Gamer's Outpost Press (Archived)

by Steve Wright

As many gamers expected since its discovery, the infamous Destiny loot cave has been patched by developer Bungie. Fair call or not, the way in which Bungie did so is a a slap in the face to anyone playing the game.

If you’ve hit the level 20 soft cap in Destiny, you’ve discovered that you can continue to increase your level up to 30 by using armour equipped with Light. This armour will be Rare or above — so Rare, Legendary or Exotic — and at the moment is mostly obtained via in-game drops.

So, loot.

Saavy gamers found a certain cave in Old Russia that was a constant spawn source for Hive enemies. By headshotting anything that tried to come out of the cave, gamers created a nice little spot where enemies could be dispatched quickly and in a contained space. Sitting at the cave for a while meant you’d have a pocket with a couple Rare or maybe even Legendary Engrams to then redeem in an attempt to try to increase your Light score.

It wasn’t perfect; you still had to take those Engrams over to the Cryptarch and watch as he basically fucked you over more often than not, providing gear that was worse than the stuff you already had.

Anyway, that’s how the loot cave worked, now how Bungie has disrespected its players. Let’s delve into that, shall we?

In a post explaining that the cave had been nerfed, Bungie tried to do it in a jovial manner. They failed. Miserably.

“The social experience of a cave farming run is amazing: the herding to get a team of Guardians all behind the line and firing in the right direction, the rush to grab the loot, the scramble when the panic wave starts, the beckoning glow from inside the cave. The speed at which the community organized around this activity was inspiring and humbling to us.

“But shooting at a black hole for hours on end isn’t our dream for how Destiny is played,” Bungie said. “Our hope is that social engagement in public spaces is only one part of the Destiny experience. Expect changes soon which decrease the efficiency of cave farming and correspondingly increase engram drops from completing activities.”

In case you didn’t pick up on it, Bungie has just told us all that loot farming via the loot cave is wrong. We’re not meant to obtain gear in this manner. Rather, we’re meant to repeatedly play Destiny’s handful of (not-even-remotely-) story missions over and over again, hoping that we’ll get loot drops as we play. We’re meant to go and play through The Crucible, hoping for drops. We’re meant to go and play through increasingly more difficult — and still extremely repetitious — special playlists for drops. Call me entitled, but I don’t like being told how I need to play a game.

Here’s the problem, Bungie: your game is broken. I don’t want to go and play through Strikes and story missions and then find I get drops that are lower than my character can use. Or are for another character type altogether. I don’t want to slog through the Crucible, picking up the best kill/death ratio of the match, only to receive nothing post-game. I certainly don’t want to do that and find that the worst player of the entire match manages to get a Legendary Engram to boot. I can’t go and take on level 24 “Queen’s Wrath” missions by myself — because I get destroyed — and since you don’t offer matchmaking, I’m left to try to find friends that can play with me at the same time. Even then, this whole broken Light system means my friends have to hope for proper gear to get to level 24 or above or else they’re useless to me.

Hell, when two friends and I finally got to do “Queen’s Wrath” twice, I got the same damn Legendary helmet both times.

I know I can align with a faction and grind through the Crucible and Vanguard missions to buy gear, but all of the issues explained above still apply.

Everything about Destiny is frustrating at the moment, and Bungie, you have the audacity to tell us we’re playing your game wrong? I’m gobsmacked. We’ve got missions that are classified as level 28, but no real path to get to that level without things like the loot cave. But, fuck it, it’s gone cause it’s not how we’re supposed to level up.

The loot cave has already been patched, so you don’t need to “expect changes soon,” as Bungie said. That’s a huge slap in the face as well; Bungie’s quite quickly made sure we can’t use the loot cave, but haven’t addressed other pressing issues that they’ve acknowledged exist. The list of issues isn’t small either.

By your own admission, Bungie, Auto Rifles are better at ranged distances than the Scout Rifle. That’s not fixed yet.

The Cryptarch destroys engrams. That’s not fixed yet.

Strikes are “grindy” — your words, not mine. That’s not fixed yet.

If we’ve resorted to playing your game in a certain way, it’s because your game is wrong. Developers on the whole, know that it’s never a case of people playing your game wrong. To say that is to act like a child, threatening to take your toys away from friends because they’re not playing the way you like. It’s pathetic.

Developers should never scold gamers after they’ve found different ways to play their game. In fact, things like this should be encouraged! Bungie, get off your high horse and listen to what gamers are actually saying, or else you’ll find your user base will be diminished quite quickly.

by Colin Campbell

Few arrivals in gaming history have been ushered into existence with quite the same level of scrutiny as Bungie’s Destiny.

Apart from Bungie and its anxious paymasters at Activision, no-one will have watched the game’s arrival with as much interest as 343 Industries. Located just eight miles from Bungie’s offices, 343 is Microsoft’s manufactured ‘new Bungie,’ a development studio entirely created to replace Bungie, when it quit the company’s fold. 343’s job is to take over the future of Halo, the franchise that Bungie created, and that made Bungie.

The relationship between the two studios can safely be described as “competitive,” though there is an element of mutual respect and even interdependence. They are both competing in the high stakes space age first-person shooter market, and they both require the other to continue contributing to the good name of that genre.

Microsoft is readying Halo 5: Guardians (below) for a beta introduction later this year, and launch in 2015. Halo 5‘s fortunes are closely aligned with Xbox One’s fortunes. For Microsoft, there is no more important game.

If the game had been terrible, or sold badly, we might now be reading doomsday predictions about the future of space-shooters. Let us not pretend that Destiny is anything other than a successor to the original Halo games from Bungie, both stylistically and spiritually.

If the game had been a commercial and creative triumph, Halo might have quickly seemed like a thing of the past, a herald for the arrival of the true space-shooter king.

As it is, things have worked out pretty perfectly for 343 Industries…

Destiny Sold Really Well

Destiny‘s commercial success, including sales of $325 million in its first five days, is a clear sign that large numbers of people still want to play Halo-like shooting games in a sci-fi setting. This may seem like a constant given, but tastes change, especially during console transitions.

Although the console shooter has remained a favorite for a decade-and-a-half, subsets within that genre have glowed and faded. Destiny is the best market research Microsoft is likely to receive.

Hype Springs Eternal… Still

Activision showed that an expensive and carefully staged hype campaign still works wonders. Lots of people were enthused by the hype and did not wait for reviews, many of which turned out to be negative.

In reality, Activision showed very little of Destiny before its launch, made a great deal about its high-level aspirations, and reaped major benefits. Even if you do not agree with the reviewers, it is certain that if the sub-80 percent reviews had been available on day one, that $325 million figure would have been diminished. Destiny is Bungie’s lowest rated game since Oni, in 2001.

In the social media age, the ability to control messages through expensive and highly controlled marketing is still highly prized by large companies, and they don’t come much bigger than Microsoft. It is highly probable that Halo 5‘s pre-launch marketing campaign will follow the same drip-drip pattern as Destiny‘s.

Central Characters Have Appeal

One of the questions constantly put to Bungie execs in the run up to Destiny‘s launch was the lack of a central figure like Master Chief. The execs had a canned response about how the game was really about the player and his or her own identity. This is a reasonable direction to take.

However, Destiny‘s story, and the characters introduced throughout the game, were pretty yawn-inspiring. This was a surprise, given Bungie’s pedigree with Master Chief whose stories, while convoluted and confusing, have always seemed appropriate to their setting and enjoyable in the moment.

Microsoft’s 2014 play with the Halo franchise is a re-issue of the games associated with Master Chief, a reminder of the rich fictional world underpinning the franchise. Bungie tried to co-opt some of this heritage by talking up the Destiny narrative setting as a classic in the making, but the reality felt flat and empty. When it comes to personality, Halo still has a significant lead over Destiny.

Bold New Ideas, Ripe for Revision

Despite its flaws, Destiny was an impressive creation, especially in terms of its world-building and the ways in which its designers sought to integrate single-player and different kinds of multiplayer experiences together.

There were other bold ideas that entwined role-playing elements into emergent character creation, all wrapped up with enemy loot drops and mission choices. Some of these ideas worked out better than others, but few were decisively brilliant.

343 can make use of Bungie’s innovations and shape them to their own designs, without looking like they have basically copied their rival’s ideas. Destiny has innovated, but it has not innovated so far as to change the entire landscape of shooter design. No-one is really saying, ‘how the hell is 343 going to top this?’

Destiny has Failed to Rewrite the Rules

Most of us who like video games tend to cheer for new properties. We want to see something other than sequels, and so we root for the new guys. Games companies make use of this laudable instinct, by affirming our desires with promises that, frankly, turn out to be untrue.

343 will consider Destiny’s launch, its successes and its failures, to be a win

When I went to a Destiny press day a few months ago, I expressed my disappointment that so little of the actual game was being shown, while journalists were assailed with a constant stream of interviews all saying much the same thing; that Destiny was a new kind of game that would make everything before it seem smaller and lesser.

Bungie is not the only company to do this. Witness the contrast between Watch Dogs‘ ludicrously overblown arrival in 2012, with its actual launch in 2014. The media and consumers must take some responsibility for the continued success of these strategies.

Both these games have created enjoyable entertainment and, in their own ways, have progressed the idea of what video games can do. But the level of their progression is not so significant that developers working on other games have been caught unawares.

343 is a fairly new studio, and none of its work to date had come close to the demands placed upon it by Halo 5. But the 343 team members working eight miles down the road from Bungie should consider Destiny‘s launch, its successes and its failures, to be a win for their own project.

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by Daniel Kline

September 24, 2014 | Comments (1)

Sony (NYSE: SNE ) has had very little to be happy about in recent years, but its games division has been a rare bright spot in a sea of disappointments. PlayStation 3 was a huge success and now PlayStation 4 has gotten off to a strong start, which has led the company to increase its efforts in gaming with new initiatives planned involving streaming video games, a $99 PlayStation TV, and the Morpheus Virtual reality headset.

Though Sony has been losing money and recently increased its forecast for how much it expects to lose in the current fiscal year to $2.12 billion, the company plans to increase its investment in gaming. That makes sense because sales in the company’s Games & Network Services division increased 95.7% year over year in the most recent quarter, driven in part by the sale of PS4 hardware, the company reported in its most recent earnings release.

Games have been good
The division even eked out a profit of $43 million for the first quarter, which is impressive because consoles themselves are essentially a break-even proposition that lead to future sales opportunities for games, apps, and other software. The November 2013 launch of PS4 actually helped Games and Services reverse its fortunes as its revenue had slipped and profits had dropped from 29.3 billion yen in 2012 to a barely there 1.7 billion yen in 2013. The games division contributed only 7.8% of sales for 2013, but it’s clear that there is an opportunity to grow games’ contribution and use games to help other areas of Sony.

Better yet, the best appears to be ahead of the division. While Sony was increasing its overall expected loss forecast, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Andrew House told Reuters earlier this month that he “hopes he can again raise the division’s profit forecast for the year to end-March. Sony pushed up that forecast in July to 25 billion yen ($230 million) from 20 billion yen,” the news service reported.

With Sony’s mobile division facing huge losses and massive cuts, and the company already exiting the PC business, it seems increasingly likely that gaming and the PS4 will play a major part in whether Sony survives at all.

What’s next for Sony games?
Because of the success of the PS4, House told The Wall Street Journal that the company plans to create a service to stream video games onto smartphones, tablets, and other devices. Those devices would not be limited to ones made by Sony.

“A streaming-based approach needs to have a very wide funnel of devices, and that inherently means a broad- and manufacturer-agnostic approach,” House told the paper without giving a timetable for its launch.

The company also plans to build on the success of PS4, which, at over 10 million consoles sold, has doubled sales of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT ) rival Xbox One. (My fellow Fool Andrew Tonner broke down the sales difference in a recent piece titled “The Sony PlayStation 4 Continues to Put the Microsoft Xbox One To Shame.”)

One way it’s doing that is last week Sony made available software that allows game developers to more easily create titles for PS4, which should increase the amount of games available. The company also used the recent Tokyo Game Show 2014 to show off its Morpheus virtual reality headset, which has been in development since 2011 but now looks closer to an actual release. Morpheus will originally target heavy gamers, but the Journal said Shuhei Yoshida, who is in charge of the project, hoped it would deliver “whole new experiences” for non-gamers.

On Monday, Sony also set an Oct. 14 release date for its previously announced PlayStation TV. The small console costs $99.99, or $139.99 with controller, and should serve as a competitor to Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ: AMZN ) Fire TV as well as Nintendo’s (NASDAQOTH: NTDOY ) original Wii. It launches with nearly 700 games available, including a number of well-known titles, giving Sony a viable option for people unable to spend $399 on a gaming system.

The company is also leveraging the success of PS4 to attempt to find some audience for its Xperia Z3 tablet (as well as other Sony-made tablets) and help the fortunes of the company’s reeling mobile division. The Z3 will offer the ability for gamers to access their PS4 console via home Wi-Fi to play actual PS4 games on the tablet using the console’s controllers. It’s a bit of a gimmick, as the user is already home, and playing on a big screen is a better experience, but offering the service exclusively on Sony tablets could raise interest in those devices. The tablet has been on sale since Sept. 4, but the PS4 integration does not launch until November, according to ZDNet.

Games are Sony’s future
Sony is in trouble and the foundation being built with PS4 could give it stability and allow the company to launch some new, profitable products and services. With a lineup that includes a high-end console, as well as an inexpensive one, the company is positioned to offer something for everyone.

The PSTV could ultimately serve as a stepping stone product that leads people to PS4 but even if it doesn’t it puts Sony’s online store into even more living rooms. Games alone may not save the company, but they certainly will be a big part of any turnaround.

#GamersOutpost
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by Alessio Palumbo

I’ve been able to get my hands on both Bloodborne (the highly anticipated new IP by Hidetaka Miyazaki, revered creator of Demon/Dark Souls) and Lords of the Fallen, a new project led by Tomasz Gop, who was Senior Producer on The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings.

Both games clearly fall within the same genre, being action roleplaying games with a focus on 1-vs-1 combat, fairly small environments and a high degree of challenge. While Bloodborne seeks to distance itself from the Souls series mainly through a different setting (it takes place in Yharnam, an ancient city overrun with a horrifying curse) and a more aggressive combat system compared to the defensive one favored by the Souls games, Lords of the Fallen draws as much from the games developed by From Software as they do from the traditional Western RPG.

In Lords of the Fallen, the main character is Harkyn, a convicted criminal who turns out to be humanity’s last hope against the return of a Fallen God. Unlike Souls games (and probably Bloodborne), players will able to make pivotal decisions during dialogue which supposedly change the plot’s outcome, leading to very different endings.

While playing the game, the influence of Miyazaki’s masterpiece is undeniable. However, there are a few differences; while Gop and his team want Lords of the Fallen to be challenging, they also want to alleviate some of the unnecessary discomfort which translates in frustration. As a result, there are checkpoints nearby bosses, and I cannot stress how happy this made me; by the way, in case you think this makes the game “easy”, let me assuage your fears.

It doesn’t. In my 30 minutes hands-on, I spent about 10 minutes making my way towards the demo’s final boss and about 20 minutes trying to kill it; I didn’t even get past half of its Health Points. Jan Klose, Creative Director at Deck 13 Interactive (working on the game alongside CI Games) was giggling on my left side, saying that it was normal for someone who isn’t experienced with the game to be failing this much, and I was actually doing nicely compared to the rest of the press. This didn’t really do much for my self-esteem, though in my self-defence I’ll say that this was a high level area, where supposedly players will have gathered more gameplay experience than I had.

The boss was not only hard-hitting (he could kill me in four or five hits, despite my character being fully decked in plate armor and using a massive shield as a Cleric), but also quite fast for its size, not to mention that he summoned a stream of fireballs coming from all sides that required perfect dodge timing. Perhaps a Rogue character would have had less issues; it will be interesting to try different classes, weapons and skills.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Lords of the Fallen is its graphics, though. I played on PC (with an Xbox 360 controller) and the game looked fantastic, with (almost) perfect image quality, high resolution textures and stunning fire/snow & spell effects. I’m not quite sure of the system configuration, and obviously the PlayStation 4/Xbox One versions might be slightly inferior (speaking of which, it was confirmed yesterday that it will run at 1080P on PS4 and 900P on XB1), but what I’ve seen is certainly impressive, and way more so than Bloodborne.

The PS4 exclusive, which had a way shorter demo on display, didn’t look like it was using Sony’s hardware to its fullest (like Infamous: Second Son or Killzone: Shadow Fall, for example); there was a lot of aliasing on the scene, and the textures seemed to be similar in quality to those in Dark Souls II. There were a few frame rate issues as well, although it should be noted that the game is coming out in early February, so they definitely have time to smooth this.

Overall, gameplay felt like a rehashed version of Dark Souls II; it was a bit disappointing to see that, with the notable exception of the main character’s cloak, environmental physics and animations weren’t improved. Bloodborne’s strongest point is clearly its dark, brooding atmosphere, which gives the city of Yharnam a unique and eerie feel; if the story will be able to match the setting, then the game could still be something special.

Another area where Bloodborne might outshine Lords of the Fallen is longevity. Klose told me that LotF will last about 20 hours (although there’s a new Game+ mode, collectibles etc.), and since games in the Souls are known for their massive longevity, it’s fair to say that Bloodborne should easily surpass 20 hours.

Still, I’ve personally always favored quality over quantity and I can’t help but be more impressed by Lords of the Fallen at this stage of development. At any rate, fans of this peculiar RPG niche will have two great games, and they might be surprised when it will come to choosing a favorite.

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