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MOBA Crash

November 5, 2014 by Belghast

Falling Down

Yesterday we had an interesting bit of news released as the first big MOBA, or multiplayer online battle arena if you are not familiar with the term, announced that they would be closing their doors. Dawngate was the product offering by Electronic Arts and entered closed testing in May 2013 but quickly fell from the buzz cycle. Quite honestly when I saw this announcement I had quite literally forgotten there was a game called Dawngate. Some of the complaints about the game was that it felt like a rather lifeless clone of League of Legends. Many of the Champions or “Shapers” as they called them seemed to have one to one relationships to league of legends champions. However the game did try to fix some of the things that were broken with the existing Summoner’s Rift map type, adding in more interesting gameplay elements.

The problem is that no one that I knew was actually playing it. There were a handful of people who got into the beta process last June and then I never heard anything again about the game. For whatever reason they lost at producing enough forward hype for their game to drown out the other MOBAs or at least fight for a place at the table. The game looked very pretty, but I just don’t think they did enough to excite players. My only hope is that Riot will take some of the ideas that Dawngate had and try and incorporate some game modes that are similar to that into League of Legends. I am not the biggest fan of MOBAs in general, but I have played enough of them to know some good ideas when I see them. The fact that Dawngate had this mechanic where taking down each tower was essentially the equivalent to like 1/3rd of an inhibitor seemed like a cool idea. Instead in League you reach a point where taking down additional towers is a waste of time… and I don’t think you would ever reach that point in Dawngate.

MOBA Crash

One of the interesting things about the games industry is how much it repeats itself. When someone has a successful idea, it seems that the “investors” all get involved to dog pile on that genre and try and crack out as many look alike games as they can. That is not to say that each of the new games does not have merit, nor is it to say that they are not good games. The problem is there is a certain point at which the market has reached saturation and can support no new offshoots. Unfortunately I think we have reached that point already with the MOBA genre. Dawngate was really the first major game in the genre to call it quits, and Turbine the developer of Infinite Crisis does not look terribly strong right now after a round of layoffs in October. I feel like we are just about to enter the same area we have been with MMOs for some time now… where there is no “easy money” left in the market.

Right now you have the juggernauts of League of Legends and DOTA2. To a lesser extent Heroes of Newerth still has a bit of a following, but their latest product offering of Strife seems to be struggling to gain traction. Smite on the other hand… seems to have found a niche in the fact that it is a WASD controlled MOBA and for folks like me that hate click to move… it offers a new way to play this game genre. Heroes of the Storm on the other hand has done what Blizzard does best… polish a game to a mirror shine and lower the barrier of entry. As such HoTS is a much easier entry point into the MOBA genre for non-MOBA players. Personally of all of the titles it is my favorite in part because it leverages characters that I already know and love and just extends that nostalgia into another genre. Apart from these few games though I think pretty much every other MOBA is suspect, fragile and vulnerable to be the next announced cancellation.

The Cycle Repeats

I think my first experience with this cycle of trying to cash in on the next hotness was the massive amount of vaguely playable games that came out after the release of Doom during the early 90s. For every Dark Forces there were a few Depth Dwellers or Nerves of Steel that were barely playable. Then Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans came on the scene… which itself borrowed heavily from the mechanics of Dune 2. But immediately following was an equally confusing cavalcade of RTS genre games finally ending up with only a handful of series surviving. We are seeing this same thing playing out currently with the string of “Minecraft clones” fighting for your dollar. Essentially if a game comes out that is popular enough you can bet that somewhere in a back office someone is willing to pour money into something vaguely similar in an attempt to rush their version of the trend to market. Eventually someone comes along with a box full of straight pins and the bubble popping begins.

The thing is that I don’t really even think this is a bad thing, other than for the folks who get caught up in the round of layoffs that almost always follows. It is possible for a game to move the genre forward even if it doesn’t end up a success itself. Warhammer Online for example had quite possibly the best quest objective visualization system I had played with, and many other games came through after its launch and offered a similar system for their own product. The next release of World of Warcraft offered a version of quest visualization that looked almost exactly like this one. So even though Warhammer Online turned out to be a failure, it imparted on the genre a few features that have stuck around. As such I feel like if we are starting to head towards a MOBA crash, the ones that failed to find a niche will still have an impact on the games that ultimate end up dominating the market. There will always be a market for MOBAs, just like there was always a market for Adventure games, FPS, RTS, Survival Horror, MMO, Sandbox Building or whatever the next big fad becomes in gaming.

Fuzzy Blankets

This month I am talking about something each morning that I am thankful for. This morning as I am wrapped tightly in a fleece blanket while typing this… I am reminded just how thankful I am for our array of very warm and very fuzzy blankets. Oklahoma is an interesting place, in part because we go through this seesaw act with our weather towards the end of Fall. Until a week ago it was pretty reliably 70*-80* days and I was mostly wearing shorts on the weekend. Then a cold snap hit is and it has gotten down to the 30s. The problem is I fully expect that we will be back in the 70s within a weeks time. During this back and forth I am always reluctant to turn on my heating, just because I know it isn’t “really” winter yet. As such we spend a month bundled up in blankets and honestly due to the weight loss I find myself more cold natured than I used to be. So this year like so many years I am thankful that fuzzy blankets exist to keep us warm, when our weather is still deeply confused.

Crystal Madness

June 6, 2014 by Belghast

Permanent Exhaustion

Back in March my wife and I each purchased a fitbit, and since then it has rewired quite a few things in our daily routine. Over the first few month we mostly focused on changing the way we walked, and picking up steps in places we could during our normal routine. So instead of taking the elevator in the parking garage, I started walking the stairs… and have now changed that up to walking the ramps down for maximum steps. In many ways the fitbit changes exercise into a game, and with it comes a whole slew of “achievements” being tracked by the fitbit dashboard. While what it does is rather stupid… it is just an always on pedometer, the fact that it is there and constantly reminding me that I need to be walking is where the real benefit comes in.

Over the last month we have been walking on a nightly basis, and within the last week and a half this has morphed not only into walking to augment our total steps… but to trying every night to “ding”. My wife is not a gamer really, but she has picked up my MMO analogy when it comes to the fitbit. For us dinging is getting to our target steps of 10,000 per night, and this is fitting since the little band goes nuts when you reach your target goal. While trying to hit 10,000 is cool… my new goal is trying to hit 70,000 weekly steps and getting the achievement associated with it. Why do I care? Well it has been looming there for months… and it was a thing I never thought I would actually be able to hit.

More than anything this whole experience has been a lesson in proving me wrong. I’m fat, and I will likely always be fat. At 6’4” I carry my 350 lbs more better than some… but I am still very much a fat man, and I am mostly okay with that. More than anything I want to be a more “fit” fat and have more stamina and endurance… and I have already come so damned far already. Granted right now I am somewhat living in a state of permanent exhaustion as I try and do this exercise thing each night and also do my evening gaming. Right now we are walking a little over 2 miles per night, and doing what we call our “triple loop” where we weave a course through our neighborhood and the next one over. The course is designed so it never takes us past our house, that way we are not tempted to call it and stop. Right now I need to have walked between 6500 and 7000 steps to be able to hit 10-11k during my evening walk. With it being a rainy and otherwise sedentary weekend… we might have to start walking a “quint loop”, but by god I will hit my 70,000 steps this week.

Crystal Madness

I had all intents of streaming last night, but for whatever reason it never quite happened. I spent a good deal of the evening running down the last few things I needed to do to complete Deredune, and what I was doing… while enjoyable for me seemed like it would be extremely boring to watch. As the evening wore on, more people joined me in the channel… and I simply never alt tabbed to fire up OBS. Wildstar is latching onto me with a vengence, and in ways I am surprised. You can go through my pre-launch posts… and I struggled hard to figure out a way to get into this game. I wanted so bad to like it, because at face value it seemed like a game I would love… or at the very least the me from five years ago would have loved. Overall it intrigued me enough to play it at launch, especially since I would be bringing with me a chunk of the Alliance of Awesome community.

Now that I have spent a good deal of time playing it… I am completely enthralled. The thing is I am not sure exactly why. Guild Wars 2 is one of those games that I have tried to dissect just why I don’t enjoy it, and no matter what I try and do there… the game felt largely pointless. Wildstar feels like it took so many of the good elements of GW2 but presented them in a way that I actually care about them. Problem is I am not sure if I can explain why. For starters there is something psychologically enjoyable about challenges. You can be wandering around and loot an item… and then all the sudden you on the clock and every fiber of your being is poured into completely whatever this task happens to be. Sure you can ignore them, and start them manually from the challenges section of your quest log… however there is something special about just stumbling onto one naturally.

The game has a depth that I have not seen since Everquest 2, and that really shocked me. There are layers within layers within layers of nuance going on here. Right now it seems to have every feature that I ever wanted in a game. While it doesn’t have a “chronomage” style self mentoring system, you can apparently drop your level down to your party members at any time. In fact so many of the things in the game seem to be there to help you group with your friends. The only real thing that the game fails at is in still continuing to divide players into red and blue teams. That said I can for the most part deal with this, since they have account based friends and I can at the very least talk to my friends on the other side of the faction wall. I have reached a point where I am pretty sure already that this is my new “WoW”, and had I not already purchased Warlords of Draenor… I would seriously consider skipping this expansion.

The picture above is pretty cool because it is from my skyplot. One of the nifty things is that while you are out in the world, you are constantly collecting things for your house. A special kind of item that you can find is a “PreFab Kit” and these allow you to build new sections of your skyplot. While wandering around I managed to find a green quality one that essentially added a crazy jumping puzzle to my house. So the fact that it is a jumping puzzle in itself is cool… but it basically added a daily quest to my house. If you can make it to the top of the puzzle in 1 minute 10 seconds you can get a prize, which is similar to the prizes you normally get from challenges. I’ve managed to pick up a handful of housing items from doing this, including a really cool spiral tree. If you are on Evindra/Dominion let me know and I will neighbor you so you can have access to do the puzzle.

League Beginner Night

I feel like maybe this week the title of our weekly League of Legends night might be a bit of a misnomer. We had several folks, but not quite enough to do two matches at the same time. So as a result we alternated swapping folks in and doing 5 man vs Bots games to let folks get adjusted to new champions. Oakstout joins us this week and it turns out that while he signed up for a beginner night… he owns a whole slew of champions and has like 130 wins under his belt or something like that. So I would hardly call him a beginner, in fact I am far more beginnerly than he was. That said it was still an awesomely fun time and we hung out and joked while playing the game. I played a total of three games, the first of which I tried out the champion Gangplank that was free this week. I have to say I dig him quite a bit, and if he goes on sale again soonish I might pick him up.

The second round I played Aatrox, which I still absolutely love for his pure survival. During this battle Oak was playing one of my all time favorite champions WuKong… but the combination meant we got to bully our lane severely. Our double jumps meant we could engage quickly and shred the enemy bots quickly before returning to farming or taking down turrets. I have decided though that I really need to pick up the Justicar Skin since I don’t really care much for Aatrox’s default appearance. Finally I closed out the night by playing a game as Woad King Darius… which we have all agreed is the “most belghast skin ever”. It was a great time, and if you are looking to ease your way into League of Legends, then I highly suggest you participate next week. At some point I figure we will even start to play real people.

#Wildstar #LeagueOfLegends #LoL

Ramble About Content

June 5, 2014 by Belghast

Story Content

I was having a discussion yesterday with some friends about whether or not the MMO player actually wants carefully crafted story driven content. When you look at the lackluster support that Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World have gotten overall, you could easily come to this conclusion… since each of them are deeply story driven and carefully constructed experiences. I think we are maybe seeing something else at work. If you look at a game like World of Warcraft, some of its deep story arcs have long been heralded as some of players favorite content. However the vast majority of the content is nothing like this, and I think it is simply a case of not everything has to be “art”.

It is in essence the filler content, that is just good enough to keep you from throwing up your hands in frustration, that make you appreciate that gem in the rough of a quest. Games like ESO, SWTOR and TSW attempted to infuse deep story and meaning into almost everything you do, therefore shifting story driven content to the status of a commodity. I suggest that games need busy work, to make you appreciate the transcendent content when it is placed in front of you. The “kill ten rats” quests are there to cleanse the palates so to speak, so that when a deeply engaging story arc is put in front of you… you actually take notice and don’t resign it to more content to grind through.

Epic Crafted Content

When I think about epic custom crafted experiences I think of the Mass Effect series. I have gushed on this game so much, and watched friends play it over and over. As much as I enjoyed the entire trip through the series… it is not the type of game that I would want to play every night. That ultimately is the problem with MMOs, you are asking players to come in and inhabit your space… hopefully making it a nightly traditional to log in and play with their friends. As much as I might like a Mass Effect or a Transistor… I wouldn’t want to play these games on a nightly basis. I want a space that is much more malleable, and doesn’t require so much of myself to play it. Essentially one friends assessment that MMO content “needs to be exactly good enough to be passable” is really not too far off the mark.

One thing that the busy work tasks excel at is helping drive your own personal narrative forward. The players who inhabit an MMO and really live there on a night by night basis, whether they realize it or not, are crafting a custom narrative about their character based on their own actions. Each time you kill some baddies, save a villager, or deliver a package to some far away mountain… these actions are complementary to whatever narrative you have in your head about your own character. When you ask a player to participate in something longer, more story driven… the end results are predetermined and may or may not be complimentary with this personal narrative. When you have a few of these long epics scattered throughout the game, they are welcome interludes. However when everything you do is based on some narrative that you don’t necessarily fully control… it can be jarring.

Grouped Content

While I would not want to play Mass Effect every single night, I still want to play it often… so there sets up the paradox. Right now I find myself compartmentalizing games as either “fun to play with other people” and “fun to play by myself”. Elder Scrolls Online is very much fun to play by myself, with brief flurries of playing with friends when it comes to dungeon and pvp content. This is part the game and part me. Firstly I hate questing as a group, and it has been something I have tried to avoid like the plague since the early days of World of Warcraft. I’ve always found the experience to be generally frustrating since someone is always a step behind or a step ahead of where you happen to be. Trying to keep people in sync is madness… but Wildstar and its focus on leveling the guild through grouped content is trying to change this.

They’ve given me a hook, a reason to group up that so many other games haven’t. I greatly prefer to experience “content” by myself and then group up to do “group content” whenever I can. But the fact that the only real way to level your guild is through players grouping up together and doing content, makes the entire concept of group questing much more friendly. They’ve given me a shiny bauble for my troubles, and also given me tools to make the entire grouping experience more meaningful in the way the various “paths” interact with one another. So this construct is making me re-evaluate the way I think about content in general, and start looking for ways to group up to accomplish things rather than solo everything.

In part my reluctance to group comes from my Everquest roots where your ONLY option was to group for everything. When MMOs gave me the option to be self sufficient, I took it and ran with it and have simply never looked back. So in a game like Elder Scrolls Online, I greatly prefer to be wandering around by myself. I go AFK frequently, often have to take my headset off to respond to my wife, and am generally not always super engaged with what I am doing. In short I feel like I am a liability for grouping, and in those cases I try and solo the entire night. The problem is this becomes a pattern with me, and I simply NEVER group unless it is content that I can’t do by myself. I find it interesting that Wildstar is somewhat successfully making me re-evaluate that point, and seeing that grouping is something that is beneficial to me, the guild, and the players I am grouped with.

Room For Both

Another thing I have learned about myself is that I seem to always need a “WoW”. I am talking about this in super generic terms because the game has shifted at various times… but I always seem to be playing one. Traditionally this has been me shifting back and forth between playing World of Warcraft and Rift… while at the same time playing a game like The Secret World or Elder Scrolls Online. Wildstar seems to be my new “WoW” game in this equation, and it speaks to my desire to play that type of themepark/themebox type experience. The thing is there is always going to be room for an Elder Scrolls Online as well. I find myself right now wanting to pair down to just those two games, even though I have a ton of other games that I somewhat want to play. It is like I have various itches that need scratching on a regular basis, and no one game ever quite covers them all. However between a combination of those two games it might get close to covering all the bases.

The more I play Wildstar and enjoy it because it is new and shiny and exciting… the more I want to spend my weekend delving into Elder Scrolls Online and exploring Auridon and more of the Veteran level Aldmeri content. I functionally need both experiences, because so far I have not been able to get both from the same game. However after seeing the lackluster reception that Elder Scrolls has received versus the glowing recommendation of players for Wildstar, it is pretty clear that most players just want a better “WoW”. There is no shame in this, because to some extent that has been what I have been looking for as well. I want to visit these worlds with rich story, but I want to “live” on a nightly basis in one that is more of a “choose your own adventure” novel. Wildstar inundates me with choices of things to do… and there is a never ending list of achievements and things to explore, giving me a constant stream of adventures to be had.

League Beginner Night

I realize this mornings post has been an odd rambling one… without much of a firm point. I blame a clear lack of sleep on my part, and a measure of exhaustion on another. Hopefully there is something worth reading up there in that big mess. Tonight is the Alliance of Awesome League Beginner night again, and if you are a member of the AofA community I highly suggest you check it out. The start time is 9pm CST, but if we have a critical mass of players on mumble beforehand we might start a little early. Last week we had enough time to play a 3v3 Twisted Treeline and a 5v4+bot Summoners Rift. We had a ton of fun in the process.

If you have never played League of Legends before, and have been interested in getting into it… now is the ideal time to try it out. Last week we had several first timers, and to make things easier we broke apart into separate mumble channels to help tutor the new folks in what they should build and where they should be focusing their efforts. This in part involved me barking orders to Maric quite a bit, but he seems to have survived just fine and is signed up for this week again. I am still very much a newbie myself, but as a whole it is a really fun time to be had and presents a wild divergence from the types of games I normally play. I wish we had enough people in Heroes of the Storm to be able to have a similar night for that game.

Faffless Wednesday

August 7, 2015May 29, 2014 by Belghast

Banging Doors

Well it happened again last night, I was woken up by one of our cats banging on the closet door. The problem is after I finally got her crackhead self settled down and up into bed with us… I once again was completely wide awake. Problem is this time it was at 12:45 when it started, so there I lay in bed at 1 am completely unable to get back to sleep. So I sat there for a bit, finally deciding to get up and go upstairs and play something for awhile to hopefully tire myself back out again. The game of choice was Defiance, but I will go into that more later. I managed to get to a state where I thought I might sleep around 2 am, but the rest of the night was extremely fitful.

According to fitbit I was awake 9 times during the night. I have no clue what is going on with me that my body keeps thinking I am fully awake at any point I wake up. I have always struggled with sleep, and as a result cannot nap for fear of not being able to sleep that night. This whole waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep thing that has plagued me the last two nights is brand new however. Right now this morning I feel mostly normal, albeit a little sluggish… I just fear for what this will mean as the day wears on. Yesterday was rough since I had been up since 3:45, especially about 2 pm or so it became torture to try and do anything productive. I might have to start resorting to taking a sleep aid, but I hate how groggy they make me feel in the morning.

Faffless Wednesday

Last night for whatever reason we simply did not have a good turnout for our normal “faff about” in Elder Scrolls Online event. It could be that people were just busy, or it could be that the Wildstar servers were up for some reason yesterday and folks are anxious for the head start coming Friday. In any case there were just three of us that showed up with the purpose of doing the event, so we decided that it was really too few to do a dungeon, and too few to really do anything meaningful in Cyrodil. As a result we just kinda piddled around doing our own thing and chatting back and forth. PK and Delevax joined the rest of us on mumble and we hung out while playing. I have not really as much time to play Elder Scrolls Online that I would have liked.

Lately my weekends have been scattered with little landmines of not being able to play anything, and then last weekend the amazing single player games Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order got my devoted attention. At this point I think I am about two hours away from finishing Wolf, and transistor was a punch in the gut… but a very good one. I had been looking forward to Wednesday because I knew I would devote myself to playing nothing but Elder Scrolls Online, even if the “event” didn’t happen. I have to say I love the veteran content, and more importantly I love that mobs are once again difficult. There were always a couple of types of encounters that were painful for me… I am looking at you Harvesters… but for the most part I had reached a place where I could steam roll in entire packs of mobs. There were several late game public dungeons that I solo’d my way through, so my skill level with the game had reached a point where it was simply greater than the challenge.

Veteran content reset that equilibrium. I literally can get my ass kicked by a mudcrab if I happen upon a pack of three, and even in the case of two at a time I have to use Green Blood to heal myself while dealing with the second one. I like that the game instantly became a challenge again the moment I completed the storyline. The result is that while I do the Aldmeri Dominion content, the game feels fresh to me since I am having to relearn how to manage tough encounters. Last night I finished up Kenarthi’s Roost and moved on into Auridon. Since this is the content I have done the least, I am really enjoying winding my way through elfland. I’ve decided that I really like the Bosmer… I was talking last night with Euron that they remind me quite a bit of the Witch Elves from Warhammer Fantasy. As much as I want to dislike her, I have to admit that Queen Ayrenn is pretty awesome as well.

Figuring out Defiance

I wrote yesterday mornings blog post at about 4 am, and then proceeded to faff about in Defiance for the next hour until 5:30 when the alarm normally goes off. During that time I think I finally figured out how to enjoy the game. There was always something I liked about it, but the experience just felt lacking in some way. Like I didn’t quite grasp how the questing system worked or how the world exploration worked. The first change I made is that I started playing the game with the Xbox 360 controller. While it controls competently with the keyboard and mouse, everything feels like it just works better with the controller. I guess this is the side effect when you develop a game for consoles, but I am slowly getting used to playing an FPS with a controller. I find the lack of focused aiming to be far less of a detriment that I thought it would be.

Secondly I had a major epiphany while playing as I stumbled across and Arkfall. I started treating this game like it was Rift, in that so many times in Rift I just spend my time ping ponging from tear to tear closing the Rifts. Doing this so far has been worth a ton of experience and my Ego rank is slowly climbing. Additionally you seem to get some really good rewards for doing it, and I am starting to bump into other players as well which makes the experience overall more enjoyable. I always felt like the thing that was lacking was that I didn’t really have anyone to play the game with. I am hoping as this game transitions from “buy the box” to “free to play” that folks will start filtering back in. It might just be the recent time spent playing and FPS, but I am enjoying the game quite a bit. Therein lies the problem however… I simply have too damned many games to play.

League Beginner Night

Tonight I’m Playing League of Legends. Once upon a time in House Stalwart we did these league beginner nights, when we coaxed new players to League of Legends onto mumble and did some vs bots or custom 5v5 gameplay. The purpose was to ease folks into the game and let them soak up some of the knowledge of a few of our more veteran players. When the Alliance of Awesome folks started talking about League, I figured it was a good time to try and resurrect this concept. So tonight I will be playing some league and hanging out on mumble with folks while doing it. I am just hoping to get in some practice playing Braum, but if not I will probably default back to Wukong, Garen or Darius. I would actually love to play some Varus since I have yet to do so since picking up the PAX skin. If you are interest in joining up check out the Anook event, the goal is to start around 9 PM CST to make it doable for the West Coasters. There are technically only a couple of people signed up, but I know we will have a lot more just from word of mouth.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance #LeagueofLegends #LoL