Category: PC

Genre: MMORPG
Platform: PC

I’ve been playing mostly the same main since Wrath of the Lich King – a hunter. I’ve played all three specs at various points, including a run for a while raiding as melee survival. For the past couple of expansions though I’ve settled back into playing Beast Mastery. The War Within in a lot of ways feels like a continued push for Blizzard to allow me to play the game in a way that best suits my current capabilities – limited time because of work and kids and really a lack of time to dedicate to high end playing. However, that has come with some early oddities in terms of playing as a hunter.

From a surface level, this expansion really pushes you to play in a way that best fits your lifestyle. The main story line is segregated from other quests in a very obvious way, so you can simply run that. Dungeons are still there so you can simply run those. Follower dungeons where you run normal difficulty dungeons with AI allow you to get the dungeon experience in a less public and more digestable format. The new Delves system brings back a system similar to the Pandaria Scenarios with difficulty scaling that looks like it’s going to continue throughout the expansion. Basically, there’s a lot of options in how you want to play that support any sort of play style.

Delves are probably the thing I was most excited about because they gave me something tied to a dungeon-like experience, but without the need to queue and deal with PUGs in what will ultimately be limited hours to play the expansion. Early runs through all of them show a tremendous amount of promise as there’s a nice mix of objective-based gameplay and normal pack killing, combined with the Brann Bronzebeard AI helper to provide healing for me. Some of the delves slot into the overall story arc of the expansion similar to how dungeons have always kind of existed near the end of story beats. Some of them simply exist to thematically exist within areas. They all feel like they are meant to be there as smaller dungeon experiences, rather than simply replacing existing planned dungeons. However, as difficulty increased and as I hit level 80 some scaling and class-specific issues started to really show up.

Scaling is definitely one of the biggest issues that I’m running into this expansion. I would say from about level 70 to 78 the game was easy easy. Part of that was coming in with gear that I didn’t really replace until about level 75, but part of it was just that it was easy. I could easily kill mobs in a couple of hits, so I was never really getting into any sort of rotation. Elite mobs generally didn’t require me to even heal my pets, let alone do anything other than face roll. Around level 79 things started to feel suddenly appropriate. At 80, it’s like a flip was switched. Delves that I was previously clearing without issue were suddenly rapidly killing me. Non-elite world mobs in level 80 areas were in some cases near unkillable if I got more than two or three leashed to me. It all really caught me off guard.

What it feels like to me is that the automatic scaling system was not given enough testing at lower levels and potentially given too much testing at level 80 with instance gear. For someone that is going to exist on the fringes of gear quality, it does not encourage me to go into the current systems at max level. World quests in these high level areas are fine now with a lot of people playing, but I can imagine they will become frustrating as server populations naturally drop past early expansion stages. Delves giving me trouble now will not be something I want to continue doing when higher level difficulties open up in a few weeks.

Some of this comes down to just weird scaling, but part of it also feels like class issues for soloing content. There’s really two main issues for me – pet threat and lack of AoE – that are really hampering the level cap experience. Ultimately I guess pet threat is the big issue here, in so much as my pets just cannot hold NPC focus which ends up being a huge issue for high end delves. One of the theories I’ve seen floated around is that the Stomp talent is actually redirecting threat to the hunter instead of the pets, and it wouldn’t surprise me very much. It seems like no matter what I do my pets will not keep focus in packs of enemies, so I spend a lot of time in the current tier 3 delves not doing DPS and instead feigning death or running around to save Brann from pulling the pack. This is somewhat exacerbated by Misdirection now being a talent that is tough to justify speccing into over other options on BM hunters. This is even more exacerbated by the lack of AoE damage – and in particular AoE damage that triggers threat generation by the pets. It all leads to a situation where the class mechanic decisions that have been made for this expansion really just reduce the ability to solo content as a BM hunter that should be soloable.

All that being said, the leveling experience and story quest line experience was a lot of fun. Each zone has a very distinct feel to it. The starting area Isle of Dorn is a normal wide open WoW zone to get you situated with the new Earthen race. The second area – The Ringing Deeps – is a huge underground mine that features some of the more fun use of sky riding for me with height being such a constraint in a lot of situations. Hallowfall is a huge human zone that would feel right at home in Classic Alliance areas – even if it comes with some really confusing Arathi civilization timeline stuff. Azj-Kahet then finishes up the base story with a zone that feels like a fulfilled promise of what the Wrath Nerubian areas started to tease. Each area feels like some WoW zone that’s come before, but done to a degree of iterated polish that hasn’t been seen before. I suppose after 20 years that isn’t a huge surprise, as there’s not going to be a whole ton of completely unexplored area left. However, the promise of the expansion is that we’re going to be interacting with the very soul of Azeroth, so I suspect we’re simply waiting on the really weird stuff.

The difficulties with scaling and class balance that I’ve run into so far feel like the typical start of expansion woes. I am disappointed that the scaling is so wonky right now, and I am disappointed by how the BM Hunter currently feels, but this isn’t my first rodeo and I do think that things will be fixed. In the case of hunters, they haven’t really mechanically changed so it isn’t like they are going through a failed fundamental rework. However, they really do need a solution for solo threat generation on pets and that is not a new problem. On the core balance side, a mix of natural gear progression and ongoing balance patches will almost certainly smooth things out, and even at my current ilvl in the mid 570s it’s slowly improving. However, finding a natural balance point for things like Delves is not something I really think they are going to be able to pull off. Ultimately some classes are just going to be more suited to the high end of that content without some significant reworks to Brann as your AI helper.

Overall it’s not a bad first week though. The game works, the main quest line was fun, the solo content shows a ton of promise, and I’m enjoying the lore so far. This is a brave new World of Warcraft where factions for maybe the first time really don’t exist as a core idea of the expansion, and to this point it’s feeling like a compelling situation where both Horde and Alliance will be working together for something bigger than the last 30 years of Warcraft fighting, and I’m hoping that Blizzard ends up delivering on that promise.

2023-11-202023-11-06

How’d It Age #6 – Pharaoh / Pharaoh: A New Era

More Info from DotEmu

Genre: City Builder
Platform: PC

So I suppose this is a bit of a look at how an old game aged, and a bit of a look at how a remake both did and didn’t change a game. Pharaoh is a game that I played when it first came out, and is something that I’ve continued to come back to on and off throughout the years since. This is really the first city builder that hooked me. I’d played some SimCity on SNES, SimCity 2000 on PC, and dabbled a bit in Caesar 3, but none of them really got their hooks in me like this one. However, it had some distinct issues that have never really gone away for me as I play through it, and for better or worse a lot of that is maintained in the remake, though it does come with a few nice tweaks.

I think this screenshot is a good place to start, because it really shows the main thing that drew me to playing the remake over the original. They added a global worker pool mechanic that later games like Zeus started playing with. In the original game, your places of work had to be close enough to housing to allow recruiters to find people for the jobs. What this meant at least for me was that instead of designing cities I was haphazardly putting together pods of industries where they needed to be with pods of housing connected to them, but not too close so their desirability wouldn’t be affected. It always felt like a weird restriction to me in terms of how I wanted to go about designing my layouts. The global worker pool fixes that.

Now, I simply need to have enough people in the city to fill the jobs. What this means for me is that I can design my cities with distinct regions. I can have industrial regions, where resources and production buildings are grouped in ways that make sense for efficient creation, storage, and ultimately trade purposes. I can then have housing in areas where it will best allow it to both have access to everything it needs, as well as room for the buildings to expand in later levels to high-level 3×3+ housing. It makes the entire city creation process about designing rather than fitting to specific mechanical needs.

There’s also an additional sub-option that changes the underlying worker availability from being age-based to just being a flat percentage, and this is unfortunately a good option covering up a mechanic that I feel still doesn’t work right. The underlying default worker pool is anyone in your town from age 20-49. This works great as your city grows and workers move in. However, once your housing capacity is reached it becomes a long term problem. There seems to be an underlying mechanical issue where people just do not have children at a replacement rate so your city ends up ultimately aging out. To keep the worker pool up, you end up just constantly chasing a growing population or doing mechanical cheesing, such as deleting an entire neighborhood and rebuilding it to get new immigrants.

At the time of the game’s release it felt like potentially a systemic limitation that was just annoying. However, it feels like something that should just be fixed. The flat percentage worker pool is an alright solution, and honestly gets me my goal of having a city that I can grow to a predictable size. However, I’d have liked a more elegant solution where roughly stable populations also have roughly stable birth rates, and I can plan around that. Yes, I expect that cities with full health care coverage would have more older citizens that age out of the worker pool, but it’s so aggressive in both the original and remake that it feels broken.

That isn’t the only thing that I kind of wished had more elegant solutions. In the original release as well as the remake I end up hitting a point in the middle kingdom period where mechanically the game just becomes something I don’t want out of a city builder. You reach a point where you’ve kind of seen everything so the game becomes less about city building and more about speed running. You start getting into levels that expect you to have a lot of industry up and running extremely early, and if you don’t do things just right you start suffering consequences such as the pharaoh invading your city. It ultimately is not how I want to play a city builder. I find it more interesting to be chasing layouts and efficiency within that rather than hitting mechanical bullet points, and the later levels just feel like you should build in precise locations at precise times and learn that via being defeated. It’s at that point where I tend to fall into just doing mission editor free play on cool spots.

The game also really did nothing to alleviate boredom around the god mechanic. The tl;dr is you need to keep gods happy or suffer negative consequences. If you keep them happy you have positive consequences. Unfortunately, the practical way to do this is to just routinely hold festivals in their honor. It’s so robotic of a mechanic that I’d almost rather neither positive or negative consequences existed, and the whole thing just went away. Long wait periods while monuments are being built just turn into clicking the festival button every couple months and doing that in repetition for long periods of time. It felt unnecessary 25 years ago and feels unnecessary now.

All that being said, I’m glad this remake is out and is still seemingly being worked on. This offers me a hugely easier way to do my semi-regular hop into the game. It gives me modern perks like ultrawide support and cloud saves. It modernizes a few mechanics and gives me hope that they’re going to be willing to do more to create an ultimately better experience. And I suppose what it really gives me is hope that city builders are still a popular enough thing to exist within some niche on Steam. I would say that since this game came out I’ve leaned more heavily into open-ended builders like Timberborn, but I think there’s still a place to explore more history-focused task-oriented builders like Pharaoh, though I do want to see more of a push to fix what wasn’t liked about the originals if the studio behind this does end up going into later titles.

2021-11-172021-11-17

Game Ramblings #151 – Forza Horizon 5

More Info from Microsoft

Genre: Open World Racing
Platform: PC / Xbox Series X
Also Available On: Xbox One

Look, this is Forza Horizon. From a meta game perspective, there’s nothing new. You drive around in an open world, find races, find over the top stupid events, crush signs, get a ton of cars. That hasn’t changed. The location has changed. The specifics of the story have changed. None of that is really important though. If you’ve played these games, you know if you like this series by now. If you don’t know if you like it, give it a try. That stuff’s not really what I care to talk about.

What’s nice about 5 is that it’s a lot of the things that they felt like they learned from 4, but amped up and there from the start. Seasons and seasonal play lists are no longer the big new feature, but just part of the game. As a result they feel oddly more integrated to me. There’s more variety in the seasonal play lists. There’s a better push to get you to jump into multiplayer games just to try them out, without the stress of needing to win. There’s just more of a reason to do these things for the hell of it. Being rewarded with cool new cars is just a part of the fun.

The other big thing just there is the Eliminator. For 4, this was the battle royale that was added as a random patch a year after the game’s release. What nobody expected is that it was going to be a hell of a lot of fun. For 5, it’s there from the start and continues to be chaotic. Now that it’s just a part of the game, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of dumb shouldn’t work but ends up being hilariously find ideas they come up with.

However, the big thing for me is related to screenshots in this one being in different aspect ratios. I was actually able to take advantage of cross platform play this time around, and boy does it work well. For FH3 and 4, my choices were PC or a base Xbox One, and let’s be realistic – that isn’t a choice. I was PC all the way. However, now I have my development PC or a Series X. They’re comparable hardware for me with comparable experiences – I can do 60 FPS in 21:9 1440p or I can do 60fps in performance mode dynamic res 4k. They’re both great experiences and I used them both.

The big thing for me is that the cross platform play just works. A lot of cloud save stuff in the game industry has tended to be sporadic. Nintendo’s cloud saves work well, but require a lot of manual handling that can be kind of a pain in the ass. Sony’s storage needs are so slim relative to the size of modern save files that I stopped taking advantage of it when I left the PS3 generation. On mobile, both Android and iOS have made me want to stab myself in the face when developing on those platform. Steam’s cloud saves work well though because they check when you launch a game for any newer data in the cloud. Microsoft takes this approach, and it works flawlessly. If I was already at my PC, I’d just play there. If I wanted to lay in my beanbag or didn’t want to turn my PC on, I just turned on the Xbox. In both cases I didn’t think about save data or whether I needed to sync things. I just went, it just worked, I just raced.

It should also be noted just how well it runs on any hardware you throw at it, but frankly Digital Foundry covered it better than I will ever be able to.

That was really the important thing for about playing through 5. I already knew I was going to come in and enjoy the game because I’ve literally been doing that now for this subseries for the past decade. What I didn’t expect was how easy it would be to just play where I wanted to play. This series has always been spectacularly fun, and it continues to be so. Now I just know that I can do so where I want, when I want, and I don’t have to worry about the platforms getting in my way.