Normally I rant here about numbers. Sometimes I fuss about progressive politics and how it relates to games.
Today I am here to be grumpy about mood lighting.
In Battle For Azeroth there are a real variety of dungeons with a wild expanse of aesthetics and styles. I like that! There is a silly pirate town with a pirate boss riding a parrot, a dank prison on a remote island, and a goblin factory / research lab full of robots and mad scientists.
When I think about which dungeons I want to visit again and again though, there is an obvious pattern. The dungeons I want to visit most are the ones where I can see what is going on.
Waycrest Manor is the best example of this. The aesthetic of the place is a old manor house infested with witches, ensorcelled servants, magically animated constructs, and horrors. It is dark, gloomy, and hits the look perfectly. Heck, it even has an endless lightning storm going on so that when you are outside in the courtyard fires start from lightning strikes. Great!
But you spend most of your time in this dungeon in a narrow corridor with dark brown walls, dark brown floor, dark brown ceiling, and dark monsters. Sometimes you have to go into an alternate realm that changes the colouration of the place, and that places a dark purple tint on everything. It is maddening! It is so hard to see what is going on, and when mechanics require you to dodge stuff on the ground that makes it even worse.
With perfect room lighting it is workable, but my computer is in a room with windows, and under those conditions Waycrest Manor is just unplayable. I can't see anything that is going on, because the entire screen is just a mess of darkness.
There are two ways that restricting vision usually happens - either lighting, as described above, or by restricting space. Narrow hallways and low ceilings can be a struggle, but they are workable. Low light conditions are, by themselves, a thing I am okay with. But bother together is just misery and I hate it.
It is no coincidence that I want to run Freehold over and over. It is outdoors with lots of room to move, has good lighting so I can see what is happening, and even includes a variety of routes to choose from in an open format.
I get that people want a variety of aesthetics. I can see the appeal to an old manor house, or a dank dungeon. But Blizzard needs to resist the urge to make restricted areas also dark areas, even though that totally makes sense. It just causes me to rage at the computer, desperately playing Battle With The Interface trying to figure out what the heck is going on. I don't mind challenging mechanics and tricky choices - in fact, I quite like it! But squinting at my computer, being unable to know what is even happening, doesn't feel like challenging or interesting - just frustrating.
Even if I get less variety in style and look, I want open format dungeons where I can choose my route, see what I am doing, and feel like I have choices. Narrow dungeon corridors are a staple of old school fantasy gaming, but they mostly function to limit player choice, and that just isn't a compelling reason to continue to include them in the future.
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Thursday, July 23, 2020
To Infinity and Beyond!
The Flautist and I decided to alter the rules of Terraforming Mars a couple of weeks ago. We wanted to try the game with an alternate end condition to see how it made things feel. Instead of ending the game when all the terraforming tracks ran out, we decided to end it the turn the last card was drawn from the deck. We played with basic set and preludes.
We knew that this change would lead to higher scores and different card evaluations, but we didn't anticipate quite how out of control it would get.
The early game was fairly normal, though we did play more card draw than usual. How much card draw I play depends a lot on what I draw, my income, etc. and at times I don't play any because I already have places to spend all the money I have. I knew the game would be a long one though, so I played every card draw effect available.
The heat ran out on turn 9, and the other tracks maxed out on 12. We then spent a couple turns filling up the remaining board with cities, then greeneries. By 14 the board was completely full except for a few spots allocated to specific cards, and at this point the great majority of cards were dead draws. Thermalist was in play, but I was ahead by 100 heat, so heat and energy production were completely dead. Our incomes were 135 and 136 counting steel and titanium, so there was no way we could possibly find ways to spend all of our money. Miner was in play too, but since I had 10 titanium / turn and 9 steel / turn, there was no way for me to lose it. Greeneries were also impossible, so plant production was also moot. We looked at our boards for a minute, declared me the winner of Miner and Thermalist, and set aside our boards entirely, declaring all resources infinite.
For the last 3 turns of the game we sat there drawing as many cards as possible, putting the cards we drew straight onto the table, and waiting to see who would get Noctis / Mohole / Phobos to be able to claim Landlord. I got lucky and collected 2 of the 3 and walked away with all three awards.
The final score was 192 to 170 in my favour. Key to my victory was scooping all three awards but only having paid for two of them. I got 23 points from animals, and roughly 60 raw terraform rating, as well as 16 points from Physics Complex. Honestly the game was a ton of fun, though it did take a long damn time to finish.
My long term takeaways are that the game as we played it is kind of stupid. Infinite money makes much of the game feel ridiculous, and it was too long. However, I actually quite liked knowing that I would get to play all the things, and I enjoyed knowing that we would see all the cards. I think that the game would be a lot of fun if it was slightly shorter, and I have a couple ideas on how to do that. First off you could just have players draw five cards a turn each round, which would shorten the game by about two rounds, shaving off the ridiculous infinite resources time. Also you could simply declare that just like the solo game, the two player game lasts exactly 14 generations. That is still a long game with lots of opportunity to do fun things but you would never get to infinity, and filling the board would be possible but by no means guaranteed.
Doing a 14 turn game seems like a cool variant, but I really like seeing all the cards. Maybe we could just flip over 3 cards every turn and trash them out of the game, so at least we know that all the cards in the deck will be seen by game end. Not too sure on the best way to achieve that goal, but this kludge kind of gets there.
We knew that this change would lead to higher scores and different card evaluations, but we didn't anticipate quite how out of control it would get.
The early game was fairly normal, though we did play more card draw than usual. How much card draw I play depends a lot on what I draw, my income, etc. and at times I don't play any because I already have places to spend all the money I have. I knew the game would be a long one though, so I played every card draw effect available.
The heat ran out on turn 9, and the other tracks maxed out on 12. We then spent a couple turns filling up the remaining board with cities, then greeneries. By 14 the board was completely full except for a few spots allocated to specific cards, and at this point the great majority of cards were dead draws. Thermalist was in play, but I was ahead by 100 heat, so heat and energy production were completely dead. Our incomes were 135 and 136 counting steel and titanium, so there was no way we could possibly find ways to spend all of our money. Miner was in play too, but since I had 10 titanium / turn and 9 steel / turn, there was no way for me to lose it. Greeneries were also impossible, so plant production was also moot. We looked at our boards for a minute, declared me the winner of Miner and Thermalist, and set aside our boards entirely, declaring all resources infinite.
For the last 3 turns of the game we sat there drawing as many cards as possible, putting the cards we drew straight onto the table, and waiting to see who would get Noctis / Mohole / Phobos to be able to claim Landlord. I got lucky and collected 2 of the 3 and walked away with all three awards.
The final score was 192 to 170 in my favour. Key to my victory was scooping all three awards but only having paid for two of them. I got 23 points from animals, and roughly 60 raw terraform rating, as well as 16 points from Physics Complex. Honestly the game was a ton of fun, though it did take a long damn time to finish.
My long term takeaways are that the game as we played it is kind of stupid. Infinite money makes much of the game feel ridiculous, and it was too long. However, I actually quite liked knowing that I would get to play all the things, and I enjoyed knowing that we would see all the cards. I think that the game would be a lot of fun if it was slightly shorter, and I have a couple ideas on how to do that. First off you could just have players draw five cards a turn each round, which would shorten the game by about two rounds, shaving off the ridiculous infinite resources time. Also you could simply declare that just like the solo game, the two player game lasts exactly 14 generations. That is still a long game with lots of opportunity to do fun things but you would never get to infinity, and filling the board would be possible but by no means guaranteed.
Doing a 14 turn game seems like a cool variant, but I really like seeing all the cards. Maybe we could just flip over 3 cards every turn and trash them out of the game, so at least we know that all the cards in the deck will be seen by game end. Not too sure on the best way to achieve that goal, but this kludge kind of gets there.
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