#i mean its just a series of combat tests not a campaign or anything but i am nonetheless excited and having fun so far

[crowned-ladybug]

Hee hoo DnD go brrr

[satoshi-mochida]

Rabbit & Bear Studios, a Tokyo-based studio formed by key creators of the Suikoden series, has announced Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, an ambitious new RPG planned for release in fall 2022. A Kickstarter campaign seeking $500,000 USD in funding for a PC release—with a single stretch goal to unlock PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Switch versions (or next-gen Switch, if one is available)—will run from July 27 at 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET to August 28. A trailer will also debut when the campaign launches.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is led by Suikoden I and II veteran scenario writer Yoshitaka Murayama, alongside series veterans Junko Kawano, Osamu Komuta, and Junichi Murakami. The project marks the first time these four creators have worked on a game together, as well as the first time Murayama and Kawano have collaborated in 25 years.

“The first thing we decided when our members came together was, ‘It’s about time we made a really interesting game that we ourselves want to make,'” project lead Murayama said in a press release. “We chose Kickstarter in order to make an interesting game with the players in mind, hold the rights to the planning, world, and story of the game, all while keeping the fun of the project. Please lend us your support in this new challenge of ours! We promise to create something that heeds the call of your voices.”

Speaking to Gematsu, Murayama shared more information on the game’s similarities to Suikoden and what elements of the series will carry over.

“Eiyuden Chronicle is about war, or more importantly, the intention and feelings of the 100 heroes who fight that war from a variety of perspectives and for a variety of different reasons,” Murayama told Gematsu. “And of course the drama that can only occur when a group of different people from different walks of life come together and must wage a war of life and death.”

Murayama continued, “And the many characters that participate in this war aren’t just pawns added in as ‘war fodder,’ they have a living breathing soul and begrudgingly must fight to protect the things they believe in. Additionally, there are non-combat specialists, researchers, and other ‘heroes’ on the periphery that can help win battles or lose them. Each and every one of them is a living breathing character that the player gives life to through their choices.”

Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses that can be leveraged to help the player form a balanced team.

“Some characters are good are some things and bad at others,” Murayama explained. “But if you combine them with other characters that can strengthen their weaknesses, you can end up with a really balanced team. And based on that delicate balance your team make be more apt at mining or adventuring which will affect the overall game progression loop. One of the core game loops in Eiyuden is to experience the wide variety of different characters and personalities in your 100 person army.

“With each new character your ‘fortress town’ grows in size and ability. It is a key system in the game. As you increase your teammates, some members will be blacksmiths, some chefs and whether on the battlefield or not, each character will play a role in strengthening your resolve as an army. There are guilds that you can join which will largely change the visual make-up of your fortress town and grant different abilities. The more people you recruit, the stronger the snowball effect. As you level up, new trade options appear along with enemies and thieves that randomly attack your town in an effort to impede your progress. You need to make choices whether to strengthen your walls or hasten your progress. Each choice will make every play session feel different and have its own consequences.”

According to Murayama, all of this is “just the tip of the iceberg,” meaning that fans can expect much more to come.

Here is an overview of the game, via Rabbit & Bear Studios:

■ About

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is an ode to the classic Japanese RPG genre from the PlayStation era that will feature classic Japanese RPG exploration and battles in high-resolution 2.5D graphics, pixel-based characters, a story of war and friendship, a diverse cast of 100 unique heroes to join the protagonist’s endeavor, and a fortress building system to grow their army.

The game will feature a guild system that allows players to change their fortress attributes based on the guild they join. Battles will be turn-based with parties of up to six members and feature dynamic boss battles that change camera angle and rotate depending on the environment.

■ Studio and Staff

Rabbit & Bear Studios

Founded March 26th, 2020 by Yoshitaka Murayama, Rabbit & Bear Studios asks the age old question, what do gamers really want? It’s something we must never forget as creators. To continually focus on giving the fans the experience they really want.

We have created Rabbit & Bear Studios as the first step in realizing that dream and to have the responsibility that comes with it. That’s our core philosophy and we plan to lead by our actions.

Staff

Story: Yoshitaka Murayama (Suikoden, Suikoden II, The Alliance Alive)

Character Design: Junko Kawano (Suikoden, Suikoden IV, Arca Last)

System Design and Direction: Osamu Komuta (Suikoden Tierkreis, Suikoden Tactics, Arca Last)

Art Direction and Production: Junichi Murakami (Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, OZ)

Composers: Michiko Naruke (Wild Arms series), Motoi Sakuraba (Tales of series), and more.

■ Story

Welcome to the Continent of Allraan

“Our story begins in one corner of Allraan, a tapestry of nations with diverse cultures and values.

By dint of sword, and by way of magical objects known as “rune-lenses,” the land’s history has been shaped by the alliances and aggressions of the humans, beastmen, elves, and desert people who live there.

The Galdean Empire has edged out other nations and discovered a technology that amplifies the rune-lenses’ magic. Now, the Empire is scouring the continent for an artefact that will expand their power even further.

It is on one such expedition that Seign Kesling, a young and gifted imperial officer, and Nowa, a boy from a remote village, meet each other and become friends.

However, a twist of fate will soon drag them into the fires of war, and force them both to reexamine everything they believe to be right and true.”

■ Characters

Nowa (Default Name)

Sex: Male

Age: 17 years old

Home: A remote village in the League of Nations

Favorite Food: Anything with meat in it

“That’s who I am. A meddler. Always will be—just ask Leene. So don’t tell me to do nothing. I may not be able to help them, but I have to at least try.”

When the League of Nations recruits warriors to assist in a joint expedition with the Galdean Empire, our protagonist answers the call and leaves his remote village to test his skills. On the mission, he finds an ancient rune-lens, unaware that the discovery will spark a war between the League and the Empire. After the conflict begins, he joins a unit in the League’s border guard.

The protagonist is the “leap before you look” type. He doesn’t always weigh the pros and cons before springing to action, and while his constant need to involve himself in other people’s problems sometimes creates headaches for his companions, they like him for it and know his heart is in the right place. After all, if they ever got into trouble, he’d be the first person there.

Seign Kesling

Sex: Male

Age: 18 years old

Home: A noble house in the Galdean Empire

Favorite Food: Poached eggs

“I can dream all I want, but it won’t change a thing. The world is not that kind. So if the only way to achieve my ideals is to betray them first, then I will do that—unflinchingly. You have my word.”

The second-born son to House Kesling, a powerful imperial family. His older brother died on the battlefield. Seign is exceptionally gifted; after achieving outstanding grades at military academy, he was placed in command of a company of his peers and sent on the expedition to find the ancient rune-lens. During the mission, he meets the protagonist. The two warm to each other as they overcome adversity, and they learn of one another’s ambitions.

Seign’s strategic mind allows him to analyze things from a broad perspective and make sound decisions. People often confuse his clear mind for a cold heart, but he is guided by strong ideals and a deep passion to fulfill them.

After his brother’s death during a border rebellion, Seign began to think long and hard about what it means to fight.

Marisa

Sex: Female

Age: 16 years old

Profession: One of the Guardians who watches over the forest

Favorite Food: Herbed chicken

“You just leave the forest to me. I know where the water springs, where the rabbits burrow—and most importantly, where your enemies will try to hide.”

A young member of the Guardians, a clan that hallows and protects the forest. Since Marisa was very little, her family has instilled their ways and traditions in her. She has a warm, affable smile—except on the battlefield, where she wears the countenance of a warrior.

Although the Guardians live as one with the forest, they have respect for the outside world’s culture and technology, and they are not against integrating the parts of it that make sense to them. Marisa is particularly forward-thinking in this regard, and loves new things—especially cute things.

Over the generations, the Guardians have developed a unique method of wielding the rune-lenses. For that reason, both the Empire and the protagonist try to win them over to their camp. Whom the Guardians choose will prove to be a major turning point in history.

Melridge

Sex: Male

Age: 27 years old

Profession: A scholar of natural history

Favorite Food: Duck soup

“You should lay down arms and surrender. That’s the quickest way to end this… No? Very well. Then I suppose I’ll provide you with the next best thing: a winning strategy.”

A young scholar who specializes in natural history. He yearns to know of every last thing in the world, and exactly how it got there. He also happens to be a genius tactician, and will be a valuable asset to the protagonist.

That said, he views warfare as the most pointless of all human endeavors, and any personal contributions to it as a complete waste of time.

Garr

Sex: Male

Age: 32 years old

Profession: Warrior in a clan of mercenaries

Favorite Food: Pancakes slathered with whipped cream

“Only a soft-brained leader runs headlong into danger. Anyone who knows what’s good for him will tell you you’ve lost it, kid. But not me. If blaze-of-glory’s your thing, count me in. We all die in the end. Might as well make it interesting.”

A veteran beastman warrior. He and his clan make their living as mercenaries, and their vast experience and sheer brutality put them in high demand. War is all Garr has known, and to him life is one battlefield after the other until you die.

When a conflict breaks out, every army wants as many beastmen as they can afford. Because mercenary contracts are made with individuals and not the entire clan, it is not uncommon for Garr and his fellow beastmen to face each other as enemies in the field.

Lian

Sex: Female

Age: 16 years old

Home: A martial arts dojo

Favorite Food: Super-spicy ramen

“Uhh, maybe I’m dumbing this down a little, but—like—if a bunch of arrogant swine strut into YOUR home and started acting like they owned the place, what would YOU do? ‘Cause there’s your answer.”

After the Empire’s forces invade League lands, Lian is infuriated and runs away from home…without even the slightest semblance of a plan. She decides the first thing to do is hoof it to the biggest town she can find, and luckily that’s where she meets the protagonist and his companions.

Lian was born in a dojo, and her father wasted no time in teaching her. She was doing roundhouse kicks before she even learned to walk properly.

Mio

Sex: Female

Age: 27 years old

Home: The Far East

Favorite Food: Bamboo-wrapped sasa dumplings

“The road you walk is one, and yet its endpoints are myriad. You can still choose where the road takes you.”

A swordswoman who is journeying to perfect the way of the blade. She has a stoic personality and rarely speaks, unless it’s to challenge someone she views as a worthy opponent.

When she does open her mouth to say something, it’s straight to the point and usually dripping with wisdom, so the people around her have taken to calling her “sensei.” However, even the greatest of senseis do have the occasional brain fart…

■ World

The Waterstead of Quinja

The Seaside Cavern

Watch a gameplay teaser video below. View the first screenshots and artwork at the gallery.

[radramblog]

Halo through its guns: CE Anniversary

This isn’t a post I planned on making. This game is just a remake of the first game, after all, and I didn’t think there’d be a whole lot to talk about. But I came up with an idea, so we’re running with it for a little bit.

When control of the franchise was handed over to 343 Industries, they set to work on two main things. One, they got to work on Halo 4, and two, they commissioned a little-known studio called Saber Interactive to make an updated remaster of Halo: Combat Evolved to celebrate the game’s 10th anniversary.

They gave them a year. And they did manage to deliver, but the end result was somewhat awkward.

I cannot think of a better way to analyse this than through the lens of the Assault Rifle. This is going to be the one exception to the rule I’ve had of “always talk about a new gun”, because this game doesn’t have any.

2011 is sort of when remakes really started becoming a thing. The graphics in video games were getting to enough of a developed point that it started to become worth it to spend time remastering an entire game and rereleasing it, that is, if you wanted people to buy it. I feel like at this point we’re at something similar to the 25-year cycle of nostalgia- the 10-year cycle of remastering, if you will.

On a technical level, Halo CE Anniversary is fairly impressive. Despite an entire decade of difference, it’s actually only one console generation separated, due to Halo being a launch title for the Xbox and Anniversary landing near the tail end of the 360- and yet the difference in the model and texture quality is remarkable- even if a fair few assets were reused from 3 and Reach. In order to make the game tick, Saber rebuilt the entire thing in a modified version of their own 3D engine, but it still plays extremely similarly to the original. And the ability to switch between the original and remastered graphics with the push of a button is genuinely quite cool.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of about where the changes made to Halo CE end. Well, that and adding Skulls and Terminals to the Campaign.  But due to the limitations on the developers and the way they went about transferring Halo’s programming to their new engine, they basically couldn’t do anything else. Even something like adding a new reload animation would spring a litany of bugs, so basically every animation the game has is the same as it was in 2001.

And the gameplay is quite literally identical. In 2001, Halo CE’s gameplay was revolutionary, rewriting what the FPS genre would look like from that point onward. 10 years later, and it hasn’t aged especially well. And I feel like the AR is a great way to look at this.

Halo’s Assault Rifle is utterly different to what the concept of “assault rifle” meant in 2011, both within its own franchise and among its contemporaries. It’s a bullet hose with range closer to an SMG, and the sheer lack of animation in its firing aches of technical limitation. It seems to have literal zero recoil somehow, and while I’ve heard its sound effect described as “thunderous”, it sounds more to me like someone saw machine gun onomatopoeia as “budabudabudabudabuda…” and turned that into folie. I won’t mince words, I do not like this gun in this game. It’s…lame. The least interesting gun on the list by a mile, and also one of the least effective. I’d argue it even feels worse than it does in ODST, where it is completely and utterly overshadowed by the Suppressed SMG.

It’s genuinely quite jarring to go from basically any other shooter to CE: Anniversary. Even in 2011, the mechanics felt simple, the gameplay felt sluggish, and even the story felt a little tired. Do take this with a grain of salt, though- I’m someone who was 3 years old when Halo CE released, so I obviously didn’t have the nostalgia for this particular game that drew people to it. But from Reach to this?

The Reach comparison is shockingly apt, as it happens, because much like ODST, Anniversary doesn’t have its own PvP multiplayer. I would argue ODST gets away with it, though- despite the price, the game was clearly meant to be an expansion, and Firefight was enough new content to work with next to Campaign. As well, ODST ran in the same engine as 3, so having 3’s multiplayer (with a few extra themed maps) worked perfectly fine.

Anniversary also has the PvP Multiplayer from the most recent Halo game at the time. Which was Reach. And Reach plays so much differently than CE, such that going between the two makes you feel all 9 years of game design between them. Reach has loadouts, armour abilities, twice as many guns, playing as Elites, asymmetrical gameplay, the list goes on. And while porting in CE’s multiplayer was probably not worth the time or money, it means that CE Anniversary is effectively only a campaign that is only barely altered from the game that released 10 years earlier.

And it means that the nigh-unchanged Halo CE Assault Rifle- basically null when you could just use the Pistol and a more specific weapon- sat next to the Reach Assault Rifle- a sleeker, more animated, more powerful weapon that was actually decently effective at close range, and actually paired well with the Pistol.

This was a fully priced game, by the way.

I don’t want to be too harsh on CE Anniversary. Fundamentally, Halo CE is still a great game, and the remake doesn’t ruin that. I choose to believe that 343 was testing the waters with Anniversary- they had a lot to prove as the new developers of the series, and remastering a beloved game is an easy way to get a lot of brownie points from long-time fans. It also let them emphasize where the franchise came from, such that with their next game, they could show where the franchise could go in the future.

Next time, we’re going to have to talk about Halo 4. It seems like online, much like with any hype cycle, people are finally warming up to the game. So talking about it now, in 2021, with Infinite on the horizon, is going to be interesting.

[jerryeexb7927-blog]

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[onlyonemister]

Make a Game 1: Introductions

While this blog has thus far been mostly about video games, I also have a passion for tabletop roleplaying games. I started like most people do, with Dungeons and Dragons, and continued on to play Savage Worlds, Dogs in the Vineyard, FATE, and a number of others. I own many more rulebooks than I have used, and picking through the rulesets has provided hours of entertainment and inspiration. In college, a friend of mine and I designed an RPG, and playtested it a few times with our gaming group. It was a fantastic project. About a year ago, inspiration struck again. I wrestled with the project a bit, got excited, then got frustrated, and progress has been slow going since then. A few weeks ago I started work on a new video game project, and the RPG fell by the wayside. The thing is, I still want to make this game, but I know I cannot keep myself on task with it if it just sits in a file on my computer. I need to document the process, to showcase what I am working on, my thoughts and ideas about game design and the process of creating, and to ultimately give myself an audience, however small, to be beholden to. So, this is the start of a series of articles that will document my progress on the game I have temporarily dubbed Vikings and Valkyries. There is already a supplement for Mazes and Minotaurs called Vikings and Valkyries, so that is unlikely to be the final name of this game.

The first thing to note about this project is that I will be tossing around a lot of game names, mechanics, and other lingo. I will do my best to explain these ideas as I go, and will be happy to answer any questions about the mechanics or games in question, but I will probably leave some unexplained. I am trying to build an RPG from scratch, and that is going to mean pilfering the best ideas from a lot of other games. It is also going to mean looking to other games for what not to do. This means I will be talking about a lot of mechanics and rules and trying to explain them on the fly. I am going to miss some stuff. I miss some stuff in this very article. Just to get you ready.

Inspiration and Origins

Inspiration is a fickle beast. Sometimes ideas spring from your forehead almost fully formed, and other times inspirations slowly grows and pieces together threads from your life and experiences over the years. The truth of inspiration is that the first situation is almost always a myth. Even ideas that present themselves as fully formed and complete in your mind will need work in order to grow into something good, and if you try to simply roll with the initial idea, you will most likely be disappointed. That is what happened on my first pass with VnV. I had an idea that seemed so solid. A core mechanic and fictional underpinning appeared in my mind at the same time, and I thought I had a perfect idea. I soon found out that was not the case. The mechanics I had thought of turned out to be unwieldy, and not properly fleshed out. The lore that seemed so clear at first turned out to be nothing more than the skeleton of an idea, something that could one day be a real story, but was not one then. The project needed work. So, I did what any good creator would do and abandoned it in a huff.

The thing is, VnV was a good idea. The mechanic I had created did not work like I wanted it to on the first pass, and the lore was half formed. Neither of those situations are compelling reasons to abandon a project. So, my brain never let go of the idea. It nurtured VnV through the year, letting it grow in the background. Every now and again something in my life would bring it back up, and I would start to work the problems a bit before letting it sink to the background. Recently though, inspiration struck again.

So, where did the idea for this game come from. It really did pop into my head all at once, but it grew out of thoughts on class balance in Dungeons and Dragons and a piece of lore from Norse traditions that made its way into a classic PS1 videogame: Valkyrie Profile. Valkyrie Profile follows the adventures of the Valkyrie Lenneth, and her quest to raise an army of Einherjar (the spirits of fallen warriors) to defend Vallhalla during Ragnarok, the final war between the gods. This is a simplification of that game’s story, and of proper Norse lore, but it provided the jumping off point for what will probably become VnV’s core mechanic mechanic. You see, what interested me about Valkyrie Profile’s lore was the relationship between the Valkyrie and the Einherjar. Lenneth descends from Valhalla to Midgard, the human world, and listen for the approaching death of a warrior. She finds this warrior, witnesses their demise, perhaps helps them defeat some kind of monster or other supernatural evil, and then takes their spirit. But, Lenneth does not send these spirits to Valhalla right away. First, they need training. So she uses the warrior spirits as party members, diving into dungeons, defeating evil monsters, and sending them to Valhalla when they are ready. I thought this would make for a fascinating party dynamic in an RPG: One player would play the Valkyrie, the centerpiece of the party, and the others would be her Einherjar, helping her to defend Midgard from threats both mystical and mundane.

To represent this relationship, I thought of a dice mechanic: what if each player had 3 “action dice” that they could assign to various actions in and out of combat. The Valkyrie would only have 2 dice, but she would gain an extra die for each Einherjar in the party. At a glance, this would make her more powerful than any of the other characters in anything more than a two person party; however, the Valkyrie would have the power to pass out her extra dice to any of the party members in order to increase their power. This would make her the focal point of the party, the character most able to control the flow of battle and the survival of the party. This mechanic would cause some problems that eventually led to me abandoning the project, but we will get to that in a later article.

This, I thought, would present an interesting alternative to the Wizard bodyguard problem present in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. See, in DnD, spellcasters tend to be very powerful. So powerful that they will eventually invalidate the abilities of anyone else in the party. This reduces the rest of the party to the role of bodyguards, protecting the spellcaster from threats while the she solves all of the problems. Now, whether this problem is overstated, understated, the product of bad game design, good game design, or anything in between does not matter for this project. What matters is that I thought that dynamic seemed like it could be something worth exploring. What if the game promised that from the get go: a single character in the party who acted as the centerpiece. Thus, the idea of a party of a single Valkyrie and a group of Einherjar was born. One character would be the backbone of the group, with the others each supporting and being supported by this central character. The dice passing mechanic would mean the Valkyrie’s role was different from that of a DnD spellcaster, however. Instead of solving all of the major problems herself while the other characters scrambled to protect her, the Valkyrie would empower the other players and herself as needed, in order to solve the challenges facing the party. This relationship is ultimately what saved the project.

All of this mechanical pondering led to an interesting idea: what if all of the players died in the first session? Valkyrie Profile did this with the introduction of each Einherjar, and games like Dungeon Crawl Classics have shown us that a session 1 death crawl that kills off a series of characters can be a hilarious and enjoyable way to start off a game. If the first session consisted of created a scenario in which the players would die, and be chosen by their Valkyrie, the players could get to know the game, their characters, and each other in a low consequence environment where their failure would be inevitable. Then, when released into the rest of the campaign, they would already know the rules in time for the stakes to be raised.

Each of these steps might seem like something I sat and worked through, but that happened after the fact. You are getting this step by step presentation so that it makes sense. When the idea hit me, it happened all at once, a series of threads from a life of gaming coming together to create something new. Exciting, yes, but now it needs to be worked into something actually playable.

The Plan

Building an RPG from the ground up is going to take time. Lots of time. I will need to figure out how I want the game to be structured, the granularity of the rules, the pace of play, the tone, the lore, whether we will use a battle map or try and fail to imagine the positions of all the characters. I am going to need to decide what kind of dice to use. All of that is stuff I have thought about, but that will need to be worked, written down, and ultimately tested. And testing is where things are going to get really screwed up. See, testing is where you realize that all of your ideas are stupid. Players are not going to understand the rules, they are going to misinterpret or push back against ideas, and even if they don’t, something is going to bother you as a designer. The pace of play will be too slow, abilities, gear, and spells will be unbalanced, and ultimately, it might not be all that fun. Then, you will test the game with another group, and find a whole different set of problems. This is why we are going to test this game early, test it a lot, and be ready to scrap work. Sometimes that is what a game needs in order to grow.

So the schedule for the game is as follows: I will be posting at least one article a week discussing some aspect of the game. Each article will discuss the design process behind each idea, and why I have come to the conclusion that I have. Some articles might combine multiple mechanics or pieces of lore if each piece is small enough, other articles may be split into multiple parts if the scope of the mechanics and lore involved demand it. Ultimately, I want to explain my design decisions to create a record of what I am thinking about and doing, and to potentially receive feedback. This is going to be my project, but that does not always mean I will have the best ideas, and I would be happy to hear from the audience if you have any thoughts.

The final thing to note is that this is probably a terrible idea. Game design is hard enough without having to write an article explaining every little thing, but this is what I feel like doing, so I am going to try it out. Sometimes my weekly update might be fairly anemic, other weeks I might pump out a series of articles about wildly different topics, because I had a breakthrough that week. Who knows. This could all come crumbling down, but I am excited to see what it will be like to design a game post by post.

The Goals

When my design partner and I worked on Psychout in college, we did not have a set of design goals. We had an idea, and we had some thoughts about how that idea might come to fruition, but we mostly assumed that we were on the same page, and that the mechanics we were coming up with fit our vision. Luckily, we had pretty compatible ideas, my partner was also the DM of the DnD game I played in, and it went pretty well. I am not going to leave that to chance this time. Right now, I am working alone, but the me today might have very different ideas from the me tomorrow. So before we launch this project, I need to establish some coherent goals. These will act as the framework for the game. Any time I am questioning a mechanic, I can check them with my goals to make sure they line up. I will also lay out some principles of design. This being a solo project, I get to decide what principles to follow, and if you have read this blog, you might know that I have fairly strong opinions about games.

Make an Action Game: Sorry fans of the new wave of “story games”. My favorite tabletop games are still DnD and Savage Worlds. This is going to be a game about Valkyries and Viking warriors fighting men and monsters in a post Ragnarok Midgard. There will be sword fights, monster battles, and challenge aplenty. I want to create a game with a solid action system at its core.  These are Viking warriors risen from the dead to do battle with the supernatural and horrifying that have taken to Midgard after Ragnarok. They should be heroic and powerful, but the challenges facing them should be all the more daunting because of it.

Make a ROLE Playing Game: VnV being an action game does not mean I won’t take any inspiration from games like FATE, Edge of the Empire, or Dogs in the Vineyard. I have played and run all of those games, and there are some good ideas there. Ultimately though, I don’t like games where the players play anything but their characters. FATE forces the players to make bad decisions instead of allowing the GM to put the players into a situation where they have to make hard decisions, EotE demands that players take control of the whole scene, not just their characters, and I actually think Dogs in the Vineyard is just great, but not what I want to make. I want this game to focus on the adventure and action, and to allow the players to occupy their own characters. The GM is the GM, and she will have control over the NPCs and scenery. The players will play their characters. Ultimately, the rules should not ask the players to make decisions that harm their character’s goals arbitrarily. No taking over the GM’s role or being forced to make a bad decision for lack of FATE points.

No Combat Swoosh: Ideally, I want to create a robust enough action system to encompass both combat and non-combat scenarios without something like an initiative roll. The idea of the Combat Swoosh is one I stole from the Angry GM, and refers to turn based video games where the game swipes away from the world map to the combat screen. This creates a hard distinction between fighting and not fighting that prevents the player from transitioning smoothly from one mode to another. In tabletop games like DnD, the combat swoosh takes the form of the initiative roll and breaking out the battle mat. This hard break from the default mode of play can make players and game masters feel trapped in combat, like they cannot do anything else once the fighting begins. FATE and other games remove the combat swoosh by making all conflict the same, but I want to be able to distinguish the feel of a fight and a debate without forcing the game to a stop at the start of each scene. I want the game to be able to flow from a fight to a dialogue to a race and back to a fight without seeming strange. That flow is really the major goal of this idea. If I am being honest, I prefer battle maps to imagining the positions of all the characters in a conflict. Maps allow for greater tactical depth because they can show a complex and granular situation. When the players and GM have to imagine the positions of every character, it necessitates a simpler understanding of position and distance like EotE’s range band system. Despite that simplicity, I find that it ends up taking longer in practice because players will forget where things are, and then have to figure that out and then fights become arbitrary and less interesting. So we will probably have battle maps. That means some kind of swoosh is inevitable, but I want to see if I can still transition from conflict type to conflict type. Dogs in the Vineyard has a combat swoosh in that all the rolling happens at the beginning of a conflict, but the players can escalate a conflict to a new type by rolling more dice. This can cause a tense conversation to transition into a chase which culminates in a fight, or it can cause a fight to turn into a chase, and then into a discussion. It is brilliant and I want to ape some of that system if I can.

Active and Reactive Combat and Conflict: Look, this is gonna be a game about fighting. I have said it before, but it bears repeating. Recently, a friend of mine got very into the Infinity tabletop wargame. Infinity is about small squads of soldiers facing off in quick, highly tactical combat. I love it. The game is beautifully designed, simple, and tactical as all heck. One of its most brilliant ideas is that when a unit is acted upon, that unit’s player can decide how the unit reacts to the action. If one of my riflemen is being shot at, I can have him run for cover, drop prone, or even shoot back. Then, the players roll off and see if the action and reaction is successful. The die resolution system itself is also one of my favorites, and I have been trying to find a way to integrate that into the game. We will get to that more in a future article about the dice. For now, suffice it to say that I want players to be active participants in a conflict, even when it is not their turn.

Feeform Magic: I don’t have too much to say about this goal except that I have a cool seed of a magic system in my head, and I want to see if I can get it to work in practice. It involves using magic runes to create a spell instead of picking from a list of generated spells. This might not work, so I am considering it a kind of sub-goal for now.

Simple and Quick Dice Rolls: Playing EotE is fun as hell. The game lets me take some control of the scene as a player with each dice roll and allows me to give my character some real screen time because of it. As a player who likes to GM, this is heaven. Running EotE is a miserable experience for me. The stats are well laid out, the game is satisfyingly crunchy, but the dice rolls take so, damn, long. Especially if players do not want to contribute to the scene, and plenty of players do not. What I realized running EotE was that I want my players to inhabit their own characters, and I want dice to simply tell me if something succeeded or failed. I don’t need to know how well a character jumped over a pit, or if he succeeded, but got some consequences. I don’t want simple rolls to convince somebody of something to spiral out into massive consequences because a player rolled three despairs and two triumphs. I want to be able to have characters succeed or fail by the dice, but then be able to decide the consequences based on their actions, not their rolls. This means I want to find a binary yes-no dice system that can work with the idea of the Valkyrie empowering the other players.

Strong Lore Framework: I know, right? Crazy. This might seem like an obvious one, but games like DnD and Savage Worlds rely more on their feel than their lore. They have a unique feel to their system, and they can get away with having minimal lore, knowing that players will want to make their own. This game cannot do that. The mechanics are way too tied to the setting for the game to be used for generic fantasy. Sure, players will be able to replace Valkyries with Angels or something like that, and I want to offer ideas for players on how to do that, but the base game should have a strong framework of lore so that players can jump right into creating adventures that feel unique to the game’s world. Eclipse Phase does this by creating a towering mass of lore that the GM and players have to sit through before getting started, and while that is one approach, I prefer to ape Dogs in the Vineyard on this one. In Dogs, the lore framework is pretty much all spelled out on the back of the book, and is evocative enough to tell players how to play in that world without requiring hundreds of pages of reading material. I want something like that for this game. I want to build a lore framework that gets players into the right feel for the game without them needing to spend their lives studying the game world.

And that is it for now. VnV will be an Action Game that can Flow Between Conflict Styles while maintaining a unique feel for each style. I want Conflict to be Reactive, Freeform Magic, a strong Lore Framework, for players to Play a Role, and Simple and Quick Dice Rolls that allow the players to spend more time playing and less time doing math. Now, you may notice that these goals do not necessarily encompass everything you might expect to see. I have not said if I want the game to be focused around crunch, or fluff. Is the game going to have simulationist stats, or gamey stats? Will there be “story mechanics”? Well, those things will come up in the details. They are not goals in themselves. If creating a strong lore framework means that we need some mechanics in place to guide narrative creation, we can do that. If simple rolls require gamey stats, we can do that. Moreover, crunch vs fluff, sim vs game, and story vs action are not very helpful definitions. Any good game will fall somewhere in the middle of all these ideas, and frankly, a lot of these distinctions are not that useful. We need to define our game on actionable goals first, and then we will see how things shake out as we design.

Our first goal to work towards is a playtest. I can sit here theorizing long and hard about how I want the game to play, what I want from the fiction, the dice, the mechanics, but will not know if I have the right idea until some people play the thing. Don’t get me wrong, I can figure out a lot of the game from design, but sometimes the way I think a design will work is not how it will go down at the table. So, a playtest. What do we need for that? First, I will need to define what I want to play at the test. Is it a combat? A whole session? For Psychout, our first playtest was a simple combat with no fiction attached. Here are some dudes, here are your characters, duke it out. It worked well enough to highlight the flaws in the system, but I want to give myself and my playtesters a little more for our time, so I am going to run a short scenario. This will give us a taste of the conflict resolution mechanics, the lore, and allow me to see the holes in other pieces of the game. So I need a scenario. I will also need combat rules, gear rules, magic rules, and non-combat conflict resolution rules. I will also need some pre-made characters, some NPCs, some basic maps, and a time and date. Most importantly, I need to decide how actions resolve in this system. I know I talked earlier about characters having a number of dice for actions, but that caused me some conceptual problems before, so it will need rethinking. Once I have all of these things, I can run the scenario for some friends, take notes on how it goes, and hopefully run the scenario again for some different groups. Doing so will let me see if things I noticed were anomalies, or endemic to the system.

So there is the basic idea. Let’s hope this does not turn out to be a terrible idea. Next week, we will talk a little bit about dice rolls and a lot about what dice rolls are for.

[aion-rsa]

Control: AWE Review – Alan Wake Pays Jesse a Visit in the Oldest House

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Control’s first DLC, The Foundation, offered a lot of exploration but surprisingly little world-building. Protagonist Jesse Faden had settled into her role as Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, and learned more about the game’s ever-shifting brutalist setting, the Oldest House. Limited by the mostly identical hallways of the House’s undercroft, The Foundation never matched the wonder of finally seeing the sky in the initial campaign or meeting some of the characters for the first time.

Fortunately, the newest venture into the Oldest House, AWE, is a much more substantial expansion, bringing horror and quirky humor to a story that feels a bit constrained by its length and unanswered questions. AWE has some of the same problems with scope as The Foundation, but offers stronger world-building and a miniature return to the game’s expertly balanced tones. Humor and horror effectively collide as Jesse follows a message from supernaturally harried writer Alan Wake, who, in true Remedy fashion, has reached out of his own game through the power of fiction and the Cauldron Lake. Or has he?

This DLC is absolutely at its best if you’re already familiar with Alan Wake and its spinoff, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. You’ll get a loose introduction to Alan himself, Thomas Zane, and Dr. Hartman in AWE, but it’s hard to imagine some of Wake’s interludes meaning anything to someone who has only played Control. Unfortunately, the exploration of his story is actually the shortest of the expansion’s three sections. As expected from a game as cryptic as Control, dialogue stops just short of truly explaining anything. The finale is especially frustrating in this regard, landing both as a hokey sequel tease and an oddly cold moment for Jesse herself. 

However, this is one of those cases where it’s really about the journey, not the destination. The writing, level design, and art all remind me what I loved about Control the first time around: the weird bureaucracy, the effective horror, and the dry humor. In AWE, Jesse primarily interacts with the containment supervisor Langston, whose rambling dialogue makes for a funny twist on the video game trope of a friendly voice in the hero’s ear. 

Players will encounter three main areas in the expansion, each a different incident examined by the shuttered Investigations Sector. All three emphasize what was suggested in the base game: the Federal Bureau of Control was a squabbling organization with regular instances of prisoner abuses during the previous director’s tenure. The first two sections offer some satisfyingly difficult fights and puzzles, interspersed with the expansion’s best and worst addition: the monster Dr. Hartman has become. Both new Altered World investigation areas were fun and intriguing, especially the one that explains why the FBC has a lunar lander in one of its cavernous storage rooms. 

Hartman’s doubly-corrupted form is a masterful example of when to show the monster. Most of the time he’s in shadow, clear enough that you can see the body horror that results from Hiss possession and swathed in the kind of darkness that became infamous in Alan Wake. When the expansion finally reveals Hartman’s monstrous shape, the sight is unnerving, to say the least. The first few fights against Hartman gave me that distinct “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?” feeling, and often he was. His teleportation ability makes dodging his attacks particularly difficult, and it’s very satisfying when you manage to evade one of his swipes at the last second. In some sequences you can’t fight or repel him at all, leading to SOMA-style haunted house adrenaline. 

Hartman avoids light, but AWE never quite reaches the novelty of Remedy’s use of light in the Alan Wake series. I found myself wishing for a gun mod that would give me something like Alan’s gun and flashlight combo. Instead, you use Jesse’s psychic Launch ability to shine conveniently placed lanterns on seething, snarling pools of darkness. Since the psychic grab was effectively developed as a tense, powerful attack, Launching with more delicacy can be fiddly. 

Release Date: August 27, 2020 Platform: XBO (reviewed), PC, PS4 Developer: Remedy Entertainment Publisher: 505 Games Genre: Action-adventure

Jesse does have a new weapon form at her disposal: Surge is a sticky grenade launcher with delayed detonation. I used it to wail on the boss more often than for carefully timed crowd control. Speaking of crowd control, players who want more combat challenges can use two arcade machines to jump into a horde mode or survival challenge in previously visited locations. 

The Oldest House itself has always been its own character in Control. While most of AWE’s locations look like the office spaces the game is known for, there are some new House features that add to the wonder and weirdness. That said, plot-relevant developments between Jesse and the other powerful entities in the House are one area in which The Foundation was far more substantial than AWE. By now, Jesse has fully embraced her role as director, but that turns out to mean she doesn’t seem to feel anything about these fights — not about defeating Hartman, not about her old favorite poet, Thomas Zane, or about potentially being a side character in a story about Alan. 

Some problems from the base game still persist: some attacks are badly telegraphed, and maps and menus chug slowly along. Remedy has added some welcome quality of life changes, including more control points, which mean less backtracking, and a variety of difficulty sliders. You can adjust incoming damage and the power of your attacks on a 100-point scale, or simply make Jesse invincible. Running at 50% will make some of Control’s infamously difficult bosses and side missions less frustrating while still maintaining the challenge.

Unfortunately, the very last Hartman fight dispelled a lot of my good will toward earlier encounters. The last fight is extremely difficult, with Hartman regaining full health every time the lights go out. This is the worst part of the expansion: not a particular test of survivability, accuracy, or the light mechanic, it’s just a war of attrition, a process of unloading grenades into a monster who, revealed, isn’t quite as scary as he was in the shadows. It’s the worst of the few occasions where the game seems to be putting walls in front of Jesse for the sake of walls. Since paranatural abilities don’t regenerate in the dark, it was frustrating to plot out Jesse’s next few moves just to remember she couldn’t use any powers. 

Like a lot of Control, AWE teases more than it reveals. However, the new areas are quirky and imposing enough to make it an effective reminder of what is so great about Control’s atmosphere in the first place. How much you enjoy it might depend in part on how willing you are to enjoy the mystery, not the answers.

The post Control: AWE Review – Alan Wake Pays Jesse a Visit in the Oldest House appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[mwsa-member]

MWSA Interview with Bill Riley

Date of interview: 27 October 2019 Bill Riley is a writer and retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel with interests in space exploration, coffee roasting, global communication, intelligence activities, and ancient ruins. Bill was an intelligence analyst during the Cold War. Later, he specialized in strategy and communications. During his career, he’s worked with intelligence and special operations professionals from every service, virtually every intelligence agency, and several friendly foreign governments. Bill’s deployments took him through combat zones across the Middle East where he played significant roles in Kuwait and Iraq, supported joint coalition operations, and helped nations rebuild after wars. He was the first US electronic warfare officer in Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom, he led the air force’s largest network operations and security center, and he was the first cyberspace operations officer to receive the Air Force Combat Action Medal. He holds degrees in literature, public administration, and strategic leadership, and he is a graduate of Air Command and Staff College and the Air Force Space Command VIGILANT LOOK program. Bill lives in Idaho, just outside Boise, with his wife and two sons. Find him at billrileyauthor.com Look for him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at billrileyauthor

Interview

MWSA: How has MWSA helped your writing and/or marketing skills? Bill Riley: I've been a member for less than a year, and MWSA has already directly helped me in two ways. The biggest is networking. In a short time, I've had the opportunity to meet many writers willing to answer my questions and discuss both the art of writing and the struggle to make writing a career. Very well established authors have been generous with their time and advice, and both new and experienced writers have shared valuable tools, perspectives, and approaches with me. The second benefit has been feedback and recognition. These go hand-in-hand, and the review process MWSA offers is phenomenal. The volunteers who conduct book reviews are professional, constructively critical, and provide notes that provide feedback on what worked and didn't. This dovetails into the MWSA Awards program, which represents the genre of Military Writing in the United States. It judges each submission against professional literary criteria, not against the books submitted in a given year. This means we compete against the best standards of writing and storytelling, not each other. Baghdaddy won the 2019 MWSA Founders Medal and Gold Medal for Memoir, and I was blown away. It was exciting and humbling. As a writer, it was a moment I'll never forget. Now, being able to market Baghdaddy as an award-winning author has opened up speaking and media gigs that were difficult to get before. So please submit your work, the feedback is excellent, and you never know what'll happen. MWSA: Baghdaddy is an intensely personal sharing of your life’s journey. At what point and how did you decide it needed to be written?

Bill Riley: I witnessed the effects of Saddam’s rape of Kuwait and his failure to honor the terms of his surrender. Later, I was stationed in Iraq and experienced the unique challenges of trying to rebuild that country while some of its people were trying to kill me. My father tried to prepare me for the worst that life could throw at me. He taught me hard lessons that often hurt, and I resented them. After he passed away, I tried to put things in perspective. I realized that there wasn’t a lot of difference between the skills I needed to survive my childhood, be a father, and go to war. I met some amazing people along the way, and connecting those dots brought me to Baghdaddy. MWSA: What attracted you to intelligence and national security? Bill Riley: I wish I could say I had a noble purpose or a higher calling, but I didn’t. I was the stereotypical enlistee, in a bad situation without other good options, and the air force offered me a way out, an opportunity to prove myself, and a fresh start. Funny story: I entered the air force without a guaranteed job. I was an “open general” recruit, which is another name for “whatever the air force needs most.” A.k.a my recruiter Jedi mind tricked me into meeting his quota. Halfway through Basic, our military training instructor lined us up and said, “I have to send five volunteers to the new special ops pre-qualification course. Who thinks they have what it takes?” You’d think everyone would want in, but no. He got four volunteers, and I was “voluntold” to be the fifth. I was annoyed. It was just one more thing I had to do. But I said, “YES, SERGEANT,” on cue. I figured it would be obvious I wasn’t into it, nature would take its course, and I’d be out. The thing was, it wasn’t bad. Yeah, it was chaotic and exhausting, but there was no yelling, I ran and swam, and avoided the most tedious aspects of basic training. Our ability to observe and improvise was tested, and we wrote short essays to answer unanswerable morality questions as our group got smaller and smaller. When there were five of us left, we were given our final task. Dive in the water, reach the other side of the pool, pick up a mask from the bottom of the deep end, clear it, put it on, and swim back to where we started. All underwater, all in one breath. Problem was, when I’d almost gotten to my mask, some asshole with a padded stick hit me and knocked the mask away. I grabbed it, but another stick knocked me in the head, and I let go. I was running out of air, but surface and you lose, and I was pissed. I swam to the wall just above the mask, and the sticks came at me again. This time I grabbed both and kicked off the wall as hard as I could. One stick came free in my hand, and there was a big splash. I grabbed my mask, cleared and donned it, and swam to the finish line. When I broke the surface to gasp for air, a hand the size of a ham grabbed my head and hauled me out of the pool. It was a huge, unhappy sergeant in soaking wet fatigues. I figured I’d screwed up. I just hoped they’d let me finish Basic. They congratulated me. I finished first in that class and was offered a spec ops class slot. But there were only two slots, and there were three of us. In the pit of my stomach I knew I wasn't the right man for the job. I didn't want it like the other candidates did, and I figured their passion had to mean something. I declined the Pararescue slot I was offered, got yelled at by a major, for what seemed like a long time, then the big sergeant I dunked in the pool came in. He told the major that while he questioned my decision-making skills for not going in the program, I had integrity and grit and he recommended me for an intelligence job that just felt right. No one had ever told me I had grit or integrity before. I stayed because there’s a sense of community in the military that, for me, was like family. MWSA: Your book’s cover art elicits strong reactions. What were your thoughts behind it? Bill Riley: The Baghdaddy cover is polarizing, and I love it. I wanted it to cut to the heart of my story, and with one glance it does. I wish we lived in a world where there weren’t child soldiers, but we do, and they’re a part of this story. The art also captures the warlike aspects of my upbringing, and it feels personal. My father once said, “One definition of adult is surviving your childhood,” and I never forgot it. Each story element meets on this cover. You know the moment you pick it up. MWSA: Baghdaddy provides a firsthand view of war; what are the most common misconceptions held by many Americans? Bill Riley: We see war mostly in snapshots, and not everything gets the coverage or the attention or focus it deserves. There’s been a terrible war in Yemen for years, but the media barely covers it. The same was true of the atrocities of Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait and the campaign of rape and terror employed by Slobodan Milošević during the Bosnian War. Few were interested in investigating and reporting until the world couldn’t look away anymore. The first time I was in Iraq was just after President Bush declared victory. We absolutely met and exceeded the first phase objectives of the war, but even at the highest levels of power, there were misconceptions over what “victory” meant, and unfortunately, an agenda often drives what gets reported and what the public sees. I was with an army signals unit on the outskirts of Karbala, about fifty-five miles southwest of Baghdad. There was a friendly village just off the major supply route, and we encountered a news crew at the burnt and twisted remains of a blown-up semi-tractor-trailer. People from the village were rummaging through the blast field, looking for salvageable spoils. We waved, the Iraqis waved back, and the reporters were busy setting up their shot. We pulled over, and I went to touch base with the news crew just as they were assembling a group of men and boys with slung Kalashnikov rifles in front of the still-smoking vehicle for a picture. Back then, if a supply truck fell out of a convoy along the route, the driver detonated the vehicle and cargo so it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. The vehicle in front of me, and the reporters was one of those. We knew it, they knew it. The title that ran on the picture in a scathing news story was, 'Insurgents Destroy Military Supplies.' It was a good picture, and insurgents did destroy military supplies, just not that time. If you look closely at the picture, you can see all the boys smiling for the camera. Don't get me wrong, there is still great reporting. Unfortunately, we've also reached a point of manufactured and skewed news saturation. The difficulty in separating the truth from the lies has, more than anything, led to misconceptions. MWSA: You're currently writing a YA series. What can you share about the series, and does it have a connection at all to Baghdaddy? Bill Riley: Absolutely, it does. Thank's for asking about this, I just finished the first book in my new Cypher series. In it, I draw on my military background and time in secret organizations, and while I was raising boys when I was often away doing things I couldn’t talk about. I’ll take readers to places they haven’t seen before in Young Adult Fiction, and it will be a wild and surprisingly moving ride. The first book is called Ashur’s Tears. In it, near-future technology collides with magic in a vibrant world where the government has a lot to hide. An apocalypse-class artifact has been stolen, powerful factions have emerged, and demons are poised to invade the world if a disgraced temple guardian and the three Cypher children can’t find their father and stop it. I love this story, and I can't wait to share it, probably late 2020/early 2021. You can check out billrileyauthor.com for updates and events.

[acetokens]

The Curse of the Vampire: My thoughts on MUA3′s first DLC

Today I wanna talk about the first DLC expansion pack for MUA3: The Curse of The Vampire! Because I can’t contain my hype for this any longer, I have to ramble about it and you can’t stop me.

This post will probably be stupid long, so its all under the cut!

The Curse of the Vampire is MUA3’s biggest update so far, and its first paid DLC update. It released just in time for spooky month, so naturally the entire thing is Halloween themed. Every player will be able to sink their teeth into a new story mode difficulty, ‘Nightmare’, where enemies affected by a vampiric curse will appear, as well as accessing the SHIELD Depot, where you can purchase various costumes and items for SHIELD Tokens. The update raised the level cap from 100 to 150 and added extra sections to the Alliance Enhancement Grid, both of which can be used to further strengthen your heroes. For Season Pass holders, you can also unlock four new characters: Blade, Punisher, Moon Knight and Morbius, through the new ‘Gauntlet Mode’, where you take on challenges in a loop of ever increasing difficulty to get rewards.

There was radio silence from the devs leading up to the release of the DLC, so my hopes weren’t high. But I was really happy to wake up on the 30th September to see the massive amount of content we received! Because there’s so much to unpack here, I want to talk about each new feature one at a time, starting with the most hyped up part of the update!

The Characters

I’ve never been a big fan of The Marvel Knights, but I was really pleased to see most of them had something unique to distinguish them from other heroes and I had fun trying them all out!

Punisher is, of course, based around using his huge arsenal of guns. His stats are horrible, like all ranged characters, but he makes up for it with his surprisingly good evasive abilities, as he can shoot his guns or throw grenades whilst strafing left, right or backwards to avoid attacks. Punisher’s sniper rifle is also incredibly deadly, and feels so satisfying to land, especially on those AIM snipers in Wakanda. Punisher feels like the kind of character where you have to play very tactically to win with, which makes him the one I enjoyed playing as the most out of the four.

Morbius gets KO’d fast because of his poor defensive stats, but he absolutely rips apart enemy health bars. Not only does he have high strength and can increase his damage output with Fangs and Claws but he can also lower his foes’ defence with Hypnotic Gaze. The combination is absolutely terrifying. He can also heal himself by biting his enemies, as a vampire should. Playing as him is very fun because you deal so much damage its’ just obnoxious. He’s like Hulk on steroids.

Moon Knight is the most unoriginal character of the four in terms of playstyle, which is a shame. All of his abilities are identical in use to those from other characters, with the only unique feature of Moon Knight is his ability to glide, which is a more situational version of flight. His crescent kick and EX are also visually impressive. I think Moon Knight is the definition of ‘basic but practical’. He has the least impressive moveset of the four new characters but he’s also the only one who didn’t get KO’d when I ran through Nightmare Mode with them all, so he’s a solid unit.

Blade has the unique ability to charge all of his abilities to make them stronger. While charging he can move around (albeit slowly) and you can even switch to a different attack mid-charge. At first I found Blade the least enjoyable to play because of how slow he felt and how often he’d get interrupted by the enemy before he had a chance to do anything. But with the right items equipped, I found Blade significantly more fun, and seeing him stalk around the stage, charging up and waiting for a chance to strike was undeniably awesome.

Something I also noticed is that currently the characters’ traits are incorrect. It doesn’t say Blade can use elements, but he can. It doesn’t say Punisher has the super strength trait, but he does. And it says Morbius has a passive healing factor, but he doesn’t. I hope this gets addressed next patch.

The Story & The Enemies

I don’t think I was the only one who felt disappointed when the ‘new story content’ we were promised turned out to just be another difficulty option. After clearing the campaign four times already I wasn’t too motivated to do it a fifth time, but I did it anyway, and I have mixed feelings on it overall.

Disappointingly, Nightmare Mode has no treasure chests or infinity trials to discover and you get no reward for completing it. Its purpose is ultimately just to be a place for players who haven’t purchased the season pass to fight the new vampire enemies and collect SHIELD tokens. Despite that, I did have fun playing through Nightmare. The enemy’s stats rapidly increase in this difficulty more than the rest, starting at level 40 and rising all the way to level 90 by the last stage! Not only that, the new vampiric enemies (Reborn, Infected and Cursed) add an extra layer of strategy to combat, forcing you to adapt your tactics and your team pretty often.

The Reborn come in many different types, each with unique buffs that make them harder to defeat than standard enemies. They might slow you down or poison you if you get too close, heal nearby enemies, magnetically pull you towards them, inflict the damage they take back onto you, explode after being defeated etc. There are also Infected, which may return as Reborn after being defeated (and can Infect you, which will make you rapidly lose HP until cured), and Cursed, which will cure all Infected of their disease when taken down. Its hard to remember all of this at first, but once you’ve memorized what each of the enemy types do it makes Nightmare Mode much more enjoyable in a uniquely challenging way, especially in boss battles.

I do wish we’d gotten a brand new story mode chapter instead though.

The Gauntlets

I expected Gauntlet Mode to be a never-ending wave of enemies, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a lot more innovative and enjoyable. Gauntlet Mode is split into three phases, each with 4-6 Gauntlets. In each Gauntlet, a series of trials must be completed one after another, with the added caveat being that you cannot change your characters or items mid-Gauntlet, and (aside from after completing certain trials) your HP will not recover. After completing a Gauntlet once, you can challenge it again, and this time it will become an Endless Gauntlet where the trials will loop continuously and get harder each time, only ending when you give up or your team is defeated.

Like Nightmare Mode, Gauntlet Mode starts easy and gets progressively more difficult. The first Gauntlet is only level 5 and includes 3 trials, whereas the last Gauntlet is level 120 and includes 10 trials! I must be sounding like a broken record by now but this is the hardest challenge in the game. Gauntlet Mode really puts your endurance to the test, pitting you against continuous waves and bosses, many of which are Reborn, Infected or Cursed, all while under difficult conditions. Many of the optional challenges are also deliberately designed so that they are only achievable on an Endless run, meaning if you want those sweet rewards you have to clear the Gauntlet two, three or even four times in a row without quitting or losing.

I haven’t fully completed Gauntlet Mode just yet. I managed to get 4-stars on all Gauntlets in phase 1 and 2 without much effort due to my over-levelled characters, but on phase 3 the difficulty rose quite considerably. I had to start thinking very carefully about what characters and items I took into the Gauntlet, and I can’t exaggerate enough how incredibly hard Endless can get on these high level Gauntlets after a few loops. There’s a reason they give you 99 revives on Condition: Terminal. They expect you to die. A lot.

Overall, Gauntlet is pretty great! It offers a lot more variety than Infinity Trials, which is perfect if you’re using it to grind or farm items, and phase 3’s Gauntlets are the ideal test of skill and patience for players who enjoy a challenge. That being said, the load times between the trials can be tedious, and the difficulty isn’t for everyone. But I really enjoy Gauntlet Mode, and it’s my favorite part of the expansion!

The Store

The most unexpected part of the update for me was the new SHIELD Depot. Here, you can spend the SHIELD Tokens you collect in Nightmare and Gauntlet Modes for goodies, including new costumes for Black Panther, Captain America, Iron Man and Thor for 400 tokens each. You can also buy voice lines (which I believe may accidentally hint to future DLC characters) and items, some of which are very expensive at 10,000 tokens but look powerful. My favorite part of the Depot is that you can use Credits to buy XP cubes. Up until this point, Credits have been a useless currency. You can spend them to upgrade your items or enhance your alliance, but the sheer rate that you acquire credits means you end up sitting on a pile of 80,000,000 with nothing to spend it on, and that’s not a exaggeration. With this update, my mountain of Credits can finally be put to good use! I bought over 2,000 XP cubes and used them to level up my lesser used characters, so that felt pretty good.

I think the SHIELD Depot is a nice addition to the game, but I am slightly concerned how it will be affected by future updates. Will all future costumes be available for purchase there? If so, does that mean we have to play Gauntlet and Nightmare over and over to get the SHIELD Tokens needed to buy them, since that currency can’t be found anywhere else? I really hope not...

Other Changes

The expansion also made big changes to the level cap and the Alliance Enhancement Grid. Heroes can now reach the lofty heights of level 150, which is absolutely insane. Previously difficult trials like the New Brotherhood and Ultimate Alliance of Evil become a total cakewalk when you’re that overpowered, so anyone willing to put the grinding hours in will be well rewarded. My teams are currently around level 115-125, so I still have a way to go before I hit the new level cap, but I want to reach that stage before I try to 4-star the last phase of Gauntlet Mode because I think I’m gonna need it.

The Alliance Enhancement Grid has also been extended with new upgrades now available. They cost a lot of AEP, but the ones that allow you to heal by attacking stunned enemies are very helpful for Gauntlet Mode. I was close to finishing the original AEG (literally just 7 nodes away from obtaining every upgrade in the game) so my first reaction was: ‘’Damn, I should’ve saved my AEP for this’’. But luckily, the update also added the option to spend void spheres to reset the AEG and refund all AEP spent on it, so you can edit your upgrades. No more buyers remorse! This is one of the features I’ve had on my wishlist for a while so I’m happy they implemented this feature!

Finishing Thoughts

The Curse of the Vampire is a great first expansion for MUA3 overall. It has its let-downs, but it really surpassed my expectations with the amount of new content it contained, and sets the standard for the future expansions pretty high. One thing I am confused by, however, is that they mentioned in a tweet that ‘’players will be able to discover a new Infinity Rift’’. Despite all the new stuff included in the update, an Infinity Rift wasn’t one of them, which gets me thinking: Is this particular expansion really finished? I think we may receive another update on the 31st October, which includes that Rift as well as some spooky costumes. Maybe some free characters as well? Although that might be too optimistic.

Taking my tinfoil hat off for a moment, we know for a fact the next expansion will drop in late 2019 and include characters and features from the X-Men. This is the one I’ve been looking forward to. This is X-23’s (extremely slim) chance to make it in. More than anything else, that’s what I’m wishing for out of the next expansion. Although even if she doesn’t get included, I think if the next update includes as much content as this one, I’ll be more than happy with it.

[ciathyzareposts]

Treasures of the Savage Frontier: Red Menace

Imagine what the Zhentarim could accomplish with Twitter.

              Treasures of the Savage Frontier gives us a plot in which an authoritarian regime from far to the east collaborates with local plutocrats and religious fanatics to wage a war of mis-information, thus demoralizing and destabilizing the free people of the west, ultimately effecting changes in leadership. Ah, the wild imaginings of fantasy!

Indeed, the axis of the Zhentarim, the Hosttower of the Arcane in Luskan, and the Kraken Society of the Trackless Sea has done such a thorough job planning this campaign against the Lords’ Alliance that one wonders why the Zhentarim attempted a more conventional invasion in Gateway to the Savage Frontier. (I think those three are the key partners. I’m not sure if the pirates from Luskan are a fourth organization or whether they’re associated with the Hosttower or the Krakens. Also, the Temple of Bane is somehow involved, but they just seem to pop up any time an evil plan is afoot.) Remember, no significant time passed between the party winning Gateway and getting sucked into this new conflict. The schemers were able to launch their Plan B so immediately that the game mostly consists of the party mopping up damage already done.

Vital to the evil plans are a series of documents–for some reason called “lucky papers”–that describe the axis’s plans for each city in the Lords’ Alliance (or, at least, most of them). To fully read the papers, you have to have three gems–blue, red, and green–each color carried by a different faction’s agents. I believe green was the Hosttower, red was the Zhentarim, and blue was the Kraken Society. When you fight a group of people carrying these gems, you always get the color of the first enemy that you kill. After that, everyone else present shatters their gems so that the party won’t get a complete set.

            You almost have to admire the enemy forces. One of their number having fallen, they assume they’re all going to die, and they think of duty first.

              As Null Null pointed out in a premature comment, but I soon discovered anyway, the party’s prioritization of mages means that you end up killing a lot of green-crystal holding enemies first, which makes it harder to get the other two crystals unless you specifically target them. Once I realized what was happening, I used “Hold Person” spells to paralyze and then kill Zhentil Lords and Kraken agents during first combat rounds.so I could get their gems.

              And the color red is associated with our primary enemy–what will they think of next?

              I didn’t get all three until nearly the end of this session, but once I had two, I could take a pretty good stab at what the various papers said. I don’t think any of them were fully necessary to “solve” their associated cities, but they all added some fun background to what was going on.

            Even missing one gem, you can mostly make out the enemy’s plan: “If we lose Llorkh, we will bring forces to lay siege to Waterdeep . . .”

         When I last wrote, I had mostly finished with Loudwater, where I had simply stopped on my way between Llorkh and Secomber. A rematch with the harpies went in my favor, and I cleared out an area of undead (very easy with three characters capable of turning) for some grateful residents in exchange for a Cloak of Protection +2. (I always forget the rules of cloaks and rings of protection if you already have magic armor. Some combination of them do not stack, although I’m not sure how saving throws are affected.) Ultimately, I’m not sure there was anything necessary in the city.

         No adventurers before me had clerics of Level 6 or above, apparently.

      I moved on to Secomber, which turned out to be less than a half-city (coordinates occupying only 7 x 15). There was one major battle with axis members, difficult because they had multiple mages and were arranged in multiple groups. Initiative is vital in such battles. If the mages are able to get off a few “Lightning Bolts” or “Ice Storms” before I can nullify them, the battle often results in a reload. I find myself using ranged weapons more in Treasures than in previous games, always attempting to strike each mage before he or she can cast.

We visited Amanitas, who told us that ambassadors from Neverwinter and Mirabar were traveling to Waterdeep to discuss the situation, and that we should meet them in Leilon to escort them. He also gave us a magic crown that would allow us to communicate with him without walking all the way back to Secomber. It added a “Crown” option to the party’s encampment menu.

           It’s nice to see Amanitas living in such privation while we do all the work.

               At this point, I had the choice to head directly for Leilon or to take routes through other cities first. I chose the latter option because I wanted to test how well the game lived up to its open-world nature. I get annoyed with games that pretend to be open-world (allowing you to travel anywhere) but in reality enforce a certain linearity in encounters. In Gateway, for instance, visiting a couple of cities out of order screwed up a plotline with a dwarf NPC. A good game separates the territory from events that occur within the territory, but the Gold Box titles have been wildly inconsistent in how they handle this.

Here, they seem to have done a decent job of anticipating a rogue player. By visiting Daggerford before Leilon, I solved a part of the game earlier than anticipated, but not in a way that had an effect on other encounters. Daggerford is referenced in one of the “lucky papers,” with the author saying that the axis would have to control Daggerford and the Way Inn to besiege Waterdeep from the south. Sure enough, when I arrived, I found Zhentil troops patrolling the streets and most of the key figures of the city locked up. 

           I sense that the game’s artist is going for a certain theme.

          There were about half a dozen fixed battles with Zhents, manticores, fire giants, cyclopes, and margoyles as I slowly cleared the city. Another large final battle with the same composition as Secomber finished clearing the area. I found the Duke of Daggerford huddled in a secret area. After the final battle, in a rare timed encounter, I had to chase down a party of Zhentarim getting ready to leave the city and warn their allies at the Way Inn that I’d be coming.

               Complete non-sequitur, but I used to think the lyrics to Albert Hammond’s “It Never Rains in Southern California” were: “It never rains in California / But, girl, don’t they warn ya / Big horse, manticores.”

           There seemed to be no way to get into Waterdeep, where some kind of alarm was going off, so we continued up the road to Leilon. The enemy documents said that they planned to kidnap the ambassadors and blame it on the party, this being the sort of world where proven heroes can be undone by a forged scrap of paper. We got attacked by gryphons in a stable near the entrance, and I realized this is also the kind of world where if you get attacked by gryphons the moment you enter a city, you don’t know if that means something has gone wrong in the city, or that’s just the kind of danger the residents of the Forgotten Realms live with.

We walked into a tavern, where a group of Waterdeep guards hailed our arrival as the “Heroes of Ascore!” and invited us to join the party. As a player, I was screaming “no!,” but my guileless party took them up on the offer and soon found themselves unconscious from drugged food. The next morning, they awoke in a bare room with a locked door. (Of course, the evil guards had not chosen to relieve us of our magical weapons or valuable gems or jewelry.) Ghost tricked the guards into opening the door by setting a small fire.

            It would have been fun to know what “Sick Trick” and “Laugh Trick” did, but Irene happened to be walking by when I got this choice . . .

          As we escaped, we noticed that the guards were probably just wearing Waterdeep uniforms and were not, in fact, Waterdeep soldiers. After several battles with these fake guards and their giant allies, we escaped back into the city and found that the Zhent allies were gone and services were back to normal. Although there were some weird combats with specters an spiders on the west side. I guess every city has its slums to clean up even in absence of evil occupiers.

We checked in with Amanitas (via the crown), who suggested we go back to Waterdeep and investigate rumors that Waterdeep soldiers have been pillaging local farms. When we arrived and demanded to see Lord Piergeiron (leader of the Lords’ Alliance), we were instead taking to a gruff guy named–no kidding–“Fell Hatchet,” who denounced us all as spies and demanded that we be taken to the Anchor of Justice.

             The “lucky paper” outlines the Zhentarim plan for Waterdeep.

        I would think that my relatively-high-level characters would have something to say about that, but instead, we got an absurd scripted sequence in which the entire party was chained to an anchor and thrown into the harbor–again without being stripped of our equipment and valuables. But within moments, recounted in the longest journal entry that I can remember (one full page and half of a column on another), we were rescued by sea elves and released in a set of caverns below the city.

             The game forgets that some of the PCs are female.

           The caverns took a while. Because of so many areas taken up by water and other obstacles, the previous 16 x 16 maps had been easy to explore without mapping, but I had to make a crude one here thanks to all the one-way doors, secret doors, magically-locked doors, and spinners. I’m not a huge fan of spinners, which go all the way back to Wizardry, but if you’re going to implement them, it’s best to do it subtly, so the player doesn’t realize he’s going a different direction until he’s mapped on for a while. The Gold Box approach is to have the characters announce immediately that something has gone amiss.

            Nice and subtle, Gold Box.

          The caverns included encounters with spiders, giant slugs, and carrion crawlers. As we neared the exit, we found some Zhent guards and hellhounds.

             Ghost is still a little behind the curve.

         We finally made it to the exit. Instead of getting to explore the city of Waterdeep as a whole, however, we were confined to a single dock taking up only about a third of a standard map. It was a weird place. Again, I don’t know if the enemies we encountered had anything to do with the evil in the area, or that’s just the way the docks are in Waterdeep. We had to pay a fee to enter in the first place. One of the taverns was run by a group of women who again morphed into greenhags–what is it with this game and this particular enemy? The only temple was a Temple of Mask, and we had to give money to a beggar to learn its password. The docks were swarming with hill giants and fire giants. And in one of the warehouses, we found ourselves face-to-face with a fire dragon.

Having stumbled upon him with no warning, our first battle resulted in the death of two characters. Upon a reload, I had them cast “Resist Fire” first, which improved our odds considerably, and the dragon went down easier than the average Zhent fighter.

              Well, at least he’s not under-powered.

          It’s worth noting that the docks also had a cartographer who sold maps to (I presume) future areas, including the Tunnels of Orlumbor, Firedock, the homes of the Luskan high captains, the Farms of Longsaddle, and a generic “treasure map.” I don’t remember anything like this in a previous Gold Box game.

             I’ll have to look for this configuration.

          I’m not sure we really solved the Waterdeep problem, but Amanitas suggested that we liberate Daggerford and the Way Inn next. Having already taken care of the former, we went to the latter (the southernmost location). It consisted of a half-map for its lower floor and quarter map for its upper one. Predictably, the owner and the employees had been locked up by Zhent forces, and we slowly worked our way around the large building, liberating them. Enemies included otyughs, Zhentil lords, Hosttower mages, margoyles, and Kraken masters. I think we got the last of the gems in one of these fights. Eventually, we cleared everyone and freed the owner, Dauravyn Redbeard, who gave us some Bracers of AC 2.

            We target a “Fireball” at some otyughs and margoyles.

            Our final expedition took us to the twin cities of Yartar and Triboar, which apparently have a long history of practical jokes against each other, which the Zhent have exploited to make it seem like they’re escalating into something more serious. The “lucky paper” outlines the plan as to kidnap the Waterbaron of Yartar, implicate Triboar, and then circulate rumors that the kidnapping is in fact a “false flag” operation by Yartar as an excuse to conquer Triboar.

I suspect that the encounters play quite differently depending on which city you explore first. I chose Triboar first, and the party found a city getting ready for war. But we soon found the captured Waterbaron, who in turn demanded that we take him immediately to the Lord Protector of Triboar, and between the two of them, they worked out their issues and both cities became relatively sedate places with the usual selection of shops and services.

            This same location will sell you things after you solve their problems, which is a nice dynamic use of territory.

          My characters are all Level 9 at this point, except for my Level 8 paladin. (And yet Siulajia, Level 9 herself, still loves him.) My clerics only have one level to go, but my paladin, thief, and fighter each have three and my mage and ranger have two. The average experience point total is around 250,000, which means we’ve only gained 40,000 since the game began. The idea of the ranger ever getting to 650,000 or the paladin ever reaching over 1 million (needed for their respective Level 11s) seems impossible.

Other than the equipment I mentioned above, everyone has found helms +2 by now. Somewhere, I got a two-handed sword called the Sword of Stalking +4, which I gave to Broadside the paladin. I don’t know what the “stalking” part means. Ghost, my fighter/thief, acquired some Boots of Speed. I generally insist on keeping my thief character in leathers even when the game rules don’t require it, but I’ve been paying for it all game with Ghost knocked out in a lot of combats. In the dragon’s hoard, I found some Redflame Armor +2, and since it doesn’t explicitly tell me what it is, I’ve decided to pretend it’s leather and give it to Ghost. Because he’s one of the few characters without a two-handed weapon, he also has the Squid Shield +2 that I got from Yartar. Again, I don’t know if the “squid” part means anything. Everyone else has magic weapons and armor, at least +2, but nothing unique.

             Ghost’s inventory. Do we think the texture background instead of the black screen adds anything?

         I’m enjoying combats in this game even more than the typical Gold Box title, partly because my mage capabilities seem so nerfed  My plans to dual one of my clerics to a mage were stymied by low intelligence for both characters, so I’m going to have to solve the game with just the one. And while she has the typical complement of useful spells, Treasures doesn’t offer any Rings of Wizardry or other mechanisms for getting bonus spells, so I don’t feel like I have quite the arsenal that I usually do. I haven’t even had a chance to memorize “Haste” yet–and I haven’t seen a single mage scroll that would allow me to memorize (or cast) spells outside of the normal leveling-up process. All of this means that my fighters and clerics take a much greater role in combat, including (as I mentioned before) using ranged weapons to keep enemy mages inert, spreading out to avoid vulnerability to “Fireballs” and “Ice Storms,” maximizing back stabs, making better use of cleric spells, and so forth. It’s rare even in random combats that I can just ALT-Q the battle and write a couple of blog paragraphs while my characters duke it out.

           My selection of mage spells is powerful but not apocalyptic.

          Miscellaneous notes:

               The various establishments in the cities have more florid descriptions in Treasures than I remember in previous Gold Box games.

          Past games would have just said “Tavern.”

            Most taverns only offer options to “fight” and “leave,” which also happened in Gateway. Had the programmers at Beyond ever been to a tavern?

            Ale? Is ale an option?

              I haven’t found any magic shops yet, although one of the “adventurers’ shops” (a useless place that sells non-magic boots and belts and such) sold Cloaks of Protection +1.

In between Waterdeep and Leilon, we had a random encounter with a seer named Rabgar. He charged us with “the quest of the three dungeons” and told us to “seek the dwarves throughout the land.” Later, we met some dwarves who told us where to find the first dungeon north of Daggerford. We entered it and followed the dwarves’ hints for the right set of doors to get us out, but all we did then is enter and leave. We didn’t find any treasure or fight any battles. Now the dungeon is gone. We have new instructions to find the second one, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort.

            The dungeon just confronted us with a set of doors. But “solving” the puzzle just meant exiting the dungeon, which we didn’t have to enter in the first place. What was the point?

        Outdoor encounters include the bulette, which as we all now know, is pronounced “bul-AY.” Don’t ask why. It’s a sensitive issue.

In the last entry, I said how much I appreciated the pre-combat encounter text. Its quantity and quality mostly continued into this session, but there were clearly times that the writers ran out of ideas. I guess there are only so many dice games that you can interrupt.

             Don’t waste a lot of time on this puzzle. It was two hellhounds and two cyclopes.

         The game requires a tedious copy protection exercise every time you start, but at least it no longer draws its answers from journal entries you haven’t read yet. All of the answers are from the pre-journal part of the text.

               Treasures of the Savage Frontier features what is arguably the first “romance” in an RPG. I remember some previous games that would let you engage prostitutes (e.g., Empire II, Wasteland) and a couple of games in which you were either had a partner as part of the backstory (Elvira II) or got to marry the princess in the end (The Dragon & Princess, Zeliard, Prophecy of the Shadow). But I can’t remember a previous game in which an optional romance develops between a PC and NPC during the game.

          Ah, yes, the old “close your eyes and nod occasionally” trick. Sorry to break it to you, Siulajia, but he was thinking about Batman for most of that conversation.

              The romance is entirely passive, however. At various intervals, when camping, the game notes that the lead male character and Siulajia are spending time together–talking, flirting, laughing, and so forth. Eventually, the game had Broadside stand up before the rest of the party and announce that he and Siulajia were in love. While acknowledging this could make some things “awkward,” he expressed hope that the rest of the party would “accept us as a couple just as you accepted us before.”

            Not as awkward as trying to remember how to spell and pronounce her name.

              Strangely, we now had an option to accept or reject the couple. Just for fun, I tried “reject.” The embarrassed Siulajia leaves the party. Broadside, “shaking with rage,” announces that he will fulfill his vow to complete the mission but that he will never forgive the rest of the party–never!! I reloaded of course and accepted, mostly because I didn’t want to lose a fighter.

            Aww.

           I guess if the lead character is female, the romance plays out similarly with Jarbarkas. The whole episode is okay, but I rather that the player has an input into such things. I don’t like how often this game hijacks my character’s mouths for its own text. It’s fine when it does it for Siulajia, because she’s not my creation, but I’m supposed to be role-playing the rest of this party.

            Amanitas’s opinion about where we should go next.

          According to the game map, I have six cities left to visit–Longsaddle, Neverwinter, Port Llast, Luskan, Mirabar, and Fireshear–plus something called the “Ice Peak,” plus the islands of Mintarn, Orlumber, and Ruathym. So despite having covered what seems like a lot of territory in this entry, we still have several to go.

Time so far: 11 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/treasures-of-the-savage-frontier-red-menace/

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order Review

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/marvel-ultimate-alliance-3-the-black-order-review/

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order Review

With Marvel Comics’ long history of tangled legal red tape and licensing deals, it brings me a special kind of joy to put together a team composed of a yellow spandex-clad Wolverine straight out of the old cartoons, a Spider-Man essentially ripped right from the PS4 game, a modern comic book rendition of The Wasp, and an MCU-style Rocket Raccoon doing his best Bradley Cooper imitation. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order – Nintendo Switch

$59.99on Amazon

pulls from anywhere and everywhere to stock its very fun (if fairly simple) co-op brawler with crowd-pleasing moments.

The story itself is one we’ve heard a lot lately: Thanos is hunting for the Infinity Stones and you have to find all six before he does. It’s a new telling of some extremely well-tread ground, but the writing and voice acting still manage to capture the funny, self-deprecating, and occasionally overdramatic attitude I love about big comic book stories. The campaign also acts as a tour of Marvel’s greatest hits, taking you to lovely renditions of places like Avengers Tower, The Raft prison, and even the wonderfully nostalgic Xavier Institute.

In the tradition of the original decade-old games in this series, Ultimate Alliance 3 is a totally linear button mashing beat-’em-up. You run through locations in order, strung together by plenty of amusing and well-animated cutscenes, with only some lightly hidden collectibles to pull you off the main path. Thankfully, these environments are dotted with plenty of mid-level boss fights and loads of quippy hero banter that kept me smiling even when the straightforward levels were otherwise relatively predictable.

Everyone is Here!

And, of course, within those locations are a whole boatload of heroes – far more than you’ll actually play as during its 12-hour campaign. There are more than 30 playable characters to swap between to make up your team of four, and lots more will drift in and out of the story as NPCs who fight alongside you or point you toward the next encounter. While I would have liked to be able to control some of those support characters like Beast, the sheer volume of heroes (and villains) on display here made Ultimate Alliance 3 feel appropriately epic.

Besides, it’s not like there aren’t enough playable characters to choose from. All of the big names like Iron Man and Captain America are here, but it was also exciting to see both some of the smaller characters like Ms. Marvel as well as longtime X-Men favorites like Nightcrawler join the fray alongside the MCU regulars. Each of them has a set of four playstyle-defining abilities that unlock quickly as they level up, and while there’s a bit of overlap between similar characters like Peter Parker (who is even voiced by the PS4 Spider-Man’s Yuri Lowenthal), Miles Morales, and Spider-Gwen, they each still have little twists that set them apart, like Gwen’s widespread webs or Miles’ shock-based attacks.

Each hero also has a ridiculously over-the-top Extreme move that can fill the screen with damage. One of my favorites of these is Venom’s, in which melts into a puddle of black symbiote ooze before emerging from the center as a giant, fanged mouth like a scene out of Jaws. I love that you can easily chain these Extreme moves together with the press of a button if you had more than one character charged at the right moment, though using all four at once was the only time I occasionally saw Ultimate Alliance 3’s frame rate take a hit (which is understandable given the visual chaos they can cause).

The only time I saw Ultimate Alliance 3’s frame rate take a hit was occasionally when using four Extreme attacks at the same time, which is understandable given the visual chaos they can cause.

“

The only drawback with having so many character choices is that I constantly wanted to change up my team and play around with everyone I could. While there’s nothing stopping you from playing with all these action figures, it’s discouraged slightly by the character-specific experience system. When I changed Captain Marvel out for The Wasp in Avengers Tower, or Spider-Gwen for Psylock to take down some Sentinels, it meant the experience gains were spread in a thin layer across my roster, leaving them underleveled as I went forward.

There is an Alliance Enhancement skill tree that offers global stat buffs to all your heroes, but it didn’t feel like it mitigated this issue much. I eventually had to start focusing more on a select cast (or using newly unlocked characters who start at levels appropriate to the area you are in) which inevitably left some of my favorites like Miles and Venom in the dust in the late game. I found myself occasionally using characters just because they were a high level, not because I particularly liked them – looking at you, Ghost Rider.

You can get around that by grinding your squad through previous chapters or completing the optional Infinity Trials for XP Cubes to give them a boost, but I didn’t really want to since the story is simply more fun. I ended up sticking with the same team for the last few chapters – Wolverine, Dr. Strange, Storm, and the absolutely vicious Black Panther – both because I liked how they worked together and to make sure they were strong enough to avoid grinding entirely.

Bamf, Thwip, Snikt!

Ultimate Alliance 3’s combat is fairly simplistic, with the strategy coming more from timing, team composition, and Energy management than actual combat skill. Apart from their four abilities, every hero has a light attack that you can string together, as well as a heavy attack that lands as a single big hit. There’s also a mid-air attack, a block, and a dodge, but otherwise that’s pretty much it.

There are no fancy button combos to memorize or special attack patterns to use, so you’ll be spamming that light attack a lot in between abilities.

“

There are no fancy button combos to memorize or special attack patterns to use, so you’ll be spamming that light attack a lot in between abilities. That can definitely get stale all on its own, and while the enemies you face will change visually in interesting and exciting ways – you might be fighting Kree soldier in one level and Hand ninjas in another – the differences in their behavior and attacks never really altered the way I went about punching them to a pulp

Larger generic enemies and mid-level bosses like Mysterio, Nebula, or Bullseye make things more interesting with a purple Stagger bar; instead of just whacking them, I had to use heavy attacks and abilities with high Stagger damage to take that bar down. Once it’s empty, you have a brief window to land a Synergy ability – essentially two heroes using complementary abilities at the same time, which is made easier through button clear button prompts – to stun them for a longer period, during which they take considerably more damage. Your abilities all cost Energy, so figuring out the right balance of using it to Stagger and having some left over for a synergy stun was an interesting puzzle that often changed based on the level I was in or the heroes I was using. Fights are still very mashy, and I definitely wish characters had more than their extremely simple two-button basic attacks, but I still found myself consistently engaged in Ultimate Alliance 3’s combat for far longer than I expected.

That said, those puzzles are only truly challenging to solve on the Mighty difficulty setting, with the Friendly mode letting you get away with a bit more of an ability-spamming approach. Apart from big, villainous fights that turn up the heat, Mighty isn’t crazy hard or anything, but it actually forces you to play smart. Bosses like Kingpin or Ultron can easily eat up your three hero revives, even if most groups of basic enemies can still be torn through like tissue paper – which makes a certain amount of sense, because where’s the fun in being Hulk if you struggle to take down a group of ninjas?

Apart from villainous boss fights that turn up the heat, Mighty difficulty isn’t crazy hard or anything, but it does force you to play smart in a fun way.

“

Part of that difficulty is also influenced by how many people you are playing with. Ultimate Alliance 3 can be played solo but it feels like it was really meant to be played in co-op with up to four players, either locally or online (though we weren’t able to test out the online functionality ahead of this review). Combat gets both easier and harder in co-op, depending on the situation: your teammates generally make smarter decisions than the AI but synergy moves and attack timings are often trickier to coordinate than it is with the simple button inputs it takes while playing alone.

You can drop in and out of co-op at will, but be warned that Ultimate Alliance 3’s Stagger system (while a good addition overall) actually makes it a harder game for a visiting friend to blindly pick up and play. The concept is taught well in the first level, but isn’t intuitive or easy to read at a glance if someone joins you after that. I found players who jumped in to join me in the middle of a mission wouldn’t really understand why just smashing buttons wildly wasn’t working so well. It especially didn’t help halfway through the campaign when a big chunk of my roster was underleveled, often meaning the character someone wanted to play was missing abilities or just sort of weak.

It can still be chaotic, snack food-like entertainment regardless, but played with a group that knows what they are doing Ultimate Alliance 3 can become a delightful coordination challenge. There’s lots of calling out targets, working together to Stagger specific enemies while you have a synergy attack waiting in the wings. The only real enemy of this experience is a fairly predictable one: the camera, which frequently felt too restrictive and zoomed in when your co-op party moves in opposite directions, and was frustratingly stubborn in a handful of tight hallways.

While co-op seems to be the intended way to play (as seen particularly in its boss fights that often ask you to multitask), I actually really loved playing alone as well – I might have even liked it more at times. There’s an alternate camera option this way called Heroic that drops the viewing angle down for more of a third-person action feel, and I absolutely preferred it to the default zoomed-out perspective. Ultimate Alliance also has pretty decent AI partners, swapping between heroes on your team is fast and seamless, and using synergy abilities is made super simple, all of which meant controlling four heroes at once kept battles fresh far longer than just sticking with just one character for a long period of time.

We’re In the Endgame Now

Supporting your heroes’ literal journey are a plethora of stats to upgrade and a borderline excessive number of currencies to spend. You can use different pools of points you earn to rank up individual abilities, improve the stats of every member of your alliance via a sprawling skill tree, and equip special ISO-8 crystals for even more stat boosts – which can themselves be upgraded to improve their bonuses. With six different stats that govern attack, defense, health, and Energy there is a ton to dig into here, and min-maxers will have a field day doing just that with great success – but that doesn’t mean any one upgrade is very exciting because of how incremental the vast majority are.

Essentially every form of upgrade or modification in Ultimate Alliance 3 is stat-based, which means that they are almost entirely invisible to you while you are actually fighting. For instance, you could buy a skill that gives your heroes 40 more Strength (even though most heroes’ Strength values are in the thousands), get a team bonus for using two of the Defenders at once for plus 2% Durability, or upgrade a basic ISO-8 crystal to give a hero 5% more Vitality instead of… 4%. Their combined effect will be practically unnoticeable. Hooray!

The ability rank-ups are also unimaginative. Every single ability – whether it’s shooting webs at enemies as Spider-Man, zapping them with lighting as Thor, or dropping giant fidget spinners on their heads as The Wasp – gets a reduced Energy cost at rank 2, increased damage at rank 3, and usually increased stagger damage at rank 4, though sometimes that last one will be a bit more tailored to the ability itself. No matter how detailed or extensive all of these upgrade systems are, these purely number-based buffs are just boring since they don’t change the way any of your heroes play.

No matter how extensive all of these upgrades are, the purely number-based buffs are just boring since they don’t change the way any of your heroes play.

“

Hidden in that sea of marginal stat boosts are some actually interesting upgrades, but they are few and far between. By far the coolest one I unlocked was a skill that healed my heroes for 3% of the damage they dealt during Extreme attacks – a significant amount considering they can do hundreds of thousands of points of damage. That was an actual, tangible improvement I could see in the field, and it did actually change my thinking in fun ways as I started using Extreme attacks to save heroes on the cusp of death instead of just take down big baddies.

But by the end of the roughly 13 hours it took me to complete Ultimate Alliance 3’s story I had unlocked only about a fifth of its gargantuan skill tree. Beating the campaign unlocks an even harder mode, called Superior, to replay on, and beyond that are the high-level Infinity Trials to test your mettle against for bonus unlocks.

The Trials usually have you replay bosses or sections from the campaign with a twist to the rules – sometimes you have reduced damage on anything but abilities or synergy attacks, or maybe there’s a timer running that only refills when you defeat enemies. A fair number of these are a higher level than your heroes will likely be by the end of one run through the campaign, encouraging you to play again or level up further through easier Trials to get their rewards.

No Microtransactions, but DLC Is on the Way

As far as I’ve seen, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 doesn’t have any form of microtransactions at launch. However, it does already have an Expansion Pass on sale for $20. That pass comes with a Deadpool costume that’s available at launch, as well as three upcoming DLC packs that (allegedly) won’t be sold separately. The first will arrive in Fall 2019, the second some later time in 2019, and the third in 2020; according to the official description they will include new “playable characters, modes, and additional story” from the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Marvel Knights. Additional free DLC characters like Cyclops and Colossus are also planned.

The first DLC pack will focus on Marvel Knights and add Blade, Moon Knight, Punisher, and Morbius as playable characters. While we don’t really know any other specifics, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3’s structure is set up in the form of chapters that each revolve around a specific hero group or area, with characters tied to that setting unlocking as you progress. Adding something like a new Fantastic Four-themed chapter where you unlock that team (potentially alongside some more Trials) could be a nice way to refresh what I liked so much about the base campaign. It has promise, but we’ll of course have to see what those DLC packs actually entail before we can determine if they are worth it.

Those rewards are usually Ability Orbs used to rank up moves, XP Cubes to level up characters, or alternate outfits – though the outfits are a massive missed opportunity as they are slow to unlock and have so far been limited to a single, uninspired recolor for each hero’s default costume, like taking the red stripes of of Captain America’s suit. You can even unlock a few extra playable characters here like Elektra, which I imagine is to keep things fresh in the post-game – you won’t unlock new ones anymore just by playing through the campaign again, even on Superior difficulty.

The massive skill tree and extensive amount of number-crunching upgrades available feel like they were designed for all these post-game tasks. There is fun to be had in trying to craft that perfect team build as you take on the hardest content Ultimate Alliance 3 has to offer – I enjoyed doing a bit of that myself for some of the tougher bosses and trickier Trials – it’s just hard to see the results of that work, especially on your first playthrough. Instead, the spice is found in the variety between heroes, not how those heroes change… because they don’t, they just get bigger numbers. And while I’m certainly still interested in diving back into some of those harder challenges, I don’t exactly know how long “harder” alone will keep me hooked.

Source : IGN

[terryblount]

RAGE 2 – Review

What is the secret behind a good sequel? Some of the best examples focus on refining what was poorly implemented in the first instalment, while others just carry on the story and leave the core gameplay largely intact. On the other hand, certain sequels have achieved greatness by making everything bigger or more elaborate, and yet some of my favourites are basically just a graphical upgrade.

While there seems to be no clear or definitive answer, there is actually a common thread between all these different approaches. A good sequel comes from a developer that can objectively ask what their game needs. This may seem like an oversimplification, but all the best sequels in our industry work because they find something new in the familiar. A good sequel has the potential to lift out an I.P.’s residual potential rather than adding, rebooting, beautifying or changing.

That hair style was all the reason I needed.

So this brings us to RAGE 2, a sequel. This collaboration between id Software and Avalance Studios has stayed within the first game’s premise, but the graphics, gunplay and scope of the game have all been overclocked. I can sense an attempt towards continuity from the first game, and yet it feels like RAGE 2 could do without many of the changes that have been added. As an open world game, there is undeniably a solid experience here, but I would have a hard time convincing fans of the original to go out of their way to play this.

Up your asteroid

The first RAGE game was a pretty big deal back in 2010 even if the story hardly brought anything new to the genre. RAGE was released during the ‘Crysis era’ when first-person shooters were at the forefront of graphical experimentation. See, you played Rage to benchmark John Carmack’s fancy new ‘Mega Texture’ tech building the game’s identity from the world around you.

Rage plunged the player into a bleak world filled with mutants and garage bandits fighting for survival in the aftermath of a cataclysmic asteroid strike (rather than a nuclear winter you see often nowadays). RAGE 2 plays out within this same setting, but takes place 30 years later in a civilisation that has risen from the ashes and is no longer trying to get by on scraps of resources.

Meet the leader of The Authority.

Players thus enter a world in which the Arks, or satellites preserving life on earth, have been reactivated and a new world is beginning to emerge. Unfortunately, a formidable faction seen in the first game, named The Authority, has proclaimed themselves the leaders of this new Earth. Rather than earn their leadership, they have used a series of bloody wars to obliterate anyone standing between them and their authoritarian regime.

The only opposition that once proved a match for The Authority are a division of technologically-enhanced mercenaries called rangers. You play as either a male or female version of the last, surviving ranger named Walker (I can neither confirm nor deny if this is some kind of Chuck Norris reference). The campaign is subsequently centred on Walker’s exploits of starting a contingency plan against The Authority named operation Dagger. You do this by shooting, blowing up, eradicating and driving over anything they deem even mildly important.

Choose wisely. The game kills off the character you don’t choose shortly after this.

What’s my age again?

Sounds kind of familiar right? Well, Avalanche Studios are the developers of the Just Cause series, and they have fallen back on their tried and trusted template of toppling a South-American dictator here. Yet, this is also the problem since RAGE 2 plunges into the trap that I see many open-world games fall into. Namely, the rather poorly-told story just ends up fading into the background.

Now many might say “Hold up, the Just Cause games are about blowing stuff up, not a moving, deep story!” True, but remember that the post-apocalyptic and open-world genres are hopelessly oversaturated markets right now. Seeing as RAGE’s story was somewhat underdeveloped, this would have been the perfect opportunity for RAGE 2 to make me care about its plot and characters some more.

These arks are scattered all over the Wasteland. They unlock powers for Walker’s ranger armour.

Instead, you have to grind your way to a farcical and irrelevant main villain via a series of noticeably repetitive tasks. Let me be clear that these tasks are fun, but the fun only lasts for small doses at a time. Playing RAGE 2 gets monotonous too quick for comfort because every play through eventually began to feel like I was working my way down a checklist. Killed all those mutants? Check. Destroyed this big sentry turret? Check. Cleared the outpost of bandits? Check… why am I doing all this again?

This is a problem I see all the time in the abundance of open world types filling up my backlog. A character would yak-yak-yak away telling me so-and-so has their such-and-such and the solution is to go to point x and kill every last y. I don’t care about such-and-such because I don’t know them, and don’t bother yacking my ear off because I know how the mission is going to go anyway. This feels too similar to what I have been doing for the last 2 hours, and it is a design philosophy in open world games that needs to evolve.

Smash that asteroid

So you will probably forget the story, but does the gameplay redeem RAGE 2? Well, sort of. RAGE 2’s gameplay ends up feeling like a weird hybrid of genres. It is like 2016’s DOOM hardware, but running on Far Cry’s software. This means that Bethesda has recycled the explosive, momentum-based mechanics they had virtually perfected in 2016, and revived it in a lush, open world this time.

That is the actual shock wave from my shotgun.

What do you actually do in RAGE 2? You shoot the crap out of things, so that you can collect things, so that you can upgrade things, which is interspersed with the occasional race through the wasteland. It is really that simple because the aim of the game is not to find missions. The player’s task is using an arsenal of weapons and traversal abilities in order to turn themselves into a killing juggernaut.

RAGE 2 absolutely nails this part because the combat truly goes out of its way to make the player feel dangerous. It is every bit as gloriously violent as DOOM, except demons have been replaced with split-lipped mutants and punks who look like they are attending a Rammstein concert. There are also show-downs with big bosses who were deadly head-on, but fell quickly once I used Walker’s smooth acrobatics to stay just one step ahead of their sights.

Thank heavens for the dash ability.

The first RAGE had some of the best enemy AI I have ever seen in a video game, and this has been faithfully preserved in its sequel. Enemies dodge and leap out of your gunfire while their companions would sneakily flank you from behind, forcing you to switch to close-range artillery. Virtually all the missions dealing with baddies involved either clearing an outpost/bridge/building claimed by bandits, or, in the case of the mutants, it was a closed-off, darker lairs where Walker could mow them down in droves.

As a side note, I played as the female version because reasons, but this frequently became annoying due to the actress’s voice acting. I would recommend the male Walker because nearly every time she received an injury, she made a moaning sound which I can only describe as somewhere between an orgasm, and giving birth.

In any case, killing enemies gives you various kinds of loot used for the aforementioned upgrading, but once the environment is covered in blood, the player can also explore for additional goodies hidden in cooler boxes and crates. You will know it is loot because they are painted shocking pink. Who the hell was making all this pink paint before the apocalypse!? Far Cry: New Dawn this is your fault.

This brings me to the second issue I took with RAGE 2 because the developers have just gone way over the top with locked content. Worse still, the upgrades have all been arranged in a rather convoluted system of menus and sub-menus that made me exhausted by just looking at them. It is all really just too much since I rarely noticed the upgrades once I unlocked them, and let’s not forget that the first game had a much more subtle emphasis on this aspect of gameplay.

Look at all these upgrades… you don’t need.

Road Rage

Since Half-life 2 introduced drivable vehicles into shooter games, cars were basically just an interesting way of getting over long distance. Again, RAGE was sensitive to this. You could do races which I actually enjoyed as a minor distraction, but the major purpose of the armour-clad dune buggies was to get you through dangerous terrain.

The vehicles serve a much more central role in RAGE 2 as there is a lot more driving and races. I actually had to look both ways before crossing the roads since I was run over more than once, and had to restart from the last checkpoint (lol). However, I still felt most cars to be a little sluggish and unpredictable in their handling.

Some of my vehicular antics.

When cruising through the wasteland to my next objective and taking on convoys with mounted guns, this is less noticeable, thankfully. During the races, it is rage-quit inducing. I found almost no enjoyment in the racing at all since the cars refuse to turn, the handbrake is far too enthusiastic, I occasionally won only for a bug to tell me I placed second, and hitting certain plants made my buggy fly out of the track once. RAGE was much better on this point.

Boy you shur got a purdy mouth

Despite bandits having an unhealthy obsession with the colour pink, RAGE 2 is graphically quite varied. As mentioned, the arks have been terraforming the Earth again which means that forests and wetlands have begun to emerge in certain parts of the wasteland. This makes for a nice distinction between the missions when the same vegetation and rocks begin to test your patience.

Bandits love blocking the roads and attacking anyone caught in the blockade.

This game is also more expansive and more vertical than the claustrophobic canyons or corridors of the first one. There was the occasional, jarring pop-in while driving across the landscape at high speed, but the mountains did a reasonable job of hiding such things in the distance. The slow but steady day-night cycle produced some gorgeous sunsets, and I never felt that the wide variety of textures in the landscapes ever repeated themselves. Avalanche is really good at this stuff.

During combat, the game is more than capable of handling large variety of explosions and particle effects when the action intensifies. This is particularly noticeable when you use the nanotech abilities within the ranger armour. These are movement-based attacks which allow for devastating damage on the punks and muties, and they feel glorious within the physics system built into RAGE 2’s engine. I suppose I do not have to explain what everyone’s favourite, Shatter, does…

Even the sunsets are pink! Pretty though…

Dammit Bethesda

I get that everyone’s favourite target of internet hate is the Epic Store at the moment, but Oh My Gosh the Bethesda client is utter trash. It happened to be the platform on which my review copy arrived, and I instantly remembered why I have been avoiding their stupid software until now. I felt as if I fought with it to play this game.

I urge everyone to purchase RAGE 2 on Steam instead. Virtually every button on the client basically opens up a web page, you have to log in with your password every time, I could not find any option to save screen shots, installation of the game randomly restarted, there are only a handful of games, and my download speed was embarrassingly slow. My experience may represent no reflection on yours, but it is high time we start putting some pressure on Bethesda to get with the program.

That is the question

This conclusion puts me in a difficult situation. If you enjoyed the first game and you are looking to have a repeat performance of that experience, I am afraid that RAGE 2 will leave you disappointed. I actually played RAGE in preparation for this review and I have realised they are almost nothing alike. They share ideas but not experiences, which make me wonder if the title was trying to bait fans by using nostalgia. This feels more like some sort of a standalone expansion to DOOM.

The environments in RAGE 2 feel incredibly alive. Bandits are constantly racing past you and having little skirmishes on the roads.

However, if this is what you are looking for, or your appetite for open world games is somehow not yet slaked, you are going to love this game. The action is refined and intense, the world is big and begging to be explored, and there are tonnes of unlockables to refine your playing style. Matter of fact, you would have to be a cantankerous old fart who’s daily highlight is chasing children off your lawn not to find anything you like here.

Let me therefore emphasise, again, that the problem is how long this fun will last for. After playing for about 5 hours, my map was chockfull of question marks, arks to explore, bandit camps, and so on. One part of me was saying “seriously, do I have to do all that? I just cleared out a hundred hideouts!” The other part was hopping up onto a garage roof, charging up Shatter, and turning some blue-headed sucker into a cranberry smoothie. I like that part of me.

Decent graphics

Combat (DAMN!)

Story

Selection of guns

Interesting environments

Racing

Overemphasis on unlocking

Lackluster story telling

Too far from first game

Boring NPC’s

          Play time: About 20 hours total. Combination of both missions relating to main story line with a substantial amount of side questing.

Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using Nvidia GTX 1070, i5 4690K CPU, 16GB RAM

RAGE 2 – Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[bern33chaser]

15 Groovy, Awesome, Swell and Cool Words

What’s your favorite word of compliment or admiration? How do you express approval? These are important questions for each generation of young people, who want their vocabulary to distinguish them from previous generations. It’s not fool-proof: a slang expression of approval is often fashionable in one place or time but not another, and may even coming back into fashion later. A word that is fashionable in one school might be considered outdated in another.

Perhaps the longest reigning compliment is “Cool!” – after an unusual run of popularity among several generations of young people, it remains fashionable in 2019. But in the last century, dozens of similar words have come in and out of fashion.

ace – Meant “top quality,” as in the highest playing card in a standard deck. A “flying ace” in World War I meant a pilot who had shot down five or more planes in combat. A student who gets an A on a test can say, “I aced it!” But once upon a time, it was used as a positive exclamation: “Ace!” meant “Great!”

awesome – typical of GenX youth (those born roughly between 1961 and 1981), but also used by American preteens in 2019. Example: “This popcorn is awesome!” One of several contemporary uses of a stronger word in a weaker sense, awesome originally means “producing terror,” then “full of awe” or “awe-inspiring.” Example: “The volcano erupted in an awesome shower of fire.” More recently, it has been used for anything that’s moderately interesting (such as rocks, socks and clocks in the Lego Movie song “Everything is Awesome.”) Perhaps this usage expresses a hope for a life that’s more than moderately interesting, or else, youthful enthusiasm.

bad – An example of contrarianism in youth slang (bad means good), but still with the original connotation of “rough” or “evil.” That is, a girl would not say, “Oooh, that’s a bad bouquet of flowers! Thank you! I’ll put them in a vase right now.”

bully – One of the favorite adjectives of U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, meaning “grand” or “excellent.” Used in this sense in Great Britain by 1680 and revived in popularity America around 1844 (“Bully for you!”). Its meaning changed from the Middle Dutch boele, meaning “lover” or “boyfriend,” later probably used similarly to “Ooh, your boele is really bad! I like him!” to the current sense of someone who is cruel to those weaker than himself. But when Roosevelt was President (1901 to 1909), it was probably as popular as cool is today, and meant approximately the same thing.

cool – This word has also kept its Old English meaning of “low temperature.” Someone with a cool head is not hot-headed or easily angered – he has control of his passions. But a dispassionate person might also lack compassion for others, an implication of cool in the 1957 musical West Side Story. In the 1940s, tenor saxophonist Lester Young popularized the word as an expression of calm approval and satisfaction. If you ask teens in the Teens if they need anything, maybe something to eat or drink, they may respond, “No, I’m cool” or “No, I’m good.” It has been spelled “kewl,” but that’s now dated or ironic.

crack – Used in the phrase “crack shot,” an accurate marksman, but it means good or skilled in general. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary definition involved “quickness or smartness.”

epic – Frequently used by young gamers but common among many young male Americans, meaning “very cool and exciting,” Originally used for important events or great objects worthy of long works of heroic poetry such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Beowulf, and Paradise Lost. Political campaigners like to refer to the “epic accomplishments” of their candidate, if any, the last time her or she was in office, if ever.

groovy – Popular in the 1960s among surfers and hippies. It even became the title of a Los Angeles television show in 1967, live from the beach in Santa Monica. But it originated in the Jazz Era of the 1920s, from the phrase “in the groove,” referring to the groove on vinyl records. If you were in the groove, you were part of the latest music scene.

gucci – From the high-quality clothing line, used by YouTuber Matt Smith to mean “high quality” or “good.” When a former enemy becomes your friend, you can say about your relationship, “It’s all gucci.” In a 1999 magazine interview in Harper’s Bazaar, singer Lenny Kravitz calls his bedroom “very Gucci.”

hep – According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word “hep” was first used in 1862 to mark the cadence of a march, like this: “HEP 2 – 3 – 4… HEP 2 – 3 – 4…” The words “Left… left… left-right-left” served the same purpose and also made it clear which foot you should put forward when. By 1900, it had already begun to mean “trendy.” decades before it was adopted by beatniks and hippies.

hip – Originally spelled “hep,” this word referred to the most current-conscious residents of the 1960s. Someone who was hip knew all the latest jargon, wore the latest fashions, and understood the latest ideas. To say “I’m hip with that” meant “I know what you’re talking about and I agree.” So a hippie at the time was someone who was very hip. Of course, being trendy is a moving target – the word was first used in this sense in 1904, and trends have changed substantially since then.

mod – Beginning about 1958, the mod youth culture was typified by young sharp-dressing, scooter-riding working class Londoners, but spread around the world. So in the early 1960s, if something was mod, it was trendy. Long after mod stopped being a common compliment, an American TV series called The Mod Squad debuted in 1968 and ran until 1973. Its young undercover detective stars were more hip than mod, using solid and groovy as their compliments. The word was revived effectively later – according to a middle-aged GenXer, “That word was so 80s.”

sick – Another example of contrarianism in youth slang. Being ill is disagreeable, but something that is sick is attractive. In other words, calling a skateboard sick is an expression of admiration. On Mark McCrindle’s list of the most annoying youth phrases in Australia, “fully sick” is number 2.

swell – By 1786, a swell was a dandy, a fashionable person with a swollen sense of self-importance. But it became an exclamation of admiration. In the musical The Music Man, set in 1912, Professor Harold Hill warns parents against sinister influences on their sons: “Are certain words… creeping into his conversation? Words like… like swell!” But it was too late: by 1930, expressions such as “That’s just swell!” had become common in the United States.

wild – The theme song of The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966) says about the two main characters (both played by Patty Duke) “What a wild duet!” Perhaps a 1960s reaction to the staid 1950s, where wild behavior was not acceptable.

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Original post: 15 Groovy, Awesome, Swell and Cool Words from Daily Writing Tips https://www.dailywritingtips.com/groovy-cool-words/

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E3 is a wondrous time of year when publishers and developers go all out to win your attention and get the world excited for their upcoming lineup of games and products. With so much news, trailers, and announcements, it's tough to narrow down our picks of Best of E3 Awards to only 20. These are these are the most exciting games coming out of the show according to GameSpot's editors, and the ones we can't wait to play more of.

Every game and product in this gallery shares in the glory of our Best of E3 award, but there is one big rule for inclusion: it must be playable at the show. This means that anything that was simply teased or was only shown as a trailer isn't eligible.

Our awards represent our absolute favorite things at E3 2018, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of other exciting new stuff. If you want to catch up on things you might've missed, you can read our press conference wrap-ups for Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Square Enix, and EA; as well as our list of all the new games announced at E3.

But what were your favorite moments from this year's E3? And what games are you most looking forward to? Discuss it in the comments below!

Anthem

BioWare's first new IP in 10 years is coming early next year, and it's a big departure from what BioWare is known for. It's an always-online, action-adventure shooter that has no romance options and limited branching dialogue choices. It may be different, but it stands tall on its own merits based on what we've seen and played at E3. One of its most unique and compelling elements is its flight mechanics. You basically become Iron Man and fly around with an exosuit powered by jets in your feet. Doing so gives the world an impressive sense of scale. When you zoom through the air from one objective to the next, you can't help but wonder what lies below that you'll want to go back and explore on foot. It absolutely bears a resemblance to Destiny in terms of look and feel, but I don't see that as a bad thing. (And not to mention, producer Mark Darrah told GameSpot that Anthem started development before Destiny came out). BioWare's Mass Effect: Andromeda might have been a miss with critics, but I am hoping for the best from Anthem and the early signs show Anthem is on the right path. -- Eddie Makuch, Editor

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is evolving the long-running franchise into a fully realized RPG by adding branching dialogue, choices within quests, and consequences that show up throughout the story. By going to Ancient Greece, Ubisoft continues the trend of using history as a backdrop to tell its stories; Spartans and Athenians are at war during 431 BC in the midst of the Peloponnesian War. However, players have a bit more say in how that plays out. You can have philosophical conversations with Socrates and challenge his school of thought, but also take side quests from him. And how that particular quest concludes will have ramifications for the mainline course of leading a rebellion. And that’s just a small piece of a much larger game.

Ancient Greece is expansive, which makes for one of the largest Assassin’s Creed settings. That also means a ton of seafaring adventures. Ship combat comes back in big way, similar to Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag and you’ll be able to recruit people and build a crew as you destroy enemy ships with fire arrow barrages, waves of javelins, or full-speed naval rams.

Hand-to-hand combat bears a lot of similarities to Assassin’s Creed Origins, but Odyssey layers on a few more elements. Players will have a number of skills at their disposal like a shield rip, healing ability, and a multi-arrow shot. But nothing comes close to the iconic Spartan kick. Giving enemies the boot will comically send them flying backward; it’s ideal for launching them off ships or off the side of a cliff.

While we had Jacob and Evie in Syndicate as a dynamic duo, Odyssey will have you choose either a male or female version of the same main character; Alexios or Kassandra. It’s just one of the elements in a number of changes for the franchise, and Odyssey is better for it. -- Michael Higham, Associate Editor

Battlefield V

Battlefield V does a great job of making me feel like I matter again in the midst of large scale battles. I have a long history with the Battlefield franchise and one of my biggest issues has always been feeling like cannon fodder; gains made often evaporated through the sheer number of enemy players. Battlefield V aims to tackle this challenge through automated squads and rewarding players who stick together. With a squad, I matter. I can revive teammates, build fortifications, gain good spawn position, and avoid running out of far more scarce ammo. Staying with a squad means making progress, and that's a feeling I've rarely gotten from my times spent playing with groups in the series' most recent entries.

Other new systems are at play to keep matches exciting. The Grand Operations map Port Of Narvik has an active parachute drop where I could decide when to jump out of an aircraft that could be shot down by the enemy team. On the ground, new animations and contextual callouts gave my teammates more personality and charm. These additions really shine when given room to breathe on large maps.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Battlefield V shows off next. The focus on rewarding players for sticking with squads has the potential to bring meaning and a sense of contribution to players who otherwise might get lost in large scale warfare. If developer DICE keep this up, Battlefield V might just be the best Battlefield game to come out in years. -- Aaron Sampson, Video Producer

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

Treyarch is back in business this year with Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and I am very excited about it. One of the most exciting new additions to the mix seems to be Blackout, which is battle royale with a Call-of-Duty spin. We haven't seen it in action yet, and it remains to be seen how Call of Duty's fast-pace translates to the more strategic battle royale genre, but it is an exciting proposition all the same to see it happen. Another thing I am excited about is the new Zombies mode. After all, Treyarch created the fan-favourite mode, and every effort they have put forth so far has been better than the last--and this year appears to be no different. Then there is traditional multiplayer, which returns to the fast-paced, exosuit-enabled frenetic action that was missing in Call of Duty: WWII. And Nuketown is coming back, which is always exciting. There is no traditional campaign this year, and that will understandably upset some fans, but Treyarch is promising some story content from the game's solo missions that focus on each Specialist character. -- Eddie Makuch, Editor

Control

Control is a game that's very difficult to describe in detail, but that's part of the reason why it's so impressive. Not unlike a twisted film from David Lynch, Control freely defies logic and consistency in favor of dreamlike and occasionally nightmarish sequences that toy with your understanding of the world and the characters suffering within it. You won't understand it at first, and that's precisely the point.

Jesse, the lead character who is both possessed by and in control of supernatural powers, seems to take it all in stride. She's trapped in a massive compound that changes shape and identity from one room to the next, all the while under threat from corrupted humans at various stages of transformation. Jesse's telekinetic powers allow her to manipulate objects in her surroundings, using desks to attack enemies, or clusters of smaller objects to form a protective shield. She's also got a shape-shifting gun that we only got a taste of, but Remedy promised it's central to character customization as Jesse's mission progresses.

Whether it's the otherworldly manifestations or Jesse's impressive moves in combat, Control looks simply incredible in motion. Remedy has proved that it can craft shockingly mysterious worlds in Alan Wake, and Quantum Break was a showcase for the dev team's ability to mix super powers and shooting mechanics. Remedy is combining its strengths for Control, and the result so far looks like it may shape up to be their most impressive game yet. -- Peter Brown, Senior Reviews Editor

Cyberpunk 2077

The gameplay demo for Cyberpunk 2077 is completely overwhelming. There's a moment when you leave main character V's apartment and enter a lift. It has a clear glass door, and as you descend the stacks of small flats become a freeway filled with speeding cars, and then down to the seedy underbelly of the city. It happens completely seamlessly, without a loading screen, and drives home perhaps to most impactful thing about CD Projekt Red's new game: you are insignificant--at least to start with.

The world of Cyberpunk doesn't feel like a video game city where a story will happen to you, it's feels like a place that has always existed, and your story is just one of thousands happening at the same time. You're not the sole focus, the special one. The game isn't explaining its systems to you, telling you who everyone is and what everything means, it just is. The onus is on you to look at it, learn about it, and understand it. And that is what V aims to do as he or she takes on jobs to pay off debts and work her way into the upper echelons of society. There's plenty to say about Cyberpunk 2077's gameplay too--the fluid combat that allows you to dash around to gain the positional advantage, the exotic weapons that you can use to ricochet bullets or file through walls. The ability to hack people from a distance and turn off their guns, or be hacked so that all your secrets are laid bare and conversations become a lie detector test--but, honestly, I just can't get over the world and the storytelling opportunities it has in store for us. -- Tamoor Hussain, Editor

Dying Light 2

The original Dying Light made some clever choices in how it presented an open-world survival game. Focusing on undercover agent Kyle Crane's exploits in a ruined tropical city where the infected have taken over, the story took many turns--showing that there were worse dangers in the town aside from the hordes of zombies. In the years since it's release, the developers at Techland gradually fleshed out the scale of the game, adding in new multiplayer modes, DLC episodes, and updates that made Dying Light into something more. And after years of quiet development, the developers have finally unveiled the true sequel that looks to expand on the core systems, while telling a far more involved and dynamic story.

I had the chance to see a behind closed doors demo of the game, and the new approach to the game's storytelling looks to be a real standout. Taking place in the "modern dark age," a setting where technology is minimal, most areas are lawless, and firearms are in short supply--the new setting offers a greater focus on making important decisions, while staying one step ahead of bandits and the undead. With Chris Avellone, writer of Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 2 working on the main story, there's many key moments where your choices will make some drastic changes to one of the last cities in Europe. With a greater level of freedom for traversing the open-world, along with depth in the game's core combat system, Dying Light 2 is poised to be a stellar follow-up to one of 2015's most exciting games. -- Alessandro Fillari, Editor

The Elder Scrolls Blades

The Elder Scrolls: Blades has distilled the essence of the franchise and has allowed it to live in your pocket. While it might not boast the huge world of Skyrim, Morrowind, or Oblivion, the dungeons are satisfying to explore, its inhabitants thrilling to slaughter, and loot rewarding to plunder. While combat is quite basic, it’ll still take some practice to master. Striking enemies is done by pressing your thumb against the screen; the more accurate the thumb press the better chance you have for a critical hit. Once you spend enough time with the game, you’ll get the timing down for combos and to deal more damage. There are also abilities like a shield bash and block and magic spells like an ice blizzards and a lightning bolt, which were available during the demo. But as with any Elder Scrolls game, plenty of other abilities and weapons will be at your disposal.

We saw an underground dungeon and a more open forest area during our playthrough, and these environments are surprisingly well rendered for a small screen. While we didn’t get any time with the town-building aspect that was mentioned during the game’s initial reveal, we’re hopeful that it’ll allow us to build the Tamriel town we envision. We’d expect The Elder Scrolls: Blades to expend every percentage of battery life left on our phones. -- David Jewitt, Video Producer

Forza Horizon 4

Launched in 2012, the Forza Horizon sub-series has become immensely popular for its more arcade-style approach to racing games. The latest entry, Forza Horizon 4, launches in October and represents the "biggest paradigm shift" for the franchise to date, Playground Games says. Set in Britain, the online-focused game adds a big new feature in the form of seasons. This is a big deal because as each season unfolds, the game changes with different road conditions and tailored new content. It's a cool idea, and one I'm excited to see play out when the game launches. Also new for the sequel is the ability to re-wind time and pause in online matches, while the Xbox One X edition will have a 60 FPS option for players looking for the slickest experience. There are more than 450 cars in the game, so you can be pretty sure that it will have something you're interested in. There are also really, really gorgeous skymaps thanks to Playground spending a year capturing the night sky throughout all four seasons. When you look up at the sky in the game you'll want to just stop and stare. You can pick up Forza Horizon 4 this October for Xbox One and PC (and there is cross-play!). -- Eddie Makuch, Editor

Ghost of Tsushima

The characters in Ghost of Tsushima fight with a deadly stillness, only moving when they need to attack or parry. There’s never a wasted motion. Their silent duels are displayed against a gorgeous backdrop of falling leaves to create a beautifully juxtaposed silent foreground and emotive background. Ghost of Tsushima perfectly captures the same aesthetic of the old Japanese samurai films of the past.

I love Ghost of Tsushima’s commitment to historical accuracy. Although the story is fictional, the Mongolian invasion of the island of Tsushima actually happened. The samurai were really wiped out, and the Japanese natives were at the mercy of an unbeatable threat. You can tell that Sucker Punch did their homework.

Although I could just stare at Ghost of Tsushima’s gorgeous backdrops for hours, the game truly excels in its combat. The protagonist, Jin, is the last of the samurai. Faced against impossible odds, he needs to adopt a non-traditional strategy of subterfuge and assassination. The Mongolians refer to him as “a ghost,” and this directly translates into the combat.

Jin is deadly with the katana and disposes of threats quickly and efficiently. He’s a one man army who can silently stalk his target as easily as he can engage in a three on one duel. I love watching Jin stoically stand among a group of men who want him dead, before the quick flick and flash of his blade signals the loss of an enemy’s limb. Those fights are some of the most intense moments of combat I’ve ever seen. -- Jordan Ramee, Associate Editor

Kingdom Hearts III

For many fans, the Kingdom Hearts series is about being transported into iconic fantasy fairytale worlds and adventuring with beloved characters that feel more like old friends. My experience of playing Kingdom Hearts III after a 13 year wait is perhaps the most perfect encapsulation of that. In the time since the last mainline entry in the series I've grown older and more cynical, but the moment I heard the first few delicate notes of Dearly Beloved at the title screen, I became a teenager again. I suddenly remembered just how much I loved the series, and cared about the characters. Sure, older me knows that the story is mostly nonsense, but the joy I got from running around with Buzz, Woody, and the rest of the Toy Story gang completely pushed that aside. Kingdom Hearts 3 played almost the same as previous entries in the series, the camera is slightly wonky and the dialogue is awkward at times, but I just can't bring myself to get caught up on that, especially when wielding a Keyblade again is able to unlock the child at heart. -- Tamoor Hussain, Editor

The Last of Us Part II

Based on what we know so far, The Last of Us Part II seems especially brutal. But now that we've finally seen gameplay, we have a better understanding of the context of that violence, and that's one of the most intriguing aspects of Naughty Dog's highly anticipated sequel.

A lot of the combat in the section shown during Sony's press conference looks almost scripted--Ellie cinematically dodges melee strikes and gunfire, and she pulls an arrow out of her shoulder after a particularly harrowing run past some archers. But according to the game's co-directors, Anthony Newman and Kurt Margenau, those moments are entirely in your control. Dodging is an active part of combat with a variety of animations depending on the type of threat, and dealing with arrows is a separate mechanic from healing with its own considerations and status effects.

All of this adds depth to combat that says a lot about who Ellie has become. Her transformation after the events of the first game is heavily hinted at in her movements; her strikes seem to have an immense amount of anger behind them, and her defenses reveal a person who is not only desperate to survive but hardened by having to fight. It remains to be seen exactly how combat works and how Ellie has evolved as a character, but this is a great start. -- Kallie Plagge, Associate Editor

Resident Evil 2 Remake

Resident Evil 2's upcoming remake rides a fine line between new and old. While it triggers nostalgic memories with its familiar characters and locales, it instantly makes you uneasy with its new rendition of events and mechanics from the classic survival-horror game.

All throughout my plodding trek across the RPD, I rarely felt a sense of safety. An area would be recreated exactly as I remembered it, but then the game would completely mess with my expectations. The empowering over-the-shoulder shooting featured in latter games has changed to make shots harder to line up. A deeper focus on exploration with more freedom overall to explore and discover secrets offered a welcome change of pace, but at the same time, the absence of the series' iconic door loading screens created a more seamless, yet hostile environment than the original.

I walked away pleasantly surprised from my time with Resident Evil 2 remake. As a massive fan of the original, I had reservations. But after playing it, I can't wait to jump back in. There's something so special about the way it takes advantage of your knowledge of Resident Evil 2, pleasing you with its faithful renditions of well-known locations, while at the same time terrifying you with everything it does differently. This persisted all throughout my experience with the game, and I can't wait to see all the changes it makes once it finally releases early next year. -- Matt Espineli, Associate Editor

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the latest game from Dark Souls and Bloodborne developer From Software. As you might imagine, given the studio's track record, it's a tough action-RPG. The developer insists Sekiro is not part of the Soulsborne series, but it still appears to be in the same vein.

This time round, the studio is exploring 16th century Japan, and you play as a one-armed ninja. Well, sort-of one-armed; your left arm is cut off by the game's main enemy, and you replace it with a customizable prosthetic. This can be equipped with add-ons such as a ranged Shuriken, or a Firecracker than can blind enemies and scare those who are frightened of fire, and a Loaded Axe to deal heavy damage. Of course, you also carry a sword: Miyazaki, the game's director, says he wanted the theme of Sekiro to be "a clashing of swords," and this is reflected in the game's combat. Your sword, which you hold in your able hand, is used to both injure your enemies and reduce their posture. Reduce their posture enough, and you can deal a deadly finishing move.

Of course, they can do the same to you, but should you fall, Shadows Die Twice has a handy solution: bring yourself back to life. You can resurrect in Sekiro, and this can be used to your advantage by letting enemies walk away before you come back to life and strike them down from behind.

Sekiro is to be published by Activision, and it's coming to PS4, Xbox One, and PC in early 2019. For more on the upcoming action title, check out our Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice gameplay impressions. -- Oscar Dayus, Staffwriter

Spider-Man

Spider-Man may well be one of the world’s most beloved superheroes, but video games haven’t done right by the wallcrawler in some time. After a smashing success with Spider-Man 2, paired with one of the best superhero films of its era, the character languished with a steady stream of high-concept but middling adaptations. With Insomniac’s Spider-Man, the character has come back swinging. While Insomniac’s take on the venerable character is unmistakably familiar, it’s the little touches that make this latest iteration really stand out.

This Spidey is a master of improvisation, thanks to a mixture of Arkham-like combat mechanics and environmental hazards that are easy to grab at a moment’s notice. The feeling of speed and momentum as he swings around New York City is unmatched by any previous Spider-Man game, taking him to new and dizzying heights. And visually, the character designs stand out as unique takes on classic characters, from Spider-Man’s own duds embossed with a white emblem to the believably DIY take on Shocker that remains respectful of the source material.

All of this combines to make the character feel fresh again. It’s been a long time since I’ve whiled away the hours simply patrolling the city, swinging and looking for citizens to save, and just generally being your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Now I can’t wait to step into his boots. -- Steve Watts, Newswriter

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

By this point, you generally know what to expect from a new Super Smash Bros. game. Each installment in the series has built upon its predecessors incrementally, introducing a few new characters and stages, refining the underlying mechanics, and ramping up the fan service. And while all of this applies to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for Switch as well, the game still manages to surprise and delight like few other fighters thanks to its sheer breadth of content and snappy combat.

True to its name, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is far and away the most feature-rich entry in the series to date, boasting a staggering number of stages, characters, and items. The roster in particular is massive; not only does it feature every character to have ever appeared in the series, but many of them have received dramatic overhauls, so even recurring fighters such as Ganondorf are as exciting to use as newcomers like Ridley.

But what makes Ultimate such an engrossing fighter and one of the best games we got to play at E3 2018 is that it fully embraces competitive play. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U/3DS made strides in this regard, but Ultimate doubles down by increasing the pace of its gameplay. The controls remain as accessible as ever, only now combat feels much speedier, resulting in even more exciting and intense battles. The game also places a stronger emphasis on skillful play by introducing directional air dodges and other advanced techniques. Like the best fighting games, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is easy to pick up but endlessly satisfying to master, making it one of my most anticipated releases of the year. -- Kevin Knezevic, Associate News Editor

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

The recent Tomb Raider games have focused heavily on fleshing Lara Croft's backstory, while making her overcome brutal and overwhelming challenges. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which aims to be the darkest game of the series, the adventurer will have to put a stop to the Mayan apocalypse in Central America. But while fighting off the forces of Trinity and other ancient threats lurking in the hidden tombs over the course of her journey, she'll begin to question whether her influence in the region is making matters worse.

I had the chance to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the game's reveal last April, and while it feels very similar to the past titles, the darker tone and story gives it a far more interesting flavor. Much like Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow focuses on giving players more freedom in how they'll the explore the environment, which will have the largest setting the series has seen yet. To go along with the darker tone, Croft will utilize a number of new skills and stealth moves to take out the heavily mobiled PMC forces that have invaded the land. It'll be interesting to see how far Lara Croft is pushed to her limits in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. And if our small hands-on time was any indication, the conclusion to the Tomb Raider origin trilogy will definitely leave a lasting impression on the character. -- Alessandro Fillari, Editor

Skull & Bones

The backbone of Skull & Bones has taken all the best bits of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and added a level of breadth to create a fully-fledged pirate experience. Like the water ships sail upon, it both has shallow parts and a deep end. To beginners or wannabe sailors, there’s enjoyment in taking the helm of a number of ships that have their own unique characteristics like speed, strength weapons, and abilities. For the hardened admirals amongst us, there are gameplay elements that would even test the heartiest of sailors. For example, learning to cut the wind so your ship can make the most out of speed and maneuverability as well as learning how to effectively disguise your ship to hide from AI and sneak up on ships in the horizon.

If you’re looking for an authentic pirate experience, Skull & Bones is as close as you can get. Crews will shout and yell in response to commands, and during quieter moments they’ll sing the sea shanties you love from the Black Flag, but they’ve been dialed up to 11. And all of this happens on beautifully rendered oceans dotted with islands and detailed historical vessels for you to cannon, board, plunder, and sink. -- David Jewitt, Video Producer

Tom Clancy's The Division 2

As with the original Destiny, the first Division improved greatly over time. Creating a shared world shooter with long-term progression that's meant to interest players indefinitely is no easy task. The Division 2 looks to be continuing that by introducing eight-player raids and DLC expansions that are free for all players (at least for the first year of the game).

In going hands-on with the game, it immediately struck me that its shooting mechanics have been enhanced significantly. While there remains a dissonance with the way human enemies can absorb numerous bullets, there's now a level of precision and tightness to the controls that was lacking in the original Division. Seamlessly moving between cover points feels better than ever, and the endgame specializations' special abilities--such as a crossbow that fires explosive bolts--are fun to use, even if they aren't as impactful as Destiny's Supers.

The improvements to the moment-to-moment action are welcome, but what's most encouraging is what Ubisoft is saying about The Division 2's endgame. Things like the aforementioned raids could present the sort of high-end, challenging activity that keeps players occupied after finish the main story. The company seems generally aware of the need to deeply invest in what players are expected to spend their time doing in the endgame, and that's encouraging. If it's able to pull that off and offer an interesting evolution of its PvP Dark Zone--something it isn't talking about yet for Division 2--Ubisoft might just manage to realize the vision it has for the franchise. -- Chris Pereira, News Editor

Xbox Adaptive Controller

The Xbox Adaptive Controller is an important piece of hardware. Not only does it allow people of all kinds of disabilities to play games, it also shows that Microsoft is willing to invest in catering to that audience.

The controller acts as an interface between Xbox One and any number of third-party controllers. This means those with disabilities can use whichever device best suits their needs--be it a joystick, chewing device, motion controlled switch, or anything else. As long as it can communicate through USB or 3.5mm jack, the Adaptive Controller can see it. What's more, Microsoft says this will be forward-compatible with all future Xboxes, and it's even open to making it work with PS4 and Nintendo Switch.

The Xbox Adaptive Controller launches in September for $100 / £75 / AU $130.

-- Oscar Dayus, Staffwriter

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Destiny 2: A Second Opinion

When the first Destiny came out, most gamers and journalists gave it a free pass, myself included. After all, it was an innovative game. A MMO meets first-person-shooter in a Bungie world! The game was interesting, introducing us to Strikes, Raids and the Crucible, where I spent most of my time. I eventually got bored, but this was after over seventy hours. The game had its faults, but it kept me playing and the game got better with DLC. The Taken King was particularly good and a step in the right direction. Three years later Destiny 2 was released, but it offered nothing new, different, or innovative compared to the first game, and the free pass is no longer in effect.

Destiny 2: Now With More Cutscenes!

One of my biggest gripes about the first Destiny was the story, or lack thereof. One Shacker, Wikus Van De Merwe, summed it up rather nicely "The game didn’t have time to explain, why it didn’t have time to explain…" Destiny 2 improved on storytelling, but honestly the bar was set so low it wasn't hard. The story in Destiny 2 is shallow, cliché, and boring. In a universe that’s very interesting (I read the Grimoire cards), Bungie seemingly didn’t give a lot of thought to the writing. Aside from the opening story mission, where you are fighting beside the three main characters, the rest of the game's story falls completely flat. The villain even gives the clichéd "You’re not so different, you and I" speech. The Speaker from the first game also dies in a very awkward way, if he did die. It’s not really clear.  The writing just feels lazy. It's like Bungie begrudgingly added in more story in response to its community asking for it. The story is bad, the campaign short, and other than Cayde-6 and Failsafe, all of the characters are forgettable one-dimensional placeholders for you to turn in rep rewards to. Bungie told such an epic and awesome story with Halo series and set the bar high. To see them drop the ball so hard with Destiny is disappointing. A great story should leave you wanting more, but Destiny 2 is so preoccupied with trying to sell you what's around the corner that it misses the bigger picture. The Destiny 2 campaign felt more like a DLC add-on for the first game rather than a continuation of the story.

A Shallow, Hollow Shell of a Game

One of the better parts of Destiny 2 is the gameplay. It's Bungie, the people who made Halo. The gunplay is spot on, but after completing the single-player story and spending over ten hours in PVE, players will start to see how repetitive and shallow the game really is. The game loop is short. You shoot things and they die, which is the same that could be said for any FPS, however Destiny 2 lacks any depth, tactics or diversity in this matter. Games like Doom, Borderlands, and Warframe have strategies and tactics, while dealing with a variety of enemy types. However, in Destiny 2, there is no diversity or strategy to disposing of the enemies in the game. Except for the Raids, most enemies, including bosses, are defeated the exact same way. Shoot, reload, and occasionally take cover. It’s incredibly simple, too simple, with no meta or interesting abilities to spam. That’s not to say simple gameplay mechanics are bad. Take Super Mario World. Players can jump and run, but it’s the underlying mechanics that create a sense of precision, depth and strategy to the game. This shines when players take a look at the levels in Mario Marker. Destiny lacks this type of depth in every way, shape, and form.

The enemy AI is also painfully stupid. The combat simply isn’t deep enough, sorely lacking any type of diversity. The game does try to give you things to do including missions, patrols, public events, and more. Sady, all these things are all centered around dumping more bullets into the lackluster enemies. Ultimately, the game blurs together into a big mess of mindless, dull shooting. The game tries to spice things up with the the Warlock, Hunter and Titan classes, but they’re so similar it almost feels pointless to have include them. Since all of them DPS the exact same way (shoot, reload, repeat), there really isn’t a difference in play style. There’s also no penalty for death in the game. More could have been done to make the classes feel unique, like restricting Warlocks to Submachine Guns, or by giving classes roles, like having a Titan Tank/Hold Agro, so Hunters can get shots off on a strike boss. Anything to differentiate the classes beyond what Destiny 2 offers would have been welcomed. As of right now, the Destiny 2 classes offer only the illusion of choice.

The world gives you a lot to do, but it all boils down to shooting, reloading and more shooting. The only example of diverse gameplay I saw was using shade in the Almighty: 1AU mission, to avoid sun/fire damage. Why wasn’t more of this in the game? Less shooting and more environment interaction would have been welcome changes from the original Destiny. What the hell happened? Where are all the new features? Modes? Classes? Add-ons? Why can’t we do simple MMO things like transmogrify gear on our character? Why is there no crafting system? Destiny 2 severely lacked content at launch, and it tried to make up for by having players do the same things on four different planets, but it’s all the same. Shoot, reload, and repeat until everything’s dead. With very little incentive to explore, the game becomes a mindless chore.

The Ten Year "Plan"

Before the first Destiny was released, Bungie and Activision promised a ten year plan. I thought that this ten year plan meant that they would continue to support the game and expand the world internally. I was very wrong. The ten year plan was basically just a publishing deal with Bungie and Activision, promising four separate game releases as well as DLC for the Destiny IP. This means we have two more games to go. The plan was confirmed again in an interview with a Bungie developer at E3 2017 that "this is a fresh start…" with all your gear gone and all old locations unable to be revisited (even the Post Office). They simply rebooted Destiny with Destiny 2 and quickly used PR buzz words like “boots on the ground” and “action shooter” to try to pull away from the MMO branding the franchise had become known for. However, if they just planned on releasing four separate games each with a “fresh start” would that have flown with fans? Imagine if World of Warcraft started players fresh after each expansion and prevented them from visiting old locations and trashed all their gear. Players would revolt, but for some reason this is accepted by some of the Destiny community, and looks like it will be done two more times. Why limit your game? Why not just build and expand this universe? Bungie could have done something like WoW did in The Cataclysm expansion, and reflect the old locations in Destiny 1 with the after effects of the Cabal Invasion. What did the three years of developer time go to? It seems Bungie is making one giant game, breaking it up, and selling it to us in pieces, but the pieces don’t even connect, and they’ll all be stand alone games. I think gamers, including myself, were hoping for a massive sci-fi world at the end of the ten year mark. 

The "Esports" Angle

The Crucible in the first Destiny was where I spent the majority of my time playing the game. Honestly, the mode was quite fun. The maps were diverse, the game types enjoyable, and the fight for the heavy weapon ammo spawns was always a rush. Crucible was one of the original Destiny’s high points. I expected the PVP in Destiny 2 to be just as good if not better. However, it ended up being a small step backwards. Vehicles are completely gone, despite the community demanding more of them. Space Battles were not included, another example of community feedback being completely ignored by Bungie. It was one of biggest and loudest requests from the Destiny community, and Bungie confirmed they have no plans for vehicles or space battles in any Destiny games in the future. Going back to the Crucible in Destiny 2, the PVP has gotten a little worse for wear. Players have been restricted to 4v4 battles down from 6v6. Another annoying change are the smaller corridor-like maps that feel half the size of most maps from the first Destiny. The most disappointing change was to the arsenal of weapons, which became even more limited. Sniper rifles, fusion rifles, and shotguns are now power weapons, meaning they require heavy ammo to use, which is spawned in limited amounts throughout the match. These changes made the already small variety of weapons and play style even more restrictive. I understand this makes the game a lot easier to balance, but in return this leaves a small amount of weapon options for Guardians. Abilities have also taken a hit, with grenades on an annoyingly long cooldown timer, and it’s been my experience that player's class super can only be charged and used once per match. Doing this lets you focus more on skill-based gameplay, but with such a limiting weapon set, it just makes the experience less enjoyable.

The Light is Fading…

Destiny 2 is not a bad game or a good game - it's mediocre. The lavish marketing campaign, Bungie's legacy, and the extremely loyal community worked together to present the game as a genre-defining experince, but when laucnh day came around, the emporer had no clothes. We need to call developers out when they don't deliver on what was promised. The potential of the first Destiny still hasn't been reached with the sequel. Bungie gave players a mediocre game that they clearly chopped up to sell you (again) in bits of DLC. In total, players can expect to spend around $90 for the full Destiny 2 experience. How is this acceptable? Are they testing gamers to see how little they can put into a game and still be rewarded?  The game-buying public should be smarter than this. Destiny 2 is a mediocre game that does not deserve the hype, positive scores, or the overly-forgiving community that it currently has.

Destiny 2: A Second Opinion published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

The Most Vexing Unanswered Questions of 2017

There is something to this argument, as Kaepernick actually lost his starting job with the 49ers before the protests began and only got it back because his replacement was less effective. But that argument ignores the fact that 72 quarterbacks have appeared in a game this season, dozens of whom cannot match Kaepernick’s talent in any system.

Did the owners collectively agree not to sign him? Such outright collusion is unlikely. But in a league that has often overlooked domestic violence, animal cruelty, steroid use and vehicular manslaughter all in the name of talent, it is curious that Kaepernick was shown the door for a demonstration that did not violate any rules. BENJAMIN HOFFMAN

Did the Russians influence the election?

The political scientist Emily Thorson used her 2013 dissertation to investigate whether fact checking was an effective way to combat misinformation. She found that even when readers believed fact checks, they could not banish false information from their minds entirely. The power of fake news, she concluded, incentivized politicians to strategically spread untruths.

Not just American politicians. In January, a declassified report informed the public that the C.I.A., F.B.I. and National Security Agency concluded that Russia’s leader, President Vladimir V. Putin, had ordered an influence campaign to affect the 2016 election. Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, called posts disseminated by Russians “an insidious attempt to drive people apart.”

So there is little doubt that Russia meddled in the election (though, for the record, President Trump has said that Mr. Putin denies it). Determining influence is trickier. Did even one person change his or her vote after seeing a mocked-up Facebook advertisement?

Dr. Thorson coined a term for the residue of untruth left behind by misinformation: “belief echoes.” One of her experiments tested whether people became besotted by misinformation only when it confirmed their previously held opinions. She found that was not the case. Humans change their minds. They are subject to influence. And when a state actor summons a sonic boom of nonsense and sends it rattling through the largest communication platform ever invented, there’s no telling who might hear the echoes — and maybe even follow that actor’s lead. JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH

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Lena Dunham in February. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Is Lena Dunham a feminist?

Lena Dunham has embraced the feminist mantle with gusto, often posting about gender politics on Twitter, where she has 5.72 million followers, courting thinkers who espouse similar views in her newsletter and on her podcast, and writing about the well-being of women for Glamour magazine, LinkedIn, The New York Times and elsewhere.

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What’s a feminist now? And is she one? There’s a joke she once made on her podcast about wishing she had had an abortion. (She later apologized.) Or the time when she compared reading Gawker to “going back to a husband who beat me in the face.” (She later apologized.)

This year, particularly dismaying was Ms. Dunham’s statement accusing Aurora Perrineau, an actress, of lying when she filed a police report alleging that Murray Miller, a writer on “Girls,” raped her when she was 17 and he was 35. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Ms. Dunham and Jenni Konner, her co-showrunner, wrote that “this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”

Believing rather than discrediting assault and rape survivors is a tenet of most feminist philosophies — and a stance Ms. Dunham has taken in the past, including in a tweet she sent this year: “Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don’t lie about: rape.”

Ms. Dunham, once again, apologized. And since mid-November, her Instagram and her Twitter have been silent. VALERIYA SAFRONOVA

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Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Is wine good or bad for you or what?

Everyone who smokes cigarettes knows that their lungs get a little blacker and death draws a little nearer with each puff. Now those who pour a glass of pinot for pleasure, or to harvest its “medicinal” properties, can’t help but think of cancer too.

This fall, the American Society of Clinical Oncology stated that alcohol consumption may slightly raise the risk of breast cancer (also: esophageal, mouth, throat, liver and colorectal cancers). Its statement came after years of studies suggesting that drinking red wine (in moderation) lowers the risk of heart disease, reduces the incidence of Type 2 diabetes and improves cholesterol.

To put things in perspective, there are hundreds of known and probable carcinogens, many of which you could certainly find at home and not all of which are strictly bad for you. Moreover, just because we have evidence that alcohol consumption is associated with cancer doesn’t mean we can conclude that the relationship between them is causal.

So, the real question is: Are the effects of wine net positive? Actually, don’t answer that. BONNIE WERTHEIM

Are there any good men left?

Last month in New York magazine, the writer Rebecca Traister noted how, in this moment of post-Harvey Weinstein cultural reckoning, her husband had asked, with genuine feeling, “How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?” It’s a question many women I know — those who sleep with men, anyway — have found themselves contemplating, as the list of terrible men doing terrible things seems to metastasize (and not just terrible men we knew were terrible; terrible men we thought were good guys, in some cases feminists, even).

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But, O.K., let’s not get carried away. Statistically speaking, not all men are harassers — in fact, most of them aren’t — and there have been plenty of good men who did good things this year. Like Snackman. Remember him? He broke up a fight on a New York City subway by standing in between two people snacking on a tube of Pringles. Or this guy, Oscar Gonzales, who saved a bunny from raging California wildfires (if you haven’t watched the video yet, prepare to sob).

There were the men of the El Bolillo bakery, who baked pounds and pounds of bread while trapped inside as Hurricane Harvey pummeled Houston. (They donated it to evacuees.) And, of course, there was salt bae, a Turkish chef by the name of Nusret Gokce, who tickled women and men alike with his flamboyant sprinkling of salt onto a carved steak.

What these men have in common — with the exception of, perhaps, our Turkish chef — is that they were bystanders. Bystanders who jumped in, active in the face of larger events they often couldn’t control. Their participation fits with this particular cultural moment, as one of the only agreed upon methods for effectively combating sexual harassment and assault is, in fact, to intervene. If 2017 was the year of bad men falling like dominoes, let’s raise a glass to 2018 as the year that the good ones will stand up for the rest of us. JESSICA BENNETT

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Cardi B at the W hotel in Midtown Manhattan before for her show at MoMA PS. 1’s Warm Up series. Credit Amy Lombard for The New York Times

Was this the Year of Cardi?

Maybe not officially, but we’re happy to settle the score. Just recall the video of people in New York starting an impromptu dance party to “Bodak Yellow” earlier this month in the Times Square subway station. See how the woman wearing the National Guard jacket transforms within seconds of hearing the beat. The bravado. The debauchery. The absolute lack of concern. In a year of nonstop bad news, Cardi freed us.

Fans who have followed her since she was a stripper in the Bronx named Camilla know that her success didn’t come overnight. She’s been making money moves for years, from her days on VH1’s “Love and Hip-Hop” to her mixtapes which, bafflingly, never took off the way “Bodak” did.

Since June, it’s been nearly impossible to go out or stay in without hearing Cardi’s breakout single, which went triple platinum and earned her two Grammy nominations. The song of summer has staying power. Maybe the real question is: Will Cardi still reign supreme in 2018? JOANNA NIKAS

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Rachel Lindsay and Peter Kraus, of “The Bachelorette.” Credit Scott Baxter/ABC

Why aren’t Rachel and Peter together?

Rachel Lindsay — America’s first and maybe last black “Bachelorette” — walked away with a ring at the end of the last season, but it was not presented by the American steel-haired ironman heartthrob Peter Kraus and so 7.5 million hearts and brains broke at once. The rule of the “Bachelor” franchise is that we will make sense of the heart. The rules of reality television are that enough editing and music can make us understand anything.

But in this case, producers of Rachel’s season of “The Bachelorette” had to dodge an inexplicable gravity sinkhole in the middle of their universe. They know why Rachel and Peter aren’t together, and they have no way, within their limited palette of reality show hues, to paint us the picture that explains it. No one else involved will or can! They are all too busy doing sponsored content and getting paid. The tabloid universe, which lives by similar rules, can’t execute on this narrative either: they tried “Peter Kraus Reveals Why He Turned Down ‘The Bachelor’: ‘I Was Not Ready,’” and it just smells like smoke screen spirit.

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We will probably never know why Rachel and Peter aren’t together. Their relationship is our Roanoke colonists. What’s left to believe? Who believes Rachel and Bryan Abosolo, a.k.a. “Plan Bryan,” are planning their wedding and next dog and/or baby? (No, seriously.) Who is even ready to trust “The Bachelor” again as Season 378 begins shortly? It’s also entirely possible this is 100 percent displaced anxiety about our engagement with the nuclear power of North Korea or maybe even some personal baggage. CHOIRE SICHA

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Jay Ellis and Issa Rae, of “Insecure.” Credit Anne Marie Fox/HBO

And will Issa and Lawrence get back together?

Will they? Who knows. But should they? Probably not — at least not right now. The most recent season of “Insecure” opens with two newly single characters, both so accustomed to the comforts of partnership that navigating the often choppy seas of dating in Los Angeles is naturally a little awkward.

Issa’s attempt at a self-described “hoe-tation,” in which she juggles multiple partners at varying levels of seriousness, only reveals her lack of experience with romantic relationships when boundaries aren’t clearly defined. As for Lawrence, his new and nearly serious relationship highlights just how wounded Issa left him. (Spoiler: In Season 1, Issa cheats on Lawrence with an old flame.)

For many, the ultimate betrayal is finding out the person you’re in a monogamous relationship with has had sex with someone else. But what this season of “Insecure” showed, particularly the heart-tugging finale, was that often both parties have had a hand at the gradual erosion of the union.

It’s clear that Issa and Lawrence love each other. If they even want to entertain the idea of getting back together, though, they’ll need to do some serious self-reflection first. IMAN STEVENSON

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Credit Chris J Ratcliffe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Is it nuts to start preparing for the apocalypse?

One strange thing about 2017 was that you could talk about preparing for the end of the world and not even have to explain why. The headlines were filled with apocalyptic scenarios — hellish wildfires, North Korean nuclear threats, melting glaciers, not to mention a long-prophesied economic collapse. As such, the popular image of the survivalist is changing, from wild-eyed cave dweller in camouflage fatigues, hoarding canned goods, to the mild-mannered executive or lawyer or insurance salesman who lives next door.

In a world where the bombproof bunker has replaced the Tesla as the hot status symbol for young Silicon Valley plutocrats, everyone, it seems, is a “prepper.” What else is on the list of must-have doomsday items? Artfully stocked bug out bags, folding kayaks, jet packs (yes, they exist), even condoms — and not just for the expected purpose, although they might come in handy for that, too. ALEX WILLIAMS

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Compiled by THE STYLES DESK

The post The Most Vexing Unanswered Questions of 2017 appeared first on dailygate.

[symbianosgames]

The best games are a slow steady learning process.

They teach and guide while they entertain and challenge. They push players to improve steadily — to master a mechanic not by forcing you to scale a metaphorical wall, but by compelling you to climb a series of metaphorical steps. 

This does not necessarily mean they have great tutorials — indeed, many games with awesome learning curves throw you straight into the experience proper. Nor does it mean that they have to dumb down their design. It's simply a matter of crafting progression systems that allow the player to get a handle on the fundamentals early and then to grow and improve at every stage after that. 

It's not easy to pull this off. To give you some guidance as to how you can execute a brilliant learning curve, we asked several designers to tell us what games they think do it well.

None of the seven examples that follow are easy games, but all of them meter their difficulty with a well-considered learning curve. 

From the moment the player wakes up in protagonist Chell's minimalist living quarters, Portal gently prods her forward. As Global Game Jam co-founder and Rochester Institute of Technology assistant professor Ian Schreiber notes, "the entire game is basically a tutorial on how to beat it, except it expertly frames the learning as gameplay." Portal challenges by crafting puzzles around new mechanics and new applications of existing mechanics.  

It allows all the time players need to get comfortable with the controls or to think about how to solve the next puzzle, and it scales the difficulty by simply incrementing the complexity.

What you learn in completing one puzzle is needed to figure out the next one, and you have environmental cues that indicate what you need to learn or do (though not how to do it). Some cues are subtle such as the position of sentry turrets, while others are obviously instructional like the warning signs at the entrance to each test chamber. And thanks to these cues there's a clear progression from using portals to walk through a wall to using them for high-speed platforming. 

TAKEAWAY: You can simultaneously teach and challenge players at the same time if you weave the learning experience into the environment and level design.

All of the Burnout games do a fine job of introducing faster cars and tougher races and challenges at a comfortable pace. But one deserves special praise.

"I absolutely loved Burnout 3," says Corey Davis, design director at Rocket League developer Psyonix. "The pace of acquiring more powerful cars lined up really well with my mastery of the boost system, crashing opponents, and track knowledge." 

Each new car is just the right amount faster and stronger than the previous one to maintain an even challenge level and not pull the player out of their depth. The crafted tracks and frantic high-speed tussles with rival racers grow more intense as the player progresses, and there's a rewarding and fun experience for anyone to find — veteran racing junkies, casual fans, and newcomers alike.  

TAKEAWAY: You need to constantly test players and push them to execute tougher maneuvers as they improve their mastery of the core mechanics, but there's a fine line to straddle here if you want to keep both inexperienced and experienced players engaged from start to finish.

Much like a real instrument, Guitar Hero offers an intensely satisfying learning curve. It arguably even outdoes a real guitar in this respect, as it provides more useful feedback and gave the player ways to play along to their favorite songs regardless of skill level — the chosen difficulty level affects the number of notes to play and fret buttons to hit. It also adds an extra layer of progression by dividing songs into a "setlist" of increasing difficulty — so the challenge ramps up song by song as well as by difficulty level. 

Davis praises this design decision. "I never felt like it was cheap; it felt purely like I needed to get better," he says. And the feedback loops both on the screen during play and intrinsic to the challenge of mastering the twin difficulty systems combine beautifully with the simple joy of making music — of mastering hit rock songs. 

TAKEAWAY: Multi-tiered learning curves can let players control their own challenge level and rate of progress, and also provide a clearer indication of how much harder the next stage will be.

To someone who's heard about but not played the infamously-difficult Dark Souls, it may seem like a strange inclusion in this list. But extreme challenge and a good learning curve are not mutually exclusive. "The difficulty escalates very nicely," says Red Hook Studios creative director Chris Bourassa. 

"Just as you start feeling overwhelmed, you find yourself back in Firelink Shrine," he continues. "It's a clever use of the town hub as a thematic downbeat, and works like a chapter break in the game. As you catch your breath, you can look forward to a meaty jump in difficulty as you set off to the next area, followed by another smooth curve."

Cthulhu Saves the World designer Robert Boyd made a similar point in his 2012 analysis of Dark Souls' design

TAKEAWAY: High difficulty does not necessarily equate to a too-steep learning curve, as Dark Souls exemplifies.

Bourassa also praises the learning curve of real-time strategy/action-RPG hybrid Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II. Specifically, he was drawn in by its tension between threat and empowerment. It gives the player confidence to try things and to experiment with new combinations of strategies thanks to a steady trickle of loot and new units. "I always felt confident heading into the missions," says Bourassa, "even when that confidence was misplaced." 

The smaller-scale structure of Dawn of War II's campaign missions in comparison to traditional RTS games helps, too. Short missions with small groups of units battling other small groups (and little or no base building) reduce the need to master micro-management and instead allow the player to learn and adapt as the situation demands. The skirmish multiplayer mode doesn't share this well-balanced learning curve, though, as it's too different to the campaign for knowledge transfer and new players tend to get annihilated. 

TAKEAWAY: A good learning curve balances danger or challenge with player empowerment; it gives the player a taste of both failure and victory and makes either feel like a learning experience.

Ironcast is the rare genre-mashup game that gets the blended elements to fit together. It's a Puzzle Quest-inspired tile-matching puzzler with a touch of roguelite adventuring and steampunk-themed resource management and mech-bot warfare.

Bourassa notes that while it looks straightforward at first, it's actually a deeply layered experience. "They do a lot of interesting things with the mechanics at all levels," he says, "and I found the meta-game quite engaging." 

The player gathers resources from the tile-matching mode, which they soon learn how to use to engage in full-on turn-based mech combat that involves a range of abilities and strategic and tactical decisions. If they lose a battle, it's game over, but certain upgrades and unlocked mech pilots remain so that they can still feel a sense of progress. All the game's complexity is metered out in such a way that you have time to get comfortable with new mechanics before your skill with them is tested. And the upgrades enable new strategies rather than simply incrementing the power of your weapons and shields.  

TAKEAWAY: You can ease players into complexity and surprise them at the same time by starting simple then repeatedly upping the stakes and stripping back the layers underlying the gameplay systems.

The original Super Mario Bros remains a masterclass in game design, and a big part of that is the expert manner in which its difficulty ebbs and flows — a small spike at the beginning followed by a gentle upward curve that has additional spikes at the end of each of its eight worlds (as Mario nears and then battles the world boss). 

It's also a great example of how to teach a player without tutorials. "It introduced most of the core concepts in World 1-1," says Schreiber. It didn't explicitly explain anything, but rather left the player to explore and discover the mechanics simply by trying things.

You may not go into the game knowing that enemies die when you jump on their heads and that blocks with question marks on them give coins or items (or what those items do), but you can stumble on these concepts within seconds and extend your understanding of how they work over the duration of the game. 

TAKEAWAY: Classic games still hold great lessons in game design, and Super Mario Bros in particular is a shining example of how to quickly introduce the core concepts and then playfully explore their permutations over the rest of the game.

There's no point developing a great game mechanic if only a tiny percentage of players can figure out how to use it. If you're striving for challenge, be fair, and remember to allow players some time to acclimatize to their new-found skills. You need to both give your player the appropriate tools and teach them how to use these tools before you ask them to scale a cliff or make a seemingly-impossible leap. 

If you're not trying to make a difficult game, remember that great learning curves should have small spikes along the way to challenge players and test their mastery of the mechanics or to introduce new mechanics. 

Most importantly, consider that teaching people how to play your game is not just a matter of telling them what to do and then leaving them alone. Nor is it about micro-managing their experience. You need to let them play and experiment and to ensure that when they fail they can understand why. Mistakes and successes alike should improve their mental models of how your systems work. And they should drive your players to get better at your game, not to walk away. 

Thanks to Corey Davis, Chris Bourassa, and Ian Schreiber for their help with putting this article together.