Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Ok children, time for new annoyances regarding video games.

Our subject today is Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning for PS3.

What brought my attention to this game? Two names: R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane. If you have the minimum appreciation for fantasy fiction (specially D&D based) and ever heard about Spawn, you know these guys.

So, my expectations were quite high about this game. But, unfortunately, unjustified as you will see.

Playability

Game playing is a lot like playing God of War. And hey, that's great!
But here comes the first annoyance: at least Kratos can jump. Your character in this game cannot.

It seems a lot stupid since your character can change fate itself. But he/she can't jump a single tree root! Expect to be stucked in some scenarios just because your character can't jump a cliff.

Yes, it is true that there are some specific places that your character can use jump (and sometimes from pretty high places, without losing life) but those are not everywhere. Expect to walk around a lot of places just because of that.

There are more annoyances: some weapon combinations are not the smartest possible. Your character does have a limit of equipment he/she can carry, but you can use a huge hammer that requires both hands to swing and still use a shield (and don't have to be a buckler) to block. Same thing for other weapons. And hell, from where those weapons come up while the character is not using them? Forget it, I don't wanna know...

The point here is: if you want to sacrifice reality in the game, that's ok. But do it in a way that at least makes sense.

Another annoyance it the totally absence of axes. I like axes. How come a game like that doesn't have an axe?

What about two swords at the same time? Salvatore, where are the two classic scimitars all of us love to see dark elves (or whatever they are called in this game) using?

I just can't hit if it does not look good

There are several sequence of attacks your character will develop. Once you start one, you will be in trouble to stop it, so you're just exposed to be hit by a NPC.

More than that, your character likes to pose for each sequence finished. Great... until a troll smashes your character's head to the ground because of it.

Almost linear RPG

I'm a big fan from Fallout. It doesn't matter which one, or how old the game is, you got a lot of options during game play.

This does not applies to this game. You can be a bad, good or an idiot character and the difference will be noted just during conversation with NPC's.

Hey Salvatore... did you slept while writing the game story? Put a trainee of yours to do it for you? I hope you just got some very lazy programmers to make the game non-linear.

You can hit anyone you want, but some will just not die

Looks like the character has a minimum part of the plot, you can hit them a lot until they fall... just to be raised again from the dead, as if nothing happened.

Quoting Homer Simpson: "the quest is mine and I do anything I want with it".

Some side missions should never be included in the game

Some side missions are just too boring: not just that, they don't add any color to the game. Keep trying to touch pillars to see if you get the correct sequence of notes from it? Boring... and just to see a boogan?

Bugs

There are some bugs in the game that weren't fixed. Some are related to the 3D modeling, others with the scenarios. Once I got "buried" into the ground meanwhile jotuns were smashing my head... had to get out of the game.

In other situation my character failed a persuasion test with 95% of chance of success... I never found a way to get the quest finished after of that.

When visiting some cities you get a nice overview from them, like flying over them. That's fun in the first time: all others are just an annoyance that you won't be able to avoid every time you enter again in those cities.

Never ending text to read

This game should have a great story, but I never had the patience to read all the text it comes with it. Most of it had very little relation to the plot and after some tries I just kept pressing the button to get away with it.

Very little interaction with NPC's

You can talk and hit NPC's and... that's it. Nothing else.

You can't give them equipment. You can't give to them a potion to save their lives. There isn't any way to heal them (at least with my "fighter style" character).

During the game you will some help from them during combat but considered yourself lucky if any of them is actually capable to putting down a single enemy.

Conclusion

If you want play a electronic RPG, go find other options available. Baldur's Gate is still the best in my opinion.

If you want beat n' up in Tolkien's style I strong suggest you to take a look at Lord of the Rings: War in the North.

Playdom says goodbye to Marvel Avengers Alliance Tatics

Update: 24/09/2014.

To my surprise, I got this announcement yesterday (23/8/2014):

Run Forrest, run!

Well, of course that made me upset. I didn't put just gold in this game, but also a lot of my time and energy.

If I had any hint about that (well, the tons of bugs in the game might be something to consider), I wouldn't even bother using a defensive strategy to try to get my hard earned silver and Iso-8 inside my own vault. I would just pick some characters (not all of them), so farming for SHIELD Points would be much less required. After all, you can play with only four characters at time, and if you get 8 in total (to get different skills) that would be enough to finish the game.

This is so true that attacking (and destroying) another player building will result in an error: you will loose the energy spent and will got nothing back to you. That's a very unprofessional way to disable PVP. Here is some more details about:

https://www.playdomforums.com/showthread.php?138224-Error-905-Has-PvP-been-Disabled&p=2313708#post2313708

In fact, I don't bother that much with it: PVP sucks, always did. But I wouldn't had bother trying to protect my base so that's made me angry.


PVP is now working. Don't ask me why.

Besides, there is a known issue due PVP disablement: that made task 1 of Assignment 9 impossible to complete, since it expects you to attack other players base. The only way to complete it is expend 10 gold pieces as you would for any task you want to skip. If you're trapped in this situation, do not despair: keep reading to the next part of this post.

New "Christmas" assignment

Now looks like everybody needs now to rush and try to finish second Chapter. Playdom helped a bit, because they added a new assignment that gives tons of bonus in SHIELD Points, items that cannot be bought and even gold. Energy recovery is much faster too after this new assignment was released.

To finish any task of this new assignment I suggest using characters below level 8. I experimented this a bit, and for all tasks you will get a villain helping you always with level 8. The opponents level will be your highest character level plus two, so a level 7 character will get opponents at level 9. A character at level 9 against an enemy with level 12 will have a hard time even to hit the opponent and the damage will be ridiculous.

Another tip is to use Miss Marvel with Absorb Energy and Ronan with the Defender skills against the krees and Cyclops. Using characters that can apply bleeding for any circumstance will help a lot too.

The new assignment: easy stuff to get compared to other assignments

So, to help you rush and get the game finish until the real end of it, I'll give some additional tips besides those from my previous post about this game:

1. Don't bother defending your base anymore. Put your highest level characters in the planes to get Silver and experience. PVP is on again. Think twice about leaving your base undefended.
2. Don't bother upgrading the lackeys, I mean, the SHIELD agents too. But do expend some SHIELD Points to get more of them if already got all heroes and villains you can.
3. Repeat the Endgame assignment as many times as you can, to get gold and SHIELD Points.
4.  If you want to farm experience for characters, although, repeat any task from chapter 1. The amount is almost the same of chapter 2 and it will be much easier.
5. And, the best tip of this post, get yourself large amounts of Silver and Iso-8 doing absolutely nothing.

Excited by tip number four? Let's see it in details.

Getting Silver and Iso-8 without breaking a sweat

Requirements for this tip:

• Download and install AutoHotkey. Don't worry, it's GNU GPL licensed software.
• Got yourself three jets in the Flight Deck at the first level. Don't upgrade them!
• Make your highest level characters available to fly.
• This tip will restart the Chapter 1, assignment 3 many times over and over. Be careful since this will reset any other assignment in progress.
• Get yourself a decent browser to do this tip. Forget about Internet Explorer, install Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. I suggest Mozilla Firefox to be able to use the sample script without having to modify it too much.
• Wait the Iso-8 Refinery to accumulate some of it's stuff until the icon shows up. Don't collect it.
• Close all windows, boxes in the screen. I suggest even disabling the Facebook chat.
• Get yourself inside your base.

After getting these ones, create a new text file, adding the following content to it:

IfWinExist, Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics no Facebook - Mozilla Firefox
{

    loop
    {

        WinActivate
       
        ; activate the bonus
        Click 64,444
        Sleep 3000
        Click 1083,690
        Sleep 3000
        Click 901,779
        Sleep 3000
        ; confirm new task
        Click 178,497
        Sleep 3000
        Click 1089,811
        Sleep 3000
        Click 1108,953
  
        ; gather Iso-8
        MouseMove, 834,466
        Sleep 3000
        Click 834,466
        Sleep 3000
        ; close Iso-8 fucking window
        Click 1599,489

        ; minimum of 3 minutes waiting airplanes to return
        Sleep 150000
        ;186000
        WinActivate

        ; gather Silver
        MouseMove,1592,670
        Click 1592,670
        Sleep 3000
        Click 815,980
        Sleep 3000
        Click 1167,429
        Sleep 3000

        ; gather the bonus
        MouseMove, 178,496
        Sleep 3000
        Click 178,496
        Sleep 3000
        MouseMove,1085,811
        Click 1085,811
        Sleep 3000

    }

}
else
{
    MsgBox, Cannot find window
    ExitApp
}

Now save it and run this script to see it working! Be sure to leave the monitor turned on.

How does this thing work?

Assignment 3 of the Chapter 1, first mission, will give you 900 in Silver after flying three planes and collecting from them. You will have it complete in 3 minutes by using three level 1 jets at the same time.

Now repeat these steps over and over, collecting the Iso-8 between collecting from planes, and you got 900 in Silver plus what your planes give to you.

The script part automates that for you. It will wait more than 3 minutes to do that, to be sure windows were closed and buttons were available to click, but not much more than that.

The coordinates used in the AutoHotKeys script were based on my PC. If you have a different screen resolution configuration (mine is 1920 x 1080) you will need to double check the coordinates yourself. It is a bit boring fixing those (you will need to turn the AutoIt3 Window Spy program that comes together with AutoHotKeys), but after some hours running alone, you will get your vault full of Silver and Iso-8 doing absolutely nothing.

It is possible to use jets with higher levels, but your will need to make a good scheme to have them flying so you can get 900 from 3 in 3 minutes. To make it easier, I upgraded as much jets I have, leaving just three at level one.

As is, the script is good enough for me. If you find any way to improve it, please let me know!

This is computer programming, I'm a newbie!

Nowadays doing some programming is quite easier than in the past. Don't be scared by it, the algorithm I used is simple too (and it has a lot of space to improvements).

Be sure to check the tutorial of AutoHotKeys to understand better what the script does.

And last, but not least, pay attention to the text I used in the script to identify the browser Window ("Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics no Facebook - Mozilla Firefox"). Unless you're using Microsoft Windows in Brazilian Portuguese, most probably you will need to change that to match your window title.

From time to time, your script might stop working. For my experience, Playdom is updating the game from time to time just to disable such schemes, which is "funny" since the game have lots of bugs that they don't mind fixing.

They change coordinates a bit to make those scripts stop working, so you'll have to update the coordinates. I think it is still worth your time to update the script.

Conclusion

Nowadays it's common to not buy a game anymore, just the opportunity to play with it. Besides the need to play it on-line, this situation with Playdom really shows one of the drawbacks in buying something that will never be truly yours.

In the old times (and still with console video games), when you buy some game, that means you owned it and can continue playing it a much as you want. It's a shame to see a company leaving us like that.

I can only hope that Disney/Marvel get a better partner to make new games with their characters. Playdom's work is a complete deception.

Marvel Alliance Tactics

Welcome to my review of Marvel Alliance Tactics!
This is the first post that I made to this blog and Marvel Alliance Tatics is debuting it!

Introduction

I think this quote does an pretty good job about describing what is this game about:

Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics is a 3D turn-based tactical RPG game (like XCOM, Tactics Ogre) with a World Map that connects base building and PVP features (like War Commander).

I grabbed it from this other blog.
I've being a fan of Marvel comics since childhood, so playing around a video game that involves the Marvel universe character is always fun. And after Disney bought the copyrights, things got really interesting, specially with the new movies.
And playing strategy games for me is always cool, so it might be a great chance to have fun with both, doesn't it?
But this game, oh well... I'm really disappointed. Let's see why.

What is annoying

No documentation

Documentation is almost none. It may be useless if you just playing around a few minutes a week, but if you want to understand better what happens between an upgrade or other, you're lost. There are other annoyances in the game that I mentioning in the rest of this post that will make you wonder "a wiki would solve this thing".

"Wizard-like" tutorial

The game tutorial sucks big time: it forces you to use it: there is no way to get out and it's difficult to change game settings as well. See "Why 3D?".

Why 3D?

The choice for creating a game 3D is almost default these days. It seems to be 3D is the sexiest thing about video games nowadays.
But what a minute: isn't this game to play from Facebook, over the Internet? Well, that means that if your Internet connection sucks, game experience will suck as well!
I have no problem with 3D, it has it's place. And definitely is not here.
This is a game about Marvel Comics. It may be a surprise for some, but most Marvel Comics are not 3D. And it's supposed that Marvel Alliance Tactics will be played by the comics fans! Also, considering that this game is translated to other languages besides English, it's not a clever assumption that everybody got a nice Internet connection.
Sure, you can set the game graphics to a minimum, turned off sounds effects and music, but that's not easy at the beginning of the game. See "Wizard-like" tutorial.
And, after all, the 3D with low graphics just sucks on the eyes. It would be far better to get nice animations in 2D (hey, Mike Deodato's work would rock here!).

Bad translation to Brazilian Portuguese

The game is badly translated for Brazilian Portuguese players. Don't know about Spanish although. It might be better than Brazilian Portuguese because some translations are actually in Spanish, so I think it just stayed there because of it's "coolness". It might be also a surprise for some morons, but in Brazil Spanish is not the official language.

"La garantia soy yo" as said by the Brazilian Portuguese translator hired by Playdom

Useless items upgrades

That's messy. Some skills and weapons don't have a decent explanation why you should buy the upgrade. Let's see some examples:

Teleport Self upgrade explanation

This example is a good example. By examining the screen shot, can you tell if the upgrade is worth paying for? This seems to apply to all defensive items upgrades as well:

Guard upgrade explanation

Balance upgrade explanation

In the other hand, action items upgrade are better explained:

Roundhouse upgrade - Chuck Norris would be mad if he sees the price of it

I just quit upgrading the defensive items. So far, so good. But, being a curious guy, I decided to ask to the good people at Playdom what is what:

Support given by a disciple of BOFH

Oh boy...
And don't forget: if a item doesn't have a decent explanation of what it does, don't bother buying it because it will do nothing at all.

Base upgrades are useless

Base upgrades are just a lame excuse to make you buy gold... or expend several hours farming for silver. After upgrading some times the vault, you might question yourself "why the hell the vault have now all those cannons that actually are not used at all"?
And... there is no answer for that. Attacking a level 1 vault is the same thing than attack a level 8. The difference is with the guards that are inside the vault. Oh boy, I really miss that part of building walls in Age of Empires...
Let's see some lame examples of what are you paying for:

Level 1 Jet upgrade dialog

You may think "oh, I upgrade my jet and something good happens!". Surprise! After upgrading the Jet you find out that will have to still hire agents to pilot it... with gold! You have to expend 8 pieces of gold to replace your previous crew to Jet level 2. I wonder what happened to the old crew... maybe all of them were fired? Besides that, you don't have the slightest idea what you get before buying a new Jet.

Command center upgrade explanation

In other words "you will need to upgrade the Command Center just to be able to do the other upgrades". Nothing chances at all at the Command Center. It's the same thing it was before the upgrade.

Iso-8 Refinery window

The Iso-8 Refinery is upgraded to allow harvesting Iso-8 faster. The capacity is also expanded. Or not?
It seems really stupid to have a production of 1920 that stops producing after 960 because someone needs to click the COLLECT button. Hope your have insomnia.
Don't even dream about upgrading the Quinjets hangar: you don't want to buy a new one. Do you know what you got if you do? A new Quinjet... but wait, you can't deploy two squads of heroes in the same mission. You also cannot execute two attacks simultaneously. And considering that you won't get any advice when your base is being attacked, WTF, for what this thing is good for?

Barracks is useless

What are barracks good for? The higher level you have for it, more people will be able to join your team.
But unless you are far above level 60 as commander, or have a lot of good to expend, well, the barracks are useless. Getting new characters is an expensive process. Buying ordinary Shield agent is just stupid, since they are much weaker than the weakest hero/villain you can buy.

Gold is your new god

Anything really cool (items and hero skills included) that you could purchase in this game is based on gold. The only ways to have gold are:

1. Buy it with real money. Now, come on: is it 500 pieces of gold worth of U$100?
2. Gain new levels as commander. A level up means you get a single piece of gold.

Some items doesn't costs gold directly, but are very expensive. For example, a new Quinjet costs 100,000 pieces of silver. Just for comparison, three minutes of acquiring silver with the most basic Jet gives you 30 pieces of silver.
And before I forget, a new "feature" was recently configured to the game to SPAM you about the new features of the game (all of them available with gold that you can buy) in the beginning of the game. You can close the window, but boy... after the fifth time it gets boring.

This annoyance completely justifies the next one.

Bullying is for everybody

Well, considering that gold is expensive and getting silver is hard, how do you accomplish getting resources quickly?
You can accomplish missions, but some of then doesn't always gives silver. You can get some higher amounts from the "roulette" that appears after completing some missions, but hey... if I like gambling I would not play a strategy game,right?
The answer is to attack other players. Yeah, the PVP mode could be translated to "bullying mode".
When you start playing, you got a shield protecting your base. As long you don't attack anyone, no one can attack your base. But this "free shield" last only for some days (5, if I remember). After that, you can be attacked by anyone. That means a level 1 player or a level 345366!!!
Not very cool if somebody keep hitting your base and destroying it. They will get a percentage of your earnings (in Iso-8 and silver) and you will have to wait some minutes to rebuild the base and "release" your team from the collapsed buildings.
Another problem is that getting your based defended just sucks. Even if you're on-line when being hit, there is not way you can control your characters against the invader. Yeah, the game AI is not that smart, I tell you.
Of course, you can get a new shield protecting you. Just buy it with gold. Depending on how much gold you expend you will get a new shield lasting for a couple of days.

Lame story

Well, the game story is not that good if you asked me. It is a bit messy have thousands of alternative Earth's trying to destroy your planet. The plot is just not that elaborated.

Bugs

Nowadays bugs are common in video games. Software programming is quite complex in this area and shipping must be done following a schedule.
Unfortunately, this games has some serious bugs. Sometimes the characters loses animation during battles, gaining a "sliding" movement. Sometimes the game completely crashes my Adobe Flash plug-in on Firefox. Or freeze it. Anyway, the solution is to close the browser and go back again.

Now and then I got invisible obstacles in some scenarios (most of them in some sort of jungle). You can't go cross the obstacle or attack from it, specially with attacks that involves area or a single straight line to hit several enemies.
And there is also that missing item description:

And last, but not least, let's talk about memory usage of the game: when you start playing, you will get something around 700MB of memory. After running the game for sometime like an hour, you will get something like this:

Don't know you, but I see a memory leak problem too, because I already saw it going to 2GB!
And there are many, many other bugs. Playdom even holds a list of the known bugs that they never fix. Iron Fist, for example, has a skill to recover energy for free. It's description says that occasionally he can heal other characters too. I never saw that happening. Besides, most of the time he uses the skills to heal energy when he doesn't need to. Other times, he uses the heal skill to attack enemies (doing damage in the processes) and other times the uses the attack to heal himself!

Why Flash anyway?

If you're technical inclined (I am) you may ask yourself why the insistence in using Flash anyway for on-line games. Flash is proprietary. This means that you might not have it available in your platform (I also use Linux).
The game is too heavy to download and run, even if your Internet connection is not that bad.
What about using HTML5? Or even Java (don't laugh, one could use Java Web Start).

What is cool anyway?

It's a Marvel game, with all the good characters you like it.
The strategy is quite simple, but really addictive. You just want to do that next stuff to complete something. It never ends.