For Extra Difficulty, Struggle With Controls or Concepts

The best way to empathize with complete newcomers to the MMO genre who are not so much concerned with high level concepts like ‘levels’ and ‘xp’ but are struggling with the more immediate concerns of “how do I move” and “how do I look around” and “why can’t I hit this thing that is hitting me, halp” is to put yourself into a similar situation.

Like trying a sports game, for example, only to find out that each NPC is separately modeled to have different areas of strengths and weaknesses.

I guess that’s why my attempt at one of the Madden games when I was in a mild fascination with American football phase failed rather miserably.

Mind you, I live in that majority of the world where football means kicking a round ball into a net at one end of the field. I did always find ‘soccer’ rather boring and individualistic, where the art of falling down and making it look like you’ve been fouled horribly was generally more exercised than teamwork. Watching the goalkeepers was the most interesting thing of the interminably long match of running up and down a field after a ball for hours as they at least had a role different from the other men on the field (Stop the ball, not kick the ball.)

So it was much more fascinating to discover that American football had teams with an intricate breakdown of many different roles – people who caught the ball, ran the ball, threw the ball, kicked the ball and those that didn’t even have the primary role of doing anything with the ball but blocked and interfered with people trying to do stuff with the ball.

It did, however, take some homework of reading the highly intricate rules online, slowly deciphering out scoring and everything else, before I could turn on the TV and not have a match be complete gobbledygook. I did eventually puzzle out enough to develop a casual fan’s appreciation of the game.

The PC game, though… Well.

Plays defeated me.

I could manage controlling one player on the easiest setting and bullrush my clumsy way through ten yards, more or less. Then all these complicated pages of the playbook would pop up with no explanations, Xs and Os and dotted lines and there would be a time limit to select one of them. Randomly picking plays and going ahead with whatever the hell I decided to do in the moment worked about as well as you might expect.

—

This month’s infuriating difficult game attempt is another go at Dark Souls.

I’m not much of a console player. A long time ago, my ISP had a free PS3 promotion if you contracted with them for 2 years, and well, one was -already- paying for internet monthly anyway. It was a well-timed promotion because Heavy Rain was a PS3 exclusive, and god, did I want to play that game badly. While haunting the local games store for a copy of Heavy Rain, I saw a decently priced copy of Dark Souls and decided, what the hell, let’s see what the difficulty hype was all about.

That very first attempt was pretty much a disaster.

First, there was the encounter with the Abyss Demon, armed only with a broken sword hilt. Yes, I am aware in retrospect that it is meant as a lesson in running away being the better part of valor. I can see the design now, what with the brightly illuminated doorway and all that.

At the time, I had bought into the hype that you could defeat anything, as long as you reacted properly. A dozen deaths feeling out its patterns later, I had indeed found the exit door, but dammit, I didn’t WANT to run away.

I’m doing 4 damage to this thing each hit! If I keep behind him, he doesn’t hurt me! Surely there must be some kind of masochistic achievement award for actually defeating this thing earlier!

Several more dozen deaths later, rubbing in the fact that I didn’t have much skill with the controls and that it was damned difficult to consistently stay behind this boss without getting clubbed into nonexistence, I was getting motion sick and very tired of stone textures.

With the bitter taste of defeat in my mouth, I finally ran away to continue the rest of the tutorial. Except that didn’t get very much further besides killing a few skeletons, and then running in circles, completely lost and unable to figure out how to get past a bunch of locked doors. I couldn’t even go back to play with the Abyss Demon again because a locked gate had slammed down behind me.

After the better part of half an hour or more, I may have finally googled for help, only to realize that I’d missed a new hole in the wall that had been knocked open by a round boulder rolling down some stairs. Good grief, was this a game I was going to have to play with a walkthrough constantly in hand?

Talked to NPC, unlocked door, killed more skeletons, killed Abyss Demon at properly intended time, zoned to next zone.

Where one was promptly greeted with arrows and flaming projectiles and proceeded to plummet to my death trying to dodge them.

I stopped that play session there, having had enough motion sickness and repeated deaths for the day. And never quite felt compelled enough to power up the PS3 specifically just to play it again.

—

Cycle forward in time to now.

I like to think that playing GW2 has given me a new appreciation for watching mob animation tells, trying to understand their combat patterns and practicing getting the timing right on appropriate button responses (like dodging or parrying, etc.)

I do also own a copy of Dark Souls on the PC, having picked it up for cheap during one Steam or bundle sale or another.

Perhaps it was time to give it another go.

The PC port of Dark Souls has received some criticism for being a rather lazy port. The default screen resolution isn’t great, all the in-game tutorial messages are hardcoded to still show you Xbox buttons rather than whatever controls you’re really using (which makes everything a fun guessing game of hmm, which key represents the green B or the yellow Y?) and the default mouselook camera is alarmingly wonky.

Best played with a gamepad, say the majority of forum commenters.

No problem, I have a very functional Logitech Dual Action gamepad that has stood me in good stead playing PC ports like Indigo Prophecy and various Japanese RPGs.

I gamely chop, run, spin, block my way through the first zone, slowly dredging up from the recesses of my memory all the moments I remembered from my first playthrough. I notice with some pleasure that my GW2 experience has given me better observational skills with regards to combat animations, but this increased observational prowess also applies to myself… and my failure to appropriately press the buttons my brain is telling me to tactically press.

Dodge now! Strike now! No, not -that- strike, the other one! Block. BLOCK! Not parry! Oi, what buttons are your fingers pressing?!

The struggle extends to navigating menus. Firstly, the default controller keybinds are not mapped intuitively to my particular gamepad. The instructions on screen say ‘press start’ or ‘press select’ to bring up some menu or other. I hammer away at my start and select keys, button 9 and 10, and nothing happens. Trial and error reveals that I have to press down on my right thumbstick to bring up the menu.

I’m used to PS3 controls where pressing the bottommost button selects and the rightmost button cancels. Except here, the rightmost button selects, and trial and error again reveals a different button cancels.

I flip open the keybind settings to see everything is mapped onto keyboard keys and doesn’t apply to the gamepad. Aaaargh.

Now, of course, I could slowly and patiently use the Logitech provided profiler to remap all my gamepad buttons to match whatever twisted configuration Dark Souls is using, and then tweak it again so that it feels more intuitive for me.

But it also occurs to me that I’m not that in tune with a controller either. While I can coordinate movements using the left thumbstick while controlling camera with the right thumbstick, they’re not as smooth as they could be with WASD and mouselook. Surely some of that lurching causes accidental hits that might be avoided, not to mention increases my motion sickness queasiness when the camera isn’t acting like I expect it to.

So I put down the gamepad and try it with mouse and keyboard.

Which actually has potential. I move better and more confidently.

Except the mouselook is jittery and I’d like to block with -this- mouse button but the in-game keybinds don’t seem to support that, and a dozen other key binding niggles interfere with any more enjoyment of the game and desire to progress.

On the bright side, players have come up with unofficial fixes for this poor PC port.

Except now I have to stop the game, figure out which fixes I want/need, download the fixes, apply them, test and troubleshoot problems and so on.

One fix, DSfix, fixes the poor screen resolution.

But oh, remember to turn off AA first or you’ll get a black screen. So I start the game, turn off AA, then stop the game. Then apply the fix.

Another fix, DSmfix, fixes the mouse camera issues for those who like to use mouse/keyboard controls. Note the M for mouse. Small, but crucial difference.

I start the game to test again, and while the screen resolution fix is working beautifully, the mouse fix doesn’t seem to have kicked in. Stop the game. More forums and readme.txts later, it turns out I have to edit an .ini file to have it included as well.

Start the game. Ahh, now the camera is moving at a more suitable speed for mouse look. And the mouse fix has also provided a nice customizable GUI for mouse keybinds and an intuitive default setting.

Except… I run dual monitors and my mouse is escaping from the Dark Souls full screen window when I look to the right. When I left click to attack, I end up alt-tabbing out to desktop, with rather fatal results in the now minimized window.

Wut. I try windowed mode, but the cursor still runs off and I have to keep moving it back to the left again. It’s almost playable already, but for this last little niggling detail! I gamely try to progress a little further in the game this way, but it’s distracting and throws me off. *sigh* Stop the game.

More forums searching and reading later, I finally find a fix that involves editing the dsfix.ini and enabling a ‘capture cursor’ setting.

Phew.

Now I can finally start PLAYing the game, right?

I’m putzing around in the Undead Burg, finally feeling like all my deaths are at least fairly earned mistakes and experimenting with various tactics to deal with differently armed skeletons.

An invader has arrived in your realm!

Wut?!! Okay, I sort of had the impression that PvP was possible in this game if you were connected online (and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to shut off Dark Souls’ connection either) but I also had the impression that it would be LATER, not when one was in the second zone armed with starter gear.

I knew that I had one item of some kind in my inventory that had text along the lines of send an invader back to their realm, but it was the only one I had and hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to use.

So I just waited.

In strolls some burly guy outlined in red with the LARGEST FUCKING hammer I have ever seen, and probably all kitted out in ‘finished the game’ gear.

*sigh*

I just hold down block and wait for inevitable death.

It’s not like I really have anything to lose. I’d already been dying twice in a row repeatedly to second zone skeletons.

Guy gestures a few times, tries to say Hello.

I haven’t the heart to tell him that I don’t even know how to use the gesture menu. Just kill the noob and get it over with, eh?

He circles me, probably wondering if this is some kind of elaborate trap. Or maybe just laughing too hard to fight. Or taking pity on me. Whatever.

Eventually, he hits me twice with the hammer (hey, holding block prevented me from getting one shot!) and then casts some kind of massively pyroclastic spell that fills the whole screen in flames.

Well, it’s a change from getting stabbed to death by skeletons, I guess.

After getting shot in the back by various archers, then getting gibbed by the Taurus Demon, which solidifies the suspicion that I’m really going to have to play this game with heavy reference to a walkthrough, it occurs to me that I don’t even have the faintest clue what the enigmatic words “Reverse Hollowing” and “Kindle” mean when I sit down at a bonfire, and what does Humanity do anyway?

I quit and save the game, then start googling for a Dark Souls manual. I find some player tips and a wiki instead, which are likely more helpful.

It is then I actually learn that I managed to invite the invader in by having experimented with Reverse Hollowing once, which had the effect of making myself look human. Well, that was totally obvious.

Not.

I’ll be playing Dark Souls again. But not until I read several website’s worth of information, tips, advice and walkthroughs, I suspect.

I was really just expecting execution and reaction sort of difficulty, rather than all this homework.

Mob Wars LCN: Of Fake Friends and Progress Bars

It was around five years ago that I watched one of my work colleagues mess around with Mob Wars.

Being somewhat of a privacy and pseudonym advocate, I already eyed Facebook with great suspicion and wasn’t at all inclined to give “Facebook games” a fair shake at all.

“Is that it?” I asked. “You just click buttons and watch progress bars go up?”

That didn’t seem much better than Progress Quest.

Hell, Progress Quest streamlined all the unnecessary clicking for you (moar efficiency! mouse button spared!) and you just had to sit back and enjoy the concept of gaining xp and getting your next level up and becoming numerically stronger over time.

Then there was the friends spamming problem, aka How to Ensure You Have No More Friends in a Hurry.

Wanna be stronger? Click this button to invite all your friends to join you and play the game!

Ah, social networking, aka inviting spam from friends into your life.

One naturally thought ahead a few steps. a) I’m an introvert, I don’t make as many casual friends and acquaintances as an extrovert. b) It seems extremely rude and crass to spam all your real life friends with an invitation to a “game” made for low-impulse control individuals to part with their cash. c) Therefore, I’m never going to have as many allies as someone more connected will. d) Therefore, they are going to outnumber me and gank me whenever they want.

And of course, there was the disreputable pay-to-win aroma wafting off a cash shop selling virtual items for insane amounts of money with no more effort that inputting a few numbers on a spreadsheet. At least for cosmetic options in MMOs, some artist had to slave away at a 3D model and spend time making it look good.

This very quickly led down the Wargames scenario of the only way to win is not to play at all.

And boggling at people who still were ignorant enough to play anyway.

—

Cycle ahead five years, and strangely enough, I find myself dabbling away at one of its variants.

Concept-wise, it’s quite alluring thematically. You’re a pretend gangster building up a mob of your own, conducting a variety of virtual crimes across the globe with a click of the button, rabble-rousing and doing the equivalent of a drive-by shooting with your homies on some other unfortunate mobster.

(Nevermind that that mobster has friends of their own and may just come after you in a nuclear escalation scenario where there is no winner. We won’t think ahead that far.)

What made it suddenly more acceptable to experiment with?

Choice of venue, for one thing. No Facebook.

Mob Wars: La Cosa Nostra has made it onto Kongregate. Yep, the social gaming site of 1001+ flash games.

Now your real life and your game accounts don’t have to mix.

Furthermore, having the backbone of connected Kongregate gamers with chat rooms makes it easier to get around the “friending” hurdle.

Yes, some time ago, I learned from Tobold that it is indeed possible to make a fake Facebook account for the sole purpose of playing Facebook games, find websites and forums where you can find a load of like-minded people sharing codes and add all these ‘fake friends’ to mutually help each other out.

Except that seemed like a ridiculous amount of effort to go through to play a not-very-good game to begin with, and Facebook could fry your account any time they felt like it, erasing any and all progress and time invested.

The advantage of fake friends, of course, is shared interest in only one thing. The game which you are currently playing. It’s pretty much like a casual pickup group where you don’t know at all who these people are, except that everyone is interested in getting to the end and getting loot. And that’s good enough for everybody’s purposes.

Maybe you’ll encounter some of them a few more times over time, and get to enjoy their company and become real friends, but for now, strangers with a shared purpose is okay.

Kongregate shortcuts that process by allowing you access to a network of people currently playing that very game. The chatroom fills up every so often with random alphanumeric letters that an observer on the side might think are bots speaking in tongues or unwanted spam, but the players tolerate non-repeated chatcodes because each is a potential ally for someone (perhaps even yourself. After all, the maximum limit of fake friends starts at 500 and goes up to 1000 as you gain levels.)

What this does for me is provide a certain amount of equity. Every player has access to these codes. Depending on how lazy or obsessive they are, they can cut and paste every code they encounter to accumulate their game allies or not.

The other thing they seem to have improved with the La Cosa Nostra variant is the pacing. According to the Wikipedia article, the rate of xp gain is sped up. It’s quite normal to gain at least one level a day, and most likely, more. This gives Achievement seekers the kick they are looking for when they play with incrementing progress bars.

As mentioned, I don’t have much Killer or Socializer interest in me, so how long I stay engaged with the thing is debatable – the “whole prey on people weaker than you, get arse kicked by people stronger than you, group up for safety and to gang up on others” concept doesn’t hold long term appeal for me.

But the Explorer in me is actually surprised to find a certain amount of depth where I initially assumed was none to minimal.

Where there are numbers, there are efficiency calculations.

And boy, are there a lot of numbers.

Is it better to pick this job for the energy spent and the return, or that other job over there?

You buy property for an initial cost, that gives you a return over time. Which one do you buy? How many?

Your total combat strength is made up of both your avatar carrying a loadout of weapons, armor and a vehicle and your fake mobsters using a stockpile of weapons, armor and vehicles that you have accumulated. And all that stuff is collected via a variety of different means, from crafting to loot drops to buying it off the store (via fake money or real money.) Certain items obtained quite easily have an upkeep cost that eats away at your in-game wealth over time, making it tricky to afford good combat stats.

Each individual players’ failure to master various aspects of these numerical calculations lead to holes one can take advantage of when attacking them.

Oh no, does this mean the game is doomed from an eventual attrition of sheep getting tired of being mauled by wolves?

I don’t know. Perhaps. But there are some pretty elegant mechanics in play. Tired of getting attacked constantly by someone stronger than you?

For a cost, you can set up ambushes to dissuade the other party. When they attack you, you get a 100% defence boost, which tends to really help you out. Except that cost is calculated based on how much property your opponent has bought, so some people can be much more expensive to ambush than others.

To add on to those fun nuclear escalation scenarios, there is also the hitlist. The other guy not getting the point? Well, place a bounty on his head. There’s bound to be -someone- else out there that’s stronger than him. Hitlists appear and vanish in seconds as they’re snatched up by people looking to increment achievements. Nothing like getting ganked to stop a wannabe ganker in their tracks.

What? Is the other guy hitlisting you now? Rig his ignition to stop his hitlisting of you, in what appears to be an equivalent of Ambush to counter the basic Attack.

What seems to end up happening most of the time is a mutual avoidance of this nuclear escalation, which is an interesting study in micro-politics.

When you run out of health, you drop into the hospital and are hidden from all attacks besides a very weak punch. Few people tend to bother you there unless they really have a hard-on for killing you dead. Most people tend to back down away from fights in this manner.

Everyone understands that a bunch of attacks will happen because people are trying to level up and fights give points for what are essentially guild dailies – fill a certain progress bar each day to contribute to your guild aka syndicate. You deal with it and/or work to be less of an easy target.

You get the most xp when fighting people that are very close to you in combat strength, which subtly steers most people away from ganking very weak targets unless there’s nothing else left to hit.

I understand that some people even form leveling buddy pacts where they mutually agree to keep hitting each other and healing up so that each can gain xp. One such wordless exchange got me an inroad into a guild I was trying to join. Happened one of the officers was in a position to keep bashing on me. I -could- have ambushed him to get him to stop, but what the hell, that’s not going to make him like me very much, is it?

So I healed up, let him keep whacking on me for xp, and whacked back a few times to get -my- xp in because he didn’t have sufficient defence to counter my attack either. All in all, over a day or two, he got some 150 attacks on me, and I got 50-75 attacks on him. This in a period where most people hit 5-9 times and stop because the other guy has vanished into the hospital. After that, I got an invitation to join him as an ally, and an invitation to his guild because he was impressed that I didn’t back down.

Uh, okay, whatever works. I was kinda letting you hit me for xp while I got some xp off you, but I got the guild invite that I wanted, so that’s cool.

The other thing that tickles me immensely are the limited phrases you can choose when sending a message to someone that is not your ally. If they are in your mob, you can type whatever you like to them. If they aren’t, you get to select three phrases from an interesting range:

A small selection thereof

There does seem to be leeway to construct quite a variety of messages to get a basic point across, but minimizes spam and abusive trashtalking while still allowing for -some- trashtalk if you are so inclined to pick a fight. And you can also ask them to join you as a Mob member so that you can better communicate with them and so on.

New players get 30 days of protection where only people within a certain level range can attack you and vice versa. I’ve yet to see what the atmosphere will be like with this protection off. Should be interesting.

At least for a while more.

Amazing what even something so basic and not really ‘game’ can offer for interesting ideas. Some of the solutions and interactions they’ve hit upon may have some relevancy to how people might interact in PvP sandboxes that aren’t just FFA all the time.

Anyway, it’s something to do while waiting for Tequatl for 45 minutes.