HAX!

Darksiders II – Find and kill Gorewood

Check him out at his deviant art page: http://wraith8r.deviantart.com/

You can commision digital portraits from him, so don’t be afraid to send him messages

The year is 1750 of the Nyarna legacy, the Eastern Sun looks upon the terran planet Lucarnia-Nyarna with great sympathy and rejoice, for its peace has stood throughout the whole era of the current families reign.

Lucarnians are one of the few remaining Polymorphers in the Universe, they shape-shift into their designated fredaemon, creatures that resemble the animals found on non-Polymorpher planets, only difference is that their primary ability is increased tenfold. Imagine a tiger that has augmented claw strength, an eagle that can see as far as the end of the world, a horse who can gallop with the speed of sound.

For order to be maintained fredaemons are assigned taking in consideration social status and family history, this law has been instated by the first king of the present dynasty, Nyarna Umbri. Before this approach, there was no criterion. Chaos was present for thousands of years, seldom legacies lasted more than a couple of days, until the Guardians came and reestablished order. Guardians are the Universes accountants, where there is too much chaos, peace is brought upon the land, and where there is too much peace chaos is unleashed for the amount of time necessary for balance to be present once again. This is the law by which all planets abide. Their plans are flawless, executed in darkness, each time success is guaranteed without the population’s knowledge of external meddling. It is best this way so that the Guardians remain incognito to the eyes of the Universes inhabitants. Their reasons for intervention are unknown, yet what is certain is that Lucarnia-Nyarna will be visited by them once more.

This work by Cristina Bradea is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Along the line you will encounter numerous visits from a little critter called “The Demotivator”, been mentally prepared for him decreases the chances of encountering these unwanted situations, where you just sit down at your desk pondering on whether it can be done or not. People will always doubt the position he or she is in, will always question the correctness of an action, the intensity and frequency of these events depend on the individuals personality and upbringing, there are some who experience it on a weekly basis, some have these kinds of episodes once in a while, point is that you have them and you want them off your back as quickly as possible.  So the problem raised is what to do at an individual level to keep the level of motivation as high as possible? (Note: the following answers are given for a person who momentarily is stuck in a rut and doesn’t know how to get out of there, giving this type of advice to people that have no will-power is pointless)

1. Get out of your own way. Yes, you, step aside right now!  Thinking “I’m not going to make it!”, “I haven’t done anything in a while so why try now?”, “I am never appreciated so why bother?” is equivalent to tying a ten tone cannon ball and throwing yourself in the Thames. The result? Well most likely you will drown, unable to escape a dire situation, which has you as the lead protagonist. Eventually your body will be found years later by a search party, who will ask left and right “Who was this person? Does anybody know him/her?”, sadly no one remembers. So if you don’t want to end up like that, get out of the way and see the path in front of you.
2. Read blogs, book and articles. Gaining knowledge from people that do the type of work you do is always helpful and motivating at the same time, nobody earned his or her title like that, they share experiences they’ve lived throughout their carrier, road blocks that held them back, mistakes that made them stronger and so on.
3. Don’t set your mind on a goal that can’t be accomplished in a given amount of time. Deadlines are important and every day we bump into them, it’s a challenge that gives motive, but also takes it away if the task remains unfulfilled. For example “I want in the next week to ship out a triple A title”, the statement is greatly exaggerate, nevertheless it represents the current trend, do as much as you can in a short time, the world is a jungle because we make it a jungle. Calm down, breathe and think realistically about what you can and most importantly cannot do, don’t try to figure out how something intricate works without knowing the fundamentals, don’t try to paint the next masterpiece if you are unable to think of composition, don’t try to write the next bestselling novel in two days, etc.
4. Find a mentor. Albeit it sounds like I want to enforce a teacher on you, the baffling truth is that having someone looking after you, ready to outline the does and don’ts, praising what you did right, criticizing you every step of the way is on a scale of one to ten, a ten plus plus. We find ourselves not motivated enough because no one bothers to tell us what we did wrong and what could have been done right instead, in a corporate structure there is so little time for these types of conversation, one day you wake up and you are fired, no further explanations. Friends and family really don’t count in this particular matter, so find someone whom you have a platonic or professional relationship with, emotionally involved people compromise the clarity of the judgment.

Motivating yourself is the key to accomplishing whatever you want, it is not ambition we lack , we have plenty of that, what we don’t have is a well thought-out system that can keep us going. There are a lot of brilliant people out there that have no motivation, yet they have potential to be extremely proficient in a given area, we don’t see the skill because nothing is happening and most likely will never happen.

Talking from experience I have successfully applied 1), 2) and 3), 4) is a bit out of my reach, however I find it appropriate for the discussion at hand. So did they work? Well i am still writing  whatever pops into my head aren’t i, so they must have had some sort of impact, whenever I find myself down that all familiar path I do something that pushes  me away from that road and following those guidelines helped me.

Always thought that any close replica of a DoTA game is not worth my time, however one day my boyfriend told me that I was dead wrong and that there is something that I might find interesting in Demigod. After two months since the mention of the game in one of our conversation I decided to join in and play.

After about 15 games I was hooked, it was indeed as my he said a fun game to play, as long as you don’t have players who lie about how good they are. So why was I hooked on a design that I hate? Frankly, it wasn’t what I expected it to be.

You have 8 demigods split up in two factions: Generals and Assassins. Uniquely designed, they can be used either for support or battle. This type of flexibility is exactly what I was talking about a few articles ago, for instance a healer will be used about 75% of the time as a healer, however if you want you can heal your teammates, but also do some damage in battle. Because of how the game is built this freedom of choice can sometimes turn a General into an Assassin, bad design or an exploitable feature? Leaving all other aspects of the context aside I would say the first, the idea of morphing between character classes is over powering, if you want to try it yourself just learn to play Erebus. If it were up to me I would really balance them so that my General remained a commander and not a stomping-crushing unit, this can be solved through damage reduction, items property changes (Note: never change what has already been seen in a game, modify it or like GPG did pull it out, if you are playing Demigod now you will miss on items that were in the original version).

The game unfolds by choosing to be part of the Forces of Light or Dark and accomplishing the goal of the match. You have several types from which you can select, but I think the most relevant is Conquest, where you have to make your way into the enemy base to destroy the Citadel (main building). And here is one of the few flawed concepts: there is a huge discrepancy between the levels of fun that you can find in each goal. I haven’t seen one player that picked a different type of goal other than Conquest for his or her match. The replayability doesn’t suffer because of this, no two battles are alike, however can’t help to notice that this slipped their mind in their meetings: “Which of these goals will the player enjoy?”, “Do we really need the other ones?”, “How can we improve, the ones that have a lower percentage of been chosen, so it would be just as fun as the top ranked one?”.

At first glance the flag system is just a “plus one” design; however looking more closely a great advantage is revealed. Besides gaining XP, they give bonuses (HP/Mana regeneration, cooldown reduction, gold, etc) and increase your teams WarRank, a coefficient that lets you buy upgrades for your base so that it can be more resistant, spawn more powerful units, decrease your Demigod re-spawn time, so on and so forth.

In matches you earn experience by killing enemy units, capturing flags and of course smiting down Demigods. The one skill point you receive at level-up is used to upgrade or take on a new power. Each power is defined by what it does (splash damage, support, interrupt) and by cooldown (the interval of time that takes your power to be active again). An item system is designed to improve your Demigod even further; you get to chose one favor item that you can’t change and an additional 6 items which you can buy using the gold gained from slaying enemy Demigods.

One might think this is easy to play through; the truth is that it isn’t. Designers have created three gameplay systems (skills, items, flags), which combined, form an intricate tactical conglomerate. Moreover for this tactical gameplay to work teamplay must be a common mentality, if you have one player that goes about his business head-on, then I’m sorry but the match is lost.

Let’s talk a bit about the interactivity between players in the game lobby. There is a chat where you can say what’s on your mind, if you like the game settings, if you want the host to change them, but our dear host has so little tools to assure that the game is well balanced and suitable for all, most of the time players leave before he can do anything. Newcomers will always join a lobby without taking in consideration that those who are already there want a quality game, not a 5 second one due to rage quitters or childish tantrums; GPG said that in the next patch they will have a system that allows the players to see stats directly in the lobby; furthermore they said that a list of previous games would be available to discover premade teams. Now this seems promising and all, but why hasn’t this been put into practice earlier, say when they launched the game? The number one thing that must be on every mind of the development team is “How I can implement/design/make this so that the players effort is minimized and his fun level is maximized?”.

Other design aspects that are present, but I prefer not to discuss them in detail are as follows:

• Hands-On Play – when you enter the Multiplayer menu you can choose to join a battle automatically.
• Pantheon Play – to feel that you are in a battle of light versus dark you can pick this mode, only disadvantage is that the pool of Demigods from which you can select has been reduced to four per each side.
• Camera System – flexible, great for viewing battles when you overlap with another player.
• Graphics – suitable for the theme, exceptionally well designed Demigod models, the source of inspiration can’t be pinpointed exactly which enhances their originality, unique minimalistic maps; however I don’t recommend playing it on a laptop or really low end systems.
• Control System – characters are moved using the mouse, while the keyboard is used for shortcuts. You can only control the Demigod and his minions if he has any, reinforcements have a mind of their own, though you can help them in combat by killing the enemy units.
• Alerting the Player – when you are in the middle of battle, thinking what power to use, where should you go next, there are other things that go down on the map, for example if you are not careful enough your opponent can make his way to your base and capture portals from which reinforcements are spawned, this is where the alert system comes in. Whenever something happens on the map you are announced through the voice of the commentator, however when the above example occurs it’s too late to do something, because the announcement is made after the event took place. For that you have the ping, a team-mate can ping a certain area of the map if he or she detects any sort of danger.

My journey still continues (even after 200 hours), despite the crashes, connectivity issues, poor path-finding, overpowered items, power glitches etc. Yes it is buggy, but I like the design and how you can get absorbed into playing it even though it’s clear as daylight that GPG never made any programming department meetings. If you find decent players that prefer their game to be fair I guarantee that you will have a great time.

Screen-shots:

I am a huge fan of John Carmack. Don’t know the fellow? Google him right now, moreover do an essay of 10.000 words with the title “Why I think inverse root square is awesome?”.

Just kidding

All you need to know to read this entry is that John Carmack is one of the pioneers of the industry. Because of him the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre took the PC platform by storm with the release of Wolfenstein 3D, some even argue that he was the one who jump started the game industry, but these are philosophies and let’s face it jabber talk, what truly remains in history is the brilliance of the current technical director at id Software. Wolfenstein 3D is one of the first game I’ve seen and never got to play due to my frail age, I couldn’t understand what was going on the screen, but the movement and expressiveness of both Wolfenstein and other games at that time got me into what I love doing the most, analyzing and designing games.

The franchise had a lot of developers, the original owner remains id Software, but they develop in co-operation with other studios such as Grey Matter (Return to Castle Wolfestein) in 2001. Today Raven Software took the mighty task of bringing fans a new “We need you agent Blazkowicz!” and yes there is a hint of sarcasm. Managed to get a hold it for the PC, but it has many console elements, which obviously means that it’s a port, not a platform specific developed game. I am not sure what elements should I portray as been good or bad, let’s face it PCs will never be consoles as much as consoles will never be PCs as far as game design. You may be wondering how did I manage to see that it’s a port and not a PC version, well :

• The number one concept that gives all PC versions away as been ports, the bloody messy highly easy to use for newcomers: health points regeneration system or in lame terms “shoot me and I won’t die if I make it to the next corner”.  I know why developers use this design on consoles, the save/load system, hard to master controller, etc. Now why do some PC developers use it? *crickets in the background*.  Don’t laugh that is my reaction whenever I hear the question. Firstly the PC controls mouse and keyboard is easy to use and master in comparison to console controllers, secondly the save/load system doesn’t involve checkpoints, we have Auto-saves, Quick-saves and the classical save and load menu. My guess is that either the cost of production had made it impossible for more than one development set of requirements or they wanted to make it easier for the player. It’s argumentative, therefore I will leave it at that and say it’s a bad design chosen for Wolfenstein considering it’s ancestry and as you will see along the way the horrifically stupid enemy AI.

• The Menu – the way you navigate through it resembles the Left-Right schematic on the Xbox360 controller. It’s not that big of a deal, yet I strongly refuse to believe that it was that hard to create a list type menu. Getting to buy something from the Black Market can become a hassle because the way you “click” on it bases itself on a “press the A/Square button”, double click works, but it takes a while to actually make contact and enter sub-menus.

So it’s a port? Is it that bad? Frankly speaking those two elements aren’t even as half as bad as what follows. I’m not the type that judges a game by how it looks, but you can’t seem to wonder why the graphics are “bad”. Oh I don’t know, maybe because it’s based on a 5 year old engine, namely id Tech 4. Outdoors or indoors you will be blinded by bloom, textures are of low to medium quality, the meshes look unfinished, if you don’t believe just take a look at the screens[1]. There is something I like in this game: the appropriate use of the physics engine[2] (Havok) : boxes can be destroyed, things blow up in a beautiful way, limbs are dismembered, all of these aspects make the game more enjoyable than it already is not, when you will reach the cavern level you will know what I mean.

Let’s get on to another aspect of this analysis, namely gameplay and storyline elements. Like in the Velvet Assassin GDA I could summon thousands of paragraphs to come in my aid, but I won’t, I’ll just outline the main aspects that really popped out as bad.

Scripting is a good idea generally, however using it excessively can create what I like to call “Nostradamus effect”, I can foresee what’s about to happen: going in a room throw a grenade, making my way down a silent corridor something will most likely pop out, the game is saving a checkpoint a horde of soldiers are waiting for me, so on and so forth. Losing atmosphere is one of the most common ways to get the fun out and the banalities in.

Another thing that bothered me is the way the story develops; you get your missions from various agencies: Kreisau Circle or Golden Dawn. Some of them are go there, see what’s going on, get back and report, linearity couldn’t have found a better home in my honest opinion. From time to time when a mission starts you are assigned a contact, occasionally he gets stuck , however don’t fret the enemy AI is average, they don’t use any kind of strategy, moreover sometimes they just run into you, waiting for a nice applied head shot. Interesting is that the game increases in difficulty when you reach the farms, by that I mean their bullets find your body more often, not that the AI has grown a virtual brain.  Enemies range from soldiers to evil doctors with super-powers to some pretty ugly monsters, however it really doesn’t matter they are still as thick as a sheet of paper.

Another aspect of this game is the presence of the Black Market. Here, using the money earned from completing missions or by collecting bags of gold, you can buy upgrades for your weapons and powers. Did you say powers? Yes I did. This game gives the player powers, manipulate time, see through dark, be invincible, etc. I really sat down and pondered why designers would present such a concept for implementation; it’s not specific for the franchise. It really makes the game easier than it actually is because you can refill your energy by using the fountains or barrels, which are dispersed in an immense quantity throughout the entire levels.

Storyline like I said it’s linear, moreover it’s surrounded by clichés, I didn’t even have to complete the first mission to know that, the intro reeks of it.

Furthermore along the mission you will be astonished by a humorous side. Namely the “YOU look like an American”[3] and “The Doctor Dance”[4]. Honestly if I were in charge I would really ponder on whom I am going to hire to write scene scripts.

Wolfenstein is a mediocre game without any innovative aspects, it’s really ok to try it if you just want a blind shooter, aim the gun, kill like a maniac, get the reward and save the world. From my point of view the production and release of this games was a last chance to get some money out of the id Tech 4 engine, since in 2010 it will shift to a different license policy, namely GNU General Public License. Furthermore the Zenimax deal means that Activision will no longer do business with id Software, so frankly speaking this was the last boat to catch.

[1]

Flying wierd looking paper

Textures

Uncanny Valley anyone?

[2]

Poor guy.

[3]

Really now?

[4]

STOP! Hammer time!