The Mannconomy Update – A Credit to Team?

Last week, with next to no prior hype Valve launched the latest update to Team Fortress 2, with 5 class updates produced by modellers from the Polycount forums and a long promised feature permitting the trading of items. The biggest surprise however, was a feature never, to my knowledge, even alluded to, the Mann co. Store, allowing players to spend real-world money so that they can put a saucepan on their Soldier’s head.

The thing I keep having to remember is that the store items with non-cosmetic gameplay value, namely weapons, are still obtainable for free via random drop and crafting, and indeed are more accessible thanks to the trading option, nothing has been taken from me. Some rices seem a little steep for virtual items, such as the rarer hats (especially new ones that are components of the Polycount set, at £12 each) but again, no obligation. And of course, you can get all the Polycount content for £30, cheaper than buying three of the hats stand-alone. So that’s a “saving”, though still more expensive than the game itself, but I did find myself feeling tempted to take the shortcut and get to try the new content right away.

But there is something I regard as, dare I say, insidious. A new, fairly common random drop comes in the form of a Supply Crate, which may contain a rare paint or hat, a real potential badge of status or something that can be trades for another desirable item. Or it may be a weapon you already have in duplicate. But to find out what’s inside, you need a key. A key that can only be obtained for £2 at the store. Hmm.

So I end up with two crates in short order, and there they are in my inventory, saying “I might have a Sombrero for your Pyro” “Don’t you want to paint something black?”. I caved to curiosity, bought the keys, and got a Wrangler and Scottish Resistance, that I recall struggling to get back when their updates first came out, but nearly worthless to me now. I felt sick, these weapons weren’t even worth £2 each from the store. I know this was the chance I took, but is this a feeling Valve should want to be giving it’s players?

Lesson learned, though, I’m not going to stop playing TF2, it is still one of my favourite, most enduringly appealing games, so it really looks like Valve wins, though I can’t help feeling I was monetarily punished. Time to move on and get hold of the new loadout sets, which seem to have interesting properties. The Scout set’s +25 heath seems worryingly good, whilst the Pyro’s full set seems to lack synergy and for some reason is the only one with a drawback of a +10% extra vulnerability to bullets. The Sniper set seems to be aimed at preventing the Snipers of both sides entering a long-range duel separate from the rest of the match (as so often seen over 2Fort) by preventing them from delivering or receiving headshots, whilst the Spy’s identity-stealing set opens up a distinctive new play-style to the class, disguising as his last victim but unable to do so before hand. This is all speculative for now, but looking forward to trying them out for myself. Someday.

Have a little post-Eurogamer, er- post on the way, once I’ve had a day to digest it all.

What is wrong with you people? Mass Effect 1

I’m staring, right now, at my copy of Mass Effect 2. Bought and paid for. With money. My purchasing this game got me thinking that, well, I really should get on and play Mass Effect 1 properly shouldn’t I? Obviously it has all of that story Bioware is known for leading into the next instalment, plus I can carry my character over, and of course, everyone keeps saying it’s great.

What were they playing? I’m really trying hard to find something good here that isn’t part of a dialogue tree. The story might be okay, and I do only mean okay, and moving around on foot is much smoother than in KOTOR, combat really isn’t much fun. Enemies seem pretty tough most of the time, and your squad-mates fragile. Shepherd isn’t much better, though can be given some health regeneration if you play the right class. I didn’t once, and the tutorial mission was too difficult to complete.

One of the concessions most fans make of the first game is that the Mako APC gameplay is a pain, but that’s okay since they aren’t in the sequel. Except, why not fix it? Why not make it fun, since these sections have a reasons to exist? Getting around within a planet’s atmosphere makes it ‘feel’ a lot bigger, and it makes sense that they would need to get around like that where the Normandy can’t land. You could turn it into a on-the-rails shooter, or just give the time to fix the vehicles physics so it doesn’t bounce around in such an infuriating way. Understandable they responded to criticism about it, but that’s the simplest solution. They should make the sound idea work rather than throw it out because they didn’t bother last time.

And how did it escape notice that despite all the stops for long conversations, bullshit ambushes and elevator rides, they didn’t put in autosave checkpoints? I feel sick thinking of the hours, literally hours, I’ve had to replay because I’ve not been quicksaving every time I blink. And every time I need to replay a section, I can’t skip a cutscene or dismiss dialogue I’ve already heard. It’s the sort of thing many laymen blame on poor QA, but I would say it is more likely developers ignoring their testers or not asking for feedback on anything but bugs of features already implemented. I’m hardly a venerable industry bod, but I’ve seen many times that very few developers want to utilise their QA resources to find out if what is being produced is up to scratch as it is designed.

This most is largely driven by my extreme anger and disappointment over this game, I was going to hold off on commenting until I was playing ME2, which I don’t know will even happen any more. I know the shooting element is meant to be a lot better, but I will have to skip the majority of the existing story and whatever advantages moving the character over confers. And I have to remember that people said the original was a great, enjoyable game. Can I really take their word about the second? And it gets me thinking about how people look at Bioware. Yes, they do interactive story very well, but that’s just a Choose Your Own Adventure book if it’s not got good gameplay to wrap around it. And I remember now that KOTOR’s character and combat system was derived from Wizard of the Coasts Star Wars RPG, and not and original Bioware creation. Sonic Chronicles had a few good ideas to use DS tech, but got repetitive and unfulfilling pretty quick. Gets me thinking that Bioware simply don’t live up to their hype. A lot of people seem to cut them a lot of slack for making great stories embedded in poor gameplay. I’ve probably been guilty of this myself, moving around KOTOR was a bit of a chore and the combat and character progression quite basic, but I got to swing a Lightsaber around and drop Force Lightning.

Maybe I will be able to play more when I calm down, but it’s hard not to see continuing as a massive waste of time. Given how people like it I want to believe I will come back to it and see what they see, and enjoy myself again, but right now the game seems to do little but make me very, very angry.

I’ve just found I’ve been misspelling “criticism” on my blog tags. This is embarrassing.

Down with Crackdown

It seems slightly odd to me that Prototype seems to draw more comparisons to Realtime World’s Crackdown than to Radical’s previous “cult classic” Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, or other open-world super hero titles such as the more recent Spider-man games (though I’m given to understand that Spider-man 2, the only one I have played, is the only one that’s even fairly good). Parallels with H:UD, with it’s over-the-top attacks and combos, seem much more apt than the slightly more sedate (not saying much) Crackdown, which seems more like a somewhat super-powered GTA. Prototype and Crackdown don’t share mission-structure either, which is where RTW’s effort departs markedly from the GTA template. Maybe it’s just compulsion to compare all open-world/sandbox games to one-another?

Crackdown gives you effectively 3 objectives and drops you in the game world, free to do them and the sub-missions in any order but strongly shepherded by the difficulty of getting the 3 bosses without beating the underlings first. It was perhaps the most truly free-form “sandbox” game yet made, though for it there is next to no story to draw you in and drive you forward. Or rather, there is story, in the form of mission briefings and interjections from your handler, but it’s the city’s story and the criminal’s stories, not the story of this agent that is, for some reason, on a one-man crusade against crime.

That brings me to our mute protagonist. At the beginning of each play session you may choose a new appearance for him, and this changes a bit randomly when you resurrect after death. You are told he is all the Agency has, besides regular police, to take down the big 3 organisations, and yet they can load you up on any kind of ammo at any time, clone you repeatedly and furnish you with any number of flashy transforming cars, which begs the question why they don’t just clone and arm an army and go Order 66 on the criminals. I think further than just unlocking checkpoints, which offer fast-travel points, healing and ammo in-game, your campaign should include seizing the means to get all these benefits. Improve the defences on these points, and besides acting as a travel target, have each confer a benefit, such as access to a gang’s weapons. Rather than be able to get an agency vehicle at any time, there could be a recharge timer before a new one can be requested, with the timer shortened when certain points are held.

As an open world game, Crackdown places a large focus on the city setting, but I just didn’t find it engaging or memorable when compared to the obvious benchmark of the GTA series. I just lacks character, I have no great interest in what happens to it, and so when I died on one of the last missions a few times, I put it down and didn’t feel like going back. I’m really not sure what people see in this game beyond a Halo demo delivery system.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

I’m doing my Sith Master play-through right now for the achievement mother-lode. I liked it fine on the easier settings, my big gripe being the camera being awkward and the control prompts for the “Star Destroyer bit” not being clear on what you need to do, forcing you to spend ages moving the sticks around as you try to work out what I wants.

As Star Wars games go, the story was strong, and I loved the voice acting, I think that needs to be said. Good sound-alikes for Vader and Palpatine, and I loved the voice of Starkiller, who really came to enjoy as a character. I am also a big fan of Euphoria physics, which work well with the OTT force powers of the game and make the game world more cohesive and “real”, as reactions seem more appropriate and organic. Graphics are wonderful, and the classic Star Wars sounds have the same effect on me as ever. The controls are well structured and intuitive, giving each face button ever to a particular power type, which also helps remembering and structuring combo’s either. In many ways structured much like God of War, down to orb collection, but it’s a good fit.

On the hardest setting though, I swear, the game cheats, loosing 100% health to something unseen with no comeback. It’s a nuisance to begin with that if you are doing anything more than standing, moving or jumping you can’t protect yourself at all, and you pretty much have to accept you will take massive damage, probably from someone you haven’t seen. Also, the game needs more and better placed checkpoints, I keep getting stuck at places where I repeatedly have to wade through normal enemies, kill one or more big enemies (Rancors, AT-STs etc) and then something else, and I have to go back to well before the big thing if I die.

As I say, on the lower settings I didn’t take issue, it’s supposed to be hard, even if I don’t like how it is made so, but at this point I really shouldn’t feel bad to put the game down, and feel glad for the experience. The engine gives you free reign to throw enemies and objects around, leaving a satisfying trail of twisted metal and broken bodies as you go.