My night watching competitive League of Legends

As some of you may know, the Intel Extreme Masters tournament is on right now as part of CeBIT, in Hanover Germany. Having played League of Legends (hereafter LOL) for some time with a guy who likes watching competitive LOL, I have forever been bombarded with Youtube highlights of the latest going ons. I never really payed much attention beforehand. However, my interest piqued, I finally succumbed to the link he threw me last night to the tournament at IEM.

As someone who really enjoyed watching Starcraft 2 professional matches for some time, I was tepid about how LOL would work in a broadcast format. Five people all farming in three separate lanes, mostly concerned with simply last hitting the creeps. For the first quarter hour of some games, no one even dies. The multiple perspectives thing is the real problem though, as it’s hard to empathise as much with five little struggles instead of the very personal back and forth of a 1v1. It’s the same problem that’s kept me away from watching competitive Counter Strike but has made Street Fighter  and Marvel vs Capcom so exciting.

In the end I stuck around for two matches of LOL. The first amazed me. SK Gaming, the most prevalent in eSports of all varieties, versus E-Home, a Chinese team. Within a few minutes, both teams had largely abandoned their lanes. The top lane, usually all important for dull farming and the ever important last hitting, was pretty permanently abandoned after the eight minute mark. Both teams moved as one unit, basically living inside of each other’s jungles. All that boring laning was completely abandoned and the problems of multiple perspectives to watch were abandoned. It was all team fights, all the time.

My other big worry about the game was that both teams would largely be just trying to outplay one another at LOL. Simply fighting better than each other with largely the same strategy. Instead, I was in for a treat. At a previous IEM in Kiev, the team Moscow 5 had forever changed the metagame (or “Meetah” as the players called it) to be more aggressive, something which SK Gaming took to heart and E-Home was still playing catch up on. There were two distinct styles on display for the whole game and SK, who took the most risks and played the most excitingly won the day.

At this point I was pretty pumped for the second game. Sadly, it fell far more into the traps I had imagined. Everyone stuck to their lanes for the first 25 minutes. The game ended not because one team was playing more excitedly than the other, but merely because one was playing better. Perhaps it was simply a more subtle game, but it was far less interesting and far less watch able.  The commentor hurridly swapping between the lanes for most of the game put me in mind of Counter Strike where the viewpoint changes so often in broadcasts it is supremely difficult to both know what’s going on or care about any particular player.

I wonder if Riot Games aren’t watching these matches and slowly balancing the game towards a more interesting spectacle and away from its DOTA roots. No real conclusions today, just observation.

If only the Skyrim Dragon killed the Loan Shark

Some friends and I were playing Dungeons and Dragons the other night and we came across a fountain with water which glowed an eerie green, which the party ascertained had unknown magical properties. All in all, not unreminiscant of something you’d find in Rogue or Nethack. Or for a more contemporary reference, Dungeons of Dredmore. Much like in the above three games, the first person to take a drink received an almost entirely useless buff.

The second person to sip from the waters gained the ability to discern truth from lies for the next five minutes, which would have been ideal if we weren’t finished for the night. Or if the dungeon included any less than hostile NPCs. So the drinks went along, as every member of the party became convinced that there must be something truly useful in the fountain.

So it was that our wizard came to contract a Fey Blindness, a disease which is initially harmless but might eventually send him totally and permanently blind. Our version of the adventure had a misprint which required our wizard to roll a 23 on a 20 sided die to cure the disease, lest he succumb to blindness.

Speaking of stories, I want to hear the one behind this cover.

Upon realising that it had since been patched, two factions got into a fight.  The DM and most of the party wanted nothing more than the ticking time bomb of blindness hanging over Good Sir Wizard. Not only was it pretty funny to watch him squirm at the bad the news, it would also serve to spice up the party dynamic a bit, perhaps make combat a bit more interesting. Lastly, it would be a good story to tell, which is important, as DND often seems as much about telling others about you adventures as actually having them.

Using the errta’d rules, the disease would almost certainly be cured prior to anything interesting happening.  While trying to repair the fallout between the group’s factions, some of whom wanted the old rules and some who wanted to update, I was struck by the similarities to problems I’d had playing Mass Effect and Skyrim recently.

Somewhere through the Argos Rho nebula, the Normandy picked up a garbled distress signal. Apparently some hospital ship had run into some meteor problems and had taken a few hits. Only a very careful half of each word was audible, but they very clearly wanted help ASAP because the ship’s life support functions were offline. They were quite literally running out of oxygen.

Of these three systems, the only one I wouldn't want to live in would be Gorgon. What a name.

At the time, I wasn’t at all interested in pursuing another side quest, so I left the poor people to die, safe in the knowledge they never would.  I went and dismantled the corporate disaster that was unfolding on Noveria, a good week across the traverse. Afterwards I took a trip back to the Citadel, where I had to help out a certain C-Sec officer move a particularly evangelical Hanar out of the Presidium. Eventually I got to the stage of the game where you just finish all the rest of the side quests for no real point.

Needless to say the hospital of Argos Rho was still waiting for me, with just enough oxygen left so that I needed to pay attention but not really rush to the [E] prompt. It put me in mind of Skyrim, where nothing is less terrifying than a dragon attack. Despite being the game’s marquee feature, the element that was designed to elevate the game above its predecessor, Oblivion. 

The dragons were supposed to make the game more dynamic, interrupt the normal pace of adventuring and keep things interesting. Provide, if you’ll excuse the buzzword, emergent gameplay. Give you a story about the time where a dragon attacked you so great that you actually want to share it with everyone you know.

I wouldn't worry too much about blocking that one, CG trailer man. It does about 15% damage. The dragon would have to bite you more than five times for anything to change.

Sadly, it’s not how they panned out. Instead of people telling tales about how they were about to finally deliver the gold they owed to a loan shark when a dragon swooped down and ate him, everyone’s story is largely the same.

You hear the game’s title theme kick up in the background and see a dragon majestically swooping around over Lake Riften. It just flies in circles for a few moments, sometimes high, sometimes just skimming the water with its wing tips. It’s one of the most amazing things you’ve seen in the game, you might even have taken a screenshot. Then the dragon sees you and swoops you, doing incredibly minor fire or frost damage. It lands atop this little farm on the north shore owned by two dark elves, who both rush at the dragon with tiny little daggers. All the while they’re screaming about how terrified they are. Two guards pop over and after peppering the dragon with a few arrows, engage it in combat.

While the dragon is occupied with these four NPCs, you shoot/stab/magic it from the side until it dies, at which point the NPCs gather around and speak in hushed tones about how you’re the chosen one.

Even this bit of the dragon business gets rote. Somehow.

Occasionally one of the guards die but that’s rare. The named NPCs are in no danger. Not only are the game’s dragons too predictable, but they also lack any real bite. There’s almost no chance of them impacting the world. Which means that you don’t end up with any stories you want to tell. You were never filled with anger because a dragon swooped down and gobbled up your wife. You were never to finish the job yourself after the scholar you were bringing an ancient scroll of evil to deal with happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You don’t even get any slightly funny situations like the loan shark one I made up.

This wasn't actually the first image result for "Loan Shark", but it was too good to pass up. I mean, wow!

What if a dragon did actually kill a quest giver? Would Bethesda have to waste inordinate man hours making fail safe solutions to every quest that trigger if the NPCs all die? Might players be left without a quest, possibly ruining an achievement? Might someone experience an emotion because someone they cared about or something they wanted isn’t there any more?

What if you got back after five months of Saving The Galaxy to find it was too late for that hospital ship? You step aboard and all it’s just eerie, silent corridors with asphyxiated corpses scattered around. Shepard has to wear her mask and the entire section is punctuated by her breathing, much like the vacuum section at the beginning of Mass Effect 2.

Still the greatest moment of Mass Effect 2, aside from perhaps the Gilbert and Sullivan number in Act 3.

The industry is too young to be so safe and commercial, with focus and usability groups ensuring that every scenario about death and war is sanitised to the point of meaningless. It’s like Hollywood, a war where you never need to feel bad. You’re always the hero of the hospital and the slayer of the dragon.

Much like in Hollywood blockbusters though, none of these stories are worth telling your friends about. That’s a shame.

A Renaissance of the Dark Ages

I’ve grown bored of Fantasy. I used to absolutely love it as a kid. I used to watch The Two Towers almost every night and just replay the Helm’s Deep sequence over and over again. Magician is probably still my favorite book ever, although that’s probably wrapped up in an 11 year old’s mindset and has just carried forward on the wings of nostalgia.

But recently I’ve had a falling out with the genre. It’s probably fair to attribute this in a large part to the pressure of going into university and trying to picture myself as an adult. I’ve probably thrown out some of my interests so that I could adopt new ones to consider mature.

But now I’ve cycled right back into Fantasy. Specifically Game of Thrones and The Witcher. This particular style of Low/Dark Fantasy which doesn’t feel like Fantasy despite ostensibly being Fantasy.  In Game of Thrones I think the renewed appeal lies in the way George R. R. Martin  uses the bevy of characters to try and paint an all encompassing picture of a Dark Ages society. For me, it’s the way he talks about shield construction, the way that they break and degrade over time. That someone needs to repaint the bloody things every so often. I had never about what went into putting a crest onto a shield before and his books are filled with these tiny moments. It feels like an authentic society out of a history textbook with some fantastic elements layered on top of it.

Another evocative element of Game of Thrones is the way the houses are associated with animals and people interperet that house through the animal's characteristics. I imagine that's what people used to do.

In the Witcher, I get that same sense of historical authenticity despite the game’s far more prominent fantasy elements. It obviously isn’t portraying a real society in the same way, but it feels really faithful to what the fables of the Dark Ages must have been like in middle Europe. The idea of a monster slayer who slays beasts with a silver sword and men with a steel sword is sensational. There’s no magic involved and in all likihood, no real difference between the swords. It just seems like the kind of thing they might have done back then, were there beasts. Word passes around a village that somebody slayed a monster and within a year everyone carries a sword made of silver.

Why not just use the silver sword against both beast and man? Is the silver blade pure enough that it’s significantly more brittle? I can imagine a religion teaching that you had to slay them separately, lest they grow to be the same thing.  Which is a theme of both universes. Men becoming beasts.

We fear what we might become. The scales are just an artist's embellishment.

My favorite enemies in The Witcher are called ‘Drowners’ and are described as:

scoundrels who ended their wicked lives in the water. Drowned alive or thrown into deep water after death, they turn into vengeful creatures which stalk the inhabitants of coastal settlements.

They look like the creature from the black lagoon and aren’t terribly interesting ludically. But they do really invoke that fear of the unknown, back when death was understood way less than it is now. Some weird bastard drowns a few people out in one hamlet and a year later some village across the kingdom has changed their burial practices to stop people from rising up. Fear and Superstition. A man who is cruel in life will become a monster in death. In that regard, the distinction between the two swords in The Witcher is a pretty amazing irony.

GAME OF THRONES FIRST BOOK SPOILERS HERE

Game of Thrones handles the whole “Man into Monster” thing in a pretty cool way too. At the start of the first book, the Seven Kingdoms are at peace and everyone’s having a lovely time getting married, one unfortunate murder aside. A lot of emphasis is placed on The Wall and the role of the Night’s Watch in guarding the kingdoms from horrible skeleton warriors from the north. Although everyone’s being kinda dismissive of the threat. So you immediately jump to the conclusion that the story is going to be about skeleton warriors invading from the cold North. Real standard fantasy fare.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon popped up in a Google image search for "Evil Skeleton". Bizarre, especially considering I looked him up not a paragraph ago. Nightmare time.

Then they don’t. For almost two books there’s nothing but foreshadowing to say that Evil Fantasy Monsters are going to come and make everything horrible. But that doesn’t stop people’s ambition and greed from turning a peaceful kingdom into something horrible. Men are the real monsters again.

They also both share a love of bandits and thugs, portraying the dark ages like a Spaghetti Western where violent men are kings outside of the main towns. Power is a law unto itself and all that. Reminds me of Mount and Blade which is set in the same kind of “pre-medieval” society. As soon as you leave a town in that game, you have to be able to defend yourself. Because there’s fundamentally nothing you can do if there’s a larger party who catches you out away from the safety of a city. They will kill you if they want to.

Which is perhaps an important distinction to make, that Dark Fantasy isn’t interesting because bad things happen, something I think Dragon Age missed. It’s so fascinating because that dark lawlessness is evocative of time in Europe where everyone’s life was just a little bit shit.

Growing Old

This post contains spoilers for all of Assassin’s Creed 2 and the first half of Brotherhood. You have been warned, in italics no less.

It’s something you see all the time on forums such as NeoGAF.  People wondering if they’ve grown too old for games, or are finding that new titles lack the lustre they once had and returning to the games of their youth. Sadly, they’re far more common than the occasional Kotaku post about an lady of 94 who enjoys using the dogs instead of the gunship in Black Ops.

This guy seems to be enjoying himself, but is he the exception to the rule?

Games have traditionally been considered a juvenile medium, in both the sense that they haven’t been around for very long and have stereotypically young audience. This myth has become less prevalent in recent years, as first few generations who grew up on games are now coming into their thirties and forties and there is a strong argument to be made that gaming’s audience will further age with the medium. Nonetheless, a fear I’ve always harboured is that one day I’ll wake up and have an epiphany, realising that I don’t really like games anymore. I think this fear might be largely due to the stereotypes of comic book fans in the media, portrayed as man-children whose hobby holds them back from joining in with society at large and enjoying life.

One of the thing’s I’ve always liked most about the Assassin’s Creed series is the way they handle time. Narratively speaking of course, as I feel no fundamental attraction towards the way Ezio stands next to an entire aqueduct being rebuilt  through the magic of time lapse while a mission to meet a lover later that night waits patiently over the hill. That is kind of silly.

The way Ubisoft Montreal have approached time in the narrative is on the other hand, wonderfully self serious. As everyone knows by now, Assassin’s Creed 2 begins with Ezio as a teenager and you learn the game’s mechanics through his charming escapades. This whimsical opening is probably best encapsulated by the track “Florence Tarantella”, which brings to mind jaunty adolescent dances.

Like any other idyllic video game opening, violence soon interrupts Ezio’s childhood and he is forced to take up his father’s costume and kills Uberto Alberti, who betrayed Ezio’s family to the Borgia. Over the course of a single day, Ezio has to go through his father and two brothers being hanged publicly, burning their bodies and killing one of his uncle figures before fleeing the city he’s lived in all his life.

Then nothing happens for the next two years. Most video game plots take place over the course of a few days, with the protagonist being wronged in some way and then continuously killing people until he reaches the end of his story. Despite being totally non interactive, these two years are really evocative. Imagine trying to come to terms with a an upheaval in your life like that. At the end of those two years, he returns to Florence for two years, where he kills some people before travelling to Venice where he lives for the next six years of his life and kills a whole bunch of Templars.

Despite the way my brain romanticises this kind of desperate escape, it's probably more fatiguing than anything. Especially considering how often I got caught.

Ezio is now 27 years old. The love of his childhood, Cristina Vespucci, he left behind in Florence when he fled the city a decade ago.  He’s hardly poor, but he lives off stolen money and Assassin funds. He’s contributed nothing to society aside from killing people. His life is transient, without any real home. The people he knows are all fellow assassins or members of the underworld sympathetic to his cause. He’s become trapped by the needs of the Assassin’s guild and doesn’t really live for himself.

There’s a lighthearted moment between him and Rosa during his time in Venice where Rosa gets flustered after Ezio tells her that he “needs her” before clarifying that he needs her to teach him a climbing technique. Ezio’s relationships are all professional, even when he’s sleeping with someone. He’s lost the inclination to fall in love after a decade of killing. His quest for revenge against the Borgia has become who he is. This is particularly clear in one of Brotherhood’s scenes, where his sister reprimands him for trying to protect her from the world, as if she were still just his younger sister instead of a woman. Ezio has barely spent any time with his family over the last two decades and imagines that they’ve been trapped in the same emotional stasis as himself.

This track has always seemed bittersweet to me. There are hints of the exciting and warm times of his youth in the guitar.

My favorite moments in the story are when Ezio has a moment of self awareness and laments the way his life has become. In Venice he spends time with Rosa wondering where what he’ll have to show after he gets his revenge. In Brotherhood, there’s a great moment where after rescuing her, Caterina Sforza leaves Rome to return to her family since she “didn’t have an army” and thus was of no use to the Assassins. Ezio is left standing there as she rides off, mentioning under his breath that he’d like her to stay.  He’s not in love with her and neither she him, but to Ezio she represented a life outside of his 24 years of death and revenge. She’ given up the fight and gone back to live her life. Ezio has nothing to go back to.

I hope that’s not how I feel if I ever feel like I’m too old for gaming. I hope I can look back on all the time I’ve spent and things I’ve bought fondly. Ezio sure as hell doesn’t.

Osada

Amanita Design’s Osada is a totally nonsensical Western music video flash animation interactive thing.   I really dug the western themes, having gone through a big Sergio Leone stage a few months back, even though the western imagery and sounds were kinda ancillary to the whole thing.

Was this irrational western hiding behind this classy facade all along?

What it reminded me of were the old Putt Putt games, which taught me how to use a mouse when I was 4. Last year I found out that they were designed by Monkey Island’s own Ron Gilbert, which probably explains why I played them so obsessively as a child.  The joy was in clicking every stupid thing in the scene and enjoying the funny noise it made. You pixel hunted like in the most hardcore of adventure games, because you were a kid with one game and kids are weirdly vigilant about that stuff. It’s a funny balancing act, between the difficulty game developers have with kids getting bored quickly or turning off because a particular section was too hard and the obsessive, time bountiful nature of youth.

It’s been some time since I felt that sense of wonder when I clicked around my computer screen.  Possibly since I discovered pornography back when the functions of the human body were still a mystery to me. Some years ago now.

I feel my comparisons between Putt Putt and Porn are quite valid. Also I don't remember the colors being so bad. Nostalgia's a bitch.

Amanita also does something very clever to tie a single, thin thread of rationality and continuity into the last scene of Osada, so good on them. Clever chaps who remind me a bit of Team Ace, who made Zeno Clash and are hard at work on Rock of Ages.  Both are surrealist in a totally different way to the standard “digital-geometric-colour” surrealism so popular among computer nerds. Keep making different games, guys.

The curious balance of Super Street Fighter IV 3D

If both players are spamming the fireball button, Guile wins. They often do.

Gripped by a madness most peculiar, I awoke a few days ago with the irrepressible urge to purchase a  3DS and a yet another variant of Street Fighter 4. Continuing from their ‘simple’ controls scheme options in Marvel vs Capcom 3, SSF4 3D defaults to simpler controls, to compensate for the difficulty of pulling off moves on the 3DS’s tiny Dpad and Analog Nub.

The ‘lite’ controls allow you to bind any move in your arsenal to any button on the 3DS, as well as to one of four touch screen buttons. So players who used to have trouble pulling off a quarter circle forward consistently, can simply map Hadouken to the right trigger. This is important because it allows these players to pull off any move without taking the time to do the directional command, essentially giving professional level speeds and execution to amateur players.

Moves with high priority, such as Ryu’s Shoryuken have become to mainstay of a lot of lower level players. Normally once players have reached the level whereby they can effortless pull off an extremely fast dragon punch, they have also been playing for long enough such that they know when to and when not to use it. This is not the case at the lowest levels. I have won a fair number of matches simply by blocking whenever my opponent gets near me and then punishing whichever move they throw out without fail.

While fireball stalemates are still common, the "Dynamic View" has some more interesting balance changes due to the difficulty in perceiving the distance between you and your opponent.

Other matches devolve into fireball wars, thrown out with inhuman timing as both players hit the Hadouken button as fast as possible. These fireballs are being thrown out literally as fast the game will allow, so they always meet and cancel in the exact same spot between the players. No one gains a slow advantage, they stay locked in total equilibrium. A common tactic is for a player to rush in and get the first hit to put him at a life lead, then back off and start throwing out the fastest fireballs he has. His opponent can either start hitting the fireball button himself and stop the game from progressing, or attempt to close the distance. The problem is that at this skill level, trying to navigate the fireball field will do more harm than good for most players.

The logical counter, which is to throw out an EX version of a fireball, is very rarely used in my experience. I don’t know for sure whether this is because people simply don’t know about EX moves, or whether they’ve bound so many buttons that they can no longer use them.  This strategy I’ve seen most with Guile and Seth, due to the speed of their Sonic Booms. Sometimes players even set up their own custom matches that only last 30 seconds, to make their time killing strategy easier to pull off.

Reports of characters without fireballs online have been greatly overstated.

Playing with a friend over ten matches, a curious rock paper scissors emerged. It was a Ryu mirror match and he bound DP to the right trigger. He’s smart enough not to simply hit that button constantly, however I couldn’t get around his ability to get up close and throw those into my face. I couldn’t match his DP spam since I didn’t have it bound to anything and can’t even pull it off consistently, let alone at the lightning speed that he could without having to input a command. So I switched to Bison, who I don’t think he’d ever fought before and started spamming his moves, which I didn’t know the commands to but could simply bash on the touch screen for. This worked pretty well, as he didn’t know what to do with Bison. Eventually he took his game more slowly and started  blocking my moves so I had to find something new.

This illustrates the fundamental trinity of low level SSF4 3d.

• Both players race to find the best move to spam, which their opponent is unable to deal with.
• The other player can then try to find a new strategy their opponent doesn’t know how to deal with. Surprise.
• Or they can figure out how to counter the spam and get better as a player.

However, as most random matches last only a game or two, the last option is fairly unusual and it becomes an arms race to find either the last word in simple to use spam or an unconventional strategy, against which the opponent doesn’t know when to use their spam.

Slang of the North American Fighting Scene

If you just watch Evo when it comes around every year, you’re missing out on the true joy of North America’s fighting game scene.  Seth Killian’s commentary is fantastic and it would be great if he had the time to make it out to more events and offer some commentary. But he’s a professional. You can understand what he’s saying. The same is gloriously untrue of the commentary which graces Teamspooky’s stream. Below is a quick guide to making sense of what the hell they’re on about. Although some of these are general fighting game terms, they’re all ones I had to look up at some point.

Slang

Blow up: Doing a lot of damage, being in control of the match or having a lot of people showing up to an event.

Clean: Playing well and executing combos.

Dirty: Playing nervously and making risky attacks. Dropping combos.

Free: A person who is statistically unlikely to win a high level match.

Drop the Soap: Drop a combo.

Hype: Just means excitement, but is generally used without any regard for grammar.

Respect: Assuming your opponent will counter risky play and thus not taking those risks. A player who doesn’t respect their opponent will either throw them off balance or get beaten badly.

Body: Getting in close to someone and beating them down.

Guard Crush Special: Using Balrog’s overhead punch randomly to catch your opponent off guard and throw him off.

Justin: Justin Wong, who dominates the scene in both SSF4 and MVC3 at the moment.

Stream Monsters: The horrible beings that watch the Spooky stream. They live in the mythical Stream Land.

Justing Wong at the World Cyber Games.

More General Fighting Terms which Confused Me

Reset: In most modern fighting games, hits in combos do less damage the larger the combo is. A reset is when you deliberately stop the combo and attempt to start another one, in the hope that your opponent will go on blocking the combo. This second combo will be doing full damage again.

Frame Trap: Delaying an attack in a string by a few frames, to try and trick your opponent to stop blocking and try a counter attack. You would counter attack because you think your opponent has choked and dropped the combo, when really their attack is going to get through since they started it only a little bit late.

Hitting Buttons: Trying to attack from a position where its more normal to block and getting punished for it. This is usually when a player is getting up or when an opponent has an Ultra combo which punish any attack from the current range.

Hit Confirm: Using a light attack to check whether your opponent is blocking before going into something heavier, since the light attack can be punished less than a heavier one. Here’s a great tutorial on Youtube.

Things people say when they’re talking about Marvel

DHC: Delayed Hyper Combo. This is when someone uses second hyper combo for either more damage or to switch out the current character safely.

Dark Pheonix: If Pheonix dies with five unused super bars, she regains all her health and transforms into Dark Pheonix, who is a great rush down character.

Now you’ve earned the rights to watch some sweet Winter Brawl matches 😀