Blood in Space: Templar Battleforce Tharsis

Two turn based games with death among the stars.

Templar Battleforce

With deadly xenos threatening to invade the colonies, it is up to you and your battleforce to save the day in this turn based strategy game. Don't let the simple cover art fool you, despite the many similarities this is no Warhammer 40K as you need to manage more than just the endless swarm of xenos (and other enemies)... each of your templars are in battle suits which have a huge problem in that they overheat & explode!

Not so bad if you just have to hold position (overwatch is awesome) but in the majority of the levels, speed is the key to victory (and engineer turrets help). Do you risk losing your men to win the mission? Especially when said soldiers level up through the campaign with you? Highly recommended for tactics buffs, and there's a decent story to boot. Three Spear Cutters out of five.

Tharsis

Going to Mars was never going to be easy, but no one expected it to be this hard either! Left in command of a damaged space ship, you must organize your crew to survive the many hazards en route. In an interesting twist, most of this is by dice rolling, and those dice can do various other things depending on the character and the location they are in meaning you might be tempted to not fix every problem.

Eat the weak. Muahahahaha!

With such a strong board game feel you'd think I'd like this more, but I guess it just feels too random. Got a few bad rolls? Welp, that's probably the beginning of the end as things just pile on without any hope of getting better. Two mini meteorites out of five. Not really recommended. 

Next Up Hero

Only the dead can help you now.

This online only game has some rather odd art coupled with rather odd game design. In it you must go on expeditions on randomly player made generated floating islands to beat the random foes there. While it plays a bit like Gauntlet, there is no healing. Instead, you can find "echoes" of other defeated players you can revive (as NPCs) to assist you in combat.

Just me and my ghosts...

You can also "spend" the echoes to activate various special abilities, like increase damage or temporary invulnerability. This is pretty cool, but also a massive flaw in that expeditions that are more popular will always be more popular simply because the number of echoes you can find there will be greater than if you made a fresh one of your own.

The always online factor also can be problematic in that looking for maps on the server can sometimes be really slow. Not one I could get into and not one I can recommend, I give this one rocket launcher out of five. Not worth playing.

Insight: Follow the title and simply find what game is next up for you. Skip this garbage.

Thought of the Day: All things are Poison

"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison."  -Paracelsus 

I know that's a quote on toxicology, but I wonder if it is true for all consumable vices, video games included. My addiction is in full swing at the moment, evidenced by 7 days of no blog posts. Gotta get my schedule back on. Blergh!

MMOs: Fairer RNG Drops

[Part of my MMO Design Folder]

RNG = the Random Number Generator. It's an old staple of MMOs and one that is often hated when it comes to the chances of getting the item you want from the rare slain monster or hard to reach reward chest. Usually that chance is fixed at a miniscule percentage, encouraging people to try and try and try until they finally burn out or get what they are looking for. I think it can be improved.

One way is what Guildwars 2 and Neverwinter Online do to a certain extent, which is handing out currency items over the course of the adventure or from the target monster/chest itself which can then be used to purchase whatever reward the player was after. On paper this is the best fix, but even on those games they still insist on having some rewards that require pure RNG luck to acquire, which is exponentially made worse when said items can only be "won" within a short period of time. I suppose the argument there is that they don't want "the sword of killing everything in one hit" available to a guy who just killed a gazillion mice underneath the starter tavern for two years. My counter argument is to reward people who stick to your game, regardless of how they want to play!

Anyway, for rewards that remain pure RNG, I propose that developers just whack another variable for each character (and visible to the player), the "reward percentage modifier" or "perseverance" or whatever name suits. Every time they complete a dungeon run, or slay a boss, or complete x number of quests or do -something- in game the modifier grants a bonus to the loot table RNG. Then it will check what level loot the character got. If they got lucky and the loot was of high levels, the modifier is reset to zero. If they got anything below that threshold the modifier increases, which gives them progressively better chances until finally they get a high level drop.

This way the lucky ones will still get their drops early, but those that persevere will also definitely be rewarded instead of "might be rewarded, but usually not". What are your thoughts? Is this a good idea or will it break loot as we know it?

Walking the Path of Exile

I was all set to bag out this obvious Diablo clone for being just that, and then I played it. It's a pretty decent game, and arguably better than Diablo in parts once you get past the limited character creation. I imagine it's because they put all their development into the character advancement screen. It definitely overwhelmed me the first time I saw it!

The game also features more skill options in combat, though for the most part you will still be breaking your mouse buttons while you not only level your character but each "skill gem" which means your fire ball or shield bash may not be as effective as the guy next to you. The self-refilling potions is a new one for me too. Instead of lugging around hundreds of health or mana potions, here you have a belt of five (of your choice) that refill as you kill baddies. Obviously you'll be swapping out the little flasks for the big ones that are more beneficial but does this also mean you'll be hoping each boss comes with adds (extra minions) to give you top ups? It's a little weird.

I think she's about to refill her potions.

 

The other thing I also like is the barter system they have, but can see where there is room for improvement. There's no gold in the game, instead NPCs trade you random bits and pieces to form little consumable things like weapon or armor improvement and scrolls of identi-*cough*-wisdom. The problem is that all the NPCs give the same tidbits which means players have found common items to use as currency. I would have preferred if each NPC (at least in the one zone) traded different goods from all the others, and possibly doesn't accept items of particular types but I guess that's an improvement for next time.

Really my biggest issue with the game is a little one. It is an ARPG, not an MMO. You have safe zone hubs where you can run into people, sure - but out in the ever changing, procedurally generated wilderness each instance is only for you or your party with zero chance of meeting anyone else (actually didn't DDO and GW1 do the same/similar thing just without the procedurally generated map). Even in Warframe if you play "online" there's a chance other random players will show up to help in your mission (which also has randomly generated maps), though only a maximum of 4 at any one time. I think it would be nice to be able to bump into others out in the wilds every now and then, but I guess that opens up the door to other issues.

Of course the real question is: is it good enough to keep playing? To that my answer is a solid yes.

Roll of the Dice

Really been "off" lately by not being drawn into any of my usual games for prolonged periods of time. Maybe I'm just burned out, or it's the lack of Masterchef on TV, or simple procrastination (from games, what)? Whatever it is I'm going to try fight it using ... a six sided die.

Yerp! At least for the next week or so to see how well this system works. The idea is whatever I roll on the night is what I end up doing, but all results can get trumped by real life stuff or if my guildmates call for my aid somewhere, which rarely happens these days (they're pretty powerful too).

So, I'll see how I go with these:

1 - Guildwars 2
2 - Neverwinter Online
3 - Wizardry Online
4 - a Single Player Game of my choice
5 - Write guild related stories
6 - Anything else, NOT in the above!

Mabinogi isn't there on the list because it still doesn't want to update for me. I guess a total reinstall for it could happen on a roll of 6, so let's just see how this plays out...