Blaugust Day 3: Master of Magnetism!

Marvel Heroes is another game whose developers seem to be very good at learning from their mistakes. Most recently they did away with multiple story mode difficulties. Where previously you had to run through the entire story 3 times to get all the available rewards on a particular character (most importantly power points) a single run through the story now takes you from level 1 to 60. Previously you would expect to be around level 25 the first time you fight Doctor Doom. Now you'll be nearly at the level cap when you reach Doom.

I decided to test this out by pulling out one of the characters I have unlocked but a level 1 and seeing how the leveling felt in this new system. I considered a couple of options, but ultimately decided on Magneto.

Those are some impressive guns for a 90 year old.

I played through the first 4 chapters of 9, and had hit level 33 by the time I defeated the Kingpin. Based on a little time spent in Midtown Manhattan, that seems to still be a quicker way to level, but Story mode is definitely a more viable leveling option than before.

I did notice that villains in events had a lot less health than before, resulting in super-villains often being defeated almost instantly when they appeared. On one hand, it's nice that I can complete those events by myself without it being a multi-minute slog now. I think maybe they need to be adjusted back up a little though, as it's pretty much not worth trying to get to one unless you were near it when it spawned.

As far as Magneto's gameplay, I had a lot of fun floating around hurling metal shards at people and listening to Magneto's haughty comments whenever other heroes ran by. Magneto uses 'debris' as a secondary resource for his attacks which recovers slowly over time or faster through wrecking up the place. I tend to destroy anything around in any case just for fun, so that works out well for me. I also really like the white costume they chose as his default, though if his costume from his time as Headmaster of the Xavier School ever gets added to the game, I'll be picking that up immediately.

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

One of the things that continually impresses me about Final Fantasy XIV is that the developers are very good at learning from their mistakes. Sometimes systems don't work quite how they were intended to at first, but improvements get made and the game develops over time. One good example of this is cutscenes.

The storyline in FFXIV includes a lot of cutscenes throughout, many of which can be fairly long. All well and good, but at first those cutscenes would often be in the middle of dungeons. If not everyone in the dungeon wants to watch the cutscene, then you end up with some members of a group either having to wait for the others to finish, or running on ahead and starting fights without the person who was watching the cutscene. The very worst offenders were the final two 8 person trials in the initial story, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium. It is entirely possible for a player to watch the cutscene triggered before a boss in one of those trials and find that by the time the cutscene is over the rest of the group has already defeated the boss and moved on without them.

In the content that was added in later patches however, mid-dungeon cutscenes are noticably rare. When they do exist they are usually very short. Cutscenes at the beginning of dungeons are usually quite short as well, with the long ones almost always placed at the end of dungeons where watching them won't hold the rest of your group up. The lesson was learned and adjustments were made to avoid repeating the mistake.

I've been working on my crafting jobs recently, and I've noticed the same sort of thing there, where choices appear to have been made to address weaknesses in the crafting system or to fix elements that don't have the expected effect.

Crafting in FFXIV is a mini-game that involves using various abilities to fill a progress bar while also trying to increase a quality bar as much as possible to improve your chance of producing a high quality verison of the item you're making. For final products a high quality item is noticeably better than the normal version, having higher stats across the board. You have a limited number of actions to do this with as well as a limited amount of crafting points to spend on your abilities. To complicate things even further, your craft has a material condition which can vary over the course of the craft, adding an element of randomness to the process.

In theory, one needs to pay attention to material condition and react differently depending on the current condition since it heavily affects the amount of quality added by abilities. In practice, at most points in the process changing which ability you use would result in wasting the effects of previously used abilities or using too many crafting points and running out too soon. Thus, condition ends up just being something you don't pay much attention to that occasionally greatly helps you or screws you over.

In Heavensward, all the crafting jobs get a new ability at level 53, Precise Touch, which increases item quality. This ability is identical to the very first quality increase ability you receive, Basic Touch, with two differences. Precise Touch can only be used when material condition is Good or Excellent, and it adds a level of Inner Quiet to your Stack. Inner Quiet is a status you can stack that increases the effectiveness of all you quality increase abilities.

That's useful in and of itself, of course, but more importantly that stack can then be spent to fuel the ability Byregot's Blessing, which increases quality by an amount dependent on the size of the Inner Quiet stack.

What this means is that any time you would normally use Basic Touch, it is better to use Precise Touch if possible. Now you need to pay attention to material condition so you can use the better ability. It's not a huge change, but a small step to slightly more complex crafting. Of course, whether you think that's a good thing or not will depend on whether you view it as interesting complexity or not. I'm still not entirely sure on that point, but it's at least an attempt.

Blaugust Returns, Day 1

I originally started this blog on the first day of Blaugust last year, so I suppose it's somewhat fitting that I return to it on the first day of Blaugust.  I'm not really certain why, but I just haven't felt much inspiration to write in recent months.  Time for a fresh start though, and to see if I can keep things going this time around.  We shall see.

What are you hoping to get out of Blaugust this year?

 Belghast posted that question as a writing prompt for the first day of Blaugust, and it seems like a good question for me to answer.  What am I hoping to get out of this?  I'm certainly not it for the phat stacks of blog cash.  I have a day job that works just fine for me; this will only ever be a hobby.  I think I mostly want to blog as a way to think about my ideas and get them out into a more concrete form.

That's why I blog (when I do), but why Blaugust in particular?  I've found that I tend to work best with concrete goals.  That's one of the reasons that I'm a big fan of in-game achievements; they provide me suggested goals to work towards which give me sufficient structure that I'm not just flailing around wondering what to do.  Blaugust serves a similar purpose, setting a goal of one blog per day for a month.  I've done it once, but this time I'd also like to try and use that month to come up with some ongoing structure to keep me going.  One of my friends had a few suggestions for ongoing features I could write each of which could run for a year or more if done on a weekly basis.  I may try to do one or more of those and see how that goes.

In any case, Blaugust has come and the challenge has begun.  Let's do this.

A Prediction for Heavensward

This entire post is CHOCK FULL OF SPOILERS for the most recent story events in FFXIV. Seriously, if you don't want spoilers turn back now.

Not a spoiler:  There will be internet dragons

Alright, so I'm going to be theorizing based on the state of things as of the end of the current storyline, and particularly one scene that shows up after the ending credits. I'm assuming if you're reading this you already know what's gone down, but if not you can listen to us talk about it on the latest Aggrochat podcast. The important thing for our purposes here is that the Scions of the Seventh Dawn appear to have been nearly wiped out. Yda, Papalymo, Y'shtola, Thancred, and Minfilia all remained behind and apparently gave their lives in Ul'dah to aid our escape.

What really got me thinking, though, is the final cutscene where we see Urianger speaking to Elidibus, the white-robed Ascian. We don't see much, but Urianger appears to be ready to enter into a deal with Elidibus.  My theory is about that deal and the possible repercussions.

I think Urianger, already hit hard by the death of Moenbryda, was devastated by the apparent deaths of the other Scions. Willing to do whatever it takes to save them, he enters into a deal with Elidibus, offering him the stone from Louisoux's staff if the Scions can be returned to life. Elidibus accepts, and the Scions are restored, but not without cost. They come back in the thrall of Elidibus' "One True God", effectively tempered.

This would lead into a storyline where we find ourselves having to face our former friends and desperately search for a way to free them of the Ascians' influence.  I see us facing them one by one, most likely starting with Moenbryda, and collecting a dark crystal from each as we defeat them. Adding Moenbryda to the five Scions who fell in Ul'dah would give us a total of six dark crystals to collect, just as we collected six light crystals from the primals in the Realm Reborn story.

Dark Crystals, you say?

I might be entirely off base with all of this, but this seems to me like something that fits in with the sort of story the FFXIV team have been telling thus far and also hearkens back to aspects of previous Final Fantasy games (collecting dark crystals, friends mind-controlled and set against the party). I'm looking forward to seeing if I'm right.

Game vs Metagame

Tam's recent post about solved games really crystallized something for me with regards to why I do and don't like certain games.  In particular why I will sometimes really like the concept of a game and yet end up absolutely loathing it in practice.  In a word, metagame.

...game

I've come to realize that the existence of a codified metagame for something is a pretty good sign that I won't want anything to do with it. If there's a way of doing things that is the way, the truth, and the light, then I get to choose between following the crowd or trying to go my own way knowing that I'm actively not playing optimally. The former tends to lead to me getting bored quickly, particularly since the one right way rarely ever syncs up with the way I want to play, and often relies on degenerate strategies. The latter puts me in a spot where I don't get to take joy in improving, since I'm aware that I'm actively not playing 'the best way'.

Beyond that, I'm being forced to spend time figuring out how to play the game 'properly' rather than actually playing the game.  Part of the problem with metagame for me is that it is, by definition, external to the game.  So I end up having to look for FAQs, wikis, or even *shudder* official forums to even begin to figure out what I'm 'supposed' to be doing.  And then, without fail, I learn that I chose the wrong class, hero, skill set, or whatever and I can either start over completely or bull on with the knowledge that I'm 'doing it wrong'.  At least if it's a single-player game I can take comfort in playing the character I want to play even if it isn't optimal.  In a multi-player game there's the added joy of other players more than happy to tell you that you're stupid and wrong if you dare to step outside of the accepted orthodoxy.

My roots in tabletop role-playing, where metagaming has long been viewed negatively, may also enter into this. For me playing a game is about working within the bounds of the assumptions that are made by the system. Avoiding use of out-of-game knowledge as much as possible is part of this. If a game is well designed and things are messaged properly, I should be able to figure out everything I need to know to play well without having to resort to outside information.

Ultimately, the more time I'm having to spend playing the metagame instead of the actual game, the less I tend to enjoy myself. I want to do my learning as a part of playing, rather than as a prerequisite to even getting started.

Return of the Flumph

It was recently decided that the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign I've been playing in will be switching to 5th edition for our next session.  On the whole, I'm excited since 5e feels much more like Dungeons & Dragons should, in my opinion.  My stance on 4e has always been that it's a perfectly good system for strategic combat, but it's not D&D.  I am , however, disappointed that I won't get to debut my rebuilt warlock who never lets his opponent stand up, ever.

With a 5th edition session in the near future and needing to port my character over, I went ahead and picked up the core books as well as the two adventures that have been published so far.  I had leafed through a friend's Player's Handbook and determined that I liked the system, so I figure there's a reasonable chance I'll want to run some games in the future.  I also figure the adventures will be useful in getting an idea of how the creators of this edition think the game should play.

So anyway, I've been reading through those books and in the Monster Manual I found something amazing.  The flumph is back.

The original flying spaghetti monster

For those not in the know, the flumph is a perennial entry on lists of weird, crazy, or useless D&D monsters (along with such luminaries as the flail snail and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing).  The flumph is one of the rarest of D&D monsters, a lawful good aberration.  It's also basically a floating telepathic jellyfish that is helpless when knocked on it's back.  Flumphs are awesome.

The fact that the flumph is, for the first time, among the initial set of monsters published for an edition of D&D says a lot about the design team's willingness to try and recapture the feel of older editions and marry it with a cleaner ruleset.  The Dungeon Master's guide is full of the sorts of random tables that made the first AD&D books so much fun.  Example artifacts have DM chosen (or randomly generated) minor benefits and flaws, just like AD&D.  One of the example traps is the classic Tomb of Horrors sphere of annihilation trap.

Ultimately, D&D is a game about creating stories.  A little weirdness and a little randomness can go a long way towards making a story memorable.  5e seems to have been created by folks that realize that, and that brings me great joy.  I'm sure the flumphs are happy too.

Farewell Uncle Pterry

Terry Pratchett has died, and the world is a little darker for his passing.

It would be hard to overstate the impact that Sir Terry had on me over the years; his writing has been a near constant in my life since I really began reading fantasy.  It would have been around 1990 or so that a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Guards! Guards! and from there I was hooked.  Not that Discworld novels were easy to find in America at the time.  For a few years they were out of print here with only used copies and the like available.  Most of my copies of the books before Small Gods! are book club editions I picked up used.

There's one last Discworld novel to be published, the 41st in the series.  I have that last bit of Pratchett to look forward to, and then it's over.  I'll reread the series, have no doubt of that, but for the first time in 20 years I won't be avidly anticipating the next book.  I'll miss that.