RPG Elements in Dead Island

By biggest gripe with Dead Island is that many of the traditional RPG elements seem largely unnecessary. Do I really need to see large, floating numbers appear around every zombie every time I attack to indicate damage?

What makes a level 30 rusty pipe so much more powerful than a level 2 rusty pipe? What makes a revolver spiteful and how is it any different from any other revolver? I can’t help but think the gameplay could have been accomplished without all this emphasis leveling, numbers, and experience, leaving your character’s player-chosen abilities to do all the talking. As it stands, many of these elements only detract from the player’s immersion in the game world.

Weekly Report - 07/27/2012

This is the first of a (hopefully) ongoing, down-to-earth series of posts which will describe my Backloggery progress each week. I normally try to post more thoughtful and philosophical content, but these reports are intended to be more concrete (and, perhaps, less interesting).

Last weekend a few friends visited from mid-afternoon until after midnight. We downloaded the Free to Play (F2P) shooter Tribes: Ascend. The vast majority of our time together was spent huddled around our laptops, reminiscing about Tribes 2 while playing round after round of this new F2P title. None of us earned much more than 20,000 XP which is barely enough to unlock a new character class, let alone some of the more valuable items. Naturally we weren’t inclined to spend any real money (Pay to Win). It seems a decent game and all three of us were productive members of our respective teams, but I probably won’t play it much more.

Late that night we discovered the Magicka collection sale for $7.49 was about to end, so we hurriedly purchased it with plans to play Magicka: Vietnam during our next gathering. I look forward to that.

Monday and Tuesday evenings I spent polishing off the last two achievements for Mass Effect 3 (5,000 kills for Veteran and weapon level 10 for Gunsmith). I’m 100% complete on the entire ME trilogy (minus a few DLC, which I rarely bother with).

No forward progress was made on GTA: Chinatown Wars or Torchlight, where I’ve been working on a very hard hardcore (VHHC) playthrough.

However, I did fire up the long-unfinished Call of Duty 3 on my 360. I plan a single frustrating playthrough on veteran to earn the worthwhile achievements and complete the game (multiplayer will be ignored given the age of this game).

Mass Effect 3: The Endings

I didn’t play Mass Effect 3 when it first came out. Instead, I continued to work through my overwhelming backlog of games, waiting to pick up ME3 on a decent sale. Even after I bought it for $40, I didn’t play it until several months later thanks to Gears of War 3 and Modern Warfare 3.

During this time, however, I read rumors around the net that the ending for the Mass Effect series was disappointing, outrageous, and insulting. Tempers flared, tears fell, and rage was rampant throughout forum posts and blogs alike. I intentionally ignored all this to avoid spoilers, but in the back of my mind doubt grew.

I didn’t want to hate the ending, but I was afraid I would. Mass Effect holds a very dear place in my memory (particularly the first game) that I didn’t want to tarnish.

Eventually, I had to experience the bookend of the trilogy for myself. So I dived in with my paragon character on normal difficulty. Near the end of the story, I realized that BioWare released an Extended Cut DLC for free.

This DLC adds some extra cutscenes and was purported to alleviate many players’ concerns about the abruptness of the original ending. I downloaded it immediately prior to entering the final mission. I had to delete a number of less important items from my 360 hard drive just to install this piece which weighs in at 1.9GB. I have the lame 20GB model which is nearly always full; this time around my Modern Warfare 3 recordings didn’t make the cut.

Without divulging any spoilers, I’ll say that I found the ending fairly satisfying. Depending on your military strength score and reputation at the end, you have a handful of options from which to choose. After making my choice and viewing my ending, I rushed to YouTube and watched the other endings. It turns out your final choice is somewhat irrelevant, as the ultimate outcomes are largely identical. Your decision and military strength score do determine which main characters survive the final encounter, however.

The Extended Cut DLC certainly adds enough information to resolve certain questions (the ending sans-DLC is rather abrupt and leaves several hanging threads), but it certainly doesn’t dramatically alter the outcome of the trilogy. Without the DLC, the ending is passable. Had I earned a lower military strength I probably would have been rather upset with the outcome. With the DLC installed, however, the ending is mildly pleasing. It beats Battlestar Galactica by a long shot - the bar for sci-fi endings has traditionally been set very, very low - which is all I was really hoping for.

Torchlight Vanquisher Build for Very Hard Hardcore

After burning through the campaign on normal difficulty as the Alchemist in order to get a feel for the game and experience its storyline, I turned my attention to very hard hardcore (VHHC) mode where a character death is permanent and irreversible.

I typically have much more fun playing these games in hardcore mode. Because you actually stand to lose something, you start to care more about your character’s build and equipment not only because you have to (due to the increased challenge level) but because you want to. Hardcore mode forces you to invest part of yourself in your character. VHHC in Torchlight takes thought, strategy, and a healthy dose of caution.

This time around I chose to build a Vanquisher. I employ the following strategies:

• Every level, increase Defense by 3 and Dexterity by 2. You need the survivability offered by Defense and extra damage from the increased Dexterity. The other attributes are next to useless for the Vanquisher.
• Level up the following skills roughly in this order: Ranged Weapons Expertise, Critical Strikes, Explosive Shot, Armor Expertise, Adventurer, and Bock and Parry. I stopped Adventurer at 5, but the others are worth maxing out. Your primary attack throughout the game should be Explosive Shot as soon as you get it. I put one point into Ricochet so I could use it until I got Explosive Shot.
• Approach every pack of enemies carefully. Keep a finger on the health potions and prepare to backtrack immediately if necessary.
• Buy up all the map scrolls you can. Keep playing them until they become obscenely easy, then move to higher level map scrolls.
• Try to keep your character roughly 5 levels higher than the enemies you’re currently facing, whether that’s in map scrolls or the main dungeon.
• Phase portals are particularly dangerous because they take you to a two-floor dungeon with enemies that match your level. The entrances to both floors are often swamped with numerous powerful enemies, so be ready to backtrack upstairs if things get too hot.
• The hardest part of VHHC seems to be making it until level 5 or so. By then you should have bootstrapped your character with decent equipment and abilities to face the lower-level map scrolls and begin leveling up more comfortably from there.
• Use your ember! There’s little reason to continually save it. Since you find much better equipment every hour or two of gameplay, simply break the old equipment to recover your ember. This is a good time to upgrade the recovered ember and use it again on your newest gear.
• Enchant your gear repeatedly until you no longer feel comfortable with the disenchant risk. I usually go until 10% or so.
• Always give your pet the strongest Heal All spell you have.
• Pick up all loot and sell it when you and your pet’s inventories are full. You can easily afford the town portals and you’ll need the gold.
• Spend your gold on equipment, ember, map scrolls, and enchantments. As long as you don’t go crazy with enchantments you should have plenty of gold.
• Keep it simple and have fun. Expect the likelihood of death, but enjoy the thrill of every success.

Economics of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Aside from the distasteful subject, the continuous drug trading side quest in Chinatown Wars is actually entertaining as well as useful. I’ve found it to be by far the most efficient way to earn cash in the game. After about two hours of doing nothing but schlepping illicit substances back and forth across Liberty City, I have probably accumulated more than enough funds than I could possibly ever need to supply myself with enough ammo and equipment for the duration of the game.

The strategy is pretty obvious: buy low, sell high. Every now and then you’ll receive an in-game message about a dealer who’s selling some product at a huge discount or buying another product like it’s going out of style. Take advantage of every such situation. If someone is selling low, buy up all of their stock even if you don’t have a buyer in mind for it yet. If someone is buying high, sell them all of your stock then run around town and buy up more to resell to the high buyer. Just make sure any extra you purchase is cheaper than what you can resell it for, and ignore the glaring logical fallacies inherent in such outrageous price gaps between two dealers who work only a few miles apart from one another.

It’s that easy, and you’ll have earned plenty of cash to enjoy the rest of the game in comfort (i.e. fresh armor on every mission!) long before you get even begin to get bored of driving back and forth between the various traders in the city.

Vacationing on Dead Island

Dead Island from developer Techland and publisher Deep Silver was first announced at E3 2006, but it first came to my attention in 2010 with its innovative slow-motion, nonlinear cutscene trailer. The trailer is brief, unabashedly violent, and somewhat confusing, but it tells a story - and that’s something most trailers simply fail to accomplish. Interestingly, Techland did not produce the trailer. It was contracted out to a third-party firm.

As it turns out Dead Island is not at all what I expected. It’s an open world action-RPG where I had anticipated a first-person action game a la Left 4 Dead 2. That’s not a bad thing by any means; it features a quest-based, sandbox-like feel similar to Fallout 3 but at the same time it remains action-packed due to the density of the game world.

Atop this initial surprise comes the shockingly visceral gameplay. Encounters with the infected are uncomfortably, nail-bitingly intimate. You are thrust into your first battle armed only with a broken oar. Throughout the game you’ll discover that melee combat with sticks, pipes, knives, and clubs is the most effective and, often, the only plausible method of engaging the enemy. The game requires you to get up close and personal. Guns don’t become available until the second act, and even then they simply cannot dish out enough damage to become very useful.

Played solo, the game is rather challenging. There isn’t much you can do in terms of crowd control, so you must play strategically in certain areas to avoid being overwhelmed. The game is a co-op home run with my gaming group. It’s less nerve-wracking when you know someone’s got your back. I highly encourage playing with a group of friends in the room; it’s a blast.

Paragon vs Renegade in Mass Effect 3

I’m currently working on my second play-through of Mass Effect 3. I typically play each Mass Effect game at least twice; once on normal difficulty with paragon decisions as male Shepard (Nick) and once on the hardest difficulty available with renegade decisions as female Shepard (Karen).

According to this BioWare blog post Mass Effect 3 is a little different from its predecessors in that Shepard’s reputation isn’t dependent on the paragon or renegade score. Reputation is now an additive value, so you won’t miss certain dialog options or paragon/renegade encounters just because you don’t devoutly adhere to the paragon or renegade path from beginning to end.

In other words, now you can play the game in a more varied manner - making decisions that truly fit your character and the situation - without worrying about missing out on some content.

I’m inclined to welcome this change, since it allows me more breathing room to enjoy the story. I can choose to be unfriendly, violent, and careless throughout each encounter but still choose to be kind and gentle toward my potential romantic interests - showing a truly multifaceted (or perhaps schizophrenic) personality.

That said, I find that the renegade and paragon options differ very little in Mass Effect 3. You’re always going to end up the hero, no matter what you choose: you might mildly hurt some feelings, but it probably won’t cost you anything; or you might gain some begrudging friends and a paltry few extra military strength points. Generally your decisions are smaller in scale than they were in the previous installments of the Mass Effect series. You won’t be making any major galactic impact like rescuing the Council or letting them suffer their fate without your intervention. At least until the ultimate decision of the game - although as far as I can tell the ending varies little regardless of your final choice.