Where did the time go? To Mighty Quests.

I don't know about you dear readers, but the past few days have just flown by in a blur for me. Lots of gaming related things have happened that as of this morning has me trying not to mash 7-9 different ideas into a massive wall of text. (At least no more massive then usual.) This is just a side note, but the hardest part of blogging is that you either feel you have nothing, or everything to talk about.  Right now I feel I have everything, today I'll keep it to one game.

This weekend, when I had time, I played three games:

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot
The Elder Scrolls Online Beta
Space Engineers

Today will be about the first. The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, a game that could also be known as 'The Elitist Quest for Elitism'.

It's a game about trying to prove you're better than other people. It's pure unadulterated elitism. Normally I hate elitism, but generally in games not designed around it. This game is.

Basically, you build a castle in the sky. This castle holds your loot, and you need to protect it. Build up your defenses to keep other players out, but there is thankfully one catch to that. To stop you from building an impossible to beat castle, you need to 'validate' by invading yourself and succeeding.

How do you get more loot?

Invade your neighbors! Show them how bad their defenses are! Avoid the traps, kill the monsters!

While building your defenses can feel like Evil Genius or Dungeon Keeper, invasion plays like Diablo or Torchlight. Get to the end and you actually steal resources from the owner. That being said, once a castle's defenses are beaten, a shield goes up. When the shields are up, a castle can be invaded, the invader can gain loot, but the owner can not loose further resources. How long the shields are up depend on the level of the invader vs your castle. Someone who's a higher level then you ravaging your castle place a shield of longer duration then if a lower level walks through. This prevents you from going to bed for the night and returning the next morning completely broke.

Crowns are the point of the game, they are the ranking system. If your defenses kill someone, or you successfully invade another castle (shielded or not), you gain crowns.  While the game is massively multiplayer, at no point do you actually play with others. Only against. No guilds, no teams, you vs everyone, for everything. When a game is built around elitism, elitism can work.

 

Now here's where I cause Gevlon's ears to perk. My 'fun' in the game has dwindled a bit in the later levels. There is one tactic I am seeing more and more in castles, and I just don't enjoy trying to get through. A narrow hallway of spring traps that launch you into fire mines. I'll avoid terms like 'cheap' or 'unfair', after all, it's a game of elitism and people don't want me to beat the castle. But, I will say it's a tiresome binary mechanic. Walk on spring trap, walk back before it activated, walk forward and trip next trap, walk back before it activates, again and again. When you get to the third trap, the first has reset giving a narrow space to maneuver, one false step and you land in the mines, and die. I get though I'd say 70% of the time. But I don't enjoy it, where everything else is a fight for survival, this is binary. I either do it perfect, or die. Now worse yet, I'm starting to encounter slime walls in front of these spring traps. They slow you down, so you can't walk on, trip and get off before it flings you into mines. My class has an ability to flip over some of these, but not far enough. I land on a springtrap, can't move for a moment after landing, and get flung into mines. It is currently impossible for the archer to get through. No combination of class abilities can get you through, and this falls of the game developers more then the players. After all, it is not a game of fair play, and they managed to validate so somehow they go through themselves.

There's a limit to how many monsters can attack at once. Fill the room with three hundred monsters and they will still only attack 6-8 at a time. I think something similar should be done with traps, perhaps increasing the power cost of traps would help, at any rate, I think something must be done.

That rant aside, I still very much enjoy the game, even if my personal defenses are falling behind those of others.

Ok, one other topic for today.

If you made it this far, let's be friends! But really, starting this blog has been great, one of those things I talked about for a long while but never started for a number of weak non-reasons.  Another thing I had talked about for a while with some friends was the idea of doing some youtube game reviews, well starting my blog got them to finally start.

Here's our second video on Banished.

Our first video was on Loadout, I;m hesitant to link that one because multiple issues combined with hitting the deadline equaled pretty poor quality. I'm much happier with the second video and look forward to improving again on the third as we get used to our pipeline.

What do you think? Leave a comment! Or don't, I'll continue posting and ranting regardless.

-McJigg