I have my doubts about Little Big Planet and how much effort your average gamer will put in to the creation side, but with this news. Sorry, that should be THIS NEWS as it needs shouting, the game just became an instant classic anyway.
Nat over at buttonmashing.com is asking an interesting question: Do you finish the games that you buy? I had to answer no, but the question is more complicated than that.
I should start off by saying I play a lot of games. I probably on average buy one a fortnight, and since I have an interest in the mechanics of the games I tend to play a lot of games that do interesting things but people may consider to be bad games according to the reviews. Apparently either I have low standards or reviews are rubbish because I don't think I've brought a game that I didn't enjoy since I gave up on non-MMO PC games a few years ago.
All this means that I have a lot of games and so it's not possible for me to finish them all yet. I probably will do though for most over the upcoming years, but there are specific games that I know I will never bother with.
The easiest way to make me never complete your game, Mr Game Devs, is to have a final boss that's a lot harder to beat than the rest of the game. Adding quick time events to that process will help greatly. A perfect example of this is Heavenly Sword which has an impenetrable end fight without using a spoiler site saying what to do, and on top of that it needs random timed button presses. You know what? I failed it a few times and now can't be bothered so won't ever complete the game. I'm probably only a few minutes away from the end titles, but they've lost me. There's no payoff for winning beyond the oh-so-predictable plot so no incentive for me to put up with the lazy gameplay, even though I really enjoyed the rest of the game but the end ruined the experience, and this is a pretty common failing in games I fear.
I will finish lots of games though, but maybe not for a while. I have a habit of playing for a bit, getting distracted and then going back to it six months or a year later. I will probably complete every game I haven't given up with at the final showdown at some stage due to evenings of just waiting to play something different, but it's going to take a while. A good example is Just Cause, which I finished a few months back. Now that's a game with some very good ideas and a distinct lack of variation in gameplay, but coming back to it a few times over the months meant that I got past the boring grinding nature that came about from not having enough variation in missions to take over the villages (at this point it probably helps if you've played it) and had enough fun finishing it off that I'm really looking forwards to the sequel as I know they'll fix that problem. It's amazing what game design problems go away if you only play it for a few hours every so often.
The other problem is what is completion? Getting all the Trophies and Achievements? Getting to the end of the plot on easy? Having extracted every ounce of enjoyment that the game has to offer? I've completed Burnout to 100% (must get around to getting 101%, don't ask) and yet I still play it lots online so can I really consider it completed? I finished and enjoyed Bioshock very much, but I didn't do it on the highest difficulty level so is that considered completed? I'm not going to go back to it again until I want to enjoy the story again, so that's probably not going to be just before I get Bioshock 2. I maxed my skills out in Ultima Online many years ago, is that completing it? Have I completed Dead Rising after the first ending? How about the second? Do I really have to do Infinity Mode to some predefined level, such as the achievement for it?
Something that I would love to see, probably through 360voice.com as part of what it shows for your gamertag is game completion. There are achievements that designate having won at one level or another, so it would be nice if it said and listed the games that you've finished the plot on at any level, or maxed out the level or whatever is relevant for each game. I don't care if strangers can see it, it's just handy information to share between friends.
So the last war ended without a shot being fired. Or us seeing the enemy. To be honest that's more disruptive than real war as it scares the hell out of the newbies. Lucky for us we have a new war!
This is another small corp, but with double the members this time. So that means there are two of them!
I suspect it's the same typical thing. Hotshot PvP pilot declares war against 100 man industrial corp who he thinks will be easy pickings, but since he's hanging around our highsec base I suspect he's not that keen to come find us where we have the POSs, capital fleet, 0.0 and alliance friends. If he was into fair fights he'd not be picking on industrial corps. Still, let's teach this guy the error of his ways and I've relocated back to our highsec training base and, as a bonus, found a few ships I'd forgotten about. Ohh a Manticore, and that's what happened to my Eagle!
We've lost our first ship in a 2v1 battle where we just couldn't get reinforcements there in time. Took them an age to take him down though, let's see how well they do when they're up against more than one of us.
Show 10 of the podcast is now live and contains rambling and stuff.
I didn't mean you when I was moaning about people on the internet by the way, just everybody else.
It's that time of the fortnight again and we have the
Van Hemlock Podcast Episode 9 for your listening pleasure.
Lots of talk of Eve, Planetside and a bonus nervous breakdown.
Our latest corp war has ended, and this time it was against a one man corp who never even came close to us. He declared on us, told us that he'll probably never follow up and attack us and we told him where to find us in case he felt in the mood. Still, he had good 0.0 experience and was very well represented on the killboards.
My paranoia was screaming trap throughout all of it. But now the war is retracted and we've survived yet another conflict where we didn't even see the enemy in space. I never even saw him online as he didn't play my hours, and I'm the easiest guy in the corp to find because it's my name above the door.
If his intentions were to bug me through my paranoia and curiosity then he's the winner, I really can't stand not knowing somebodies motives. Maybe there's a "you should always have a dec on" mentality out there, or bragging rights for being one man up against a corp of a hundred. Was it some convoluted revenge plan from a disgruntled ex-employee whose magnificence has yet to be fully revealed?
Or maybe he went off to factional warfare.
Now that you can get 50+ pickup blobs (I never thought I'd be able to say that about Eve) what is the point of declaring war on a corporation unless you have a specific goal? (revenge, destruction or griefing all being very valid). If you want somebody to shoot in Empire you can now have it with very little work, the worse case being you need to build faction with somebody. There's now no point in wardeccing somebody just to have targets. Unless, of course, that is because you can't hold your own in factional warfare.
Speaking of which another night of grinding faction in frigates has passed and has yet again reminded me how much I like them as a class of ship. This happens whenever I fly them, but then I go back to my main and fly big things again and forget. I think I should make a point of sticking with frigates until I get very good at them with my new factional warfare character, maybe go up to interceptors as I do enjoy having to actually fly the ship intelligently instead of the usual keeping at range.
One of my few fun PvPing experiences was against an interceptor. The corp that I was in was in one of those "Pay us X and we'll retract the dec" wars. Our CEOs response had been, of course, "How about we just blow you up lots instead until you've lost way, way more than you asked us to pay?". The war was going well, and the enemy was dropping down to smaller and smaller ships each day as we, presumably, removed their larger ships from play. We were, at that stage, being taunted by an interceptor that we just couldn't hit as we were lacking most of the equipment and skills that would be needed to shut him down. I had the best bet, an Eagle from when the HACs were first introduced (hey, I like how the Moa looks. It's you lot who aren't normal) and I was in a mood to snipe him from afar, what with transversals being so much less of a problem at range.
I went off and grabbed my ship from quite a few systems over as it wasn't something I ever used and began my trip back. I think this was pre-warp to zero so it would have taken a while. On the way back I ran into a slight snag, that interceptor at a range close enough to scramble me and dismantle my ship piece by piece way before help could arrive, or before I could get to the gate as the Eagle is, shall we say, a tad slow. I was set for sniping so didn't have a web or scrambler (not to mention it's a Caldari ship so had put a tank in there to travel anyway) and so I wasn't really in a state to win in a fight against an interceptor, sniping setup or no sniping setup.
Luckily I had something on my side. The guns didn't have long range ammo fitted, they were full of antimatter. On a whim I had decided to fit that in case I ran into any trouble and although it brought my range down massively, it also upped my damage by quite a lot. It took an age to lock the 'ceptor but once I had I kept an eye on it's transversal and managed to get a couple of very lucky volleys off as he manoeuvred. After a couple of these he was getting a tad low on shield and, what with the ship being Caldari he decided to wisely withdraw from the field and leave me cursing that I didn't have a scrambler and web fitted.
Still, I survived a close range fight against an interceptor in a rail boat that's only really good for sniping. It felt good at the time and they announced that they were "redacting their declaration against us to concentrate on other enemies as we weren't worth their time and effort" soon enough. I suspect it had something to do with destroying over a billion ISK of their ships very quickly and organising a coalition between all of their current targets, but we let them go anyway.
It seems that all I've done over the last few days is roll alts in Eve. Alt for the factional warfare sister corp, alts to see what good base skills you can get with a pure noob and, finally, a new alt for actually experimenting with factional warfare.
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but despite playing Eve for over five years now I'm utterly useless at PvP. Well that's what I think because I never actually do any except when I really can't avoid it. I think it's time that I did actually bother to learn, but since the curse of having a high skill point character is that clones are expensive it's time for an alt with a cheap head for no consequence mayhem.
So here we are, a fresh new Minmatar pilot called Theobald Gaudin. My name picking strategy consists of grabbing a history book at random and picking the first name I see, this time it was a book on the Templars. I picked Minmatar because if I'm going to be stuck in Frigates for a while I'd rather be in a Rifter, which is I think a bizarre adaptation of the "If I'm going to be staring at my characters' arse all day it might as well be a female one" argument that may mean that I need serious mental reconditioning.
Sitting here with my current skills in Evemon I can see that I'm not that bad out of the box. I can fly a Rifter already, I can even nearly use T2 projectiles, but that's a decision for the future. I'm going to need to add the skills for warp scrambling and webbing, but I seem to remember I'll be able to use a webifier after the tutorial agents finish so that's OK. I know I'll be needing a MWD, but an afterburner will do for a day or two before I can train one and then that's it. I'm ready to go.
Next comes learning skills. You know all those people who say get them all to level 5 straight away? Well they're wrong. Get them to 4 soonish and then get the advanced to 2s as you can afford it. Longer term get the advanced ones up to 4s, but there's no real rush as you've got most of the bonus already. Whatever you do make sure that you're still training the skills you need in order to have fun in the meantime! Eve is not a game where you train solidly for the first month and then undock, even if some people tell you that it is.
Now what am I missing? Oh yes, faction standing. I'll be ready to go on Thursday or Friday thanks to Van Hemlock. By that time my skills should be ready too.
I am slightly torn as to the next bit: cash. The thing I really know is that I need at least a couple of Rifters all fitted up ready for me to explode due to low skills both for me and my character. Technically I know what to do, and I understand how everything works far too well but the human element is an unknown. I suspect I can fund one of them from the cash I make while sorting out my faction, but that does then depend on me looting more than I lose in fights. So what are my options?
Option one is to bung 100million from my main and live off that. This is probably the easiest.
Option two is to do the time code for ISK thing. Since I'm paying for this account with timecodes funded by my main already that doesn't seem that sensible and becomes option one again.
Option three is to hope I make enough cash from the fighting. I'm not an optimist at the best of times so I doubt this will work.
Option four is to run missions. One of the reasons for this char is to have fun and rekindle my enjoyment of Eve. I've been finding the game a little stale lately and mission grinding outside of factional warfare isn't the answer.
Oh well, it seems like cheating but I'll bung some cash from my main. It's a shame since I'm doing this from scratch and it would be nice to have the proper newbie experience, but those advanced learning skills cost cash and I don't fancy grinding more than I have to in order to get started on this. I think I'll treat it as a loan and keep track of how much I earn in case I can actually make this pay from looting. Of course in the background I've still got my corp to run so this is certainly going to be casual PvP.
Can I play Eve with a casual PvP character and not need to keep funding it with my main? Will I learn how to actually fight? Will I miss having lots of skill points? And most importantly, how much will Eve change as a game for me? I may, or may not, blog about depending on my results but I'm sure it'll keep coming up in our podcast as me and Hemlock laugh at each others' results.
My goals:
- Have fun
- Try to be financially neutral, if not actually make a profit
- Learn how to kill people
Although CCP or White Wolf haven't said anything about it recently I think it's probably time to call the Eve CCG dead. The last of the fan sites are shutting down and the official site was down for a couple of days seemingly without anybody noticing. The last news was in April, and there was a big gap before that too. Most telling there's no moderation on the forums anymore, swearing doesn't seem to get you censored as you would expect. CCP/White Wolf have no visible interest in the game any more. Worse of all it's been far too long between expansions and the CCG world has forgotten about the game.
When I was younger I was into CCGs, but moved on. When the Eve one came along I ordered a few cards and started playing and really enjoyed it. The game wasn't perfect and there were decks you could make that would be a guaranteed win if you only had two players, but between friends that's not a problem. The two player games were all very short, but where the game shined I though was when you had more. A Minmatar Kamikaze deck might be hard to beat in two player, but if you had three then it would just lead to you being killed next and the remaining guy winning because you had to overextend yourself and ignore defence.
The game was more complex mechanics wise than Magic the Gathering, but not too complex to make it unplayable which gave it the subtleties of play that you need to keep a game interesting. It could have done with some better and actually achievable victory conditions but it was a fun way to pass an evening.
So what went wrong? We got the original game and then one delayed expansion, which is the first big problem. Delaying a CCG release really pushed you off the radar in the shops as it's a really cutthroat business if you're game isn't called Magic. Part of this delay was a printing error but there was always a feeling of a lack of support at CCP and then White Wolf too. The game always seemed to need just that bit more manpower on it. Now it just seems to need some manpower. The original expansion every six months plan came and went, and with it any chance to keep on the shelves in the shops. There's been no word on a second expansion for a long time now, but it doesn't matter. You're going to be hard pressed to find any cards in the shops and it would take a relaunch to get the game back there. With only online stores to sell it you're not going to pick up new players.
So the game will fade into history. The last couple of die hards on www.eve-ccg.com will move on and it'll be a game only ever played in the corners of Fanfest by the old timers welcoming the chance to meet somebody else with a deck.
I think it's telling that it's just being left to fade away and forgotten. RIP the Eve CCG. I, at least, will miss you and will still crack the cards out every so often.
Maybe CCP could do what Everquest did and put the game inside the MMO. It's got to be better than staring at an asteroid, right?
Is it just me or is the Empyrean Age title screen music very Terminator era Brad Fidel?
That's not a bad thing, just an observation.
It's Eve patch day, and we're getting Factional Warfare. Yeah, yeah but what's the important new feature? New music of course! I shall rip them out as soon as I patch and add them to my iPod. Hey, podcasters. More music for us to use!
Speaking of podcasts there's a new Van Hemlock podcast up, the rather imaginatively named Episode 8. It'll appear on virginworlds.com shortly, but for now http://vanhemlock.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=348193.