Gaming : SuperSnake.io - New Personal Best

Just shy of 20 minutes growth... Not bad... Died to a super snake, he clipped the last of his fifth gold tokens as my venom spit struck, and... boom I popped, but I was quite happy with this performance.

Heroes and Generals - Bugs & Problems

I played a game of Heroes and Generals last night, it was the only bit of relaxation time I got, and I'm sad to report it was not very relaxing... The game is of course only in BETA, so subject to change, and I hope to god changes happen, because there are some very very annoying problems with the game.

The biggest problem I found was the strange lack of a tactical direction, what do I mean by this?... Well in the game you have your missions, they have set objectives, they show you them, but then they don't actively reward you for them, so sitting on an objective, defending gets you no points.  To earn points you have to let the enemy take it, or neutralize it, and then recapture it... This is of course playing with fire.

Once you let the enemy in, you're asking for trouble, and sure enough once the clever souls around me figured they ONLY got credits/rewards for letting the enemy in we were screwed, we lost defensive location after defensive location, but the canny sods climbed up and up in the scores... Over all we lost, but they got massive scores, and I can't help but think this was backwards, and a better metric should be rewarded for defending, e.g. being within X distance of Y flag whilst that flag remains friendly and Z enemies have been within a certain distance... So the flag is being pressured, but you're stopping the enemy... Not letting them physically neutralise it.

The next frustration was the snipers and tanks... Players were sitting far away, untouchable, nailing whole buildings with fire... So what?... Well, we had to spawn in those buildings... So you spawned and were blown up, you spawned and were head shot, you spawned and were shot... Then you finally get a spawn away from the rest of the action, and you get shot running back over and into cover... Because the mission did not encourage or provide a counter to the enemy... If you can't see 'em, you can't shoot 'em...

And then, even if you did shoot them, and hit them, in the early tiers you really don't do any damage to the enemy... I was hitting people with my G43 and so frustrated that I could shoot 3 4 or even more times and they'd just run off... Then someone else gets one hit and they get the kill... I must have seen this fifty times (I'm not joking), and it annoys me greatly.  WarThunder handle this better with their assist system.

Then of course there was the anti-tank and grenade mechanics... Grenades, what a useless thing they are, I've seen them fall at an enemies feet, and blow up, and the enemy survives... Anti-tank weapons, I hate you can't fire them from the hip... But then I've had it so you can't fire at all... So bugs bugs bugs... Plus the bullet drop rate it terrible on the projectiles, they fly like British spring fired anti-tank rounds, not the rocket propelled rounds they are!

Next, collisions... I was on a bike, going across and open area, an enemy plane dived down and rammed me with its wing, this killed me... the message... "Xelous (Killed) Xelous"... NO I DID NOT!... I didn't kill myself, I was rammed, by a plane!

Finally, the weapon upgrade pathways, are about as clear as mud, there's no clear benefit to any one set of upgrades, they are so very very costly, yet when you mention this the elitist of gold spammers call you a fool or a noob because your weapon is weak... I find this very annoying.

Still, am I enjoying the game?... Yes, am I going to be interested in how it develops, yes... Am I going to continue to explore the title, yes...

But above all this, I hope the weapons get balanced, and this tactical problem of a "direction" and more reward for actually carrying out the mission is given.

Worst case for me last night was in a defensive mission, I was only rewarded +53 for capturing an outpost... I was meant to be defending an objective, not running away from those three objectives to re-capture something else... Very counter intuitive.

Heroes and Generals - G43 Game Play

Heroes and Generals has featured in my evening game play time this week, and I'm happy to finally find another commentor finding the G43 underpowered as I do...

His comments about the gun taking 3 hits to kill is so true, and probably the most annoying thing.

I think I'm even more annoyed because this balancing act has already been done in Day of Defeat for me... So I'm used to the K(or G)43 taking 2 hits max... The Garand taking 2 hits... The K98 one, the MP4 3-5 hits then each weapon matched up with its alternate in the allied tree, and my brain appears to be wired for this, so seeing 4 hits from a G43 strike and the target start to jump and rotate annoys the shit out of me.

Though I'm still to accrue enough credits to fully upgrade the gun.

News Flash: Lord of Ultima Closing

Just a few minutes ago I heard news that Lord of Ultima will be being closed down, it is always sad to see a game going down... I doubt news of this will filter far beyond the community playing.

 

I for one briefly enjoyed Lord of Ultima, but eventually found it a very grindy game, with a lot of elitists playing it.

However, I do wonder whether this news opens the market for an open source, or free to play, game in the same vein.  When I last played it I did strongly consider developing my own version of it, which sorted out some of my problems with the game... This maybe that time... Watch this space.

WarThunder - Earning Crew Skill Points

Earning crew experience points in WarThunder, this has been a pet peeve of mine with the title, as it really seems to be the biggest grind fest in the game, but the one most easily remedied with a cash injection... Now, I have subbed to WarThunder, I have spent money on Golden Eagles, but I've no disposable income, I just moved, I have to decorate, I have issues at work which means we need to keep as much money aside as possible, plus it's Christmas and so we've had to buy gifts for folks.  So Golden eagles are right down there on the priority list.

Now, crew skills are essential in Full Real Battles as I want to play, strangely the vision skills apply differently in FRB & Historical battles.  It seems a tad complex to me, but essentially you still see the enemy dot... right out to infinity, but it has no text/information written around it until the range of your view point perspective... Specifically they call this mechanic "Sighted", and I'm not sure whether the skill applies more importantly in FRB & HB than in Arcade, and arcade just has "Sighted" set to a fixed distance?

Anyway, getting crew skills...

I tried to get skill points in my other planes, I've followed tips by Krebs and others... But I can't play like them, I'm not that good... I mean recommendations like "Get 6-8 kills and then fly out your other planes" is pretty... well unrealistic, in a game where the average player gets between 3 and 5 kills per game, and ground kills still don't count for much - even if you're in a bomber - its so annoying.

For example, I flew out in my reserve and rank 1 Russian planes, got a win, 5 air kills from 3 planes (twice myself being shot down)... plus 9 ground kills... I got 1 crew skill point on one plane, and 2 skill points on the other.... Dismal, for a not bad result.

Next Japanese... I got one skill point on one crew, for a five plane fly out, 8 air kills, 3 ground kills (including a destroyer) in a match we lost... So loosing the match, despite getting a decent result... Indeed in the Japanese match I got Battle Trophies for being in the top 3 on my side, so an extra 1000xp... But no crew skill points.

I just wished I had some idea how/why they were applied/awarded, I might have to read the forums - and their inevitable speculation on the subject - but having a variety of crews only with 30-50 skill points is not cutting it above rank 5...

At least I have one well trained crew on the British - over 250 skill points - so they can access training/expert on the planes and I use them for FRB... but I really want other nations in my FRB, but I can't spare the cash!

Welcome to Eberron

Right well, here we are at my second instalment of my progress with DDO. Downloading and installing the game, in both standard and high quality graphics, is actually relatively painless, indeed it took far less time and was more informative to the progress made than other titles and indeed the obligatory patching and data updating following install went on without a hitch on both platforms I tried.

The only glitch came with I starved the connected of bandwidth, throttling it down to below 100kpbs, I found the updates repeatedly stalled while downloading. But I can forgive their servers that, after all I caused the problem by watching too many Videos of Elmo on YouTube.

Once I logged in, I could select the world [I assume this is the same as realm] to visit, and previously visited realms are highlighted in bold. However, if like me you are on different machines between visits the different machines are not aware of what realms you've been on. As such I missed getting the same character twice for my time on the laptop and desktop PC's.

Creation of the characters went on without a hitch, however, when creating your character you get a few of the action animations being played. Immediately I was struck with how awkward some of these animations look. Characters will spin and swing clubs, dodge, parry and cast... but some of the moments are physical impossibilities. I don't like this much, it's a real turn off to me, I like to see natural looking [albeit cartoon-esp] movements. Not these strange efforts in DDO. Indeed I'd have to go so far to say they look amateurish.

However, after selecting my class, race, sub abilities and look I was ready to go, and after giving my character both a fore and surname, I was on a beach somewhere with a short bloke shouting at me.

Please Note - I added the speech bubble.

Now, this guy grates with me, his speech is voice acted by someone I want to punch, this whiny, adenoid dominated rat faced character is matched only by the most whiny adenoid dominated rat arsed voice acting. [Did I mention that the speech text is not bubbled and comes up in the most basic courier font?]

This is your welcome to DDO, this guy SHOUTING at you, showing how bad the 3D sound system is, because though you see the guy a head and slightly left of you the sound of his voice comes from way left and is VERY loud for someone stood so far away.

He proceeds to cajole you into moving about controls, however, there is a lot going on within the UI, if this is your first view of it then it can be quite daunting. You have an action bar at the bottom, which on default settings is hard to comprehend. You have a text/chat area with more of the bad font being used. You also have a mini-map but also a lot of crowding going on, the interface is not clean looking. It just looks to me like it has a lot of things to explain to me, or rather a lot of buttons I don't yet know about. And I'm not sure what clicking them is going to do. All of which leads to feeling that I'm in a rather cluttered user experience. And, with bars above others, and the position of things I have to just hope that I can change things around because to my untrained, but WoW Conditioned eye the interface in DDO does not appear to take ergonomics into account.

Now I suppose I have to draw on a point raised by Darren Love in the latest edition of SUWT. That is that with Blizzard's domination of the MMO Market with Warcraft, there are certain demands and requirements from a player of an MMO today, which are wants and needs influenced by Blizzard. One of these is a simple accessible learning curve and interface. And I'm afraid to say that though DDO's interface is visible, I don't feel like it is accessible.

Even simple things like popping up hints & tips, or tooltips seem sluggish. On the machines I'm running DDO on, I don't think it should feel sluggish... And these feelings about the UI don't even take into account actually achieving control of my character. I am solely commenting about the UI here. Actually taking control of your avatar feels even more alien.

For example, in World of Warcraft to attack you have to select the target and choose to attack [or you can auto attack with a different control]. In DDO you can stand and suddenly make your character punch air. I have been told that later this all makes sense, but right now to the total beginner it does not, I'm basically looking at an avatar whom is punching thin air and I can't seem to stop them doing it [again because in WOW you have to click something else to stop the auto-attack going on, not so in DDO].

I find this shift in my expectations hard to reconcile. I'm afraid to admit that Blizzard have me well trained, conditioned to jump to their tune... I am Pavlov's Dog for MMO control expectations. *Sobs*

However, I did play a little more of the game, I played through the introduction instance, more about that in my next DDO post.

Now, in other news, I have to blush somewhat. As you may gather from post number 1, Darren Love over at CommonSenseGamer was the inspiration for this blog, and today he has made mention of this my corner of the interwebs as his blog of the week.... I thank you Sir.

For now though, I'm about to take a weeks break from work, I'm going on Holiday! While I'm away I'm going to play some Total War Games... Those of you whom know me as “Lord Xelous” formerly of "The Lords Modding Collective" and “The Lordz Games Studio” will know how, and why, I love the Total War series.