Amassing An Effective Experience

One of my favourite video game franchises is the sci-fi role-playing epic, Mass Effect, by Canadian developer BioWare. I've been excited about it since before I even got my Xbox, as evidenced by a blog post that is over five years old!

So when the third game was released at the start of March, I couldn't wait to finish the story I started way back on December 9th, 2007. There was so much to look forward to. I had brought Ryan Shepard and his crew through many adventures across the galaxy, saving it from certain doom twice! And now, I was going to end the threat once and for all. No longer was I content to simply "hold the line", but my team and I would wipe their smug alien grins off the face of the cosmos.

The first thing that went wrong was when I tried to import my Shepard from my previous games. An error told me that the facial code was not recognised. Instead of the character I have had for five years, I was given something that looked like he'd been dropped as a child. Repeatedly. After checking online and confirming it as a known bug, I tried to recreate Ryan in Mass Effect 3. But he didn't look right. No matter what I did, it wasn't Ryan.

Figuring that a patch was on the way, I decided to start the campaign anyway, as I couldn't wait to experience the thrilling tale. I would play for a day or two, clock up a few short hours and then restart when the patch went live.

Two weeks later and no patch. I haven't even touched the single player since the Thursday after release, some twelve days ago at it stands. I'm having to avoid half the websites I normally read due to spoilers, and I can't even discuss anything about the game with friends, leaving me out of a lot of excited conversations that I've enjoyed from playing other games in parallel in the past.

But I'm not angry. And here's why.

When Bioware finally confirmed all the rumours that were circulating about the possibility of including multiplayer in the third Mass Effect, I was... less than enthusiastic. I didn't see the need for any extraneous flash added to my deep and engaging story. When they elaborated and told us it was going to be a co-operative experience, I was a little more interested, as I'm a huge fan of the Gears of War series Horde Mode.

With no single player experience to enjoy, I jumped into the multiplayer to try it out. And got hooked.

I've been playing it exclusively since Thursday, at times with my friends in Ireland, and at other times with my Canadian friends. I'm currently ranked 8th in Ireland on the leaderboards, which amuses me greatly! The game is fantastic fun, engaging, thrilling and hilarious. Every session is different, depending on the class and race I play, as well as the team I'm with, and even the build I choose this time to try out. I love the idea that there are only 20 Levels to gain before you get the choice to reset to 1 in exchange for a bonus to the single player experience, as it encourages players to try out new builds, new ideas and new mixes, knowing that if they don't like it, they can throw it out and try again quickly.

Experience and credits earned are entirely shared evenly, regardless of how much or how little you killed during the session. Everyone gets the same amount. There is a medal and points system that ranks the team on the final score screen, but it's only for bragging rights within that one game. It doesn't get remembered once you exit that screen. The entire experience is built around rewarding co-operative play and not punishing players for not being as good at killing as other team members.

Credits earned through completing challenges can be spent in the ingame store to buy random booster packs containing cards that award items, abilities and more. The random element makes opening every pack a thrill, and finding that rare weapon or much sought-after character a huge joy, much more than if it was just a straight up "Earn this much to buy this weapon".

So when my friends and I played a few games this evening and discovered that none of our experience or credits had been counted for the last three games, we were a little more than disgusted. This is just another problem to add to the growing list of issues we've been having with the game. Game crashing freezes, enemies getting stuck in mid-air, invulnerable to damage, an infuriating choice by the developers to map Take Cover and Revive Teammate to the same button, and now lost experience and credits all sour the fun we've been having.

It is impossible that no-one at BioWare was aware of the character import bug prior to launch. To assume such would be to assume that no-one on the team, or in their testing department tried to import their character over, and that's madness. It's one of the core mechanics and selling points of the series! Since the game's launch, BioWare are saying that a patch is on the way.

But here's the rub: In response to other issues related to the game, franchise executive producer and director Casey Hudson said "When we finish a game, we finish it many months before it actually hits the shelves..." So in those "many months", we are lead to believe that they didn't notice anything wrong, thinking they had a functional game on their hands. In those "many months", nobody thought to polish the game up and at least have a day-one patch ready at launch, as other games have done, fixing the worst of the issues.

Or maybe they knew they didn't have to. They knew it was going to be one of the biggest games of the year, selling millions of copies globally. It was already a success before it even went on sale. Why bother fixing something people have already paid for? Now I'm being really cynical, but I don't think I'm being entirely untruthful.

And that's just not how you should treat your fans.

The Coalitions Finest

Gears of War 3 has taken up residence in my Xbox almost exclusively since it's launch in September. Apart from hacking and slashing my way through the dungeons of Torchlight and rocking out to the Coldplay pack for Rock Band 3, I've been investing an extraordinary amount of time in the third game in Epic Games' console flagship series.

My first experience of Gears of War was via the second installment. Aidan and Rob had bought the steroid abusing sci-fi action shooter and invited me to try out this new game mode called Horde.

From Wave one, I was hooked. Team based co-operative multiplayer with no competitive element! Wave after wave of inhuman enemies in steadily increasing numbers and difficulty, this was pure survival gameplay balancing edge-of-your-seat tension with frantic and cinematic firefights.

My love of Horde was so great in fact that I pointedly ignored what I thought was surely a terrible, machismo, testosterone filled, steroidal, brain dead campaign. By the time I did get around to playing it, I knew how to defeat every enemy it threw at me, apart from the bosses. This somewhat robbed me of experiencing the terror of the bullet absorbing Sires, as I already knew to simply walk around the area with my chainsaw permanently revved up!

Going into Gears 3, I promised myself that I'd get the campaign finished before trying out Horde 2.0 or the new mode, Beast. Once the surprises of the story were out of the way, I was eager to jump into my favourite gameplay mode in it's newest incarnation.

Horde has seen a vast and sweeping overhaul since it's appearance in the second game. Now you earn cash for kills, and can buy fortifications, ammo boxes or weapons across the map space. Way back when this was first announced I was a little apprehensive that they had messed with a good thing. Horde was great because it was so clean. Just you and up to four friends versus 50 waves of Locust creatures looking to decorate their fireplaces with your skulls. Nothing else.

But the new additions not only work, they work spectacularly. Earlier I called Horde Mode "pure survival gameplay balancing edge-of-your-seat tension with frantic and cinematic firefights". Horde 2.0 adds heart pounding building, repairing and upgrading of all too often meager defenses to help you survive the rising flood of enemies. The fortifications further encourage team-work, as people co-ordinate to maximise the work done in the short time they have between Waves. Players can even share cash with each other if they wish to, although while I have seen this used occasionally in private games with friends, I have yet to witness it during a random match-up over Xbox Live.

One of the best additions to Horde 2.0 however has to be the Wave 10 Bosses. Horde is still played as 50 Waves broken into five 10 Wave sets. In the first version, this meant that the number and difficulty of the enemies per Wave steadily increased up to Wave 10, where we were terrified of Bloodmounts, before resetting to the enemies of Wave 1 again for Wave 11, but making them tougher. Horde 2.0 makes that 10th Wave even more fun by giving it a random Boss, from a choice of about seven or eight. The bosses are usually bigger and badder than anything else in the mode, and standard tactics for almost every one of them is to take out all the regular enemies while avoiding the Boss characters until they are the only things left, and then combatting them. Standard tactics usually result in death. Non-standard tactics however, focusing fire on the Boss characters first and then the little guys, just results in additional iterations of the Boss character appearing. If there is anything worse than dealing with a Burmak, it's seeing its twin brother step out from the smoke of the exploding first one.

Horde kept me playing Gears of War 2 much longer than I have played any other shooter to date. Through it I made some great friends over Xbox Live, and enjoyed many frantic and hilarious moments of both victory and defeat. Horde 2.0 has successfully improved on the original design, and I know I'll be playing it for months, if not years, to come.

Just Plain Talented

After far too many months of waiting, Gears of War 3 took its first steps into the public light at 2am this morning, Vancouver time. Naturally, as a Gears fan since playing Horde mode for the first time at a friends house, I stayed up to get in on the action at the first opportunity. Equally as obvious, Claire stayed up with me to watch the first few minutes before tottering off to dreamland.

The Gears of War Beta allows us fans to experience an early build of the multiplayer, putting the maps and weapon balances to the test. It's only a Beta, so most of the final content that will appear on the disc is not available, and I'm not just referring to the single player campaign. My favorite more, the previously mentioned Horde Mode is not featured, nor is the new gameplay type I'm most looking forward to trying out, Beast Mode.

This first week is for BulletStorm owners and Epic Games friends and family only, and the options available are limited. Currently, there is only one game mode and two maps available, though more will be released over the course of the four weeks the Beta runs for. First up, the maps.

Checkout: This is set inside a ruined supermarket. It is very close quarters combat orientated, with lots of destructible cover and low walls to both crouch behind, but also mantel over and stomp enemies. The rows of shelving give loads of ways to get around opponents and create cross fire opportunities, as well as quickly splitting up uncoordinated teams. The lighting on this map is beautiful, with sunlight streaming through frosted of grimy glass, brightening everything. But we'll get back to that later.

Thrashball: Set in a destroyed thrashball arena from the pre-war days. This is a big, open central area with small side areas for bottlenecked combat. One major issue I have with this map is that it appears to be possible to spawn-camp a team - the spawn zone has one tunnel exit (like a team dressing room exit to the pitch) and if you get forced back to there you're pretty much boned. This happened once to my team last night. When that doesn't happen though, it's a great fun map. The grass and plant-life that has reclaimed the arena are bright and lush, a noticeable departure from the browns and grays more common in the previous games.

Play alternates between the two maps per match, not per round. As I stated earlier, currently there is only one game mode available. While Team Deathmatch is nothing new to shooters in general, it is new to the Gears franchise, and their version puts a Gears style spin on things. Each team has a pool of 15 respawns. The object of the lesson is to kill the enemy team enough times to deplete their pool, then eliminate them. This means that four great players stuck with one sucky player could lose if said sucky player dies a lot and runs though the pool[1]. It also means one player could potentially be the last remaining player on his team and still cream the enemy with skillful use of the shotgun, going on to win for his team[2].

My opinion on competitive multiplayer shooters in general: I play Gears for Horde. I love the cooperative gameplay, the team work, the shared joy of victory and the shared exhilaration of defeat. There are no hard feelings when we die to the Horde waves. No one calls "cheater" or, "unfair advantage". No one accuses the opponents of host advantage, or the game of having unbalanced weapons. But I've never played a competitive multiplayer session that lasted more than a few rounds before those accusations were flying across the chat channels. And the Beta was no different. When my team was winning, this was "the best game ever", and this map was "so balanced" and everything was "great". When same team was loosing, the other team was "clearly cheating" and the maps were "unfair" and the shotgun was "so overpowered" and yadda, yadda, yadda. Sigh. I miss Horde already.

Based on my brief trip so far, here are my two top Pro Tips for the Beta:
1- Stick together as a team!! We lost more rounds by splitting up and running every which way than by opposing skill.
2- Learn when to ignore the voices in your head. When they're being nice and coordinating the offensive, then stay in contact, work as a team. When they're being offensive and complaining about the game, shut up and don't join in. You're better than that, and must accept that chances are you'll lose more than you'll win, especially at the start. Just focus on getting a few kills per game and you'll be fine.

Graphically, the game is beautiful, vivid and lush, with gorgeous lighting. One of the promises was to make everything brighter, and they have. Vivid colours, streaming sunshine. Everything looks amazing. From what I've seen, character models look nice too, but usually they're running about or getting stomped on, so it's hard to tell for sure. If you've played Enslaved, the Thrashball arena especially reminds me of those bright post-apocalyptic areas from that game (also built on the Unreal 3 engine), and the Checkout map reminds me of a brighter, easier to navigate and more interesting version of the supermarkets in Fallout 3.

Here are some stats from my first night playing. This might be especially useful for those of you interested in hoping to unlock the Beta exclusive Gold Lancer and Trashball Cole skins.

10 matches of Team Deathmatch took me approximately 2 hours and netted me 24 Rounds played, and a total of 22 kills with the Lancer alone (the required stat to watch for the Gold Lancer retail unlock), and many more kills in total. I unlocked a bunch of stuff, including weapon skins and Anya as a playable character for just playing the 10 matches.

I originally thought the retail unlock Gold Lancer requirements (Complete 90 matches in any game type to unlock for the Beta period. To permanently unlock, score 100 kills with the Gold-Plated Retro Lancer during the Beta period) were tough, but they seem like something that is going to happen anyway over the course of 4 weeks. Even over the 3 weeks most people have. Kill stealing is a bitch, but I've given as much as been taken, so it all balances out, right? Also, I'm generally ignoring Executions in favour of laying a few more rounds in my target to guarantee no-one else gets to him first.

And finally, the weapons. I'm gonna make this fast, as Claire just hit the shower, so I have access to the PC monitor the Xbox is currently plugged into. Here goes:

Lancer is lancer, gnasher shotgun is broken, retro lancer seems ridiculously inefficient compared to the modern version (terrible recoil, massive footprint), new shotgun is crazy powerful but takes an eon to reload, incendiary grenades are hilarious (melting surfaces), flash bang grenades cause stun, blinding white light and just seem more useful, new digger weapon (tunnels underground and past cover) is cool to see in action but I haven't had a chance to try it yet, mortar is the usual splash damage hilarity, grinder is same as always, and I haven't gotten my hands on the sniper rifle yet.

All in all, I'm loving the chance to get my hands on the game this early. The game modes that will be available over the course of the Beta period are not why I am even remotely interested in the final retail game, but they give me the opportunity to see some of the maps, weapons and gameplay tweaks that is ahead of me. I'll be playing as much of it as possible, all the while yearning for the peace and man-love happy times that is Horde mode, now with female skins![3]

[1] Me.
[2] Not me.
[3] Despite female playable characters, Claire has made it very clear that she will be remaining with Marcus as her ingame avatar of death-by-sniper. Can't blame her. Even after all these years, my man-crush on Baird remains as powerful as the first day I laid eyes on his goggles.