CONFESSIONS OF A TERRIBLE GAMER: FILTHY CASUAL EDITION

I have a confession to make -- and no, it’s not that I’m a terrible gamer (I will never admit to that). It’s that... well, over the past week, I think I'm becoming a Blizzard fanboy. As someone who writes about a variety of games, I guess I thought I should give full disclosure.

Something about the design of Blizzard games has me gravitating toward them not strictly in and of themselves, but as preferable alternatives to similar titles. Over the past decade, each release seems intended to fill in successive slices of the genre pie: Real Time Strategy is what they’re known for, followed by Action RPG’s, but now they have a highly successful card-based puzzler in Hearthstone, a fun-for-all MOBA game in Super Smash Bros. Blizzard (Heroes of the Storm), and in June, Blizzard’s first Team Fortress 2-alike first-person shooter Overwatch comes out. I put Starcraft 2 down a long time ago - I found it literally too challenging to focus through a real-time, multi-battlefront resource management wargame - but these most recent 3 titles have become like safe injection sites for some of my most toxic gaming habits. Blizzard games are polished, generic, internally consistent, and low on time demand. A game of Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, or Overwatch comfortably fits into the 10-30 minutes slot. Compared to rival games in these genres, where a match tends to take upwards of forty minutes, this is a really attractive feature.

I don't want this to have melted by the time my game is over.

Take my 2200 hours of experience in Dota 2. I worked hard at that game; I invested hours and hours of research to improve, always seeking opportunities and advantages. But regardless, a painful loss can take 60 minutes. SIXTY. MINUTES. There is no surrender. You can Abandon the game, but you get punished for this by playing against other players who’ve also abandoned, which is even more unpleasant. Ask me today which game I’d rather play, and I would tell you Heroes of the Storm nine times out of ten. It’s a “lesser” game, certainly. It’s simpler, smoother, more forgiving. Finnicky annoyances like last-hitting enemies in order to get gold, or micromanaging the precious, gear-toting courier, are condensed in order to make the game faster and more fun. Small variances matter less in HOTS than Dota 2; what matters more is the overall movements and tactics of each team. And that’s why I’d rather play it. Also, that your name goes on fire when you get a killstreak.

Ever wanted to play as Pandora the Explorer... in a bugcatching costume? What's that? You don't? 

Or look at Hearthstone. I’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering on and off for probably 14 years. I LOVE Magic: the Gathering. Sometimes I can’t find a friend to play with so I will wiggle my shinies in the light for a few hours, just longing to play. A MTG friend of mine recommended HEX to me, a game so similar to Magic it was sued for plagiarism, and yet different enough that many experienced MTG players prefer it over Magic’s digital counterpart. The funnest way to play these CCG’s is in a format called Drafting, in which you buy a few randomized packs of cards, and build a deck from them. Win games against other players who have done the same, and you could win enough packs to Draft again (and then some)! The legendary self-sustaining one-time investment is attractive to the smugly clever folk who enjoy these games. So I dropped $7 and drafted a pretty good Blood/Diamond deck. I had to *shudder* “pass a rare” - sometimes when drafting, you will forego using a rare, valuable card in order to pick less cash-valuable, but more efficient, synergistic cards - in order to make a better deck. I smashed Round 1 of my first best of 3, lost the second match badly, and in the tiebreaker, it was tough to call the winner before my internet crashed. I couldn’t get it going again in the 5-minute permission window, so by the time I signed in again, I had nothing to show for my $7 investment but a bunch of common cards that accomplish almost nothing beyond the Draft. Betrayed by about 90 minutes of gameplay which amounted to nothing by a fluke, I immediately uninstalled HEX and downloaded Hearthstone.

I might be new to the game, but I cannot even IMAGINE how these numbers got onto the board.

Like Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone balms the wounds left by wasted time. Hearthstone’s Arena drafting costs either $2 or some in-game currency you can earn just by grinding, and lets you play one 5-15 minute match at a time, whenever you want. So even though there’s the same risk of disconnecting I experienced in HEX, it’s less costly, and less painful. There’s no pain in passing rares, because you don’t keep the deck you draft; instead, you use your rental draft to rack up wins (you can play as many matches with the deck as it takes to lose 3 times) which translate into card packs and game currency. And while there is a strong incentive to sink money into the game for cards, with no buyout, the free-to-play features give you access to all the same resources, should you boast the patience to grind.

All told, my near-exclusive Blizzard fixation of late hasn’t stifled, but brightened my view of games today. I’m happy to have a client outside of Steam that reliably offers up fast, fun, & fair match-based gameplay.

SUICIDE SIMULATOR Z: I AM HUNGRY & THIRSTY & I HAVE NO SHOES

The first time I heard abouty DayZ was when it was still a Arma2 mod. This friend of mine told me stories of breaking his leg and being dragged to safety by an ally from a swarm of a flesh-hungry zombies; of encountering self-organized player unions who lifted players from the spawn point, equipped them with basic tools, and dropped them. Other sources inspired me with their sheer surreality and hilarity that comes with encountering potentially hostile strangers. It would be a long time before I had to opportunity to actually play the game - in fact until last week when I finished building my first PC - but now I have, and my main take-away so far is that, while a true multiplayer sandbox is a terrific gameplay model, early access can be a tragic development model.

In my first ever run I wandered through fields for awhile before passing through a more industrial block along the highway. I found some nice gear in it - a flaregun, a welding mask, a pipe wrench, some canned food. But how am I gonna get the damn…? Oh. The pipe wrench smashes the can open. A bunch of food splatters everywhere but I can salvage enough to stave off starvation. This is kinda cool. I am feeling pret-ty tough as I head into town along the highway with my mask, wrench, and cold bean smell.

The town was a jackpot. Food, water, pocket-laden tactical vests! I fill to bursting with more tinned calories and bottled water. I find a hunting rifle with no bullets. I continue to sweep the town, throwing open door after door, until, approaching an intersection, my eye catches a flash of movement on a rooftop. I pull out my (useless) firearm and train it on the door as a man steps out, both hands gripping a pistol pointed directly at me. He cautiously approaches, and I remember there is mumble chat function. I immediately also remember neither of the goddamn microphones on my two headsets actually work, and this other player seems mute as well. We stand silently, facing each other down, and a thought occurs to me. I lower my weapon, step forward, and put a can of spaghetti on the ground. I take a few steps back. He trains his gun on me, then on the can … then lowers it, steps forward, and takes the can. Wow! Nonverbal peacemaking! Great job, me!

Eager to make progress on our newfound alliance, I head forward and see, in a fenced enclosure attached to the building this stranger came out of, there is a zombie shuffling about. Awlright! Let’s get him! I equip my wrench, my real weapon, pull open the gate, and the screen goes black and tells me I’m dead.

Huh. Guess that guy had a bullet after all.

In spite of the shock-disaster, that was an awesome gameplay experience. Long spans of nothing broken up by short bursts of tension, anxiety, release. However the game, being early access, is not consistent in producing this flow. In a later play session, I tried to meet up with my friend. But the way the game works, you spawn in random locations on the massive map, and have little resource for locating yourself in the game. Promising landmarks turn out to be distant replicas. My friend and I both spent an hour in a phone conversation trying to figure out how to meet up in the game. Over that duration, we each encountered nothing in the game world: no other players, no zombies, no weapons, and no food, and each died in total solitude and inertia.

If your leg isn't broken, sprinting off industrial-zone rooftops is a great way to cast off the good old B&W filter of a dying character in DayZ.

Later runs have shown a 50/50 probability of being either shot dead on sight by the first rigged-out human being I encounter, or starving/bleeding/thirsting to death, alone, laden down with tinned foodstuffs and powdered milk. I think I may actually write a guide on how to clip off your own dying characters, because once you've gone terminal, it's a good 10-15 minutes of gameplay before you can actually respawn a healthy character and a better chance at survival.

I found a shipwreck off the shoreline and abandoned everything to go explore, but sometimes you just gotta beat your head against a deck.

Ongoing experience with the game has been fairly positive however. To anybody new to DayZ, I strongly recommend shopping around the different servers and finding a high loot, low violence server to suit your desires. For some reason I loaded into one spawn as a pantsless, shoeless white man, and before I could find a single inventory item, I was shot dead by a stranger in a motorcycle helmet. My now-working headset microphone brooked no favor with this man.

While early access has earned a great deal of revenue towards the development of DayZ, it seems constrained by its shaky beginnings. Between the horrible user interface, jittery gameplay and rendering, and untuned randomness, many of the game’s improvements over the years have been preoccupied with glitches and balancing, rather than bolstering the shoddy foundation of the game as a whole.

And what’s worse, though it more or less invented the genre, DayZ now struggles against dozens of competitor games, which took conceptual inspiration from DayZ and backed it with some variation of a better-funded, more stable game engine. These competitor games allow shared spawn points, or start with a navigational tool of some kind. While this may break “immersion” in the survival situation, it makes those games more enduringly playable, and dependably fun, in a way that casts DayZ’s emphasis on hardcore survival in a shadow of quaintness.

To drive the point further, Dean Hall, head designer of DayZ, has openly stated that DayZ improvements have taken inspiration from the game’s competing knockoffs. Sadly, kicking off the genre does not set the standard and perhaps it remains to be seen who can build the optimal zombie survival sandbox game.

In spite of tracts of utter boredom, though, I have been enjoying my time with DayZ and look forward to delivering more epic tales of failure from the frontline of Hiking Simulator Extre