To Boldly Flee! Faster Than Light

Aaaaaahhh! There’s fire everywhere! Missiles are flying and engineering is tied up dealing with intruders; at least the shields are holding. The pilot is glaring at the console, counting down the seconds before the FTL drive can be engaged. This was poor choice of sector to jump to. The Rebel fleet had caught up with the brave crew of HMS Waffle. But there’s only one way out of the system, so flying through the jaws of the enemy was a necessary risk. At the last second, the engines are fired up flinging the ship into the next zone where new threats lurk.

Of course there’s danger everywhere in FTL. The Rebel fleet is always on your tail, chasing you through every sector. The intelligence your scout ship has collected is vital to the Federation cause. Your only chance of success is to beat the random pirates and aliens on the way to the Federation Fleet. Collecting salvage from the scraps of your enemies gives you currency to trade at friendly merchants. Buying upgrades is not only vital to your final goal, but is necessary to survive the journey.

 There’s plenty of choice available in ship systems, however the random nature of the game means you might not always find what you want. Weapon systems are divided into standard lasers and missiles, to exotic ion guns and beam weapons. Each has different power requirements and is affected by enemy shields in a different way. Arming yourself to the teeth with guns is not a wise strategy however as powering it all is expensive.

And there are plenty of other systems you’ll be relying on to keep your ship in one piece. Salvage can be spent on increasing the reactors power output. This allows you to boost shields and run auxiliary systems such as teleporters and cloaking devices. Sending an away team to board the enemy ship has become a favourite tactic of mine. Killing the enemy crew gives a nice bonus to the precious salvage you recover. That being said, I did lose a few brave souls to friendly fire accidents. Remembering to hold fire and teleport your party back is a good idea.

So how do all these weapons and system work in combat? Manning systems gains a little extra performance. Having an engineer working the engines and pilot in the cockpit gives you a chance to dodge attacks entirely. It also charges your FTL jump allowing you to make your escape if necessary. Shields can hold off light laser fire, but missiles, boarding parties and teleporting bombs can bypass them entirely to deal nasty interior damage. If a system is hit, it loses power and can even go offline until you move a crew member to repair it. Fires can break out and sustained fire can punch holes in the hull, causing precious oxygen to start leaking out. Thankfully space bar pauses the action so you can plan crew movement and reassign power. Land enough hits on your opponent and you’ll see them satisfyingly break up into little pieces.

Being a Roguelike game; I would have a normally strayed away from a title like FTL. The genre is famously defined by randomness, high difficulty and unfairness. Similar to arcade games of yesteryear. FTL changed my mind with some smart design choices. The game itself is fairly short. A good run will only take an hour or so to play. So dying part way through is not such a problem. There’s plenty of unlocks and achievements to strive for. There not just the standard, well done you’ve played the game achievements either. They actually challenge you to use a ship in particular manner and reward you with new ship layouts.

The aesthetic design of the game is clean and crisp. The sprites in the game are of a very high quality and are backed up by an excellent bit tune-esque soundtrack. The sound effects are also cleverly chosen to suit the atmosphere of the game, whilst providing clear feedback of what’s happening.

There’s plenty to discover on each journey. The random events are well designed and often given you tough choices to make. Some enemies are smart enough to beg for their life, offering you a bounty. Others fire up their engines to try and make an escape.  The environments such as nebulae give you a chance to delay Rebel pursuers. Asteroid belts, solar flares and ion storms also add twists to your combat plans.

Overall, FTL has just jumped its way onto my list of favourite games of the year. It provides a lot of entertainment for a very sensible price. There’s even an easy mode for people like myself who want to play with all the cool toys, rather than being turned into space dust on a regular basis. And FTL is one of the first Kickstarter game projects to see release. The small development team has really delivered for those who backed it.

MMOs Level Up? GW2 Part 2

It’s good to see GW2 is selling well. Innovation often takes second place to iteration in AAA development. GW2 has finally broken through that barrier which has been a problem for many MMOs that have struggled to take off.

So what’s different with GW2? Well there’s a series of changes too what was the ‘standard formula’. Let’s start with the classes. Usually you pick your class, get abilities as you level up and equip a weapon, which doubles as your stats stick to beat your opponent over the head with.

GW2 changes where you acquire skills. No longer do you have find and pay a training guru to learn wax on, wax off. Instead your first five skills are determined by you weapon choice. Picking up a hefty greatsword on a Warrior grants a series of deadly AoE slicing skills. But swap to a gun and now you have a set of skills to cripple your opponent’s defences and finish them with deadly volleys. Also the same weapons are used differently by each class, which adds great flavour to the game. A Memser using a greatsword gains a series of spectacular ranged attacks. Blasting opponents with bright purple laser beams and driving spikes of energy through the ground.

To round off your action bar, you have a choice of slot skills. You start with a basic healing skill and unlock further slots on your way to level thirty. You earn skill points from levelling and events in the world. This allows you to spend them in your character sheet to gain new abilities unique to your class.

And on top of that customisation sits the traits system. This functions in a similar way to traditional talent trees. You put points in to unlock bonus passive skills and stats. Combining these three mechanics together allows for some great character customisation. Because of the variety of choice for each class, you can build any profession to fill any role. From a tough spell caster to a support based heavy armour weary.

There’s plenty of choice in how you want to enjoy the levelling experience. Previous MMOs have had a very set path. Player’s rarely had any choice in where to go or what to do. Having more than one zone to explore has often been a luxury, but not anymore. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by just how little of the world I’ve seen. Having hit max level on my fist character, the stats tell me I’ve only seen a little over forty per cent. That’s astonishing. There are still whole areas untouched and the main story line to complete.

And there was always World vs World or structured PvP just a button press away if I felt like it. In fact if balanced PvP is your thing, you don’t even have to level. You can just jump in at max level with good gear and have a real skill based fight.

The combat gameplay is also a step up. Certain skills can be used simultaneously, or have their effects combined to create powerful combos. This allows players to create great synergies between the different professions. Most skills have a reasonable recharge time, which moves away from the usual play of spamming the best ability, limited only by a particular resource.  Now you no longer feel penalised for using utility skills. Instead they become part of your standard play as you can only benefit from using them.

Also, the combat is a lot more manoeuvrable as most skills can be used on the move. It does require some trial and error to work it out though as it’s not clear which can or can’t. You also have the ability to dodge. Above your health pool is a recharging energy bar. When full you can dodge twice to avoid all incoming damage. In the early levels you often forget you have it, but bump into an elite enemy and you’ll need it! These can hit players with nasty attacks which are best avoided if you want to live more than a few seconds.

However if the worst happens, you’re not out of the fight yet. Instead of dying, you get an opportunity to rally. You’re reduced to four abilities based on your profession. If you manage to kill any enemy you rally; wounded but able to carry on. Allies can also help get you back on your feet, and you can rally by healing yourself if enemies leave you alone.

It’s not all positive changes though, some ideas don’t quite work. Crafting is one example. You can pick two different crafting skills and you can gather all crafting materials. You can swap crafting skills without losing all your hard earned progress. But you’ll find it almost impossible to level one of them all the way without some farming, or spending money on the trading network. This is a bit of a shame since ArenaNet have done such a good job of removing the grind from other areas. I’m not saying it should become easy. But until you work out the mechanics, it can be frustrating; constantly running out of materials for little progress. 

That being said, a lot of convenience has been added by allowing you to access your bank and a crafting materials bank, directly from any crafting station. You can also send crafting materials directly from you inventory to the bank with two clicks. This saves a lot of pointless running around.

If GW2 is lacking anything, it would be raiding and more objectives for structured PvP. Currently the PvP maps are all based around holding control points. There really needs to be more variety in game modes to improve replay-ability. Raiding is more of an odd omission. Technically there is lots of large group PvE content that occurs through the games Dynamic Events. But these tend to be single boss fights and not too challenging if plenty of players are around. They do scale, but they are slightly simplistic in design so you can work out tactics without reading a guide. Large scale organised PvE like raiding is fun because of the high skill challenge it can provide for a group of players. All things considered, GW2 has moved the genre forwards and it’s well worth the price. Hopefully ArenaNet will continue this high level of quality in future expansions.

MMOs: The State of Play

You could be forgiven for thinking that 2012 is the year of the MMO, they’re everywhere! With Guild Wars 2 dominating the headlines and reviews, what’s the rest of the competition up to?

Well I’m going to cheat to bring up Diablo 3’s recent patch (Blizzard think’s it’s an MMO). I was fairly critical of the difficulty in my review. There was a clear lack of balance in the difficulty of elite enemies and bosses. To counter the problem Blizzard made a range of changes, tweaking numbers across the board.

Abilities were buffed and enemies nerfed to create a massively improved difficulty curve. I’m still slogging my way through Inferno, but it has become a lot more fun to play. It feels like a challenge again rather than a test of my patience. I still wish they would add an option to start on higher difficulties. As much as I want to play the other classes, I can’t bring myself to play through hours and hours of gameplay that is unlikely to kill me once.

To spice up the endgame content, Paragon levels have been added as well as buffs to legendary items. Paragon levels allow your character to continue gaining power. Each one grants a stats boost and gives you a little extra gold and magic find to help you find the best gear. It keeps the levelling treadmill ticking over. Each one requires a massive amount of experience and there’s a hundred of them! Only a madman or someone who farms items for a living (oh yes they exist) will ever hit the maximum level.

Legendary items have been tweaked to include bonus effects, such as on hit bonuses and special effects to make them stand out. Adding up all the changes does move Diablo 3 towards being a great game. It’s this level of care and attention to their game’s post release, which has earned Blizzard the reputation they have.

But in a galaxy far, far away, things are not looking good. Everyone had predicted The Old Republic’s inevitable slide into a free-to-play model, but it happened a lot sooner than expected. Bioware’s studio that developed the game has shrunk drastically, which is always a shame.

The new system is built around cartel coins that can be earned through play, or bought through the standard subscription. Now almost all aspects of the game have limited access for free, with the option to spend cartel coins for full access. Oddly, the operations are limited to subscribers only, blocking free players from sampling some great content, and potentially paying for more. However the best part of the game is entirely free. The levelling in SW:ToR is easily the best story content in any MMO. Bioware is clearly hoping to use this to draw new players into the game and get them spending money in other areas.

In the world of MMORPGs, WoW and Rift have decided to jump in the same boat. Their new expansions aren’t far from release with all the standard content we have come to expect. More character levels, new dungeons, raids and story. But surprisingly, the granddad of the genre Everquest is about to get its nineteenth expansion. It goes to shows what happens when a game carves out a dedicated fan-base.

And finally, Sony Online Entertainment has let slip the news that Planetside 2 will be released before Christmas. It was announced as part of the ‘Alpha Squad’ package which acts as a sort of pre-purchase. The game will be free-to-play, but the package will grant beta access with in game items and a chunk of Sony’s online games currency on full release. The market has been dominated by MMORPGs for such a long time; it’s exciting to see the return of MMOFPS. The alpha and beta footage released so far has looked fantastic. So fingers crossed for an excellent end to the year.

MMOs Level up? Guild Wars 2

Finally Guild Wars 2 hits release after years of build-up, prophesising the second coming of MMOs. And it’s the first MMO that has hit the ground running. Usually there would be servers going up and down like yo-yos, but GW2 has had a very smooth launch. However the auction house servers are still having trouble, to the annoyance of budding entrepreneurs.

ArenaNet unveiled GW2 with many ambitious promises and a clear goal of setting a new standard for MMOs. So how have they done with revamping the levelling experience? The formula so far has presented players with a very linear experience, following a bread-crumb trail of quest givers. Collecting bear flanks from every one in ten bears that was lucky enough to be born with buttocks.

In GW2 quests are swapped for events that cover the map. You can usually stroll out of one event straight into another. It’s fair to say that the standard events haven’t made any great improvement on traditional quests. Most involve killing the hostile NPCs plaguing the area and recovering objects to hand in. Thankfully they have entirely removed any randomness. Doing any action listed for the event increases your contribution, and each event provides a couple of ways to progress.

Dynamic events are the real spice in the questing experience. Randomly appearing around the map, you are alerted to any that are nearby. They are often escort missions or large scale fights against a mini-boss, but they always inject action into the area. In Queensdale, the human starting area, a group of bandits rallied to raid a local farm. But as the battle got into full swing, a cave troll burst onto the scene. Chaos erupted as a three way battle broke out. Players had to utilise all their skills, helping fallen comrades and watching their step, or else they would fall into the clutches of bandit reinforcements.

A third part to questing is your character’s personal story. During character creation you are presented with a series of backstory choices. These vary between your chosen race and profession, but together build into an interesting profile. Quests for you story are dotted throughout your levelling experience. You always have the next part highlighted on your map, and the journal details your past chapters. All stories do the classic trick of pretending you are the chosen one, whilst you’re surrounded by thousands of other ‘chosen’ players. But it’s a sensible choice as it introduces you to the main characters of the GW2 lore, and what is happening within the world of Kryta.

I’ve found the early story to be standard fair for a fantasy game, however that all changed around level thirty. I was introduced to new factions in the story and presented with real choices to make. At this point the writing definitely improved. I started going on missions with a Charr named Tybalt who is a genuinely funny character. One part of my story involved him being disguised as the daughter of a powerful politician. Ridiculousness ensued as he adjusted to his new form, and did his best to disguise his deep growly voice as pirate captains tried their best pick-up lines. The writing still doesn’t match that of Star Wars: The Old Republic, but it’s ahead of the rest of the field.

These aren’t the only options for gaining experience. PvP is available right from the start in both balanced arenas and the open World vs World. The WvW content does have the problem of being unbalanced for new characters. Your base stats are boosted to max level, but you will be lacking the gear required to take part. I found myself struggling with wildlife as a level ten Elementalist, however when I merged into a large group, I was able to support my teammates and actually take part.

Exploration of the world has been expanded on since the beta. Dotted around the vistas of each zone are viewpoints. These provide the challenge of scaling tricky scenery and finding hidden paths. When you reach them, you are rewarded with a good chunk of experience points and a quick cinematic camera pan that shows off the scenery in the area.  Experience is also handed out for reaching waypoints and points of interest, further encouraging players to explore every inch of the landscape.

Crafting also gives experience bonuses every time you reach a new rank. This is easily the most difficult way to level up due to the rarity of materials. However this didn’t stop a determined group of players using it to claim the title for the first max level character.

It would be fair to say that GW2 hasn’t massively improved the levelling experience. Instead it has iterated on previous ideas and done an excellent job of bringing them all together. The variety available has kept me interested in what I’m doing, avoiding the feeling of grinding for levels. But as the majority of players are still on the levelling curve, it remains to be seen if the endgame content will match up to it’s peers.