I have not played Planescape Torment. I just need to get that out there and anyone that played or is planning on playing this game should probably stop comparing these two games. Its a spiritual successor, its not the same game, and its never going to live up to its predecessor. The biggest problem people have with this game is its not Planescape Torment. The game is based off the Numenera tabletop game universe, which takes place BILLIONS OF YEARS into the future. Instead of Planescape Torment's "What can change a nature of a man?" its instead "How much does one life matter?" This theme unfortunately makes zero sense and we'll get into that later. Its a narrative driven game where you can talk your way out of any battle if you are good enough at it. This also means combat is the biggest shit stain on this game and anytime you fail a skill check you want to restart because sitting through combat makes you want to jump in front of a truck. Yes its one of these type of games.
Lets look at the universe of Numenera for a second. This game takes place "a billion" years into the future. We need to stop and think about this for a second. A billion may sound like a small number when you say it out loud. But this is an astronomical number in life and evolution. The earth itself is only about 5 billions years old and life started only 3.5 billions years ago. Life evolved from single celled organisms to land life in 3 billions years. Within 200 million years they evolved from amphibians on land into dinosaurs. These lived for several hundred millions of years before going extinct. It took 66 million years from the time of dinosaurs to the time of humans. Humans only evolved 200 thousand years ago. Human civilization only begun 10 thousand years ago. You're telling me billions of years into the future, everyone is still human and look exactly like the people today? People still live in mud houses on the side of a cliff and everyone has the same moral standards as people today? That architecture and design still look the same as today? They tried to explain it all by saying its currently the ninth world as in 8 great civilizations before the one in the current game have come and gone and currently everyone is living in a medieval like civilization. What the fuck? This basically is a medival fantasy game that uses "technology" instead of magic. It uses Authur Clarke's famous third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Instead of shooting fireballs you're shooting esoteric bolts. Instead of casting heal you use innervate which channels esotery into their bodies and cleans them of wounds.
Now we have the billions of years rant out of the system we can start looking at the world of Numenera. The world of built on the ruins of ancient civilizations. Every now and then you can click on an object and shit will happen. Sometimes nothing will happen and most often than not, it is completely useless. Why have all this cool stuff around when they do absolutely nothing. In fact the main storyline has almost nothing to do with any of the technology around. The main story is short and garbage but there are plenty of side quests that are somewhat interesting. There are some pretty interesting ideas in the game like the house of empty time where homeless children, though the keeper is able to be adopted by another family in another time frame. You could be adopted 600 years into the future or into the past. Or something like the Anchorage and the lore behind it. There is a lot of interesting stuff if you look for it, unfortunately none of that is in the generic main quest.
With technology and future shit out of the way we can focus on the main storyline. Some time ago someone discovered a way to to transfer his consciousness from one being to an artificial body and was called the changing god. Whenever the conscious is transferred out of the previous body, a new consciousness appears and takes its place. These people are known as the castoffs. You are the newest castoff of the changing god and you basically travel the world trying to figure out what to do. And by world I mean three maps. The first area you are at is the biggest, then it gets smaller as the game goes on. If you just follow the main quest you can probably finish the game in a couple hours. Doing every side quest took me about twenty hours to complete the game. Most of the time was wasted running around doing nothing trying to find quests. The other half is talking. This game has a lot of text. Do not play this game if you don't like reading. Its a whole lot of text with a whole lot of nothing. They can drag a description on for paragraphs yet you learn nothing about the character. If fact you rarely learn much of the people in the world. They are sort of just there and you sort of just walk away before stuff happens.
Not expanding on things really hurt the game. Like you meet a group of Nanos in a bar who fight the the Adversaries, a group of beings that traveled through the bloom, a multidimensional living creature that opens maws across dimensions, composed of pure thought and are in constant combat with the Nanos in an invisible psychic war. You show up you do a few quests and you leave, you never really learn that much about them and they never show up again. It was interesting but it was over much too fast. This also includes the Bloom, its a huge living creature that has maws extending to different dimensions and the living beings in the world of Numenera use it as a way of travel as well as a home. However the maws are not permanent and many groups of people get lost in different worlds. New maws are also always constantly being made which require different foods to open. Slaves are sold to feed the maws who will only eat certain things. For example, one maw will only eat guilt and after the feeding, the person will sometimes stay alive, but lose their ability to feel guilt. Upon eating something, the maw will open leading to a whole new world. Like this thing is fucking awesome why isn't the game expanding on this. Am I the only one who thinks this multi dimensional creature the size of cities just biding its time at our doorstep is a threat? Its such a powerful entity that the sorrow can't even reach you inside the bloom. Except when suddenly plot holes appear and it could reach you.
The main story is shitty. You are chased by the sorrow, a monster that chases the changing god and all its castoffs to kill them. Really? You're going to call it THE SORROW!? What kind of shitty name is that. The sad part was the original name was called The Angel of Entropy. Basically its a creature that ignores space time and is angry at you and your siblings. Why? Because of the tides. Its wiped out civilizations because of the tides and its after you because you, the changing god, and all your fellow castoff siblings are tied to the tides. What is the tides exactly? Well its the currents of urge and emotions that flow through humanity's collective psyche. Its never really expanded on other than its a power thats shared among you all. It has the ability to affect people around you based on the colours of your tide. Its basically a reputation system. The tides are as followed:
Blue Tide: Represents wisdom, enlightenment, and mysticism. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to expand the mind and the spirit.
Red Tide: Represents passion, emotion, action, and zeal. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to live in the moment, to experience life to its fullest, or to follow their heart wherever it leads them.
Indigo Tide: Represents justice, compromise, and the greater good. It is the Tide of people who view life's difficulties from a broad, global perspective rather than an individual one.
Gold Tide: Represents charity, sacrifice, and empathy. It is the Tide of people whose primary goal is to help others, especially at the cost to themselves.
Silver Tide: Represents admiration of power and seekers of fame. It is the Tide of people who seek to influence the lives of others or who actively seek to be remembered.
Almost every choice you make in the game will shift your tides, and it shifts very quickly. You can even have two dominant tides if there are two high ones instead of one very high tide. For example I started the game with the blue tide because I kept asking questions about the world, but as I started doing quests I gained gold and turned into blue/gold tide. Eventually I did a bunch of quests that jumped me so far ahead that I turned into full gold tide. By the end of the game I was back down to blue/gold and ended at that. However, from what I've read theres only like a couple of NPCS who will mention anything because of your tides. That and the ending which is similar to Mass Effect 3's notorious ending. It looked like they wanted to do something with the tides but never got around to it. This holds true to almost everything in the game.
Onto the worst part of the game, the combat. I have never seen combat in a game this terrible before in my life. It is turn based with the most horrible UI I've ever seen. Combat design in this game is to put as many enemies as humanly possible on the map and each one takes forever to move. The next is to add consistently respawning enemies or enemies that will keep joining in the fight. A single turn of combat can take minutes, a entire fight could take ten to twenty. Like what the fuck? The good news is you can skip most of it by cheat scumming. Usually I'm too lazy to bother with that but when the alternative is the equivalent of sitting through an Adam Sandler movie I would rather retry over and over until I got it right. No matter what you do, there are several fights where you cannot avoid. Most of them involve the Sorrow and the Sorrow are the worst fights. It takes forever to appear and walk, and then it will spawn Sorrow fragments every turn which is another enemy that takes up time during combat and the entire time is spent running away so enemies eventually fill up so much of the screen you can take a shit and come back before your turn is up. When your turn is up though, you usually can't tell where the fuck you are going. Sometimes the circle for how far you can move disappears entirely. So combat becomes a game of clicking as far away as possible then clicking closer and closer and closer until you can move then hoping the enemies don't spawn new ones and waste five minutes of shuffling around before its your turn to run away.
There is a lot of potential in the game and it was obviously unfinished. A lot of the things promised on kickstarter never made it into the game, although they have said they are working on a new patch to add in one of the removed companions. I wish they expanded on more of the lore and side quests instead of the dumb main story quest that is over way too quickly. More areas to explore would be nice too instead of the three maps we gotten. Combat would have to be completely remade because what it is now is a piece of shit. Is this game good? I would say its passable if you ignore the combat. Its not the greatest, but some of the side quests, characters, and lore are interesting but they just sort of end abruptly. The ending also ends abruptly and completely shits over the theme of "How much does one life matter?" by giving you the power to choose the fate of the world. All of them involve the death of many so there really isn't much of a choice.
Showing posts with label Piece of Shit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Piece of Shit. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Leaked SWTOR developer's meeting
SWTOR Dev Lackey: GUYS GUYS GUYS GUYS GAIZ GAIZ! I has idea! What if we take our game, which nobody thinks is worth paying for... And then strip content out of it, and sell it back to them as individual components at a collectively higher price?
SWTOR Dev Lead: GENIUS. Let's take 6 months to covertly plan and develop our new F2P features, while subscribers continue to pay a monthly fee and receive no content updates. Then when F2P arrives, they will have to pay TWICE just to get back the items and perks they've earned and already paid for.
And thus, an already shitty game became a cosmic joke. In retrospect, I guess they achieved something original with the franchise after all, instead of just cloning another MMO.
If you haven't heard, SWTOR announced F2P some time ago, after the TORtanic prophesies proved true. Waves of players and developers abandoned the sinking ship, and EA hastily branded it a failure, and the sole unpredictable blemish on their otherwise flawless business strategy, deferring all blame onto Bioware. When your own parent disavows and abandons you, you know you've fucked up. Around that time, BW/EA tried to excuse themselves with data claiming that subscription based MMOs were dead, and an unsuitable payment model for the times. They also tried to reference F2P MMOs like LOTRO, DCUO, etc for their relative success. But the truth is, F2P isn't a cureall. I will probably make a dedicated post about that later, but F2P doesn't automatically make your game better, nor will it alleviate the existing flaws. However, no need to worry, because SWTOR never got the memo on how to make a F2P game; they focused all their time on fixing their public relations problems instead, so it would be a farce to even call this F2P.
Back to the headlines then: SWTOR officially launched their F2P today, and now all servers are open for you to play for free. Not that I would recommend it.
SWTOR's F2P restrictions are so tight, that many players are labeling it an 'extended trial', as it allows a player to level from 1-50, but little else. For the first time in any F2P MMO I've heard of, SWTOR restricts your UI, and makes you pay money to use it. It doesn't end there. Let's list some moronic restrictions:
SWTOR Devs: Herp derp, you don't want to pay $15 a month for my game? How about $20 for only 1/5th of my game? ULTRA DEAL!
It is clear that this F2P change won't draw in any more players than their free trial did. Because that's all this is: another free trial. And a chance for Bioware to double-dip into their subscribers and make them pay again for something they've already paid for months ago. And which ex-subscriber would be stupid enough to pay? If they didn't think the entire game was worth the money then, why would it be worth the value now? Nothing's changed, except for getting even less content. Sickeningly, it also means Bioware gets an excuse to put in a CASH SHOP into a P2P game. People would have been outraged if they did it while it was still technically P2P, but now they can call it F2P, however unfaithful it may be to that label. It shocks me that Bioware promises more content every 6 weeks from now on, when they've broken that promise repeatedly since release, when people were already supposedly paying monthly for content. Now that people don't have to pay monthly... They're promising monthly content again? How gullible do you think your subscribers are?
These guys have no fucking clue how to run a MMO, or a F2P game. Since release, more than half their employees and major project leads were fired, and I'm not sorry to see them go. They were trash and should never work in the industry again. My only regret is that their replacements are just as deluded and out of touch with gaming and the community.
What a fucking waste. And I'm not even surprised. I came to my senses in March, but that was already too much time wasted on this crap. So I'll redeem myself with a prediction, nay, a prophecy: SWTOR F2P is going to flop hard, and will not get any more players than a wave of trial offers. Not even close to the 50 million predicted (this guy should be fired too btw). Bioware won't shut down SWTOR so soon, so I foresee massive revamping of the F2P system, an admission of guilt and a shallow apology, then a reduction in its restrictions, and more incentive for ex-subscribers to return. New periodic content of substance will still be scarce. Cash shop profits will keep SWTOR afloat, and they'll attempt to use it to bolster their reputation and initial claims, despite subscriber numbers not actually increasing (but they'll conveniently avoid that data).
Update: Just read this at wired.
While the rest of the article points at a conclusion I'm not quite ready to accept, this segment of it is spot on. The game is bad, that's why it's not worth $15 a month. If they focused on trying to make the game better to match the $15, it would be harder, but ultimately a better product. Instead, they weakened the product to market it at a deceptively cheaper price. I also don't think the problem is with the p2p MMO archetype, it is with the games being lackluster and ultimately, lacking the frequent updates you'd expect with a monthly bill. Imagine subscribing to a magazine, and paying a monthly fee only to get the same issue over and over again. Not enough content? Re-read it! Read it backwards! Fold it into origami! Keep yourself warm at the fireplace! The sad thing is, f2p moba games update every 2 days, yet $15 a month, despite server maintenance costs, give you an update every 6 months if you're lucky? I'm afraid the problem lies with the developers and publishers, not with the model.
SWTOR Dev Lead: GENIUS. Let's take 6 months to covertly plan and develop our new F2P features, while subscribers continue to pay a monthly fee and receive no content updates. Then when F2P arrives, they will have to pay TWICE just to get back the items and perks they've earned and already paid for.
And thus, an already shitty game became a cosmic joke. In retrospect, I guess they achieved something original with the franchise after all, instead of just cloning another MMO.
If you haven't heard, SWTOR announced F2P some time ago, after the TORtanic prophesies proved true. Waves of players and developers abandoned the sinking ship, and EA hastily branded it a failure, and the sole unpredictable blemish on their otherwise flawless business strategy, deferring all blame onto Bioware. When your own parent disavows and abandons you, you know you've fucked up. Around that time, BW/EA tried to excuse themselves with data claiming that subscription based MMOs were dead, and an unsuitable payment model for the times. They also tried to reference F2P MMOs like LOTRO, DCUO, etc for their relative success. But the truth is, F2P isn't a cureall. I will probably make a dedicated post about that later, but F2P doesn't automatically make your game better, nor will it alleviate the existing flaws. However, no need to worry, because SWTOR never got the memo on how to make a F2P game; they focused all their time on fixing their public relations problems instead, so it would be a farce to even call this F2P.
Back to the headlines then: SWTOR officially launched their F2P today, and now all servers are open for you to play for free. Not that I would recommend it.
SWTOR's F2P restrictions are so tight, that many players are labeling it an 'extended trial', as it allows a player to level from 1-50, but little else. For the first time in any F2P MMO I've heard of, SWTOR restricts your UI, and makes you pay money to use it. It doesn't end there. Let's list some moronic restrictions:
- Only get 2 of the available 6 hotbars for skills (and believe me, you need at least 4)
- Pay more at vendors and every time you exchange tokens for gear (the primary way to get good gear)
- Can't use guild bank or regular banks (any items inside are locked)
- Can't mail or trade
- Cant accept common quest rewards
- Can only post 2 auction house listings
- Cant have more than 200k credits on you (the rest is locked into an account that is never released until you subscribe)
- Can only talk in 2 channels at 1 message a minute
- Cant wear epic gear (even if earned from being a subscriber)
- Cant wear event gear (even if earned from being a subscriber)
- Can't hide headslots or display titles or legacy name (even your 'founders title' awarded from being a long term subscriber)
- Can only roll 3 times for loot in dungeons PER week (failed rolls count)
- Can only do 5 battlegrounds a week (losses and incomplete games count, and the weekly quest requires 9 battlegrounds won)
- No access to the LFG tool
- No access to raids.
- Only 1 of 3 professions allowed
- Emotes are locked
- Half your inventory size. Anything in the other half is locked until you pay.
- Quick Travel (town teleport ability) cooldown is quadrupled, now at 2 hours. Emergency fleet pass (teleports you back to main fleet hub) completely disabled
- Only 2 characters per server. Returning players must select 2 and lock out the rest.
- No rest xp.
- No using /who.
- No using out of combat move speed passive ability until level 14.
SWTOR Devs: Herp derp, you don't want to pay $15 a month for my game? How about $20 for only 1/5th of my game? ULTRA DEAL!
It is clear that this F2P change won't draw in any more players than their free trial did. Because that's all this is: another free trial. And a chance for Bioware to double-dip into their subscribers and make them pay again for something they've already paid for months ago. And which ex-subscriber would be stupid enough to pay? If they didn't think the entire game was worth the money then, why would it be worth the value now? Nothing's changed, except for getting even less content. Sickeningly, it also means Bioware gets an excuse to put in a CASH SHOP into a P2P game. People would have been outraged if they did it while it was still technically P2P, but now they can call it F2P, however unfaithful it may be to that label. It shocks me that Bioware promises more content every 6 weeks from now on, when they've broken that promise repeatedly since release, when people were already supposedly paying monthly for content. Now that people don't have to pay monthly... They're promising monthly content again? How gullible do you think your subscribers are?
These guys have no fucking clue how to run a MMO, or a F2P game. Since release, more than half their employees and major project leads were fired, and I'm not sorry to see them go. They were trash and should never work in the industry again. My only regret is that their replacements are just as deluded and out of touch with gaming and the community.
What a fucking waste. And I'm not even surprised. I came to my senses in March, but that was already too much time wasted on this crap. So I'll redeem myself with a prediction, nay, a prophecy: SWTOR F2P is going to flop hard, and will not get any more players than a wave of trial offers. Not even close to the 50 million predicted (this guy should be fired too btw). Bioware won't shut down SWTOR so soon, so I foresee massive revamping of the F2P system, an admission of guilt and a shallow apology, then a reduction in its restrictions, and more incentive for ex-subscribers to return. New periodic content of substance will still be scarce. Cash shop profits will keep SWTOR afloat, and they'll attempt to use it to bolster their reputation and initial claims, despite subscriber numbers not actually increasing (but they'll conveniently avoid that data).
Update: Just read this at wired.
The $15-a-month subscription game is dying. But it’s not because players are cheap, it’s because they’re bored.
As the game development website Gamasutra put it, the most expensive game in history is now free: With a reported $200 million budget, the massively multiplayer RPG Star Wars: The Old Republic wasn’t attracting nearly the number of subscribers that publisher Electronic Arts needed if it was going to see returns. So EA added a business model that has been lucrative for other online games: Allow gamers to play for free, then charge them small amounts for upgrades once they’re hooked.
But that may not be enough. Experts in the space say the reason Star Wars struggles while other online games are killing it isn’t because of the money, it’s because of how the games themselves are designed. It’s not the business model that’s obsolete, but the product.
While the rest of the article points at a conclusion I'm not quite ready to accept, this segment of it is spot on. The game is bad, that's why it's not worth $15 a month. If they focused on trying to make the game better to match the $15, it would be harder, but ultimately a better product. Instead, they weakened the product to market it at a deceptively cheaper price. I also don't think the problem is with the p2p MMO archetype, it is with the games being lackluster and ultimately, lacking the frequent updates you'd expect with a monthly bill. Imagine subscribing to a magazine, and paying a monthly fee only to get the same issue over and over again. Not enough content? Re-read it! Read it backwards! Fold it into origami! Keep yourself warm at the fireplace! The sad thing is, f2p moba games update every 2 days, yet $15 a month, despite server maintenance costs, give you an update every 6 months if you're lucky? I'm afraid the problem lies with the developers and publishers, not with the model.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Lucius - Just another cliched name for a cliched game
First thing I want to ask is why is Satan always portrayed as an evil businessman in a suit? This game starts off with you as some dumb kid called Lucius. Yeah one of those cliched "evil" names. So apparently you're the son of Satan and he wants you to go around killing people for human souls. So you lock your maid in the freezer and then turn down the temperature. Then the detective starts narrating foreshadowing a huge series of murders. Some of them are brutal, and all of them are boring.
You'd think its impossible to screw up something like this. It'll be like Hitman but as a kid what can possibly go wrong! Everything. You have a huge ass fucking house but you probably use about 5% of it every mission. The second mission starts off with you walking around with no instructions. You're just blindly bumbling around until you open your map and theres a big arrow pointing where to go. You start walking then suddenly everything freezes and blood starts dripping from the walls and you zoom in on your dad's BFF. He is your target. So he's sitting there smoking a cigarette and you have to find a creative way to cause an accident.
Doesn't sound too bad yet right? No. You walk over steal his matches and now you have to find a way to cause an accident elsewhere. You steal some tools and fuck over the stove. When the guy tries to light matches it explodes on his face and burns him to death. Then like that the mission is suddenly over and you are thrown back in your room and a month has passed. Now you have to run around trying to figure out who your target is and what the fuck is going on. You walk into the bathroom and blood on wall shit happens again and this time its the drunk as fuck janitor. You kill him then get thrown back into room. Walk around see the butcher. Repeat.
HOW FUCKING BORING IS THIS. Its brutal as shit when you saw a guy's face in half or smash their brains with a piano and shit but come on this is boring. A mission can last between 1 minute to 5 minutes. I didn't get far but this is just the same thing over and over again. Can't we have bigger missions? Can't we use the whole house? Can't we have more of a intro story or something for every mission other than walk around randomly until you find a target. This is a giant piece of shit. It had potential for something awesome but they fucked it up.
You'd think its impossible to screw up something like this. It'll be like Hitman but as a kid what can possibly go wrong! Everything. You have a huge ass fucking house but you probably use about 5% of it every mission. The second mission starts off with you walking around with no instructions. You're just blindly bumbling around until you open your map and theres a big arrow pointing where to go. You start walking then suddenly everything freezes and blood starts dripping from the walls and you zoom in on your dad's BFF. He is your target. So he's sitting there smoking a cigarette and you have to find a creative way to cause an accident.
Doesn't sound too bad yet right? No. You walk over steal his matches and now you have to find a way to cause an accident elsewhere. You steal some tools and fuck over the stove. When the guy tries to light matches it explodes on his face and burns him to death. Then like that the mission is suddenly over and you are thrown back in your room and a month has passed. Now you have to run around trying to figure out who your target is and what the fuck is going on. You walk into the bathroom and blood on wall shit happens again and this time its the drunk as fuck janitor. You kill him then get thrown back into room. Walk around see the butcher. Repeat.
HOW FUCKING BORING IS THIS. Its brutal as shit when you saw a guy's face in half or smash their brains with a piano and shit but come on this is boring. A mission can last between 1 minute to 5 minutes. I didn't get far but this is just the same thing over and over again. Can't we have bigger missions? Can't we use the whole house? Can't we have more of a intro story or something for every mission other than walk around randomly until you find a target. This is a giant piece of shit. It had potential for something awesome but they fucked it up.
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