Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: Great Game, Bad Ending

I know I'm a few years behind, but I just finished this game, and I feel like the ending... I don't want to say is terrible, but I just don't get it. From the title, you should be able to guess that there are spoilers for the ending of the game. So, don't click if you don't want to be spoiled.

Asking the Right Questions to Improve

Come, I will conceal nothing from you. On Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends, my in game name is Lucentile. You will see that this means in LoL that I am B5, with a 43~% win rate. I am what you would call "Terrible" at League of Legends.

Toxicity in Games

I've been playing more MOBAs and MMOs lately. One problem in both of these genres is the other people I play with. Not the people I personally know; the random people. If you're a non-toxic player, then, you can probably stop reading here. If you ARE a toxic player, then please keep reading. The "you" from here on in is to be understood to be toxic players. This is my attempt to explain why I want them to stop being toxic. So, if you aren't part of the intended audience, this isn't for you.

Quick Thoughts on MOBA Team Fighting

Matt's thoughts in response to a Reddit post on team fighting in Heroes of the Storm.

Thoughts on Dawngate

First of all: I liked Dawngate. It was a fun game. But, the people on the Dawngate Reddit are really getting in their two-minute hate at EA. I'm not a huge fan of EA, but, in this case, I can see the business sense in what they did.

I can't really blame them for closing Dawngate though. It's been in Beta for a year and a half, still had balance problems and had low populations even during peak hours (sometimes taking 15~ minutes for a game to pop for me, someone at the middle/newbie MMR.) There's no guarantee it was going to be a money maker with LoL, DotA2, Smite and soon Heroes of the Storm to compete with. EA is also giving refunds on in-game purchases. Every dollar spent on Dawngate is a loss; odds are, they would have been throwing good money after bad to keep developing it. An economic reality that a lot of gamers don't want to face, I know, but games need to either make money or not be someone's primary source of income to get made.

If Dawngate had gotten to this level of polish a year, maybe two years ago, it would have been well-positioned to be a major player. Unfortunately, it just didn't strike at the right moment. What Waystone provided [an amazing lore and world] is sadly something that the vast market of MOBA players don't care about.

People blame EA for not advertising; I constantly see people saying "my friends say they would have played it if they heard about it!" Honestly, these people are most likely soft lying. They honestly believe that they would have played it, but the fact is, they would not have. You know how I know? Because anyone passingly familiar with MOBAs is aware when new ones show up because we all follow the same news outlets, or have friends who try them and try to get us to play. I doubt most of them would have tried Dawngate if they had heard about it, and those that DID try, even fewer would become paying customers.

Which is sad. Dawngate was on the way to be a very good game. It just missed the moment.

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P.S.,

With NaNoWriMo happening, I realized I'd been neglecting the blog. Maybe after, I'll get back to writing more regularly.

New Basic Rules, A Quick Note

The new D&D Basic Rules are posted.

I expect I'll do a full read over the weekend and give you a lot more insight as I go. But, just after skimming the opening [which I'll re-read again], one thing stands out to me as kind of... awkward. Especially given the reason we moved AWAY from 3.5/3.0 to the 4E model was to fix the very problem.

Go read The Wonders of Magic section.

Though, the section on the Wonders of Magic makes me leery for our brave non-magical people. All of their examples are ways adventurers are screwed without their magical helpers. You need clerics or you will DIE. You need bards or you will be OVERWHELMED. Without wizards and druids everything is TEN TIMES WORSE. Even if everything is more balanced, someone may have wanted to say something about warriors and paladins being a protective shield in front of their more vulnerable members, just so it didn't seem like the warriors were just sort of there for other people to be awesome around.

WAR -- What Was It Good For?

Now that WAR is ending, let's look back on the good, the bad.

To Add or Not To Add, That is the Question

Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The 'twerks' and 'selfies' of outrageous Oxford,
Or to take pen against these buzzworthies,
And by unliking end them: to squee, to say
"Whatevs!" And to tweet to say we must end
The 'LOLs,' and the shocks of a thousand 'OMGs'
That English is heir to?

RPG Maker Game Update

Actually playing and trying to break my own game in RPG Maker is really flexing problem solving skills I had long since let atrophy. It gives me a new sense of respect for the QA big games have to go through to get published. Think, in a fairly minimalistic sprite-based RPG, in the first two real rooms of the dungeon, I had nearly half-a-dozen game breaking bugs (using a certain skill causes a crash, saving/loading breaks event scripts, door won't reopen, etc., etc.) Imagine how much more complicated bug shooting, say, Eden Prime or the Human Noble's origin story must have been.

RPG Maker Combat System

Before I go any further with making items/characters/skills, I need to sit down and decide combat numbers. On the one hand, I like how the HP/damage scales through Ch.1 (at the end, your tank has around 1.3k HP and his base attack does around 120~, while your damage dealer has around 750 HP and does around 160~, but can reliably do special attacks that pump that 300~.)

That feels like very Final Fantasy numbers. The problem is that it gets unwieldy FAST. So, what's the other possibility? Make the numbers much smaller, removing the multipliers. At the base, a regular attack is your Attack Value * 4 resisted by an enemy defense value * 2 [with a +/- 20.]

What I'm tempted to do is retweak the numbers to get rid of the multiplication. So, instead, your tank would have around 130 HP by the end of chapter 1, the damage dealer would have around 75. The difference in their basic attacks would be 12 to 16, with the damage dealer being able to put out about 30 damage with a special, with the boss going from having nearly 1500 HP to having about 150. Nothing changes except the scope of the numbers, but it would make it easier for me to balance in my head.

So, here's my question for RPG Players: Do you prefer the large abstract numbers of Final Fantasy/Star Ocean titles, or the smaller, more easy to understand numbers of a more tactical game like Fire Emblem?

The Dreaming Path

Ever since I played the early Final Fantasy games, I've wanted to make an RPG. The biggest thing standing in my way has always been a complete and total lack of technical skill in coding, programming and art. Enter, RPG Maker.

In this image, Arthur, our first character, uses a spell.

As you can see, RPG Maker has solved a lot of these problems for me. Finding a script from their Wiki to make the party's sprites appear in combat, we currently have a fairly solid system for an old-school, turn-based J-RPG. But, we really want to try and make things different than other games. The first thing you'll notice is that the title implies that dreams are going to be a powerful theme.

That's true, in more ways than one. Right now, I've only finished the first floor of the starter dungeon. It is a bit surreal, a bit silly, and fairly simple. The enemies there are basic starter monsters. They just attack you. As you're all alone, though, you'll need to guide Arthur to safety. The first dungeon will take you from level 1 to 7.

Walking Dead: 400 Days Review & Annoyance

Spoilers below the fold, but first: For a $5.00 DLC on Steam, this was well worth the investment. It isn't very "gamey," sort of like the original five episodes. It is much more narrative in scope. Because of the shorter vignette structure, as opposed to a more cohesive story, it lets us have wildly divergent choices where we're left to imagine the outcome that brings our five characters from the end of their snapshot (if you've played the game, you caught the pun, I hope), to the epilogue.

I'm actually a fan of this style of game, and while a lot of people say you don't get a feel for the characters, I think they're just not paying attention. Vince is a protective leader-type; we're not sure WHAT he was helping his brother with that lead to his story, but throughout his story, no matter what choices you take, he comes across as a can-do leader that both of his companions come to trust.

The other characters are a bit more divergent in their growth, but that is based solely on your final decision. To get into to much detail there is spoilerific, so be warned.

Matt Plays League of Legends

I play League of Legends, which you know from past posts. One thing I want to do is get better at LoL and MOBAs in general, especially with Smite and Dungeon Defenders 2 happening. So, one thing I thought that might help me get better, is to make some MOBA match reports. Before that, full disclosure, I play ranked because there's less racism and trolling than in normals. I may not be good enough for ranked, as my Bronze 1 division attests, but it is a more pleasant experience all around.

So, from here-on-in, I'm going to try and keep updates on my League of Legends play (and later, Smite and Dungeon Defenders 2.)

End of June Role Playing Event

In June, I am going to run a Call of Cthulhu one-shot. There is a crew of 11 people that the players can elect to choose from. The transport plane housed 13 people (plus the pilot for 14); only 11 remain. While the lead-in short will give the characters some traits and the like, they'll be flexible Pre-Genned PCs, meaning that the only thing definitively set is their profession and last name.

Making More Time In Your Games

People like table-top role playing games, but the general consensus is that a lot of the role playing has subtly turned more into combat roles than character roles. The main reason for this, I am going to posit, is pure economics. Resources, specifically.

The first resource is Time. The average time people have to game drops as they age and responsibilities kick in. The two times in your life when you have the most time to play games are at the bookends of it. For everyone else, there isn't time for a day-long delving into the lair of the dark lich. Combine this with the second resource/problem: Players, like any other actor in an economy, are rarely rational actors. These are the two biggest factors standing in the way of getting more RP in your RPG.

So, how do you get more out of your RPG?

Final Fantasy 4: Onward to The After Years

FF4 is a surprisingly quick game (completed in under about 17 hours played.) There are a few points of real difficulty, but even those can be breezed through by simply doing fights as they come. I reached the end game on the moon at about level 57 across the party by the time we used the crystal in the last fight. Simply knowing how the Active Time Battle system works this time changed the whole world. I knew what counters were used by what monster; Behemoths were no longer a long, drawn out fight once I realized they countered every hit with a nasty attack. Rubicant was no longer a stopping point once I realized how his cloak works; and the water turtle demon Caganazzo, or whatever, was a push over.

Final Fantasy 3: The Last of the NES Era

After beating the Cloud of Darkness, we say a fond farewell to the NES era Final Fantasy games. Even though I was playing the remake, I still felt the danger of things going wrong in the battles enough, and there was a real hint of danger throughout the game play. Coming off of FF2, the body count among our heroes is much lower, and the tone is lighter. Most of the world is not destroyed, and our friends are reunited in the end. FF3 sets up a nice, hopeful spot between the depressing worlds of FF2 and FF4.

Extra Credits Video

Video here.

This is something that I try to explain to people, that I think this video does better than I could. One thing I try to explain when playing games is the difference in power in classes, strategies, etc. For example, in most Final Fantasy games, you can pretty much ignore much of the complexity the game offers by simply finding the exploitable bits and exploiting to the hilt.

Final Fantasy 2: Complete

I finished Final Fantasy 2 yesterday evening. One of the most interesting things about this is that it was actually, for all its NES-level story-telling capability, a fairly dark game. A lot of heroes end up dead, and our heroes do not reconcile with each other at the end. Leon is sort of a proto-Kain, but he pulls it off better since he doesn't seem to slip in and out of mind control as easily as a cartoon character. As with FF1, the early limitations really showed in the game; grinding by hitting yourself and your friends in the head is... thankfully a system Final Fantasy dropped. The other problem with FF2 is that, much like some of the later Final Fantasies, your characters start to blend together, ability wise, if you're going for max effectiveness. By the end of the game, Firion, Mariah and Gus were only different in that Firion swung two lances, Mariah used two swords and Gus had two axes. All three could heal and buff effectively, and attack magic was of nominal use.

This is another game that is fun in the sense that you get a feeling of overcoming challenges, until you hit the mid-game when some odd combination of equipment and spells lets you sit on easy street until a random encounter in the final dungeon with monsters that do a percentage of your max HP as damage. Then, once you clear the two floors they are on, it is smooth sailing. I expected the boss to actually transform into a super powered. final true evil form. He did not. Oh well, on to Final Fantasy III, which brought us the Job System as we think of it.

Below are some pictures from my failed adventure to the Air and Space museum today, as the lecture I was hoping to attend was canceled.

Walking Dead Episode 5

Warning. Below there be spoilers.