Gaming Weekend: I Guess There’s E3 Edition
The demise of E3 is regularly trumpeted as imminent, foregone or perhaps in some cases past tense. In any case some variant of it forges ahead roughly every 365 days so I presume that these discussions are moot. And while there appears to be a unanimity about the appropriate level of hype associated with the event, somewhere between rhetoric and action exists a sheet of ether made from what I call oppositium, whose sole purpose is to flip the outcome 180 degrees from the stated intent. So while journalists talk cool and lean back, nonchalantly saying “Oh, it’s just E3, no big,” what comes out of their mouths in a shrill, girlish squeal is “OhmygoshE3ohmygoshEEEeeeeThreeeeee!!”
No news that perforated my filter struck me as particularly noteworthy. There are going to be sequels to big franchise games, which I suppose qualifies as news similar to the way they throw the sunrise and sunset times and tide reports at the end of the weather forecast as though it were some kind of pertinent information. Also, I guess Xbox Live’s Dashboard is now designed by Apple and Nintendo? The revamp is… good? They spent the first couple of years excising the active user hostility from the first iteration, so this reset will be, um, new. And then there are the additional details about games we already anticipated which reinforce their imminent awesomeness. I don’t know, I felt a remarkable lack of interest in the press coverage considering the highlight of the show seemed to be a concert by The Who exclusively for media types which had, at best, a peripheral connection to Rock Band but unless Harmonix is prepared to send Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey over to my house to jam with me, this comes across as audience pandering; the ultimate schwag.
Meanwhile my actual gaming gets narrower in scope while the depth expands beyond the oceanic floor level, deep into the crevasses of near singular obsession. Whoever thought it was smart to put a lunatic OCD-targeted turn-based dungeon crawler on an easy-to-use hand held device that lists, among its key feature set, at-will clamshell hibernation mode—well, they didn’t take into consideration the impact it would have on my particular mind. Etrian Odyssey II goes with me everywhere. I steal moments between meal bites to search a wall for secret passages. I adjust inventories at red lights. In the time it has taken me to write this sentence, I’ve gained three experience levels.
EOII has a mechanic where enemies that are visible in the dungeon view (as glowing orbs; the graphical presentation of the 3D environment is more suggestive than representative), called FOEs, move through the dungeon in particular fashions. They may patrol a set course, or they may fly over areas you cannot pass. Or, in some cases, they may stand still or move very little but when you get within range they attempt to follow you and engage you in combat. FOEs are disastrously overpowered enemies. I accidentally read a spoiler that indicated there are at least 24 floors to the dungeon (probably more) and I’ve reached all of the fourth. However, my principal party members are hovering around level 17 and to date I’ve only been able to handle a singe FOE. Perhaps this indicates something about my choices in skill allotment as I advance, but I routinely handle the random encounter creatures at higher floors without even manual intervention (viva the L button Auto key) in less than a full turn. I suspect the FOEs are designed to be moving obstacles more than actual level-specific opposition.
The List
A short list this week, because I had a lot more going on this weekend than I typically do, but I focused so much on these couple of games that I actually spent about the same amount of time I generally spend gaming, I just did it in pockets or in between other activities.
- Blood Bowl - Week One of our RMBBL league and I already got in three games. This is good since I’ll be out of town next weekend so that will probably have to suffice until August. But I managed to play three different teams with my Undead and while my overall record isn’t great, I thought I had a couple of decent games, including the one against the Goblins last week.
Wednesday’s match was against Thom’s Orc team. He plays Orcs mean, and he rarely loses with them. Part of the reason for that is that his strategic positioning is typically impeccable and the resilience of the Orc team means you have to get some seriously good dice rolls to succeed against him. I lost, naturally, but I did learn a couple of key things during the match. The first thing I learned was that I do well with Undead when I can clear the pitch a little. That’s true for any team, but the Undead are good at getting into situations where they outnumber opponents as the game wears on thanks to Regeneration on most players and some hard-hitting units. When I can’t clear some space for myself, I end up struggling and that’s part of the game I really need to work on.
The second thing I learned was that I need to be better attuned to the available time. He scored in the first half and I got the ball on Turn 6, where I built a cage near the line of scrimmage thanks to a favorable kickoff result. When Thom stacked his defense in front of me, I spent Turn 7 trying to route around to my left hoping for a more open shot at the end zone. But what I didn’t consider was that I wouldn’t have enough time to make the score before the half ended because my guys don’t move that fast. If I’d been more confident, or at least more determined, to push toward the end zone I might have at least put myself in position to score. As it was I had no chance by the time Turn 8 came around and I was stuck throwing random blocks and hoping for casualties.
The third thing I learned was not to get so hung up in the opponent’s psychology. Thom’s Orcs have a Troll on their team and I spent a huge portion of the game throwing my mummies at the Troll. I’m sure he couldn’t have been happier about this because while I did knock over the Troll a few times, the truth was that the Troll didn’t really impact the game significantly except in taking my mummies out of the equation for him. I realized that the mummies are far better spent making high percentage rolls against weaker opponents that they are likely to remove from the game than trying to go toe to toe with players more their size. Obviously taking opponent big guys out of the equation can be valuable as well if they’re doing the same thing, but in this case he had one Troll and I was double teaming him with two expensive mummies. That’s a trade-off I’m sure any opponent would make.
So armed with this knowledge I went into the third game against Thom’s human team and fared much better. We still only managed a tie but I consider it a victory on other grounds. First of all, the match started off a little rough with an early score. But little by little I worked to make solid blocks where I should, used my Wight’s newfound Guard to my advantage, cleared a few of his players off the pitch, and kept him mostly contained. By the second half I made a strong drive down the field to score and in the process I eliminated nearly half his players and not just to the Knocked Out box. By the time I returned possession to the humans they were outnumbered badly enough to not even present a serious threat to win the game.
And a result of the better mummy strategy is that each got enough Star Player Points to add a skill. I even rolled doubles with one of them so he was able to take Block. The other I gave Piling On, which I hope will help with more casualties by allowing me to re-roll armor and injury checks to speed up his advancement. So I’m 0-1-2 after Week One, but my TD ratio isn’t atrocious so mostly I need to shore up my offense and stay the course defensively. - Etrian Odyssey II - Each time I find what I think will be my ideal party, something changes my mind. At first I was using a Survivalist, a War Magus, a Protector, a Medic and a Ronin. Eventually I swapped the Protector for a Landsknecht and the Survivalist for an Alchemist but over time I drifted back to the Survivalist because of his ability to hold all three item collection type skills (Take, Mine, Chop). It’s so hard to sacrifice a skill increase on any other type of character for item collection. And while the Landsknecht is a good fighter, for a while I had a hard time distinguishing him from the War Magus so I dropped him in favor of the Troubadour whose ability to passively raise the XP awarded was too sweet to pass up. Also the FOE influencing was becoming necessary as I advanced up each floor.
I’ve sent various other raiding parties through the labyrinth to beef up some lesser-used characters, but I keep returning to the same basic configuration, whichever is currently in vogue. I’ve gotten to the point now though where I think I need to develop two basic parties and more or less trade off between them. Historically I’ve had my War Magus be a front-line fighter but I think he may be better suited to a support role on what I’ll call my Confrontation Party. This will be a mostly combo-based party where I cast certain sets of spells designed to disable and then heavily punish a particularly nasty enemy or enemy group. I’m thinking the War Magus and Hexer in the back for support, healing and opponent limitation, with the Dark Hunter, Ronin and Protector up front for direct damage, special damage from limitations (the Dark Hunter/War Magus/Hexer combo has the potential to be devastating in longer battles) and defense.
My other party will be the Exploration League, where I have my Survivalist, Alchemist and Medic in the back to gather items, supply ranged or elemental damage keep everyone alive while the front consists of a Landsknecht and the Troubadour for direct damage, party support and to keep these guys speeding through the level advancement. Ideally these guys will have the Medic on hand in case they run into trouble being all forward-progressing but they will only find the really tough enemies, they’ll let the Confrontation Party clean them up for a while before they step back in to do more searching.
I’m thinking of these things mostly because at my current pace (four floors in two weeks) I’ll be finishing the game around Thanksgiving.
Parting Shot
I read a summary of the new 5th Edition Warhammer 40K rules, mostly focusing on what had changed from 4th Edition. It sounds like a lot of mechanics from 2nd Edition are back and generally speaking I don’t think there is anything about the new version that I read and went, “They did what!?”
But on the other hand, my problem with 40K is that as a game it didn’t have one or a few rules that broke it or made it too cumbersome, but that it wasn’t in itself compelling enough to warrant the peripheral effort and, frankly, the overall expense. I came to realize after playing for a couple of years that I enjoyed the modeling and the painting and the idea of playing more than I did actually running through a game. And that doesn’t mean the game is bad per se, but to me the appeal is in the cool models you get to design and the flexibility of a game that can be played on whatever landscape your mind imagines.
Instead it starts to feel like a sort of nerd pyramid scheme. There’s no reason the core rules have to cost $50. There’s no sense behind making armies run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Most people flesh out their armies with the secondary market buying used because that’s the only way they can afford the number of models they’d like to have. Meanwhile there is a never ending list of items on the hard core player’s mind that they need to pick up when the next batch of expendable income shows up and it becomes exhausting. If the game itself were as elegant or sublime as DunegonQuest or Blood Bowl or even Settlers of Catan, where the addiction to the game matched the addiction to the hobby, there might be less to actively complain about. Instead players operate with fear that their carefully crafted armies may be obsoleted or the next Codex version may introduce key new units that haven’t previously existed and they have to, at best, re-purpose an older unit or at worst buy even more figures. All for a game that’s so much a moving target primarily because it hasn’t yet settled on something refined enough to be considered “complete.”
And unlike other hobby games, specifically role-playing titles that 40K draws significant inspiration from, there is only so much local modification that can be done to alleviate the issues; any desire to play in public tournaments or external events requires conformity. At this point my interest in 40K is so low that I’m likely only to find a copy of the 5th Edition PDF and perhaps continue to work on my existing models. If Games Workshop thinks I’m spending more money on an army whose list was updated for the previous rules edition less than 12 months ago, they clearly don’t understand their target audience.