Miniature Maxing: The small things that make Vindictus a great long-term game.

Vindictus may look like a mindless hack-and-slash game, but there are some design elements that make my intellectual side flutter like a high-school girl over Jacob’s abs.

Vindictus has something really nice going for it: Titles.

Yes, you get titles for doing this.

Most titles I’ve seen in the game do not require you to wear them to get a stat benefit, much like how LOTRO handles traits. Titles are those little bits and pieces of development that fills in the gaps between levels and gear. Of course, there are titles for doing silly things like killing mobs with kicks, environment weapons, etc., which encourages plenty of hilarity, but economically, they do little. Equipment titles, on the other hand, will keep the economy running for a long time.

Equipment set titles bandage this issue. Unlike in most games, when you score an equipment set, it provides you a bonus as long as you wear it, which is always painful. Naturally, your first set is replaced in a day and you bemoan your efforts. Vindictus gently urges you to get sets because they contribute to your stats permanently. Subsequently, when the game matures, many players will want to maximize their base stats and will likely forgo the grind for materials and support the economy via auction house. Equipment set titles are a great, and I mean GREAT, way to keep the wheels turning in MMO economies.

Tokens are surprisingly awesome.

At first, you might scream, “Oh no, it’s like FF14’s fatigue system!” To some degree, you are right, tokens are designed to limit your maximum progress per day, or rather, they’re telling you to get a life in the nicest way possible. I’m fine with this practice because game companies shouldn’t be afraid to tell you that there are more important things in life. However, tokens don’t just teach that lesson; they augment responsibility.

For the first 7 completions per day, each tier 2+ mission requires 2 silver coins. 7-14 requires 3 coins, 15-21 requires 4 coins. You have a maximum of 50 coins, which are recharged periodically (Not sure of the dates.) Efficient use of coins is obvious here: only do 7 runs per day so you get more than the guy who dumps all of his coins on a single day. This is awesome. It helps shorten the gap between casuals and non-casuals, encourages players to exhibit some level of restraint and ensures that all traditional forms of Chinese Gold Farming benefits the publisher and developer, assuming you can buy platinum coins via cash-shop, one of which replaces the cost of silver coins.

I know what you’re thinking right now, fellow grinder. They’re stupid for limiting me. I should be able to dick-measure with investment alone.

Yeah, no. Listen, that mentality has allowed farming companies and sweatshops to flourish simply because time investment is the core component of progress in MMOs. Trust me on this when I say that gold-farmers can trump your time-sinking powers two-fold without breaking a sweat. You want a game that requires skill and not a freaking bot to be on the top-tier. Being against this token system is basically akin to encouraging inflation in a game economy.

You know what tokens mean? Players can dominate the economic field for once, or at least aren’t at the mercy of gold-buyers. I don’t know about you, but I’ll play Civ 5 for a little bit every week instead of suffering the hopelessness associated with inflation.

 

Vindictus: Old gnoll, new tricks.

Game’s down for maintenance right now (again as of 10:30 AM PST), but the good 4 7 hours I had with Vindictus were very pleasant. By pleasant, I mean terrifically gratifying. I murdered hundreds of slobbering gnolls, showering my screen with oily blood and felt amazed. After I started feeling too powerful, the game chucks this magnificent red mega-gnoll and slams a monstrous hammer into my library of extremely cool boss fights. (I forgot to press the screenshot button, sadly.)

At the moment, Vindictus is probably the best F2P starter experience I’ve ever encountered. The tutorial was delightfully epic, the interface is absolutely gorgeous and the gameplay is definitely a part of the next-gen cadre the jaded MMO community has been slobbering for some time for.  I paused for a few moments to figure things out, then found myself gently guided by the intelligence behind the game’s flow and into a state of gaming nirvana, where I didn’t feel lost and the only thing keeping me from kicking ass was a load screen.The Source engine is absolutely fantastic for this game, rendering plentiful amounts of gore and mayhem without a hiccup in sight on my mid-range. If there are any significant bugs, I certainly haven’t run into them.

You know what this game is? Really? Super-Badass Phantasy Star Online II TURBO. When I first picked it up, I had this feeling that I had played a game with a similar flow in a past life. Before I started considering what my past form was, I realize that my current life had held the experience. The structure is very similar and easy to work through. While some people may hate Phantasy Star, I enjoy it thoroughly. I remember sitting around in community college with PSPs, playing the living crap out of Phantasy Star Portable and really getting a sense of camaraderie with my friends after we smashed through the content and compared our title tracks to PSPerfect. Vindictus evokes a very similar, “You vs. Epic boss” feel with a small party size of 4 and has plenty of titles that I suspect will become a central motivator for prolonged play, as many of them appear to improve your stats without forcing you to equip them.

Of course, Petualant Pioneering always finds room for complaints, or in this case, a couple observations that are likely to be unfixed due to the nature of the game’s design:

1) Hosting – Unfortunately, there are some limitations to how Vindictus works with parties. Each instance appears to be hosted by the party leader, whose connection and possibly his game performance affects the smoothness of the session. As a result, you’ll be tearing through levels with really choppy animations and fairly glitchy presentation. It is still playable, but it is distracting and it might deter a few ungrateful folks who want perfect animation quality.

2) Can’t turn off the music – The game is very hush-hush for a while up until you hit a boss battle. While Vindictus’s music is fitting for the theme, I like the option to play my own tracks. At the moment, I don’t see a music slider.

3) Yuck, F2P players – Of course, the community is terrible. Nexon’s reach is far and massive, and unfortunately, it has collected many inept wordsmiths and unpleasant scrubs in its process of climbing to the top. On the forum, you’ll find yourself blanketed in bitching about how the servers are down and how Nexon is inherently evil. That or unified against BRs and the usual fodder. I suppose this isn’t that much of a problem, given that you grow intimate with a handful rather than the entire population thanks to the instancing structure, but there’s definately a copious amount of e-penis and measurement of said organ in the future.

Either way, small gripes compared to my glowing adoration for this game in its entirety. If you convince yourself that this game isn’t worth the time to check out just because you want to be different or you happen to have a pet-mmo that will undoubtedly be crushed by Vindictus’s inevitable success, stop, spin 360 degrees and walk away from the path of shameful foolishness.

Also, after you kick, literally in this case, a bosses’s guts out, the game does some dramatic screenshots which you can choose to save afterwards. A nice, sexy touch as demonstrated below.

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THIS. IS.

Google provides adequate drama to simulate well-kick.

It’s free-to-play mania over here at Petulant Pioneering.

Originally, this post was going to be about how much dick people were sucking in order to get a beta key for Vindictus. Subsequently, I was going to comment on how pathetic some people are in posting queries about this fabled key on Yahoo questions. (For you aspiring sardonics, begging for a key on that site in broken English is approximately half as funny as “how is babby formed?”)

I later revised the theme because I was reduced to cleaning pipes in the form of rampant google searching. It came to my attention that despite there being thousands upon thousands of keys released in the wild, it was near impossible to acquire one outside of a sporadic single-digit window on some cheesy F2P MMO site forum or groveling to another player who immediately ascended to godhood by offering his keys to the lowly masses. The struggle immediately felt more real than I ever expected it to be.

In order to fuel my hunger for these keys, I watched a few videos of the gameplay. After viewing a solid thirty minutes of material, I was sold. Vindictus looks about as polished as Guild Wars 2 at the moment, chock full of simple and satisfying gameplay tidbits, particularly the ability to grapple, which allows you to disable targets, use monsters as weapons against the masses or shields verses projectiles. Remember that old “Rule of Cool?” that Blizzard used to tout? Vindictus picks that up, literally.

Vindictus reminds me of a design philosophy that was prominent during the infancy of MMOs. Essentially, MMOs were fun when they first started because the gameplay was fun to begin with. The subsequent act of measuring the e-penis was a side benefit, not the primary goal. As the format matured, many developers simply acknowledged the fun in measurement and that particular aspect was a sufficient platform to run a game on in the Free to Play market. Now, most MMO players are jaded, mostly because RPGs have about as much gameplay depth as a measuring stick. At best, you’re crunching numbers. Big. Fat. Sexy. Numbers. That was cool when I was young, but now, I like a little more than playing with a few variables with a pretty calculator.

In fact, Vindictus reminds me of the same giddy feeling I had when Granado Espada was first announced. It’s still a MMO, but it’s not a RPG in its entirety. You get that sense of community, but you’re playing something that isn’t as predictable as a skill bar. GE is a MMO…TRPG. (It’s not a RTS given that there is no resource management whatsoever) and it turned out pretty great on all levels, at least up until the point where I realized that there was no attrition in combat.

Like any rational person, I cannot say for certain that this game will have enough depth for the long term, but its visceral appeal definitely makes it a contender for the top spot of my short-term list. Still, I can predict that it will not lick my competitive bone, simply because that’s currently being stinted by Starcraft 2. I know LotRO is not going away any time soon, so it doesn’t hurt to leap into something refreshing in the window before Civilization V.

Hopefully the servers will open soon and I’ll be able to bring my single-digit viewers something more than blabber.

 

Looking for a decent group of people to play LOTRO- GOD AMNESIA ARGH.

Just as the title says, of course. I want to experience this game, but not alone. Alone, well, I have Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the perfect alone game.

It’s late, I’m chilled to the bone and scared to death. Need sleep, need safety. Need companionship.

My name is Daniel. . .

 

Koreatime!

TheLittleOne makes me shudder sweetly

I really like Starcraft 2. It effectively fills in the empty hole that comes from being a MMO player with an ego. MMOs as they stand right now reward time investment exclusively, whereas Starcraft 2 rewards time investment and genius. When you see someone play in a MMO, you generally define them by their strategic choices: gear, tree, etc., but not their tactical ones simply because you’re generally just crunching numbers.

Now, I won’t be the first to say that I am awful at Starcraft in general. I have a couple friends that can attest to my inability to anything right. I threw games to sneak into bronze league and semi-stumbled my way through the rivers of cheese to end up in gold while remaining 50+% win ratio. Of course, most of diamond is bad compared to the high tier most Starcraft players love to idolize, generally defined as the top 10% of ladder.

The general difference between me and the next guy is that I get the concepts of the game to the point where I can actively improve on them just by playing more scrimmages with a Terran player who has better habits. For the most part, Starcraft 2 doesn’t make sense until the basics of the game really, really work out. When I mean basics, I mean understanding that investing those 50 minerals in building workers every chance you get will benefit you beyond any strategy at lower levels.

When I was community college, I did a lot of crapping all over Brood War for the very reasons I like SC2 so much today: easy to pick up, practically infinite skill ceiling and very, very stupid units that credit a player’s ability to micromanage. All of this ultimately makes a really good E-sport in theory. Unfortunately, balance is a bit shaky given that Zerg is not showing up in a lot of tournaments. Nevertheless, the competition is fierce and there are a few new celebrity players within the western circuit.

Example? I’m staying up to 2AM to watch one guy play: TheLittleOne.

This guy shows up in beta and just does crazy stuff. In a game like Starcraft, small deviations in play are huge, so when a guy like TLO comes around, you can’t help but back the guy for having guts in a game where very few people have the skill to innovate on the fly. His playstyle has a personality and its clearly visible in Starcraft 2.  If I played more, I could probably pick out his style without a nametag, but at the moment, I simply associate fun, wild and experimental gameplay with TLO.

 

MOUSTACHE

You know how long it has taken me to figure out how to change my favicon? Herp.

But yeah, this guy is one of the reasons I adore FF14. Inexplicably funny for me.

 

Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta – I really want to love this game, but it hates me.

I’m trying to gussy up something. Hold on. Alright, done.

Listen, I really want Final Fantasy 14 to not suck. Not because I like Square-Enix nor due to any intrinsic love for the universe, but because I really enjoyed the depth that was fused into the characters, the dialogue and the overall presentation of character although the world. Fourteen has emotive NPCs everywhere; each and every individuals is packaged with very natural and emotive animations that really bring out a sense of life. Coupled with absolutely splendid writing, I can’t help my tugged heart-strings. I expected the game to feel old-school and I got exactly what I wanted. Okay, a bit too much.

I have to ask you to implant an image of a very well-spoken rock into your consciousness. You will find that mental image hard to shake.

Fourteen takes everything you knew about bad execution and gives it an entirely new tier for you to experience. The cursor is not just a cursor; it also contains a literal ton of bricks compacted into each fingertip. It moves like a rock. It really does. You will have nightmares about the mouse experience well after this issue is fixed. Think of a cursor that runs at 5 frames per second and you will probably have a good approximation of how quick it will take you to accidentally alt-tab out and crash the client.

The UI is designed for a console environment. Normally, this seems like a nice gesture, until you realize the following:

• In order to navigate to parts of the menu, you have to enter a menu then find the sub-menu you’re looking for. There are no keybinds to individual sub-menus. Hell, you can’t even bind them. Have fun pressing home or menu every time you want to look at your quest journal.
• You can only have one sub-menu up at a time. No multi-tasking for you.
• You like to turn because yo- oh, wait, mouse control still sucks.

Combat? You will press one button for a while. Really. One. Button. I tried to feel good about it, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was doing the auto part of auto-attacking. Okay, so I got an attack that had some dramatic dimming of lights. I also realized that other people could dim my lights as well and immediately threw an egotistical fit.

I could go on-and-on about how clunky and rock-like the game felt, but you can probably google any more fodder you want to put up against anybody who is trying to make this game sound releasable. Finally, a game with a splendid atmosphere completely shattered by an experience so terrible that even I, the great complainer, never could have expected. Seriously, I got Spanish Inquisition’d by Square-Enix. I really cannot blame anybody who canceled their pre-order. It simply is not done for the PC-market, where players are used to MMOs and will feel absolutely ripped off after they open the box, slide in the disks and fire up an experience that is epic in its sheer magnitude of nagging frustrations.

 

An excerpt from a PCgamer comment.

I wrote this the other day (read: Practically a month ago) to win myself a copy of Going Rogue from PCgamer. I’m only posting it because, well, I won my copy.

If I had a jetpack, I’d go somewhere and do something with it, but I’d have to get away. Not because I’m a kid in a room with stars painted on the ceiling, but because having a jetpack is like any other good superpower: Always a weakness.

Jetpacks give your physical being freedom. A freedom to move into the Y-axis and enter a space known yet unknown. A place where no one else is but you, the birds and possibly a commercial flight. Your frail body goes wherever it wants and slips past every little mechanical frustration that they, the great architects of Earth, made for those without such liberty. The speed, swiftness, how it completely ignores the mangled maze of roads and slices through administrative searches, mocking every bit of established infrastructure with tails of puffy gray. Still, you’re going to be the only human going up and that’s how you’ll feel inside in the end.

Some people want to go to places and be themselves, but you can’t use your jetpack there. People fear and envy flying versions of themselves, but they’re too stupid to know how dangerous a real jetpack is. Besides, you won’t be human anymore, you’ll be the guy with jetpack. There’s a difference. Might start small, but it’ll get bigger, uglier and more distinct. Jetpacks don’t have five-star-safety-ratings and they never will. Only you can use it because you’re the only one trained in the craft. You can’t just give it to someone to try because there’ll be that one kid who blasts off and plays ketchup in asphalt. It’d be all your fault, of course. You should of known better because you’re the guy with the jetpack.

You fly on the wings of dangerous emissions. You’ll be the poster-boy of the industrial cloud of plant-slaying smog. When those titanic glaciers weep and the coast is swallowed by those tears, they’ll think of the guy with the jetpack. At first, people might like you, but once the envy sinks in like a flu-shot, they’ll find every reason in the world to hate you. You, who could do so much more than fly around. You, who wastes the gift of flight and covets it. You, the guy with the God-damn jetpack.

The only place you could go is to the sky and pray that there’s fuel up in the clouds. It’d be cold up there at rate you were going, a place with eternal air-conditioning. That jetpack is a curse, but once you taste the sky, you might never come down. That’s when you know you’re flying on real wings of liberty: when you make the choice to separate yourself from those people because you don’t live in their world anymore. Nobody else can make that decision because they’re on the ground.

Well, I’m the guy with the jetpack.

As for the rest of my blog, I find myself immersed in playing Starcraft, CoX and misc. games more than I feel compelled to write about it. I might get around. MIGHT.

 

Ghosts of Ascalon – Generic, yet fascinating

60% DP? Hah.

Ghosts of Ascalon doesn’t pull any punches. I won’t either, especially since it’s almost two and I just finished the book after a criminal procedure final. Bottom line? I actually want more.

The book does its job in terms of giving a glimpse into the future. Technically, the book feels like an Eye of the North excursion with all the new races flaunting their zany expressions of typical xenophobia. As far as it as becoming a legacy of Tolkien, probably not.

If you’re into Guild Wars, I’d recommend it. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits and names thrown around that’ll make you nod and maybe smile. I enjoyed trekking through and got surprised once in a while.

One semi-spoiler: This book carries on the tradition of human’s completely dismal state in Guild Wars.

Humans have always been shafted throughout Guild Wars history. This book helps remind you that humans suck eggs and will continue to suck eggs as a race.

As far as the racial breakdown and time spent on the races, the book seemed to be split up between…

Human 30%

Charr 30%

Asura 20%

Norn 15%

Sylvari 5%

Which may come to a disappointment to some, given that the information on the Sylvari is relatively scant. At this point, I get Sylvari at this stage. They’re an open-source race, literally. They’re the speculation race because, despite seeming like the token elf, they’re absolutely bizarre. Still, if you carry any level of interest in roleplay concerning Guild Wars, Ghosts of Ascalon helps illuminate the way roles mesh together.

As far as gameplay is concerned, I think we might be getting a charr flamethrower somewhere in the future.  Necromancy is definitely on the caster plate and mesmer got a slight mention.   Moreover, the book gives you a look into how the writers might include you into the epic-club without necessarily making it seem awkward.

I guess the only emotion I didn’t feel was profound sadness. Didn’t have time to feel sad and tragedy couldn’t really grip me at the pace the book was going. Of course, I’m not reading anything particularly sappy to begin with. I still feel warm about the whole book and I really want to engage in the RP community now that we have something to base everything off of.

Anyway, I’m tired. Tomorrow is Starcraft 2 day. I can’t wait to go punch some faces in silver.

 

Starcraft 2, but of course.

RANDOM :3

I’m sitting here, thinking about Starcraft 2. I just took a refresher course in the game, plowing through the campaigns easily then settling for some youtube synopsis, Blizard’s own recap and a bit of listening to Blizzard’s Echoes of War.

Normally, I only care about MMOs, but I can make an exception to Starcraft. Normally, I hate dislike Blizzard, but, again, I can make an exception to Starcraft. Why? Well, I don’t like Warcraft in general and all that’s been spewing out of Blizzard as of late has been Warcraft exclusively, so it’s easy to perceive my current vibes towards the developer. Subsequently, I really enjoy Diablo and Starcraft. Honestly, I think it’s my drone training, but whatever.

I think it is going to transform into a magnificent title for fans of the series. Having already experienced the beta, I felt the game was largely the same classic charm with greater accessibility opportunities. Basically, the game-play is the same but the control groups are substantially more useful in commanding your forces by not having a cap. The units are familiar but surprising. The pace is probably faster than Starcraft, especially with the intermediate economy boosters inherent in each race.

However, for people who dislike Starcraft in general, namely through how it feels or how the ‘cool’ stuff doesn’t really start till you acquire an acute feel for the game and its interface, disappointment will likely continue echo throughout the realm. In terms of innovation, the game is no closer to that true thoughtful RTS pipe-dream that we’ve all been having. For that reason alone, I do not think it will get a perfect score around the block. As far as my pessimism can carry me, the average score will probably aggregate around 85%.

Still, I am looking forward to the single-player experience in general. After refreshing myself with the tale that is Starcraft, I began to realize that this sci-fi space epic feels distinctly like Mass Effect, the Xel’Naga something akin to the enigmatic Reapers. Moreover, the single-player seems littered with opportunities for relevant, potent character development. Moreover, I can sense that Blizzard knows that they cannot carry out a storymode exclusively on objectives and missions with the vanilla gameplay. There’ll probably be some progression and tuning along the way to give the single-player experience a unique feel to that of online.

Anyway, I’ll be getting the game a few days late due to snail mail and some academic obligations that happen to arrive next week. It’s a painful realization, but a healthy one, I suppose.

By the by, I’m actually playing Guild Wars again. Add Taste of Futanari (Tee-hee) and chat me up when I’m on.