Visceral Combat - Intro
Posted by Jay | Filed under Game Industry
Ask yourself about visceral combat design? Which titles come to mind? How about movies? Here is a list of games, movies and books that feature visceral combat. This is from my personal recollection and from titles that I have read, watched or played.
- God of War (ps2)
- Dead or Alive 4 (360)
- F.E.A.R. (PC, 360)
- Fight Club (movie)
- R.A. Salvatore Books - Well known for good combat sequences
- Ninja Gaiden: Black (Xbox, 360)- Way too hard for the average user.
- Any Bruce Lee Movie - If anything, watch how he performs his combat for movies.
Some of you may have played, watched or read these titles. Some of you may not even know what they are. After reading this, I would suggest playing, watching or reading from this selection to get a better example of the content.
What makes combat visceral? There are a couple basic bullets points I’d like to cover.
- Animation
- Feedback
- Sound design
- Controls
In this series 4 part series, I will cover each of these aspects from a high level. Finally for my wow readers, I will review some of the changes to World of Warcraft that made it more visually compelling. Who knows, maybe by then I’ll post some screen shots!
Tank in Order, Heal if destruction, Rant if player
Posted by Jay | Filed under Game Industry
I just hit 14 on my swordmaster and 13 on my zealot. Going from tier to tier is a lot of fun except a few minor issues.
First, where are my flight paths? Seriously, there’s like 1 per region, what’s that shit about? What it does is penalize me the player for wanting to experience new content. Let me illustrate an example:
Last night, my guild wanted to get together for some early tier 2 PQ action. So, I flew out to Shadowlands in the dark elf territory to start gathering the troops. My guildies had the option of travelling to two points; (1) the first war camp which is a 10 minute run from the previous tier and (2) the mid point war camp in the Shadowlands which was again a 10 minute walk to the location. Royal pain in the butt. Total tiem to get the group together, 30 minutes! 30 minutes of travel time! Pitiful.
Second, is class disparity. DPS classes in War are REALLY fun. By their nature DPS is more fun than the support. Missing a healer means you can’t complete PQs at all. Missing a Tank means you can’t complete 50% of all PQs. That’s 50% of regular leveling content that cannot be experienced without a tank. That sucks. Mind you, I play a tank on the order side and I never have this problem.
Third, and this is more minor. Apparently alot of people queue into scenarios. I don’t buy it. I agree that many people do queue into them except that when I queue for an evening I will see the same names. So I imagine the overall population is roughly 100 folks queueing scenarios. Of course, Warhammer doesn’t show how many scenarios are actually running, so its impossible to tell.
Third and a half? Please for the love of gawd, add some randomness to the scenarios. Whatever the algorithm is, change it! I’m tired of Nordenwatch and I’m tired of Mourkain Temple. 60% of all scenario content is never experienced. Any company would find that poor practice.
I’m having a great time. I just wish it were easier. And don’t think that its any easier to have said good time in World of Warcraft. These same issues are even more excaserbated in WoW.
Importance of consent in World Events
Posted by Jay | Filed under Game Industry, World of Warcraft
With the Hallow’s Eve event in World of Warcraft, players abound are becoming infected, turining into zombies and in general having a hoot! Or are they?
There is a facination social phenomenon occurring. Many players ask for a way to “change” the world. The zombie event provides an opportunity to do just that. Why then would so many players be upset with the zombie event. One word: consent.
Historically, the opening of the gates of AQ40 participation in the global world changing event lead to rewards for all, riches and titles for some and unique equip for a select few, one per server to be exact. Players felt like they were joining a global effort! Contributing much needed resources to the war effort. If you didn’t play original vanilla WoW, this was a great event. Let’s move on.
Conversely, the recent zombie event is non consental. You’re participation in the zombie event is at the whim of other players. Much like truly open world PVP, Your experience may change due to online play. Your enjoyment of the zombie event is dependent on whether:
- You enjoy being a zombie, unable to perform regular tasks in the game world.
- You enjoy griefing to an extent. All friendly entities become hostile and all hostile entities become friendly. This is almost the definition of grief play.
- You don’t mind leaving a negative impact on the game world.
Of the above three distinctions, I argue the primary reason the zombie event is failing is due to the negative impact a player has on the game world. The majority of players want to positively impact the game world. They want their name sung to the high heavens. They want to save the day. They want to belong.
Contributing, as with the opening of the AQ40 gates, versus griefing, as with the current zombie event, are two distinct activities for any human. You’ll find in most psychology document that the need to contribute to the greater whole is intrinsically built into the human species.
The majority of players in the World of Warcraft game space would GLADLY join the fight to repel the zombie invasion, provided the zombie invasion was NPC based.
If I were a historian of MMO design, I would strongly discourage the griefing nature of the zombie world event in favor of world events where the player can positively impact the game environment.
Why I’m not playing Disc until 80.
Posted by Jay | Filed under PvP, World of Warcraft
I’m not playing discipline again until 80. I’ve had it! Gone are the days for me where I will happily sit behing the front line of various DPS and keep people alive ( healing ) or try to get everyones attention so my buddies can do their stuff ( priest tanking ). Each of these actions are gone for the priest for many reasons.
PVP players are already used to stacking 2-3 dps on a discipline priest to take em down. Pre-3.02 a D priest could certainyl live with that and excel! Since we’ve trained the player base to do this, post-3.02 2-3 dps on a tanking discipline priest takes me down in 5 seconds. I don’t even get to heal myself most of the time.
Yes. I am whining about priest tanking!
On the other hand! Shadow is WAY fun. 4 dots, dispel still works and as long as I’m on my game, a longer mass dispel is no longer detrimental. Haha, get it?
Overall, I applaud Blizzard for the change. From what I can see, they’re pushing raiding and pvp to be more frenetic, more decisive and more open ended. Everyone has a little bit of everything with one or two specialties. Enough ball pading, here’s some pointers since most of Discipline will play the same.
- Mana drain is less important because fights will be over quicker.
- Fear bomb is a potent weapon. 3 seconds is HUGE in pvp right now. Like 12k HP to dead huge.
- Learn how to pillar dance. Put your left hand on WASD and learn to turn and camera pivot with your right hand. Reverse that if you’re left handed.
- DO NOT MOUSE CLICK. Learn to use the key binding menu to create SHIFT + AlphaNumeric and CTRL + Alphanumeric to cast spells.
- Throw shield around.. like a bad analogy that I can’t think of right now.
- Target health can be displayed as a number now. When you’re target is at 4k life, queue up mind blast + Shadow Word: Death. Bring that target DOWN!
- Discipline priests are great for single target healing, but you HAVE to learn to play offensively to survive. The best defense ( YOU! ) is to have a strong offense ( situation awareness ).
That’s all I have to say until I start arenaing at 80. Enjoy the freebies, raid where you can. Go kill Illidan. Just go!
Rerollmuch - 70 doesn’t work, and waiting till 80.
Disc Priest 3.02 Build - First impressions
Posted by Jay | Filed under PvP, World of Warcraft
There’s a lot of subtle differences when it comes to the new discipline.
- You’ll spend the majority of your time at 35% mana. Its wierd but it happens.
- You MUST live through the opening burst. If you can survive for 5-7 seconds you’ll live through the encounter.
- Mana burn is much more important.
- Shield + Aegis + Many damage reductions = Your heal target will not die if you chain flash heal. This in itself is a HUGE change.
- Range and pillar dancing is even more important then it was before.
I really want to be fair to you guys and give you a full review of the new talents and changes to Disc Priest PVP. I’ll need to run more BGs and more Arena matches to get a true(er) feel for the changes. Next week I’ll have a full talent run down. Stay tuned.
This is what I’m running right now. Be wary of disc priest tanking. Offense overall for everyone, including YOU, has increased.
