, what we’ve seen at launch is an incredibly forgettable story wrapped around a game that is, for all purposes, incredibly barebones and at the retail price of $60-150 despite missing a number of features. The social aspects are weak, if not mostly nonexistent, considering that this is apparently an MMO. Unless you are hell bent on getting the game immediately, give it a few months to go down in price.

Destiny falls somewhere in the realm of decent, and assuredly there are plenty of people who will find joy in it. Hopefully Bungie will work hard over the next couple of months to fix some of the game’s more glaring issues.

MMOments: RuneScape Companion App

I finally had a chance to try out the RuneScape companion app on my iPad today. Currently the app isn’t an actual app, as in one that you download through the Google Play store or Apple store, but exists as a website you access through your device’s browser. The app allows access to a multitude of features, including your bank, the Grand Exchange, stock market, chat, and more. I tested this out using an iPad mini, and found performance to be mostly alright. There is a bit of annoyance in setting up the device, as you are required to have an authenticator set up to access features like the Grand Exchange, which is likely on the same device. You also have to talk to the tutorial NPC at the Grand Exchange and enable access through the game.

As a companion app for RuneScape on the go, this is turning out to be a pretty good program. Trading is done seamlessly via items stored in the bank, and anything purchased through the Grand Exchange is stored in your bank as well. Merchants can use the app on their phone while out of the house to continue making money flipping items (buy low, sell high), which is what many seem to already be doing. You can even simply use the app to keep up with your friends and clan using the chat program. The distractions & diversions window shows progress and reset timers on activities, making it possible to check progress without actually going in-game.

But none of this is useful if you want to have the companion app open while playing, as currently you cannot be logged into both simultaneously (which is unlikely to change). Logging into RuneScape will kick you out of the companion app. On the other hand, you can also access the companion app from your desktop browser, meaning that you don’t need one of those fancy smartphones or tablets to enjoy the convenience.

I have high hopes for the RuneScape companion app.

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Less Than Massive: Thinking About Burial At Sea Part 1

I finally finished Bioshock Infinite’s second DLC: Burial at Sea Part 1, which wasn’t exactly an easy feat. I see a lot of reviews stating that the game takes around two hours to complete, which sounds like a reasonable estimation, but I kept getting frustrated by multiple game-breaking bugs that the process from start to finish took a few days. If you aren’t an idiot like I am and knew where you were going, backtracking is literally impossible at the moment (at least in the PS3 version) because of the presence of a bug that causes the airlocks to spin forever when you try to enter through them a second time. I also faced several times where the game crashed, which I think had to do with attacking certain story-related splicers before I was supposed to. I haven’t seen a game crash from breaking NPC scripting in a long time.

My biggest complaint with Burial at Sea is that the game attempts to merge both worlds of Columbia and Rapture with varying success. In all honesty, I would have rather seen Infinite’s characters dealing with a more Rapture-centric lifestyle. Plasmids and Eve are the exact same Vigors and Salts you encountered in Infinite, they are just called Plasmids and Eve now. Elizabeth lies to Booker by telling him that her ability to rip tears is just a Plasmid called none of your damn business, and he doesn’t question much further. The sky-hook, or the air grabber as it is called here, has no contextual reason for existing in Rapture’s tight corridors and would have been better replaced by Bioshock’s large wrench, but I get the feeling that Ken Levine wouldn’t let this go through without the sky hook being present. Apparently someone created a tool to navigate Rapture’s equally pointless decorations.

There aren’t many upgrades, not that it matters because you won’t find enough money over the course of the game to afford more than two or three of them. I managed to pick up a generic weapon mod that gave +25% damage across the board and an upgrade to the shock jockey. Ken Levine said that Burial at Sea is all about stealth and resource management, a fancy way of saying that ammo is extremely scarce, and the game definitely feels like a constant fight for survival. You’ll find yourself regularly outnumbered and outgunned, and death comes very easy in Rapture. Even on the lower difficulty, your shield doesn’t protect from much and recharges very slowly. You have a very difficult game when you add in Rapture’s ability to fill what was previously a cleared out room with new splicers.

One bit I particularly enjoyed about Rapture is the ability to miss what otherwise would have been key features. Previous Bioshock games had a habit of ensuring you were forced to encounter new weapons and Plasmids in order to progress the story. Aside from the one or two Plasmids required to progress, it is very possible to walk by and completely pass them over if you aren’t paying attention. I actually missed the Carbine and the shotgun my first playthrough. The most powerful weapon in the game is the microwave gun, another creation that has no reason for existing, that literally cooks your enemy until they explode, can also be completely missed if you don’t find the audio log that reveals the door code.

The short glimpse of normal Rapture that you get is rigid and filled with emotionless exposition on topics you already know if you’ve played the original Bioshock games. It feels less like a walk through pre-crazy Rapture and more like a really inauthentic museum exhibit. Where they do manage to impress is in a couple of small areas where you see people using Plasmids in a context that has nothing to do with murder. The waiter, for instance, zips around the floor of a restaurant to better serve the customers with the use of a teleportation Plasmid. Booker snaps his fingers to create a flame to light Elizabeth’s cigarette. Small things, but interesting nonetheless.

I found myself more interested with Sander Cohen, the man who sends you to the prison Andrew Ryan set up for Fontaine’s men to find your lost daughter, than anyone else. After all, I already knew (or thought I knew) Booker’s story and Elizabeth is about as subtle as a hammer to the skull. Cohen is still the same brilliant artist and maniacal psychopath that he always was, and his art gallery and performance are bound to terrify and leave you in awe. As in Bioshock, Cohen seems to know a lot about what is going on, and what part Booker and Elizabeth play in it.

Burial at Sea definitely has closure in its ending, one that throws a curveball by playing on your knowledge of Infinite to get you guessing as to what the big reveal is, only to go in a completely opposite direction. If you enjoyed Infinite, pick up the season pass for $20. It includes a survival mode and Burial at Sea part 1 and 2.

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