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PUBG tweaks 'zone of death' pacing in major new update
In its latest update, PUBG has tweaked gameplay to make it faster paced, more tactical and more violent. The main tweak to PC 1.0 Update 10 is timing in the "Blue Zone," a shrinking death region that forces players together as they die off. As many requested, it will contract at a faster speed early in the game, reducing the ability of players to linger and gather loot. At the same time, speeds later on have been slowed, with damage ramped up in the final stages.
Storyboard: Pacing and numbers in roleplaying
I attend a lot of roleplaying events. This is not a surprise to anyone, I'm sure. What also probably isn't a surprise is how many of them turn out to be slow, meandering, and generally not all that great. It's like wading through any bunch of player-generated content; you've got a lot of people who have a great idea in their heads to the point that they'll ignore signs about how badly that idea will shake out in reality. A lot of it comes down to two major issues: pacing and numbers. In some ways, this is an extension of the problem of people not playing to the medium, but it's also a problem of pacing and overall event flow. If you're not thinking about how you're pacing an event, you haven't fully thought things out, and if you aren't thinking about what that means for the people attending, you're going to wind up with a lot of bored people complaining via whispers.
Storyboard: Hint, hint
During the last several months of Final Fantasy XIV, my main character did the unthinkable: She went to work for her old mentor alongside the Garlean Empire. Everything she was doing outside of personal ventures, up to and including rejoining the mercenary company she had previously helped found, was based around collecting information. She had quite the dossier by the time she was finished, too, having flushed out a number of secrets regarding both Eorzea's defensive plans and the Ala Mhigan resistance. Not that anyone knew this because it simply never came up. Part of how I screwed this one up came down to both my choice of roleplaying groups and my own work-based schedule in the game. But another part of this was the simple fact that I didn't make it clear quickly enough just what she was up to. I dropped some hints here and there, but they were lost in a rush of other events, and as a result that whole subplot never got explored, which is a shame, especially because I like to think I'm usually pretty good at dropping hints and getting others to catch on. So as I reflect on what I did wrong, let's talk about how to do it right.
Lost Pages of Taborea: Finding time to play Runes of Magic
Ever since my semester started up, I've had to learn new ways to budget my time. My schedule cuts right through the middle of every day, which is both good and bad. I don't have to get up at an obscene hour for class, and I'm not in school through the night. It still makes it hard to play Runes of Magic and other MMOs, though, as it chops my free-time up into short, interspersed chunks. I initially found some ways to satiate my gaming addiction by -- gasp -- playing Perpetuum. Games like Perpetuum -- and I suspect EVE Online -- have some nice pacing that allows me to go semi-AFK while I work on homework, articles or whatever. I can find safe places with large ore deposits, lay down a large container, and mine for 30 minutes at a time or longer. I'm still visiting the world of Taborea on weekends, and I make quick pit-stops during the week to check up on my fellow guild members, but I realized during my last visit that there are some nice ways for the returning college student to get in some game time and get his or her school-work done. If you find your having trouble balancing work, school and life with RoM, you might find some satisfaction in the long term pet, guild, crafting, and skill-building goals.
Our tour through Final Fantasy XI's June update and Visions of Abyssea
One of the weaknesses that players have always associated with Final Fantasy XI is the nature of combat within the game. Not that any fan will avoid telling you how fun it is -- but even the most ardent defender can't avoid pointing out that it does tend to be a bit slow. The actual battles run slower, abilities take longer to recharge, and the process of getting into the combat takes a great deal longer than it does in other games. You can't just jump into the game and expect to be off and fighting within a few minutes. At least, that was the case before the June Version Update. Three of the biggest additions to the game were designed to take that notion and throw it out the window, not only encouraging players to jump into violence but outright pushing you toward faster and more active combat. We had a chance to take a walk through the game's additions, and they were everything that was promised and more, enough to make any Final Fantasy XI player very happy indeed with the changing face of the endgame. %Gallery-97942%
Masthead Studios addresses player concerns over Earthrise combat pacing
Earthrise is the first massively multiplayer online game from Masthead Studios. This being their premiere release in a competitive industry, player expectations of Earthrise seem to run the gamut from excited to skeptical. Masthead Studios recently showed a brief game video depicting the game's combat system which led to some prospective players voicing concerns over the pace of combat and cooldown of weapons. Masthead Studios responded to these concerns, stating: "One of these things we are doing behind the scenes at present is fine-tuning the combat as a whole to make it faster and better. You'll no doubt notice this means things will be faster as you experience them for yourself than initially demonstrated. We may slow things down a little bit in our demos and footage for illustrative purposes on occasion to highlight systems and features, though, but this is nothing to worry about." The developers have posted this note to the Earthrise community on the game's site, where the prospective players are currently weighing in with their views.
Ghostcrawler and the pace of change
Ghostcrawler has a nice long screed over on the forums about Blizzard's theory about change. Way back when the first few patches went into the game, Blizzard had a plan to adjust a few classes at a time -- one patch would be all about Mages, while the next would be about Rogues. But right around Burning Crusade, they changed their mind -- no more large patches, and instead it would be back to lots of smaller changes.Of course, nowadays, whether they mean to or not, we're back to the way it was -- patch 3.1 will have pretty huge changes for all of the classes, and everyone is getting a free respec. GC says that while the "progressive patching" idea was a good one, Blizzard just doesn't have the chance to take that time -- patching is a big undertaking, and the way they change the game just plain leads to putting a lot of changes in a big patch. He would love to have the team make smaller patches more frequently (tweaking instead of a complete revamp), but the way things are now, the system just isn't set up that way.He also reiterates that Blizzard is designing the game, not the people who complain on the forums. Blizzard listens to what their customers have to say, but they make their own decisions from there. Sometimes, that means we complain about problems that don't get fixed (Cower bug, anyone?), and sometimes it means they hear us complain about things that turn out not to be a problem (back in beta, a few forum posters claimed Death Knights would never be able to tank, and we now know that's clearly not true). We can hope for more sequential changes in the future, but GC says that right now, the way the game works is that Blizzard fixes as they can, and those fixes will come out in large chunks like 3.1.
