League of Legends

Alright, so I've been gone for at least a week. Admittedly not a good way to start up a blog, but considering the content I think it's understandable. A lot of my time has gone into playing games and giving me fuel for this. Now if I can just find time to put it all into text for you people. However, my weekdays are generally booked, so I'll probably try to update two or three times on weekends instead of just going for that typical M/W/F spread.

Anyway, first off on the list of games I will be ranting about this weekend will be League of Legends which I have no clue what it would fall under for classification. It's a free to play PvP game with a top down set-up that gives you a champion, a team of four other people, and an unending supply of minions and sends you up against another team with the goal of killing them and breaking their stuff. Pretty simple concept all told. Your minions come in several varieties (melee, mage, cannoneer, and super), go out in waves along various paths and attempt to kill anything of the opposing color they should encounter. This generally doesn't end well for them, but what do you expect? They're minions. They're cannon fodder for the most part, the real game revolving around the Champions.

Champions come in a number of flavors, roughly defined as Tank, Mage, Assassin, and Support. Of course, if you go to that champ's info you'll likely find a few more tags like Bruiser, Ranged, Carry, Juggler, and Recommended. The latter are difficult to find should you actually be looking for them however as most of them don't appear on filters (except for Recommended). Moving on. All champs have 5 abilities: one innate, three general, and an ultimate. You then use these to kill minions and level up until the enemy gives you the chance to end them. As I said earlier- pretty simple. Things start to get complicated when you start buying items, selecting masteries, and equipping runes.

Once you get into the game is where I start being conflicted.The game's pretty fun, but there are a few issues that kind of make it annoying. Dying is very easy, and sometimes getting a kill is rather hard if you don't know what you're doing. Death timers can reach at least a full minute at near the end of a match and if you die often you can easily spend more time dead than alive. It'd be nice if they introduced a modifier that adjusted your time based on your kill/death ratio (perhaps something along the lines of kills=2, assists=1, [kills+assists] - deaths = modifier, if modifier = negative reduce death time). It'd also be nice if you could set your own shopping list. The game gives you a "recommended" set-up for each champion whenever you visit the store, but a lot of builds only use a few of the items on that list. It'd be nice if you could replace them with your own so that you can quickly and easily get what you want and get back to killing stuff.

I have a few more complaints but I think I'm more to blame for them than anyone else. I'm still a little shaky with mouse and keyboard controls and I don't exactly have a great mouse. I would highly recommend trying it out. I'm all in favor of free to play games and think they deserve all the support they can get, especially if they're actually good.

Wolfgang out.

When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley

with a knife and hard-on, I figure he isn't

out  collecting for the Red Cross.

-Clint Eastwood

Thoughts: Pokemon Black and White

This isn't a full review as I haven't beaten the games and I'm only working on the second gym leader, but I must say, I'm not very fond of this generation so far. First of all I'm not overly fond of many of the new pokemon. Some of them look passable, others are just silly. For example, we've got a dove as our new Pidgey and a meerkat with crazy red eyes as our Ratatta. They recycled the Fire/Fighting set up for the second time now and I refuse to touch it on principle. I've been waiting for four generations for a Fire/Grass but instead I get three starter Fire/Fighting. It was old the second time you did it GameFreak! That left me with the snooty looking grass type and the meh looking water. At least the final evolution of the water starter looks decent, so I went with that.

Another major problem is with the battles themselves. I'm not sure if I'm just imagining all this but it seems a fair bit more difficult just fighting random pokemon. Admittedly I'm training more pokemon than I usually take on and it's been a while, but it just seems like everything hits harder. It also appears that the critical hit rate got a booster shot. I seem to notice a critical hit almost every battle. Maybe something's up, maybe it's just me. It's hard to say.  I can say that battles now have a weird moving camera that adds nothing. It's like you're playing the game FPS style but your character is getting bored and starting to look around for something more interesting. They also seem a little sluggish in execution.

They seemed to have upped the encounter rate as well, but that might be another instance of not having played for a while. Using the PC has gotten a serious downgrade. We went from 18 or so boxes (I know I had enough for every type, plus an extra one for my team/HM Slaves/Nature Hunters/Breeders) to 8. So now I'll have to combine two types per box or abandon all hope of organization. This is another instance where things seem a little sluggish. It's hard to explain all the little annoyances I seem to have with this. The Battle Box is just plain silly. I guess you can put a team of pokemon into a hard to access box (you have to first deposit them and then move them from the storage box to the battle box) in order to use them in place of your current team when battling friends. Of course why you would bother is beyond me. If I'm going to be using a PC anyway I'll just switch my pokemon up for a better team before we start. My friends can wait the extra two minutes that will take (maybe less if I the game doesn't cause me any difficulties).

Overall I wouldn't really recommend getting these. Maybe you'll have better luck, but it seems like GameFreak just kind of gave up and said "how many gimmicks can with throw in this?" Actually... it might not even be that. Diamond and Pearl might have been equally gimmicky and I still enjoyed them. This game just feels awkward. Especially with the evil team going on about freeing pokemon so they can be our equals and then repeatedly kicking a pokemon to get it to spew mist for them.

Preview: Skyrim

Alright last night I gave you the rundown of my history with the Elder Scrolls so now let us turn out eyes to the future. All of my information is based on what I’ve read in GameInformer’s article (from the looks there’s probably more there than I’ve seen so I may fail to mention something) and what I can glean from the gameplay trailer released a week or two ago (when I mention things from the trailer I may provide timestamps, your best bet will be to use the previous link to find them). So if you happen to have more information feel free to let me know.

Let’s start with the basic premise. Two hundred years have passed since the end of Oblivion. The Empire is in pretty sorry shape, and the Elder Scrolls predict the return of dragons into the world, the events of the previous games apparently being signs pointing towards it. Apparently most of the fuss is about a big nasty guy by the name of Alduin, the World Eater. Wait... didn’t WoW just do something similar to that with Cataclysm? Nice, Bethesda. Anyway, giving them the benefit of the doubt and moving on. Skyrim is apparently on the brink of civil war and as usual your character is destined for greatness and in prison at the start of the game. Tamriel really has a great parole system; they let someone out of prison and they go save the world. You supposedly are the last of the dragonborn (the same line as the Emperor and Martin from Oblivion) a group that expelled dragons long ago (of course it’s a bloodline but you can be any race, how will that work out?). You can learn the dragon’s language and then use it in “dragon shouts” that have a myriad of affects. As an aside- I have no idea how these will work in game, but the way they’re presented in the gameplay trailer (around 1:07) is freaking AWESOME!

On the gameplay front there looks like a lot of new stuff. First up is the leveling system. They’re removing the class system and major and minor skill setup. Instead you’ll level up based on how many skills you’ve leveled up out of the whole and more value will be assigned to higher level skills. For example: Blade is at 37 and Destruction is at 12. You raise each one, but the Blade level will contribute more towards your next level than the level in Destruction. It kind of reminds me of Runescape. You leveled your various skills and then your level was calculated out of those levels. If we’re lucky perhaps Skyrim will put more weight in general behind combat skills and less behind less combat ready skills (so in leveling Blade and Speechcraft each from 37 to 38 you would get more value from the Blade skill) since I see a point to those skills, but in the end the game is about fighting and skills that don’t help you with that aren’t doing much for you in the end (you can’t slay dragons with Speechcraft and Mercantilism and I somehow don’t see diplomacy as an option). They’re also adding some new leveling options, allowing you to pick between an upgrade to health, stamina, or magicka each level (in addition to a health upgrade each level) and added a list of perks to choose from.

It also looks like they’ve pulled the spellcrafting feature from the game as in the GameInformer article they were able to give a specific number of spells that will be available (85) to “dedicated collectors.” Of course, it also looks like they could be going the way of Fable III and allowing you to have one spell equipped to each hand. GameInformer also mentions combining spells. Whether that means using two spells at once for fancy effects (like the AoE fire spell shown in the trailer) or just using them in conjunction with each other, I can’t tell you. I have also not heard anything about enchanting, so it’s unclear what they’ll do with that. What I’d like to see would be something resembling the sigil stones from Oblivion. Give us the various enchantments and just let us choose where to put them. Not sure if it would be an improvement, but it might be an interesting way of doing things.

Combat seems to be getting a bit of an upgrade as well. They’ve confirmed the addition of two weapon fighting along with the above mentioned two spells at once (though I’m a little worried that we’ll go back to Morrowind’s “magic or weapon” system rather than keep with Oblivion’s system which let you have a weapon out and still cast spells). Also, it looks like they may have added stealth kills finally. Around 1:32 of the gameplay trailer it looks like we see a player character grabbing another and slitting their neck. One of my biggest annoyances when playing stealth is sneak attacking someone and having them turn around and start attack me. Hopefully this means they’ll be putting an end to that.

There was also a bit of information about interfaces and conversations, but I’ll leave that for you to look into; it didn’t seem important enough for me to comment on. For the most part the game looks great and if they can actually pull it off what they’re going for it’ll no doubt give Bethesda another Game of the Year under their belt. Here’s hoping.

Wolfgang out.

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger.
Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
-Mel Brooks

The Elder Scrolls Rant

Well, I wanted to post something the last two days, since I wanted to get three posts a week on your standard Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, but I've been busy. Thankfully my spring break started yesterday so I should have 10 days free to maybe start up a back-log. Now on to the important stuff.

As you may or may not be aware (if you have your head under a rock or just don't follow gaming news) Bethesda is coming out with the fifth installment in their popular Elder Scrolls game series. So far, there's not much out about it but I'll give you what I know and what I think about it tomorrow. But first, it's back story time. As with Dragon Age II I feel it's important to understanding where I'm coming from before hearing my opinion on the game. However this will take a little bit longer than Dragon Age: Origins did, plus I'm actually playing Oblivion at the moment so I can rant much more effectively on it.

Of course, I have to take another step back first. I started playing The Elder Scrolls with Morrowind. That was fun, but it took a while to find something I could actually play. I started out with a mage, but the fact that your magicka didn't replenish on its own kinda killed that for me. I then tried a stealth approach, but that bombed as I was a little too sucky at the start and didn't have the patience to work my way all the way up to master thief. So instead I went through a long list of mixed and matched characters until I had  the first couple hours of gameplay memorized. Eventually though I finally started up a heavy armor/long blade fighter and actually got around to playing through the game. Of course, once I actually got into the game I still had to periodically forget that I was in a sandbox and just buckle down to doing something.

Oblivion came out and they made a few changes, some good some bad. They condensed some skills, removed others, added blocking and manipulation of your surroundings, simplified enchanting (though made it a pain to get to), made enemies scale with your character, and had magicka regenerate. With the exception of the first and last items on the list, I'm not sure I like most of the changes. Enchanting especially irks me. While they did fix “on strike” enchantments on bows and made constant effects more accessible they also greatly limited what was possible. No longer could you create a ring to let you shoot fireballs or walk on air (technically that's a removed spell, but I still miss it). You can only create "On Strike" weapons and "Constant Effect" armors/clothing and the constant effect list is much shorter. This removes a lot of options like my armbands of regeneration I was fond of in Morrowind and does nothing to fix the 100% chameleon trick which still pretty much breaks the game.

Anyway I’m still working my way through Oblivion as for a good year I couldn’t find a character and a play style to suit me. You see, Oblivion’s scaling enemies presents a bit of a problem. As you become more powerful you have to contend with more powerful creatures. You can circumvent this however if you level the right way. Unfortunately that way is very tedious. So it’s a balance between cash, level, and combat ability. Do I want to/can I find a combination that lets me just play straight and see what happens? Or try to get around the level scaling by grinding to death. Currently I’m trying the former, again, but I’ve managed to set something up that’s not TOO bad. Helps that I can abuse the crap out of invisibility spells. So far stealth is the only thing I can stand. Straight up fighting is far too messy, requiring too many health potions or healing spells (blocking only reduces damage rather than actually preventing it) and magic just tends to add Magicka and current spell to the list of crap you need to keep track of which means either opening your menu a lot or hoping hotkeys work (I’m playing on the 360 and I’ve decided it was a bad decision as the control is slugish and I get four reliable hotkeys and four that are much less so). So I’m left with stealth, which seems fairly effective for dealing with most everything now that I’ve reached a significant level with the right skills (and spells).

One of the big issues is that magic is both overpowered and underpowered at the same time. It can do just about anything with enough Magicka behind it and is insanely easy to train. However, on the other hand you need to get enough to then support all those spells you need to use. Morrowind solved this problem with the use of the Enchant skill and enchanted items. You could put pretty much any spell as an enchantment and cast it from there. This would circumvent any problems you had from being a fighter or thief as long as you could soul trap (which was pretty easy to shove onto a weapon or on another enchanted item). This could get very expensive as enchanting items yourself was fairly risky business. However, Morrowind once again had a solution: it allowed you to bundle purchases and sales together so you could trade with merchants and get the full amount for your items (if they only had 1k gold you sell a 5k item and buy 4k worth of merchandise, you could then come back tomorrow and another 1k back to them, repeat till you don’t have anything to sell). Oblivion, however, uses an instant sell/buy function so at best you’re getting 2k gold (the best merchants in the game have 1k gold and you can add 1k to their available gold at 100 Mercantilism) for items worth several times that. Of course they’ll still charge you full price for that enchanted necklace worth 8k gold when they bought it off of you for only 1k or 2k gold.

Another problem I’ve run across in Oblivion is a combination of the level scaling an quick travel options. From the very start of the game you can instantly travel from one side of Cyrodiil to the other. To me this is a problem, as one of the big draws of the game is the beautiful landscapes and the opportunity to explore them. However, why should I bother when I can instantly warp wherever I like? Admittedly you often have to do some exploring to find most of the quest locations and you can’t warp to places outside of a city or town until you’ve found them. I just can’t shake the feeling that Cyrodiil is smaller than Vvardenfell, despite claims to the contrary. Maybe it has something to do with the rocky, volcanic, and alien qualities of the latter, but I think the work involved also had a big effect on it. As they say: The journey is just as important as the destination. Oblivion just doesn’t give you much incentive to actually make that journey. In fact, with the new horses it’s almost discouraged. It takes approximately 2 seconds to get on and off of a horse and while you’re riding across the country you’ll encounter quite a number of creatures that want to kill you for one reason or another. Unless you’ve got some mad perception or a lot of detect life enchantments equipped you’re likely to be caught either on your horse or in mid dismount. Which is plenty of time for your new friend to rip a few holes in your hide before you can reciprocate the gesture. So you’re options are: travel manually by horse and take some additional damage while dismounting, travel by foot and take even longer  to get somewhere, or fast travel and miss everything.

Bah, now I want to stop playing Oblivion and pick Morrowind back up, but I need to finish the thing sometime before November and the sooner the better. Tomorrow I will take a look at Skyrim. Hopefully I’ll have it up earlier too.

Wolfgang out.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
-Albert Einstein