Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 4 of 260)

Indie Spotlight: Towns

February 8, 2012 / Jeff Morgan

Towns game.

If I had to choose just one contribution to gaming for which I could thank Notch and the team at Mojang, it would be the popularization of early alpha for indie games. While Minecraft’s level of success remains unique, developers have noticed that early alpha access to their games can build plenty of hype to carry the game through to release. I’ve been digging around in the indie scene for a while now, so I thought it might be cool to throw a spotlight on some of the interesting games that are out there.

Today’s Indie Spotlight falls on a game called Towns. The game is being developed by a small indie group known as SMP. By the way, good luck searching for anything related to this game for the next couple months. Being that Minecraft multiplayer, a system in which players often create their own towns, is called SMP, you’re going to get mostly Minecraft-related results. I’ll save you some trouble and just point you to their official website.

The game is basically an RTS with a slight Dwarf Fortress influence. You play from an isometric view, controlling a group of villagers to gather resources in order to support your spelunking efforts. The game is built on levels that increase in difficulty as you descend. There is a tiered crafting system whereby you can make armors and weapons to keep yourself safe, food to keep your village sated, and housing, to keep everyone happy.

This game is in alpha, so some of the mechanics are a little buggy or just haven’t been implemented. There is no priority system for tasks, so it’s possible to “hunger lock” yourself, meaning your villagers are too hungry to even make more food. You can then watch them all starve to death, but it’s probably better to start over. The game also features some terribly obnoxious music, though it is possible to toggle off.

There is a lot of good in Towns, too. In a lot of ways, Towns reminded me what the “game” part of Minecraft is missing, which is essentially something to do with the mountains of resources you gather over the course of a game. Exploring is definitely fun, but once you’ve seen your fourth or fifth epic cave, you’ve seen them all. Towns puts your resources to use, even if it is a bit grindy.

In future updates, SMP has plans to add a hero system. My guess is that your town’s resources will now be dedicated to decking out the hero and letting him crawl through some dungeons. It seems like a great idea that, when coupled with a solid crafting system and the hilarity of mass-butchering cows, makes this quirky little game a great buy for under $20 at retail.

If you’re interested in town management sims or even games like Terraria, I would highly recommend giving Towns a shot. The game has a demo that allows you to experience 20 in-game days, which is plenty to get your feet wet. You can also purchase the alpha version of the game for roughly $13. Alpha purchasers have unrestricted access to the latest builds of the game.

Indie, Indie Spotlight

Minecraft rts smp town management towns towns by smp towns game

Terraria devs turn to new sandbox project

February 6, 2012 / Jeff Morgan

Screenshots popped up over the weekend showing off the newest project from Tiyuri, one of the developers of indie hit Terraria. The game looks to be a step either forward or backward from Terraria’s old-school graphical style, depending on your point of view. Tiyuri has been fairly transparent about the scope of the project so far, even though the game is still in the early stages of development.

“We plan for there to be a main quest inside the sandbox world. Depends how much time we have of course,” Tiyuri said on his Twitter account. For now, I’m tentatively excited. From the looks of the UI, the game appears to be inspired by some dungeon crawlers. Tiyuri is using the Diablo 3 method of control, binding skills to the left and right mouse buttons and offering hotbar slots as well.

If there’s one thing I would like to see updated from Terraria, it’s the inventory management system. While the game did offer some nice options for moving items in and out of chests, I was constantly amazed at just how quickly my inventory would fill and how much time it could take to find what I needed.

I’m also hoping these aren’t the final graphics. I’m not sure what it is, I just don’t like them. They lack the flair that made me love Terraria’s design.

Development

indie development indie games indie projects sandbox terraria tiyuri

Should Riot consider a testbed queue?

February 6, 2012 / Jeff Morgan

League of Legends.

This is an idea that came out of my latest post about Morello’s meta challenge and I’m interested in what you guys think. I love the idea of shaking up the meta – LoL grew stale for me quite a while ago – but to me that will require some widespread adjustments to the game or a professional team to win several tournaments in a row with a different comp. Riot’s current nerf/buff strategy is to move slowly and make changes over the course of several patches, which I totally understand. They’re trying to produce a consistent service without dramatically breaking the game with an overbuff or a mechanics nerf. It makes sense. I think it has some unfortunate side effects for a genre known for variability and flux.

What if Riot put together a testbed queue aimed at trying some wild play options. The idea would be to allow for changes of greater magnitude to see how the players adapt to the changes. There are definitely some issues to be worried about here, not the least of which is whether players would participate, whether it would eclipse normal queues, and what to do if it did. It could alienate tournament players along the way as well.

I think it also has the potential to breathe some serious life into the game, and to allow people to get more for the money they put into the game. Buying champions every two weeks gets expensive in a hurry. The cost is even higher if that champion doesn’t have a solid place in the current meta (and yes, I’m mostly talking about solo queuers here). A more radical approach to changes could bring more champions into the mix on a regular basis.

Obviously the resource commitment would be monstrous – I don’t even know if this sort of thing would be possible in the current server/client structure. It is interesting, though, to think of what the game would be like with more aggressive changes to the way the game works.

Champions, league of legends, News

content patch meta change meta shift new patch new queue patches testbed queue

Morello’s meta challenge update

February 5, 2012 / Jeff Morgan

fallenangel_splash_1

It has actually been interesting to see the kind of discussion that has happened in Morello’s thread and more interesting still to see the way he has responded. A lot of the thread has been the typical “none of this will work” kind of stuff, which was to be expected. There are a lot of people who are willing to spout off on the forums but don’t have a whole lot of experience with the game. Morello has been mostly level-headed, though he did get a little rowdy with one commenter.

Here’s the original comment:

The thing is, this testing has been done over and over. I honestly feel like you are so out of touch with this game at times it’s ridiculous.
Whether or not Xin beats AP champs mid isn’t the issue at hands. Certain champs don’t fit into the game, period. Xin is just a bad champion currently. This is from someone who has hundreds of Xin games played on their main. His problem is he doesn’t scale for anything and his synergy with items is inferior to better tanky DPS (ie. Jarvan and Irelia). Xin doesn’t have a way to back out of a fight. Once he initiates, he is in. You force him to go glass cannon but don’t give him the defenses to stay up for more than a few seconds.
That aside, there are lots of times I have seen champions like Talon and Pantheon picked to hard-counter certain AP champs. So noting this in the OP isn’t something new.
If you want to break the meta, you need to focus on buffing champions instead of nerfing them. Stop the power creep and bring older champions back in line with newer ones. At times it seems like you guys try to do this, but you don’t hit their problem areas. Let me give you and example:
Ashe has the weakest base and scaling AD of ALL the AD carries. So you buff her HP and Mana? I hate to make this sounds rude, but that’s the only way it can come out: Do you even play this game?

I think this could have been said a little more tactfully, and questioning whether Morello plays the game or not is a little silly. Still, I think this guy raises some decent points, even if his argument is a bit…confused. This whole “who can beat an AP mid” discussion doesn’t really matter on a champion-by-champion level. There are counters all over the place. Unfortunately, without the other lanes changing, beating an AP mid with Talon or Pantheon won’t make the meta suddenly change.

I’ll leave you to read Morello’s response on your own. It’s a spicy one. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he’s out of line. I think he addressed most of what the guy said fairly well. I just want to highlight one part of Morello’s response to this part of the discussion.

What did we do to change the meta in the US to the EU one? Why are Ezreal and some other AD’s the standard mid in the China metagame? Why does Korea excel at AOE comps? Is one of them superior to all the others? Are they representative of different styles? Do players from different areas practice different primary skills?
It could be any of these, but I’m pretty sure “the current way the local region plays is the best way to play” isn’t true, especially with as often as we do change things.

I think this is where Riot needs to be spending a lot of energy. There are most definitely reasons the meta has developed as it has. There are reasons it has remained the way it has for months now. I wish I knew more what he meant with the “as often as we do change things” bit. From my perspective, the game hasn’t changed very much over the past six months or so. Part of that is certainly meta-driven, but developmentally the game looks very similar to the game in July. Riot is pretty mild with their buffs and nerfs. The one major change has been to the mechanics of the jungle, but even that didn’t shake loose a stagnant meta. Certain champions rose and fell in popularity, but the way people play the game has remained the same.

I would love to see a focus on much bigger concepts regarding meta. Why is safety such a cornerstone of the current gameplay. Why did support/AD bot become such a big deal. Where does sustain fit in to all of this. It would be simple enough to add a new queue that has a more volatile system of buffing and nerfing, and I think that could be really exciting. I’ll be keeping an eye on more discussion about this. For now, results are hugely inconclusive, and I don’t think this forum thread will get many, if any, people to play the game differently than they’re used to playing it.

Current Affairs, league of legends

attrition creep damage meta meta changes spell spam sustain tanky dps

Morello turns to community to change the meta

February 4, 2012 / Jeff Morgan

annie_splash_3

For a while there, I was thinking Riot was happy with the current metagame. It looks like they might like to see a little more change than has happened over the past six months, so they’ve turned to the community for ideas. Morello started a thread called “Morello challenge: bust open the meta (AP mid edition),” hoping to stir up some new ideas for changing the current meta.

I like the idea as whole – I think it would be great to see the community come up with new ideas for changing the game – but I think he’s asking the wrong people. The current meta didn’t just evolve naturally. It came from tournaments. It came from the pros. It came from livestreams. Those are the people we need to have pumping out new ideas, but unfortunately new ideas don’t really fit with what they’re doing.

The current meta evolved for a few reasons, but I think the basic theme is consistency. Pro teams were looking for a way to maximize map control, farm, and objective contest power while minimizing the ability for the other team to influence those goals. Perhaps the one wild card in the current meta is the AP mid, but the AP mid is mostly there to provide burst and control in fights, both of which can be overcome in the late game with a farmed top lane and bottom lane carry. You could say the jungler is a wild card, but the evolution of jungling into yet another tanky DPS is just another move toward consistency. Pros want reliable performance, and they’ve found the best way to get it.

Feedback from the rest of the playerbase is going to be mostly anecdotal. For starters, there is very little consistency in skill between games. Every game I play has a wild swing in either the positive or the negative. I sometimes play with very good players, I sometimes play with very bad players. In either case, this is obviously going to have a serious impact on whether a selected champion can beat out an AP mid. I’ve taken loads of champions mid and been very successful – anyone from Talon to Kayle, Shaco to Sona – but that isn’t going to bring about a shift in the meta. In most cases these matchups come down to player skill, and it is that variable that inevitably thwarts most attempts to shake up the meta.

I’m not trying to say that you can’t play outside the meta and win. You totally can. But doing so on a regular basis requires a level of coordination that most players just don’t get in their average game. You certainly aren’t going to see it much in solo queue. This is why Morello’s thread puzzles me – he’s asking a group of people that really have no influence over the meta to come up with ways to usurp the meta. Do you think M5 is reading that discussion thread thinking “omg gaiz, we should totally put Taric mid?’ They aren’t. Even if they are thinking that, they sure as hell didn’t read it in that thread.

If Riot really wants to break up the current meta, they need to do a couple things. First, incentivize top players and streamers to try new things. If those guys aren’t doing things outside the current meta and doing it on a highly regular basis, no one else will do it either. The best way to incentivize this kind of play is to make it viable for winning games. That’s number two on the “break the meta” to-do list. Make more options viable. Return some of the experience to champion kills. Stop the diminishing gold returns on killing players. Encourage teamfighting. Release some strong pushers. Encourage players to use spells thoughtfully instead of spamming them for farm and big harass. Return creep damage so that players have to think before engaging in a lane fight because they might actually lose health.

Those things will break up the meta. They will probably require some significant balance tweaks if implemented, but they could actually have an effect on the way the game is played. Asking players to rethink a method that has been advertised to them by top players for a year? That’s not going to cut it.