Amazon’s Crucible

My friend described Crucible as “Generic, Bland and Soulless”. If you made a game out of portfolio pieces and based on purely market research, you would get Crucible.

There is a genre of games people keep making, and frankly I’m not sure why. They include games like Gigantic, Battleborn, Paragon, Super Monday Night Combat, and now Crucible.

If I had to categorize these games, I’d call them moba-shooters, or something along that line. They tend to be team based, take a variety of inspiration from MOBA games, while trying to be shooters with heros in them.

The other thing they all have in common is that they have all died and failed. Some because of business choices. Some because the gameplay sucks. And some because they launched at the same time as Overwatch, and also the gameplay sucks.

Crucible hasn’t failed yet, but it’s been out for like… one day. I’ve played four hours. I do not want to play anymore. It plays like garbage. The shooting feels light-weight. Some of the individual assets are great, and some of them look like shit. See below for an example.

If I had to summarize crucible in a nutshell, it’d be this image right here. Look at the detail on that manta ray style wing. Look at the small lines, the weighting giving an impression of some sort of structure underneath. Now look at the rest of the image.

Look at the fact that said incredible wing is just straight up clipping into the players weapon, because who gives a shit. Look at the enemy in the background, where you can straight up see the where the textures split.

Someone clearly worked very hard on this shit. Look at those two images above. Look at the light gleam on the wing. Look at the way that the color sorta saturates the area. Look at how different small details are visible under different lighting.

This complete juxtaposition of incredible effort and absolute zero shits given can be found throughout every part of Crucible. Some parts are very well done, and incredibly detailed. And other parts feel like shit, look like shit,and play like shit.

Here’s the thing. I don’t want to eat a shit and banana smoothie, and I’m not gonna spend my time on the game equivalent. Some skills and abilities feel mostly great, like the grappling hook, with small custom animations for when you’ve built up enough speed. And some things, like the fact that when you drop in after respawning, you just sorta pause and sit there for a bit, feel like trash.

The shooting is trash. The “Skill trees” are non-existent. There are a grand total of maybe five types of enemies. There’s almost no feedback on when you hit an enemy, and feels incredibly difficult to land shots. The shots you do land barely seem to tickle the enemies health bar.

I have one theory on why Crucible looks, plays, and is the way it is, and it’s this: Crucible isn’t really intended to be a game. Instead, its meant to be a tech demo for lumberyard, and the other underlying technologies. I don’t know if it succeeds at that, because I’m not going to spend time playing it.

My friend described Crucible as “Generic, Bland and Soulless”. I’d say that it’s a pretty good summary. If you made a game out of portfolio pieces and based on purely market research, you would get Crucible.

Nimbatus – Sumo Archetypes

Blasters – Boom Here It Comes

Blasters are the most simple and straightforward archetype. They have a incredibly simple plan: blast the opponent out of the ring immediately at match start.

Weakness: Just make sure you have some method of getting out of the way, and watch them launch themselves out of the ring.

Beyblades – Let It Rip

Beyblades are the second most common archetype in many ways. While they tend to be smarter than Blasters, they have an equally simple strategy: build up rotational momentum, and use it to keep the opponent from being able to occupy the center of the map. They tend to be big, bulky, and get going pretty fast.

Weakness: There are two things about Beyblades that can be exploited. The first is the fact that until they get spun up, they can be attacked pretty easily. The second is they are massive fuel hogs. If you can outlast a Beyblade, it’s possible to simply run it down to the point it won’t have fuel to move.

Authors Note: After writing this, I ended up encountering a bunch of Beyblades that couldn’t be outlasted, because they were 1. Massive and jammed full of fuel, and 2. Didn’t really start spinning until something got close/the circle closed. Against these, I think you just gotta try to punch them out of the ring before they get any momentum.

Survivalists – Gotta Drink My Own Fuel

Unlike the other archetypes, Survivalists don’t really have a plan to win. What they do have is a plan to not lose. Typically, they’re fairly small, fast and lightweight. Coupled with a few extra sensors, they try to just run quick loops around the edge of the Sumo circle, baiting various other types of drones to trying to knock them out, causing their opponent to launch themselves out when they do, or just outlasting a few others.

Weakness: Survivalists don’t usually have a plan to win, and their lightweight size makes them easy to punish with anything that tries to occupy the center.

Summoners – Who Let The Dogs Out?

Summoners are easy to identify. If you go up against something that immediately detaches half a dozen mostly identical mini-drones at your ship, you’ve found a Summoner. Summoners use smaller mini autonomous drones to launch aggressive offensives via core seekers, and blast their opponent out of the ring. As the core isn’t attached to these mini-bots, they can move with impunity, and without the problem Blasters have, launching themselves out of the ring. This means that even if the first charge misses, they’ll turn around and launch themselves back again and again.

Weakness: Sumo, like all other modes, has a parts limit, and the parts spent on their minions means that the Summoner core itself tends to be far less protected then almost any other ship type in Sumo. If you can weather the attack of the little guys, they can be very easy to take out. In addition, because of their small size, hybrid builds with strong core ships that launch maybe just one or two summons of their own can easily push their opponents out of the ring.

Pushers – Lets Get Ready To Rumbleeeee

Pushers are the most strategically straight forward, and in some ways, the most technically complex of all the Sumo drone archetypes. Their battle plan is simple: Line up on the opponent, and smack em. Unlike Blasters or Claws however, Pushers tend to be equally focused on defense, with some of their many sensors allocated to making sure that they don’t launch themselves out of the ring when they try to do so. While this sounds simple, it means that Pushers tend to require a lot of sensors, buttons, and logic to make sure everything fires and triggers when it should.

Weakness: Pushers tend to be solid, well made ships. The only real way to exploit them is to hit them hard, and keep them off balance. A Pusher that itself is getting smacked may not have the time it needs to set up a good angle on the enemy core, and if some of its sensors end up outside the ring, it can start to misfire its thrusters.

Claws – Blasters Smarter Big Brother

Claws are a little tricky to identify. Usually, they look mostly like Pushers, right up until the bit where 75% of the drone decouples and charges your core at about a billion miles per hour. Unlike Blasters, Pushers don’t usually immediately launch. Instead, they have a variety of sensors and triggers that try to line up and hit with accurate shots. The launched claw itself often includes magnets or tricky geometry to increase the chance of a successful strike.

Weakness: Despite the extra sensors, Claws can be fooled, and usually if you can dodge the single claw strike, you can fairly easily win the match. Consider ways to jettison your core away from your ship if it gets hit, or mini-drones to try to bait the Claw into launching on bad targets. Against Claws that are only targeted on Cores, mini-drones can often just ram them, throwing off their aim, and disrupting their plans.

Hybrids – Jack of All Trades, Master of None

Many ships don’t fall into a single one of these categories. They might have Beyblade-like cores, but launch mini drones. They might be Summoners with Survivalist bases. Or they might be Claws that turn into Beyblades. Whatever the case, Hybrids are usually pretty strong, incorporating several aspects of the designs mentioned above.

Weakness: They tend to share the same general weakness as Summoners. The large number of parts spent on multi-stage launches, mini-drones, claws, or other odd behaviors means that they have less parts to really commit to any single strategy. If you can weather their onslaught, you have a decent chance to take the win.

Nimbatus: Drone Constructor

Nimbatus is a “Meh” game, but a fun toy.

Cowards hide their opinions at the bottom of the post. I’m not a coward, so let’s get into it. I’ve played about 10 hours of Nimbatus. It don’t think it’s a very fun game. I do think that it is a fun toy. Let’s talk about Nimbatus, the difference between games and toys, and then I’m going to randomly share some related anecdotes.

The primary draw of Nimbatus is building and constructing drones. The mode you choose to play changes which parts you get to do this with. There are two primary modes, multiplayer, which is kinda badly named, and singleplayer. Within single player you have sandbox and survival. The gameplay of both of the singleplayer modes is pretty similar, the only actual difference being in sandbox, you have all the parts and can do whatever you want. It’s more or less like creative mode in Minecraft. I’d say this makes it pretty boring. In survival you do the same thing, except you start with only a few of the parts, and you have to earn more by doing missions and such.

I didn’t find either of these modes very fun, because the primary draw of Nimbatus is making drones. And neither of these modes actually requires you to do that. I found that for survival, I made a single basic drone that I slowly updated with with new parts that I got, but none of the missions ever required me to seriously redesign the ship. Most of the missions were fairly boring, and boiled down to one of the following: Kill a Thing, Shoot a Thing, Find a Thing, Pick Up a Thing and Bring it Back. That’s it. These are the primary missions you’ll be doing. When you complete a few missions, you’ll open up the ability to warp to the next solar system. At the end of the solar system is the next galaxy.

The loop is fairly simple: try to reach the next galaxy. You have a threat meter at the top of your screen, and if it gets too high, you get attacked by an enemy ship. However, this isn’t actually a fight or encounter. Instead a small cutscene plays, and you lose a life. Your ship has a maximum of five of these, and they can be repaired at junk stations. I’m assuming if you run out of lives, it’s game over.

In addition, because each time you deploy to a planet increases your threat meter, you don’t really want to waste effort deploying multiple times. So instead of making bunch of multipurpose drones, I primarily found myself making one big drone with drills, resource collectors and weapons.

Okay, so now that we’ve talked about singleplayer, which I found really dull because it didn’t actually require me to make interesting drones/ships, let’s talk about the multiplayer which I had a lot more fun with.

One big thing: none of the multiplayer modes are actually “Multiplayer,” at least in the sense that I expected. Instead, all of them require you to design automated drones that meet various requirements, and then pit them against other players’ automated drones. You will never actually control a live drone against another live human opponent. Personally, I think this is kinda lame.

There are 5 multiplayer modes, and they are as follows: Timed Racing, Sumo, Brawl, Race, and Catch. Of these, I spent the most time on Sumo, and a bit on Brawl. Personally, I think Timed Racing is pretty pointless. The other four modes all pit you against another player’s drone, in some sort of challenge. In Sumo, you try to be the last person in the ring. In Brawl, you try to destroy the enemy core before they destroy yours. In Race, it’s a race, and in Catch, you both try to touch a target before the opponent.

This is where I’d get into my core argument about Nimbatus being a fun toy, and a bad video game. Nimbatus plays like a toy, which is to say if you don’t enjoy interacting with it, it isn’t actually all that fun to use. The actual single player wasn’t interesting to me, because as a toy, it was like trying to use a single set of Legos to build something. While there’s some fun to be had in that, it feels very limited, especially knowing there are all these other great parts you could use.

The fun part of Nimbatus is having access to all the parts, and trying to build interesting or funky drones. Just within Sumo mode, I saw 8+ different general design patterns, all with different plans for how to win and different strategies. But everything about the single player mode discourages doing that. You are penalized for experimenting. You don’t have all the parts. The best part of the game, building drones, is more or less actively discouraged, and you’re expected to not take risks.

I’d also like to quickly note one other system in place. In the trailer, I saw a variety of ridiculous and crazy looking drones. There’s a part fee that gets applied to deploy a drone, based on how many components the drone has. So yeah, deploying your insane crazy super snake build in Survival will bankrupt you, at which point you might as well just go back to the simple jack of all trades ship I mentioned above.

As a toy, trying to build clever autonomous drones for the multiplayer modes is fun. Seeing other players’ clever strats, and trying to figure out both how they got their drone to do something, while also how to beat it was fun for me. But actually piloting drones in singleplayer was boring.

I have one other big gripe with Nimbatus, and it has to do with some of the parts. In Nimbatus, you have a variety of parts to use, including a large set of weapons, and set of items called “Factory Parts” that I think can actually print out additional parts and ships while a drone is displayed.

I say “I think” because you can’t use any of these parts in any of the multiplayer modes. You can use a small subsection of the weapons in Brawl, but you can’t use any ranged weapons, and you can’t use TNT. So, of all the blasters, lasers, shotguns, beams, and so on? You can ONLY use them in singleplayer. Same thing with factory parts. I get that for balance sense, it’s reasonable to not want to give access to those parts in multi. I really do wish though there was a unlimited or open mode that allowed me to send my bots against my friends with no locks on what could be deployed. I think that would be great.

Okay, so now, story time. Long ago in Days of yore, back when I was in middle school, I participated in a thing called Lego League. You were given a set of Lego Mindstorms robots, and then you were given a set of tasks and problems to solve. I only ever did one year, but I remember it quite fondly. I also remember our team, Deep Mind (named after the super computer in Hitchhikers Guide, which I was a bit obsessed with at the time).

One of the first things that we discovered early on while preparing for our challenges was the following: it is possible to complete a very large number of the tasks that were scored for points in the challenge by simply having the robot drive forward, push something into place, and then drive backward. Because WINNING, we decided to accomplish as much as we feasibly could via this system, and instead of spending our time programming the robot and making clever solutions to problems, we instead mostly just created add-on attachments that quickly and simply solved the given problem. Then, we pointed the robot in the right direction, and ran our brilliant “Go Forward and Then Come Back” program.

Overall, I don’t remember doing very well at the end of season competition. I do remember spending several hours on the way down trying to catch Girantina in Pokemon Diamond in the car.

The reason I include this whole anecdote is that the singleplayer parts of Nimbatus remind me of Lego League. Instead of focusing on experimenting, the constraints of the format led us to find the most efficient and rather boring way to solve the problems, and then apply it to as many other situations as possible. Instead of focusing on experimentation and creativity, we focused on WINNING. I think that was to our detriment. Nimbatus singleplayer survival feels the same way to me.

On the other hand, I also remember doing something rather similar to Sumo with Mindstorms at a day long camp/workshop/drop your kids at the library and then go do something you enjoy style event. In that one, there was one really good robot that someone had brought in, that was really well made and clever. I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to beat it, by trying strategies like “making part of our bot detach,” or “having contain a spinning windmill like shape that would, in theory, yank out of the some connecting wires on the opposing bot.”

I don’t remember beating that robot. I do remember having a lot more fun. For me, this is what the Nimbatus multiplayer modes feel like: trying to make something interesting and out-think the other bot designers. You need to understand what you want to do, and you also need to look at other drones and try to learn what they’re doing, and how they do it. For me, this was what made Nimbatus fun.

Nimbatus is on Steam for 15$. If you like building drones, trying to out think people, or simply just building lots of ridiculous crazy contraptions, you’ll most likely enjoy it for at least a bit. But the single player aspects of the game never clicked for me. It also bums me out that a decent portion of the parts and weapons can only be used in singleplayer mode.

Nimbatus is a fun toy. I can see myself coming back to it every now and then, and building something, much like legos. But there is a lot of effort and space that feels wasted, I wish the multiplayer was actually multiplayer, and it would be cool if there were more game modes. And I really wish there was true free for all, or actual multiplayer.

~JFW

I’ll be the roundabout.

Secrets Of Shirakawa Castle – Review Part 2

An RPG Module Review

Module Name – The Secrets of Shirakawa Castle

Authors – RCG Harlow/Rosemary CG (Same person. First link goes to her stuff on DM’s Guild, second link goes to her twitter.)

System/Character Level – DND 5E for 4-6 Level 4 players

Price – $4 (We were given a review copy for free.)

Well, there was a three week gap between this and our part one review, which is… sub-optimal. But life happens, things go on, and most importantly, we did finish the adventure!

If you want to read the first part of the review, you can find it here.

If you want to read our DM’s thoughts on running the module, you can find part 1 here, and part 2 here.

Two brief notes before we really dive into this article.

This article will contain spoilers for the module. We’re reviewing it, and we can’t review it without talking about the content. Which means spoilers. You have been warned.

There’s also one part of the module that’s not quite fair for me to review. I’ll go into why later, but to put it simply things went a bit off the rails as the end. Who’d have thunk?

Overall, my opinion on Shirakawa remains more or less the same as it did part one: it’s a strong module where the NPC’s are written well, and it has a bunch of interesting monsters that are outside of the traditional fare of role-playing games.

The module’s primary weakness is that it gets a bit linear near the very end. It also feels like most of the combat gets a little less brutal as things go on.

I say ‘most of the combat,’ because my players didn’t actually do the final fight. They mostly just surrendered to become slaves/concubines of the big bad. So yeah, guys, I love you, but god damnit. I even made custom tokens for the fight and everything. And then you all just surrendered into slavery to quasi-immortal fox demon in the shape of a women.

Really?

Really guys?

Even after she told you that she EATS PEOPLE? And was going to eat the 13 year she had taken hostage?

This is why I don’t feel super confident assessing the combat: because it’s quite possible that if your players don’t fall head over heels for this fox lady, it’s going to end up being a brutal battle.

I wouldn’t know because mine offered to be her slaves and/or concubines. I think a lot of stories have a hero who falls to the dark side, but I don’t think many of them have heroes who just fall for the dark side.

In either case, everyone enjoyed playing the module. If you have a few bucks to spare, I’d highly suggest picking it up. The ending is well written, as long as your players at least like… try to defeat the final boss, but I wouldn’t know. It does set up another one shot, Return to Shirakawa Castle, where I’m gonna make them face off against their old PC’s.

Other then that, I don’t have too much else to say. I’m gonna close out this article with some uploaded images of the maps I made for some of the fights. Feel free to use them if you end up running the module on your own.

Central Castle Area
River running through small forest with bloody footprints
Large destroyed house in middle of grove, with dead trees above it, and alive trees and a path leading to the house below.

Running Secrets Of Shirakawa Castle – DM Thoughts Part 2

We finished Shirakawa Castle! Here’s where I screwed up running the game.

Whoof. Secrets of Shirakawa castle, finally finished. While the module is strong, there are a few places where I feel like I massively screwed up, or could have run things much better. Our actual review is up over here, but lets talk about running the module shall we?

This post will have specifics on running the module, and spoilers. While the other post talks about the module as a whole, this post is just talking about things that I wish I had done differently.

#1. Sei – The Friendly NPC
One of the things I feel like I really suck at the most is having NPC’s with the party, and Sei is a fantastic example of this. Sei’s role in the adventure is to be sorta guide/hint source to the players, while also providing flavor, a bit of lore, and in one situation, combat backup.

However, because I was afraid of using Sei too much, I didn’t actually use them in a single combat encounter, which meant there were multiple encounters where they were just sorta…. standing to the side, and then going “Oh yeah, that thing you just fought. It was a X/Y/Z.” I think that if I wanted Sei to be a more active part of the game, I needed to include them in combat, and to actually have them be a critical part of the team, so that their reveals of their backstory and other such things feel meaningful.

What would I do differently? I think I’d try to have Sei help the party more in certain situations, and decide how they’d react to various things in advance. The players need to care about Sei for some parts of the story to be meaningful, and that means including them in combat. It might even be possible to turn them into a semi-PC if I was to run the module again. I don’t know if this would solve the problem, but I think it might be better.

#2. Managing the NPC’s
Being a social deduction module, Secrets of Shirakawa Castle has quite a few NPC’s, and they’re written quite well, including a very strong list of relationships and such at the back of the module. Each of them has information, secrets, and other such knowledge….

So when I forgot about two of them that was a problem. A big problem, when they’re supposed to be used as a key part of revealing the last bit of the mystery.

Whoops.

What would I do differently?
There are a lot of NPC’s. If I was to run the module again, I’d would make sure to introduce all of them, and for the ones that the players don’t encounter, have them run into them either at the bath house, dinner, or some other point. The players need to meet them. And since there are only a total of seven NPC’s, it wouldn’t be that hard. I’d want to give the players more time to investigate, meet them, and actually get to know them. So when they die, it feels worse.

#3. Running the Module with a Three Week Break

This one wasn’t really my fault, but it was something I failed to consider, and led to some pretty…. rough parts near the end. The module is built on making you care about the NPC’s, and it uses the first half of the module to do this, building up them, their relationships, and their secrets. The last quarter or so is more combat, encounters, and fights, and the weight of those encounters relies on you caring about those who have been murdered.

What would I do differently?
This one is simple. Secrets should be run as either a 6-7 hour one-shot, or if split into parts, the DM needs to find a way to bring the players back, and make them care about the NPC’s again. This might mean improvising or filler, but not using the NPC’s is a big waste of potential of the module.

Final Thoughts – Running Shirakawa well requires the players to buy into the story and the world. As the DM, if you screw up the people, you screw up the module. If I were to run the module again, I would want to focus on the people, their stories, and make sure I don’t miss anyone. Running a game is always a learning experience, and I hope next time I do a better job.

Take care of yourself folks.