Borderlands really is different

The ARPG genre is sort of stale. There's really not a lot of innovation despite well over a decade of iteration and dozens of titles. The Dawn of Magic series introduced custom abilities. Torchlight added the pet and the shared stash. Diablo 3 added crafting, free town portals and flexible skills. Diablo 2 added skill synergies.

And then there's Borderlands. Right from the start, Borderlands throws away the ARPG standards by making the game a shooter. It discarded numerous active skills in favor of one, added a huge diverse array of passive abilities, and gave all of it a robust framework of basic abilities. Every character in Borderlands can use a sniper rifle, throw grenades, and has regenerating shields. Every character in Borderlands has a melee attack. All of them can also use the same gear to augment these elements of their gameplay.

Borderlands discards the conventional wisdom of putting the variable power onto the character and instead projects it onto the gear. In a traditional ARPG, your character provides the options and the gear enhances those options. In Borderlands, your gear provides the options and your character enhances it.

Why is this so special? In Borderlands you can change your playstyle without changing your character simply by using different weapons. Finding a new piece of gear can dramatically change your character's preferred style of fighting. You might go quite a while using close combat weapons, and then suddenly get a sniper rifle drop that mostly obsoletes them (in terms of numbers). Suddenly you're engaging enemies from very far away, picking them off one by one with your new toy.

This frequent change in gameplay breaks up a lot of the monotony of the typical ARPG grind. As you progress later and later, you also start finding legendaries that do much more than just the normal types of attack. I really like how the game smartly realizes that you're used to using the standard kinds of weapons, and starts throwing unique special weapons at you. It's not much different than Diablo 2-style uniques, but the impact on gameplay is larger. Most legendary weapons in Borderlands function quite a bit differently than their normal counterparts. It really helps to spice up the game more.

It also helps that the leveling curve in Borderlands is smoother than in Diablo 2. It's more of a normal transition where Diablo 2 had this really terrible leveling curve (very few people actually hit the level cap) and game designers realized maybe that was bad design. D3 has a very smooth curve, similar to modern MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. It's not really an innovation that Borderlands is smoother. It does help that you get new fun skills frequently along with a steady stream of neat guns, though.

Borderlands really starts to grind when you get to the point where you're only looking for a few guns of a particular type. This is especially true of the first game. You want a Hellfire and it doesn't even matter what level it is. Once you have one you want a better one. It's not the best design, definitely.

Overall though, it serves to be fun and interesting even when other games might have gotten old and stale. Torchlight 2 didn't even last to the end for me, but I'm almost through Borderlands 2 for my third time now (two characters through normal, one through TVHM) and it's still enjoyable. It definitely worked for me.

How ARPGs can learn from Torchlight

Torchlight isn't great or innovative. In many ways, both Torchlight and its sequel are slimmed-down versions of Diablo 2. The first Torchlight really jumped out and said "Hey, I'm a Diablo clone!" It didn't really try to be anything but that. It's not like Path of Exile (which also tries to be a lot like D2) where it revamps how characters work, but keeps the Diablo-like mechanics and gameplay. Torchlight has characters and classes that feel a lot like Diablo characters in a plot that even feels very Diablo-esque.

But what Torchlight and its sequel did is really something. Torchlight added in tons of convenience features that just made the game a lot better. The new pet feature acts like the followers from Diablo 2, but is completely customizable and can cart your loot back to town to sell. It can even buy consumables from the shops in TL2. This is so simple and brilliant I don't understand why more people don't jump on it. It also adds customizable ability slots that let you tailor your strategy to fit your style even more. I don't like the way they were handled in TL (having spells that healed was an excuse to not have heals in the base classes) but they were much improved in TL2.

Torchlight as a series also said, "We want you to play the game your way." There's no forced online. Even in online play you can cheat your own gear since saves are stored locally. Rather than worry about stuff like that, TL2 just let its players play the way they want. That means that TL/TL2 can be played forever with your friends, without having to worry about whether Runic will stop hosting game servers or something.

The biggest thing that other games should take away from TL2 are the conveniences. A customizable pet/follower to sell junk, more NPCs to offer useful services, and better ease of access in general. A shared stash to store loot with a lot of space. TL2 didn't make any waves, but it did make some really useful features that other games can steal. I don't know why more of them don't copy Torchlight's magnificently useful pet.

Also, why are followers in D3 disabled when you play multiplayer? Whose idea was it to make the game much harder and take away your follower?

Did the hype kill Diablo 3?

This week I'm going to be talking more about ARPGs, and because Reaper of Souls is out I feel like Diablo 3 is a great place to start it off. D3 had a lot of hype leading up to its release, and partly due to the outspoken philosophy of Jay Wilson, it had a pretty bad rap going in. Unlike most D3 haters, I don't want to rag on Jay too much because the failures of D3 are only partly his fault and in some cases not his fault at all. He was just the face for the game, so we hate on him instead of the many designers that made the decisions that ultimately caused people to walk away from the game angry.

First, let's look at what D3 did well. The classes were all interesting and well-designed, even if they weren't very balanced. The art, sounds, and music were all absolutely fantastic. The game's presentation quality is overall top-notch. Where did it all fall apart?

The first big spot is the story. Most of the story was uninteresting. The nephilim plot arc is pretty dumb even if the protagonists themselves are quite well-written (OK, the female monk and demon hunter are pretty badly written). All the villains in D3 feel like cartoon characters where they constantly get foiled by those pesky nephilim and their stupid followers. The bad guys basically never win until the very end. There's never a big climax where you feel like everything is fucked. There's no real urgency. You know the climax is going to happen the way it does just like you know who Belial is when he's first introduced.

Honestly the biggest problem with D3's plot is that there are no twists. Nothing unexpected happens. Okay, Diablo is a girl. That was a bit unexpected. Also, Zoltan Kulle died (again). That was unexpected and unfortunate, if only because having him attack the player made no sense at all. I also really liked him (because everything he said was basically true). It's unfortunate that such a good character got axed in such a bitch way.

However, I think the game's plot failings (I haven't played RoS, so no commentary there) really pale in comparison to the mechanics failings. When the game was brand new and fresh, there were a number of really silly ways to make oneself invulnerable. Playing with friends was counter-intuitive (they made the game much harder and took away your followers) unless you played with the four-monk perma-invulnerable party. If you couldn't make yourself invulnerable and you couldn't perma-stun, D3 was quite hard. Most builds fell short midway through Hell (I had to escort a lot of friends past Hell Belial) and Inferno was an insidious grind unless you played one of the OP builds.

That's really the worst of it. You had to grind. Gear upgrades became slower and slower and the rewards became less and less. Just like in D2, you ended up grinding the strongest boss you could down over and over in the hopes of getting just one good drop. And those single good drops generally weren't for you; you had to sell them on the AH and try to buy something for yourself. Crafting sucked and crafting mats were garbage. Jewel combining and selling was annoying and not very profitable. The best money came from flipping good quality items that the "average" player needed. And as the player average got higher and higher, the value of items plummeted.

All this created a downward spiral that destroyed D3's loot satisfaction. People quit the game in Inferno, unsatisfied with the experience of the loot grind and unable to complete the full game. That experience soured the feelings of many people about D3, myself included.

Compare this to my experiences in other ARPGs though, I think that if I just stopped playing before hitting that endgame wall (if there was such a thing), I generally had a better experience. I'm having a good time playing Borderlands 2 and Torchlight 2, because I haven't made it to the "endgame" equivalent (I suspect Borderlands 2 will be fun even then, though). I think we expected the game to give us the same stream of positive reward feedback as it did back in Nightmare and it jilted us when we got to Inferno.

Of course the game is different now and I have no idea even how to classify it. I do know my best friend is playing a new wizard on Expert now and he's steamrolling the game, but I don't know how the loot curve works outside of that. I do know that there's alternate advancement now (a new way to add more positive feedback to the game) which I think is pretty good to help smooth the between-loot experience for max level characters.

I really do think that our expectations of a perfect game killed D3. Torchlight 2 was probably a better game at launch but definitely wasn't presented anywhere near as well. I think Torchlight 2 had its own mess of problems as well, but they're just less pronounced and less scrutinized than D3's were. If we look at any other ARPG's story, none of them are anywhere near the level of something like Dragon Age. Why are we so miffed at D3? Is it because Blizzard actually tried to add a story in? How do we compare it to the virtually nonexistent story in Path of Exile, or the original Diablo?

I think that's a really crappy reason to hate on D3, personally. It made mistakes, but if you like it, then that's fine. If you didn't like it or felt jilted, that's fine too, but there's no need to make it personal. I got my money's worth out of the game before RMAH transactions paid for it. I played for at least 200 hours. It was 60 dollars, but it was satisfying. Is it bad that the endgame was irritating when I played the game for 200 hours?

The essence of Diablo, Torchlight, and ARPGs

The ARPG genre is one of my least favorite genres in gaming. I don't dislike it because they're not enjoyable. I played D3 for quite a while, including a fair bit of RMAHing back when that was a thing, and over 50 hours on launch day. I played a fair bit of Path of Exile, a ton of D2, both Torchlight games, and even some other games in the genre like Van Helsing and the Dungeon Siege series. I'm even playing Borderlands 2 right now. I play a lot of this genre.

The main reason I hate the genre is the insidious addictiveness present in it. Once you've beaten them once for the story, the only reason to replay is to get more loot, more levels, and bigger numbers. They're skinner boxes with this continuous positive feedback to keep you playing. Honestly they're not that much different than MMORPGs but they're more single-player focused. It's why I kind of hate the existing themepark MMORPGs because there's already a genre for that.

I'm not really fond of the kind of game design where the longevity is entirely built around grinding more numbers. It's ultimately why I quit Age of Wushu (well the P2W didn't hurt) and it's kind of dirty to gamers. It's the same kind of design that made Cookie Clicker popular. I feel like games that have longevity should be because of their interesting gameplay. What ever happened to great games like Tetris or Bejeweled where you just play to better yourself?

If I was a AAA designer I'd totally make games like this, because the constant, guaranteed progression is the equivalent of gamer crack. People play these games and feel obligated to play them far more than they would if they sat back and thought logically about it.

I really like playing these games, but I really do not like that they're basically degenerate loot farms. It's rare that "real" gameplay actually occurs in these games. When D3 was a super kite-fest (before the Inferno nerfs and then its final removal) it felt really good to play because dodging everything and not getting hit was really satisfying. When you played against Inferno Belial (he's was sort of a gateway boss) and anything he did could kill you in one or two hits, it felt really good to dodge all of it and not get hit. Then the game became another super grind number-fest (and act 3 lashers were horrible design for that reason). What ever happened to frozen + arcane enchanted + mortar + fire chains? It got easier and easier because people apparently don't like being challenged. They just wanted more numbers.

The best of the genre really focuses on producing a great experience outside of the numbers and progression. I'll talk about D3, Borderlands and more next week. Stay tuned!

The Summoner's Guidebook: Ultra Rapid Fire thoughts

I haven't actually played URF. I think it's kind of dumb and I'd rather play game modes that actually improve my skill. All of my games since it launched have been as ADC or jungle in plain old boring SR. However, URF is a pretty interesting thought experiment. What's broken and why? What isn't broken?

First, I want to look at revive passives like Anivia and Aatrox. Are they affected by URF? I don't play either character so I don't know. I know Revive was removed from URF, lol. If Aatrox passive is affected by URF then he's really good.

"Any character with a dash is good." Pretty much true, especially if ranged. Although Ezreal is the biggest stand-out, I want to point out characters like Graves and Aatrox too. Sejuani's dash is probably ok though her kit is probably not as good.

Chain CC is a really big possibility. Most of us know about Alistar but there's also Ahri, Poppy, Nami, Leona, Brand, Blitzcrank etc etc. LeBlanc is the worst. Perma snare and perma silence all in the same go, on a character with an escape. Perma ban, in my opinion. Any kind of chain CC is just nasty.

Characters with burst resistance are especially good. Blitzcrank passive is really good if it is affected by the 80% CDR. Poppy's passive is also crazy; it takes a lot of hits to bring her down, even in URF. Characters with inherent tank seem very strong. Singed, with his perma ultimate, is probably a lot more dangerous than he appears even if he doesn't get a lot from 80% CDR otherwise. Same with Leona and her perma Eclipse.

Characters that can unload lots of damage, especially from range, are great. Jayce and Ezreal are among the best. I think Nidalee is highly overrated; her spears are rapid but everyone else gets more rapid stuff too and Nidalee can't deal with getting jumped on. Ziggs is the real terror. Multiple minefields AND ranged poke AND a near-global ult AND a dash (sort of?) What the hell.

Initiation is really crazy with Flash being up every minute. Galio is probably the biggest. Morgana and Kennen are probably OK. Hard to say with other characters. The best initiations are probably actually picking tools like Nautilus' ult/hook, Blitz hook, Morgana binding, etc.

I'd say that you need either insanely good one thing (Galio ultimate) or really good in lots of things (Ezreal). Melee characters are a big liability. I think you basically need to be as good as Poppy (nigh-invincible and chain CC and huge damage) or be not really a melee (like Maokai or Gragas) to be good in URF. Due to the huge amount of gold and infinite mana, Poppy is probably decent. Akali is probably also good due to chain Shroud (takes away from the number of trinkets enemy team can have, since they need to Sweep her) and huge huge damage.

Jayce, Ziggs, Karthus, LB, Alistar are probably must-picks if open.

Sometimes I really hate gaming journalism

Gaming journalism is relatively new. There are certain parts of it that people understand pretty well (esports journalism is essentially sports journalism, which has been polished greatly over centuries) and other things that we don't. Gaming reviews, opinions, and editorials are not that much different than other forms of media journalism, only there's probably many times more dedicated gaming journalism outlets compared to all other forms of media journalism combined. Additionally, well... we don't approach it with the same sort of professionalism that media journalism carries.

Professional media critics -- particularly movie critics -- tend to have education related to media study. Literary critics tend to have literature degrees (or at least humanities degrees), except in the case of independent bloggers/streamers/tubers/whatever. Even a lot of them do. A huge number of media critics also have education or experience in acting or media production.

Compare the gaming journalism industry. I know literally zero gaming journalists with a literature degree, and only one with a humanities degree. I know of only one with any formal literary analysis education (myself) and I never finished my degree. No journalists that I know of are former pro gamers or have any significant gaming history. Most have no industry experience; gaming journalism tends to be a stepping stone towards working in the industry for many. Generally, once you've got a job in the gaming industry, you tend to get other jobs in the industry rather than working for a media outlet. This doesn't mean that gaming journalists aren't educated, but most have some other education that doesn't give gaming insights such as web/graphics design, computer science, and so on.

The average quality of gaming journalism is really poor. The writing quality is pretty bad even in print publications, and online publications tend to be terrible. Most of this is due to the lack of writing education among gaming writers. Most of our language comes from the games we play and the books we read. I had a discussion that went far longer than it should have with another gaming journalist about whether we should use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun. For writing professionals, we kind of suck.

We're even bad as gamers, too. I really hate reviews that emphasize aesthetics or story over gameplay, especially when that same reviewer does the same thing continuously. We're game journalists. Not art critics, film critics or literature critics. Yes, many things can sell a game, but when a journalist bashes a good quality game (objectively speaking, not based on my opinion) and says "I couldn't get into it" because the game was visually unappealing or because he didn't like the story, it makes me really angry. Yes, those things can hurt the experience, but the point is to review the game and not the story or the visuals.

I also hate when reviewers inject excessive personal bias. Game reviews are biased. There's no way around that, but most reviewers are really bad at separating their own personal preference from what makes a good game. They're also really bad at identifying what an average gamer might like. Reviewers tend to almost exclusively use "I liked it because X" and not "It's a good game because X."

An example of how to not do this is when I reviewed Path of Exile. Let me go right up and say that game is not my type of game. I just really couldn't get into it, and I would never play it without friends (I don't play it now). It's not a bad game, but it's definitely designed for a gamer that isn't me. I pointed out my hangups with the game, talked about the strengths of the game and said that if those hangups aren't a problem for you, you'll probably like Path of Exile. I did the same thing regarding LoL too, actually.

What I hate the most about gaming journalism is the sensationalism. People like to read things that make them feel stuff more than they like to read things that make them think stuff. As the strikethrough above indicates, this is not just a gaming journalism problem. People read stuff not to learn or to be informed, but to be emotionally moved. Unfortunately, that's the way the industry moves too. You can't really sell articles or be successful by teaching, honestly. If you are successful, it's probably not because your writing is good, and more because you have something else going for you. For instance, pro gamers can write terrible game guides (this is normal, they're not paid or trained to be good at conveying information) that get upvotes because the pro gamers are successful or popular.

The biggest reason why gaming journalism is like this (all of the above) is because honestly, we're not paid enough to be professional. Let's say you get paid 100$ to do a review of a game. It takes you 15 hours to beat the game, 3-4 hours to write the article and you didn't get the game for free. Now I will give you the big shocker, too -- we're paid even less. Most gaming journalists don't even get paid, though it is possible we will get a review copy of the game. Streamers get paid less per hour on the average, but the flip side is that they can work more than we can, and popular streamers make more than us. How can you expect gaming journalists to be actual professionals when we don't even get paid minimum wage? Most gaming journalists cut corners in some way; not actually playing the game enough to do a full review, for instance.

Is it any wonder then that biased reviews occur? All it takes for us to like the developer is for us to get a review copy. We don't even rate bribes. We're so poor that getting paid and getting to play games for free (ish) is enough.

I'm not sure what the answer is. You can't pay gaming journalists with money that isn't there. Someone has to foot the bill, and budgets across the gaming blogosphere are pretty lean. There's a 1% that makes a lot (people like Yahtzee, TotalBiscuit, etc) and a lot of people that make basically nothing. Even the well-off guys aren't that well-off. It's really telling that gaming celebrities make six figures or less when the industry is bigger than the movie industry.

That's a tangent though. God the gaming industry is messed up.

What ever happened to challenge?

Somewhere along the line, games stopped being games and started being either movies or skinner box reward simulators. The games today that aren't like that are generally virtual worlds where interaction is the game and whatever game is behind it is secondary. Even the games that are really interesting -- stuff like Gunpoint or The Stanley Parable or whatever... those games aren't really games where you have a win or lose condition. Losing in Antichamber or Stanley is impossible and losing in Gunpoint or Long Live the Queen is just a test in optimization: rewinding time back a bit to see what you can do differently.

I shouldn't really be so harsh. I would never dare to say that Gunpoint isn't a game or something like that. If you say it's a game, then I'll probably agree unless there's basically no interaction at all. Stanley's a game. Mass Effect is a game even if you take out the combat, though it becomes a somewhat shallow visual novel.

My real point though is that there's no difficulty in getting to the end. The emotional reward you feel at the end of Mass Effect is ultimately fake. You didn't do anything except invest some time and make some trivial decisions that didn't really matter. Millions of other people did the same thing and got similar rewards. Doing most dungeons in most MMORPGs are the same. You spent some time and got some loot, gained some levels, whatever. A monkey could do it. If it's too hard, the people that are dumber than monkeys complain and the challenge gets nerfed.

Challenge is so rare and nebulous that we'll even accept fake challenge like Dark Souls. It isn't hard. It isn't even sort of hard. Rogue Legacy is a harder game than Dark Souls. The difference is that Dark Souls creates unfair situations where you're almost certainly going to die, while Rogue Legacy tries very hard to be as fair as possible. Both are roughly the same type of game; you have guaranteed progression in both games. You will eventually get to the end if you keep trucking. You'll probably die a proportionately similar amount of times in both games (both Dark Souls games are much longer than Rogue Legacy). Yet we embrace Dark Souls as a hard game because it's dickish about how it kills you.

So... why aren't we making really hard games anymore? Let's explain what I mean by hard. A hard game needs to be:

• Not random, or the challenge isn't derived primarily from randomness (most roguelikes)
• Not allow for level-up progression which makes the game trivial (Dark Souls, most RPGs)
• Have some kind of significant death penalty, forcing the player to lose progression or try over 
• Challenge can't be derived from other players (a good thing, but outside the realm of this discussion)
• Memorization should not be the key element of player skill, though it can be one element of many (again, Dark Souls)

The first thing means that player skill should be the driving factor in victory. No Binding of Isaac where you reroll continuously until you get a map you like. How far a player gets should be a function of his skill. Randomness can exist in some form; I like challenges where memorization is emphasized less than adaptation, but fixed challenges are fine as long as they're not trivial even when memorized.

The second thing should really be obvious. I really like Fortune Summoners for this reason because it caps your level-ups, although you can honestly level and gear up enough that the game is basically one step away from trivial at any given point. Devil May Cry (any game in the series) is a probably better example since you can't trivialize the "hard" or DMD settings regardless of how leveled you are (they basically expect you to be maxed out going in). Grinding should never, ever be the key element of skill. You shouldn't be able to farm slabs and souls in order to get so powerful that the game is easy.

Death penalty is mainly important to remove fluke outcomes. Once you've passed a challenge, it shouldn't be because you just got lucky. You should be able to demonstrate beating it again, and that probably means that when you fail at some other challenge, you should be forced to do stuff you've already beaten again. It's mainly a failsafe to ensure that the skill tests are genuine and not just a product of the laws of chance. Boss fights are tricky, and it's where games like DMC kind of fall short. You only have to beat a boss once in a lot of games, unless that game makes you start from the beginning when you die. That's probably not so ideal for something truly hard.

PvP really requires no explanation. It's obviously a great thing, but it's not really a factor in really hard games.

Memorization is a huge problem. I would guess that probably 99% of the challenges in Dark Souls can be solved with memorization. Most don't require any really special execution aside from the basic skills involved in playing. Virtually all of the challenges that can't be solved with memorization aren't affected by the death penalty (meaning, you only have to succeed once and you don't have to do them again). Why is memorization such a big deal? It's a skill too, but I think most people agree that memorization isn't something that contributes to a really challenging game. This actually hurts some games that are pretty hard like the original Ninja Gaiden, but the difference is that even with memorization, those parts are still hard. That's why fixed games like DMC can still make the cut; even though you know what enemies are coming, you still have to beat them and it's not easy.

Games with the above qualities force players to flex their gaming muscles. You can't just expect to win. The best of these games feature easier difficulty settings where players can beat the game and get the normal sense of accomplishment, but then turn it up to 11 for the harder settings. When you've beaten a DMC game on DMD, you can say you've done something very few have done.

I miss that sort of design. I really don't like the design of games where the "hard" settings are an afterthought to the cakewalk easy normal settings, and the game clearly wasn't balanced with hard in mind. Why can't there be more honest, challenging games that don't just offer cheap BS challenges like ramped up enemy health and damage? Anyone can put the enemy damage at 200%; not everyone can create challenging puzzles with their game engine.

I think more than anything else it's that game designers are leaning more towards delivering more content than delivering richer content. It's sort of unfortunate.