Concluding 2014: My Experience in the World of Gaming

As many of you experience during this festive time of year, it can get rather busy roaming around the land visiting family and friends to exchange gifts, eat a lot and have a hangover.  Naturally, this has affected my ability to put time aside for writing which I’m getting around to fixing while trying to figure out what’s happening for the upcoming New Year’s celebrations and watch the Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2014 (I know, a glamorous life I must live…)

That being said, I can’t put it all down to extenuating circumstances as I have had the last couple days available to write; with the intention of creating a small piece on man-made mountains and their appearance as antagonists in games coinciding with previous posts on a similar fashion.  As it is the end of the year one can find themselves in the mind-set of ‘I’ll wait until January to start anew’ alongside the range of resolutions many people make, so to give the above topic a proper post alongside actually writing something, I’m going to write about some games I liked playing this year.  This isn't going to be a quantified list as I don’t think that this will be more of a streaming conscious than anything, but I hope you find the explanations interesting at least.  I should also say that these games aren't all releases of 2014 but more of a retrospective on my time spent gaming over the past 12 months. 

 *Images are from a collection of screenshots I've taken over the last 12 months*

Path of Exile

I had briefly played this game through a number of betas, but with its entry onto Steam and Torchlight 2 elite hardcore mode getting a bit annoying to achieve I saw a chance to return to the title.  I played roughly during the months of January-May and got a great deal of enjoyment from the mechanics of the game from start to finish.  The skill gem system was a totally new experience for me, as I naturally built up an array of spells, abilities and auras to use across my cohort of exiles in a number of different ways.  This was further expanded through links and augments that mutated said skills to explode, split, fear, stun and more to the point where a skill could look considerably different on use.  The bartering system was enjoyable to partake in as well, as I didn't look up guides for it and naturally experimented with items to see what would come of them.  If I was to level a complaint, I’d say that the armour sets felt a little bit too samey during my playtime (which could be down to the aesthetic choice of the exile environment) but regardless it was a really enjoyable free to play game that doesn't look to nickel-and-dime you to have an enjoyable experience. 

 Firefall

One of my first posts was about this title and since then I haven’t gone back to it.  Now I've had time to look back on it I can say I still hold the idea that it’s an enjoyable game and would be great if it wasn't so repetitive in the gameplay through the mission board system.  The big events grabbed me alongside the smaller ones that scattered the landscape and if it focused more on these akin to something like Guild Wars 2 I feel like it would have kept my interest for much longer.  That being said, it was a game that was developed for a very long time and maybe it was never going to truly work as they had envisaged.  To end on a good point thou, getting around the environment was really fun especially the glider / kite system. 

Wolf Among Us

This game came out in October 2013 but I didn't pick it up until the Summer sale of this year which by then was in its finished state with all episodes available of season one.  I had briefly played Telltale’s The Walking Dead on my phone in the spring and liked my first try of a visual text-adventure (I’m not 100% of its genre but that’s a close approximation) so as it was cheap I thought I’d give this one a go.  I instantly played through episode one and loved the gameplay, playing through the rest of it over a period of a week in the late evenings so that I wouldn't be disturbed.  I wanted to figure out where each fable came from and what sort of life they were living, alongside the possible outcomes of my actions as Bigby Wolf.  I tried to answer dialog options how I think I would act in the situations presented alongside remembering to use the ‘silence is an option’ mechanic from time to time.  Alongside the gameplay, I really love the aesthetics of the Wolf Among Us particularly in the options menu and title/credits of each episode.  The running title of Bibgy walking through the streets of New York with its purples blues and blacks looks brilliant and a particular frame of this became my pc wallpaper from July to October of this year.  This game may not have the direct human connection of the previous Walking Dead for some, but for me the Wolf Among Us was a greatly enjoyable experience for me that have me more open to narrative games in the future. 

Game of the Year 420 BLAZE IT

This year I’ve looked to try new games whenever possible to try and broaden my horizons in the medium.  Sometimes I end up in some weird places and this is one of them.  I won’t put an image up, but just download it and embrace the crazy that this is. 

Civilization V: Brave New World

I originally bought Civ V on release and got a lot of enjoyment from it; harking back to the series’ second installment I use to play on the PlayStation as a much younger self.  That being said, picking up Brave New World during the summer sale filled me with renewed interest in the game.  The addition of trade routes, religion (I skipped Gods and Kings), spies, ideologies and the revamped cultural victory added so much depth for my play style as I prefer to go for non-combatant victory conditions.  Recently, I’ve got more and more interested in the finer details as I attempt to play on the higher difficulties of immortal / deity and I’m not being put off by the losses.  There are 4x’s that are much more in-depth, but Civ (like many others) has that personal connection and I hope that this series continues to remain strong into the future.

The Stanley Parable

Very few games have made me genuinely laugh in my life, but the Stanley Parable’s standalone release this year was brilliant in being mundane on the surface but hilarious underneath.  I played the earlier source mod for this during my time at university thanks to it being featured on Extra Credits “games you may not have tried” many times, but the recent release added a bunch of new possible ‘endings’ to the parable.  To those who aren’t aware, it’s a first-person narrative-driven game where a narrator takes you through a story.  What that story maybe, is pretty much up to you and I hope more people get to experience this fascinating and enjoyable experience. 

Warframe

I've played this for around two years and this year it’s clocked up a sizeable amount of my time gaming, but somehow Warframe remains to be a game I enjoy playing nearly every day.  Being involved in the game for this length of time, it’s great to see how far they've come from when I started playing; from around 6 game modes to 20 with improvements to the former as a means to continue to make the experience varied.  Alongside being my most played game this year, it is also a free to play title that allows the player to decide what level of investment they want to take.  Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, as its free give it a try and you may enjoy what you see. 

Transistor 

Although I did dismiss the list idea at the beginning of this post, if I was to quantify the games I played this year Transistor would probably take the top spot.  This has been the only game since Skyrim that I’ve bought on release and I completed it in two short bursts of playtime; but the time I had with this game was both an aesthetically wonderful game and narratively fascinating experience.  On the surface, Transistor follows Super Giant Games previous title (Bastion) in terms of the narrative progression of an isometric combat game where a smooth-voiced narrator takes you through the world.  Upon playing Transistor, you can see how the combat has some more dynamic rpg-like mechanics and through this get a greater understanding to people who exist in this world.  Even thou I’ll admit I’m not 100% sure on the story; the journey itself was interesting enough to keep me wanting to find out more with some particular sections of the game getting a genuine response from me.  With all that being said, it is backed up by an amazing soundtrack which features a mixture of slow beats, calming melodies, high-octane melees and chilling songs; in particular The Spine and Smoke Signals somewhat fall into this last category in my opinion.  I’m looking to play through the game again next month and I know it’ll draw me back in.

To bring this all to a somewhat conclusion, I think that 2014 has been a year for me where narrative driven games have raised higher up on my interest level.  I briefly talked about my shift of gaming habits in the ‘monogaming vs. polygaming’ post but my general media habits have changed quite a bit.  These days I watch very little TV or films because I don’t feel invested in the story or potential plot.  What these narrative games have given me is a way to enjoy stories in a medium which I feel has the potential to go further than is conceived generally.  I hope that going into 2015, I get to enjoy a larger mix of narratives in games and in turn find some interesting connections to architecture that I can write about.  Other than that, have a great New Year’s and amazing 2015.  

My thoughts on Firefall

Game: Firefall
Genre: MMO (shooter)
Platform: PC (Steam / game-launcher)
Playtime: 40 hours
Level Attained: 37/40
Cost: Free to play
Personal Microtransactions: £0

Firefall is an interesting beast that has had a long development time; particularly for myself first experiencing it back in late 2011 as a closed beta state. Since then it has changed its mechanics, economics and progressions but for the sake of this discussion we’ll be focusing on the recent release of 29th July 2014 and the brief early access I experienced as a former beta tester.

Firefall is a mmo-shooter brought from Red 5 studios which allows the player to experience a quasi post-apoc south America in a redeveloping world. The player is introduced to a small scale player customisation and tutorial before taking charge of a powered battleframe. These frames fit into similar rpg archetypes that you may of seen before (tanks, damage dealers, healers, etc), but due to shooting mechanics these ‘classes’ have some enjoyable traits to them. During my playtime, I experienced each archetype but it was the assault battleframe that I enjoyed most of my time with.

The assault battleframe is a mid-range damaging class that has an affiliation with movement based skills and minor support. Although all frames are given decent jump heights and jet boosters for traversing the environment, it was the assault frame made me feel the most free. Scaling a cliff-face with my jets and at the last second of energy kick in the afterburners onwards to my next objective granted me a big smile. On top of these skills, the frame’s main weapon (a plasma canon) felt like a combination of the unreal tournament rocket launcher and flak canon requiring me to lead the target and create some fun air-raid style attacks. Against the more traditional hit-scan weapons like the dreadnought minigun and biotech biorifle, the plasma canon gave me more enjoyment and reinforced my desire to play the assault class.

Alongside each frame’s signature primary weapon, each player gets a secondary weapon that provides a supportive boost in times of limited ammo. The secondary weapons feature a more typical shooter arsenal of assault rifles, sub-machine guns, shotguns, burst rifles and grenade launchers which aren’t locked to specific frames. In my experience, I used each of these types, but it was the AR that gave me the most satisfaction when out of primary ammunition or not willing to waste shots on minor enemies. Regardless of my earlier comment on hit-scan weapons, I felt it was a suitable additional to my playstyle.

Over the past couple years, one of the most used phrases in mmo’s has been ‘dynamic content’ and Firefall is one to follow this mentality. Around the playable environment, I experienced a number of missions that took on-the-spot objectives to receive a selection of rewards from xp, currency and minor items of interest. The tasks varied from defend point x, collect x of an item, wave-based attacks and named minion assassinates to name a few. These have been enjoyable, although I have felt that their density has greatly reduced outside of the first area of engagement. In the early levels, I found myself going from event a b c naturally whereas later on it has become a lot more traditional and linear. That being said, the higher levelled environments have featured much larger scaled events that brought my attention back into focus, with particular noting of the OCT event in Sertao. This event sees the defense of a control point against one of the game’s largest enemy factions (the Chosen) featuring a multi-stage co-operative task of the players in the area. Destroying the large enemy ships (or Darkslips) with an orbital canon targeted via the effort of the players gave me a similar feeling to games like Guild War 2 and its world bosses. On a slightly small scale, there are also melding tornadoes which feature a 2-phase group event. The Players are tasked with destroying the tornado’s shields to create a portal to its dimension, which turns into a ‘goldrush’ style lootgrab where you judge how long you can stay until the portal implodes on itself and you meet an untidy end.

Much like my GW2 reference earlier, this game does also feature traditional quests in two ways. Firstly, there is a story to follow regarding you (the pilot Ares 3-5) and the large conflict with the chosen which unlocks as you level. Although these missions feature a collection of the tasks mentioned in the dynamic event section above, they do go to some lengths to make them feel in context with the story mission. For me however, these missions didn’t really grab me until #6-8 where the missions became much bigger and things like the verticality of levels were considered to a greater aspect. This may be due to my own interests in the movement mechanics but this is the feeling that I got.

The other quest system were the Ares job boards that are dotted around each larger settlement in the environment in set level brackets. This felt very traditional-mmo with the directed path of missions around a central point until the next area’s missions have been accessed via a breadcrumb ‘priority’ mission. Like with the other content, they feature a mixed-bag of kill / defend / grab / escort objectives which the last one has received much dislike from players I’ve experienced in-game. I can understand their viewpoint as the pathing and non-preservation of some targets become frustrating at times, but it is a larger application of these quests that grabbed one of my few negatives of this game.

In many games, particularly those that follow traditional mmo questing, each area is given its own narrative to give context around quests involving that location. For example, in wow a cave maybe home to a gnoll or murlock group and quests involving this cave can be things like “kill x or y to clear the cave” or “recover stolen property cause they’re thieves”. In Firefall when you accept an Ares mission from a board, each objective (beyond the stationary story npcs relevant to the mission) is spawned in a random location whether it is a random camp / cave / roadside area / etc. There has been a number of times when I will be roaming the world and a set of diggers and boxes will spawn right in front of me because someone is doing the relevant mission. This is a jarring experience and it pulls me out of the world whenever I see it knowing that it’s being conjured up by the game’s software not the world itself. Dynamic content allows a varied mixture of stuff to happen in similar locations but for this it makes the world less enticing to explore when very few locations have at least a minor narrative within it.

Even though its world can pull me out of the experience sometimes, something that has got me invested is its crafting system and approach to gearing your character. As I mentioned earlier, you can get weapons and abilities for your frame, but these pieces can be further augmented through the use of mods. Although these pieces can be acquired from all the methods of play mentioned above, to get a tailored build, one will most likely look to craft a loadout. How Firefall’s craft system works is that it’s a progressive system designed to build as you experience the game. As you play, you’ll receive a number of trash items that won’t be of use or undermine current gear. Although items can be sold on an auction house you can also salvage the gear for currency, materials and research points. The research points are used with crystallite to uncover new patterns and the resources are used to craft said patterns. Most patterns use a couple common resources, but to access the higher quality stuff you’re gonna be wanting to hunt the rare types of enemies found in the world. Researching alongside levelling my assault frame, I’ve been able to grab new weapons, skills and mods as I level and it feels like an extension of my character itself. The other thing I like about it is that it gives clear goals to attain, something which the traditional rng-based loot-roll environment was a frustrating experience in my younger days of raiding.

To finish up, one must address the elephant in the room when viewing free to play titles, in its economy and cash shops. I look to discuss this in more detail at a later date, but the general census of free to play discussion is the fairness of these titles given to the free player versus a paying one. The spectrum ranges from ‘pay to win’ items to ‘cosmetic only’ at a rough scale, but Firefall fits slightly leaning towards the item purchase; with unlocking advance frames early with pilot tokens, modes of transportation like vehicles and gliders, and vip access for faster levelling. I haven’t got a proper measure of this market as of yet, but the majority of these items can be acquired from playing the game, whether it be by maxing a basic frame to 40 (the current level cap), crafting, or converting in game currency to the paid currency at a market-control player economy (buy order and sell system similar to GW2). In my experience there has been mixed opinions on the matter, but personally I feel that in my play there hasn’t been a time where I’ve felt like a ‘second class citizen’ due to my ‘non-purchase’ status and I don’t feel a desire to change that.

Overall, Firefall is an interesting concept in the mmo world trying to bring alternative genre’s into the space. I commend its existence but I feel that its kinda a retrospective of the mmo as a genre. Maybe the genre has inherent flaws, but I’d like to see what Red 5 studios can do with this title looking to the future. If you enjoy third / first person shooters and are looking for a game to play with friends (and if your wallet like mine isn’t suitable for many game purchases currently) you may find some enjoyment from this title. Whether you find 5 minutes or 500 hours play out of this game I think it’s worth just having a little go, particularly with big titles not showing up for another couple months.