The value of teamwork

After trying several times in the past to get people to play the MvM Coaltown Halloween event map in TF2 and failing because of intense lack of interest (something I didn't and still don't get), I recently tried again at a few organised events. One was an afternoon of gaming with colleagues at uni in the GRID Lab. The other was at someone's minilan. During neither attempt was the team good enough to actually finish the map, which I found a little disappointing.

It is funny then that after just randomly scraping some people together in a couple of hours that I and a group of acquaintances managed to tear up the joint with reasonable ease, even after a start which was not even meant to be serious. It just goes to show the difference good players make when it comes to Coop gaming, when I guess 2-3 people aren't having to do all the work.

I have now come to the conclusion that the MvM event map is actually pretty easy with the right crew and as long as everyone does their job without dying much, fun and awesomeness can inevitably ensue. Speaking of fun and awesomeness:

In the video I make extensive use of the Black Box rocket launcher. Having been gifted a Beggars Bazooka, I can honestly say I am torn between two worlds in terms of using it. While the  Beggars Bazooka is undeniably the highest dps rocket launcher available to the soldier, and while getting to roughly the desired location on the map via huge chamber-chained rocket jumps, the Beggars loses some of the precision and timing I am used to with the Black Box. Not to mention the lack of life on hit, something I have pretty much adjusted my playstyle to make extensive use of.

Getting to a new tactical position quickly and easily or even jumping over incoming ordnance is something that can be done quite safely with the Black Box. After extensive use, I have come to realise that the sky is essentially a safe haven, allowing you to do maximum AoE damage from above and heal yourself with the Black Box's life on hit. It is as accurate as you are with the crosshair. There is also nothing better than rocket jumping from ammo pack to ammo pack, crit buffing teammates and dealing death below you in a precise manner.

The Beggars Bazooka on the other hand lacks that precision of aim (random spread), timely support and accuracy of mobility, but as mentioned, makes up for this in both sustained and burst damage potential. You can also fly, once you have figured out how it propels you. There is nothing better for traversing the entirety of the map, albeit in a rather reckless fashion, or for taking down giants of all kinds. While anything at range will give you trouble, anything in your medium range kill zone is going to be pounded by rockets, though not really from above. Standard rocket jumping is a bit awkward (different timing) and not as reliable to pull off in the thick of the fray.

Really I see uses for both rocket launchers. The Black Box I will use if we have heaps of damage (4 or more), little healing, but teammates that could benefit from timely, consistent crit buff support no matter where they are on the map. The Beggars Bazooka I will use if we severely lack damage, and I need to fill the role, possibly with medic/engineer support to make up for the lack of quick mobility and sustain. Ideally I would prefer to have both worlds, but you can't have everything.

The best offense is a good defense

"You do not do any damage when you are dead"

I have said it multiple times regarding a library of games. A simple statement that seems obvious, but is nevertheless ignored by a large number of players in games. Players who would stack the easiest, most simplistic of stats - damage, and potentially become useless during the course of a game. They become useless because they die instantly. While an incredibly skilled or patient player can get away with it, in a game like League of Legends it was very much the defining rule of play, especially if you were melee. The same can be said of Diablo III, at least in higher Inferno monster power (MP) difficulties.

The most effective character builds in Diablo III are the ones that have a well thought out relationship between gear, abilities and individual player skill. This relationship does not necessarily need to be balanced, but they need to work in such a way that you are not dying and still managing to do damage. Gear can be broken down into defensive, offensive and sustain categories. Abilities can be both AoE and/or direct damage, crowd control, survivability or even utility related. Individual player skill ...well, I have already talked about that at length before.

I have always been primarily a melee focused gamer when it comes to RPGs. This has probably made me view defensive stats on par with offensive ones. This is because your damage dealing ability has an incredibly high chance of you taking damage as well. Sometimes you may not even get to deal damage until you close the distance between your enemy (ranged opponent), or even at all if they can kite you to death, like survival hunters in WoW were quite capable at doing. Unless you can sneak up to opponents, being a glass cannon in melee is illogical. In Diablo III, it could be considered suicide, though that again depends on your gear, abilities and individual player skill.

Since entering Inferno, I have always chosen abilities and geared incredibly defensively on my barbarian. With the introduction of MP levels and Infernal Machine, it has become a necessity. Armor, All Resist, Vitality, % Life, Lifesteal, Life on Hit, Dodge and % Damage Type Reduction. If you do not have high enough effective hit points to take a hit from 1-20 monsters, enough sustain to restore your health before they do it again and enough damage to make the whole process worthwhile then you will not get very far. Upon breaking MP level 5, I noticed that while I could stay alive fine, my DPS was starting to drop off, making progress inefficient. It was time to return to the drawing board ...

In a previous post I talked about Nuking - a barbarian build I devised for tackling MP levels 1-5. Essentially you run around with a 2-hander and explode things. Good times. However, it suffered from one problem - the need to generate fury. This fury generation process is time consuming and lowers maximum DPS. It also hinders the possible mobility of the build, using an ability with an awfully long animation time. Unlike a fighting game, it is also an animation you cannot cancel, unlike certain other abilities.

With higher MP levels comes gold. With gold comes gear. With certain gear comes certain set bonuses. With certain set bonuses comes the need to consider different builds. Without going into details, basically I have figured out a way to give myself infinite fury, even on a single target, to use Hammer of the Ancients and Rend at my leisure. This removes the need for a primary fury generator, which is huge! Nuking Mk 2 is a monster of a build, allowing almost full mobility (i.e. manually controlled defense), and consistent use of one of the hardest hitting abilities in the game. I have jumped from MP level 5 to MP level 8 overnight. However, none of this would be possible if I was not able to stay alive.

Retaliator Alpha 0.04

Who would have thought that a blog that was originally about games development and being a journal (hence the "gdj" part of the url) would ever actually have a post resembling something of the sort? It has been many years since I undertook the board game development unit at QUT, one where we needed to write an online blog about its progress as well as many topics around general game design. The relics of these days can be found in the far off reaches of the infernal abyss (i.e. first few posts on this blog). How times have changed since then...

The top down side scroller (TDSS) or shoot em up (SHMUP) as they are often referred to I am working on is currently codenamed Retaliator. It is a simple game, one I have been working on, slowly, in Unity 3D for the better part of 2 months. It takes inspiration from several games I used to play back in the day, such as Raiden and Baryon as well as the recent (and brilliant) Jamestown. Although Jamestown is a recent addition to the genre, it unfortunately is a type of game that has also faded from the minds of today's gamers. Much like arena shooters. Hmmm ... I think I am seeing a pattern in my personal preferences here.

I have hesitated to post anything about the actual games production I randomly do, mainly because some of it falls into the 'not-creatively-owned' category of developing content for tutes at QUT. Which is a shame because I have developed many simple game assets in Blender and Unity in the last 3-4 years. Other non-work related content, such as Retaliator and its previous iterations (in Blender) I have barely mentioned either, mainly to keep it as private and secret as possible. The last thing I would want is some wanker taking my idea and developing it before I do.

The basic premise of my game is that its a traditional SHMUP, but breaks the rules in several key areas. The first is that you can aim anywhere along the 2D axis these games are usually restricted to. Obviously this will need to have a much higher difficulty then normal, as positioning enemies in your single axis beam of death was part of the challenge of traditional SHMUPS. The second feature is that you can (or at least will be able to) customise the layout and firepower of your ship, choosing multiple weapon types prior to entering a level and adjusting the spread of your primary weapon during the game itself. Unlocking weapon types and ship slots will probably use some kind of credit system, derived from your score at the end of a level. Finally, the last major change falls into the 'unique' gameplay mechanic that I actually abhor teaching in games design units at QUT. Although I am a firm believer that you don't need a unique gameplay mechanic for a game to be acceptable (shit, look at the COD series ffs), I feel the 'Link Cannon' coop weapon I am providing in the game will create some interesting ways in which players will play my game.

 This Link Cannon is also the primary feature of this video diary, that being for Retaliator Alpha version 0.04. I would recommend watching it at 720p:

I probably won't make too many posts about this project in the future, mainly because the time I will get to work on it is uncertain. Also, it is something I don't want to have consume all my free time and consequently all I ever want to talk about.

Nuking

A few days ago I was asked by a somewhat opinionated colleague of mine, what was in fact 'wrong' with me to still be playing Diablo 3? Apparently everyone else in the world had 'quit', so my persistence with it was seen to be unnatural.

Am I still REALLY playing Diablo 3? Well ... yes. So it seems anyway. I don't quite know what has compelled me to return to the world of endless hordes of demons to mow through (though its probably that), but I have fired up the old girl to see what has changed in the world of Diablo. Alot, it seems. In particular, the buffing of Legendary items, changing of drop rates and addition of both monster power level and the Infernal Machine. Should I ever choose to level another character (quite likely), one can now finally say "fuck you" to the default easymode difficulty and ramp the monster power level as high as they can handle. This should at least provide a more engaging and dangerous experience for newcomers ... which is unlikely to happen. While most of the super casual (i.e. non Inferno/60) players have moved on, unfortunately they have taken a large chunk of Diablo 3's reputation with it.

Many people were apparently unsatisfied with the game, partly due to conforming opinions (i.e. everyone else doesn't like it so I don't like it either). While I still think many of these people were expecting of and playing the game for entirely the wrong reasons (i.e. narrative, perfectly attuned item drops, fast/challenging leveling immediately etc), I can honestly say that I don't miss their presence. Diablo 3 has begun to turn into a gem of a game without Blizzard appealing to the squealing masses and the game is on road to becoming something I will frequent in the future.

After dabbling a bit into Torchlight 2, I have decided on one simple, honest truth. Diablo 3 is a superior game. I have no bias towards either game or their parent company, but when it comes to straight up, non-skill capped game play, Diablo 3 trumps a game like Torchlight on almost every aspect. An example of this is the fact that I have found an even more powerful and interesting build than the apparently confusing one I was using before. I say this because several Barbarian friends I introduced my old build to (dubbed 'Riding the Walrus') found the build to be too complicated. I feel this is because they didn't understand the purpose of it, or realise its true potential (i.e. near complete invincibility), perhaps not having witnessed it first hand themselves. Watching someone else or a video is very different than doing something yourself. Nevertheless, the new build, which is far simpler, involves using a huge 2 hander, leaping into packs of stuff and doing enormous burst AoE and direct damage, using straight lifesteal as your main means of survival (besides defensive stats of course). While this probably means very little to anyone reading this blog and while there is obviously a bit more to it then that, I will say I have dubbed the build 'Nuking', for that is exactly what it feels like. It is also incredibly fun. Observe.

While Riding the Walrus is an incredibly strong build, it unfortunately lacks some oomph, which can make its undertaking a little underwhelming. With Nuking, the visceral and destructive power I felt as a barbarian while leveling has returned. While it is not as safe as Riding the Walrus, it is powerful enough to handle Inferno content on as high as monster power level 5, which is good enough.

Why am I back to playing Diablo 3 again? I am not entirely sure. I think it offers a satisfying game play experience that I don't think many people encountered, perhaps due to their own personal playstyles. For me, the semi-theorycrafting, bloodthirsty, honour bound lunatic, the way I play the game is enjoyable and so I enjoy playing the game. It is really as simple as that.

... or maybe its just the numbers +_+

Fight Night

The genre of fighting games is the one and only genre of games I fully advocate playing on a console. While you could play it on other platforms, such as the PC, the console controller and especially the arcade stick are both superior peripherals for THAT genre type. You could argue that you can easily attach these devices to your PC, but nothing beats sitting around a large TV with a group of friends, eating pizzas and drinking terribly unhealthy soft/energy drinks (or even alcohol) while attempting to beat them bloody. Virtually, of course.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 has recently been released and a short notice 'fight night' I organised seemed to be quite successful.While no one (including myself) was particularly good at the game, it still managed to be entertaining, mostly in a rather "lolwtf" way. While I would love it if people became slightly interested to the point where they practice a bit and become somewhat competitive, I know that it is probably too demanding to ideally expect that. However, I am content and happy that people can come together and at least enjoy beating the crap out of one another. Truly we are an evolved species.

Part of the problem with becoming good at a game like Tekken is that it still, even today, rings true with that camel hump of a graph I have on my wall, both at home and uni. The general idea of the graph is that, as you become better at playing a fighting game, you actually become less successful for a period of time. At least against the people who are button mashing. I think unconsciously people know this already, even with other fighting games, and that time-sink of doing worse then when you were button mashing is not a dip in enjoyment most casual people are willing to enter. I can't say I blame them either because to get out of that camel hump requires an enormous amount of effort and dedication, something I feel I have only ever committed once to a fighting game and then only became on-par with the best  (worst?) of the mashers. While fighting games will always be a genre I love and while I have a lot of respect and awe for the people who become good at them, I also know that playing casually with friends is more important. Which is what I think I will try to encourage.

On another note, the previous video was the first gameplay footage I have recorded from my PS3 using my Blackmagic Intensity Pro HDMI capture card. A ... lengthy process in figuring out everything required, but in the end I think it is worth it. I look forward to experimenting with the technology further and possibly making more console, fighting game related videos in the future.

This is my world! You are not welcome in my world!

The title of this post is a quote from the soldier in TF2. He says the line randomly whenever he kills someone. It is quite possibly my favorite quote from the game, because it says something about both the soldier and his perception of what it is he is doing.

The soldier is a veteran of wars, a scarred, blood-crazed violent lunatic who demands great performance from and has high expectations of his fellow comrades. In some ways he is a relic from the past, possibly from a better age where honor and respect were just as important as skill and tactics. He possesses one of the most difficult-to-consistently-perform abilities in the game, that being the simple act of rocket jumping. While it is not essential for a soldier to perform, it separates the good ones from the bad and makes the soldier distinct in comparison to the other classes.

In the soldier's mind, what he is doing is the reason for his existence. If flaming limbs and scorched blood are not exploding in his face, if he cannot soar through the sky, raining explosive death from above, then life is not worth living. He wishes to inform you, should your charred, splattered corpse have the ability to hear, that this pain you are feeling and this misery he is inflicting upon your person is what he does best. It is his job. His duty. His world ... and your presence in it is not one he tolerates kindly.

You may question why ... why does the soldier not enjoy your presence in his world? Why indeed ...

Anyways, I have eventually managed to get my colleagues and I to play a single match of a competitive FPS game. Now, my colleagues are all experienced gamers and have some very interesting opinions on game design and skill in games. When it comes to FPS games, they have experience in the likes of Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield and even TF2. They are also familiar with games such as Gears of War and other 3rd person combat shooters.

I on the other hand tend to lean towards more arcade-like FPS games, that of which I dub 'arena shooters'. Most of my experience with FPS games has come from these kind of games, which I have some very strong opinions on in contrast to the games my colleagues play. Games that fall into this category are games like Painkiller, Serious Sam, Quake and the original Unreal Tournament. This is not news, but it is important.

When I found out we were going to play a competitive FPS deathmatch game together, and that this game was going to be Unreal Tournament 3, I was quite thrilled! UT3 is a game I would consider about 1/2 way between the hardest-of-core arena shooter (something like Quakeworld or the non-commercial Nexuiz) and your average modern day shooter (something like Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3), so it would be an excellent test-bed for examining the performance and play styles from players of both genres. While arena shooters are mostly dead in this day and age, it was expected that most of the people who participated were more familiar with modern day shooters. Which seemed to be the case.

The following video shows the result of the match from my (Tinman's) point of view. Apologies for the jerkiness and inaccuracy (turning angles, audio etc) of the UT3 demo recording playback. It never did have good replay functionality. I recommend watching it in 720p so you can actually make out some of the details the engine likes shrouding:

While I don't think I actually played that well (only a 23 frag killing spree after all), I am still quite pleased with the overall result. However, I will say that I am not surprised in the slightest. I am unsure whether my colleagues felt the same way, but I do hope that even for a brief moment in time they may have realised that shooters of yore are not quite what they think them to be, that being mindless, shoot fests more about luck than they are about skill. Even if it were just for half a second.

But, more importantly, in that half a second, I hope they realised something else as well. You see this virtual environment we were just in. These rules, unbounded by restrictive controls and unwavering in non-casual/hardmode mechanics (e.g. non-regenerating health) form something that may not be obvious. They form a matrix of flexible rules and the boundaries that push them. They form a place where freedom and skill is limitless. They form a ... world ... one that I am well acquainted with ...

... and you are not welcome in it.

Destroyer of Worlds

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" 

 - Bhagavad Gita / J. Robert Oppenheimer

 It has been awhile, but returning to Skyrim for the mini-expansion that is Dawnguard has brought back some fond memories. Fond memories of roaming the countryside, hunting 'bad guys' and murdering entire encampments of humanoid creatures. Cleaving through the masses, it is undeniable that there is a certain satisfaction, one of savage glee, that I possess when playing this game. If there is one thing I will remember about Skyrim, or in fact all three Elder Scrolls games I've played (Oblivion and Morrowind too), it's that swinging an enormous two-handed weapon into things makes you feel like a freaking god. Well, sometimes.

The release of Dawnguard has also given me an excuse to return to the drawing board, fine tuning my equipment once again to make the ultimate weapons and armor. With such overpowering gear comes the need for overpowering difficulty and running a mod with up to 32x harder master level enemies makes for some interesting fights. I usually run it between 2-4x though, otherwise you get splattered by simply tripping on your own shoelaces. Running another mod called Warzones (increases number of enemy encounters) ensures that, no matter where you go, there is an entire world full of enemies. It is a world that I intend to destroy.

Time moves forward. Nothing changes

Anyone who knows me at all probably knows I don't play that many single player games. At least in the last couple of years anyway. I just cannot find the reasons to justify spending $40+ dollars on a game that will more than likely disappoint me, especially after the likes of Rage, Bulletstorm and Crysis 2. While Skyrim was the latest single player game I actively looked forward to, played (extensively) and actually enjoyed, occurrences like this are more the exception than the rule. Maybe I'm just a fussy bastard.

Or maybe I'm not. I don't really know anymore. I know there are people out there, like myself, that have become annoyed with a lot of the game play 'features' that stain modern single player experiences. To name a select few we have frequent cut-scenes (which I don't actually mind if they are done well), unnecessary and clumsy cover systems (e.g. F3AR) and my most hated of all ... quick-time events. Features like these have a time, place and even specific genres where they can work really well, but lately developers just seem to want to cram them in to every facet of every game they make. The results, at least in my opinion, are games that become less immersive, disengaging and often just stupid to play and observe. Take this scene from Bulletstorm for example:



Anyways, I've been playing Max Payne 3. Maybe I knew what to except, that being a movie which has playable sections. Maybe it's because I actually like the character that is Mr Payne, the sarcastic, masochistic drunk who has the magical ability to slow time and jump horizontally repeatedly. Maybe it was simply because the game doesn't have stupid fucking quick time events. Whatever it was, I quite enjoyed Max Payne 3, even with its insane amount of mostly unskippable cut scenes. They were good and added to the atmosphere of the game. It is a worthy successor to the previous two games and expands on the series by taking the game into some interesting and believable locales. The ending was also rather epic and satisfying. Most importantly, the bullet time is as good as ever and still a lot of fun even after this long. It was and still is the most enjoyable part of the game, and probably the only game that did, and still is, getting it right. Observe.

Immortal

So yeah. I'm still playing Diablo 3. As I have been semi-busy with uni work lately, it is about the only game I have on my radar at the moment. That is of course unless you count the random moments when I feel like watching a movie and 'play' bits of Max Payne 3.

Inferno is tough. Although it was recently nerfed slightly so that the brick wall you smash your face into isn't as high/thick, it has a different kind of difficulty attached to it. This difficulty is simply the cost of items. Because more people are trying Inferno now, the price on gear needed to get through it (all resist, vitality, armor, life on hit etc) has sky rocketed. It is amusing reading about people who cleared Inferno in the first two weeks now complaining about how they cannot progress on their alts because they have spent their 40 million gold on 5 items. The rest of us (10 million gold or less) barely make an upgrade a week without going completely broke. That's not even mentioning any decent Life on Hit weapons, which cost 20 million gold or more, or the increased repair costs.

Facing this problem was difficult for me. I don't have the patience to farm Act 1 repeatedly for 50 million+ gold, which would take weeks if not months. I have never seen Diablo as a grind (at least in the WoW sense), and turning it into one was not preferable. So I did what many people are, at least in my opinion, afraid to do: admitting that your build/playstyle is not efficient and opting to change it. Long story short, I have come across a build and a style of playing that is not only efficient but incredibly fun as well. The problem is that it is slightly difficult to pull off.

My experience of Diablo is that, at least in Inferno (when the game actually gets hard), you are simply maintaining a balanced relationship between how much damage you do and how much damage you can take. Having a high effective health pool will keep you alive considerably longer, but if you are doing bugger all damage, elite packs will enrage and rape you. If you only do a lot of damage, elite packs will just rape you full stop. Generally speaking, the act of keeping your health up is a straightforward one, though conditionally difficult depending on your class and the situation. Often you will ignore your 'resource' as its generation and use become straightforward as well. You could probably just say that the game is easy to 'play', but the enemies (i.e. elites/champion packs) are what make it hard.

The build I am running now goes a step beyond this. Without bogging you down with names of abilities that mean nothing to you, I will simply say that an intense balance between how much life you have, how much life you are gaining, how much resource (fury) you have, how much resource you are gaining needs to be maintained. If not, you die horribly. This process requires perfect conditions that you need to create and control throughout a fight through both positioning and timing of abilities. Should you stuff up for even one second, you will run out of fury or life and get fucked up very quickly. There is a high risk vs reward element to the play style and it becomes very engaging. It also requires some very specific stats that I won't go into here.



As you can see, the build is incredibly strong, almost to the point where I am going to stop stacking hard defensive gear. The build is actually stronger the more things you are fighting as they provide a larger surface area for you to sprint/whirlwind into, assuming they don't hit you too hard. The hardest part of the build is fighting small packs of elites, if not a single elite by itself. This is because your ability to gain life on hit with the tornadoes that spawn depends entirely on the distance that you travel. The tornadoes come out slowly at a controlled rate (attack speed). Essentially you need to move to stay alive, but the target you are fighting is stationary, so you need to move just the right distance to and from the target to spawn the tornadoes right on top of them.

If you can maintain this intricate balance of dps/tank stats, managing your fury, damage intake, precision of movement and timing of abilities you can essentially become immortal.