A Painful Exercise

Last week I promised to write a little about Darkfall: Unholy Wars. I purchased the game with 30 days of game time for $40 last week (the recurring subscription goes for $15 monthly). DUW is the launch title for Steam’s new subscription service. From what I can tell, the service works great. It was simple and easy to immediately cancel my DUW subscription after I spent 30 minutes playing the game.

What attracted me to DUW? I read a number of MMO blogs, most of which are EVE-focused. But a one of them has been writing about DUW lately. It’s a massive, open, sandbox game with full-loot PVP and few, very limited safe areas in a fantasy (sword and shield) setting. I’m into that sort of thing, so I decided to check it out.

My list of complains begins presently.

• No sound is played when your weapon strikes an opponent. A simple sound effect alone makes all the difference in the world in terms of player feedback. Simply put, I don’t know when I hit something in this game without looking for the stupid floating damage numbers. It’s absolutely appalling. The audio is terrible overall, but this issue alone is just unforgivable.
• WoW has better graphics in every single category. Not kidding.
• Movement is freaking slow and the world is immense. Mounts don’t help much.
• No in-game voice chat. Everyone uses Mumble or whatever.
• Targeting is crap and the field of view is so messed up you never really know when you’re close enough to a target to hit them. Exception: bows work pretty well, and are fun to use mounted.
• There’s no good way to find a guild. EVE has a corporation search function with adverts and such, but this game has nada.
• The basic monsters in the starting safe area are ridiculously overpowered. They have insane health and can kill you in a few hits. Watch out.
• All items are player-crafted - that’s not my complaint; in fact it’s a compliment - but materials are an absolute bore to gather. If you want iron ore, for example, you have to hunt out an ore vein, click on it, and sit there staring at the ore vein (you can’t even look around) while your character pounds away with the pickaxe. Somehow, Minecraft makes this fun. Why can’t other games manage that?
• There doesn’t seem to be a comprehensive player market for items and materials. Stuff is sold view ad hoc conversations in chat (a la the original Guild Wars). In an MMO these days that just doesn’t do it for me.

Like I mentioned, I cancelled the automatically recurring subscription after about 30 minutes of gameplay. I feel cheated out of $40. This game has a great concept and some cool ideas, but it’s nowhere near ready. Oh how I wish they offered a free trial - but that which should attract customers, in this case, would quickly ward them away.

The Tide Comes In

As I slowly progress through my solo run of Dead Island: Riptide, a number of worthy topics pop into my head. This game is nearly identical, yet subtly different from its predecessor.

This is an extremely dangerous building. Don't go in alone!

The engine appears identical. Controls are still a bit stuttery. The audio is still pretty good. It looks to me like the animations haven’t changed at all, but otherwise the graphics seem improved. I chalk it up to improved textures. Foliage, in particular, looks fantastic. The overdone bloom effect from the original DI has been drastically scaled back, so it no longer feels like you’re staring into a light bulb while playing the game.

Gameplay-wise, character advancement and weapon customization have not changed one iota. I’ve noticed one thing over the past few hours in the game, though: zombies seem to have a much longer reach than they used to, or perhaps my kicks are shorter than they used to be. I keep finding myself taking tons of damage from weak swipes that I honestly don’t think should have hit me. Perhaps the field of view (FOV) changed on me but the zombies on my screen are, apparently, closer than they appear. And another thing: those weak swipes are capping me for upwards of 30% health. I can’t absorb more than three hits without hitting the dirt. That’s not cool when you’re playing solo.

Speaking of difficulty, enemies and items appear to respawn really fast. It seems every time I turn around, I can harvest the same huts for loot and materials over and over again. At the same time, enemies have respawned (unless you’re in a safe area). I can’t walk 100 feet down the beach and back without fighting the same overwhelmingly large (I’m playing solo) groups of zombies at least twice.

Which brings me to another point. There are a ton of zombies in this game. They apparently move in herds now, coming in tightly-knit family groups of three or so. Each family group is located ridiculously close to another family group. Woe be to the solo player who accidentally aggresses multiple groups simultaneously.

Not that I don’t enjoy the difficulty. I like hard games, but I still feel like Riptide, just like its predecessor, is a game best played with a few friends. Solo, it’s way harder than DI. Opportunities for being surrounded are numerous, and it’s just plain scarier that way. Why doesn’t Riptide scale the number of enemies with the current player count? Or perhaps provide AI teammates when humans aren’t in-game?

I played the original DI with a group of three and we facerolled the game in an almost comical fashion, with the notable exception of this one room in the middle of the city in Act 2 where raging, ludicrously fast, infinitely-spawning Infected continuously flood in to wreck you. I can only imagine how easy the game would have been with all four players. Riptide is different, though. I think it will challenge my group of three enough to make us pressure the reclusive fourth member of our gaming group into joining us.

Weekly Report - 06/21/2013

This week I finished Demon's Souls - it's a short game, much shorter than its successor. In fact, I prefer Dark Souls in pretty much every way possible. Demon's Souls, for one, doesn't have a poise system at all. That means it's possible to totally stunlock your opponents (or be stunlocked) for an entire fight. It's cheap, and when it happens to you it's no fun at all. It's not all bad, though. Demon's Souls seems to offer a more coherent story than Dark Souls, but really the narrative takes a back seat in both titles. That said, Demon's Souls is an awesome game. It's a real asset to the Playstation 3 and I think it deserves much more attention than it received.

Wondering what to do next, I picked up Darkfall: Unholy Wars on the PC. It's a sandbox MMORPG with a wide open world and full loot PVP (think EVE). Unfortunately, it's no fun. I'll explain in another post later.

I decided instead to go back into Dark Souls and try the DLC and maybe some PVP. So I picked up Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition from Steam and hooked my PC up to my TV. I'm currently enjoying my fourth playthrough of Dark Souls and looking forward to some PVP.

Weekly Report - 06/14/2013

I've spent the past few weeks in Far Cry 3 and Demon's Souls. Far Cry 3 is pretty refreshing, but it does become stale about halfway through. It's a wide open sandbox world, which is where all the fun is. The shooting and movement mechanics aren't that great - most of the fun in this game is in how you approach various situations.

I found myself growing somewhat bored after defeating the game's initial villain, Vaas. I gathered enough hides and radio towers very early on to craft the important gear I wanted (e.g. expanded holsters), so for the remainder of the game I had no distractions from the rapidly deteriorating storyline missions.

Speaking of storyline missions: my biggest gripe about this game is its "boss fight" mechanic. You typically get stabbed or shot or something, then the screen fades to black. You wake up in a hazy purple fog and are forced through an obnoxious, awkward quick time event sequence. At the end, if you manage to complete the proper button presses, the "boss" dies. It's outrageously unsatisfying, particularly in the case of Vaas, who is a real contender for video game villain of the year...

Post-Far Cry 3 I started in on Demon's Souls. It's a very familiar game to me as a Dark Souls player. It's really neat to see where the latter game gained so much of its inspiration in level design, enemy behavior, and so on. More to come as I progress farther in the game.