Category Archives: Games

SC2: Master and Commander

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It may have taken me the lion’s share of three years, but I’ve finally reached level 90 mastery in StarCraft II co-op.

Hitting level ninety mastery in StarCraft II co-op missionsThis is essentially the level cap, though that’s become a terribly nebulous concept in co-op. First we just had commander levels, but those run out fast, so account-wide mastery levels were added. Now after mastery you progress past level 90 into “Ascension” levels. But those are purely for bragging rights; your power level ceases to increase after 90.

I wasn’t exactly in a rush to get here. It’s the journey, not the destination, after all, and after about forty to fifty mastery points, it stops making any real difference to your playstyle. Some mastery can make a big difference to some commanders — unit cost reduction really changes how Karax plays, for instance — but after a while you’re just padding the score.

And I must admit that co-op does not hold the same thrill it once did in the heady days when Legacy of the Void was new and we still had hope for ongoing story DLC. Partly this is just the inevitable fatigue that comes with playing largely the same maps for three years. Partly, it’s down to questionable decisions on Blizzard’s part.

By far the biggest issue is that power creep is absolutely out of control. Nova, Stukov, and Dehaka were so absurdly over-powered they effectively broke the game, rendering even brutal difficulty almost trivial.

The real problem comes from the fact that rather than nerfing these outliers, Blizzard has decided to buff everyone else up to their level.

Defending on the Dead of Night map in StarCraft II co-op missions.You might think this is okay. Co-op is, after all, a non-competitive mode based around stomping the AI. Players are supposed to be over-powered. Rigorous balance and serious challenge were never the point of co-op. Certainly I would not have seen a problem with balancing the game by making everyone god-tier until I actually experienced it.

Unfortunately, this has turned out to be a master class in why nerfing things, while viscerally distasteful, is still necessary for the health of a game.

Between the absurd heights of power commanders have been buffed to and the fact pretty much everyone has high mastery now, very little outside of mutations requires any real effort now, and even those aren’t what they used to be. To have anything resembling a challenge, I need to play on brutal now, even though I dislike the increased game speed.

A more minor but still irritating issue is the fact we still don’t have a map veto option. The map pool is big enough now that there’s really no excuse not to let us veto at least one map. Personally I never want to see Lock and Load again.

I also must say I’m very disappointed in the addition of Tychus Findlay as the latest commander. It’s true that co-op was never a particularly story-driven mode, but I did like having it as a sort of “story adjacent” mode to fill in gaps in the lore. The addition of a character who was long dead at the time of the End War completely breaks that and makes the whole thing feel like a bit of a farce.

Tychus Findlay and his outlaws in StarCraft II co-op missions.Not to mention Tychus is arguably the worst character in StarCraft history, contributing nothing but Wings of Liberty’s biggest and most glaring plothole while being an annoying git on top of it all.

Perhaps most importantly, though, he’s just not interesting to play at all. Now, I like hero units a lot, and I prefer smaller armies, but having just five hero units and nothing else is just not how StarCraft was meant to be played, and it shows.

For starters, like Karax, he straight up doesn’t work at low levels. Oh, you can still win, but you’re sure not going to be having any fun. You have no choices on what outlaws to hire and thus no meaningful decisions to make whatsoever. You’ve got no map presence, crap mobility, and nothing to spend resources on in the late game.

I don’t doubt he gets a lot better at higher levels (I’m definitely not spending money on him), but some issues are going to persist. He’s always going to be an incredibly basic commander to play, with no economy to speak of and very little micro.

In theory, he’s meant to be a micro-intensive commander, but the power of the outlaws is weighted very heavily toward their raw stats, so their abilities never feel that impactful. Even if they did, at the end of the day you have at most five active abilities, which isn’t that much compared to what other commanders have to juggle. Fact is you’re mostly just a-moving.

Joey Ray's Bar in StarCraft II co-op missions.There’s a lot of other weird hiccups in his design, too. His Reaper outlaw’s ability is a bomb that deals high damage, but it has such a long wind-up that whatever you’re going to blow up will be long dead before it detonates. There’s an upgrade at high levels to reduce the wind-up, but it feels like you shouldn’t have to pay for an incredibly expensive upgrade just to make his ability not worthless against anything that isn’t a train or a Void Thrasher.

Meanwhile, the Medic outlaw’s pathfinding is just terrible. StarCraft 1 Dragoon terrible. Half the time she’s running ahead and getting herself killed, and the other half she just randomly stops moving and ends up way behind the rest of your troops.

Pathfinding in general is a problem for Tychus. The hitboxes for all of his outlaws are quite large, and they’re always getting in the way of each other and your ally — or your ally is getting in their way.

Also, the Hercules who drops his bar at the start of the game is obnoxiously loud, for both players. That is going to get old fast.

It’s not that he’s weak. He’s plenty strong. He’s just terribly unfun to play. He feels half-baked and unpolished.

Fact is he needed an army, even a small one. One time my ally (an Artanis) DCed, and I got to control his base and army along with Tychus’. And it was great fun. With an army and a real economy to manage in addition to the outlaws, he’s really enjoyable. The outlaws feel really good as the support to a larger force.

But as designed, it’s a very empty experience.

The Dominion Fleet calldown ability in StarCraft II co-op missions.All that being said, for all my complaints about Tychus and about the direction of co-op generally, I am still playing. StarCraft II is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and co-op is the best way to keep playing it indefinitely. The variety of maps, enemy compositions, and commanders gives it near infinite replayability, and the quick matches are ideal for whenever I want some low stress virtual slaughter.

Onward to level 1000, I suppose.

Dungeons and Dragons Online Impressions

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Given that I’ve been spending so much time playing D&D in the real world, I decided it was finally time to give the Dungeons and Dragons MMO — er, not that D&D MMO, the other one — a try.

My Elven paladin in Dungeons and Dragons OnlineDungeons and Dragons Online is one of the few well-known MMORPGs that I had not played up until now. The badly dated graphics coupled with a poorly regarded free to play model left me with the impression of a low-budget, low-effort sort of game, and I was intimidated by its reputation as an unusually complex title. But since D&D has been on my brain so much lately, curiosity won the day.

DDO is a very odd game. Playing it feels like I stepped through a portal into some alternate reality where MMO design evolved along entirely different lines.

In some ways, DDO is a staunchly traditional RPG hewing very closely to classic tabletop mechanics. Character creation involves not just the usual racial, class, and visual options, but also rolling your stats and picking feats. And this commitment to old-school character building and intense mechanical depth continues throughout the game. Some of the item tooltips are practically novel-length, even at low levels.

There’s also a greater richness to quest mechanics that harkens back to older RPGs. In addition to combat, there’s also simple puzzles, as well as hidden rooms to sniff out and traps to dodge.

But then you also have the fact that this is actually an action combat game, or an early ancestor thereof, so in that sense it feels quite modern. There’s no auto-attacking here; moment to moment combat feels more like Diablo than traditional CRPGs.

A skill sheet in Dungeons and Dragons OnlineYou do have an action bar, but there’s not the same reliance on rotations of active abilities you’d expect from an old school MMO. At least as a paladin, my active class abilities were few in number and very limited in their use, with the focus of combat on simply swinging my axe. The action bar is therefore as much devoted to consumables and swapping weapon sets as it is to class abilities.

Most of my time in DDO, my attention was held simply by how unusual the game design is compared to other MMOs. As a student of the genre, it’s fascinating.

I do also admire the commitment to staying true to D&D mechanics. I didn’t have to look up what stats do because I already knew from table-top, and my paladin had much the same abilities as her pen and paper equivalent.

However, for all the ways DDO is unique, I ended up drifting away from it for much the same reasons most MMOs fail to hold my attention.

One is that the game is simply too easy. Going in I was worried such a group-centric game would be too punishing to the solo player, but I spent all my time killing enemies in one or two hits from my axe, while never in the slightest danger of dying. The addition of cheaply available (and seemingly quite overpowered) NPC followers makes the quests even more braindead.

A puzzle in Dungeons and Dragons OnlineDDO does have a variety of difficulty settings for every quest, which is a design I very much admire, but as non-subscriber, I was only ever able to do each quest on “normal” during my first playthrough, and “pay to make the game not suck” is never an enticing business model.

The other issue is that the story is very bland. The dungeon master narration in each quest is a nice touch of ambiance, but it fails to entirely cover the fact that there’s very little plot here. In my time with the game I encountered no memorable NPCs, and ultimately most quests are just of the blandest “kill ten rats” fare.

There are other issues, too. As mentioned, the graphics are painfully dated, and the game is just straight up unpleasant to look at. Leveling is very slow (probably another F2P restriction), and I don’t know the Eberron setting very well, so I felt little connection to the world.

If you’re a fan of MMO game design and the history thereof, DDO is probably worth checking out at least in brief. It’s very unique, and it’s fun to fantasize how MMOs might have evolved differently if DDO had been more successful. Otherwise, though, I’m not sure it’s worth your time.