DLC Difficulty

I don’t mind a difficult game, but I do have issues with difficulty spikes, but it’s something I can sort of understand.  Difficulty is not exactly easy to balance, and even games that do a really good job of it most of the time sometimes just have areas where the difficulty jumps to high or the balance is not great.  Dark Souls III was a fantastic game, for certain, but the Silver Knights guarding Anor Lando with the Dragonslayer Greatbows is a good example where even a game that is generally fair can fall into bad traps.

On the whole, though, this is just something that’s merely annoying.  Yeah, it’s a bad spot in a game, but it’s just a (hopefully) singular part that kind of sucks.  Even the best games have them, it’s why I don’t go to the Anti-Chapel first in Symphony of the Night after I beat Richter.  However, recently, I’ve noticed an issue with some DLC expansions, particularly to action RPGs, that have done a really bad job of understanding how to improve difficulty, after complaints that the base game is too easy, and wound up making the game more of a chore than anything else.

This is my picture, which is why it looks so bad.

So, I beat Witcher 3: Blood and Wine yesterday, and I had an extended problem with the final boss.  I’m not going to get into details, since the expansion is fairly new and not everyone I know has had a chance to experience it.  The thing was, I beat the entire game on the Broken Bones difficulty without too many problems, mostly because the Witcher III really isn’t that hard, and that’s sort of an issue for some people.  Unfortunately, CD Projekt Red decided that the best way to deal with the criticisms were to add bosses that had instant kill moves, enemies that decide to just peace out of the fight, making Geralt wait on them, multiple self healing bosses (weirdly, some of the less annoying ones, actually), and at least one boss that straight up ignores the most popular and effective way to play the rest of the game.  It’s very annoying.

The thing is, none of those things actually made the game more difficulty, just because a boss could kill me in one hit, or had weird hitscan abilities that I’m still not sure how to dodge, even after I beat the boss.  It just makes the game feel cheap and the tools that the player is used to working with are outdated.  Yes, it is possible some abilities are exploits and those should be plugged, but, for instance, in Witcher III Hearts of Stone, the Frog Prince boss is almost completely immune to swords (along with other anti-melee abilities), the primary form of combat in the game.  It’s great that the game wanted to incentivise the player into using magic and alchemy more, but making one point in the game where the main form of combat just doesn’t work, doesn’t do that.

It’s not the worst offender, that would be the final boss of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Trespasser DLC, which is immune to all forms of crowd control, including taunts, and can ignore some of the basic defense mechanics the game is built upon.  Yes, it’s true that Armor is probably too powerful (I have killed dragons with a single hit point thanks to armor), but making it so it can just ignore that isn’t the approach.  If the game doesn’t allow for the actual difficult the developer wants, it’s not good to just throw in ways to ignore it.

The issue is that a lot of developers don’t really know what they should do to make the game more difficult.  First, it’s important, and this goes for players too, is that not every game needs to be Dark Souls.  A challenging game is great, but challenge isn’t the only thing that needs to be in a video game.  Second, when building an expansion, don’t ignore mechanics.  Look, if something is too powerful, unless it’s a complete exploit, throwing in a boss that ignores it isn’t actually making it difficult, it’s just being a dick.  Find a way to utilize the mechanic in a way that works better.  If that’s impossible, like how it probably is in Dragon Age: Inquisition, then maybe an upped difficulty isn’t a good idea (also, games with tanks shouldn’t have bosses that can ignore tanking mechanics, I mean, that’s just a bad idea, since the whole concept of having a tank is to make sure the high damage, low defense people aren’t murdered in seconds).  Developers need to look at what they’re doing when they build their expansions, and not try to bounce up, just because Dark Souls is so hard or whatever.

Anyway, enough of this rant.  It was something that bothered me and I had to get it off my chest.  I know it’s not my best, but, well, it’s something I would like to talk about again.  I’ll probably revisit it soon.  For now, I needed to say something to get my thoughts in order.

2014 Top Five Games

It’s been a little while since I updated here, and one of these days, probably when my Playstation gets fixed, I’m going to get back to doing those Metal Gear Solid reviews.  I don’t know what it is about Metal Gear Solid 3, but I’ve had a really hard time getting into it.  Part of it also might have been me playing World of Warcraft again, which is a complete time sink.  World of Warcraft probably isn’t going to be an issue anymore (more on that in a bit), so I’ll be getting back to playing Metal Gear soon.

Anyway, this year was one of the worst I can think of for video games.  I had a hard time coming up with a top five list of games, and even then, only two of them feel like they’re worthy of being on a top five list.  It’s not that there weren’t good games that came out this year, because there were, it’s just this was a year rife with missteps, disappointments and rush jobs.  I think any video displaying a glitch from Assassin’s Creed Unity would be, like, a microcosm of this year in gaming.

Right, so anyway, this year is going to be a little bit different.  Normally, in a top 5, we just count down to the best.  I’m not going to do that this year.  Mostly because, outside of my top game, I can’t really come up with a good order for any of these games.  Like I said, a lot of them wouldn’t normally make it onto a top five list, although I think most of them might have wound up on a top five, but all of them do have strengths and weaknesses, so it’s hard for me to say that I liked one game more than the others.  The exception of course, is my number one game, because that game was freaking amazing.

I’m also going to give each game its own post, and give it a sort of mini-review.  Well, it will be less of a critical review of the game and more of just my thoughts, positive and negative, of the game.  I’ll be talking about what worked and what didn’t in the game.  If no one is interested in those posts, I’ll go over my top five in this post so everyone can see them, and then move on to reading about the games they’re interested in.

Also, I know that there were good games that aren’t going to be on this list.  Obviously, I can’t play every game that comes out, that would be silly.  So, this list is sticking to games that I played, beat and enjoyed in 2014.  Games like Alien: Isolation or whatever, I’m sure were great, but I didn’t play them, so I can’t, in good conscience, put them on a list.

Finally, after I list my top five games, I’m going to do my “Honorable Mention” game, just to give an example of what I’m going to be writing later in the week.  That said, it will probably be a lot shorter than the other reviews, or whatever I’m going to wind up calling them.  Anyway, without further ado, my top five games of 2014, in no particular order except for my number one.

5.  Wolfenstein: the New Order

4.  Dragon Age: Inquisition

3.  Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

2. Super Smash Bros for Wii U

1.  Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight is, easily, far and away the best game of the year, and it would probably be number one on any year it came out (except, maybe, like 2007 or 2013 or something) because that game is just one of the best games I’ve ever played.  The other four are fun, but they have their issues and, with the exception of maybe Wolfenstien, would probably have never made a top 5 list of mine in any other year.

As for the honorable mention, this year, it goes to World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor.

I quit World of Warcraft two weeks ago.  I was on a raid team, we weren’t going anywhere and I was having money issues, so I dropped the game.  The truth is, I really wanted to drop it weeks before, probably months before, but I liked being on a raid team.  It was a lot of fun.  It was a shame that the only raid that was out when I was playing (and as of this writing, still out) sucked.  Sucked a lot.  It wasn’t just that my team couldn’t beat more than two bosses after five weeks of raiding, which sucked a whole lot, but because it was just a lame raid.  It’s got all the problems of Firelands: boring layout, sleep inducing mechanics and tons and tons of filler bosses, with none of the cool things from Firelands (a title worth having).

At first, Warlords of Draenor seems pretty cool.  Honestly, the questing is about the best I’ve done since Wrath of the Lich King.  No, scratch that, it’s the best the game has ever had.  Sure, some of the zones aren’t perfect, but the set up, how questing was done, the rewards, the use of rare monsters and events, it was great.  They took the good stuff from Timeless Isle and other MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2, dropped a lot of the shit, and managed to make questing a whole lot of fun.  Tying in some pretty decent Video Game Writing doesn’t hurt, either.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got to level 100, the game begins to grind to halt, because of the fucking grind bullshit Blizzard has saddled with the game.  The Garrison, your own personal castle/fortress, is really neat, but it’s pretty clear it’s there only because making the new models, which are gorgeous, took up way more time than they were expecting.  There are eight dungeons, a zone that you can’t access yet and a single daily quest where PCs murder about 100 bad guys for meager rewards.  I mean, really meager rewards.

I’m not a huge fan of daily quests, but I understand that they’re kind of the nature of the beast, and until Theme Park MMORPGs figure out a better way to do this, daily quests are the best way to keep players engaged in the game.  By the time I quit, half of my 90s from Mists were at 100 and were geared up to raid and had done everything that was available to them, outside of grind out reputations (which can only be raised to Exalted status by killing monsters), after only a couple of months.  Say whatever there is to say about the Mists of Pandaria dailies, which had some serious problems, at least I didn’t get the whole story available to me in a couple of weeks.

So, anyway, I quit.  It was fun, a lot of fun, until I ran out of things to do.  I know that’s weird to say about literally any other game, but like, Blizzard does a good job of making World of Warcraft fun.  It’s seriously enjoyable to play, to get engaged with the game, but if there’s nothing to do, there’s nothing to do.  Since everything is controlled by Blizzard, and emergent gameplay isn’t really a thing, it’s worse than when you run out of quests in Skyrim.  At least in Skyrim, rolling a new character can lead to a different experience just by playing a new class.  That’s not the case in Warcraft.