Cult of The Turtle

This is a bit of a spoiler for the newbie areas of Rift.  It’s also the strongest argument I can give for playing the game, so I feel justified.

Throughout the Defiant tutorial/newbie zone, you’re trying to fix the time machine that will send you back to before everything became unsalvageable.  It’s the best they can do, so when you’re ready you go up the promontory where the time machine sits, and talk to the person there who knows what is going on.  As he powers up the machine, a rift forms over it, and things start pouring out of it.

Or perhaps you climb the promontory to see one of your fellow defiants already there, fighting the things pouring out of the rift. A button flashes on your UI to “Join Public Group”  you do, and then you are in a group with that person, fighting.  You can fight and help without them, the quest is forced on you, and placed at the top of your tracker, so you always know what is going on.  At this point it’s the only thing on your list anyway.

You fight, and eventually one of the NPCs that was helping you fights the big bad of the game, Regulos, while you slip backward in time, to avert this future from ever happening.  It’s kind of epic and fun, and whoever happens on it can help, and they do.  I ran three characters through the Defiant starting zone, and once I started it and twice I helped.  One of those times I had to run it twice, because I didn’t quite have the flags properly set — it’s a beta, I’m sure they’ll make that clearer.

Eventually, you’re dumped into a wider area, where you see the twisting clouds with tentacles falling down that marks the existence of a rift.  You get a power that lets you go into one of them, and start the public/rift event which is associated with it.  I never did this, because there always seemed to be an event going on while I was in the area.

I did my first one on Thursday.  There were at least 50 people in the area, all of them working on different facets of the event — fighting invasions, protecting wardstones, and closing rifts. Taking part gets you some special currency “Planarite” which is used for quest turn-ins and purchasing specialty equipment — I never got enough to buy anything, so I can’t say what it is.  I know I could have gotten it, though.  Particularly during the beta and probably easily early in the game.

It’s easy to join a public group, and with so many people it became a raid (basically: a group of groups) and we all shared in what was going on, it seemed. Admittedly with so many people it was hard to tell what was going on.  The final boss wasn’t too complicated, as there was only one of him, but some of the skirmishes had 10-15 enemies, all of them moving around.  I was playing my warrior so it was hard to stay by whatever I was fighting.  Ranged DPS might have been easier.

I woke up really early Sunday morning — because I do, but also because I realized it would be quieter then, and I’d get to see something.  See,the problem with public events is that they’re great when an area is populated, but in general the only populated areas on a  mature MMO are the newbie area, and the top level areas.  The stuff in the middle (and by now I was getting into ‘middle’ territory) becomes a vast wasteland.  WAR had a real problem with that, not the least because WoW’s Lich King expansion siphoned off all their players, and made some of their public events impossible for solo players or small groups.

On Sunday there weren’t that many people in the zone, and the area I was trying to turn in regular quests was swarmed with elite monsters. I died twice just trying to see if I could find a healer.  I fought some, but it was beyond anything I could handle.  Now, someone started this quest, and they were probably off fighting it (they eventually won it) but they weren’t near me, and I was being overrun.  This seems like a bad plan to me.  Certainly there was no way I could solo or small group this (there were, in fact 3-4 other people around me in the same boat, dying with regularity).

Dying is just money, and not that much of it, really.  It’s the same in WoW (represented by broken equipment, Rift uses a different mechanism). It beats losing experience, like EQ did, but it’s annoying when random events invade places that are essentially ‘safe’.  And I get the feeling Rift is going to have a problem with this, once the server matures.  Guild Wars 2 has said they have a solution for that, I guess we’ll see when it comes out.  (GW2 has the advantage of not charging a monthly fee, but more about that tomorrow.)

The nice thing about public events are that they break up the monotony of killing 7 monsters, or picking up 7 things from the ground.  Believe me when I say I had a surfeit of those kinds of quests.  But they need to scale to the zone population, and be accessible to whomever is there. That may be true in Rift — maybe there were lots of high-level folks nearby, and not at my location.  On the other hand, though, this would be  great way to grief other players, starting events and then doing nothing until they’re lost.

Either way, I was ultimately left unsatisfied by these things, and concentrated on getting through the grist mill quests so that I could see something different.

The results of that, and my final thoughts about RIFT tomorrow.

I remember when the only “programming” game was crobots.  It was a game where you programmed a robot (in a c-like language, thus the name) to fight in an arena. While I was okay with that, I’ve never been a competitive gamer, and didn’t feel I had the chops to pit my code directly against someone else.  I always liked programming puzzles, and that drew me to the Incredible Machine games.

Some of those are logic-programming puzzles and some of them are physics puzzles.  The plethora of those (which included games like Angry Birds) kind of separates them out.  And while a lot of hardcore gamers are programmers, it’s a narrower market than even that.  So it’s kind of cool to find some flash game that fall in this sort of programming puzzle Genre

The first game that I ran into (which was not the first at all) is a game called Manufactoria.  It’s probably the most purely programmatic of the games, since it’s essentially about creating a Turing machine, right down to reading and writing from a tape.  I enjoyed it, although I admit there were a couple levels at the end that I didn’t finish.

That’s kind of a feature of these games: some of them are freaking hard.  They fall within my core abilities, and they force me to think, rethink, and try again.  For that reason they may be too frustrating for some people, but they’re also immensely satisfying when you finally do solve them.  I don’t feel bad I didn’t finish Manufactoria (although I may someday) but I went as far as I could at the time, and learned some things in the process.

The author of Manufactoria sites Zachtronic’s “Games for Engineers” as his inspiration. JayisGames has reviews of all the games, and links to them. Codex of Alchemical Engineering is my favorite, of them and the robot battle game the least.  I found the Russian semiconductor one to be a bit beyond me, for what its’ worth.  I’m currently playing SpaceChem, and when I finish the tutorial (or should I say if I finish the tutorial), I plan on buying it.

My main complaint about Zachtronic Institute games is that the tutorials often aren’t.  You’re expected to kind of jump in and maybe even have a basic science background before you can quite get it.  SpaceChem is better, but not perfect in this regard.  Some patience in the beginning is called for — more than modern games typically require.

I want to highlight three more games in this sort of logic puzzle game genre.  These are basically similar games,each with their own twist.  All of these games involve manufacturing something with a particular design or set of features: tiles with a particular pattern, blocks of a certain size or color, or donuts with the right kind of toppings.

The first is Tile Factory, which was made for one of the JayIsGames casual gameplay competitions.   It’s a flash game, with a decent tutorial,and is probably one of the best introductions to the puzzle/logic/programming genre as a whole.  It looks somewhat like Manufactoria, but has a different purpose and tool set.  Once you’re done with that, and depending on your setup,you might want to try the other two games.

One is The Machine, which is a downloadable game written in Unity.  Here, instead of patterned tiles you’re making cubes of various sizes and colors.  The challenge here comes from the very limited positions where you can place objects.  I bought my copy through an Impulse Game sale, but it has a demo.

Lately, I’ve been playing Rocknor’s Donut Factory, which is an iOS game (at the typical $0.99 price) which plays a lot like The Machine, with a bit more options of placement.  Here, the donuts need to be shaped, baked, and sprinkled or jelly filled.  Order matters and while there are less restrictions on where you can place items than in The Machine, often those limitations are the challenge of a level.

In searching for links I see that there’s a PC version of Rocknor’s Donut Factory, which just confirms that I don’t know about all the games in this genre.  So if you know of some that you like or want to chime in on, please leave me a note here, or drop my a line on Twitter.

I recently picked up a copy of Enslaved as a rental, after hearing that it was reasonably short if not completely wonderful gameplay.  It sounded like a good diversion, and Enslaved has the kinds of gameplay that I pref. It has melee combat, climbing through interesting terrain, and was advertised as having a strategy/decision making element.  Interesting enough to rent, so I did.

This game clearly wants to be compared with Uncharted.  Early in the game, as I’m climbing up the side of a falling, flying slaver ship, my wife commented, ” This is like that other game, the one with the train.”  She’s referring to the opening Uncharted 2 where you are climbing a train that’s falling off a cliff. It’s even narratively paced like Uncharted 2, the voice acting is pretty good, even if the  characters themselves don’t make a lot of sense to me.

I’m not going to say much about the story, except that it got me wanting to read Journey to the West. If anyone knows a good English translation with decent annotation, please leave a comment or let me know.

Uncharted 2 is basically three separate types of experience alternated in an interesting way: you’ve got your well-voice-acted cut-scenes (often very very short ones), platforming, and combat.  Enslaved has the same mix, similarly paced but doesn’t work.  If you have your game separated out like that, all the sections need to work — much like the platforming and story sections of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time worked really well, while the combat was often much harder. Sands is still a great game, since the combat was more interspersed, and the platforming really worked.

Enslaved’s combat is okay, if not inspired– it’s not hard enough to really bring the other, less straight-forward options into play (and if you do, then you lose the experience orbs you would have gotten).  It’s platforming however, is really pretty bad.  With the Prince of Persia series, I always felt like I had a character that could do things.  Sometimes what I do is context sensitive: jumping near a wall would kick jump, or run up it, depending on how I was facing.  But if I pressed the “jump” button, I always jumped. In this way I was a character that could do things, and moved around an environment which put those things into the best context.

I don’t feel that way about Monkey in Enslaved.  The ‘jump’ button only seems to work where it needs to work.  Since it’s tied into the ‘roll’ option, half the time I want to jump, I wind up rolling.  Since the environment has been built so that I don’t roll or jump off cliffs unless I can survive, often when I try to jump in a place that isn’t a good option, I wind up rolling up against an invisible wall, which is nothing like what I thought I would do.  Often I can jump just not exactly there, I need to move a few inches to the left first — and then I can jump.

I feel less like a character that can do things than like a pointer that activates an environment action.  As far as programming and level design these may be identical, but there’s a big difference in the feel.  Sure, Uncharted 2 was probably exactly like this, but I never felt like the action the environment was suggesting was different from what I wanted to do.  In that way it was ‘seamless’ and ‘fluid’ in ways that Enslaved just isn’t.

While handholds are given a bit of a glow, often the camera points away form them, except for those times when the camera is rigidly pointing exactly where I need to go (and can’t be dissuaded).  One says to me “you need to explore” — which the game encourages with masks and xp orbs — and the other says “just go this way, we’ll show you how to go” — which is earmarked by fairly (if not completely) linear game design.  It’s kind of like Enslaved doesn’t quite know what sort of game it wants to be.  If the handholds were more visually consistent, it would be better, but often I couldn’t see them without the glow, which is a stark contrast to the way they work in, say, Assassin’s Creed, or Uncharted 2.

It breaks that ‘sense of motion’ that platforming games have always had for me, even since playing Tomb Raider.  Enslaved isn’t an open world style game like Infamous or Assassin’s Creed, which allowed me to move freely through the environment always progressing and moving forward, almost mindlessly  Instead I have these moments of confusion where I don’t know where to go, nor how to get there.  I ususally know what my meta goal is — that’s laid out well, and I’m also given most of the map to look at — but the little moment to moment goals are missing.

In Uncharted 2 I often didn’t know what the meta goals were — we were just escaping or running in a direction — and mostly it didn’t matter, because I always knew what my immediate direction was, and where I was headed next.  (As an aside, the web-design book Don’t Make Me Think says that it doesn’t matter how many clicks it takes to get to something on your site, so long as each necessary click is obvious.)

I would like this game, and like the old adage — a great story can’t save bad gameplay, but good gameplay can rescue a bad story.  Unfortunately, Enslaved doesn’t really have either.