Little spotty on here recently due to me playing fewer games, also I went on holiday. Things should pick up at the end of the month since there’s something like ten interesting games coming out in the space of about three weeks.

I’ve resisted talking about World of Warcraft on here so far, except in passing. It’s twelve years old now, and my assumption is that by this point you’ve either played it already, or you are absolutely uninterested in hearing anything about it. Everyone’s going to have formed an opinion on it one way or the other and there’s little that’s useful that I can add to that conversation, especially since WoW’s pace of change has historically been somewhat glacial. New mechanics are added in so gradually that you barely notice how the game changes over time; even though a decade of cumulative additions means it’s a completely different game to what it was on launch, there has historically been very little new to be said about the it. This is precisely why I’m making an exception for the recently-released expansion Legion, though, since it goes against the grain of everything I just said by making changes to the endgame that are downright revolutionary when considered in the context of WoW. I can’t remember another expansion that changed the tenor of the game quite to the extent that Legion does — and certainly not in such a positive fashion.

Legion does Blizzard’s usual thing of taking somebody else’s mechanic, polishing it so that it works better than it ever has before, and then putting it in one of their games. What’s a little unusual in this case is that the target for this mechanical larceny is another of Blizzard’s own games: Diablo 3. In this case it’s Diablo 3 after Reaper of Souls and two additional years of improvements that have taken it from the questionable success of launch to the best ARPG ever, bar none, meaning these are undeniably good mechanics to be stealing. In theory the transplant isn’t even that difficult since they’re going from a game that revolves around hitting monsters and getting loot to another game that revolves around hitting monsters and getting loot, so it’s a relatively natural fit — but the catch is that minute-to-minute gameplay in Diablo 3 is considerably more visceral and action-packed than the comparatively sedate pace of World of Warcraft. There is going to be some surgery required to either the stolen D3 mechanics or the inbuilt WoW mechanics in order to make them fit. And the surprising thing about Legion is that Blizzard has decided to change WoW to more closely match D3 rather than the other way around.

The headline features of Legion are the same as literally every other WoW expansion: a raised level cap (to 110), a new region of the world to explore, and a new world-ending threat to battle. Most of the playerbase would prefer to forget the time-travel fuckery of previous expansion Warlords of Draenor, and Blizzard appear to be obligingly willing to tie a rock to all of the characters and content introduced in that game and throw it into a river. The sole holdover is that Orc Warlock Gul’dan — a character who got torn to bits by enraged demons all the way back in Warcraft 2 — is now alive and is summoning the Burning Legion to invade Azeroth. Again. Several major characters who have been around for nearly a decade bite the dust during the expansion’s intro scenario in an attempt to emphasise how serious this particular demonic incursion is, but honestly it’s all a little bit undermined by the Legion being curiously unwilling to expand past the borders of Legion’s new questing zones in the Broken Isles, which is yet another critically important region of the world that everyone conveniently forgot about until it actually showed up in the game¹. Still, the quality of WoW’s plot has traditionally been rather dire (although it has individual questlines buried inside it that are top-notch) and I’m not at all surprised that Legion enthusiastically continues that tradition: for all of Blizzard’s feeble attempts to add in a sense of tension it’s ultimately just an excuse to hit monsters, explore dungeons and get loot, and these are the areas where Legion really excels.

The experience of questing from level 100 to level 110 is pretty much unchanged: you go to each of the zones in turn and you do the zone storyline and then at the end you get a quest to go inside the zone’s main dungeon to cap the zone’s story off. What has changed is the order in which you do the zones. In all of WoW up until this point zones have had a set level range for the monsters and quest rewards within them. Trying to tackle a zone before you were an appropriate level was asking for a world of hurt as higher-level monsters can one-shot you, and conversely doing a zone after you’d levelled past it was a waste of time since you’d barely get any XP and the quest loot would all be way below your level. This meant there was a very set progression from, say, Westfall to Redridge to Darkshire as you hit the level required to not get one-shotted the moment you set foot inside each one. This is actually a good thing when you’re dealing with players who are just starting out as you can properly structure the introduction of mechanics and questlines that overlap multiple zones, since you know which order they’ll likely be visited in. It’s a distinctly bad thing when you’re doing it to players who have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours in-game, however, as they’ll level through whatever content you’ve set out for them relatively quickly and then spend the entire rest of their game time in whatever the max level zone or dungeon is since doing anything else would be a colossal waste of time in terms of improving their character, and the “levelling” zones end up being incredibly sparsely populated while 90% of the playerbase is crammed into one relatively small area.

Legion’s solution is the same one that Diablo 3 implemented so effectively: it scales the level of the Broken Isles zones and the monsters within them to match the player’s own level. This means you can go anywhere in Legion at any time and be assured of both a decent level of challenge and an appropriate reward for the exercise in button-mashing that is WoW’s combat system. Players being able to do zones in any order does mean that individual zones are absolutely standalone with no crossover from zone to zone, which is a bit of a shame — since the hub area for this expansion is the floating mage city of Dalaran (they moved it from Northrend where it’s been chilling for the last eight years) even the breadcrumb quests to visit a zone for the first time mean you fly in from Dalaran rather than travelling via a road, which adds to the general disconnected feel of the Broken Isles as a whole. Still, it does undeniably solve the population problem: you can go anywhere in the Broken Isles and you will always see a lot of other players going to those same places and doing those same things. This would be annoying if Blizzard hadn’t finally – finally – gotten rid of the antiquated monster “tagging” system (where hitting a monster first effectively assigned it to you and meant that only you could loot it), making the presence of other players a good thing as you don’t need to be in a party to get loot and/or quest credit for killing things any more. Yes, Guild Wars 2 already did this four years ago, but it’s nice to see WoW belatedly catching up.

These changes are powerful on their own, but they’re arguably just sub-components of the most obvious D3 mechanic that’s been crammed into Legion’s endgame: World Quests, which are Diablo 3’s Bounty system by another name. The way these work is that once you hit the expansion level cap of 110 you’ll suddenly start seeing yellow exclamation marks pop up all over your map, each of which denotes a World Quest. These are almost all styled after quests you do while levelling so the actual content of the World Quests isn’t anything particularly special, but most of them can be knocked off in five minutes or so and there’s a fair chunk of variety. That last point is important as they’re all on a timer (usually 6, 12 or 24 hours) after which uncompleted quests drop off the map to be replaced by new ones. There’s about 30-odd quests active at once out of a pool of… oh, about 200 or so? And this constant cycling of quests on and off the map means that you’ll be confronted with a mostly-new set every day no matter how much you play and you can pick and choose which ones you want to do depending on what your goals are. Perhaps you need some resources for your class Order Hall — a very-scaled back version of Warlord’s Garrisons and far better for it — and so you’ll zoom around the map hoovering up the quests that award Order Resources. Or you’re taking the long-term view in picking up reputation with a specific faction and doing all of their quests for the reputation rewards. Unusually for solo PvE² content World Quests can reward Epic-quality equipment, so if there’s one of those on the map that offers an upgrade from what you’re currently wearing you’ll probably beeline straight for it. There are any number of reasons to engage in World Quests, and this along with the variety makes them a huge improvement over WoW’s previous evergreen content system of Daily Quests.

So PvE questing past the level cap is finally rewarding in comparison to the usual endgame activities, and for this alone I consider Legion a massive success since the level cap is where players spend 99% of their time in WoW. Most of the other changes it makes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. For example, the new Artifact Weapons look like they’re going to have a huge impact on how WoW plays; getting a new weapon used to be the single most significant upgrade you could achieve for your character, so starting all players off with something that is already the most powerful weapon available in the game would appear to be counterproductive, as well as potentially gamebreaking. There’s method in the madness, however, as the Artifact Weapons being handed out as part of Legion’s main questline means it can be balanced around the player always having one. Effectively all it does is remove the distorting leapfrog effect weapon upgrades had on the game and limits character improvement to the more incremental passive stat bonuses offered by increasing the item level of your armour. Each Artifact Weapon has its own experience track which is used to gradually improve the weapon by investing in what amounts to a weapon-specific talent tree, and filling this up is meant to be one of the main driving forces behind the endgame; in my experience it’s just happened naturally as I’ve been doing other stuff, though, and while the weapon talents are useful they’re not game-changing enough to be worth focusing significant amounts of effort on.

Artifact Weapons are an intelligent addition that streamline the endgame rather than turning everyone into overpowered murder machines, and the same is true for the changes to the skill system. I play a Warrior (because if I have to be a fantasy character I’m going to be the one that charges full tilt at the enemy and smashes them in the face with a shield while screaming at the top of their lungs) and can’t really speak for how the other classes have panned out, but the Warrior’s skills have been brutally pared down to just five or six actively used skills per class specialisation, plus another 7-8 that are either situational or are on long cooldowns and only used as a last resort. It’s not quite as simple as Diablo 3’s six skill slots, but it feels a damn sight more manageable than the skill spaghetti of pre-Legion WoW; each specialisation’s skill rotation is easy to get the hang of, and mastering it becomes a matter of learning when to do the additional situational stuff. Talents have also become somewhat more like D3’s runes, in that you pick one of three different modifying effects per talent slot and can switch them around as much as you like just so long as you’re in a city or an inn at the time. Best of all is that the Glyph system has been jettisoned into the sun, which is good because I never really understood the bloody thing and it was just making things unnecessarily complicated, and stripping out unnecessarily complicated game mechanics seems to be the theme of this expansion. Thanks to these changes I actually understand how to build and play a character instead of being so overwhelmed by all the different elements that I just don’t bother with half of it, and combat also seems punchier now that each class has six abilities that all smash an enemy in the face for massive damage. It’ll never be D3 levels of visceral, but honestly I think this is about as close as World of Warcraft is going to get to that ideal while still remaining WoW.

Since I’ve spent 2,000 words throwing superlatives at World of Warcraft – a game I had previously classed as the dictionary definition of “guilty pleasure” — I should, for balance, mention that for all the smart mechanical changes that have been made there seems to be somebody on Blizzard’s design staff who really misses the days when people had to manually form their own dungeon groups by spamming LFG or similar. This person is an idiot since the experience of spending an hour to get a group together and travel to a dungeon is not something I particularly wish to repeat — especially now that item level is surfaced in such a big way — but unfortunately they’re on the design staff and I’m not, and this explains why Legion’s Mythic level dungeons are so incredibly stupid. For some context, there are three difficulty levels for dungeons in WoW: Normal, Heroic and Mythic. Increasing difficulty meant tougher, more complicated baddies, but also better loot, so obviously everyone runs the hardest difficulty they can cope with. If you’re playing a Normal or Heroic dungeon you get to take advantage of WoW’s automated Dungeon Finder, a mechanism that I regarded with childlike wonder when I first encountered it since it made doing a dungeon so goddamn easy compared to the hoops you had to jump through before. In the Dungeon Finder you just select a role you’re willing to play (Tank, Healer or Damage) and the dungeons you’re interested in doing and press Go, and the Dungeon Finder will then try and match you with an appropriate dungeon group. It’ll do this in the background so that you can get on with some light questing while you’re waiting, and when your group is ready you just accept the pop-up message and get instantly teleported into the dungeon with your group. It is simple, it is painless (as long as you don’t mind the queue time), and it is exactly what WoW needs to make dungeons viable in TYOL 2016.

That is, unless you’re playing a Mythic level dungeon, in which case you don’t get to use the Dungeon Finder. If you want to do a Mythic dungeon you must instead revisit the bad old days of LFG — or at least the 2016 equivalent, which is something called the Group Finder that essentially acts as a bulletin board for posting dungeon group ads. Because Mythic dungeons are quite difficult, and because the people who run Mythic dungeons are generally the sort of childish asshole³ you’d expect to find in what is still the world’s largest subscription MMO, your chances of actually getting into one of these groups without either an item level that’s at least 10 more than what’s actually required to do the dungeon or an achievement that proves you already did it are precisely bugger all.

Usually this would just mean I don’t bother with Mythic dungeons (I believe they were present in Warlords of Draenor but I just ignored them), but unfortunately yet another of the things Legion steals from Diablo 3 are Greater Rifts, which have been rebranded as Mythic+ difficulty. Just like rifts you need a keystone, and just like rifts Mythic+ dungeons have numbered levels of difficulty that offer increasingly better rewards. I understand there are some subtle differences between Greater Rifts and Mythic+ dungeons, but I don’t know what they are because I have, to date, been completely unable to get into a Mythic+ group via the Group Finder. Apparently I missed the two-day window immediately after launch when everyone was gearing up and learning the dungeons and now I’m expected to have done at least one thousand runs of each dungeon before Mythic+ groups will even consider letting me in. This is exactly, exactly what I expected to happen when I heard about the Group Finder, and even considering that Mythic dungeons might require a more nuanced group setup than the Dungeon Finder can provide I’m really surprised that Blizzard thought this was a good solution.

That’s about the only wrong step that Legion makes. It is sadly a step that effectively locks me out from a fair chunk of endgame content, and I’d probably be far more annoyed about it if I took item level seriously at all. Fortunately I don’t; I’ve always been more about exploring and questing in WoW than I have been watching a number go up, and so while I’m a bit put out that I probably won’t get to see what Mythic+ dungeons are like it’s relatively easy for me to let it go, especially considering the vast number of good things Legion does to revitalise a game that had been on the slide for a while. For all of its improvements I don’t think it’ll change anyone’s mind on WoW as a concept – if you already liked it you’ll probably love Legion, and if you already hated it Legion isn’t going to cause you to undergo some kind of Damascene conversion — and so this review is more of a historical marker of how willing Blizzard are to make drastic alterations to the fundamentals of WoW to ensure it stays relevant. Or, at least, that its inevitable decline is a managed one. World of Warcraft might be over a decade old, but if subsequent patches and expansions are delivered with even half the imagination of Legion then it still has a good few years left in it yet.

The post Thoughts: World of Warcraft – Legion appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

With over 10 million copies sold (and counting) Overwatch might just be the most successful game launch Blizzard have had in the last decade. Strange, then, that from all of Blizzard’s output during this period Overwatch is probably the Blizzard title I like the least.

It’s probably worth stressing that “like the least” wording, as it’s very different from active dislike or even ambivalence. Overwatch is a decent enough game, which in itself is kind of impressive for something that rose from the ashes of Blizzard’s failed Titan MMO, and doubly so considering that Blizzard have no prior experience in the FPS genre. It avoids these obvious pitfalls as well as the not-so-obvious ones, deftly blending together the fast-paced team- and objective-based multiplayer gameplay of Team Fortress 2 with a much broader set of playable characters with skills and abilities that are, mechanically, straight out of the playbook for something like League of Legends or Dota, and it does this without feeling like the misshapen Frankenstein’s monster of a game it could have easily turned out to be. I’ve sunk a dozen hours into it so far and — final hour aside — I don’t feel like that time was wasted at all. It is interesting, though, that the point where Overwatch started to lose me was the point where I felt I’d started to fully understand the mechanics and characters, since it was also at that point that I understood exactly what the limitations of the game were.

At the time I started writing this review Overwatch consisted of one game mode, Quick Play¹. There is no server browser and no choice of which map you want to play, just a button to toss you into matchmaking. After a minute or two of waiting around you’ll be informed that the matchmaking algorithm has successfully managed to construct a game and you’ll enter a loading screen telling you which map you’ll be playing on; Overwatch’s maps all have a specific cultural theme — there’s the Russian map, the Japanese map, the Greek map etc. etc. — but while they strike me as being competently designed in terms of geometry layout they’re also almost perfectly bland and unmemorable. Certainly there’s no contenders for the next dust2 in here. Anyway, the map you’re playing will determine what your objective is, and these are similarly quite unimaginative — there’s King Of The Hill, where you stand on a point while stopping the enemy team from doing the same, sequential King Of The Hill, where one team is designated as the attacking team and has to capture points one after another, and Payload, which has been 100% ripped off from Team Fortress 2 as you stand next to a bomb to move it through a level to its destination while the enemy team tries to stop you. In other words, nothing I haven’t seen roughly a thousand times before.

The first point where Overwatch starts to get interesting is the character select screen. TF2 lets you pick from 8 classes, but Overwatch massively outstrips it by offering a selection of 21 characters to choose from. Once again there are many, many aspects of these characters that have been lifted from TF2; I don’t think there’s a single TF2 class mechanic that doesn’t make an appearance in Overwatch in some form. However, in Overwatch these mechanics have been remixed and matched to new heroes with other new abilities to produce something that feels genuinely fresh. Take Overwatch’s Medic analogue, Mercy. Just like the Medic, Mercy fires a healing beam that tops up the health of anyone it’s pointed at, and she can also use the alternate fire to boost their damage output. She’s often played in much the same way as the Medic by latching on to a heavy Tank character and keeping them alive while they barrel through an enemy strongpoint. I certainly played her like this in my first couple of games with her. This is something of a mistake, though, since it’s not making the most of Mercy’s Guardian Angel ability which lets her use her jetpack wings to jump to any friendly teammate in her crosshairs; this allows her to quickly flit around healing multiple members of the team in a very short span of time, and it also gives her a much-needed escape when she’s in trouble — if she can find a teammate to escape to, of course.

It doesn’t seem like that significant a change, but it ensures that Mercy feels very distinct from the TF2 Medic. The same goes for Tracer, who is the closest thing Overwatch has to the Scout; like the Scout she’s meant to flank and harass the enemy backline, but unlike the Scout she has a short-range teleport that allows her to move quickly and get to hard-to-reach areas, as well as an ability that lets her rewind her own personal timestream to the location — and health pool — that she had a few seconds ago. The same goes for Pharah, a moderately tough assault character who carries a rocket launcher as her default weapon but doesn’t give a shit about rocket jumping like TF2’s Soldier class does because she has an actual honest-to-god jetpack that renders it redundant. Sometimes the abilities have been split out across different characters; Torbjorn has received the Engineer’s ability to build a large upgradeable sentry turret that spits hot lead at anyone who ventures into its line of sight, but teleporter construction has gone to Symmetra. Torbjorn makes armour packs for teammates while Symmetra boosts their shields. Symmetra can also deploy up to six tiny turrets that individually do naff-all damage but which can be placed on walls and ceilings and which can start racking up the kills when clustered together in a blind spot – above a door, say, causing any enemy that wanders through it to be doused in the infamous “car wash” of laser beams.

Overwatch isn’t content to simply remix ideas from class-based first-person shooters, though. It’s also taken a heavy dose of inspiration from MOBAs, both in terms of specific abilities and more generally in the way the abilities are structured and activated. Most characters have a primary ability activated by the Shift button and a secondary ability activated by E. Doing useful things for the team – killing enemies, healing people, capturing points — will charge up an ultimate ability to 100%. Once it’s full, the ultimate can be deployed by pushing Q. Each character has a different ultimate, but it’s here that I feel Overwatch’s ability design makes its first significant misstep, as most ultimates — not all, but most — boil down to “push Q to kill enemy team”. There’s some interesting ones in there, to be sure — the interplay between Zarya’s ultimate, which launches a gravity orb that sucks in the enemy team to a specific point, and Pharah’s, where she launches herself into the air and saturates an area of the map with a barrage of rockets, is a demonstration of where the ultimate design has gone right — but there’s too many like Reaper’s, which kills anyone standing next to him, and Soldier 76’s, which kills anyone he’s looking at, and Hanzo’s, which kills anyone standing in a broad rectangular area. These things are not massively interesting (or difficult) to use, and when you’re on the receiving end it’s enormously frustrating to be killed with no real chance of escaping.

The sound design helps here a little bit. All of the ultimates are announced via a distinctive voice lines or sound effect, and so you learn to run for cover when you hear McCree blurt out “It’s hiiiiiigh noon…” or to scatter at the sound of the motor on Junkrat’s Riptire. The sound design in general is excellent, in fact, with just about everything in the game being signalled via a sound cue that makes your ears just as important as your eyes for keeping track of what’s going on in the fight.  With the ultimates it only goes so far, though, and despite eventually learning what the cues for the most annoying ones were I still found myself dying helplessly far too often. Respawn times in Overwatch are pretty fast and it only takes you 20 or 30 seconds to get back into the fight, but it’s the knowledge that one of the enemy team pushing Q just completely blunted whatever forward momentum your team had that I find the most discouraging thing about it. It would have been nice if the ultimates had required timing and intelligence to deploy correctly and didn’t just act as an “I win” button to make the player using them feel good.

Still, if there’s one character that’s killing you over and over and you feel like you just can’t make any headway against them, there’s always a solution: switch the character you’re playing to one that counters theirs. You can change characters at any time — although the best time to do it is obviously when you’re dead — and with no cost, since Overwatch wants to actively encourage class switching as a strategy. Say there’s a Winston on the enemy team who keeps smashing your attacks. Winston is a big gorilla with a large health pool and a short-range tesla cannon that’s good at damaging multiple targets but crap at killing single ones, and there are characters in the game who are better at dealing short-range damage than he is; specifically the shotgun-wielding Reaper. Reaper is in turn countered by the cyborg cowboy McCree, whose flashbang ability can stun him and prevent him from escaping long enough to gun him down. McCree likes to fight at medium range, and so he finds himself at a disadvantage when fighting long-range sniping characters such as Hanzo. And to close the circle Winston’s leap ability lets him get up nice and close to Hanzo and smash him to a pulp. Every character in Overwatch has at least two or three hard counters of this kind, and as a result there’s no one character that seems massively overpowered². The converse is also true; because everyone is a counter for somebody, there’s no characters that feel like they’re truly useless either³.

Ultimates aside, the character design is Overwatch’s greatest success. They’re all distinctive and all at least moderate fun to play; the game rewards knowing what each of them can do, and with 21 of them to choose from gathering that knowledge isn’t something that comes overnight. The isolated structure of a single match of Overwatch also works well, for all that it’s ripped off from TF2; it’s basically ideal for precisely the sort of casual shootout that Quick Play is supposed to be. In an ideal world where the Quick Play matchmaking algorithm could produce balanced encounters, I think that Overwatch would be a great game in spite of its flaws — the weird POV that makes everything seem too big; the game’s complete failure to contextualise why these six vs. six matches are constantly happening⁴; the fact that every single Reaper player I have encountered, friendly or enemy, has been a flaming asshole⁵. Like, I don’t think it would go down on the list of all-time multiplayer greats, but just like recent Blizzard efforts (Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm, to be precise) it would be a perfectly valid way to spend 20-minute chunks of my time having casual, low-investment fun.

Except my overriding feeling when I look back on my time spent playing Overwatch is one of mild annoyance, not fun. This is because I have played very few games of Overwatch that weren’t complete stomps of one team or the other. The initial signs when joining a game aren’t promising; you can see the XP levels of every player in the game, and by the time I reached level 8 I was regularly being matched against players who were level 70 or even level 80. Given the nature of XP curves these were players with many more times the playtime that I had, and while playtime doesn’t necessarily correlate to skill it’s going to account for something; I refuse to believe you can play Overwatch for 100 hours and not be better at it than somebody who has been playing for 5. Still, that’s just a matter of experience – surely once I learned all the characters and the maps things would even up and I’d find myself making a bit more of a contribution, right? So I busied myself with playing the game and trying each character at least once to get a feel for their abilities; I eventually learned the maps (not by name, but by layout) and the various sound cues, and this all did lead to me dying a little less often and doing a fair bit better. Unfortunately this personal improvement didn’t seem to correlate in any way with an improved match experience. The general quality was still tremendously lopsided, with maybe 10% of my games being anywhere near a close-run thing. Overwatch is supposed to be a more casual multiplayer shooter, yes, but I still find being on either end of a one-sided match a bit discouraging even if I’m not taking it all that seriously; I don’t have all that much investment in the outcome if I feel like it was determined before I even got into the game.

I did try to avoid jumping to conclusions, but at the end of the day I’m going to have to point the finger of blame at the Quick Play matchmaking algorithm, which seems pathologically incapable of assembling teams of similar skill levels and pitting them against one another. To be fair it does face something of an uphill struggle as so much of Overwatch depends on that ability to change classes mid-match to hard counter the other team, and so the team composition is far more fluid than what you’d find even in a MOBA. It may be that the very concept of “balanced match” doesn’t actually exist in Overwatch. Whatever the reason, once I’d spent the dozen-odd hours required to learn the basics of every hero and still found myself enmeshed in these idiotic slaughterhouses I decided very quickly that Overwatch was a intrinsically broken game. It has the same problem as Titanfall, in that the core gameplay is fundamentally good — even great — but as far as the meta-structure of the game is concerned Quick Play is essentially all it has to offer. Where Titanfall’s experience was too limited to sustain long-term play, though, Overwatch’s is just too crap. If you want to boil things down to a single button that I push to play a game that’s fine, but that button had better be able to drop me into an awesome experience eight or nine times out of ten. If it doesn’t, and if you don’t provide any meaningful alternatives, then what happens is that I’m going to stop playing rather than continuing to roll those Quick Play bones in the hope that maybe, this time, it won’t generate opposing team compositions that are stunningly mismatched. Knowing Blizzard they’ll improve their matchmaking system over time as well as adding in a few more game modes, so I’m happy to take a pass on Overwatch in the hope that it will be better later. It’s not inherently bad, but it absolutely does not pass the long-term taste test right now.

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Tangentially-related footnote, for no other reason than that I want to talk about it: Gearbox released their class-based multiplayer FPS Battleborn at almost exactly the same time as Overwatch, with entirely predictable results; it’s been comprehensively obliterated.. By all accounts Battleborn did itself few favours by being an exceedingly average experience — but still, one wonders what the hell Gearbox and/or publishers 2K were thinking.

The post Thoughts: Overwatch appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The saga of Starcraft 2 has been quite a ride. If you look at the three “episodes” of SC2 as a single entity it’s something that’s been in development for nigh on a decade; when Blizzard announced they were splitting the game out into three race-specific releases I don’t think anyone anticipated it would take them five years from the release of Wings of Liberty to get this last installment out the door. Even for Blizzard, that’s slow. As it transpired, what they put in each box was easily worthy of the status of a full-fat game, which is probably why it took so long; however it also meant that the gaming landscape shifted dangerously under Blizzard’s feet while they were locked into their development process. When they first announced SC2 in 2007 the real-time strategy genre was showing serious signs of senescence, but there was still a huge appetite for it that afforded plenty of room for an old classic like SC2 to come roaring back onto the scene.

Fast-forward 8 years, and who wants to play the classic style of RTS any more? Oh, the die-hards say they do, but the continued failure of spiritual successors such as Grey Goo and Act of Aggression is a definite indicator that things have moved on. The RTS genre isn’t just looking a little bit peaky, it’s got a priest standing over it giving it the last rites while surrounded by its grieving MOBA offspring, and Starcraft has gone from being Blizzard’s biggest success to being possibly their most niche product¹.  This is an odd environment for what used to be the flagship RTS franchise to release its final episode into, and it makes Legacy of the Void a legacy in the truest sense, in that it’s something of a relic from a bygone age.

But at least it’s a *fun* relic.

After spending time with the bog-standard human Terrans in Wings of Liberty and the insect-like alien Zerg in Heart of the Swarm, Legacy is the Protoss-themed installment of Starcraft 2. The Protoss are another alien race whose gimmicks lie in every unit being shielded, warping units in instead of building them, and a heavy emphasis on tough robotic units with a lot of staying power – but if you have played either of the previous episodes, or even the original Starcraft, you’ll know all of this already; the Protoss in and of themselves are nothing particularly new. What is new, though, are the singleplayer-specific ways in which Legacy plays around with what we’ve come to take for granted as the bog-standard Protoss units. If you’ve played Wings of Liberty at all you’ll remember that you could unlock special upgrades for your standard units as well as a selection of singleplayer-only units (including classic units from Starcraft 1) in the campaign metagame, affording you a much-expanded roster of abilities and tactical options. Legacy of the Void repeats this trick except with a distinctly Protoss-y spin, and it’s much more successful than Heart of the Swarm’s attempts to do the same.

There’s a fairly chunky campaign attached to Legacy of the Void consisting of 25-ish missions. Six of these missions are confined to the prologue/epilogue, where your customisation options are taken away and you get stuck with static troop/ability choices as defined by the mission, but the rest of them allow you to gradually unlock new units and abilities. This is done through the Protoss campaign’s big gimmick, which is that you’re on board a gigantic spaceship called the Spear of Adun which flies around the galaxy gaining allies for the fight against a Generic Blizzard Villain. Each unit that you’re used to in standard SC2 Protoss play – the Zealot, the Strider, the Immortal and so on — now occupies a broader unit category of “foot soldier”, “walker”, “tank unit” and so on (these aren’t the actual names, I can’t remember what they are). Each category lets you take a choice of one of three units, and each unit will have substantially different abilities; for example, the first choice you’re given is between the Zealot, who has acquired a polearm that allows them to attack multiple units simultaneously, and the Centurion, who can charge into battle through your other units and inflicts a brief stun on any nearby enemy units when he makes contact. The walker category on the other hand gives you a choice between the SC2 Strider, which is fairly mobile and can do a short-range teleport, and the classic Starcraft Dragoon, which doesn’t have any special abilities but which is tougher and packs a bigger punch than the Strider.

To start with you’ll only have one or two options per category available (and most of the categories will be locked outright), but as you progress through the campaign and gather more factions to your side you’ll start to open up more and more options that let you build an army that dovetails nicely with your strengths as a player. I hate micro so I tended to avoid units with active abilities; instead I put together a force of strong units with a lot of staying power that could warp in anywhere on the map thanks to the Energiser variant of the Sentry unit, which can convert into a warp node at a moment’s notice. Eventually the basic units taper off a little as campaign power creep set in (in particular I was painfully aware of the Zealots’ status as expendable foot soldiers as I’d lose most of them during every fight) and it becomes more effective to just mass Void Rays or Carriers instead of playing an attrition game with the Zerg or the Terrans (which is something the Protoss are very bad at), but it’s still a nice system that affords a hell of a lot of tactical flexibility. Most importantly you’re free to chop and change your unit options from the campaign menu at any time, which makes experimenting with new combinations both easy and fun.

Still, this unit system is ultimately nothing that Wings of Liberty didn’t already do five years ago. What is genuinely new, however, is the way the game deals with the Spear of Adun itself. Your flagship is the venue for many, many inter-mission cutscenes, but it never makes an appearance on the map during an actual mission. Instead it makes its presence felt via a number of extremely powerful abilities that you invoke via a hotbar at the top of the screen. You start off with just one – the ability to summon in a Pylon anywhere on the map, which is useful for warping shenanigans before you get the Energiser — but eventually expand to a selection of eighteen in all, split into six categories; as with the units, you get a choice of one of three abilities per category, but unlike the units this choice is not free. You’ll always have access to a slot’s basic tier-1 ability, however unlocking the tier-2 and 3 abilities requires varying amounts of Solarite, Legacy’s macguffin resource that you gather through completing each mission’s bonus objectives. It’s well worth the effort to collect as the higher level abilities are much more powerful, and if you change your mind and want to try out a different ability you can always refund any Solarite you’ve previously committed and invest it in something else.

The Spear of Adun’s abilities are seriously powerful. Some of them act in a similar way to the permanent upgrades you got in Wings of Liberty, like the auto-gathering of vespene gas from Assimilators without having to commit probes, but most of them have a huge influence on how you actively play the game. Having a panic button that lets you incinerate groups of enemy units makes you a lot more carefree in your expansion, as does being able to warp in a group of Dragoons and Zealots as reinforcements or calling down a huge robotic juggernaut from space to cut a swathe through the enemy ranks. There’s a shield booster that temporarily gives your units a massive buff to their toughness, repair beams that shoot down from orbit and heal any robotic units you have in your army – not to mention the ability to stop time for twenty seconds, freezing enemy units in their tracks while your troops cut them to pieces (that one’s on a flat five-minute cooldown for obvious reasons). Probably the most powerful ability is also one of the most subtle: giving Stargates and Robotics Bays warping capabilities, which when combined with the Energiser allows you to teleport Immortals and Carriers directly into the thick of battle.

(As a quick aside, I should point out that the single-player campaign is balanced around you having these abilities at your beck and call so it’s not quite the pushover you’d expect, especially on the harder difficulty settings.)

All of the activated abilites are gated by a slowly-recharging energy resource that prevents you from firing them off willy-nilly, but they remain impactful enough to completely change the tenor of the game – arguably they’re the one big thing that stops Legacy of the Void from being the inferior do-over of Wings of Liberty that Heart of the Swarm turned out to be. I’ve never found the Protoss particularly compelling as a faction in Starcraft, but the slowly-unlocking abilities combined with the unit variants held my interest for the entire length of the campaign. It helped that Blizzard have looked a little further back for their “inspiration” in mission design this time around; many of the basic objectives are welcome repeats of levels from Warcraft 3/Frozen Throne (I think 13 years is long enough that they can defrost them with a straight face now), and there’s a couple of completely new ones like the mission where your base is on a moving platform that you have to punt about the map in search of fresh resources². Even the inevitable rehash of WoL’s zombie mission was relatively inoffensive this time around, and as a complete package Legacy of the Void’s single-player campaign is remarkably focused, coherent, and as a consequence just downright enjoyable.

Except, that is, for the story.

I said it in the review of Reaper of Souls, I said it in the review of Heart of the Swarm, and I said it in the review of Diablo 3, but it bears repeating again and again until Blizzard finally hire a professional writing team: their ability to tell a story is almost unbearably terrible and is the single biggest problem facing their games today. (Note that I say tell rather than write; the writing in the original Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo games was also pretty bad, but it was presented with a great deal more style than modern Blizzard titles.) To be fair to Legacy I don’t think the story was quite as comprehensively bad as Blizzard’s recent efforts, but I suspect that’s because I found it difficult to give the tiniest iota of a shit about the Protoss one way or another. I don’t even remember the main character of Artanis from the original Starcraft, but he’s so bland and one-note here that it’s not hard to figure out why: he’s totally forgettable, and that goes double for the crew of nobodies populating the Spear of Adun. And as the conclusion to a five-year saga spanning three games the plot itself is entirely limp and nonsensical; Blizzard have now completely reverted to type and pit you against their standard Blizzard Baddie (a dark god who dreams of destroying the universe, just like in Diablo and just like in Warcraft), complete with interludes where they call you up on the space-phone to taunt you and tell you everything is proceeding according to plan even as you exterminate their armies and kick in their front door. I am surprised that there isn’t such a thing as the Blizzard Plot Generator online, but if there was I could easily believe that Legacy of the Void’s storyline was the resulting product; a satisfying denouement to a galaxy-spanning epic it most definitely is not.

Still, I’m not about to let that get me down; it is rather unfortunately par for the course now as far as Blizzard games are concerned³, and I’ve become rather accustomed to putting up with terrible writing to get at the meaty, satisfying mechanics within. As far as those are concerned I think that while Legacy of the Void doesn’t quite achieve the insanely tight mission design of Wings of Liberty, it’s at least good enough to be mentioned in the same sentence. As a swansong for Starcraft in particular and for the classic style of RTS in general it has at least left me with some pleasant memories. And given other recent efforts? I think the genre could do a lot, lot worse.

The post Thoughts: Legacy Of The Void appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Heroes of the Storm represents something of a departure from Blizzard’s usual M.O for releasing new products. For the last twenty years their strategy has been the same: identify a market that is suitably zeitgeist-y but which is not yet saturated; do a crapload of market research and design experimentation to figure out what makes it so popular; and then make their own entry into the genre which is far from revolutionary, but which is so accessible and refined in terms of mechanics and highly polished in terms of production values that they establish dominance over the market, or at least a significant share of that market. It’s been that way ever since Warcraft II, and the most recent example — Hearthstone — is doing just as well as you’d expect by carving out a huge portion of the virtual CCG market on both PC and mobile. Blizzard like to operate from a position of strength; they’ve always been pretty good at design (even if they do occasionally make fucking stupid decisions like the Diablo 3 auction house) but if there’s one thing that makes them so good at what they do, it’s that they have the time and the resources to do it properly where other developers might feel pressured by financial constraints or publisher deadlines.

This is why Heroes of the Storm is a dramatic role reversal for Blizzard. It’s their entry into the MOBA¹ genre, a market which is so cutthroat that it’s already strewn with the bodies of dozens of failed and cancelled titles. The MOBA market is currently dominated by the behemoth that is Riot’s League of Legends, with Valve’s Dota 2 also holding on to a sizeable portion of the playerbase. Valve and Riot are much tougher competition for Blizzard; they have just as much money as Blizzard do, and furthermore they’ve already been operating in the market for some time and have had 2-3 years to grow their audience share. MOBAs are incredibly deep games that require a level of time investment on par with a particularly obsessive brand of MMO, and so Blizzard are facing the same problem that the horde of World of Warcraft challengers did a decade ago: Heroes of the Storm is up against established best-of-breed games whose playerbases are going to be extremely reluctant to abandon something they’ve sunk hundreds of hours into in favour of something new. Breaking their stranglehold is going to be extremely difficult.

So despite their reputation, their resources, and (thanks to Battle.net) the huge network of existing players that they’ve made a habit of leveraging into playing their new releases, for once Blizzard are operating at such a huge disadvantage that they’re the definite underdogs in this scenario. If they’d just copied LoL and slapped a coat of Blizzard paint on top I wouldn’t rate their chances much, but fortunately there appears to have been a realisation early on that targeting hardcore MOBA addicts would have been a total waste of time as no matter how many of them there are and no matter how much money they’re feeding into LoL and Dota, most of them are already spoken for. Instead, Heroes is aimed squarely at an even-larger audience: the people for whom existing MOBAs are too complicated, too intimidating, and just too downright demanding. This makes a hell of a lot of sense; there’s no room in the market for another League, but for every player that game has there’s ten more who bounced off or lapsed out, and who might be very much up for a less stressful take on the genre.

It’s a strategy which ties into that other strength of Blizzard: taking a previously existing idea (even if it’s one of their own) and cutting it down, polishing it and repackaging it as something that’s twice as accessible, even if it has lost some of its depth in the process. That pretty much perfectly sums up Heroes: it’s Dota for people who don’t have six hundred hours to spend on merely becoming very bad at a game instead of downright abject, and League for those of us who would like to be able to log on and play a game in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Friends. It’s the familiar heroes-and-towers-and-lanes setup, but ruthlessly, ruthlessly streamlined in a way that I’m sure would horrify those hardcore players the other would-be MOBAs made the mistake of targeting. There are no items in this game, no gold, no last-hitting and certainly no denying². XP gain has been massively simplified; a hero merely has to be in the vicinity of dying creeps and structures to receive the XP for their destruction, and that XP goes into a team-wide pool that means everyone levels up at the same time.  Each hero still has three abilities and an ultimate that unlocks at level 10, but the basic abilities are all available from level 1 and increase in power automatically as you level up; the decisions around items and abilities have been shifted to choosing which of a pool of four supplementary talents to take at specific level gates. These talents are split between buffs to existing hero abilities (like Sylvanas’s Shadow Dagger now healing her for each enemy damaged) and extra generic abilities like applying a shield to a teammate – it’s nothing dramatically game-changing, but they do provide enough valid choices that characters can be built in legitimately different ways.

Speaking as a lapsed Dota player I do sometimes miss the meatier decision-making and the tension of the laning phase when each team is trying to get an edge on the other in a hundred little ways, but I think this streamlining definitely achieves its goal of making Heroes matches quick, simple and clean. Most of the stuff I listed above were the primary reasons games of Dota could go on for an hour plus, most of which was spent grinding up gold to buy the items needed for endgame builds. Here all that stuff is gone, and each team instead progresses at a universal rate determined by their map control and teamfighting ability – and because it’s centrally set, Blizzard can tinker with that rate to dramatically shorten match times while retaining the fundamental strategy and individual skill that MOBAs rely on. They’ve settled on around twenty minutes as the ideal length, and I must say I’m surprised at how each game still feels like a meaty experience with a beginning, middle and end despite being half the length of a typical Dota match. The short match times really do work, to the point where I’m starting to wonder how I ever tolerated it being longer; it’s just about the right amount of time to feel like it’s worthwhile playing, but not long enough that you feel you have to set aside a whole block of time just for it. This is a MOBA where you can jump in for a quick game in between doing other stuff, where you can reasonably fit one or two matches into a lunch break, and that alone is a very valuable selling point for Blizzard’s target audience.

Blizzard have done a fair bit more than just cut, though. They’ve introduced a few new innovations too, chief of which is having more than one map. There are currently six different arenas in Heroes, each with a different layout (some even dispense with the third lane entirely) and their own individual special objective. These objectives kick in two to three minutes after the match starts, and most of them involve picking up and turning in a certain amount of tokens — seeds, skulls, doubloons, whatever — to unleash some horrifying fortification-destroying monstrosity on the other team. The objectives are valuable enough that you can’t afford to ignore them, and so the two teams inevitably end up colliding as they scrabble for tokens, with one- and two- player skirmishes quickly escalating into full-scale teamfights. It’s a great mechanism for forcing players to fight instead of farm, and the different objectives also serve to give each map its own sense of character (which is good because visually most of them are rather bland in that special Blizzard way). It also makes map control and pushing creep waves extra-important as it’ll give you the space to complete the objective – or at least it’ll mean that while the enemy team is fighting you in the middle of the map the creeps will be smashing down their base. If you need a little extra pushing power there are mercenary camps of tough, neutral minions scattered around the map; you have to defeat them before they’ll join you (which usually requires the efforts of two or more heroes) but once you do they join the nearest creep wave and usually end up pushing down a wall or a fort before they get killed.

These features are especially welcome because they ensure Heroes retains some of the complexity it would otherwise be in danger of losing while at the same time isolating that complexity inside each individual match – put simply, I don’t have to memorise a hundred different hero ability sets and items in order to do well at it, but I do have to pay attention to positioning, map control and the overall flow of the game. The maps may be different but the same principles can be applied to each, and it’s this that you have to learn and grasp in order to be good at Heroes. It’s still got a fair bit of depth to it, enough so that after 90 games I still feel like there’s plenty of room for me to improve strategically, but it’s not so deep that I’m sitting here looking at a learning curve that’s disappearing into the stratosphere and thinking “Bloody hell, I’ll never get up there.” I think they pitched the balance right, in other words. They successfully refined the MOBA concept in a way that only Blizzard really can, stripping out the dead weight and making it truly accessible for maybe the first time ever.

But that’s not to say that they’ve done everything right.

In-match, Heroes is a solid experience. It never quite reaches the highs of Dota, but it gets pretty damn high regardless and I see that as an acceptable tradeoff for being able to dip in and out whenever I want. Outside of the matches, however — in the menus and in the in-game shop — it’s a different story entirely. First off, Heroes tracks two types of level in the metagame: overall player level, which increases as you gain XP with every match played, and individual hero level, which only increases if you play games with that hero. The higher hero levels have colour and skin unlocks associated with them, which is fine; it’s a nice way to show off your experience with a hero you’re good at. The lower hero levels is where it gets dicey, however, as certain talent options and the hero’s alternate ultimate ability are locked off until you hit levels 2, 3 and 4. Often these are the best talents for the hero in question or are otherwise critical parts of the build you want to try – but you won’t be able to until you’ve played 4-5 games with them (more if you don’t have an XP bonus active). For those 4-5 games you’ll be playing a version of the hero that’s effectively crippled, which in a lot of cases severely impacted my enjoyment of them. I suppose the intent is to introduce the hero’s abilities gradually to avoid overwhelming the player, but it’s backfired massively and seems like the worst first impression the game could make.

Then you’ve got the vast array of game types on offer, which is to say that there’s one game type on offer: Quick Match, which is just a standard matchmaking mode. It’s unranked and just throws you in a game with nine other chumps, and the matchmaker isn’t all that fussy about team composition either; in Heroes you pick your hero before you find a match instead of drafting them during the match, but unfortunately it has no qualms about putting you on a team with three assassins (glass cannons) and no support healers while the other team has an almost perfect lineup. There’s also a Versus AI mode which is moderately useful for learning a character’s abilities in a safe environment, but the Heroes AI is predictably terrible and so every one of these I’ve played has been a one-sided stomp.

And then you’ve got your Hero League, which is the actual ranked mode for Heroes of the Storm, except this doesn’t unlock until you a) hit player level 30 and b ) own ten heroes. Fulfilling the first condition is difficult enough – I’ve played 90 games, most with various XP bonuses from launch events, queueing with friends and the in-game booster packs you can get for spending real money, and I’m still only level 23 — but it’s the second condition that’s the real ballache, since Heroes follows the League model of having all of the 40-odd heroes locked by default until you buy them with either real money or in-game currency. There’s a weekly rotation of 5-7 heroes you can play for free, but you have no control over what those are and anyway they don’t count towards your ten owned heroes total, so your only recourse is to get grinding if you want to participate. And here’s where we hit my principal beef with Heroes of the Storm: I know it’s a free-to-play game, and I know Blizzard have to make money off of it somehow, but it is tremendously grabby with both its real-money and in-game currency pricing.  I just did a tally and you can buy the ten cheapest heroes with 28,000 of in-game gold, which just so happens to be more than all of the money I’ve made so far. To buy them for real money would cost £38 – and bear in mind that these are what can be thought of as the basic starting heroes, the solid dependable ones you throw at new players to get them accustomed to the game. If you want the more interesting (and expensive) ones you have to pay a whopping £7.50 per hero.

Coming to Heroes from Dota 2, where all 100 heroes are available to play from the moment you install the game, this strikes me as a incredibly grasping monetisation strategy. Cosmetics, fine, boosters, fine, but locking heroes — the basic foundation on which the game is built — behind a paywall is really fucking dumb, especially when they’re priced as stupidly as they are. Blizzard attempt to soften the blow with various sales and package deals, which is great until you notice that the heroes bundled together in the packs are all from the cheaper end of the scale and that they’re thrown in with some skins to make the saving seem larger than it actually is. It’s sad to see a developer that had managed to acquire a reputation for doing F2P right with Hearthstone fucking up their pricing as badly as they have here; I have no qualms about spending on F2P these days, but Heroes has wrung a measly £7 out of me so far. I think I’d spent at least £15 on Hearthstone at the same point in its lifecycle, so this more aggressive pricing isn’t really working for them since the value proposition behind what I’m buying isn’t anywhere near good enough. For me, anyway.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that many of the basic features of Heroes are locked behind paywalls that require a prohibitive amount of grind to tear down. If I actually cared about participating the Hero League at all I’d be very, very annoyed that they’d set the minimum requirements for it so high; I understand it includes that pre-game hero draft that’s missing from Quick Match, but as it stands I won’t see it until I’ve played another 40-50 games, and no matter how quick and accessible Heroes is that’s still a significant quantity of time. As it is I’ll just be annoyed that I can’t even try heroes properly unless they’re on rotation, and then even if I like them I’ll have to scrounge up enough in-game currency to buy them – when you make about 400 gold per day if you play daily, and the most expensive heroes cost 10,000 gold, that is going to take some time. Fortunately it’s difficult to take this as a mortal insult when Heroes has succeeded so well at being precisely the sort of disposable fun a MOBA should be, but it’s still something that leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.

The post Thoughts: Heroes of the Storm appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Like I said in the Diablo 3 review two years ago: this is going to be complicated.

Depending on how you look at it Reaper of Souls is either the best expansion pack Blizzard have put out since, oh, Frozen Throne back in 2003, or else an incredibly mediocre experience on par with last year’s underwhelming Heart of the Swarm expansion for Starcraft II. The reason behind this little dichotomy is that most of the admittedly excellent changes Reaper of Souls has ushered in aren’t part of the expansion pack itself. Instead, they were introduced nearly a month ago in the Loot 2.0 update that everyone who owned Diablo 3 got to experience free of charge. And when Reaper of Souls itself is retailing at a ludicrous £30 (which is more than I paid for the base game), it’s important to know what you will and will not have to pay for

So this review will treat the two as separate entities. On the one hand you have the much-vaunted Loot 2.0 patch. As the name implies, this is a complete and fundamental overhaul of how Diablo’s loot system works that was necessary in order to walk back possibly the most stupid mistake Blizzard have ever made in one of their games: the Auction House. It’s gone now, and so is the miserly loot system that underpinned it in a misguided attempt to encourage players to actually use the sodding thing. In its place is a far more satisfying mechanic that practically showers the player with loot; you now pick up roughly one magical (blue) or rare (yellow) item every minute, and a legendary (orange) every hour or two. Even though the yellow magical super enchanted items are now much easier to find than stock white items with no affixes whatsoever, this somehow never gets old. Diablo as a series has always been about killing monsters and getting loot, and looking back on it it’s astounding how hard the base game failed at the latter half of the formula. 90% of the time you’d get all excited about a yellow item dropping for your Wizard only to find that it was a Barbarian mighty weapon that you couldn’t even use, and so you’d inevitably end up schlepping over to the auction house to buy the things that wouldn’t drop for you in-game. The previous loot system was intentionally crippled so that this would be the case, and it was by far the most obnoxious thing Diablo 3 did in terms of mechanics.  I called it out back when I originally reviewed the game, and it remains a stupid, stupid idea.

Now, despite a year(ish) of denials that they totally hadn’t taken a hammer to their loot system in order to try to get people to spend money in their auction house, Blizzard have finally admitted that the process of getting loot was nowhere near as fun or compelling as it would have been had the auction house not been included, and their solution is to remove it and beef up the loot system massively. With Loot 2.0 not only do you get more loot, and not only is it fundamentally more awesome (I’ve still got some legacy items left over from before the patch hit, and the Loot 2.0 items are roughly twice as powerful), but thanks to a new smart loot system it will almost always be loot with affixes that make it good for the class you’re playing when you pick it up.  This means that every single time an item drops it has a genuine chance to be an upgrade from what you’re using right now. Often it isn’t – in fact most of the time it isn’t – but Blizzard have successfully rekindled the almost gambling-like thrill when you pick something up: it pays off often enough that you’re excited to find out what it is, and the loot drops often enough that you keep on playing.  Hell, the much-improved legendary item drop rate on its own is enough to keep me hooked for the time being; pre-Loot 2.0 I picked up a grand total of three legendaries in 100+ hours of play. Now I’ve got two stash tabs full of the things, and about half of them have unique properties that’d make me completely redo my build in order to take advantage of them. When you see an orange item drop you get a little twinge of excitement in the pit of your stomach that it might be something game-changing like Fate of the Fell or Jekangbord.

It really can’t be understated how much of an improvement this state of affairs is over the base game, and it goes hand in hand with a new dynamic difficulty system that scales with player level. The old static difficulty settings of Normal, Nightmare, Hell and Inferno have been consigned to the dustbin of history, and in their place is a transparent set of difficulties that are both finer-grain (i.e. going up a difficulty level isn’t the huge leap that it used to be) and which straight up tell you the increased rewards you’ll get for playing on a higher difficulty setting. The scaling is a little bit disappointing since getting ahead of the curve is much more difficult when the curve simply adjusts itself to catch you up, but unless you’re playing on the highest difficulty setting it’s still possible to make a build that’s hilariously overpowered, which is all I really ask. The upside to the scaling is that since enemies scale to your level all they loot they drop – as well as the XP you get for killing them — does as well, meaning that playing earlier acts of the game no longer feels like wasting your time.

There are other changes that have been made as part of Loot 2.0 – for example all classes that aren’t Demon Hunter are noticeably more fun to play than they were two years ago, although I haven’t been playing in the interim so this may just be the result of two years of balance tweaking – but the headline shift in how the game doles out equipment has been a huge success in my eyes. Diablo 3 always had a particularly polished set of mechanics in terms of killing the monsters, and now the loot they drop has been adjusted to be equally satisfying.  The best part is that you get this fix absolutely free; you can go back to Diablo right now and level a new character from 1 through to 60 under this much more enjoyable system without paying a penny. Once you get to 60, though, you’ll have to start thinking about whether you want to fork out for the actual expansion part of the expansion or not, and this isn’t anywhere near as much of an unqualified success story.

Reaper of Souls itself makes the usual expansion improvements, including:

• A new class, the Crusader. The Crusader is basically a paladin from WoW; if you’ve played WoW you know that means armour like a tank and a bunch of long-cooldown abilities focused on survival, but the tradeoff is that you might as well be hitting the monsters with one of those rubber bats used in movies when nobody really wants to hurt anyone. While it is possible to make a build that’ll vomit out an absolutely obscene amount of burst damage with the right skill combination, most of the time playing a Crusader is kind of dull and feel distinctly underpowered compared to the other walking-tank melee class in the game, the Barbarian. It’s possible to give it a power boost with endgame gems and enchantments, but then I could stick that on a Wizard I was levelling and kill things twice as fast; perhaps in the future they’ll tweak it so that it’s less boring to play but right now Crusaders aren’t exactly screaming “BUY ME” at anyone thinking of shelling out for RoS.

• A whole new Act. More on this in a bit, because it is laughably bad and deserves a more systematic beating with the Hating Stick. The only good thing it does is give Blizzard an excuse to raise the level cap to 70.

• After you’ve finished that Act you get access to the brand new Adventure mode for all characters, which is a grudging concession that Diablo 3’s plot was awful and that the game would be much improved if the story was removed, as evidenced by it removing the story and opening up all the waypoints; you can now go anywhere and kill anything and the hideous cutscenes will get in your way far less than they used to. It also gives you Bounties, which are mini-missions to go somewhere and kill a monster/clear a dungeon/do an events; do the Bounty and you get a lump sum reward of cash and gold along with some Blood Shards that can be gambled for random items. You also get fragments of the keys needed to enter Nephalem Rifts, which are dungeons generated entirely randomly using any combination of monsters and tilesets found throughout the game.

• A new crafter, the Mystic. The Mystic lets you reroll stats on items (for a fee) and also changes the appearance of your equipment, which is important for fantasy dress-up purposes.

Of these four major additions, only two – Adventure mode and the Mystic – are actually good. The eleven hours I’ve spent playing a Crusader haven’t exactly been a trial, but at the same time I’d feel a little cheated if I’d bought the expansion for it. And then you have Act V, chronicling the continued struggle against new big baddie Malthael and his angelic groupies, and this is notable because it is utter balls.

Diablo 3’s story is really bad. Famously bad. It was so bad I wrote a whole extra blog post on how bad it was, and I was far from the only one to notice the badness; basically the entire internet pointed out exactly the same flaws (i.e. all of it) as I did. Faced with this overwhelming quantity of negative feedback Blizzard have taken a long, hard look at their story and writing process… and proceeded to make exactly the same mistakes they made in Diablo 3, and Heart of the Swarm, and Starcraft II, not to mention god knows how many WoW expansion packs. After everyone pointed out how shit it was to have Azmodan call the player on his holophone every time they thwarted his plans and tell them it totally didn’t matter, he didn’t care anyway and that he was still going to win, even as you systematically slaughtered you way through his armies and into his house and stuffed him into a hunk of rock, I’m utterly astounded that they’ve chosen to do the same thing with Malthael. He appears to you every so often throughout the Act, and while he isn’t quite so full of himself as Azmodan was his lieutenants are still spouting off the “YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT US!” one-liners even while you’re busy burying your maul into their skulls.  Reaper of Souls spends far more time exploring Tyrael’s difficulty with the concept of eating than it does Malthael’s motivation for trying to kill everyone on the planet (as far as I could tell it was because he was corrupted, because Blizzard have been telling the same fucking story over and over and over since at least Warcraft III)  and the ending is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen in gaming. I honestly think I would have preferred the game to dump me straight back to the desktop a la Syndicate rather than inflicting something so stupid on me I’m afraid I’m less intelligent for having been exposed to it.

Even if you can ignore the story, there’s no ignoring the fact that design-wise Act V just isn’t up to scratch. Where the main campaign is fairly no-nonsense in having you travel from A to B while hitting a bunch of monsters in the face on the way, Act V’s zones are huge and meandering and take you forever to get anywhere in them. One of them is a swamp level, and my objection to swamp levels is well-documented¹ There’s a pretty cool bit where you have a big fight on top of a battering ram while it smashes its way into the Pandemonium Fortess, and Pandemonium itself is probably the best bit of the Act, but the rest of it doesn’t show anywhere near this level of imagination and ends up being dreary, depressing and dull; it also doesn’t help that the dynamic difficulty scaling goes a little out of whack here and starts giving monsters several million HP each the closer you get to level 70, meaning that travelling from A to B takes even longer because you have to spend whole minutes whittling down each individual monster pack on the way. Act V was mostly just a slog, and I eventually jammed the difficulty down to Normal and zipped through to the end because I couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to get to the good stuff in Adventure mode. For the single biggest addition to the game it is incontrovertibly terrible and not at all worth buying the expansion for.

As a package, though, is Reaper of Souls worth buying? If it were retailing at regular expansion prices I’d still say yes; the raised level cap, new items and the Crusader class would probably be worth it at that point. The issue here, though, is that it isn’t retailing at regular expansion prices. It is actually retailing at a price point higher than that of most full releases. I know Blizzard like to project a reputation as the premium PC developer to justify their premium prices, but that projection is currently falling quite some considerable way short of the reality, which is that if you divorce Reaper of Souls from Loot 2.0 it’s not actually that good, and certainly not worth £30.  If spending that kind of money on an expansion pack makes you stop and think about whether or not it’s really worth it, it very likely isn’t and you should save your money, or spend it elsewhere. As for me, well, I’ve had enough fun with it that I don’t begrudge the money spent, but I can’t promise you won’t too.

The post Thoughts: Reaper of Souls. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I wrote this just before Christmas but held off posting it until Hearthstone hit open beta, which it did just last week. Aside from some card tweaks the game has not changed at all between now and then.

Let’s talk about Hearthstone.

If you follow certain news websites *cough Eurogamer cough* you can’t have missed the existence of Hearthstone. It’s a surprisingly low-key project for Blizzard: a collectible card game with a Warcraft theme whose ruleset is basically a heavily adapted and streamlined version of Magic: The Gathering. It’s a game that’s clearly being made on what, for Blizzard, passes as a budget, and which is selling itself solely on the core mechanics of its card game. Now, I don’t know if this is intentional or not (knowing how game development works I think it’s far more likely to be a happy accident) but all that stuff we associate with Blizzard games that’s missing from Hearthstone — the “epic” story and CGI cutscenes in particular — is stuff that Blizzard are indescribably bad at these days, and their absence is actually a massive, massive plus point for the game. This means Hearthstone’s development team has been free to focus on making their card game as good as it can possibly be, and the one thing I would say Blizzard are still peerless at is taking somebody else’s idea and polishing it to the point where it’s twice as fun and three times as addictive.

My knowledge of M:tG isn’t fantastically detailed, being limited to a couple of hours spent playing one of the yearly Duels of the Planeswalkers video game adaptations, but even I can see the similarities between Magic and Hearthstone. Each player starts the game with thirty hit points and a board in front of them onto which they play minions in the form of cards. Minions have attack and health values, plus one or two special abilities or attributes. Minions cannot act the turn they are played (unless they have the Charge ability), just like Magic’s Summoning Sickness, and cannot attack more than once per turn (unless they have the Windfury ability). The objective is to use the attacks of your minions, plus spell and weapon cards, to reduce the other player to zero health and win the game before they do the same to you.

So it’s not just a superficial resemblance, Hearthstone is pretty much nicking Magic’s core gameplay structure lock, stock and barrel. However, when it comes to fine detail the two games are very much different, and (at least in my limited experience of Magic) play very differently. Let’s run down the list:

• In Magic, the resources that you spend are represented by Land cards that you play alongside your minions, and which you “tap” (i.e. spend for the turn) to buy stuff. This makes the rate at which you gain resources somewhat irregular; most of the time you’ll have a Land card in your hand to play, but sometimes you won’t. In Hearthstone, the resources that you spend are represented by an autonomous mana stockpile that increases at a fixed rate — one mana on turn one, two mana on turn two and so on — and refills at the start of your next turn. It’s both more predictable and 100% hands-off.
• Except in special cases, Magic’s minions do not retain wounds once a turn is over, with most of them regenerating back up to full health. I’ve always thought this was as much a practical choice to save faffing around with tokens as it was a mechanical one, and Hearthstone takes advantage of its nature as a computer game by making wounds persistent. You do two damage to that troll and he’ll stay damaged, allowing you to finish him off next turn if he doesn’t get healed. I think this is a far more intuitive way of doing it.
• Magic relegates its minion attacks to a special combat phase that takes place towards the end of a turn; the attacking player selects how many of their creatures they want to attack, and then the opponent selects how many of their creatures they want to use to block those attacks. By contrast Hearthstone’s minions can spend their attacks at any time on whichever target the attacking player deems most appropriate. They can do this before, after or in between the playing of other cards, which means the order in which you do things suddenly becomes very important.
• Finally, I’m a bit fuzzy on how deck themes worked in Magic because deck construction was conspicuously missing from the version of Duels that I played, but it seemed like you had a theme for your deck — Nature, Fire, Earth etc. — and that having more than one or two themes would weaken the deck significantly due to each type of card requiring its own specific type of land to play. In Hearthstone it’s a bit more fluid; here you pick a hero class to play (along with their associated special power) and up to about half of the cards in your deck will be cards only available to that class, but the other half will be cards drawn from a common pool of “neutral” cards. While the choice of hero does have a profound effect on how your deck plays and which strategy you try to employ, the neutral cards mean that this is more of a flavour than a choice that’s set in stone.

Each of these changes reduces the complexity of the Magic concept — yes, even the ones about minion wounds and attacks, since I found the way Magic did it to be pretty counterintuitive when I played it. This meshes well with Blizzards goal of creating a version of it that’s more streamlined and accessible while retaining a reasonable amount of depth, and while Hearthstone is naturally a more limited game than Magic — there’s only a couple of hundred cards rather than several thousand, after all — I’d say that it’s a reasonable tradeoff. The only real issue it’s created is that thanks to the reduction in complexity Hearthstone is somewhat more vulnerable to the whims of the RNG than Magic is. You have to accept that occasionally a match will be decided by your opponent getting excellent draws in the first few turns of the game, or that they’ll sometimes be in a seemingly untenable position with no cards in hand only to draw the one card that’ll kill you before you can kill them. It happens. It happens to the best players in the world.  Best I can say is that it’s something I’ve learned to live with, and if I can do it so can you.

My unusual forbearance of the luck-based aspect of Hearthstone is down to how absurdly quick it is. A typical game of Hearthstone will clock in at under fifteen minutes long, with a turn timer of about forty seconds for each player to think and make their moves. It’s very rare that they’ll use all of it, unless they’re either stuck or trolling. When the matches are so short it’s hard to get invested, especially when the matchmaking system can get you into another one within thirty seconds, and there’s no player-to-player communication except for a broadly-positive set of emotes which ensure the obnoxiousness of your typical Battle.net denizen is drastically reduced. Hearthstone is the friendliest, easiest to deal with multiplayer game I’ve played in quite some time simply because there is almost no pressure to win unless you’re playing Arena mode or really give a shit about a rank that gets reset at the end of the month anyway. The emphasis is very much on having fun with your cards, and I find that immensely refreshing.

Now, about those cards. Like I said, Hearthstone currently has a roster of about two or three hundred cards. Each card has a mana cost that will depend on how “good” the card is; this must be a nightmare to balance since the quality of each card will vary dramatically depending on the deck and the current situation on the board, but you soon learn to identify the cards that are particularly good for their cost (hint: they’ll be the ones that everyone else is playing). For example, Taunt is an ability that forces incoming attacks to hit that minion first.  In general you want minions with Taunt to be big and beefy and capable of absorbing two or more attacks before being destroyed, but since an attacked minion will exchange damage with the attacker you also want it to have a decent attack value. This means that the Shieldbearer — 0 attack, 4 health — is not a very good Taunter in spite of its low cost (1 mana) because even a crappy 1-1 Argent Squire will be able to plink away at it without fear of retribution. The Frostwolf Grunt – 2-2, cost 2 mana — is similarly terrible since it’ll soak just up one attack, and that’ll likely be from a single 1-mana minion.meaning you just made an unfavourable trade. No, if you want a decent Taunter the absolute minimum you should be going for is the Sen’jin Shieldmasta, affectionately known as TAZDINGO since this is what he says every single time he is played. Tazdingo is relatively pricey at 4 mana, but his five health points mean that he can weather an attack from nearly every other 4 cost minion in the game and remain standing while inflicting three damage in return. If he’s played before the big beasts come out an opponent will either have to expend two cards to deal with him, or else use removal of some kind to either nullify his Taunt or get him off the board entirely.

Removal is a very important concept in Hearthstone. A card with single-target removal provides a way of countering big, tough minions without having to waste your own minions plinking away at their health, while mass removal does the same for a large number of low-health minions. As an example the Priest probably has the best single target removal spells in the game, with the 2-cost Shadow Word: Pain instantly killing any minion with 3 attack or less, and the 3-cost Shadow Word: Death doing the same for minions with 5+ attack. Mages and Shamans can Polymorph/Hex minions into harmless frogs and toads, while the Warrior’s Execute ability instantly kills any wounded target. Then there’s quasi-removal like Silence which removes all card text abilities and leaves a minion with just its basic stats; this is excellent for dealing with minions under the influence of multiple buffs since they’re usually quite weak without them, or for bypassing a Taunt minion. Since Taunt is a card text ability Tazdingo is vulnerable to being Silenced, but he at least has decent stats to fall back on if this happens, plus you just made your opponent waste one of their Silences (I’m aware of only two basic cards that actually have it, and you can’t have more than two of each card in a constructed deck).

The prevalence of removal in Hearthstone means that filling your deck with high-value, high-impact minions and attempting to weather the storm until you get enough mana to play them is a losing strategy, since it’s very likely you’ll plonk down your Sea Giant on turn seven only to have it instantly removed while your opponent has three cheaper minions all inflicting steady damage on your hero. Removal means Hearthstone is a game about covering your bets. Several minions have passive abilities that mean they constantly grow in power, but this makes them prime targets for removal; you can’t rely on them. Playing buff cards is a gamble that you should only take at the start of your turn when you have active minions who can make some use of them, since the minion you use them on will almost certainly be removed during your opponent’s next turn. Having active minions at all is a pretty big deal, in fact, as it probably means you have board control which gives you a defacto advantage. The one turn lag between playing a minion and having it be able to do something is usually enough time for your opponent to kill them before they can do anything, if they have board control and are willing to make intelligent trades, and if you don’t have board position you’re extremely hamstrung since unless you’re a Mage your options for dealing direct hero-to-hero damage are extremely limited.

Leaving the specifics of the cards aside, what Hearthstone is about, at the end of the day, is tempo. If you can make your opponent spend two cards to deal with one of yours, or six mana to kill something that cost four mana to play, or you play a three mana removal card to eliminate a massive seven mana minion, you’ve just clawed yourself a small advantage. It’s abstract and probably won’t help all that much at first, but if you can do this two or three times you’ll notice the momentum of the match start to swing in your favour, as your opponent begins to run out of cards in hand that can prevent you from gaining board control and eventually winning. While it’s possible to come up with combinations of cards that seem ridiculously overpowered — I’ve heard tell of a Priest creating a 48-48 Fen Creeper — there will always be a counter in the form of removal, and so building a deck with these hail mary plays in mind isn’t a very good idea, especially because you can’t guarantee getting all of them in hand at once.

There are three game modes in Hearthstone (four if you count Practice mode against AI opponents). Casual and Ranked modes are two sides of the same coin, where you build a deck out of the cards that you personally own and see how it performs; you’re limited to having no more than two of each card in the deck so you can’t build anything too broken. You get 10 gold every three wins plus your rank will go up if you’re in Ranked, and that’s all the reward you get. You can also complete daily quests in Casual/Ranked mode, which are along the lines of “Do 100 damage to enemy heroes” or “Win 2 games as Warlock or Shaman” and which pay out between 40 and 60 gold when completed. What do you use gold for? Well, you could spend 100 gold to buy a pack of five cards, but this would be a waste of gold. Instead, what you should do is save your gold for the entry fee for Arena mode.

Arena mode is Hearthstone’s version of a sealed draft, where you get a selection of random cards and have to assemble the best deck you possibly can before taking it in against other people who have done the same. You get a choice of three (out of nine) hero classes, and then you’re presented with a choice of three cards, of which you pick one. Repeat another twenty-nine times and you have a deck. There’s a chart at the bottom that tracks the number of cards in the deck by cost (popularly known as the mana curve) so that you have some idea of which areas of the deck are looking a bit weak, but this is all the help the game offers you; it’s up to you to play the odds and get cards that synergise well enough to win. Arena mode has two particular quirks compared to the regular modes: first, you don’t have to own a card to be offered it in Arena mode. The card selections you are presented with are drawn from the entire range of class and neutral cards, meaning that Arena mode is a great opportunity to play with cards you otherwise wouldn’t see. Second is that the two-card limit no longer applies; if you’re lucky enough to be presented with three Flamestrikes or four Hexes¹ then you’re allowed to take all of them if that’s what you want.

This makes the draft in Arena a little more chance-reliant than I’d really like, as sometimes you just don’t get the cards you need in order to make a deck work while your opponent has managed to get some wonder draft that ends the game on turn six, but everyone else playing Arena is struggling with the same problem and other than that it’s a level playing field. And this feeds into the main draw of Arena, and the reason why it costs 150 gold to start an Arena run: the more matches you win with a given deck in the Arena, the better the reward you get at the end of it. You can currently win up to twelve matches, and you’re allowed two losses (the third will end your run); however, as you win more and more matches you’re matched against other people who have won their matches, and so the competition gets harder as you push your win streak further. Winning a full twelve matches is something that only a small number of players will manage. Most of my Arena runs have ended at three or four wins, and the best I’ve ever managed is seven. Even so, though, once you know which cards to go for and how to build a deck the economics of the Arena are remarkably forgiving.

Some numbers. A pack of cards costs 100 gold. An Arena run costs 150 gold, and is guaranteed to reward you with a card pack even if you win no matches. This means that in the very worst case scenario you’re paying 50 gold over the odds for a pack of cards. If you win even a few matches you have a chance of getting a small gold reward, and once you get to four or five wins you reach the break even point where the rewards you get back out of the Arena are equal to or greater than the value of the gold you paid to enter in the first place. Seven wins refunded my entire entrance fee and gave me what amounted to a free pack of cards. I’m not very good at Hearthstone and yet I’ve managed to make seed capital of 600 gold — four Arena runs — last for eight runs because of all the extra money I made from Arena rewards. Better players than me can play the Arena indefinitely. And this is strange to me, because it seems like this economy renders the two pay-for options in Hearthstone — buying card packs and paying real money to start an Arena run — utterly redundant. You don’t need card packs to play in the Arena, and you don’t really need to pay real money to enter the Arena unless you’re irrevocably hooked on the thing, and if you’re even remotely talented at the game the rate of return that you get for your gold is pretty much the same as if you just spent it all on packs. I spent real money on a few packs (my getting the beta key just after getting my Christmas bonus was not good timing) but this was before I realised that it genuinely is possible to play Hearthstone and have a lot of fun without having to spend any money on it all.

And finally since this is a Blizzard game there’s an absolute ton of neat touches despite its “budget” nature. The playfields are bright and cheerful, the card effects are very nice, and there’s amusing flavour text for every single card. When you play a card you get an appropriate soundbite that’s taken from either WoW or one of the Warcraft strategy games, while the matchmaking system plays tinny Warcraft 2 music while it’s searching for an opponent. In general Hearthstone is just a pleasure to play, and that goes double if you have any experience with the Warcraft series. I have just two complaints. First, the crafting system — whereby you can disenchant unwanted cards into magic dust used to make other cards — is a bit impenetrable. It’s not so much complex as it is saddled with a rather ugly interface. Second, the stat tracking doesn’t go into anywhere near enough detail, especially considering what Blizzard do with their other titles. All it does is show you number of wins the Arena and number of wins in the other modes, with no losses or wins broken down by class. It’s a superficial thing to want to see the numbers, but then Hearthstone is numbers: the rapid summing of attack values to see if they add up to more than an opponents current health, or a comparison of mana costs to see if a card sacrifice is really worth it. It’s a game for mathematicians and students of chance, and with plenty of ways to manipulate the latter² it couldn’t be better suited to my tastes.

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The post Thoughts: Hearthstone. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is very disappointing.

I really liked Starcraft II’s Wings of Liberty campaign. The writing and story was the substandard cliched dross I’ve sadly come to expect from Blizzard these days, of course, but as far as the gameplay was concerned it was the first title to actually iterate on traditional RTS design in years¹.  It recognised that the single-player campaign didn’t have to be identically balanced with its multiplayer component, and by doing so shook itself free of many tired conventions that have held the genre back. It removed research and development from the RTS part of the game and embedded them into the campaign storytelling. And the most surprising thing it did was to come up with a collection of mission designs that were consistently and entertainingly varied.  In one level you’d be ambushing enemy trains running on randomised routes; in another you’d be constantly uprooting your buildings to escape from a wall of fire sweeping its way across the map; and in yet another you’d defend your base against zombie swarms during the night and then venture out to destroy their nests during the day.

In short, Wings of Liberty made the moribund old RTS seem fresh and fun again, and I figured that if Blizzard was still capable of delivering a gameplay package that was just so good  I’d overlook the horrible things they did to Starcraft’s story in the process. The game ended with the de-Zerged Queen of Blades becoming just plain old Sarah Kerrigan again, and no matter how tacky it was to watch her nuzzle into the shoulder of her literal knight in shining armour Jim Raynor I have to admit this made for an excellent setup for the second campaign – one in which Kerrigan would both  come to terms with her Zergy powers and seek revenge against the man responsible for her getting them in the first place. At the time it sounded like it’d have a fairly heavy RPG focus, kind of like Rexxar’s campaign in Frozen Throne² with additional swarming alien monstrosities, and with the legwork already done on the engine and multiplayer it seemed like the chances were good we’d see this expansion in twelve months or so.

And now here we are three years later, and the first expansion pack for a game released in 2010 has finally been released³. I was looking forward to Heart of the Swarm. I really wish I could tell you that it was worth the wait. Unfortunately HotS is distinctly underwhelming, and that’s when the game is at its best. At its worst it is everything bad about modern Blizzard games wrapped up in one misshapen package, and after last year’s Diablo III turned out to be something of a bust it makes me worry about Blizzard’s future output in general.

Kerrigan has been reunited with Jim Raynor and is holed up on a remote moon while floppy-haired JRPG reject Prince Valerian runs tests to figure out the extent of her control over the Zerg swarm. This functions as the game’s tutorial as Kerrigan demonstrates how the Zerg army functions, but it’s abruptly cut short when the Dominion attacks and she becomes separated from Raynor and Valerian. Raynor disappears and is reported dead in a Dominion news report, and because everyone in a Blizzard game is a barely-functioning IQ-minus idiot she doesn’t dismiss this as blatant propaganda⁴ and she doesn’t team up with Jim’s buddies on the Hyperion to go find him. Instead she decides to undo the entire previous game by re-Zerging herself and building up the swarm again so that she can go find Arcturus Mengsk and stick a claw through his face.

Now, I’m not saying I liked the way the previous campaign ended, but I have to question a game which plays so freely with prior events in the way that Heart of the Swarm does. I mean sure, it’s a Blizzard game, and I’ve already said their plots are universally terrible these days, but when you bombard the player with (admittedly extremely pretty) in-engine and pre-rendered cutscenes every five minutes it does start to become a problem when the story those cutscenes are telling is in incoherent, illogical mess. Despite retaining her humanity this time around Kerrigan still acts like a mass-murdering monster, with no act being too foul in her pursuit of Mengsk – there’s a couple of bits where she orders the swarm to consume entire planets, for crying out loud – and while I do quite like playing the bad guy in video games that’s not how Kerrigan is coming off here. Tonally the game still treats her as a hero, with the player expected to sympathise with her plight and tacitly endorse her actions.

Because Wings of Liberty had bits where you could walk around the ship and engage the crew in conversation Heart of the Swarm feels like it also has to cram these segments into the game, except because Kerrigan is a Zerg and her army is made up of Zerg, everyone she talks to is a Zerg. Not only is this inconsistent with the nature of the Zerg as a hive-mind entity (it’s like having individual Borg oh wait no they already did that as well) but the characters she surrounds herself with are the most awful, one-note cliches possible; after you have played through the Heart of the Swarm campaign you will never want to hear the words POWER or ESSENCE or SPINNING again as long as you live. Finally, while the whole Raynor/Kerrigan thing was an unwelcome presence throughout the WoL campaign Heart of the Swarm is the point where it becomes a malignant tumour that threatens to consume the entire series with its high-school teenage angst. Do you remember when Blizzard’s stories were very hands-off and were far more about generating basic atmosphere than they were relaying huge exposition dumps and trying to elicit emotional responses from the player in the most hamhanded way possible? I miss those days.

 Anyway, the storytelling is especially malodorous this time around, and since we’ve established that I’m perfectly willing to forgive this if the gameplay is good enough you can probably guess what I’m about to say: the gameplay really isn’t good enough. In order to justify Heart of the Swarm’s hefty pricetag there’s 27 missions crammed into the campaign, but in light of how imaginative WoL’s mission design was I was actually shocked at how derivative most of them were. Seven of them are “evolution missions” which function as extended tutorial segments that basically waste the player’s time (having video sequences embedded into the UI that demonstrated key unit features was a significant innovation for WoL, and I don’t understand why they couldn’t have done the same thing here), and fully half of the remaining twenty are direct repeats of concepts already covered in Wings of Liberty. The ambushing trains mission reappears, except this time you’re shooting down Protoss shuttles. The gas harvesting mission reappears, except this time you’re gathering biomass. The scrap collecting mission reappears, except this time you’re collecting eggs.  There’s even (amusingly) a point where Heart of the Swarm steals from Diablo III instead, with a boss fight that is identical to the fight with Belial. When so many missions are retreads of content I already played in previous Blizzard games with only a minor twist to liven them up it doesn’t exactly endear a game to me, and when combined with the story it did much to sour me on Heart of the Swarm from the outset.

That’s not to say that the entire campaign is a waste of time. There are new and original missions in here, and when they crop up they’re usually enjoyable at the very least (I especially liked the one where you take control of the Hyperion in a space battle), it’s just that they’re rather bizarrely concentrated towards the end of the game, and by that time the damage had already been done. It doesn’t help that on most missions you’re given control of Kerrigan herself, who is often capable of   eliminating the entire enemy army singlehandedly; this cuts down on the variety by making every mission where you get her virtually identical in terms of what you have to do to win. In fairness this is an unintended consequence of the RPG elements that actually did make it into Heart of the Swarm – instead of research points you now gather XP for Kerrigan which gives her better stats and new abilities as she levels up, and this mechanic is of little use if you don’t get to use those abilities in a fight – but I do think there are ways of doing this that wouldn’t have rendered the strategy side of the gameplay so cookie-cutter in nature. Perhaps a little more exploration of the Zerg swarm’s ability to mutate and adapt; this is represented in-game by a selection of three mutation bonuses for each major strain that can be chopped and changed at any time, as well as permanent mutations into one of two substrains that change the basic behaviour and appearance of the unit. This is fine, and I did enjoy making all my zerglings look even more horrifying and insect-like by giving them a pair of wings, but it would have been nice if they’d integrated it with Kerrigan’s progress a little more instead of just handing you the evolution missions as part of the story. As it is there’s little to separate Kerrigan’s levelling up from Wings of Liberty’s research mechanic, and I feel this drastically diminishes what was (for me) the game’s key selling point.

Still, I wouldn’t describe Heart of the Swarm’s campaign as bad. It’s simply shockingly average and derivative, with little sign of the good ideas that drove Wings of Liberty past its self-imposed storytelling limitations (or rather, too much sign of those good ideas because it’s shamelessly stolen them). However, I would describe the rest of the game as bad, and no matter how you mix bad and average you’re never going to end up with something good. Perhaps Heart of the Swarm will be of interest to you if you’re involved in Starcraft’s multiplayer scene, but then let’s face it – if you do Starcraft multiplayer in any way at all you already went out and bought it. If you haven’t, then I’d recommend staying away for now. Despite its theft of the better missions Heart of the Swarm doesn’t come anywhere near close to the high standard set by Wings of Liberty, and so unless you really want to see just how low Blizzard’s writers can sink it isn’t worth your time or your money.

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The post Thoughts: Heart of the Swarm. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I promise this is the last Diablo 3 related thing I write.

Diablo 3’s plot is astoundingly bad. Staggeringly bad. It’s so bad I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out how one of the world’s foremost game developers could do this to one of their three flagship titles. I even went back and had a look at the manuals for Diablo and Diablo 2 — these being written in a kinder, gentler age when having 50% of your manual filled with backstory was seen as a requirement rather than a regrettable waste of paper and money – and something that struck me was that the background blurb there was just as poorly-written as Diablo 3, if not more so. Awful plots are clearly not a new thing for Blizzard, and yet it was not something that I particularly noticed when playing through either of the previous Diablo games.

Why is this? Well, the answer’s fairly obvious: while the manuals flesh out the backstory to Diablo in all of its hideous glory, almost none of it is mentioned in the games themselves. Maybe Blizzard always wanted to fill the Diablo games with interminably long expository cutscenes that pop up every five minutes and it’s only now that the technology available has allowed them to realise their artistic vision, but no matter the actual reason the fact of the matter is that the first Diablo game basically doesn’t have a plot, while the second chooses to paint what little plot it has in very broad brush strokes that leave plenty to the player’s imagination. There’s almost no detailed background on the Sin War or the Horadrim or the Worldstone or the Prime Evils. There is just you, the player, single-mindedly chasing the Dark Wanderer across the various continents, and everything else is incidental to this.

Diablo 2’s plot may be almost non-existent, but I’d argue that it’s actually a very good example of storytelling in a game precisely because it’s very hands-off. It tells the player almost nothing; what exposition you get comes through Deckard Cain and the end of Act cutscenes, which themselves are only indirectly to do with you. The events of Diablo 2 take place in medias res; the cutscenes are a series of flashbacks and flashforwards which relate the story of Marius, an unlucky traveller who got caught up in the Dark Wanderer’s wake. This is a very strong method of telling the game’s story because it sets up the scenario for the player’s actions and it shows you some of the consequences without ever involving the player themselves. The player character is left entirely to the player’s imagination to flesh out; they’re a perfect cipher who doesn’t particularly need a backstory, because whatever class they are they’re pretty much just there to punch a successively larger series of monsters right in the face.

The same is true of the villains. In Diablo 3 the villains are constantly phoning the player up to tell them about the next step in their dastardly plans, thus conveniently letting them know exactly where they should be going and what they should be doing to stop them. They are also completely delusional, reacting to the player’s systematic destruction of their armies with a series of increasingly absurd statements along the lines of “It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter! LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”, and when facing you themselves they’re utterly convinced they’re going to win despite you slaughtering your way through literally thousands of baddies to get to them. There are several effective ways to write compelling, threatening villains. This is not one of them.

Contrast this with Diablo 2. Would you like to know how many lines Diablo, the primary antagonist of the game, says to the player in the fifteen hours or so the game takes to play to its conclusion? On finally catching up to Diablo in his stronghold in Hell, he says “Not even death can save you from me!” which isn’t particularly imaginative, but which at least leaves plenty of room for him to be threatening rather than absurd, and that is it. That is the sum total of the direct player-villain interaction in the game — aside from the obvious appointment your mace has with his skull –
and while it isn’t necessarily the ideal it’s undeniably effective for the sort of game Diablo is. Diablo is not an enemy who needs to posture or threaten; he probably doesn’t even know the player exists until they wander into his keep. He lets his actions do the talking, and since he’ll probably kill you several times on the first go the lasting impression he makes is that he’s a pretty effective final boss.

It also helps that, right up until the moment when you kill them, Mephisto and Diablo are winning. Mephisto has broken free of his prison and successfully corrupted the Zakarum priesthood charged with keeping him confined, while Diablo has physically taken over the body of the hero who vanquished him in the first game and is literally raising Hell as he makes his way across Sanctuary. Until they encounter the player pretty much everything they have done has gone according to plan, making them seem at least competent enough to be leading the infernal legions in their eternal war against Heaven (or whatever). Diablo 3’s Azmodan on the other hand is all talk and no trousers; throughout Act III you’re constantly told what a super-duper awesome general Azmodan is and how he’s won countless victories on the battlefields of Hell, and yet his modus operandi in game – the stuff you as a player see him do – appears to involve repeatedly tipping the player off as to where exactly he’s going to strike next. These are not the actions of a tactical genius.

Of course you can’t really have effective villains when you need to make the player character out to be a super-special last-scion-of-an-ancient-bloodline Chosen One. This is what I like to refer to as the Sherlock effect, which I observed in the recent BBC adaptation of the same name. Sherlock Holmes is supposed to possess genius-level powers of deductive reasoning which make even intelligent men like Watson look like chumps in comparison. The conclusion we’re supposed to draw from this isn’t “LOL Watson is dumb” but rather “Man, that Sherlock Holmes is pretty amazing!” In Sherlock, though, it’s the other way round: in order for today’s viewer to understand the plots Sherlock is written to be about as smart as the average person, so the only way they can accentuate his supposed superhuman intelligence is by having every other person on the show act like they’ve been given a pre-frontal lobotomy. So it is with Diablo 3: we’re constantly told that the armies of Hell are unstoppable and that the Evils are a big deal who are not to be trifled with, but in the game they’re portrayed as inept, bumbling buffoons both by their actions and by your victory over them coming so easily. In backstory terms, it came easily because you’re so awesome. In game terms, it came easily because Blizzard wrote the baddies to be incompetent morons. Would Moriarty have been threatening if he kept tripping over his shoelaces every time he tried to kill Holmes? Probably not.

The problem with Diablo 3 isn’t too hard to understand when you compare it to its immediate predecessor, then. It’s a game that spends too much time telling you that the world is in peril because these total badass Evils are on the loose, and not enough time showing you the results of said peril. It’s more concerned with backstory and lore than it is tone or atmosphere, and as a result the plot turns out to be a horrible, disjointed, nonsensical mess. The origin of the Nephalem is given far more exposition time than SPOILER’s nefarious scheme and eventual betrayal, which I think is dealt with in about two lines. It’s not that the inherent quality of the story is worse, particularly, it’s that the way it’s told is completely lopsided resulting in a complete tonal shift away from the gothic horror of Diablo 2 and towards an almost Benny Hill-like level of absurdity in the places and characters you meet as you make your way through the game, which is completely wrong for what Diablo is. Or rather, what I think Diablo is supposed to be, and what Diablo has been in the past. I don’t know what it is now. All I know is that I don’t like it.

The post On Diablo 3’s Story, or: Why Less Is More In Videogames appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is going to be complicated.

The problem is, Diablo 3 is very much a Blizzard game. Back in the day this wouldn’t have been an issue. Back in the day “Blizzard game” meant you were going to be in for an experience of unalloyed awesome no matter what the game actually was. Unfortunately Blizzard today is a very different company to what it was a decade ago, and so the term “Blizzard game” — while still guaranteeing top-notch mechanical design — now also carries with it unpleasant connotations of truly awful writing and metagame elements that are either pointless or actively detrimental to the good work done with the gameplay. So while Diablo 3 is undoubtedly a very, very good game, it is unnecessarily handicapped by a huge number of flaws that could have been avoided so easily. I actually find Diablo 3 somewhat depressing in a way, because the thought that someone could take the excellent concept of Diablo and say “I know what this needs: more cutscenes!” is rather indicative of the way mainstream game development is heading these days.

You are one of five heroes – Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor, Wizard and Demon Hunter – on a quest to stop a sudden undead infestation by punching said undead right in the face and/or blasting them with magical incendiaries. When you punch a zombie’s head off there is a chance that loot will fountain out of the corpse under high pressure; you then (if it’s better than what you’ve currently got) equip this loot to improve your zombie-punching abilities. Every so often your hero will light up like a Christmas tree to indicate they have levelled up, which gives them access to more varied methods of zombie-punching. This is the basic structural framework that underpins all Diablo games, and the good news is that Diablo 3 pulls it off just as well as – arguably better than, in fact – its predecessors. Rumours that the auto-levelling up and being handed the same skills everyone else gets would dumb down the game are completely unfounded; the skill system is streamlined, building on Blizzard’s eight years of experience with WoW, but it is not shallow.

An example. On my Wizard, I have four hotkey skill slots (1-4) and a skill for each mouse button. Left mouse button is either a chain lightning area attack (for groups) or magic missile (for bosses). Key 1 is bound to Frost Nova, an area-of-effect attack that centres on my character and freezes everything in place for a couple of seconds, allowing me time to get away. Key 2 is where Force Pulse lives, which is similar to Frost Nova except instead of freezing it’s a “GO AWAY” knockback attack. These two skills are activated whenever I see a big group, or whenever my Wizard gets in trouble and needs to escape. 3 activates Hydras, a kind of magical turret that auto-shoots everything around and which I use to soften up/mop up really large groups. 4 sounds boring, but is actually key to the whole build: Diamond Skin gives a limited and temporary damage absorption ability to the Wizard, but I have it runed so that it also reduces the cost of casting spells while it’s active. And this makes the right mouse button ability, Disintegrate, downright obscene. It’s a thermic lance for monsters; a double beam of magic power that cuts through groups and bosses alike as though they weren’t even there which – thanks to Diamond Skin – can be kept up for about 10-12 seconds, and this is enough to reduce anything that isn’t a boss or a named elite monster to a smoking pile of ash on the dungeon floor. On Normal, anyway.

The synergy between Diamond Skin and Disintegrate is representative of the way the skills interact with each other; on its own a particular skill might not be that great, but it’s often the case that if you combine it with another skill it becomes much more powerful. There’s about 15 primary skills for each character, each of which can have a single rune attached to it which specialises the skill further. My Frost Nova can be runed to do more damage, release additional Frost Novas in a chain reaction or create a slowing area of effect rather than a snap freeze, while the double beam of Disintegrate is also the result of an applied rune. Passive skills complicate things even further; these confer some inherent bonus to your character like increased armour or more frequent critical hits, and many of them also synergise well with the active skills. Despite everyone having access to the same skills the way people evolve their characters over time will be different; I’m reasonably sure my Wizard is built completely differently to Josh’s Wizard despite us being roughly the same level. By opening up the range of skills available rather than limiting you to one of a few branches of a skill tree Blizzard have vastly increased the amount of tinkering and experimentation that’s possible, which is the most important thing.

There is one thing I don’t like about the skill system, however, and that’s the glacially slow rate at which your options open up as you progress through the early levels of the game. Those hotkey slots I mentioned earlier? Those are all locked at the start of the game; you – absurdly – have to unlock them one at a time as you level up, meaning you have very little you can do at the start of the game beyond “click on bad guy”. Taking control over skill unlocks out of the player’s hands also means that if you want a certain skill you can’t beeline to it through a skill tree; instead you just have to wait until you get to the level it unlocks at, and considering some of the good ones don’t unlock until levels 25-30 or so this can take a very long time. With most of my characters I wasn’t really having fun with the game until level 15 or so, when I could do three or four things in combat that weren’t throwing purple balls at people.

Still, getting that far only takes an hour or two, and while it’s crap that the game doesn’t do much to grab you from the outset once you’re there Diablo 3 is an awful lot of fun. The mesmerising effect of increasingly better loot drops is present and correct, and the monster punching part is admirably visceral with particularly powerful abilities hurling dozens of baddie corpses across the screen. The game even encourages homicidal rampages by giving you an experience bonus for killing a large number of monsters in one hit, or chaining together kills in an orgy of mass slaughter. The randomised levels and dungeons have also made a welcome return, and this time they’re leavened with a variety of special one-off encounters that have a chance to spawn on a particular runthrough; for example, I went through the start of Act I for the sixth time last night and I found a mini-event that I hadn’t seen before. This ensures that there is something genuinely new to see each time you play, and that’s before taking into account the little extras like the Golden Axe treasure goblins.

So the gameplay is mostly great, except… I kept getting the disconcerting feeling that Normal mode was too easy. Groups of 30+ baddies were dispatched in seconds. Bosses were often killed before they’d had a chance to finish delivering their opening monologue. I think I died exactly once on Normal difficulty to an end of Act boss’s special attack that took me by surprise. This is exacerbated by the auction house, which I’ll talk about in a bit, but I got the distinct impression that Normal mode basically functions as a ten hour long tutorial, and that the real game starts when you finish it for the first time and unlock Nightmare mode. Quite frankly if it wasn’t Diablo I probably would have given it up long before I got to Act III, which is the first part of the game that is even remotely tricky. Nightmare mode plays like the game Diablo should be, where small, isolated groups of enemies are easy prey but champion monsters have to be treated with care and you need to make sure you don’t get cut off and surrounded by a horde. The loot is much better, too, and I’m rather puzzled as to why Blizzard took the decision to lock this off from me until I’d invested ten hours beating the game on Braindead difficulty.

Or rather, I would be puzzled if everything else in the game that wasn’t the punching didn’t belie a complete contempt for the intelligence of the people playing it. The plot is… god, I don’t even have the words to describe how bad the plot is. It’s entirely possible that Diablo 3’s plot is, pound for pound, the single worst videogame plot it’s been my misfortune to encounter, which is astonishing when you consider that it’s Blizzard making this game. They’re possibly the second or third richest developer in the world! Are you telling me they couldn’t afford to hire professional writers rather than getting Chris Metzen to vomit out yet another story that would be rejected by fanfiction writers as being too clichéd and Mary-Sueish? The Chosen One trope rears its ugly head for the umpteenth time in a videogame, the baddies are all completely ineffectual yet continually call you up on the batphone to taunt you like you’re not systematically slaughtering their entire army, everyone else in the game has the mental level of a teenager – the Supreme Commander of Heaven in particular acts like an angsty fourteen year-old – and worst of all this unending barrage of crap is constantly forced down your throat via cutscenes. Diablo 2 did not have cutscenes (aside from the excellent pre-rendered ones that served as a coda to each Act, which is the natural place to put them), and for good reason: they would have gotten in the way of the punching. Here, though, if you want to fight a boss, you have to wait while the game loads a cutscene and then press Escape, and then click “OK! I really want to skip the cutscene!” It got to the point where I actually stooped to hunting through the game options in the hope that there was a button that would turn the awful, awful story off and just let me punch skeletons. There wasn’t.

So Diablo 3 is no longer about the punching and the loot; instead, it’s now riddled with this horrible story-cancer that the game thrusts in your face at every opportunity. It’s all very well to say that this is a Diablo game and that I should just ignore the plot, but that’s the thing: I literally can’t. It’s so obnoxious that it becomes one of a number of things which are actively detrimental to the experience of playing the game, with the other major culprits being the auction house and the requirement to always be signed in to Battle.net even if you just want to dick around in single player for a bit.

The Battle.net thing is simple enough to understand. When you’re signed in, it’s great. It’s fine. The interface is very slick, joining your friends is as simple as pushing a single button and while there are occasional lag issues I have to say I’ve never died as a result of one. I have no beef with Battle.net itself, but insisting that I always play the game via Battle.net is completely insane, and if you want to know why you need look no further than yesterday afternoon. The EU server for Diablo 3 fell over at about 2pm, meaning nobody in Europe could play the game until Blizzard got it back up again just after 7pm. This was a Sunday afternoon, remember; it’s difficult to think of a more inconvenient time for the game to be unavailable, and yet it still happened. Apparently this is the future, though; the benefits always-online connectivity brings to a game are deemed to outweigh not being able to physically play the damn thing whenever the server goes up the spout.

The auction house is a little more uncertain because we’re only a week in and that’s not really enough time to see how it’ll impact the overall gameplay experience in the long-term, but the way I see it there are two problems with the auction house. The first is that – up to level 30, at least – it’s very very easy to find an excellent item for your class for just a few thousand gold, meaning that a couple of minutes’ browsing will ensure your character is just about as good as it can be. This takes the fun out of killing a boss and watching rare loot fountain out of his corpse because you know it’ll probably be worse than the stuff you can find on the auction house. Which brings me to the second problem: I have a sneaking suspicion in-game loot has been gimped to encourage players to use the auction house. Certainly I noticed most of the stuff I picked up was 5-10 levels below the level I was currently at, and I never picked up an item that had a higher level in over forty hours of play. Either way the auction house is just downright better, which I think strikes at the very heart of what Diablo is about. I said a couple of paragraphs ago that Diablo is supposed to be about punching monsters and getting better loot, but the auction house removes the fun of the loot part leaving you with just the monster punching – and while this is an admirably well-judged element of the game, it’s one that starts to visibly stagger under the weight of the rest of the bullshit you have to deal with when you play it.

Like I said, then, it’s complicated. I’ve spent a sickening amount of time playing Diablo 3 over the last week. I have enjoyed nearly all of it. Diablo 3’s flaw isn’t that it’s a bad game, because it most definitely is not. Rather it’s that, as excellent as it is, it’s nowhere near as good as it could have been had Blizzard been a little more focused in their development goals rather than adding in all this extraneous stuff and changing the basic gameplay to compensate. It’s probably one of the best games I’ll play this year, but I’ll always associate it with a vague sense of disappointment that this is the direction Blizzard took it in rather than sticking to what they do best and delivering the premier monster-punching experience of the next decade. It remains to be seen whether it’ll have the insane longevity of its predecessor (which people are still playing 12 years on) but my gut feeling says no. Diablo 3 is a great game. It isn’t a classic.

The post Thoughts: Diablo 3. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.