It was the night before Christmas and all through the house. No one was stirring… not even a Russian developer who was working on a re-imagining of Blizzard’s classic game Rock n Roll Racing.
20 years ago Blizzard made this game and it was… amazing. It was a classic fighter driver game in which you used various weapons to knock out your opponents.
So someone decided they were going to remake it. Up until the official launch it was actually called Rock n Roll Racing 3d…. because the game came with a 3d view. But on the day of the launch they were requested by Blizzard to adopt a different name… they complied. They called it, Motor Rock.
And after a week they were requested to get rid of the classic Commentator from Blizzard, they quickly put in their own English and Russian commentators which… as you can imagine… sucked.
So now they’ve been taken down because of one thing they just didn’t cover… they weren’t paying licensing fees for the music. There were only six songs in the game but they were all songs by Ozzy Osbourne being covered by a band…. and of course a recording is protected by copyright for up to 150 years.
So as the devs are off looking for some decent royalty free music it appears this game will be temporarily off Steam.
Well it looks like Amazon is matching Steam on prices during the Steam sales. They are also offering 15% off on one game if you use the promo code “GOONCAVE.” So actually you can get at least one game cheaper from Amazon.
I found this sale and honestly… it just didn’t feel like much of a sale to me:
Captain’s Mode in it’s description just makes sense, why oh why not have this?
It appears to me that Captain’s Mode is perfect for Team Leagues, professional play, and any arranged Team vs arranged Team match. In fact if two teams every face each other, this should be the only mode they should be allowed to face each other with. I’m that confident in this mode’s ability and purpose… not confident in how it is presented.
Captain’s Mode by it’s description allows each team to have a captain who will pick the heroes for the team. This sounds great, except it’s not.
First problem is captain selection. The captain is randomly selected for both teams at the beginning of the game. Random selection is by far the worst way to choose something.
Imagine if you will there was a bag full of job titles. There is a perfectly qualified doctor out there but he can only become a doctor if he pulls the doctor job title out of the hat. Unfortunately he pulls out the clown.
This is basically how leadership is chosen in this mode, completely random.
This means that someone who is completely new to the game mode will have no idea what to do.
The second major problem with this mode is that it’s not obvious who the captains are. The captains are the first players on each team on the loading screen and are the closest to the middle on the team screen. There is no special indicator to show who is captain. Very often minutes will pass before the team realizes the captain isn’t aware that he has to do something.
A fix to this would be to have a voting system setup at the beginning in which people can vote for who they choose to be captain.
The third major problem is the time limits…. they’re too long. The Captain’s Mode picking can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. It is actually faster to leave Captain’s Mode (with no penalty) and queue for another match than it is to actually go through the voting process.
To fix the rampant Captain’s Mode leavers the process needs to be sped up, this means lower timers. On top of this it means the process will be more involved and it gives a real advantage to one team for picking people fast. In it’s current form it just drags out and seemingly people can waste all of your time without hitting the slow punishment.
A good time is differing in DOTA2. But for sure there are a set number of carries, possibly a jungler, so many nukers, an initiator or two, a lane support, and a support. You combine these into appropriate team models.
This means that in this world of Captain’s Mode not everyone will get to be the hero they want to be.
This mode gets treated as a glorified All Pick in which the team mates say what hero they want to play. But after there are so many carries or tanks on a team the Captain is forced to make the decision to pick up a pure support, jungler, or nuker. Of course no one wants to play these heroes.
This causes fights. People will take heroes they didn’t call because they feel more comfortable playing it leaving the last person to select a hero to choose that they don’t want to play.
Team synergy is ruined as now the black doubt has been placed on the team and two people hate each other over this situation.
If you have not seen the Heart of the Swarm Battle Report Protoss vs Zerg check it out here:
The match is between two unnamed players (well smurf names) and is casted with Rob Simpson from Blizzard and Day[9] who is the most famous Shoutcaster on the planet.
So in this post I’d just like to list out my thoughts on the development build they are showing off.
So the protoss standard opener is a forge fast expand with a new unit called the Mothership Core. This unit is kind of neat because of just how much it does. I’m interested to see how this gets horribly abused. The scariest ability it has (it has Recall!) is one that grants more energy to units.
But right now off the top of my head I can’t think of any protoss units that would benefit from this in an imbalanced way. Well, except for sentries. They can make a sentry, max out its energy and do an even stronger 6-gate.
Another unit debuted in this video is the Oracle. This is a flying protoss caster, yeah blizz loves casters. It moves about the same speed as a phoenix would. It has two abilities of big importance. Entombed shields all of the mineral patches at a base. These shields have to be DPSed down. This basically costs the opponent about 80 minerals per shot but much heavier if the other player doesn’t notice.
The other crazy ability is the new scouting tool which allows you to gain permanent vision from a single building. It seems like an ability the protosses didn’t need. I mean honestly they already had observers which were the best scouts in the game.
The last new protoss unit shown was the Tempest. A new super super range (22-range unit) that is also a flying unit. It doesn’t do splash damage so it’s honestly not that good. It’s about average and looks like it’s a sort of unit to deal with enemy late game units. But combined with colossus this seems to be kind of crazy.
Swarm hosts (or swarmers as people will probably end up calling them) are like underground brood lords. They send swarms at you that are about the same size as a zerg and seemingly do high amounts of damage. They kind of look like lurkers but trust me, don’t try to use lurker tactics with these guys.
With that in mind heavy speed hydralisks is common apparently. The speed upgrade makes hydralisks the new zerglings. The new speed upgrade means you basically don’t have to micro your hydralisks into good arcs since they line themselves up very quickly.
The new ultralisk ability is in the same way designed to make it so you don’t have to micro. One of the big problems with ultralisks is that they get all clumped up and funneled. So this new ability will have the ultralisk burrow and move to the enemy.
The vipers have the ability to grab units towards them essentially allowing the zerg to pick off any big tech units they want. When units are retreating it also allows the zerg to pick off a lot of the retreating units.
I think of the viper as OP in the same way that sentries are. For the longest time protosses were the only ones who could change the battlefield and modified another person’s position. Now zerg have it. So it’s probably mostly balanced considering sentries still exist.
So looking at this the vision that I’m seeing is that Blizzard is trying their hardest to add a tonne of caster units to the game and make all of the harder to micro units easier to micro.
I think terrans had a generally easy time moving an army since all terran units basically move the same speed and are generally smaller so they’re easier to organize into arc. Hydralisks on the other hand are largely a nightmare to micro. Creating great arcs with these guys is insanely hard
Despite a lot of the new units being showcased are pretty OP the direction of the game is probably better and having a larger caster roll makes the game more strategic and less micro. It sounds odd I know. But I think newer players to the game will have an easier time understanding strategies and units and I think it’ll make for far more exciting pro games.
Looking forward to seeing a terran battle report Blizzard!
The website is down for maintenance as is the game’s servers. As it turns out they awkwardly made their launch day the same as their maintenance day.
Oh NCSoft you so silly.
In other news Blizzard released an interview with… themselves. This one relates to questing in Cataclysm. As many of you know Blizzard re-did the entire 1-50 experience creating brand new quests for the whole 1-50 experience. This was on top of their 80-85 experience which was also really good. The experience was so good that I found myself re-doing all of the quests in the original vanilla game.
So in this interview… with themselves… they are buttering themselves up and talking about how great of a job they did.
When asking themselves the traditional dick move question “what is your greatest weakness” they dodge their own fricking question and answer this:
“We really spread ourselves thin and taxed the team. The original plan was to totally re-do a handful of high-priority zones, but to leave a lot of the zones that worked mostly alone. We categorized them into “red,” “yellow,” and “green” zones. The idea behind the green zones (for example, Loch Modan) was just to tweak the quest flow to be a little smoother, but not to make any major changes.”
Yes the answer to their own question is WE WORK TO HARD. So yeah another fluff piece from Blizzard. Not really worth the read but if you’re interested it is there.
TheGameGuru.Me 