Tag: PC

Aragami Review

Aragami Review

First 15

The game opens into a hazy cutscene showing me something I’m sure is important, but without any sort of context I can’t tell what it’s supposed to mean.

Now I’m into the normal game, and it looks absolutely beautiful. The environment, the main character, everything looks stylized and yet realistic at the same time.

The game drops me right into it and quickly walks through teaching me how to use my abilities. The game also teaches me about being in shadow and to avoid the light.

The way they shows me what buttons to use is really neat. There are giant tablets in the world that have the instructions written on them. Surprisingly, it feels quite natural.

The audio is interesting. The dialogue is in, I think, Japanese but it’s run through an audio filter so it sounds a little like characters are talking underwater. It reminds me of Okami. Of course there’s a lot about this game that reminds me of Okami, which I can only think is a good thing.

I finally got caught out, and discovered that not only do I die in a hit, but the soldiers with swords can use them to fire a wave of light to hit me from range.

After a little more trial and error, I found that once spotted I have a second or two to respond before an enemy either kills me or blows a horn to summon reinforcements.

Story

The character Aragami is a conjured shadow of vengence meant to exact death to the enemies of the princess and to free her from her confinement. One interesting thing about this setup is it completely bypasses the discussion about the morality of killing people. You were summoned to kill the Kaiho, the army of light, and so that is what you’re going to do. The story does go much deeper as you progress, but if I try to describe it then I’ll end up spoiling it.

The reversal of light and dark is also interesting since you are the creature of shadow and your enemies are the army of light. Even the gameplay supports this since shadows are good and light is bad.

Interface

Aragami is a beautiful game, and part of that is the lack of a UI for most of the game. Rather than have a HUD, the designers placed everything the player needs to know on Aragami’s cape, similar to Dead Space. For the most part this works well, though occasionally I had trouble seeing how many special ability charges I had whenever the cape got twisted up.

I wish the camera didn’t auto-rotate to point towards the objective when I push C to have Korasu show me the objectives. Often times I would bring up the indicators so that I could look for ability scrolls, which meant I first had to drag the camera away from the goal marker before I could look around me. They need to add the ability to toggle the auto-rotate off in the options menu.

I like that each of the special abilities has its own charges. This encourages players to make use of the more unique abilities since if they don’t then the charges will simply go to waste.

I found it strange that the game uses (at least on the computer) E for special and F for use. In most other games E is the use key and F is the special key (or melee key in most shooters). A number of times I found myself hitting E to use something, then had to take a moment to remember that F is use. Most of the time I had Kunai equipped so mistakenly hitting E didn’t cost me anything. But I could certainly see people wasting a special ability charge by mistake if they’re used to the keys being reversed. Unfortunately there’s no way to remap the controls.

I wish there was a way to know if I killed all of the guards in a level before I leave since that is one of the optional objectives. I ended one of the levels having missed two guards. I missed those last two guards not because I thought they would be too difficult, but simply because I didn’t know that I had passed by them.

Occasionally you’ll get a checkpoint right before a cutscene (instead of right after it), which is odd. But since you can skip cutscenes, it’s really just a minor annoyance.

Gameplay

Aragami is overpowered. The game goes out of its way to give you some insanely powerful abilities. Not only can you teleport around from shadow to shadow, but you can also create shadows almost anywhere and then teleport to that spot. And then there’s all of the other abilities like the kunai which is a ranged instant kill that never misses. Despite this, you are still going to get killed/spotted. The end result is that whenever you do fail, it absolutely feels like your own fault rather than the game doing something cheap. After all, with such powerful abilities, there should be no reason for you to fail. I feel like this is the real secret to the game that makes the gameplay feel so good.

My one big complaint with the game is that there’s aren’t enough checkpoints in the early levels. Each level is divided up into several areas. In a stealth game such as Aragami, each area is like a puzzle. You keep working at it, learning where enemies are, where they patrol, what areas you have access to, the best places to lure enemies to in order to take them out, until eventually you find the right combination of patience and action to solve the puzzle. The problem is, once you solve a puzzle, it becomes far less interesting having to solve it a second time. You would think that there would be a checkpoint after each area, but often you have to clear through two or even three areas before you reach a checkpoint. This can lead to a situation where you clear the first area, only to fail in the second area and thus have to re-clear the first area. Each time you have to re-clear an area, your enjoyment of that area goes down. The most times I had to clear an area was three times (meaning I died twice in the next area), but after the third time I honestly hated the first area since it took a while to clear and wasn’t interesting at all since I already knew exactly how to solve it. I would like to see the developers be a little more liberal with their checkpoints.

I feel like a lot of stealth games do this and yet every time I see it I cannot help but think it is a mistake. That is, they give the character the ability to go invisible. I feel like granting invisibility to players is a poor design decision because it allows them to go into a state where they no longer have to care about anything. The enemies stop being dangerous, players don’t care if they’re out in the open, and all around it undermines the very foundation of the game itself. Aragami is not the only game to fall into this trap. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided did the same thing, and that too I felt was a bad design decision. I tried out the stealth ability in Aragami and felt that it actually subtracted from the gameplay rather than enhanced it. After my test I decided to continue on as if the invisibility special ability didn’t exist, and I think I enjoyed the game more as a result. I personally would like to see this ability get removed completely. Though the designers would need to double check that each mission can be cleared without killing any enemies (one of the optional objectives) without the use of invisibility.

The ability to disappear corpses should be part of the base kit for Aragami. It’s one of those abilities that has such a massive impact on the game it seems like it’s too important to be considered optional. As for the ability itself, I do like that it doesn’t work on the corpses of enemies that die in direct light. It adds an extra bit of strategy to killing. Though once players gain access to the Shadow Kill special ability, they can use that instead since that ability does work in direct light.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you’re a fan of stealth games. The gameplay is solid, the levels are well laid out, and there’s a constant sense of danger as you go (so long as you play without using the invisibility special ability).

You will not like this game if you aren’t very patient and want a game with a lot of action. You spend a lot of time slinking around in the shadows, and if you get killed then you will have to repeat a bit to get back to where you were.

Aragami is an incredibly well made game. I know I’ve said this already but I can’t say enough about how beautiful the game is. The aesthetics make you want to explore the world, while the solid gameplay will make you truly feel like a master assassin. Aragami is one of those games that takes a core idea, stealth assassin, and successfully narrows down the mechanics to deliver a near perfect game.

World of Warcraft: Legion Raiding/Mythic+

World of Warcraft: Legion Raiding/Mythic+

Introduction

I have spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft as evidenced by my 259 mounts, 684 pets, and over 22,000 achievement points (before Legion). This is the third and final part of my review series on World of Warcraft: Legion and will primarily focus on my guild’s first experience through the newest raid of the Emerald Nightmare in addition to some thoughts and comments on Mythic+ dungeons. I lead the raids as well as main tank for my guild as a Blood Death Knight.

First 15

I send out invites for everyone who accepted the calendar invite and quickly the raid starts to form. It’s been months since we stopped raiding Warlords, so to see the familiar sight of people getting read to raid is invigorating. It takes a little to get everyone summoned to the instance since we keep having to stop and kill the mobs that people end up kiting into us as they run to the stone. It’s a little annoying, but there are tons of people, so things die real fast.

The officers have decided that we want to try to run the raid on Heroic Mode from the start. Once we get everyone summoned we run inside the instance and suddenly the first boss is right there! I kind of expected to have to clear a whole mess of trash mobs before the first boss as we have had to do in past expansions. I really like that we can get right into it.

First I spend some time to do some general housekeeping to welcome the new people to the guild and to lay out the rules. With that done, time to pull trash. Right away things go wrong and we pull 2 of the adds at once. Once they start dealing their AoE damage, people start dying. Fortunately players can resurrect nearby to jump back in. Things are crazy for a bit until the first mob dies. After that things go much smoother.

Our guild has a tradition we call the “no strat pull”. It’s exactly what it sounds like, no strategy, just go. I set up a countdown from 10, and then we pull the boss. It becomes very obvious who watched the strategy videos posted on the guild forums and who did not. Needless to say, we do not defeat the boss on the no strat pull. We wipe up the fight, reset, and now it’s time to explain the fight to those who didn’t watch the videos, and to explain specifically how we will handle the fight.

Story

I really like the story for the Emerald Nightmare. Players have already quested through Val’Sharah and witnessed the devastation of the Nightmare’s influence. They saw Cenarius, now one of the raid bosses, get taken by the Nightmare. Druids players saw the same happen to Ursoc, another raid boss, during their quest to gain the Guardian artifact weapon. Players dove into Darkheart Thicket to defeat the Shade of Xavius. Now they’re ready to cleanse the Emerald Dream and finally put an end to Xavius himself once and for all.

And of course there’s the excitement of wondering what’s going to happen to Ursoc and Cenarius. Will we be able to break the Nightmare’s hold over them? Or will we be forced to kill them as we’ve had to do for others who fell into the darkness? And what consequences will killing Xavius have? In theory it should allow the druids to purify the Emerald Dream and push back the Nightmare, but nothing is ever that simple.

Interface

It’s hard to talk about raiding without talking about the addon Deadly Boss Mods (some people use Big Wigs). Deadly Boss Mods (DBM) is an addon that helps players to keep track of what’s going on. Almost every single player who does any kind of serious raiding has this addon or one just like it. The debate about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is actually a rather contentious one. One the one hand, the addon can trivialize some mechanics, practically telling the player exactly what to do in any given situation. On the other hand it gives Blizzard more leniency when it comes to designing mechanics since the addon can help do things like show players exactly what 8 yards is if players need to spread out. In the end it’s hard to say if it’s good or bad for raiding as a whole, but it’s certainly not going anywhere.

That said, players should be able to clearly pick out what’s going on in a fight without having to rely on the addon. In this regard Blizzard has done a great job so far. Effects on the floor are clearly visible. On the first boss, when the debuff or one of the large bugs deals its area damage the graphic clearly shows how big of an area it is hitting. Some of the adds on the Dragons of Nightmare can be a little hard to see at times, but fortunately their nameplates are clearly visible. Blizzard just did a big improvement pass on nameplates this expansion which appears to be working nicely.

One of the best things to come out of Warlords of Draenor was the boss skip mechanic. Players receive a quest in the dungeon which requires them to reach a certain point in the instance 4 times. Once they do, from then on they can skip directly to that point without having to clear the bosses before it. This mechanic is a godsend to raids like ours who don’t have the time to slog through 6+ bosses we’ve already killed for several weeks in order to access to the bosses we haven’t cleared yet. I’m extremely grateful Blizzard kept this mechanic from the last expansion and hope it’s here to stay.

Gameplay

First Mythic+. The new style of running dungeons is interesting, and reminds me of Diablo III greater rifts. But one of the big differences between the two games comes from the fact that in World of Warcraft players are constantly getting better and better gear all the way up through to the end of the expansion. Likely because of this, Blizzard went a step further in tuning the difficulty of Mythic+ dungeons by adding in keywords. Keywords add an extra mechanic to the dungeon. The first week it was Bolster in which mobs that died would buff all other nearby mobs. This led us to crowd controlling some mobs, then killing the rest as a group so that they all died at about the same time. It certainly made things more interesting, which makes me wonder what’s going to happen when we start having 2 keywords at once (or 3, or 4).

The one issue I have with Mythic+ is depleted keystones. Right now, the keystone depletes the moment you start the run. A depleted keystone means you are no longer eligible for loot using that keystone. This is true even if, for some reason, you were unable to finish the run and never got any loot in the first place. The first Mythic+ I did went off without a hitch. We got to the end, killed the last boss, got our loot, and my keystone upgraded. But in the second dungeon we did, I started having internet troubles and we had to abandon the run before we even got to the first boss. After that, my keystone was worthless. It depleted the moment we started the run, but due to my internet troubles we never got any loot from using it. And now that it was depleted we couldn’t get any loot from it if we tried again. No one is going to want to run on a depleted keystone. In a different run doing Vault of the Wardens, when we fought Ash’golm one of our party members got knocked off the platform. Rather than getting ported back onto the platform or dying she instead got stuck in the pit. She could run around freely but there was no way out. When she tried to use the “Character Stuck” function it ported her not just out of the dungeon but all the way to Suramar. So she had to fly/run back to the instance, all while the countdown clock was going. I doubt we would have started over at that point, but it would have been nice to have the option if something similar had happened near the start. I would like to see the keystones only deplete themselves if the group succeeds in defeating the last boss of the dungeon and receiving loot but does not do so in the time allotted.

This is specific to Vault of the Wardens, but I personally feel like the moving walls Cordana Felsong summons are a bit too random. There were times when the gaps were perfectly spaced and we barely even had to move, and others where we actually had to run back through a wall we’d just run through in order to run through the gap in the second wall and then re-run through the gap in the first wall. This created some wild swings in terms of difficulty that I feel are bit too extreme. I really like the Cordana Felsong fight (it could practically be a raid boss), but I’d just like to see a little less randomness in the walls. Maybe consider having the gap in the wall be at least partially based on where the gap was in the wall before it.

Now onto raiding. My guild, Keine Neuen, only raids Friday night starting at 7:30 and going until sometime a little after 11 server time. We are not a hardcore guild, but rather our guild is a place for people with busy lives who also enjoy raiding. By the end of the first raid night our guild managed to defeat both Nythendra and the Dragons of Nightmare on Heroic Mode and also went back and did Nythendra on Normal Mode.

The first boss, Nythendra, was fairly simple in terms of mechanics. Not a huge surprise given that it is the first boss of the expansion. The Dragons of Nightmare was quite a bit more involved and had a lot of moving parts. At first it really did seem overwhelming. There are adds galore, plants spawning for someone to stand next to, and then the dragon in the air summoning exploding spirits or fearing the entire raid. This is the sign of a good raid encounter. Every encounter should feel overwhelming, should feel like it’s impossible, that is until you start breaking it down. Once you go through the mechanics and players start to learn what to focus on, slowly but surely things start to feel more and more organized. Mechanics that once seemed impossible start to get handled correctly and little by little you get the boss’ health lower and lower until finally on one pull it dies. Dragons of Nightmare felt exactly like that. Over the course of the night, what began as a complicated mess of abilities and adds turned into an organized attempt and eventually a kill. If the rest of the bosses follow the same pattern, then raiding is going to be quite a bit of fun.

Fun, that is, unless you’re a tank. The four worst words in the tanking lexicon: taunt swap on debuff. One of the greatest weaknesses of World of Warcraft raids has always been the tanking mechanics. Occasionally Blizzard will go out of its way to give the tanks something really cool to do, such as the Socrethar fight in Hellfire Citadel where the tank gets to drive a giant mech. But most fights tend to come down to watching a debuff and taunting at the right time. Each expansion Blizzard promises to make tanking more interesting, but if the Emerald Nightmare is anything to go by, then it sounds like Blizzard is just going to give tanks more of the same. The two bosses we did both came down to taunt swapping on a debuff. To be fair, the first boss is fairly simplistic for everyone (not just the tanks) and is meant to be an easy introduction to raids since it is the first boss of the entire expansion. But then we did Dragons of Nightmare, which requires the tanks to move closer, and taunt swap when they get enough stacks of the debuff. And looking at the dungeon journal entries for the other bosses, Il’gynoth has adds with Eye of Corruption (stacking debuff), Ursoc has Overwhelm (stacking debuff), Cenarius has Spear of Nightmares (stacking debuff). Seeing a pattern?

The ultimate problem with stacking debuff mechanics is that tanks never really interact with these debuffs. The tank just holds onto them until their timer expires. During that time, all the debuff does is prevent the tank from doing something. What tanks want, or at least tanks like me, is for the debuff to enable them to do something. The tanking mechanic, whether it be a debuff or not, should be an opportunity for the tank to excel, not a time during which they sit on the sidelines and pretend they are a DPS character (and a bad one at that). If a mechanic puts stacks of a debuff on a tank, then there should be an interesting mechanic for getting rid of those stacks. The better the tank, the more stacks that tank can clear off before they need to pick up the boss again. And if, for instance, clearing stacks has some raid benefit such as each stack cleared gives 5% increased damage, a damage absorption shield to the raid, mana regen for the healers, etc. then that makes the tank’s role both interesting and rewarding. But right now there’s no benefit to being good with debuff mechanics, just a penalty if the tank messes up. We’re still early in the expansion, so there is plenty of time and plenty more raid bosses to come. Maybe we’ll get another Socrethar style fight to shake things up. But past experience has taught tanks to expect a lot of staring at debuffs and pushing the taunt button. Time will tell.

Conclusion

You will enjoy raiding if you like working with a large group towards a common goal. Raids are the places where being part of a guild truly shines. You will enjoy Mythic+ if you enjoy a challenge that only needs a small group of people to tackle.

You will not enjoy raiding if you don’t like relying on other people to overcome a challenge. Raids are truly a group activity and require coordination and communication. You will not enjoy Mythic+ if you don’t like being up against a countdown clock.

The two raid fights our guild did so far were fun. I’ve always enjoyed working with the other members of the guild to defeat a boss. It creates a sense of comradery between the guild members that just can’t be replicated by any other activity in the game. The boss fights look amazing, though I’m not too happy with the over-reliance on stacking debuffs. Mythic+ still has a few bugs to work out, but so far I like the system and plan to run many, many more with my guildmates. All in all Blizzard has done an amazing job with this expansion and I cannot wait to see what else is in store for us down the line.