Action Shooter Archives - Page 9 of 11

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November 4, 2015 by Belghast

King of Match Three

Yesterday morning was the Activision Blizzard earnings call for investors, and much of the focus has been on one particular tidbit of information. They announced that they are acquiring Candy Crush maker King Digital for the sum of $5.9 Billion dollars. The reaction to this announcement has been pretty varied, because in truth… many “core” gamers loath the concept of games like Candy Crush. First off there is some confusion to clear up. Activision Blizzard is not the same thing as Blizzard Entertainment, so early reports I saw talked about Blizzard buying King Digital… which caused some outrage. Activision Blizzard is the big parent company that pulls all the strings of the various products from Call of Duty to Skylanders to of course the Blizzard franchises. At first I have to admit I was taken by surprise by the announcement but that pretty much went away immediately when I thought about it. In doing this deal ActiBlizz is essentially buying instant relevance in the traditional mobile gaming market.

Now you might be saying to yourself… But Bel, Activision and Blizzard already doing mobile gaming. Sure they do… but they do it in a way that attempts to appeal to “core” gamers that are wanting something on their phone to play when they don’t have access to their normal gaming platforms. This is a vastly different market than the one that King Digital generally focuses on which are for lack of a better term “casual” and “mobile exclusive” users that would never in a million years… consider themselves gamers. Essentially King Digital targets people like my wife, that spends plenty of time playing games on her iPad but does not in any fashion think of herself as a gamer. So in essence with this one… albeit expensive acquisition, they now cover a market that they did not serve in any fashion. Sure Hearthstone is a great mobile game… but it really only draws in people who already are in the fold of “gamers”. The big thing is all of these “non-gamers” have prove time and time again that they are in fact willing to spend money on micro-transactions.

What This Means

In truth I doubt for the short term it really means anything. Activision will continue releasing big budget shooters like Call of Duty and Destiny… and Blizzard will continue flirting with e-sports while still not quite certain what to do with World of Warcraft. Another big chunk of this earnings report was a note that the WoW subscription numbers have more or less stabilized from their post Warlords of Draenor free fall. I feel like there is some fuzzy math at work here, but according to the official figures they have dropped from 5.6 Million to 5.5 Million. There was a strange little definition that was released to explain what they determined a subscriber.

Subscriber Definition: World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

This makes me think that these subscription numbers are in fact counting WoW Token players… seeing as how that would count as “prepaid” access. So the actual month to month subscription numbers would be a bit lower. To some extent I wish they would have broken those numbers out separately… since a monthly sub is semi-guaranteed income, and a token is a one time purchase. The other big news however is that they plan on this being the last month they actually announce subscription numbers. Instead they have a new sort of engagement number formula that they are working on to determine the health of the game.

At first glance this sounds a bit odd… and maybe like they are trying to hide losses within the cloak of mathematics. However… we are just days away from Blizzcon and it makes me wonder. Will this finally be the year that they announce World of Warcraft going to a free to play model? Cutting the ties of relying on subscriptions to convey the health of the game… would at least be one step in that direction. If I were Blizzard I would be seriously considering it… because honestly Free to Play seems to work. With the recent high publicity relaunch of Wildstar… that game is doing significantly better now than it was, and the same was essentially true with Star Wars the Old Republic went to the model. Free to Play has been the salvation of otherwise dying games… and even though World of Warcraft is far from dying… I still think they would benefit from the switch. It would be a massive shift in methodology and would probably change the way content is delivered, but it would also bring back a bunch of players that want to dip their toes in the game every now and then… but not feel like they are chained to a subscription. Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are both wildly success as Free to Play experiences… and with Overwatch starting to ramp up and following that same model… it just seems like Blizzard has wrestled with how to make it work.

What I Hope Happens

So while I don’t think anything will change for a bit… my hope is that through this deal there is some cross pollination of skillsets. I would love to see better integration of mobile platforms and traditional games. As you know I have been playing a lot of Destiny… and quite honestly the way that game works is just not as clean as it should. There are a lot of things that you can do through the website… slightly different things that you can do through the mobile app… and even a different set of things through the game itself. The entire process feels cludgy as hell… but an attempt to move in the direction of giving players access to tools outside of the game. Now if you take that basic desire and match it with a company that has proven that they can spin the same old match three schlock into infectious gold… you can maybe create really interesting experiences that span traditional platforms and mobile gaming ones.

What I would love to see is a better mobile app for World of Warcraft. Why can’t we fish on our mobile phones and have it grant skill-ups and materials for our characters in game? Why can’t we do the normally tedious action of Archaeology in a mobile mini-game? Garrisons themselves were essentially the same sort of thing as a tiny tower like mobile game… why didn’t exist on mobile platforms allowing people to do the upkeep and maintenance activities when they couldn’t otherwise play the game? Why can’t we have a significantly better auction house integration system? Essentially… give players a reason to stay in the game by making them feel more connected to it.. on their own terms. A big part of my frustration with Garrisons is that I knew I had a one to two hour ritual waiting on me every time I logged into the game, before I could feel like I was free to do interesting things… like slay internet dragons. If I could do Garrisons while walking to my car at night, or on my lunch break… it would take some of that burden away so that I knew once I got home… I could do the fun stuff without having to worry about the “paperwork”. Essentially we live our lives on our phones… and the games that integrate better with how we live our lives are going to feel more “real” to us.

Overwatch Frustrations

October 29, 2015 by Belghast

Overwatch Hype

On Tuesday October 27th Blizzard opened the doors of Closed Beta for it’s highly anticipated shooter called Overwatch. As you might expect, the internet as a whole quickly lost their shit and reverted to a state of chain refreshing the battle.net account page to see if they were among the lucky few to get granted access. What I did not expect however was all of the infighting this process called as folks essentially called down a pox on the house of those who did manage to get in. It is one thing to be frustrated that you did not get into whatever the hot new Beta happens to be, but it is an entirely different to wish harm upon those who did. There were even a few folks who decided to flail about declaring that their not getting into Beta shows how little Blizzard cares. Others talk about how they should have earned access with this or that deed. At first I thought to myself… are we really this entitled? Because seriously… there have been some serious entitlement issues going on over the last few days.

Then I noticed something else happening that disturbs me even more. For those mere mortals like myself that do not make a living off gaming… then absolutely it would be entitlement. However for the folks that make a living through creating content related to Blizzard games… I started to read this impotently lashing out… as cold hard fear. When you make your money by presenting the freshest content on your Stream or your YouTube channel… you are in essence relying on being able to play whatever everyone else is playing. Not having access means you are missing out on all of these eyeballs that are now suddenly flocking to the internet to gaze into the window at those chosen few who get to play whatever game they want to play. Right or wrong… Blizzard is essentially saying who is really important to the future of their product and who is not.

The Hunt for Eyeballs

I am a shitty Streamer and an even worse YouTuber… but the most eyeballs I have ever had on my collective “stuff” is when I happened to get into the first wave of Alpha invites to Trove. I got to be one of a handful of people playing around with that game, and broadcasting it to the world and it was really noticeable. It is 6:30 in the morning right now… and one of the Overwatch streamers has over 10,000 viewers at this hour. During prime time… Overwatch has consistently been the highest watched game on the network. When you tune into one of these streams, especially the ones going on during the day… you will see a who’s who of internet celebrities fighting each other. Whether or not they intended it… Blizzard did essentially judge who was important to them and who was not by determining who got into that first wave of invites. That can be a pretty harsh reality check, especially if you have essentially devoted your career to supporting Blizzard products.

What worries me more however is what this says about the current state of video games in general. I remember how I felt the first time I got into a Friends and Family Alpha program… or FFA. I remember the excitement, and the desire to tell the entire world… but the reality that was I was bound behind a very serious Non Disclosure Agreement. I remember for one of these FFA programs I had to fax in a signed copy of a thirty page document back to the studio before being granted access. What made this work is that the company could literally focus on testing the game… rather than having to showcase it to the public 24/7. Sure it is frustrating to be in a thing that you cannot share… and sure it sucks for streamers especially to need to play something that they cannot show off to their viewers. However I think the model worked pretty damned well because up until these last few years it has been the model that almost all of the games you can think about nostalgically have been released under. It lets testing happen beyond the prying eyes of the public and bugs get fixed before it is ready for people to see it. The problem is… we the gamers have started to feel that there is something dishonest about this process… and that if a company isn’t completely transparent in every single minute action that they take… that it must be the sign of something horrible going on behind the scenes.

Marketing Cycle

The big problem is… we bore of games before they are released. There are games out there that seem to have permanent alpha and beta cycles, and as we go through seeing them displayed on our screens for two years… then the final release just seems lacking. There have been numerous times on AggroChat for example when someone brings up a title… and I have to ask “wait that actually released?”. There is this constant battle to control the hype cycle about a game, and make sure that your product is getting enough spin among the social media influencers. So when a game like Overwatch goes into one of these lengthy beta cycles… the company needs these streamers just as much as the streamers need the game to showcase to their viewers. They need those all important eyeballs peeping their wares… and getting excited enough to plunk down their hard earned money to purchase goods in it. The frustrating thing about it… is it feels like we are always in a hype cycle for something. It becomes much like the American Political system… where the candidates… or games in this case are always running for the next election. The market at this point is simply saturated with new titles that all sound interchangeable. MOBA with FPS roots… FPS with MOBA Character Styling… FPS gameplay MOBA spirit… the marketing spin that gets applied to games just seems meaningless after awhile.

Where I really start to get frustrated however is when this hype machine starts hurting people. Sure watching someone have an internet meltdown is entertaining while it goes on… but behind the screen is someone obviously in pain. I am not coming out to support those tantrums… but I am coming out to say that for all that is good and right in the world… lets stop hurting each other over a game. I have been just like you among those people frantically checking my battle.net account each time a new wave of invites comes out. So I get it… I get the desire to play that new shiny game. I’ve done this cycle over and over, and will continue doing this cycle until the games industry changes the way it works. Even if I want something really badly… I make it a goal in life to be excited for the people who are having good things happen to them… rather than being that selfish person who is lashing out at others because they got left out. I get the frustration and fear especially if you make your living from this sort of thing…. but having a meltdown in front of your followers isn’t going to help either. The truth is… we are eventually all going to get in… and the additional truth is… most of us will play a handful of games and then move on to the next shiny thing. This is not as important as we happen to be making it out right now… and within a years time… this will feel like another silly incident in the gaming community. What will stick around however… is how people feel about you and the way you have treated them. So lets just be awesome to each other while we wait for the next hype cycle to spin up.

Blaugust Games of Week – Week 1

July 31, 2015 by Belghast

Pre-emptive Thank You

Yesterday I freaked a lot of people out by calling it the Blaugust Eve. As I have explained on twitter, I was accounting for my amazing time travelling Aussie and Kiwi friends for whom… right now IS the start of Blaugust. For the rest of us at the time of posting this we have a little more wiggle room before the festivities kick off. I have to say last year was an insane ride for me, as much as it was for the contestants. The intent was to run everything through the Blaugust Nook but that didn’t exactly happen, and it quite literally made my life hell. I ended up spending a couple of hours a day trying to sort out who posted what when and in what time zone they were posting from… and then the people who posted after midnight in their own time zone… only served to add to the complication. There were numerous times I tried to track down people on twitter or IM to ask if they meant X post to be on Y day or not.

This year it seems like most everyone has registered on the Nook which is going to help, but what is going to be even more important is advertising your daily posts there with the day number you are intending it to be. On your side that is a small amount of work, but on my side that is saving me literally hours of scouring… and is hopefully going to allow me to actually read blogs during the course of the event. As soon as things start I have to flip into book keeper mode, and while I might be “reading” posts I was not necessarily enjoying them last year because of all of the technical foibles. So I am thanking you ahead of time for complying with the list of rules, because it is going to make my life not horrible over the next thirty one days. I’ve been a fan of Anook for awhile, so much so apparently that yesterday someone thought I worked for them. I just think they do a great job of giving me guild forum like functionality but also giving the ability to interact with other gamers. I am amped this year about them sponsoring the Community Award, and we will ultimately sort out the specifics of that as the event goes on.

Games of the Week – Week 1

Yesterday we launched the writing prompts forum, and I thought it was pretty amazing that Void spent a good chunk of the day yesterday populating it with a bunch of ideas. I plan on adding a new writing prompt to this post every day during the course of this event, but I wanted to go a little bit further. Nothing makes more interesting posts than exploring a new game, or revisiting one that you have been fond of in the past. As such I plan on highlighting three free to play games a week, with an attempt to mix up the styles a bit. My hope is that if you are lacking inspiration, you can download and install one of these games and find plenty of things to write about. Lets get on with the games!

Dirty Bomb – Nexon/Splash Damage

This is a game I played a bit in beta but have not really played much after it officially launched, and I am actually looking forward to playing it some more. I have long been a huge fan of games by Splash Damage, and I spent many an hour playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Hell I even joined a competitive clan while playing it, but never really did much more than scrimmage other teams. Splash Damage creates a shooter quite unlike anyone else makes, and they tend to focus on these complex objectives that require multiple classes of players to complete them. I always focused on the “Engineer” archetype because it made the game play more enjoyable for me as it gave me a higher purpose. I am not big into “death matching” but I loved rushing headlong into a firefight trying to stay alive long enough to build a bridge or repair a tank. This game is the logical extension of Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Quake Wars Enemy Territory and even to some extent the critical failure Brink. I think I am one of the few people out there that wholeheartedly enjoyed Brink, and lately I have been feeling the itch to play some FPS action… and Dirty Bomb seems like it is going to fit that bill perfectly.

Download From Steam – Download From Nexon

Everquest II – Daybreak Games

I will always hold a special place in my heart for Norrath, the setting of the Everquest universe. When World of Warcraft launched I was torn because part of me wanted to be playing Everquest II. Instead I went where the bulk of my friends went, but continued to periodically visit the setting of EQ2 throughout the years. It has some of the best world building I have seen in any game, and the scope of the zones just feel so massive compared to almost anything else on the market. They innovated in so many ways, and had so many rich systems like one of the best Mentoring systems out there for the time. As the years have ticked by the game has felt more and more like a dated relic, however there is a simple nostalgic charm to it that I still find appealing. They seem to be banking on taking this nostalgia to market, as they have opened a time locked progression server allowing players to go back and experience the world as it was during the early days. This is making me seriously consider re-rolling and starting fresh on this new server, but I have had so many other competing goals that I just have not done it yet. My goal is this week to roll a character and check it out, but unfortunately that means I am going to have to buy a new character slot on my already loaded account. If you are looking for a world loaded with inspiration… this is a good place to start.

Download From Steam – Download from Daybreak

Marvel Heroes 2015 – Gazillion

Another game that I really enjoy but find myself not playing a lot of right now is Marvel Heroes. This game provides Diablo II style game play, with a rich class based system in the form of all of the different heroes that you can play. One of the coolest features of this game is the way that the you pick your first hero to level. The game allows you to play a long list of champions to level 10, and then you get to unlock one of them and take it all the way to level 60. This gives you plenty of time to get a feel for how they each play and their different abilities. I personally tend to be a Captain America player, but there are heroes that fit just about any imagined play style. The other thing that I really appreciate is the way that for the most part, the game gives me a pathway to unlock the things that I might want without hiding it behind an overly painful grind. Champions are purchased with Eternity Splinters which drop fairly frequently while doing content in the world. One of the complaints I have seen from friends is that the game play is extremely easy, and this is absolutely the case while you are playing on normal mode. However after defeating the main storyline you can ratchet up the difficulty much in the same way as you can in Diablo 3. This is absolutely a really fun game and the freemium nature is not egregious in any fashion, so if you want some old school Diablo game play with MOBA inspired style character design… you might check this one out.

Download From Steam – Download From Gazillion

Daily Prompt

Since I more or less posted a series of games that I have some connection to, or would like to have a better connection with. The writing prompt for the day is somewhat connected to that.

What game that you are not playing, do you still have a deeply nostalgic connection to and why?

Let us hear what game you keep returning to even if you aren’t really actively playing it… or likely will never play it with quite the same fervor. For me personally that game is absolutely Everquest II, and I still hold a torch for it even though at this moment I have not really played it over the course of the last two years.

Night of Primals

May 6, 2015 by Belghast

Juggling Games

One of the challenges for me during the Newbie Blogger Initiative is determining which days I should make NBI related posts and which days I should do my traditional thing. It is a bit of a juggling act because I want to keep pumping out articles in support of the initiative but I also don’t want my blog to stop being… well “my blog”. As always I am juggling a silly amount of games. Right now as it stands I raid Tuesday and Thursday in World of Warcraft, Monday and Saturday in Final Fantasy XIV and for the time being I am also filling in on Wednesday nights with another free company static group. I would not mind staying with them indefinitely but I would love to get to a point where I am more optional than the current tank role that I am playing. Finally on Friday nights I have been trying to join in the festivities with the Black Dagger Society as I play some Wildstar. Other than this I am also trying to juggle playing Marvel Heroes and some Rift… and needless to say I feel like there is always something I want to be playing.

Last night was a WoW night and we once again stepped into Blackrock Foundry. I did not place the sign above but I was wondering if it was going to foretell my evening. At the beginning it did seem like maybe it was prophecy, because we had a rough start. We wiped several times on heroic and tempers were flaring a bit. Our raid leader made the right call and took us back outside flipping the difficulty to normal. From there the night got significantly better. I was once again being frustrated by Flamebender Kagraz not dropping pants or a sword for me, but that has now been par for the course so I really wasn’t that upset. Last week we made serious progress on Furnace encounter so I was extremely happy when our raid lead said we were heading that direction. Apparently we had not forgotten the progress we made because in a single attempt we downed our first new boss since March 19th. While heroic difficulty is where we will find upgrades, there is a huge part of me that wants to be able to say we cleared at least normal difficulty before the 6.2 patch. We are now two bosses away from being able to say that.

Night of Primals

One of the things our Monday night group has decided to do is to spend no more than two nights in a row on any one encounter. It has felt like we have ground our faces against turn nine for awhile now, so it is refreshing to get to see something else. Monday night was our first “off night” in this rotation and we opted to get the folks that missed Leviathan Extreme their kill. This fight went smoothly and by the numbers and other than some of the folks who were new to the fight struggling to stay on deck, we were able to make some serious progress. I want to say it was on attempt four that we managed to push through and defeat Levi Ex unlocking Ramuh for a large number of the folks, and getting a nifty summoner book. From there we moved on to Odin as our group had not actually downed it before. We made one night of attempts but then got enthralled by the push for Turn 9 never to return. We shifted things around a bit this time and had me tanking it and Ashgar dpsing, hoping that my insane health pool would help soak the horrible Sangital attack.

The assumption seemed to be correct as it would take me down to around half health instead of almost killing me. The thing is… we have gained a lot of gear since when we last tried this fight so I am pretty sure Ashgar as a Paladin would have been fine as well. We managed to take out Odin and get a piece of the armor set. I believe it was the gloves, but I really want to take this guy down more because I need to be a Lala-Odin. From here we opted to take on Titan Extreme in part because it was standing in the way of us working in Ifrit Extreme and finishing the first set. When we downed Titan before we were missing a significant number of the folks that we had on last night. This fight has been the bane of our existence for awhile because it is precisely the kind of fight we are generally bad at. If a fight requires us to adjust to conditions on the ground, then bam we are on top of that. If it is a fight that requires us to do the exact same thing over and over with laser precision… went tend to fail. Fortunately we managed to catch up to speed quickly and on I believe our fourth attempt we downed Titan once more keying a whole new batch of players for Ifrit. It was one of the most enjoyable nights of raiding I have had in any game, because each of the primal encounters were so drastically different.

The Old Blood

This game I honestly forgot was releasing yesterday, that is until in the middle of the raid I had someone message me over the steam client asking me if I was having trouble with the game. After the raid I opted to boot it up and give it a look see. I have agreed to play this game in part to let Kodra know if I think he would be interested in it. He and I both loved Wolfenstein: New Order… but completely different reasons. I loved the game because it felt like a throw back to the 90s shooter era, and he loved it for the complex character interaction and development. It was awesome that the game supported both things so completely, and by the looks of “The Old Blood” it seemed like the 90s shooter part. Essentially this game is a loving reworking of the classic Escape from Castle Wolfenstein game that I spent so many hours playing during High School. If it is nothing more than Machine Games redoing that game… I would be completely fine with this.

While I have only played a few minutes of the game right now, I have to say I am amped about it. The game is just as gorgeous as New Order, and seems to have the exact same kind of dialog between characters. The problem being that I have a feeling there is a much smaller cast given that the entire game takes place inside of Castle Wolfenstein. This next bit is going to include spoilers because the introduction is pretty short, but still extremely fun. Essentially the start of the game centers around this plan between you and a British agent to sneak inside Castle Wolfenstein and steal the blueprints to Deathshead’s compound… aka that thing you are storming at the beginning of New Order. The problem being that when you get into the offices of occultist Helga Von Schabbs, the plans are missing. There is nothing in the safe in the wall, and you and Wesley quickly draw unwanted attention and a firefight ensues. While trying to make your escape you are captured by Rudi Jager and thrown in the cell that you in theory begin the original Wolfenstein in. From there you have to escape the castle… and quite honestly I did not make it much further. The game is rather short, supposedly only two chapters, but for the price that seems more than reasonable. I think I am going to love this game, but I still question if there is enough story in it to appease Kodra.