Weregamer's Game Musings

(Where credit is due, Ambassador Kosh ) I've been thinking a bit again recently about Kickstarter's impact on computer games. Overall I think we are in a much better place with great games that weren't safe enough for ever-more-cautious big publishers, but there are a couple of pernicious trends that have me worried. Successful Games Established Developers End-Running Publishers I am really pleased with the great games that have come from KS, mostly funded one to two years ago and starting with the great projects that established game designers couldn't get past publishers: Broken Age, Grim Dawn, Wasteland 2 (with some caveats, see my earlier post ). I'm confident in including some not-yet-done games in this group, like Torment: Tides of Numenara and Project Eternity. There have also been some great games from established designers who went straight to KS. Sunless Sea is the star of this category, but I'd include Rebuild 3. Homages and Updates Another...

I've been putting off writing about this game for a while, trying to sort out my feelings on it. I like this game. I like the realization of the concepts that inspired Fallout, and I like seeing modern computer technology able to handle the complexities of the story well - the biggest problem I remember with the Apple ][ original was that combat was baffling without a meaningful map display. I'm really glad I participated in the Kickstarter, both because it brought the game into existence and because it became part of the groundswell of Kickstarter replacing the broken traditional publishing system. (I'm sad that Kickstarter is becoming broken in its own way, but that's for a different post another day.) But despite all that, I am not playing Wasteland 2 much. When I sit down to the PC for my limited gaming time, and think about which game will be most satisfying to play, WL2 never wins - and it's taken me a while to figure out why. One factor is that I playe...

SimTex was one of the first game studios in Austin (not counting Origin, an independent publisher until the 90s). They produced only three games, but each of them has an important place in the history of strategy gaming. Here's the list in chronological order: Master of Orion was the first 4X space game to break the "more complexity and more micromanagement is what we want/need" mindset. By reducing individual planetary management to a few sliders, they made room for a relatively rich ship design system and room for real strategic thought, long before PCs could support both. Master of Magic is a unique blend of Civilization-style gameplay with the feeling of being a serious world-dominating-class wizard in competition with others in that league. Several good games have come from trying to duplicate parts of MoM, but generally they reduce the power of the wizard-player in some way, often making them a unit on the board. A currently pre-release title, Worlds of Magic, is...

Path of Exile is a very deep game that is, IMO, a far better re-envisioning of Diablo II than the official Diablo III. It achieves this from a much better understanding of what is fun for the players and what is not, and with a lack of greed that Activision won't allow to Blizzard. The joy of long-term D2 players, and the frustration of newcomers, is in the rigidity of the character's "build". If you want to try a different way to play a character, you need to start a new one and work up to the point where your new strategy becomes viable before you can try it. Most "builds" require some choices of equipment (sometimes very specific items, sometimes general guidelines) which you must acquire via finding or trading. PoE addresses this to a carefully calculated balance point. No choices you make about your character are irrevocable, and the choice of what skills you are using is extremely fungible. The hard thing to change is the allocation of points (one pe...

After playing MMOs as old as EverQuest and Ultima Online, through various other games including WoW, Rift, and EVE Online, I've come to appreciate that most MMOs are aimed at very specific sorts of players or even specific ways to get people to pay money. Only a few, of which Rift deserves honorable mention but Guild Wars 2 is the extreme standout, show a great deal of thought as to what is fun for many different types of player, and consequent design features that provide for most or all of those player types. GW2 is particularly notable in that I find what I do in a play session is almost completely determined by what I'm in the mood to to do. It does not take hours of exclusive dungeon crawling to get gear useful in harder dungeons; players who focus on or exclusively play in the RvR (called "WvW" because the competition is between servers, not between game factions) areas do not acquire gear that makes mostly-PvE players unable to compete with them, and the struc...

I'm astonished at all the positive buzz this game is getting, despite how much I personally love it. It's a very literate and thoughtful game and historically those (for example Planescape: Torment) have become classics but rarely been commercially big hits. But personally I count this the best game so far that I've been on the Kickstarter for - even better than Wasteland 2. The balance is very fine, almost hard enough to become frustrating but not quite enough to make me quit, and a little luck can change things in a hurry. The legacy idea in particular makes a huge difference in how I feel when my character permadies - I have something to show for my huge time investment, as well as the intangible knowledge from experience.

I've been thinking recently about the two games that have claimed the majority of my gaming time over the past couple of months and over the past couple of years. While both are RPGs with meaningful character choices, they are quite disparate - but they have a common thread and it's in the quality of the developers. Guild Wars 2 is an MMO, while Path of Exile is an online action RPG along the lines of Diablo. The mechanics, the game worlds and their properties, the playerbases are all quite different. But they have something in common that makes them stand out in their categories: These developers have paid close attention to what people like and hate, enjoy and don't enjoy, about these types of games from well before the game was released, and they have continued to refine and iterate to make them fun for more players and more fun for existing players. Interestingly enough, they both also eschew ongoing revenue for anything but cosmetic or convenience microtransactions, ...