You see, just yesterday (November 07, 2017) ArenaNet deigned to gift players of Guild Wars 2 the ability to buy some new mount skins. However, unlike the previous set of five spooky-themed mount skins that one could purchase for a modest sum of 1600 gems (20.00 USD), these new ones were blatantly thrown behind a loot box-styled “adoption license” where you’d have a chance to get a skin you want.  To attempt to make matters better, ArenaNet made it so you couldn’t get repeats, so once you unlocked a skin, you could try again and go from a one-in-thirty chance to a one-in-twenty-nine chance of getting the mount skin you want.

And then the Guild Wars 2 twitter feed began retweeting a huge number of pictures of players loving the new skins they had rolled to get.  As in, even noticeable to me who, 99% of the time, just ignores his timeline while handing out a passing like or sometimes a retweet.  And, to me at least, all those retweets numbering way above what I’ve seen in…ever…from Guild Wars 2’s twitter looked as though they wanted to make followers and players feel bad or guilty about not having those new skins that they were showing off other players having got.  As if saying, “Look!  These players got that cool new doge skin and the celestial griffon skin!  You can too!”  And that is where I take issue.

You see, ArenaNet is, smartly, offering a single adoption license, or a pack of 10 licenses for a better chance, or you could drop 120.00USD just to get them all, even the ones you don’t want.  Especially the ones you don’t want.  Again, this is where I take issue with how ArenaNet is handling the new mount skins.  The whole sale and the way it’s being marketed (and let’s not kid ourselves, it IS being marketed) may not seem as vile as some other game’s implementations of RNG-heavy loot boxes *COUGH*Shadow of War*COUGH*, yet it is easily exploiting those who are easy prey for this type of marketing all the same.

As a sidenote, please do not attempt to get on a high horse and then go about blaming those who fall victim to these sort of schemes.  They are machinations of the slimiest sort that are meant to chip away at one’s will until they pry your money from your weakening grasp. One more time, with feeling,

DO NOT  BLAME  THE VICTIM  OF SCUMMY MARKETING.

It is also just as easy to say “but they are simply cosmetic items that you don’t need!” To which I reply with a slap across the face and the words “that’s not how the scheme works, you dolt, nor is it only about you.” These sorts of items are made and sold with the type of people in mind who like playing dress up, or showing off how good they look, or how much gold and money they spent and this latest trend of loot boxes  popping up outside the free-to-play realm has become a cyst in the gaming industry.

Back to Guild Wars 2; what also strikes me as more odd than stinging is that, ArenaNet could have easily made smaller backs of 5 (one skin per mount) and sold that for 2000 gems (25.00 USD) or just sold them individually for 400 gems per mount skin but they instead went with RNG boxes that, should you want only one skin, could only cost you 400 gems (5.00 USD) or you could be goaded into spending 9600 gems, just for a single skin and 29 other skins you’ve no interest in.

Now, I don’t want to flat out say “ArenaNet is yet another evil developer” but they are making it really hard to.  What makes it even more difficult to call them out is that I’ve met with a number of the creators and artists and team members who’ve worked on both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 and I even got Mike O’Brien to sign my Guild Wars art book to apologize for Aura of the Lich! They’re not “bad” or malicious people and, at the end of the day, they’re still working for a company that needs to make money to keep on doing what they do to bring content to players.

The mount adoption license is not the way to do it, or rather, it is if you’re not worried about drawing ire from players who see what’re you’re doing with these pseudo loot boxes.

Stay lazy, portal pup riders.

The post Guild Wars 2, Mount Skins, And Loot Boxes appeared first on The Lazy Geek.

Cons

• Right off the bat, I’m just going to say I’m not a fan of how the latest living world season concluded and that is putting it as mildly.  I feel this is mostly because I came from the first Guild Wars 14 years ago and have, for better or worse, stuck to this game despite having gone months without playing on more than one occasion.  Somehow I always crawl back for probably a whole bunch of reasons I don’t want to get into.  Anyway, I’m just not a fan of how the writing seemed to be basic name-dropping to lure Guild Wars vets back instead of doing its own thing, which I get that it’s more difficult when you build off an established lore set 250+ years into the future but you can’t just bring up old lore for the sake of bringing it up so you can dangle it in front of old Guild Wars players like a shiny object. So, while not directly part of Path of Fire, the fact that the last few episodes of the living world season deal with old Guild Wars lore and, in my opinion, deals with it poorly enough, it makes me hesitant for what’s to come in the upcoming expansion.
• Next, I want to bring up mounts.  Mostly because once upon a time I and many others were told that mounts were never planned to be included into Guild Wars 2.  However, come the Path of Fire announcement we not only have mounts, but we have multiple mounts that are, apparently, dye-able.  I’m awaiting for gem store exclusive mount skins to be announced in the months after PoF’s release and a friend of mine hopes that the jackal mount gets a wolf skin.  So on that basis alone, I list mounts as a con.
• Lastly, I want to talk about the number of maps and the supposed sizes because probably my biggest gripe with the release of Heart of Thorns was that it shipped with 4 maps that were more vertical than any core Guild Wars 2 map which really only showed up in the first map, Verdant Brink, and then was sparsely sprinkled throughout the maps that followed.  But, verticality aside, my gripe with with the promised 5 maps coming with Path of Fire is I couldn’t see exactly how large the maps were relative to how large Heart of Thorns maps are or even core Guild Wars 2 maps.  But, if they need to give us mounts then I hope that the maps are big enough to need said mounts.
• I know I said lastly in the previous paragraph but hear me out – we get nine new elite specializations coming in Path of Fire, however, none of them use a hammer.  And that makes me sad.  It makes Necromancer Munne the sadest of all.

Pros

• So, I know in the cons list above I said that ArenaNet was basically name-dropping Guild Wars 1 lore to lure in GW vets like myself and my friend, but I’m going to be honest with you – that works so well for me when you talk about the Crystal Desert, the main area we’ll be visiting in Path of Fire.  Let me break it down real quick because the Crystal Desert is home to the Desert Tour (300g per stop, pay upfront), Tomb of the Primeval Kings, The Dragon’s Lair (make sure to bring a signet of capture) and, just in general, a lot of potential goodies for new and old players alike and I can not wait to explore it all over again.  Hopefully with less wurms this time.
• Next, I want to bring up mounts.  Mostly because once upon a time I and many others were told that mounts were never planned to be included into Guild Wars 2.  However, come the Path of Fire announcement we not only have mounts, but we have multiple mounts that are, apparently, dye-able.  I’m awaiting for gem store exclusive mount skins to be announced in the months after PoF’s release and a friend of mine hopes that the jackal mount gets a wolf skin.  So on that basis alone, I list mounts as a pro.
• A really neat, not-as-big-deal-to-some-but-still-really-cool-nonetheless thing that ArenaNet did was releasing a number of new human cosmetic options that are now included in the base game, so if you have a makeover kit or are making a new character you can get the new faces and hairstyles which is really swell.
• Also really neat are the nine new specializations for the professions that all look to tie into the environment more than the Heart of Thorns specializations did. That’s how I like to roll characters so everyone can have their own little theme and the new specializations will give my large roster of characters more of a chance to branch out.  So far, my favorites are looking to be the Necromancer’s Scourge and the Engineer’s Holosmith.  There’s not too much else to say since I’m waiting for the free preview weekend to dig more into it.  Oh, speaking of the free preview weekend…
• I love me some free preview weekends.  It’s how I got roped into the first game years and years ago, and I’ve no doubt it’s how I’ll get roped into Path of Fire.
• I think the biggest deal about the Path of Fire announcement was that, not only will it be coming out in less than two months, but that it’s also, properly, a standalone expansion that’s not bundled with the core game to try to drive the price up of and the base price of PoF is very modest for the supposed amount of content.  Path of Fire is very smart in how it’s marketed and the fact that we only just got the final episode of the living world season a week ago means current players don’t have that long to wait before it will be time to return to, or visit for the first time, the Crystal Desert.

Okay, so that was a fun list to throw together and if you want a bottom line, here’s your TL;DR:

ArenaNet has, seemingly, learned from the announcement and launch of Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire looks to put to work that knowledge plus what they learned from the last living world season of content. But, I won’t get my hopes up quite yet as doing so would ruin my reputation as hating everything and being bitter about the most trivial of issues.  And, this should go without saying, but I hope Path of Fire is a huge success for ArenaNet and that, like Heart of Thorns, they learn from it and continue to improve and grow and develop even greater content that I will, of course, complain about in the future.

Stay lazy, sandy manta rays.

The post Cons & Pros – Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire appeared first on The Lazy Geek.

While everyone and their mother is playing the new Zelda game, I finally got my hands on Horizon Zero Dawn.  As such, I wanted to talk about open world games in general and their loosely-connected game mechanics that ruin the gaming industry.  I might actually be exaggerating on that last bit.  Either way, what had started out as a nagging worry slowly turned into a stronger appreciation for one of the bigger draws of  Horizon Zero Dawn.

You see, upon booting up and playing through the first little chunk of Horizon (about an hour to an hour and a half give or take some minutes) I started to feel tiny pangs of dread as a number of game mechanics that have becoming increasingly popular in open world video games began to rear their unintentionally-horrific heads.  Things like outpost capturing, limited crafting, hunting for specific parts to make bigger bags, vantage points, etc.  You know, those things.  Those things that can easily become repetitive and boring and not fun.  At least for me.

So, way back near the end of 2007, good ol’ Ubisoft launched a game that would in-turn launch a whole mess of other games that, by the time 2017 rolled around, will have made me leery of a very well-made open world game about a girl kicking ass and looking for her mother.  That original game from 2007 I’m referring to is Assassins’ Creed, by the way.  I know you know that because Ubisoft refused to let anyone forget about the “Ass Creed” franchise up until 2016 when they decided that trying to out-Call-of-Duty Call of Duty is maybe not be the best strategy, but I digress.  Assassins’ Creed, while having a fairly interesting premise, was chock-full of same-y snooze-inducing side quests and map objectives to complete just to get to the next major story point which then lead into doing it all over again and again until I eventually simply gave up and moved on.

I should point out that video games, more often than not, rely on at least a small bit of repeating certain tasks over and over.  Super Mario Bros. you ran right and jumped and that’s it.  But you kept running right and jumping because the music was catchy and you got a higher score the quicker you completed a level.  The secret is to engage the player enough that the repetitive tasks in a game don’t appear or feel repetitive.  In the case of MMOs, usually it’s to get to the next big challenge or to make enough gold to get that one item that will help you get to the next plateau or to get that one fancy hat that will make you look “the most fab.”  In the case of Assassins’ Creed, for me, there was nothing that made me want to keep repeating the same 3 or 4 missions to get to the next story nugget and every time I tried to trudge through it I ended up hating it more and more to the point that I just never beat the game.

At this point I should…point out that this is my own personal take on what I want from a game when I play it and that I’m sharing my thoughts on the matter in the hopes for discussion about game mechanics in open world video games and how the whole “capture the same looking outpost for the 140th time” needs to die out.  And this is one of the great things about video games and other entertainment mediums as well, that everyone experiences them in their own ways for their own reason.  But that’s a whole other post for another time.

Assassins’ Creed became popular enough and made Ubisoft enough money that it became this whole thing that I try to avoid despite people telling me it’s “fantastic” and “really good.”  Then Far Cry 3 came along and took what Assassins’ Creed had done and added some minor crafting bits and hunting for bobbles to upgrade your gear and the map icon treasure hunt  became a whole pseudo-sub-genre for open world games.  But there were never any “cut-and-paste” approaches to this and the open world games that followed added their own spices to the melting pot.  This brings me back to Horizon Zero Dawn.

As I said, the first little bit of the game I was worried that I had just spent $60 bucks on a game that I wouldn’t beat because it would have me go to a new section of a large map and repeat the same damn capture and hunt objectives without any real motivation.  Well, I mean it does, sort of, in it’s own unique ways, but I stuck with it and eventually I came upon some very pretty scenery and used the game’s own ‘Photo Mode’ to capture it.  I moved on and then I came upon some more chances to snap some very scenic shots.  And then I moved on and so on and so forth.  What I’m getting at is that the game is very pretty and exploring the post-apocalyptic reclaimed landscapes has become quite rewarding.  And, I guess, it helps that the main protagonist is pretty cool and the world building is interesting and I have the ability to tame wild mecha-bulls to ride around on and kick smaller robot animals in the face with…but the main thing is that the game world is an absolute treat to look at and explore and is actually so worth it to endure the repetitive tasks of hunting and crafting, overthrowing bandits, and throwing myself at some trials that I seem to always just miss getting a blazing sun on.  And that’s how Guerrilla Games got me to keep playing their game.

What it all comes down to; what it has always come down to is player preference.  But, at the same time, it wouldn’t hurt if developers crafted their world with more thought so I don’t end up feeling like a dumb mule going from one map icon to the next until I weep tears of blood wishing for sweet release.  Looking at you Watch Dogs devs.

Oh, wait they did Watch Dogs 2 which was pretty alright so I guess they did learn a thing or two.

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