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Archive for RPG

Dark Souls III vs. Bloodborne

Jun13

DS1-noscaleTitle: Dark Souls III

System: PS4 (also on Xbox / PC)

Genre: (A)RPG

Developer: From Software

Publisher: Bandai / Konami

Director: Hidetaka Miyazaki

Date Played: late April / early May 2016

Rating: Amazing

_

After the delicious time I had playing Bloodborne, Dark Souls III was a no brainer. Which understates the matter since I preordered it and was playing the day it was released.

Which leads me to both review this latest (and supposedly final) entry in From Software’s legendary Action Role Playing Game genre. But in the process, explore the small but important differences between Dark Souls III (DS3) and Bloodborne (BB) as a detailed exploration of the genre.

If you think of Bloodborne as a modern day Castlevania, then DS3 is a contemporary Ghouls ‘n Ghosts.

Bloodborne = Castlevania

Bloodborne = Castlevania

Both From Software games are born from the same DNA, but the biggest difference is:

Thematic (not gameplay) Genre. BB draws its roots from Lovecraftian horror while DS3 purports to derive from more traditional D&D-esque stock. But, not really. Both games are so dominated by Hidetaka Miyazaki’s specific auteur imprint that their differences are of a most subtle degree. And while Dark Souls is the older franchise, I’d actually argue that in BB the idiosyncrasy of his particular style more closer overlaps with the explicit genre. BB is so “perfectly” Japanese Lovecraftian, while all three Dark Souls pull fantasy much closer to horror. I don’t mean to imply any particular criticism in this observation. I adore both games, and both sub-styles. And while DS3 is more vaguely medieval and BB more vaguely gothic, they just share so much stylistically.

Dark Souls = Ghouls & Ghosts

Dark Souls = Ghouls & Ghosts

Style. BB is creepier, but DS3 is certainly creepy. The washed out colors and particular/peculiar shapes and forms are very similar, designed to vaguely discomfort. DS3 tends a little more toward matte while BB likes shiny. Certain textural material motifs are common and some are  different. BB likes cloth, leather, eyes, and fur more while DS3 likes metal, fire, stone, and dragons. BB has more 19th century architectural and costuming elements. But both are so dark, gothic, and “churchy”. Plenty of enemies or objects could almost be used in either game. Half the sound effects ARE used in both games.

dark_souls_3_hr_gundyr_battles_playerGraphics. Like BB, DS3 is a gorgeous stylized game. The art design is magnificent in its bleakly weird way. Giant vistas abound and strange unique shapes and distorted silhouettes. And although the engine (used by both games) seems perfectly competent, the art direction is more important than the tech. You just have to like dark and weird. Creatures with flowing forms, hidden eyes, and faces, weird mutations, and a generally ruined, graveyard, gothic sort of look. I’d give a slight nod to BB for uniform of graphical style and theme but a slight nod to DS3 for scale and awesome visual scope.

Sound Design. Fabulous music and minimalist but effective fx. The thud of sword on shield, or the grunt of blade on flesh are all fabulously telegraphed.

Dark-Souls-3-Siegward-Mission-04Gameplay. The broad strokes of the two games are nearly identical. You explore a interlinked world where levels fold back on each other. Monsters and death abounds. You fight through and die. And die. And die again. Eventually you may reach continue points (bonefires/lamps) or open up shortcuts that allow you to circumvent areas already explored. Item collection is persistent across death but experience (souls/blood) is lost on death, with a single chance at reclaiming it by fighting through to wherever you lost it. Souls/blood both serve has currency for leveling and item purchase. Weapons can be upgraded and fit with stones/gems.

Combat, controls, & mechanics. The combat in both games is masterful and varies slightly in important little ways. In DS3 it’s realistic, even typical to carry a shield and block attacks. In BB you can carry a gun, but it does low damage and is useful mostly to interrupt and stun. In both, weapons usually have a 1 and 2 handed mode, but in BB these vary more substantially (at the cost of far less weapons). BB has the “regain system” in which you have a few seconds after taking damage to “take back” some or all of your lost health by attacking again. This encourages a more aggressive style of fighting. In DS3 it is perfectly advantageous to play much slower and more defensively. And since in early levels, BB has 20 healing potions and DS3 only 3-4 until upgraded, the beginning DS3 game requires damage avoidance for survival. BB allows you to charge the big weapon strike and has a dedicated potion button. DS3 allows for much more magic use, opening up very different play styles. But for simplicity I stuck to melee.

I started the original Dark Souls as a caster and paid dearly for it. Only the most advanced players should consider investing in magic during their first playthrough. Melee combat is just so much easier at lower skill point investment. By a New Game+ playthrough, having acquired most of the spells and a lot more skill points, hybrid or caster roles are perfectly reasonable.

Subtle level design decisions also make for combat differences. In BB, you can easily be mobbed by groups of enemies and crowd control is simultaneously more difficult and more important. Same with AOE and sweeping attacks. In DS3 enemies are less clumped, usually only 1-2 at a time — unless you like dying.

Both combat systems are extraordinarily satisfying. The feel is generally excellent, with a slight edge to BB‘s faster, more nimble style. But blocking is highly gratifying as well.

dark-souls-3-screenshot-12.0Story. Both games offer minimal and extremely mysterious story. Yet BB actually has boss intro scenes, substantially more cinematics, and even a few vignettes with multiple characters talking. That’s not to say that this fleshes out a single character, or offers even the slightest clarity as to their motivations, just that you see them introduced and they therefore have more “personality.” Definitely I liked this in BB. And the weirdness all fit together more weirdly, lending to a sense of more odd and mysterious goings on. Yet DS3‘s plot is even “grander” and more unknowable. Perhaps mostly because nothing makes any sense at all. Listen to the above intro trailer to get a taste. That’s not to say that lines like “The fire fades. And the Lords go without thrones” or “And so it is that ash seeketh embers” don’t give me goosebumps — no, I love them — but they don’t exactly make a lot of sense. Except perhaps if you have eyes growing inside your skull. Anyway, slight nod to BB for “plot” and “character” — if you can call it that.

That said, DS3 has MORE NPCs and more complicated “questlines” (good luck actually understanding them or following them without online help as they are so much looser and less defined than in other RPGs). There is a veritable rat’s nest of guys you need to nudge weirdly along their stories in order to open up as much vending as possible. So a nod to DS3 for complexity (a good thing in this case). BB‘s equivalents feel undeveloped and there are only 1-2 of any magnitude.

Both games have multiple mysterious endings too. In both cases I used my internet prowess to achieve the “most difficult” ending. Yet I’m still not sure what being the Lord of Hollows really means :-).

Dark-Souls-3Gear. DS3 has a LOT more gear to collect than BB, but the emphasis is quite different. BB‘s armor is mostly leather or cloth and mostly cosmetic. Some have particular resists, but that’s about it. The weapons in that game are relatively few, but highly differentiated. There are two main types: trick weapon and firearm. In DS3 there is an enormous variety of both weapons and armor with four main weapon types: melee, talisman (for spell casting), bow, and shield. Supposedly all of the weapons are viable, but they aren’t necessarily highly differentiated as there are many similar ones. The armor tends to group into light, medium, and heavy. Unlike BB, weight is a meaningful factor in DS3. I personally went with fairly heavy armor, but it was unclear that the poise attribute (which is supposed to all for heavier armor to prevent you being staggered) was fully functional, or at least worth investing in. The weapons system does suffer from a touch of imbalance. Early on I got a Deep Axe which was fairly powerful, but not very upgradable. It took me a good while to find a weapon and upgrade it to a level where it surpassed this early stage find. It’s hard to know which gear to invest in. DS3 also has MUCH better boss gear rewards. Each boss gives you a soul which can be traded for a choice of two high power items, usually weapons. In DS3, there are a plethora of rings (you can wear 4 at once) that add additional powers. In BB these are replaced by runes (you can wear 3). They are fairly similar but the DS3 system is better in all ways. And overall, I’d give DS3 the win for gear, as it has more stuff and particularly more types of stuff with the shields and whatnot.

Gear Upgrading. BB‘s gear upgrade system is a little simpler than DS3‘s. They both have the same four tier currently +3,+3,+3,+1 normal upgrades, but DS3 has 2-3 additional side currencies for upgrading different gear. Boss gear, and other special types fall into at least 2 “non normal” upgrade paths. It also has a more generous supply of gear upgrade items, although split among all these types. BB only has 1-2 of the top upgrade per play-through, DS3 has at least 4-5. The different types are a little confusing. There are also gems that can be socketed on (most) weapons/shields that modify how the items scale. The use of these depends on your build and I only ended up trying 3 of the 15 or so types. In BB, each weapon has a couple sockets for different gems that can either tune the scaling or boost the damage output (a lot!). I liked this additional ability to pump up the power of even a level 10 weapon, so I give BB the edge here.

e9386bce455b00ad4380af046e247f1aOther collectables and upgrades. In my opinion, as far as RPGs go, the more you can upgrade the better. DS3 allows you to upgrade both the number of flasks and their potency, which BB doesn’t do at all, so this is a big point in DS3‘s favor. It also has more random items and consumables. However, they generally seemed less useful than those in BB. Maybe this is due to BB’s slightly higher overall difficulty level (or just the fact that I got better at this sort of game between). There are lots of spells and whatnot which I didn’t experiment with. DS3 has the whole “ember” system by which you can spend this limited but reasonably available currency to gain max health until you die. I mostly used it for bosses. You need it for multiplayer. There is also the whole hollowing thing, which even as the Lord of Hollows I didn’t totally understand. Somehow dying hollows you out more, and you have less multiplayer ability when hollowed. This is a change from the much more brutal hollowing of Dark Souls where the game just got harder the more often you died.

crystalsage1_tcClasses and leveling Mechanics. Being an RPG, both of these games have means by which you level up and improve your characters. These are extremely similar but differ in subtle ways. BB has two currencies, blood and insight. Insight is earned mostly from bosses. Often you can buy the same things with both. Insight subtly changes the game’s look and play, which is very weird but cool. DS3 really just has the souls, which are almost exactly like blood. In both cases, you collect them like XP and can spend them for gear or to level up your character. Their persistence is similar in both games in that you lose them on dying, and have a single life afterward to try to retrieve them from the spot (in DS3) or spot/monster (in BB) where you lost them. This means that if you die with a decent number of points you really need to focus on retrieving them conservatively. If you get cocky during one of these missions you will often lose the batch and end up howling at the TV.

Leveling is frequent, but a painfully small boost to your power. You have to chose which point to invest in. DS3 has more types of points, with higher differentiation, and far more defined character builds. In BB mostly you could go for strength or dexterity builds, with a few people investing in arcane for a weak kind of magic. In DS3, besides the basic stats shared by both games like health, endurance, and item discovery, there is a weight carrying stat and three different magic stats driving (in some combo) three different sorts of spell-casting abilities that can be mixed with melee. These “classes” are a bit odd and nebulous compared to something like World of Warcraft or Diablo, but they are definitely more interesting in DS3 and overall I really like the RPG mechanic.

For me, the leveling mechanic adds to the game on so many “levels,” (haha) which is one of the reasons I always like RPG mechanics. First of all, it gives you more things to progress, and therefore have that “sense of achievement.” Second, if an area gets too difficult, you can always grind somewhere and level up to make it easier. Overall nod is to DS3, but the systems are pretty similar.

Dark-Souls-3-2-980x551Level Design. DS3 has more levels, and somewhat larger than BB (particularly if you exclude the DLC). The levels are fabulous in both, but quality goes to DS3.

However, BB has the whole chalice dungeon thing which allows for A LOT of extra levels to help farm blood and with their own powerful gem upgrades. There is a lot of content here, but the problem is that it’s boring in comparison to the normal levels. Somehow the featureless dungeon levels, half randomly constructed, are both extremely difficult and very dull. I never really enjoyed playing them.

Creature design in both games is fabulous and while DS3 probably has more, the variety is very good in both cases. Each creature tends to have considerable differences in attack and defense styles, which interplays delightfully with the generally awesome combat mechanics.

frame_0000_large

This boss you kill by bursting the sacks hanging between its legs!

Boss Design. Both games focus a lot of energy on bosses. There are many. They look fabulous. They play well, and require significant investment to master. DS3 has more bosses (particularly without DLC), and both games have a lot of excellent dramatic bosses. The BB ones felt more differentiated, mostly had cool intros, and seemed harder. Maybe it’s because I often co-oped the DS3 bosses, maybe I got better between games, maybe not. BB bosses seemed to absolutely require reading strats and watching videos to conquer. Some, like the Orphan of Kos were so insanely hard I still get shivers. Nod to BB for bosses just for sheer evilness.

Hubs. BB has a dedicated “Hunter’s Dream” hub while DS3 has the hub located in the “regular” world. Both have continue points that allow for teleportation, but DS3 allows you to teleport straight from one to the other without returning to the hub. Given the lengthy load times this is a significant plus. In addition, DS3 lets you reset a level at the bonfire without a load.

Co-op Multiplayer. I don’t really do much PVP (if I can avoid it), so I’ll discuss co-op. The system is very odd in both games, and not well “explained.” But it was much easier to summon co-op help in DS3 and I used it extensively to get past bosses. Actually I didn’t even discover it until about 7-8 bosses in, but I used it on most times after that. DS3 bosses are WAY easier with 2 players. More people seems to increase the hit points of the boss more than its worth. Neither of these games bother to explain their odd mechanics. You pretty much have to read about them online. But anyway, DS3 wins here. It also has more bizarre multiplayer factions than BB. In both cases the why you should join them and what they do is vague. You have to read the wiki online for a full explanation. I don’t focus on this kind of thing, but on regular leveling, bosses, gear, etc.

Ascended Winged KnightBalance. The sort of vague mysterious quality to both games makes for a somewhat diffuse balance. But that being said, the gameplay itself is intense and spectacular. Even though the bosses are huge and terrifying, or maybe because of it, I tend to prefer the levels. These are just awesome sauce and I also like the high level of challenge and the collecting and “upgrading.” These are just very satisfying games if you invest the time. BB felt a little tighter and more focused, but the increased scope of DS3 is fabulous too.

Mystery. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. These games are oddly mysterious, ambiguous, and “ill documented.” In that, they don’t explicitly teach the player about what’s available through clear tutorials, and they don’t even telegraph the availability and consequences of major branches, mechanics, decisions and whatnot. For example, if you were playing a spell-caster, opening up the vendors that sell most of the spells requires an odd sequences of dialogs and encounters, none of which is clear. You could easily goof or miss out on these. That’s just the way this game is. I happen to like this vague quality and find it highly immersive. But I also love David Lynch films. If you like everything very neat and well telegraphed, or don’t enjoy pouring over the online wiki descriptions, these games might be extra super hardcore frustrating. If, like me, you embrace it, they have a flavor, complexity, and immersive quality much different from a more explicit game.

dark_souls_3_boss_how_to_beat_dancer_of_the_boreal_valleyOverall, these are just some of my favorite games in recent years — true masterpieces. If you don’t mind your games hard (very very hard), and you like fantasy combat and aren’t easily creeped out, you must play them.

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Related posts:

  1. Dark Souls
  2. Bloodborne – Early Impressions
  3. Bloodborne – Complete
  4. Diablo 3 – from Good to Great
  5. Witcher 3 – Middle Impressions
By: agavin
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Posted in: Games
Tagged as: APRG, Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, Fantasy, Hidetaka Miyazaki, RPG, Video game

Witcher 3 – Middle Impressions

Mar14

cover-ps4-the-witcher-3-wild-huntTitle: Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

System: PS4 (also on Xbox / PC)

Genre: (A)RPG

Developer: CD Projekt Red

Publisher: CD Projekt Red

Date Played: February / March 2016

Rating: Sprawling and involving

_

I had such a great time playing Bloodborne earlier in the year that I couldn’t resist another foray into the world of console RPGs — this time the highly regarded Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. And by the way, I’ve never played a Witcher game before, barely even heard of them.

But Witcher 3 has garnered tons of great reviews, sold 6 million copies last year, and has an interesting development history. CD Projekt Red is a Polish company that is relatively new (to making original games) and does its own publishing too.

Which leads me pontificate on Witcher 3 (and to a lesser extent Bloodborne) in the context of the history of video games and of RPGs — of which I have played (more than) my fair share over the last 35+ years. Although both of these 2015 console games are both great, and both technically ARPGs (Action Role Playing Games) they are worlds apart in style and design emphasis. As I discussed before, Bloodborne is essentially descended from Castlevania, with a bit of RPG DNA grafted in. Bloodborne is all about learning how to navigate through very fixed levels of extremely difficult monsters. You memorize where they are, and how to beat each type, and you do so primarily by mastering one of the best hand to hand combat systems yet made. The core of the game is closer to a Brawler (like Final Fight) or Fighting Game than it is to old school RPGs. The RPG element is a way to customize and level up your character.

Witcher 3, however, is a bonafide descendant of the OG RPG family. And while like all good games, it inherits from countless older games, if I were to pick a “most important ancestor” I’d go with Ultima IV: Avatar. Both games focus on questing (in U4’s case, proto-questing as the formal quest hadn’t been as formalized), big worlds, and moral choices. And I mean the greatest compliment to W3 by placing it in this family, for U4 is one of the best RPGs of all time, and W3 is a very modern, very worthy successor.

I have to say, that for a few hours I was a little disappointed with W3, thinking that it just wasn’t as good as Bloodborne (which I’d just finished). It’s certainly slower paced. But the game has really really grown on me. They are very different RPGs and W3 is fantastic in its own right, just with a total different design balance.

2457637-the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_geralt_vs_fiend

Every game design team has to decide what they are interesting in focusing on, and you can assign them buzzwords, but let’s really break this game down by looking at separate elements and how the game emphasizes them.

Setting/Style/Graphics. W3 is set in this mysterious “northern middle ages” of the 1200s. It’s gritty and “real” except there are monsters and magic. The world is vast. Really vast. Fairly sparse, with a lot of riding or running around through the wilds. People eek out a living and it feels pretty authentically medieval. It’s based on a fantasy series by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. The moral style of both books and games diverges from the traditional black and white tropes of fantasy to offer an extremely (deliberately) gray scale picture of the world. The hero Geralt is a monster hunter and sword for hire, and he blends worldly cynicism with a certain heroism — but in the game all your choices have consequences (more on that below).

The graphics are realistic and naturalistically gorgeous. Not hyper colorful, nor drab.The world is lovely in a Northern way (bogs, forests, tundra, water, stone). I haven’t seen any desert or jungle. There is weather and time of day and very nice natural lighting. You often get these gorgeous sunsets and the like. The people are naturalistic, ugly even. Textures are very high resolution and there is a LOT of animation — pretty good animation at that  — not Naughty Dog great, but very good. The voice acting is spectacular as rule, particularly Geralt — which is a good thing given how much you have to listen to him.

Things are lusty. There is a ton of swearing. There are wenches and strumpets and actual nudity and sex. It’s kinda weird as I’m not that used to this in video games, but also at the same time like a bawdy 80s fantasy novel (which it derives from), and therefore slightly in the Conan school, but much darker.

There is also a ton of detail, particularly in the construction of minor ruins and castles. While built of similar materials, each feels uniquely constructed. Vistas abound, as do lush sunsets, the glare off ice blue water, the bright expanse of a sun spilling in through a castle window. Witcher is a pretty pretty game with a surprisingly un-game-like visual style.

The-Witcher-3-9

This enormous city is fully explorable

Story. There is a lot of story in W3, both in the past and in the present of the game. Bloodborne by contrast is a game with almost no present story, very little dialog, just a very complicated mood and world and a bunch of events that setup that world. W3 has all sorts of personal and political history, some of it from the previous games, but it also includes a monstrous (haha) number of hours of directly related, animated, voiced over story. Online I read that there are 300 hours of recorded dialog! This includes an enormous main story with very elaborate central quests and plenty of options as well as an epic number of side quests. Plus Geralt helpfully comments on things constantly.

Geralt's two main squeezes, Triss and Yennifer

Geralt’s two main squeezes, Triss and Yennifer

Questing / Gameplay. Like many RPGs before it, W3 aims for a a quest driven gameplay. It’s not a grind driven game, in fact monster XP is poor enough and monsters sparse enough that you’d be ill advised to go out just for the purpose of killing. It’s viable to explore “unknown markers” (question marks on the map) and discover/kill whatever is there, but these aren’t super dense either. Mostly, you work through the quests which will drag you into the game’s three main mechanics anyway: travel, investigation, and combat.

But let us compare the sub-balance with World of Warcraft. In that game, a quest giver will deliver a couple written paragraphs of mumbo jumbo, which you won’t read, which will basically sum up to “kill 14 boars in this zone” or “collect 7 blood crystals” which are either dropped or guarded by said boars. Mostly in WOW, you collect 3-4 quests that allow you to kill monsters in the same area repeatedly until you have finished off those quests. I rarely read much of the quest text, even though my main has the Loremaster achievement (having finished EVERY quest in the game!).

In W3, however, ALL the quest dialog is animated and blessed with voice over. This alone ups the interest level by a factor of 10 and is an impressive feat. Plus, the quest writing is far more character driven and the goals usually less about grinding some monsters. Most quests involve numerous steps before the kill, usually an investigation and some more dialog. This dialog usually offer Geralt choices, and the designers have cleverly set it up such that the quest usually finishes no matter how you chose, yet the consequences vary. In countless scenarios, someone must live and someone must die — and it’s usually Geralt who chooses, although not always with clear insight as to the ramifications of the choice. Do you want to get out of an argument by using the force, bribery, or violence? Well, you’ll get to chose (a lot). So not only did CD Projekt Red have to write the quests, then record, animate, and program them, they had to write them with branching options and multiple endings. This goes for both main and side quests too.

Now, there is some clever structuring here where the choices more or less fold back together, or in the case of side quests the varied consequences don’t matter to the main story. For example, you might be thrown into prison and can escape by stealth, combat, money or magic, but anywhichway you will end up at trial. Or you might have a choice to let a malfeasant go (and maybe get a reward) or kill them and collect the loot. Occasionally, these people you save will show up again later (or not) and your choices will have big long term consequences.

This is particularly the case with the “romances.” Geralt is a lusty fellow and he has two main love interests in the game, along with a couple (possible) side affairs and a whole bunch of “strumpets.” With the two main ones, how you play influences who you end up with, and it’s all a little hard to predict. I ended up consulting with the internet to try and divine the “best” choices — but the game is structured to elude any optimal solution. If you try to romance both hard, you end up with neither.

maxresdefault (1)

Sometimes the feel is decidedly Eastern European fairy tale

Mechanics. if the questing is the mid level gameplay, the mechanics are the actual controls and combat. W3 has spread the love in terms of designer effort, and the lower level mechanics are good but not perfect. Combat has a variety of options and there is a nice skill tree. You can balance between melee and “signs” (simple combat magic). Brewing up potions is significant. The actual fighting is fun, and blessedly single character action based. One of the things that has scared me away from some recent well-reviewed console RPGs like Dragon Age: Inquisition is the party based combat. I never find it fun. Witcher‘s solo fighting is great. However, this is no Bloodborne, where a huge percentage of the design effort was spent on the intricate physical combat and the myriad weapons. In Witcher, all the weapons feel more or less the same and the game doesn’t “real your mind” with regard to the nuance of strikes, but it’s still satisfying head loping fun. Witcher‘s combat is also vastly easier than Bloodborne‘s nail biting encounters and bosses are just larger typical monsters, not highly specialized (and brutal) special encounters.

Geralt’s normal non-combat control also isn’t as stellar as Bloodborne‘s. He has a bit too much inertia and there is something a little funny going on with the rotation of the camera such that I constantly got turned around for a second — even after 50+ hours of play. In BB, the control is dead on, earning them an A+. Witcher‘s are more in B territory. They are good enough, and the overall game great enough (it really is a superlative overall game), that it’s not a problem — but they could have been better.

An interesting and new (to me) sub mechanic is Geralt’s skill at investigation. He has these Witcher Senses, which a bit like the sonar mode in The Last of Us allows you to slow down and see the important things in the world. But the Witcher uses this like no game I’ve played before. You can use it to look for look or monsters, but you also use it constantly to find secret passages, hidden traps, foot prints, blood stains, and to generally follow and track villains to their lairs. I have to say it’s a very effective mechanic, and very much in keeping with the exploratory pace of the game.

Also like The Last of Us, there’s a significant looting “minigame.” In that, there are chests, barrels, and bags of stuff EVERYWHERE and you can spend as much or as little time as you like scavenging from them — albeit with care, as sometimes guards take offense. Oddly, peasants don’t, so you can pilfer their houses right under their noses. I found lots of good stuff this way, and as crafting and alchemy require tons of materials and are very valuable in this game, I played as quite the petty larcenist.

Between Geralt’s various modes and gear, inventory management, the map, quest management, etc. there is a lot of menu use. And the menus can be a bit clunky, particularly getting in and out of shop keeps. The inventory has sluggish tabs and there is this strange need to page through them all to reach the shop keep’s “tab.” Then, if you want to actually equip an item you might have to back out of the whole store and go into the normal inventory. But at the same time, the game’s need to “keep it real” wth the dialog means Geralt will have to pound through “hey, how are you” “can I take a look at your goods” and “farewell, maybe I’ll be back later” types of useless animated dialog — again and again. Some of these asset and menu controls are more like C+ or B-. They don’t ruin the game, but they could use some programmer/designer love.

There are a couple additional side mechanics in Witcher 3. A major one is the Gwent card game. This is a Hearthstone/MTG style minigame available across the whole world. I found the pace too slow and after a couple (loosing) games just skipped it as best as I could. Some people might enjoy it, but I was more focused on the the main game. Sometimes there is also horse (or foot) racing too. This was closer to the main mechanics and I enjoyed it much more. Sure, it was sometimes hard to know where the race course was and accidentally straying led to frustrating losses, but for the most part it was fun.

You spend a lot of time on your horse Roach

You spend a lot of time on your horse Roach

Meta-Game/Progression. I’ve played hundreds of RPGs and Witcher has an unusual balance. Leveling is glacial. It’s several hours (maybe 2-4?) between levels and the amount of XP both needed and earned is fairly flat. 60+ hours in and I’m still at level 22. This isn’t like WOW‘s carefully orchestrated progression where early levels ding in quick secession and new abilities are dolled out one by one with ordered and rapid progression. In the Witcher, you have all your spells at the start. Sure you can improve and modify them with the ability points (slowly), but it’s mostly there to begin with. There is no choice of complicated rotations and the like inherent in each build (ala WOW or Diablo 3). Builds are more about emphasis. There is a lot of gear, but the Witcher sets, found through following specific treasure quests, are the best. Questing and exploration are more emphasized in this game than gear and character progression.

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Medieval Europe brought to life

Odds and Ends. PS4 load times are pretty abysmal, particularly when you die. Think at least 1-2 minutes on the load screen. This is a big detailed world, and the blu ray isn’t the speediest, so I half understand. But it’s possible to zone in, move 5 feet, die, and still spend over a minute loading. The programmers must dump all of memory and start over. I solved that problem in the mid 90s :-). Fortunately you don’t die that often, but teleporting across the world and back to turn in a quest or sell loot can be annoying. As is the “weight limit” mechanic. This is one of those “some RPGs do it” things, and I never love it. When you are full you even walk slow and can’t use fast travel! Another complaint is summoning and mounting Roach, your trusty steed. For some reason, he’s a bit shy, and he has a knack for always showing up behind you. Then when you mount up the camera somehow rolls around leading to an inevitable canter off in the wrong direction.

It’s also worth mentioning, that while Geralt is a bad ass capable of slaying the most fearsome of monsters, he must have fragile bones because a fall off the wrong roof or cliff edge can easily lead to instant death. Save often in the presence of these perilous foes.

The views are frequently just awesome

The views are frequently just awesome

Balance. It took me a few hours to adjust to Witcher‘s peculiar game balance. This isn’t a super fast paced game, but once you accept the beauty of it, and the incredible depth of its gorgeous, windswept, Nordic game world and complex moral/character driven plotting, this game really grows on you. Sure, if I were the producer I would have spent another month or so tuning up the inventory and control mechanics. But the game’s greatness transcends a bit of control clunk. And I have the impression Witcher 3 represents quite an improvement in this regard over the earlier installments. If the story / exploration aspects of fantasy RPGs appeal to you at all, than Witcher is a MUST PLAY, having created one hell of a real-seeming world.

NOTE: As of 3/13/16 I’ve completed about 75% of the game. More thoughts to come after I progress…

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Lots of classic monsters

Lots of classic monsters

Related posts:

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  2. Bloodborne – Complete
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By: agavin
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Tagged as: CD Projekt RED, Fantasy, Game Review, RPG, Wild Hunt, Witcher 3

Bloodborne – Complete

Feb12

71AEYuMzSUL._SL1248_Title: Bloodborne

System: PS4

Genre: ARPG

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Date Played: January/February 2016

Rating: A Masterpiece

_

I few weeks ago I wrote a short article on my initial impressions of Bloodborne, and I’d like to come back to it now that I’ve defeated the game. Every boss. Every area. The whole DLC. All the side quests I could manage. The secret special double probation third ending. Now that’s on the “first play-through” (known as NG), I’m only a third through NG+ (a second harder go at it). But still, I think I know the game pretty well.

Let me put it out there, Bloodborne is the best console game I’ve played since The Last of Us, one of the best console games I’ve played in a long time, and one of the best games I’ve played since Diablo 3. It’s a masterpiece.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this game — and there a lot to love — is the setting, mythos, and lore. If you can handle it, this video gives a bit of a taste (SPOILERS ABOUND):

Besides being a great game, Bloodborne is a masterpiece of Lovecraftian horror. Many of you have probably never heard of H.P. Lovecraft, but along with Edgar Allan Poe, he is surely the most influential writer in the entire genre of horror. Enthroned in the genre not unlike J.R. Tolkien is for fantasy. Stephen King, no slouch himself, cites Lovecraft as his own greatest influence.

Bloodborne is like a love-letter to Lovecraft, reveling in a blend of “classic” (vaguely 19th and very early 20th century) influences, including in no small part Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the like. Every element of the game backs up this stylistic choice: The superb art design of world and characters both. The esoteric, cryptic, and complex mythology. The themes of forbidden knowledge explored and perverted. The creepy gorgeous music and terrifying sound effects. The influence of horrific powers from above/below/beyond. The moral ambiguity. Insanity. Dreams. Transformation and metamorphosis.

This is a dark dark game.

Art-bloodborne-screen-03It’s just so deliciously creepy and mythological. Really. Dark Souls has a cool world feel and mythology, and there is significant overlap, but Bloodborne really takes it all to the next level, elevating itself above mere video game (and it rocks in that department) to become a genuine work of art. Surely no chipper happy landscape painting, but a dark broody bloody 1911 horror novel of a game.

It’s quite twisted and disturbing too, in a very gothic fantastic way. There are a lot of awful reoccurring themes: nightmare worlds, bad births, transformations into beast-hood, sadness, tragedy. It’s often slightly Japanese in flavor, which blending with Lovecraft’s very Western horror lends it even more of a sentimental exotic twist.

The above video is a good example. The “Orphan of Kos” is a horrifically difficult boss born from the corpse of its parent — a great one, one of the Cthulhu-inspired demon-gods. It fights you with its placenta as a weapon. Yuck! This fight was so hard too. It took me probably 12 hours to master.

Bloodborne is a very boss centric game. There are a lot of them, 18 in the normal game, 5 in the DLC, and at least 15 in the Chalice dungeons. They are all hard. All different.

Nothing about this game is very obvious. There is little hand holding and there are countless secret and optional areas, bosses, weapons, etc. However, taking the time to explore them is both satisfying and makes it easier — as you’ll need their powerups. Coming late to it, the DLC served as an extra optional area to mix in with the main game. It’s extremely well done, and perhaps even harder than the primary plot. It fits in seamlessly from a style point of view.

bloodborne_the_old_hunters_V2Which brings us to more fantastic points about Bloodborne, the gameplay. The sneaking around and the combat is really quite excellent. It’s extremely difficult, and very skill oriented, particularly the many many varied bosses. But the mechanics are intensely visceral and satisfying. The combinations of feel, exceptional animation, physics/collision driven hand to hand, and amazing art and sound design all serve to enhance the effect. Every strike is satisfying.

The controls are very deep and nuanced, with a ton of variety in weapons. As a control programmer I can really appreciate the effect and tuning that went into them. At times the game appears to read your mind, allowing you to combine combos and hit multiple opponents in the same strike — but really it reads subtle indications from your joystick movements during the long attacks to guide and influence the results.

It’s difficult, and I’m not that great at the highly precise art of parrying with the guns — catching the enemy at exactly the right moment as to stun them — but subtle mechanic changes have made the combat “easier” or at least less frustrating than that in the Souls games. Probably nothing as much as the “regain system” in which you can recover lost hit points by rapid retaliation.

Image-bloodborne-c20The meta game is excellent too. At first I though it cryptic and the investments of blood echoes into levels of little apparent goal. However, I found that Bloodborne is actually a satisfyingly easy game to grind. Having trouble with a boss? Well, there are two options: read up on strategy and practice, or level up and practice — actually, you pretty much have to do both. The game doesn’t discourage a bit of grinding, and rarely makes it take that long. Plus the combat is so satisfying that even killing a room full of monsters over and over again is fun. 15 minutes of grinding will often earn you a level or two. Grinding up weapon upgrade “stones” and gems works pretty well too.

You have to choose how to invest in this game. There are only enough materials to upgrade a few weapons, so you need to choose which to use and spend both on them and on the appropriate character stats wisely.

There are always a lot of options to help you get past difficult spots. The first up being to watch some strategy videos, next are to tune your “runes”, weapons, outfit, and consumables for the fight. There is a lot of variety here. With weird powerups to exploit some vulnerability in most bosses. All challenging to learn and use. The “armor” is interesting. They aren’t radically different in power, and you can often wear what looks cool (and they do look cool — and different). For particular bosses and areas you can cobble together a set as best needed, for poison resistance, or fire, or frenzy.

I also love the way the world is so dense, but all twisted about on itself. Nearly every level has a door, gate, elevator, or ladder that cuts from the beginning to the end — after you sneak around and open it. It comes to feel progressively more accessible as you open up various connections. You learn it REALLY well too, because most areas require so many careful traversals in order to master. This is a game about learning the exact way to get through difficult challenges. It’s about mastery and careful progression.

A deliberate experience to be savored.

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Bloodborne – Early Impressions

Jan20

71AEYuMzSUL._SL1248_Title: Bloodborne

System: PS4

Genre: ARPG

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Date Played: January 2016

Rating: Awesome (although hard)

_

Many years back to played a couple days worth of Dark Souls, by this same developer. So when I was recently perusing some “best games of 2015” and came across the PS4 Bloodborne, a more updated take on the “mega-difficult action RPG genre” I decided to give it a try.

Although it might not be obvious, Bloodborne is really a spiritual descendant not only of those older “Souls” games (also by FromSoftware), but of Castlevania. It’s dark, gothic, and a creature hunting action roll playing game with lots of secrets.

Bloodborne-featuredLet’s talk about atmosphere. Bloodborne is Japanese Gothic, with a kind of vaguely european, vaguely 18th or 19th century vibe. Creepy cities, leather, top hats, blunderbusses, werwolves, and all that. It’s a gorgeous gorgeous kind of dark game. Excellent and moody visuals and soundscape.

At the mechanic level, Bloodborne is a sort of brawler. You fight usually two handed, with both a firearm in the left hand (generally a slow shooting blunderbuss or flintlock pistol) and a “trick weapon” in the right hand. The trick weapons switch between a smaller faster version and a bigger slower one. This switch can be done in the middle of combat. In fact, you can have two of each kind of weapon and switch those out too. Combat is careful and calculated, generally up close and personal, very visceral — not unlike a Final Fight style brawler. You dodge slow deadly blows, shoot guys to stun them, and then bash their faces in — combos abound. This refinement of the Souls hand-to-hand combat is faster and more furious. Different kinds of weapons and blows are satisfying. The monsters are varied, their animations clear and effective. A new mechanic where you can steal back lost hit points by attacking immediately after loosing them is very effective to encourage a more furious style of fight.

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But all that is this micro-mechanic. The macro mechanics (i.e. the RPG element) are brutal and different (although less evil that the Souls games). Blood echoes are xp earned by killing monsters, but you loose them all when you die. However, some nearby monster picks them up, and if you return to kill him (after killing everything up to him again), you can regain them — unless you die a second time on route. This mechanic, combined with a ridiculous scarcity of continue points means that you spend a LONG time killing the same guys over and over, learning every corner of the world. In fact, you have to kill one of the hideous bosses to get a continue, and it took me over a week to do that. Long before that I pretty much learned the ins and outs of the first area (which has a choice of two bosses).

And you can spend your blood echoes on leveling up, or weapons, or leveling your weapons, which are all great ways to get better at the game. Too bad you can’t actually spend anything until you at least see the first boss — and this is quite brutally challenging without leveling up.

Nor did the game bother to explain this, or much else about its rather oddball but well crafted macro-mechanics. Bloodborne, like the Souls games is virtually free of the burden of documentation, walk-thru, or any of those niceties for coddled modern player. Instead it relies on painful trial and error — and no small amount of walkthrough video viewing.

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It took me about a week to kill the first boss. By the time I even faced him seriously, he really wasn’t that hard, but my initial encounters at low level had been so punishing I took my time leveling and exploring. For while the monsters respawn every time you die or return to the leveling hub, rare items and “doors” are persistent. That is you can only collect an item once, and a door, once opened stays open. It is this last, since the level is folded around itself, that makes the long traversal through the level more manageable after awhile. For example, an initially locked gate near the checkpoint, when unlocked from the back allows “quick” (killing “only” 11 monster) access to the first boss.

And while one might think that slinking around killing the same monsters over and over again would be boring, the addictive rhythm to the combat and the slow progress in both leveling and skill makes it all quite rewarding — if dastardly difficult.

All ARPGs involve a grind. Diablo 3, one of my favorites, is nothing but grind. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In Diablo, you just slay slay with abandon in order to earn xp and small changes at gear upgrades. In Bloodborne, you pick your way through carefully, for the consequences of death are much sharper. Still, fundamentally you kill monsters, collect XP, and improve your character for more more monster killing. Such is the name of the game.

More thoughts to come after I progress…

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Bloodborne-3

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What is Diablo 3?

May12

Only three days to go until D3-day, and in case you don’t know what that means, this little video from Blizzard does a nice job summarizing the game:

See you in Sanctuary!

My detailed impressions of the closed beta can be found here.

And my review of the Barbarian 1-60 experience here.

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Diablo 3 – Commercial

Apr29

The geek watch countdown!

And a second ad:

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Diablo 3 – Beta Preview

Apr19

[ NOTE: this is my beta preview. I also have a release post on playing the Barbarian 1-60 and a separate one on the Barbarian in Inferno Mode. ]

Finally, the Diablo 3 beta invite showed up in my mailbox. Unfortunately, by the time I got it downloaded and installed I was headed to Vegas for the weekend (which wasn’t so bad, really). But as soon as I returned, I fired it up, rolled a toon, and cranked through the 1.5-2 hours it took to defeat the Skeleton King and “finish” the beta. Then I rolled another class. Then another and another until I’d played them all.

General Impressions

Not surprisingly, for a Blizzard game, and one that is only a month from launch, the game looks “finished” and is seemingly bug free. I didn’t have any problems. I didn’t try any multiplayer but I’m looking forward to it in the release.

Graphics wise, D3 is kinda dark, which wasn’t a problem playing at night, but during the sunny hours it was hard to see a lot of detail. I play on a Mac Pro with an Apple 30″ monitor. At full 2500×1600 resolution the game ran fine (I have a ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB). There was occasional slight slowdown as new textures paged in (I think that’s what it was because it wasn’t during big fights but moving into new areas).

The art is fantastic and everything is modeled in detailed 3D, yet the classic three-quarters pulled back viewpoint limits the options for dynamic camerawork or even the simple ability to show enemies at any real scale. Overall, this substantially reduces the visual drama in favor of more approachable gameplay.

But in that regard, Blizzard does it’s usual slick job of babying you into the game. This is in complete contrast to a hardcore RPG like Dark Souls, which does no coddling. Here, you start each class with just one skill, gaining them incrementally as you level. The early quests are easy and straightforward. By the time you get into the depths of the cathedral and to level six or so, the real flavor of the class starts to emerge.

The overall gameplay is, as one of my friends said, like the Diablo II you remember, not as it actually was. If you boot up the aforementioned classic you’ll find a 2D game that runs in 800×600 (and that only with the expansion pack installed!). Sure the gameplay is slick, but the late 90s graphics are very dated. The new Diablo brings the same basic experience but updated to perhaps 2007 level technology. And really, it’s that great gameplay that matters.

The Barbarian

I’m normally drawn toward dark wizards, and so in D2 I mostly played a Necromancer. In D3, that niche is filled by the Witchdoctor, but neither the pet based nature or the class style really appealed. I decided to try out the Barbarian. Big and plate wearing, this is a very straightforward class. The few skill choices available in the first nine or so levels basically seemed to oscillate between heavy hitting on a single target and non-quite-so heavy hitting on multiple targets. I haven’t studied the skill system in detail but it seems to have been simplified, moving away from the elaborate talent trees. Each skill can be powered up or tweaked with runes, and there are several completely distinct skill slots (primary, secondary, defensive, etc) that you can swap in and out skills that belong exclusively in their particular category. For the Barbarian, the primary is a fury generating basic attack and the secondary a harder hitting fury sink.

Progression with the Barbarian was a piece of cake. In the limited scope of the beta I barely even had to chug a health potion, perhaps once. I didn’t die at all. Even the Skeleton King was pretty easy. The attacks definitely got more satisfying as they leveled up, but some felt lackluster like the bleed-causing whirlwind. Maybe it gets cooler later. Maybe they aren’t done with it.

Still, all and all a very fun class to play.

For my discussion of leveling 1-60 in the final version, see here.

Taking on the Skeleton King

The Wizard

Next I tried out the wizard. This is the ranged magical damage dealer. Overall, this class is much squishier than the Barbarian and I died in one spot (right on returning to the Cathedral where there are three big sub-bosses). You have to watch your health and make sure to kite, mostly using the freeze ray or the frost nova to slow down the badies. I liked the feel of the freeze ray, it’s pretty fun. If you tune the skills toward the electrical discharges and the spark-like exploding fireball the wizard can do some serious AOE damage. On one middling outside area I collected a rather large collection of undead and then obliterated them in a big firefight (earning a 60 enemies killed at once achievement). I think there is more pure DPS output here than with the melee classes — in exchange for being fragile.

You have to pay more attention to your resources than the Barbarian. The defensive skill (on the 1 key) is crucial. With the Barbarian it was a sweetener, here, it’s key to getting out of the middle of a big cluster of foes (or blasting them down quick if you are using Crystal Armor). Although harder, it was a fun class to play and I’ll be torn what to try first in the release version.

Monk

Third up I tried the Monk. Squishier than the Barbarian for sure, but fairly similar in that you get right in the thick of thinks and wallop. At the earlier levels the different skills didn’t seem as differentiated. Theoretically the Barbarian would be slower and the Monk more nimble, but the Barb is plenty fast, so I’m not sure I yet see a compelling advantage. The teleport TO an enemy rune is kinda cool though.

At about level 7 or 8 things power up a bit and the excitement level rises. The spinning circle of fire and triple punch are real nice. Overall this was an easy class too. I didn’t die and pretty much never needed a health pot.

Witch Doctor

A few days after finishing the monk I felt it was my duty as a Necromancer player and diehard WOW Warlock to try the Witch Doctor. It was immediately obvious that this was a seriously squishy class, even more so than the Wizard. It’s harder to kite with too. A lot of the early skills are pets of one sort or another and you have to toss them out there and run. This is true of the spiders and bats. I really didn’t like trading the snaring hands for the bats and quickly went back to it. The spiders were okay though. Like the other classes, by the time I got to level 8 or so he was getting fairly powerful. The dogs were fun. The runed version of the grasping hands was a really solid snare and the machine gun blow gun too. Fun to play, but despite the cool theme, I think the Wizard was more straightforward as a ranged caster.

Demon Hunter

This is the last class I played and thematically the least interesting. The Hunter in WOW never held any interest whatsoever for me and it’s the only class I’ve never rolled. But the D3 Demon Hunter turned out to be pretty fun. Its long range and rapid fire is satisfying and I put an epic? (yellow) bow I got from another tune to good use right from the beginning. The problem with this class, like the Witch Doctor and Wizard, is that it’s very squishy. But even more than those other two it becomes problematic when you get mobbed by mobs. The Demon Hunter can go down fast. Now, even given that, I only died on the Skeleton King, but it was the only class where the boss gave me some trouble. Once I learned to kite and stun him and run back and forth for the health balls it was okay, but still harder and slower than the other classes. Up until that point I often felt I was really kicking ass with the DH, but the problem seemed to stem from the classes’ lack of AOE. I ended up having to use the “trap” as my slowing and AOE device, laying them down (up to five) in advance. I didn’t like the invisible skill very much. The Wizard, while also a ranged squishy, has much better AOE (at least at these early levels).

Gear

I enjoy the gearing up minigame in Diablo, always have. My only complaint is the still present need to manage your inventory. It’s not as bad as in D2 where one spent a ridiculous amount of time combing the trash from your inventory and leaving it on the dungeon floor, but you still have to do this. The more readily available town portal(s) makes flipping back to sell your crap much easier.

I also don’t exactly get what gear you really want for each class. Classes can use a large percentage of the items, which I guess is a good thing, but it’s hard to know if a 15.5 dagger is better for a Wizard than a 12.0 wand.

Multiplayer

I spent about an hour playing the last two dungeons and the Skeleton King with a pickup group of one other person. This does not represent any exhaustive survey of D3’s four player coop mode. Overall, it was fun, and slightly easier. It was also slower as one often had to wait on the other person. That player clearly hadn’t run through the whole beta four times already and didn’t know exactly where to go like I did :-). I’m assuming multiplayer is the most fun with a good or pre-made four man group. I was playing my monk (repeating the dungeons and she was level 9-11) and they were playing a Demon Hunter about two levels lower. There is no increased loot or particular advantage to playing multiplayer, either. There should be. It’s also not very competitive anymore because everyone has their own loot and there is no PVP (that’s in a separate non PVE mode like the WOW arenas).

Random

The consistent naming and art elements in Blizzard style are an amusing note. While Diablo is darker and more gothic than WOW there are quite a number of common enemy archetypes. The grotesques (abominations in WOW) are one example. These are a distinctly Blizzard baddie. Many of the spell names (and even the class archetypes) are overlapping. The Demon Hunter fires arrows and drops traps and bombs like the Hunter. The Wizard is like a WOW Mage, even down to having a Frost Nova with nearly identical effect. There was even a skeletal sub-boss with the same name as a Scholo boss.

I can’t wait for May 15. In the meantime, watch the Wrath animated short.

Or read my discussion of the Barbarian class, levels 1-60 here.

Find more video game posts here.

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Dark Souls

Nov11

Dark Souls is an interesting entry into the 2011 holiday game rush. At one level, it has state of the art  graphics and physics-based ultra-visceral hand-to-hand fantasy combat. But it’s also a throwback to old school RPG game design.

This puppy doesn’t baby you in any way. You’re instantly tossed into an arcane character creation screen with a cryptic interface. You’re forced to make choices about class and attributes armed only with one sentence descriptions.

And it only gets less accessible from there.

After a pretty but incomprehensible bit of backstory you’re tossed into a grim and desolate undead prison. This serves as a “training level” and it is a lot easier than what is to come. But even this little intro ain’t easy — and the game gives you little or no clue what you’re supposed to do our how the mechanics work.

Now on the other hand: the control feels pretty darn good. And after a few minutes the hand to hand combat feels great. Vicious, but great. There’s a real satisfaction to smacking around the depressingly dank baddies.

Then comes the first “real” level. And I start to die. And die. And die. And die some more. The game is so hard that the first night I spend two straight hours dying between the first and second checkpoints of the first level!  My shoulder muscles got so knotted that I was literally in agony. And I didn’t even reach that bonfire (checkpoint). I had to go out.

But all I could think about was getting back to it. And when I returned, agitated as hell, at eleven at night, I wisely decided to force myself not to play — or I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. Instead I came back to it the next afternoon and got through on my first shot. Then, entering virgin territory, I started to die again. And again.

This is a game that requires you to learn every little nuance of each stretch between the unfairly distant checkpoints. Death has a steep penalty: taking all your liquid souls (experience) from you. If you can reach your corpse before you die again you can recover it. Unfortunately, your corpse is usually being guarded by whatever killed you last time!

Relentlessly cruel as the game design is. I can’t help but want to keep playing. This might be the first action fantasy game where the you fight with hand held weapons and it actually feels like you’re fighting with hand held weapons. The physics based swords, axes, maces and whatnot hammer relentlessly on your foes — and on you. It’s pretty cool.

And the art design is damn creepy and atmospheric. Weird and mysterious. The enemies are varied and dastardly. I dig it. I’ll just have to see how far I can force myself through the sadistic gauntlet of evil!

More more posts on video games, click here.

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By: agavin
Comments (6)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Character creation, dark souls, demon souls, Experience point, Fantasy, Game design, graphics, Hand-to-hand combat, role playing game, RPG, Video game, video game review

Expansion of the WOW Factor

Oct26

I was once a very hardcore WOW (World of Warcraft) player. And although I burned out and haven’t been playing this year (after reaching 85 with my main, I just lost interest), but I still follow the news. Blizzard just released a trailer for the upcoming fourth expansion, the Mists of Pandaria. Below is a series of cinematics, from the original 2004 release to this newest (sometime 2012). It’s an interesting exercise in progression.

Above is the classic WOW launch cinematic.

Burning Crusade, where the demon infested Illidan Stormrage is confronted.

Then, above, the corrupted Lich King and his army of Scourge, in Wrath of the Lich King.

Then the gigantic Deathwing shatters the world in Cataclysm.

And finally, above, the arrival of… talking pandas. Hmmm. Seems a little like an April Fools joke. But not.

Now Blizzard also just released the cinematic for the upcoming Diablo 3.

That’s more like it! Even if the demon lecture is slightly cheesy. Also note how awesome the rendered girl looks, particularly the lighting and skin textures.

For more info on my video game career, click here.

For what I’m up to now, click here.

By: agavin
Comments (1)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: April Fools' Day, Blizzard Entertainment, Cataclysm, Diablo III, MMO, RPG, Scourge, Video Games, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
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