Being a full-time college/university student for a little over 4 years now, I really learned to pinch my pennies. That shiny $60 game released today may well be worth $20 a few months from now if you’re willing to wait it out. Instant gratification is all well and good… but there’s something to be said for frugality.

My current favorite of the lot: Mechanarium.   Sure, completable in one evening, but a real feast for the senses with puzzles that are just right in terms of difficulty.

Indeed, between Direct2Drive’s “21 days of Christmas” sale and Steam’s Holiday sale, it has been a very good month to be a frugal gamer.  I suspect I can blame the recession for a lot of this – with everyone’s wallets being a bit tighter, purveyors of fine digital entertainment have been forced to make compromises.  Some of the more interesting deals I picked up:

• Genre-rocking immersive behemoth Grand Theft Auto IV for $7.50 (75% off).
• Quality medieval games Drakensang and Mount and Blade for $5.00 apiece.  (80% off)
• Excellent indy games Audiosurf, Braid, Samorost 2, and the Zombie Cow adventure games for $2.50 apiece.  (75-80% off).
• Innovative if forgettable genre breaker Mirror’s Edge for $5.00 (75% off).
• Indy city builder/RPG hybrid Hinterland: Orc Lords $6.50 (75% off).
• A city builder/RPG hybrid that works the other way around, Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim for $7.50. (75% off)

In addition to the “wow” deals above, I also pulled some pretty decent 50% off deals such as:

• Quite good indy-made Mechanarium and Torchlight for $10 apiece.
• Behemoths of yesteryear, Prototype and Command And Conquer Red Alert 3 for $20 apiece.

This is to say nothing for some gifts I received this year, including the complete Lucasarts adventure pack, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and the Borderlands Zombie Island DLC.

Overall, my gaming cup runneth over once again. Through, like many aspiring game designers, most of these games won’t get more than a few hours of play from me, it seems I’ve now a goodly amount of research materials.

Having the week of Thanksgiving off from classes has been nice, but I haven’t had a whole lot to feel thankful for.  My game design hit a bad turn, and I haven’t actually played many games so much as I have wasted a lot of time this week.

I’m still working on actually establishing a schedule of what to do, and when.  I seem to be a largely helpless soul who really can’t control his destiny all that well.

• I blame MMORPGs.  They’ve somewhat trained me to grind away the hours endlessly doing nothing particularly enjoyable or productive.  As far as games go, MMORPGs certainly know how to occupy a quantity of your time, but they generally don’t do so at a very good quality.  They’re escapism personified but, at the same time, a very poor substitute for reality.
• I blame my age.  When you’re 32-years-old, you’ve probably got enough sense in your head not to give a damn about picking up virtual trinkets. Consequently, I spent a lot of time in MMORPGs not playing a single character but rather bouncing from one character to another, which has actually strengthened my tendency towards cognitive dissonance.
• I blame derivative design.  If MMORPGs were something more than grinds, perhaps they could have been something great.  It’s this desire for them to be something more that causes me to keep trying them, long after I knew better.

The bottom line is this: this is no longer an MMORPG-centric blog.  It hasn’t been for awhile.  The reasons are outlined above.  I’ve lost faith.  MMORPGs are no longer special, there’s hundreds of them, and they’re seemingly unable to do anything particularly interesting.

Other types of games, on the other hand – those have some potential.  They’re less focused on being a staging ground for mass hysteria and more focused on being genuinely entertaining.  The details are many and varied, but suffice to say a developer’s motivation changes when they’re not occupied with stringing people along for $15 a month.

Of course, part of the trouble is that I’m going through some things right now…

Wednesday, I hit a dead end in my game design.  I took most of Wednesday, Thursday, and today (Friday) off reinstalling and playing Mass Effect.  I hope to return to development soon but, with only a few days left before it’s turn to return to classes, why bother?   It’s not like I’d have anything definitively finished before I return to classes.  I should probably spend this weekend boning up on remembering what class-related materials I no doubt forgot over the past 7 days.

Honestly, I’m beginning to second guess even returning to classes right now.  I was making great progress before I went back to school with game development.  With my financial situation being what it is, I don’t really feel secure enough to be a full-time student.

What I really need is a job that leaves me enough time afterwards to dabble with game development.  To provide some level of discipline and reassure me that if my parents passed way I won’t be out on the streets.  However, it seems that nobody of quality is hiring in my neck of the woods, or has been hiring in a manner accessible to an outsider, for years.

Thus, I’m really not at classes as a student so much as a prisoner hoping his serving time there and procuring a degree will deliver an easy way out of purgatory.  I’m not real confident that a line on my resume is going to make any difference at this point.  No wonder I can’t enjoy games lately – I’m a caged bird.

Reading my save game information, subtracting the 3-12:55 “flying time” statistic from the 1-4:55 “time saved using SETA” statistic, I can say with a fair amount of reliability that I’ve played X³: Terran Conflict over the last week for a solid 2 days, 8 hours.  (With up to an additional 4-8 hours lost to resuming saved games.)

At the end of my last Blog entry, I was wondering if this game’s end game was really worth it.  As of now, I’ve just finished the first chapter of the half dozen (give or take) in the game, the titular “Terran Conflict.” I’m now flying an extremely powerful corvette which can swat about 90% of the enemies in the game like flies.  Thus, I’m probably in a fairly good position to hazard a guess how the end game is like.

Well, in terms of how the end game feels in comparison with the beginning game, I would have to say that the main difference is simply that expensive equipment and ships are a bit more accessible.  Naturally, the more traders and facilities are working for you and the tougher the missions you have the gear to tackle, the greater amount of money you are making. Being able to afford better gear more frequently becomes inevitable.

Compared to smaller ships, bigger ships are understandably considerably easier targets, resulting in less enemy fire avoided, but are functionally invulnerable to ships a few classes before them because the shield generation exceeds what the opposition’s weapons are capable of putting out.   At the extreme top scale of things, you might have a prototype carrier (if not several) supported by a variable host of missile frigates, fighters, bombers, marine boarding parties, and so on. There’s even quite a bit of code support to keep them automatically resupplied.

The question becomes one of, “what is there to do once you have obtained great power in this game?” It’s a question I apply to many games that have the players grind away. What’s the ultimate purpose? If you’re getting more powerful simply to get more powerful, then it’s a very hollow thing. Having power loses all context without a goal.

Given that I have navigation relay satellites monitoring most of it, I can now see what’s going on in the X-Universe.  It pretty much involves a few roving packs of Xenon and Khaak in an otherwise relatively peaceful universe.  (The pirates are a comparatively benign threat that can usually be fended off by an adequately equipped freighter, with the possible exception of the powerful Yaki cartel.)

Though the game does attempt to scale threats based off of your current combat rating and the number of ships under your control, there’s only a few sectors of ultimate evil to purge – and I understand that enemies will respawn in these sectors anyway. So, regardless of whatever military power I might have at my beck and call, my ability to instill lasting peace of the galaxy is capped.

I could turn back to a largely economic pursuit, building some space stations to fulfill the various shortages in the universe.  However, the end result of this is mostly just earning money which I could use to buy more junk. When push comes to shove, it’s pretty much a bunch of pointless virtual pack-ratting against an uncaring universe.

So, no, I’d have to say that overall the end game was not particularly what I was looking for – insofar as finding a meaningful goal in a game is reasonable.

Oh well.  Wall of text about what I did in my 3 1/2 days of play follow.

Beginning as a Humble Merchant in Argon Prime, the first order of business was trade and scouting out nearby sectors of space.  I soon fell into the habit of performing missions to earn money for my freighter fleet to trade with, as I would soon spend myself fairly thin by purchasing even more freighters or equipment.  This initial grinding for logistics would probably be evident in any of the various starts of the game, but the Humble Merchant start was quite adept at it.

A few days in, I had about half the universe mapped and a half-dozen autonomous traders earning a modest fortune for me, I decided to get started on the Terran Conflict mission chain.  I took a Pelican military transport carrying my favorite fighter craft acquisitions (an Argon Nova, Yaki Susanowa Raider, and Teladi Kestral scouts I had to replace frequently due to their fragility) most of the way across the universe to Omicron Lyrae so that I could finally begin the Terran Conflict campaign.   If it weren’t for my jumpdrive, I probably would have been fried by the Xenon along the way.

Alas, though good times were had with my prized military transport and its wing of fighters, it was not to survive the campaign.  They were sacrificed distracting a Xenon Q frigate that wandered too close when I was in the process of repairing a Split Caiman freighter I had captured as a part of the Terran Conflict mission chain.  If I let that freighter be destroyed, I would have failed the campaign, so I beamed everything worth keeping aboard the freighter and sicced my Pelican and its fighters on the Xenon Q, buying myself time to escape.   I barely escaped with a few hull points.  I was out a few million credits, but it was credits well spent, as it was probably the most exciting thing that happened the whole campaign.  (Other than ship capturing, which is an activity well-supported by music and sound bites to be very dramatic even though it is a fairly non-interactive activity).

By the end of the campaign, I was flying a corvette capable of taking down anything frigate-sized or smaller with minimal difficulty.  I had reached the end of my patience with ejecting from my ship and using a repair laser on it, and spending 5 million credits to repair my ship did not seem like a great option either, so I installed a plugin that allows for marines to perform gradual repairs to ships.  I ended up doing most of the repairs anyway – the gradual repairs are a little too gradual, really – but this plugin probably prevented me from quitting the game outright from the tedium of keeping my ships maintained. Besides, it’s a great idea that space marines are useful for more than boarding fodder.

So here I sit, at the end of the Terran Conflict’s main storyline and wondering if it’s worth going into one of the other story lines.  To a great extent, I recognize the Terran Conflict as being a tutorial, so perhaps I should try at least one more to see if things become a bit more exciting.

Good Golly, did I ever play a lot of X³ over the weekend.  It was split half between Reunion and Terran Conflict, as I learned I could pick up the v2.0 version of Terran Conflict for $10 from GameSpot as they made the transition to the $40 Gold version.

Compared to Reunion, Terran Conflict might still be an X³ game on the same engine, but it’s got about 4 years more features crammed into it.  Finding a exact feature list is hard, and that’s because it can basically be summed up in one word: more.  More equipment, ships, stations, factions, space to explore, and missions to perform along with various GUI improvements.

Majestic, Isn’t it?

I feel fortunate that I’m playing Terran Conflict a year after the game was originally released, because it was initially pretty bug ridden (whereas Reunion was fairly bug free).  Egosoft has been hammering out bugs ever since and releasing giant patches every few months.  As it stands today, the problems are minor – the worst would be occasional temporary lockups.

Here I thought I was addicted to Dragon Age, but something about X³ has exceeded even the attraction to well-crafted Bioware excellence, and I believe that is the promise of a truly epic end game experience.  The game starts you off as a fair nobody against a backdrop of a giant universe, but through regular diligence and heroics (and the almighty power of reloading saved games in the event of death) you can become the controlling entity of a a large armada.   Space battles can get really epic, and you can definitively shape the events of your X-Universe instance.

Dramatic “wooshing” sounds omitted.

Unfortunately, the building of said galactic empire takes a lot of time.  Starting anew with a small freight ship and a scout ship, it takes a several good trades (somewhere between 6 and 12 depending on the quality) to double my fortune adequately to purchase another freight ship.  That’s just my first two ships out of what will eventually be a personal fleet of dozens – even hundreds.   This is to say nothing for constructing space stations or raising marines.  While each thing you control is a potential workhouse to be exploited to generate even more credits, the task of generating enough credits to reach the end game remains monumental.

I did, at least, find a couple of good ways to cut corners:

• A repair laser has been added to space suits.  Normally, a ship costs an amount to repair somewhat proportional to the overall ship cost versus the level of damage.  The repair laser does it for free (albeit slowly).  Paired with missions where you can buy damaged ships minus their cost to repair, the repair laser becomes a money gun that generates thousands of credits of value in seconds.
• Another type of mission involves reclaiming stray ships which have lost their pilots.  Honest fellow that I am, I prefer to send these ships back to their owners.  However, sometimes that’s just not possible.  The solution?  Send that ship to the nearest dry dock and sell it for several times more than what you’re being offered to complete the mission.  Ethical enough considering it just gets blown up by the space cops when time runs out to complete the mission, but it does result in a hit to my reputation.

As damning as these might appear to the overall game balance, an odd 400,000 credits here is minor; this game is epic enough that even formidable-seeming shortcuts to fortune are minor in the grand scheme of things.

And trade, and trade, and trade…

I’ve found myself driving about in my scout performing missions while my Freighters are busily trading, and this is probably the way the scenario is meant to be played as it’s a whole lot more profitable than otherwise.  Most of the missions offer absolutely trivial amounts of credits, but the thing about the missions isn’t so much the credits you’re being paid as the opportunities they bring:

• Finding something to shoot in X³ used to involve roving the space lanes frequented by pirates and hoping one appears.  You can still do that, but now you’ve also the option of taking a Fight mission (designated by red crosshairs) which brings (spawns) the enemy to you.
• Trade missions (designated by a credit sign) include not only the aforementioned ship purchase opportunities but also trades you won’t normally find.
• Build missions (designated by 3 green bricks) assure the dynamic growth of the X-Universe by instructing the player to see the difficult-to-program details of constructing new space stations through.
• Think missions (designated by a light bulb) run a unpredictable gauntlet of odd jobs, including the aforementioned ship retrieval type.   I’ve found some good credits can made from the Asteroid scanning missions.  The covert missions are a good combat exercise.

Ima Chargin’ My Laser!

I hate grinds… or so I tell myself.  However, perhaps a large part of it involves having an adequate payoff, and something about the dynamic approach to X³’s end game feels as though it has one.   Time will tell if this feeling is correct, as I could see things shaking out two ways:

1. Hopefully, I’ll get to the end game and find that it’s constant excitement as I try to hold down my galactic empire versus the various threats that crop up at every corner, creating a nice Flow situation.
2. However, it could be that upon my arrival in the end game I will find out the universe is completely uneventful, the computer-controlled alien races (my sole opposition in this single player game) are wimpy pushovers, and thus the entire game manifests as a whole lot of fluff and unrealized potential.

It’s too early to say for certain, but the early signs are encouraging.  The AI puts up a good fight, and there seems to be a whole lot more X-Universe than there is me.  X³:Terran Conflict is definitely a Mastermind’s game, and I’m looking forward to playing more of it tonight.

Dragon Age is currently rocking my world.

The main reason why? Final Fantasy XII’s Gambit system is here.   As I mentioned last year, I loved the gambit system.  It always annoys me that in RPGs that you can’t set up a bunch of standing orders for obvious situations – no brainers are not the kind of micromanagement that makes for a good game. For example:

* Low on health? Drink a potion, stupid.
* For most spells in any RPG, it’s usually obvious in what situations you should use them, so do it.
* If you’ve got this ability that does a little extra at no significant cost (e.g. the usual Warrior “kick” ability) it’s pretty obvious you should hammer out that ability as much as possible.

And so on. The Gambit system (“Tactics” in Dragon Age) is all about this – you can set up certain conditions that certain abilities, items, modes are activated. All the unnecessary micromanagement in the RPG is streamlined while your involvement as a player is not eliminated because, after all, you set up the rules in which they happen.

On a whole other level, the main reason why is Dragon Age is rocking my world is because the storyline rocks. It’s very solid, and delivered in a very compelling manner. Bioware is known for presenting a cast of characters you can really connect with in their game, and the ones in Dragon Age are perhaps the most potent yet. The custom fantasy world they created for this game is also quite interesting in the minor details they introduced to the usual fantasy fare – the Darkspawn are really an excellent set of ultimate bad guys. Like Sauron’s Orc legions (LOTR) if he had twisted divine providence going for him. (No, that’s not a spoiler, that’s pretty much the entire intro movie.)

Those who say Dragon Age is a good substitute for Baldur’s Gate are suffering from nostalgia. This game is way better than any Baldur’s Gate game, it has whole new levels of mechanics and refinement that make Baldur’s Gate look like crap in comparison. It’s not just the gambit/tactics system (though that is a big selling point for me) but little things like having a unified party inventory.

… is pretty awesome.  Gearbox basically takes all their know-how about making a satisfying FPS and marries it to a surprisingly good understanding of what makes satisfying in-game loot and quest grinding.

My only critique against Borderlands would be one that applies to nearly any game: if you play it long enough, it’ll bore you.  The thing is, the game has a lot of retread, bringing you back through the same areas to overcome the same procession of things that want to kill you.  If you love shooting stuff – and the FPS/RPG fusion in Borderlands assures it’s a pretty entertaining activity – then all this repetition won’t bother you, but once the gameplay wears thin what you have is something thoroughly predictable: a grind.

That said, I’m not regretting spending $50 on Borderlands.  Gearbox has done the right thing to stave off the grind by spacing out the game elements in good intervals.  It’s plays a bit like an MMORPG with better-than-usual-pacing, the satisfaction of a good first-person-shooter, and an addictive loot balance.   I’m completely willing to overlook the 4 player cap on the grounds that I don’t particularly need other groups competing for my content anyway.  Besides, you don’t have to shell out $15 a month for the privilege of being able to fight your way through Borderlands’ expansive world.

Sagging Tights

What I do regret spending $50 on (plus $99 for a discounted 6 month subscription) is Champions Online.   Burnout reached true fruition two weekends ago and now I can barely bring myself to look at the game.

Blood Moon was a potentially saving grace, but it turned out to be fairly underwhelming.  Zombie Apocolypse was a batch identical public quests with timers so long it just caused the players to bunch up and completely steamroll them from the population involved.  The Werewolf versus Hunter event was just a shoddy meaningless PvP kill tally quest – more of a chore than anything else.  I don’t get it, they seemed to understand population flow in City of Heroes?

Ultimately, they should have spent less time working on making Champions Online look spooky and more time fixing their broken game.  The number of genuinely useful (not replaced with better alternative) powers in the game is somewhere around 25% of what they’re offering.   I’ve been dealing with Rituals dispelling Circles for almost a month.  Little problems like these are tearing the players away from the game bit by bit.

Blood Moon’s real legacy is that they’ve hemorrhaged a lot of players by setting the wrong priorities, and I really hope the game is able to stay afloat.   Judging by the free weekend they’re conducting, they seem blissfully unaware of the shaky ground they’re operating on right now.  The game’s about two months of hard game balance tweaking from what I’d want to show anyone.

What’s worse, it seems the spirit to do the innovative over the easy seems to have left them.  They have a Public Quest and Queued Instance architecture, what the hell are they doing wasting their time adding inferior “kill 100 x” quests or mere door missions, respectively?

Of course, this isn’t the first time a game I followed for months turned out not to pan out.  Here’s hoping they catch a second wind before my 6 months are up, or there’s probably not going to be a Champions Online there to renew my subscription to.

I’ve often mentioned on my BYOND blog that I was “busily burning myself out from Champions Online” on the grounds that I know it’s not that all that productive to spend a lot of time merely playing a game when I could be making one.  However, in a perfect world, I would never really achieve being burnt out because the game would continue to entertain indefinitely.

One of the main reasons Champions Online has kept me this long is the same reason that City of Heroes managed to pull so many hours from me: because there’s so many different ways you can create a character.  However, at only a fraction of the time City of Heroes has kept me, it appears that I am now thoroughly burnt out from Champions Online.

In my not-really-a-farewell-post-so-much-as-a-feedback-post-where-I-explain-I-won’t-be-playing-as-much thread I basically sum of the problem as a lack of true diversity of play, along with an admission that people get bored of any game eventually.  I probably put somewhere around 250-400 hours into the game, so that’s not bad, but it’s not 1600 City of Heroes hours either.

I haven’t really got to the end game yet, my highest are in their early 30s. Maybe I’ll grind (*shudder*) there just because I’m curious to see how the story ends. The tough part for an altaholic like myself is picking my poison… but it is easier to do if you’re in a mindset that there is no right answer right now.

Alternatives

If I had a some spare change on hand, I think I would look into Fallen Earth.  I played the beta, and one thing that impressed me about the game is that they got the MMORPG focus right.  Fallen Earth is a game with reasonable gameplay that nonetheless manages to hook the player because they get invested in their part in the game world.  Champions Online is a game with good gameplay that unfortunately doesn’t have much in the way of meaningful player investment – it has a very hands off, casual feel to it.

On the other hand, Fallen Earth was a buggy SOB and incredibly kludgey in places.  If you want to wield a machine gun in that game, somebody (probably you) would have spent hundreds of hours in crafting so you could.  It’s remarkable just how endearing the game is considering what it puts the players through.  Consequently, I  wouldn’t spend more than $20 on the box, even if I would spend $15/mo on the subscription.

Considering this, I’m relatively content with my 6 month subscription to Champions Online…  I’m just not going to play it very much.  I do have some interesting little games to play instead.

• Brutal Legend – I could have rented it, but I decided to buy it because I really wanted to support Double Fine.   I haven’t regretted the purchase.
• Scribblenauts – somewhat, anyway: being able to summon up most reasonable objects you can think of loses its pull when most of those items are remarkably useless or their use is defeated by the overly simple physics.  Still, it manages to cudgel a chortle out of me when incredible and unexpected things happen, so I’m not done with it.
• Professor Layton And The Curious Village – I’ll probably be canceling my GameFly subscription again due to a general lack of time to really justify a game subscription plan right now, but probably not before I spend a little more money I don’t have to keep this diamond.
• Mount & Blade and Drakensang: The Dark Eye – The only two games really worth $5 apiece when Direct2Drive ran it’s “turns 5″ campaign.  (Although this is coming at it avoiding RTS and FPS.)

However, none of these games really take up the same amount of time as would an MMORPG, and that’s good.  I think my time would better be spent working on my own little creations.

My Champions Online alt-a-holicism has rapidly accelerated to an incomprehensible state of flux.   Am I bored of this game?  Not quite… but I can’t really commit to a single character, either.

To read the forums, it seems the players a whole lot whinier than usual, but I don’t think it’s the game.  I think it’s just that they’re a bunch of WoW refugees and those guys don’t have the manpower to enforce good forum etiquette.

However, there is some level of justification to the whining in that there have been pretty radical patches and a lot of the aspects of super-heroism have been well nerfed.  I am not just talking about needed changes to bring the game balance into line, it would seem that the developers are favoring mediocrity.

For example, in nerfing the “Never Strikes Twice?” advantage on Lightning Arc to be +30% damage on held targets instead of +100%.  You can spend the same amount of advantage points to get a +20% all-conditional damage boost, and so you’re basically looking at a highly conditional situation you can barely exploit in which you can get a 10% advantage out of while operating at a 20% deficit the majority of the time.

A closeup of ASCII Oakley, scourge of Snake Gulch. If you comment on the size of her guns, she'll drill ya.

This adjustment is, in one word: boring.   It is not a word you want to apply to anything in your game.  Santa’s got to be a whole lot more generous with what’s he’s got in his magic bag for the kids to be excited about what he’s giving them.

On the other hand, a lot of the adjustments were clearly needed.  Mini-mines was an instant, medium-cost Tier 2 power that was doing more damage than changed up, high-cost Tier 3 powers.   Perhaps the reason why the nerfs seem so radical is that there’s a communication problem resulting in the wrong powers getting adjusted along with the right?

I’ve got a six month subscription so, for me, the answer is easy: wait and see if they get around to realizing this on their own before those 6 months are up.  I just hope the game manages to remain afloat.

To an extent, I’m having fun.  I do enjoy thinking.  They just gave all 8 of my characters, ranging between level 12 and 29, a free full retcon.  Oh, the fun I could have playing with these!  I swear, I’m going to give myself an aneurysm trying to solve that age old question, “which, out of the infinite choices in character generation this game provides, is right for me?”

Alternatives

Nearly a year ago, I said I’d grab Drakensang if it came down to $20.  A Direct2Drive promotion has the game on sale for $5!  It’s downloading as I write this.

I also paused mid-completion of Chrono Cross, I should probably finish that while I’ve still a console that can read the disc.

I’ve been working hard on burning out from Champions Online so that I can get back to work on my game and, while I have not quite reached this goal, I have at least reached the level of familiar alt-a-holicism.  Today, I go over my various experiments with character concepts, so you don’t have to.

My first weekend was spent with Shifter Prime.  In a way, he was a bit of a careful foray to familiarize myself with the release-state game, as he heavily emphasized durability while using powers from a set I knew I enjoyed from back in beta: Force.  This power set lent well to a Endurance/Constitution focus, and there was really nothing in Gadgeteering against the idea of taking them, too.  Offensively and defensively, a pretty respectful character, capable of taking quite a few hitpoints of damage while throwing out Force Cascade, Orbital Strike, and having both Munitions Bots and Field Drones out to provide even more support.

My Endurance/Constitution focus turned out to be a little too heavy – everything this character did was rather belabored.  I was tired of having to resummon my pets who (without any bolstering from presence) tended to die whenever something sneezed on them.   Bowling for bad guys with Force is fun, but monotonous when that was my entire range of moves: knock em’ down, they get up, repeat.  The pets were having more fun than I did.  While I knew that Personal Force Field was not really built for a protracted siege, I did not know about the maximum damage per hit limit on the personal force field, and so I was really pretty helpless against the big hitters.

My second weekend was spent with Contrast.  I had decided to draw from the Telekinetics and Telepathy pools but not limit myself to both.  Since I was already heavy on Ego from Telekinesis, I made his secondary statistic Dexterity, and he does very respectable damage. However, he was wiser for my experiences, with much more rounded stats – he had reasonable scores in everything but Strength.    He would not take pets, so would not have to worry about maintaining them, and he would hopefully take some crowd control (for to the interesting tactical implications).

Without an emphasis on Constitution, his durability normally would have been lacking, but Contrast had a core power synergy that worked well.  By combining Ebon Shield (advantaged to absorb more damage the more that was taken) with Regeneration, and throwing out Ego Sprites (advantaged to heal) between bouts of turtling, Contrast had a remarkable ability to turn around an otherwise impossible fight.  When operating like this, he could be more durable than Shifter Prime, a character built for durability.

I originally planned to use Psionic Vortex to inflict damage while turtling, but Psionic Vortex’s damage is currently way too low for this intention.   I’ve also found much less room for crowd control than I expected I would, because Contrast tends to be too busy attacking.   He’s also really no better at a cosmic-level fight than Shifter Prime in anything other than a support role – Shifter Prime can survive hits Contrast can’t.

These minor concerns aside, Contrast has been a very successful experiment, a nice multi-role character that would operate in a defensive, offensive, or support role — he even tended to be amongst the top three scoring list of every PvP match.

Invitation To Distraction

Neither character was particularly broken.  Unlike City of Heroes, I’d yet to feel as though any character was completely beyond salvaging.  The retconning mechanic makes it easy to change any recent power acquisition.   If I was not able to afford to retcon out what I did not like, simply gaining a few more levels would earn the necessary power or advantage points to turn things around.  Even if I had reached level 40, with no more levels to earn, what else is there to do but to earn resources towards retconning out what I don’t like about my character?

Fate intervened to bring about another reason to roll up more alts.  A couple days ago, I learned that the developers were about to drop a free total retcon.  So I created some new characters specifically so that, in future times, I would have that ace in the hole if I decided to advance those characters.  Those characters remain mothballed, but alt-a-holicism had taken root.  I kept creating new characters even after the free total retcons had already been distributed.

My horizons had been broadened a bit, and I realized that there was one power set I knew I just had to try out: Sorcery.  Sorcery is a superbly versatile set that essentially had about three or four ways to do anything, and that’s just the kind of thing an alt-a-holic like me can get behind.

After taking Hazzard (a new pure Sorceror) up to level 9, I tried out Circle of Primal Dominion and got pretty excited.  Here was a power that apparently let me stand in one place, regenerating a massive amount of damage while being fairly resistant to knockback, and reap destruction upon my foes.

What potential awesome could I get out of combining Circles, Sigil, and Aura powers of various roles?  With Contrast, I could switch between an offensive, defensive, or even in a support role… but with this new Sorcery concept, I might be able to do all three simultaneously!

The rise and fall of the Cybernaut

Then I had a really interesting idea: what if I combined Sorcery’s Circles with the Power Armor’s natural mitigation and ability to toggle on multiple channels of continuous destruction?   In theory, I’d finally have my Cosmic foe combatant, capable of rooting himself down with Circle of Arcane power while unloading big damage.

The idea kept getting better: throw in a Sorcery support passive and have both Field Drones and Munitions Bots out, and I could emphasize Intelligence and Presense and be some kind of deadly pet master!

The Cybernaut was the result.  Creating and advancing this new character consumed Friday.  As of level 18, I’m about ready to give him up entirely.

That problem was mostly the choice of Power Armor, which turned out to have a fairly bad synergy with Sorcery.  A Power Armor hero’s attacks are mostly cones and beams (with a few AOE attacks).   To get really good use out of cones and beams, you need to be moving to sync them up with your targets.  Sorcery, however, is focused on sitting still and claiming one area.  The resulting dissonance was a death knell for the character.

On top of this, I was disappointed with how much damage I was getting out of Power Armor.  Investing three powers (not counting the energy builder) in Power Armor to have three channels of attack earned me Concussor Beams, Micromunitions, and Mini Gun.   It would have worked great if all three worked together for continuous damage, but the Concussor Beams (where the majority of my single-target damage was supposed to come from) were a massive energy hog that would soon leave me completely tapped.  I could have achieved a better damage to energy ratio from just spamming a single ranked up AOE power (e.g. Force Cascade), and it’s possible the DPS would have been better too.

So, for the first time, it seems I’ve managed to create a character who is relatively irredeemable in Champions Online.   Maybe Targeting Computer and Circle of Arcane Power, operating together with a bunch of recovery gear, might have solved my energy problems to allow me to perpetually keep my three channels of attack up… but levels won’t solve the problem that the Power Armor/Sorcery combination required I be in two places at once.  I could keep slogging onward and see what some new powers and advantage points would uncover, but that seems awfully masochistic considering he’s operating on such a shaky foundation.  Maybe another total retcon credit will show up sooner or later, and that’s 18 levels I could spend on whatever.

Next Distraction

I still think Sorcery has a lot of potential.   However, because a Sorceror is stationary, and most of the powers in the game are built around the players being mobile, a Sorceror has to pick carefully to mix and match that set with anything.

Staying with pure Sorcery is not a bad idea – the set already has both versatility and power, so you have everything you need.  If I wanted to throw in a curve ball (perhaps for the originality of it alone) I bet I could find some good powers to borrow out of Force, Fire, Ice, Electricity, and Gadgeteering.   Basically, powers to avoid would be beams, cones, melee attacks, or anything else that requires the player regularly move to use effectively.

This opens up another question: why sit around?  Champions Online is very much an action packed, visceral game.   This stationary mastermind approach may well be going against the grain of a more enjoyable experience for me.  Sorcery may be a red herring… or it could be a mental shifting of gears to keep the game interesting, an ironically good contrast against my highly mobile hero named Contrast.

The Champions Online launch has not been going super swimmingly, but it could be a lot worse.

• One major balance adjustment when, in a move that mirrored City of Heroes’ early days, the developers saw people found ways to exhaust content that was supposed to last for months in days, freaked out, and rolled some major nerfs.
• One day of downtime, owed largely to somebody playing with the patch server when they shouldn’t have.

Cryptic has moved well to counteract most of the damage.  Any character generated prior to the launch day patch will be allowed to rebuild their characters for free.  The day you couldn’t play is not being counted against your subscription.

However, the nerfs remain.

The primary thing adjusted were the passives – powers to be slotted and forgotten as they enhance your character in some vital area.  Those who leaned heavily on their passives are now very much feeling the pinch.  Passives are now somewhat between 40% to 60% less effective as they used to be, and consequently heroes who rely on them for survival are dying 40% to 60% faster.

I feel the nerfs were certainly necessary, as the game was quite trivial before, but the severity of the adjustment was an over-reaction.  Many players claim their heroes can no longer even survive a fight against 3  henchmen – a number whose importance is derived from Jack Emmerts previous declaration that being able to fight 3 minions in City of Heroes is an ideal balance.  It’s a fair argument – even at the most basic level, heroes should be capable of doing this fairly reliably.

It turns out that the over-severity was deliberate,  as apparently because that’s how Bill Roper sails:

The biggest thing you have to do when you’re piloting a ship this big is that you tend to have to make big course corrections.  I think the thing that players always talk about is ‘Well, why don’t you make smaller changes?  Just change it like a little bit, then a little bit.’  The only problem is, when you have a big ship, when you make a lot of small course changes you have to make a lot of them and it’s hard to see.

Where the good ship Champions Online was previously listing dangerously to Starboard, it’s now listing somewhat noticeably to Port.   As of today, developer posts reveal them working diligently to make an even more acute course correction.  Soon after launch, they raised a test server in play to get a little feedback on the kind of fixes they’re doing before just rolling them on the server.  Soon, we expect they’ll even have their patch messages half-decently documented.  It seems the developers are well underway to switching their mindsets from beta to retail.

In the meanwhile, if you were wise/lucky enough to stumble across my guide and follow it prior to launch, you’re probably doing just fine.   This is because my guide walked you away from the idea to taking a bunch of attacks, and instead focused on getting a diverse set of powers instead.  Such a move fairly assures that simply nerfing the passives wouldn’t have killed your character.

All things considered, Champions Online’s launch could have been much, much worse.  When Anarchy Online launched, it was so laggy and crash-prone that it was unplayable for weeks.  Even World of (Bloody Successful) Warcraft had to shut down sales of the game temporarily because the servers were being completely overloaded and unplayable near launch. A day of being unable to play and characters with passive power dependencies encountering difficulty is comparatively nothing.

That said, I’m definitely looking forward to that free respec.  Sure, my character plays well enough, but I think I could find an entertainment benefit by rebuilding my character in a more novel direction.  Thus, even in these trying times, there’s a certain silver lining in that I’m being granted an opportunity I would not have otherwise.