Achievement Unlocked 10:03.08: Warhammer Week

Posted by Rod Oracheski on 10.03.2008

411mania's Rod Oracheski takes a look at a handful of games this week, including two Warhammer titles, a Disney-published racing game, a retread of a PS2 niche classic, and more on LittleBigPlanet - including a video!



It's Warhammer Week, as I take on Mythic's newest massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (for some reason now being shortened to MMO instead of MMORPG) Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, along with trying out Warhammer: Battle March on the Xbox 360. Plus I play some of Disney's recent - and surprising - racing game, slack off in Disgaea 3, and get bored with LittleBigPlanet, then like it again, before finally losing interest once more.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Wait, what's this got to do with Achievements, you ask? Simple - Warhammer Online is another game to incorporate Achievements into the design. By doing any number of mundane, silly, or downright weird tasks in the game, you can unlock (and even benefit from) a large variety of Achievements.

Some of my favourites include 'AHHHHHHH' (Died 25 times from falling), 'The Fowl Finisher' (Killed 5 chickens, not as a chicken), and 'The Streaker' (Finished 10 PQs unarmored). I don't think there's a bad name in the bunch, though I have yet to find a complete list of every Achievement.

I'll cut down each and every tree.

The list includes rewards as well - small bits of experience, new Titles for your character, and even items like trophies (items you wear to show off what you've done) and tactics (essentially a group of three bonuses you can swap in or out). That's a pretty big incentive to start having some fun with it - a welcome change from the normal grind, grind, grind routine of a MMO.

Not that Warhammer Online really has much in the way of grinding. You can even level strictly through doing PVP, and you can start doing that from the first minute you fire the game up, though you really might want to do the starter missions to figure out the controls and get to second level...just a thought.

I did a lot of PVP in World of Warcraft, even quitting a PVE guild and joining a PVP guild - and a pretty good one at that - before I finally quit the game entirely, but WoW never really (even after the changes to the PVP system) had the focus on PVP that Warhammer does.

Mythic likes PVP, and on a massive scale. That's obvious enough given how important it is in both Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot. Both feature significant Realm versus Realm action, where players from opposing sides lay siege to Keeps and assault enemy cities. It's pretty interesting stuff, and laying waste to your enemies is a great way to kill a few hours.

It also helps that Mythic really likes to avoid having you grind, as I said before. You don't need to kill thousands of rats to hit level two, and you won't be stuck killing the same mob over and over - unless you choose to play that way, and if you do...more power to you, I suppose. From the very start of the game, thanks to the new Public Quest (PQ) system, you'll be involved in high adventure - securing a town from enemy invasion, fighting off giants you could never take on your own - epic adventures that you don't have to just sit and watch because you just started playing the game, you can actually take part.

Just about every other MMO has that grinding, and the reason is obvious - they want to keep you playing for as long as possible. They want you hooked, and paying that $10-15 a month for months and years to come. Mythic is apparently confident enough in their 'endgame' of RVR content that they're willing to let you level at a fairly painless rate while having fun, believing people will stick around even after 'maxing out' their level.

Judging by how fun it was to attack and defend Keeps in Dark Age of Camelot, they might be right. If you were a Dark Age of Camelot fan, or you're just getting tired of World of Warcraft and want to try something new before Wrath of the Lich King, definitely give this one a shot. I'm on Bechafen, an Open RVR server, on the side of Order - you've gotta love the underdogs!

If you want to join in, leave a comment with your name.

Plenty of me to go around, ladies!

Warhammer: Battle March

From a very good game, to a very mediocre one - I also tried the other new (OK, relatively speaking I suppose - the game came out September 2nd though I didn't see it on shelves until recently.) Warhammer release...Warhammer: Battle March.

The game started out really strong, with an opening cinema that's incredible. I mean right up there with Blizzard-level cinemas in that way that makes you wonder why, after all this time, has nobody made a good fantasy-based CGI movie? Beowulf doesn't count - that was done with scans of people and still fell short of the detail packed into a Blizzard intro cinema - or this one, to be honest.

Once you get past that amazing intro cutscene, and remember that topic - you'll see it in next week's 10th Hour, you choose your race and get your own in-game cutscene. It's a little less awe-inspiring though still interesting, especially with the presentation of it in a letterboxed inset, but it kind of sets up what's to come - continually dropping expectations.

After that first cutscene I was expecting a huge, big-budget game that had tons of bells and whistles, a slew of innovative ideas, and cool moment after cool moment. By the time I was done watching the race-specific one, I was thinking it was a lot lower-budget than first anticipated. After 10 minutes of the game's tutorials (And the insanely small text, even on a 60" HDTV - watching on a smaller SDTV? Forget about it) I was just hoping the game would have some cool moments.

At least on that side of things, it delivers. Leveling up your Hero characters is rewarding, as is gathering items for them to use. Being able to equip your rank and file troops with gear helps make them more valuable to you on a personal side, though you're not going to be crying that your Marauders got wiped out, at least you'll consider how to best use them in an encounter. That is, if you can tell which one they are.

The game's biggest strength is the huge battles you can get in. The biggest weakness is that you need to have the camera pulled back so far in order to control those battles that you never really feel like you're part of them. You'll lose your Heroes in the mass of soldiers, though you can snap to them instantly, and it just feels like those oldschool RTS games where you threw as many of your little guys at their billion and a half little guys and just hoped you had enough to win.

It's not that simple, of course. You have a wide assortment of abilities and spells you can use, but the control scheme is so convoluted that it's difficult to access every option in the heat of battle. As much as I disliked the NHL 2K8 controls, these are just so much worse. Give it some kind of radial access menu, like most RTS seem to have these days, and it'd be a lot more fun on that side of things.

If you're a fan of the Warhammer IP, something I'm admittedly not, then I'd say you need to rent the game just to see that intro cutscene. At the least watch it on YouTube, though the quality is horrible.

Pure

Yeah, this looks safe...

Wait...this is a Disney game? Where's the cutesy stuff? Where's the mouse ears? It's not even a cart-based racer, for crying out loud!

Pure is an all-out blast-through-the-environment style ATV racer that's probably best compared to the SSX series. You race a bit, then do big tricks so you can build your meter to pull off bigger tricks...using those tricks to keep your boost meter up. It's a simple, but addicting, formula that many developers would love to pull off as well as it's used here.

The game looks good, though tracks aren't really all that large and it can start to feel very 'same-y' after a while. The first time I picked it up, I got tired of the racing before finishing the first bracket. This week, I got three or four race brackets in before tiring of doing the same things over and over.

Speaking of doing the same things over and over, the Achievements are a very boring lot. This game could have done a LOT with Achievements, but instead it's largely a formulaic 'complete [x] bracket' list.

I'm not sure I'd say to buy this one without renting it for a weekend first. You might well find that you get all you want out of the game in that time.

Disgaea 3

Speaking of getting tired of a game - Disgaea 3 is probably going to hit the shelf soon. The game has decent writing, though they seem to think they're a little more witty than they really are in most cases, but I really feel like I've played this game before. With a wide variety of new games coming, Disgaea 3 just doesn't seem to be grabbing my attention.

This would have been easy to recommend as a PSN download at $20-25, but as a $50 title that's a tough sell. This could have been a PSN title, or even a PS2 title, so that price tag for a widely available 'niche' product is hard to take. Give it a look in the spring, when it'll be cheaper and you'll have more time to play it.

LittleBigPlanet

I compared it to both Spore and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed last week, and I'm narrowing that to just Spore this week. I played some more, even captured a video - should be visible right below this, though Wipido is a little moody sometimes so you might want to try either of these links: Wipido or YouTube



The design elements remain the best part of the game, though that - as I pointed out last week - really depends on you being in the mood to sit there designing something. The actual gameplay, as with Spore, has proved to be less than the hype indicated. The physics are a little glitchy, the control isn't quite there, etc...

Those who live to design weird machines using levers, ropes, and gears will be in heaven, much the same as those who enjoy making weird creature after weird creature are in heaven with Spore's design elements. Everyone I know, even those who were the most gung ho about Spore being the saving grace of the PC game market, has quit playing. I'm wondering if that'll be the case with LittleBigPlanet as well.

Of course while Spore is the most single player 'multiplayer' game in a long time you can actually play multiplayer in LittleBigPlanet - which stays fun quite a bit longer than the single player. Not only can you check out other people's creations, you can jump into it with them - or with other friends. You can't create 'on the fly' but it's not that big of a deal really.

The downside is that the majority of user-created levels are still heavily on the 'ass' side of the sliding scale. It's fun to play a well-designed level with friends, and it's sometimes fun to play ones that are so bad they wind up being good - but it's not much fun to play ones that are just mediocre levels without much thought put into them. Where Pure's professionally designed tracks became "samey" after a short time, LittleBigPlanet's amateur ones become that way even faster. Not every level needs a skateboard or rocketsled guys!

The level creation community is still growing though, and you can see improvement by looking through levels. Early on I'd find levels that were packed full of stuff to do in the starting section, but rapidly petered out towards the middle-to-late stages of the level. It's something that seems typical of amateur level designers, seen in almost every PC game out there that came with a level editor - have an idea (great or otherwise) but run out of ideas before you run out of level and just decide to put it out there anyway.

Either designers are getting better at editing their own ideas down to manageable size, or they've stopped making levels altogether and let the better ones make up a higher percentage of the active population - either way it's a good sign for the game's user-created content. I don't know that I'd call it a big selling point yet, but the weeks following launch will tell that tale.

Quick, act innocent!

Grand Theft Auto IV is getting a Trophy patch, though the date is unknown since nobody at Rockstar believes in the passage of time as we measure it. The list is available here and is, aside from the "Sorry for taking liberties with your time" Platinum Trophy, the same as the 360 version's Achievement list. That's particularly disappointing for two main reasons: pigeons and multiplayer.

After this long, do they really expect people - and this is assuming the Trophy support won't be retroactive, but it seems a safe bet since Criterion, who claimed to have thought it all out ahead of time, couldn't do it - to restart their game and kill all those freaking pigeons again?

And for a SILVER Trophy?

Multiplayer is another sticking point - namely the 'Let Sleeping Rockstars Lie' one, for killing a Rockstar developer in multiplayer. The online community for the game largely vanished a month or two after it was out, so will a Trophy drive gamers back online in the hunt for a developer (or someone who killed them, assuming this is a viral Trophy)?

Grand Theft Auto IV had a decent Achievement list. Not great, but not terrible. After all this time though, they definitely could have done something new - and better - with it.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles also had its Trophy list revealed and it's not bad. The names are generally funny, like 'Waldo's Still Missing' or 'Just Get a Motorcycle,' which is always a positive. They also reward unusual play - the motorcycle one is for driving a cumulative total of 50 miles on two wheels, for example. I'm not sure if it's the same as the Achievement list, but I'd guess that it is.

Last week Dave, surprise surprise, chimed in with his usual garbage. Since it's directly related to Trophies, I'll include it here:

"It offers the same Achievements as 360's Burnout Paradise, but the Trophy support adds a few more. It is the 360 version on steriods...."

As I pointed out, Burnout Paradise has "largely" the same list. They added in a few bike and patch-related (day/night cycle) ones, along with the Platinum Trophy - none of which were particularly interesting or innovative.

As I also pointed out, they also removed all the fun names from the Achievement list. If those are the "steroids" you're taking, you're finishing last in the competition.

They have the ability to do much better, as the Achievement list showed, so I'm not sure why they bothered adding new Trophies if they weren't going to do a full job of it. Because I know you love to try to take things out of context and run with them, I'm talking about giving them non-descript names and removing all the charm of the Achievement list.

That's the part I really don't understand. Why change those names? It's just a silly change to make when you're replacing good names with boring ones.

Trophy Whore

Since someone was so eager to see my PS3 Trophy status, but I've had to go 'underground' with my PS3 login to avoid those troublesome cyberstalkers who have such fulfilling lives that they lurk on my articles 24/7, this is probably the only way to do it. I'll log into the BigOilersFan account every so often, but I'm probably only going to play games on the other.

So, what's your level/Trophy stash like these days?



Comments, continued...

Dave also pointed out that Official Playstation Magazine gave LittleBigPlanet a 10/10. Colour me shocked, Dave. Feel free to chime in on the comments with your in-depth views from your playtime with the game, since you obviously think I'm wrong.

In other comments, Toddo asked if there's anyone monitoring the content created in LittleBigPlanet. There doesn't appear to be any sort of active monitoring system, Toddo - though you can report levels with obscene content.

Drew also chimed in, specifically on the comparison to Spore. Sorry Drew - if you're not big into the idea of level building, this one might be a 'rent first' for you. Obviously they'll be shipping with more levels than the beta has, but I kind of feel like I've seen all the gameplay already. That's really where that Spore comparison came from - it doesn't matter what creature you created in Spore, you were playing the same little games again and again.

A whole team of mavericks!

I watched the VP debate tonight with some interest, expecting it might well be the funniest thing on TV that night. I was sadly disappointed, with Palin only resorting to "um... ..." a few times. It's scary to think that woman, and this has nothing to do with her being a woman, just THAT woman, might be President one day.

Despite relatively strong performances by both participants, the debate, and the fact-checking that's sure to go along with it, will provide The Daily Show and Colbert Report with weeks of material. Can't wait.

Making some changes to my recording setup that will allow me to get more done, though it's going to mean I can't play online while recording - at least until I change my house's networking setup. I've been thinking about doing more video - a lot more. I'm not sure I have the time, or will ever have the time, to do a full video review of a game but I think including video with reviews would add a lot. People can describe things over and over, but it doesn't have the same affect on you as seeing it once for that 'oh...I get it' factor.

What do you think - want to see more video, or video of particular game elements? Are highlights, like big goals or hits in sports games, what you want to see, or would you rather see regular gameplay - or a mix of both?

Until next week, I'm out.