Shadow Covenant

Well, another Blizzcon has gone by and some news came from one of my favorite game developers…

No release date for Diablo III, but it seems the release is close, so crossing my fingers the game is as good as it looks (and to be honest, to see if it has aged well… It’s been almost 10 years since I’ve played Diablo, and I’ve played WoW in the meantime, that takes a lot of the Diablo ideas ten steps forward, so let’s see how it feels nowadays…)

No release date aswell for “Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm”, and I can’t wait to play it… think it’s the most excited I’ve been for the release of an RTS ever! The DOTA thing they’re going to release doesn’t excite me that much, but I’ve never been a big fan of DOTA-type games, to be honest. It seems they’re trying to do something special with the genre, though…

And the big news… “Mists of Pandaria”, the new expansion for WoW has been announced (also without a release date)… This was expected, and to be honest I’m more or less disappointed with it.

• New race: the Pandarens… Really? Pandas? Kung-Fu Pandas? That was the best they could come up with? What’s next? The Shrek Race?! Besides, for a 7-year player, adding a new race really doesn’t add anything to the game at this point…
• New class: Monk… Again, same rationale as above… introducing another class for a 7-year old player is useless… I won’t stop playing my character to play a new one; I know there are some players that actually do it, but I wonder what percentage of players that actually is, and how significant it is for Blizzard… It seems to me that alt-oholics aren’t as committed to the game as hardcore raiders, and those won’t change characters that easily… On the other hand, that might be precisely what Blizzard has in mind: add new content for less-committed players because committed players won’t drop the game that easily.
• 5 new levels. Same as Cataclysm, probably last a bit longer (because of the additional time it takes to level up). So its good enough, I think.
• Pet battle system: Seriously? World of Pokemon? Was this something people actually wanted?!
• New continent: This was expected, and the setting seems great. Oriental-based stuff is new in WoW, so it seems like a very good choice (allows for new visuals, new music, new lore)
• Challenge Mode Dungeons: The concept seems interesting, but I think again it lacks interest for end-game players… But it’s probably good for more casual players (because of the gear normalization, a raider won’t get an edge, so it’s really just a skill contest, albeit raiders and pvpers tend to be better players because of the general playtime)~
• New talent system. On Cataclysm, Blizzard changed the whole talent system, which required players to relearn their classes… now they’re changing it again, replacing the tree-system for a “choose your main orientation” – in the case of mages, fire, arcane or frost – with some new spells/buffs every 15 levels… Their idea was to diminish the amount of cookie-cutter specs around, and make player specs be more diversified and play-styles more different… but it seems to me (unless I’m missing something) that this will lead to basically people choosing their main spec and then some cosmetic choices (a bit like minor glyphs) that don’t actually change the gameplay style (at least by looking to the current proposition). I think they’re trying to limit something that can’t be limited: the endless search for the perfect spec, the best combination of stats/spec/glyphs that make the player perform best… They’re trying to limit this so that all players play differently, but I think their fighting a losing battle… If they want that kind of behaviors from the players, they’ll have to invest in better AI for the bosses and such, and make players have to improvise more…
• Account-achievements: this is a good idea for people that have alts…

Now for my main complaint: no epic-ness!

There’s no "”big menace” (the whole “focus on the war between the Alliance and Horde” seems like a cop-out, since I couldn’t care in the littlest – most of that war seems to be driven by petty interests and 1000 year old history… Maybe players in PvP realms feel it, but most players in PvE realms couldn’t care less). The game has some new lore coming in because of the damn pandas (they were enslaved by some guys, so there’s some bosses there), but no epic threat… Come on, we’ve fought Elemental Lords, Elder Gods (and other demi-Gods), a Lich King, armies of undead, several bad-ass dragons (including one that ripped apart the damn world!), and now we’re kicking the ass of some guys that enslaved pandas?! Seems like anti-climatic…

Of course, this might all be a part of Blizzard’s plan to do a weak-ass expansion while “Star Wars: the Old Republic”, “Diablo III” and “Starcraft II” roll out, so they don’t “waste” good content, but it seems like a dangerous game… I’m almost considering quitting the game, and I’ve spent almost 7 years of my life playing it!

There’s more information coming out in the next months, so I might change my mind about a lot of things, but I can’t stop looking at this as the decline of World of Warcraft… still, it was 7 years, it was a very good run!

“From Dust” is a different game… it was created by Eric Chahi, the mind behind “Another World”, one of my favorite games of all times (and one of the most influencial aswell).

At the high-level, it’s a god-sim in which you control a worm-thing that enables you to modify the environment around you. In the beginning, you can pickup sand and drop in other places, but as the levels progress, you get access to more elements (sand, water, lava) and the interactions of those elements. You have to use those powers to lead a primitive nomadic tribe to the home of the Ancestors.

The thing that’s more evident in this game is the physics…. It’s amazing:

Everything reacts physically as you’d expect, but it’s just gorgeous seeing the water flowing down and then changing the course of the river with some lava or sand. The effect of a tsunami hitting your village when it is protected by a “water shield” is epic, to say the least!

And it all looks great… one thing that really impressed me (although it might be simple in implementation) was the skin rendering of the characters… the parameters/textures of the skin shaders were just right, it seemed to react to light exactly as I’d expect.

The game is not without his faults… the AI is sometimes appalling, specially the path-finding, but those small glitches can be forgiven (although they become frustrating sometimes).

The game has a slow pace, almost zen-like and (for me) the correct length (although many people on the Internet have complained of the short length of the game – for me, if the game was longer, I’d be bored). And after you finish the campaign you also have some challenges, and some of them are just plain diabolical (in a good sense!).

Overall, this game reminds me of Peter Molineaux’s “Populus”, but with modern technology and reduced to the point of almost minimalism, and I believe is a must in any god-sim fan’s collection. Just make sure you choose the console version (PS3 or XBox360) over the PC one, if you have a choice… it seems the PC version is weaker than the rest! 9/10.

Just finished playing “Dark Void”… When it came out, it wasn’t something I really needed to play, but I found it on the bargain bin and decided to give it a try…

Rant number one: DON’T PUT SPOILERS ABOUT THE STORY IN THE FLAVOUR TEXT ON THE LOADINGS!It’s just stupid and kind of ruins the game for people that actually enjoy being “surprised” by the story.

Anyway, having finished the game, I can’t help the feeling that the game was rushed, which is too bad. Given more time, the game could have actually been very good, instead of just average.

From a game mechanics standpoint, the game is the usual fare of 3rd person adventure games, but with some nifty things. It has a “vertical combat” mechanic that is actually fun and interesting, in which your characters is dangling on ledges and such and has to fight enemies. The other one is the main selling point of the game: the rocket-pack parts.

Most of it feels solid, although the level design borders on boring sometimes. For example, the hangar part reminds of the obnoxious “Library” level on Halo 1, being too long and the same from start to finish, without anything interesting happening (besides killing hordes of enemies, of course).

But where this game fails the most in the story-telling… they’ve created an interesting premise, with a lore-basis that might have been original, and then ruin it with basic storytelling (with basic storytelling mistakes)…

In the game, you play as a hot-shot pilot that has to ferry his once-lover to some place, for some reason (yep, it’s that detailed) and instead get sucked into the Bermuda Triangle that leads the player to another world… Not to spoil the game for anyone, stuff happens there…

The basic plotline is paper thin, the cut-scenes are generic, converting what could be interesting characters into simplistic archetypes and hinting at a larger than life world outside, but never showing it, or letting it interfere with the game itself… Most of the game you spend your time going from place to place, doing things over a time span of supposed months, but nothing has actual bearing into your motivations… most of the time I didn’t know WHY I was doing things, although it was very clear WHAT I had to do.

And it’s a shame, really, because there are some visual details that are interesting (the Watcher’s “hair”, for example), but it gets lost into the usual “fight the minions of the real bad guys, which are actually robots because we don’t want to show blood”… and don’t get me started on the climatic finale, which the game has been gearing up since the start… it’s silly and inexplicable and introduces a plot hole the size of a small planet!

It feels like either the game was rushed, or without a solid direction from the narrative standpoint… the things it does badly (from generic characters with no charisma, to the use of the over-used Tesla as “science-guy”, the single black guy that speaks as if he’s just come from the middle of Africa, the pieces of “lore” that are dropped in the middle of the story, the list goes on forever) are basic ones that are covered in any narrative course!

And it’s too bad… the game disappoints because it has good concepts, we can see its potential and then it drops the ball almost continuously… 6/10