9/22/2010

Civilization 5 is some Awesome Sauce

I would just like to say: Civilization 5 is amazing.

They're right; you're always saying "just...one...more...turn..."
And then you're late to leave to work. Or its 2am... and you feel like another 'short game.'
I'll write up a review on it, but if you don't like wall of text: Its different, but only in the super fantastic way. Its easy to pickup, even for people that possibly haven't played it before.

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Guild Wars 2 Concept: Downed-state

I like this concept of the downed-state in Guild Wars 2. If you're too lazy to read the link, it works like Borderlands; if you lose all your health, you'll go into this state in which you're immobilized but can still fight. In this state if you defeat a monster, you'll get back up with 3/4 health and shields. You have approximately 10-20 seconds (depending on talent perks) to defeat a monster, otherwise you'd die and res at the nearest save point. If you can't defeat a monster in that time period, a team member can run up and manually res you which takes approximately 5 seconds.

I remember playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein on the internet ages ago, in which i'd rack up points playing the medic by running around using the syringe and ressing anyone that had fallen. Fun times; I still had a good weapon to defeat enemies, but had the ability to heal people too.

This will really make a difference in the experience of an mmo I believe. Its not good enough to defeat your enemies in pvp, but anyone has the ability to res a person and come back to life on their own. Though people may not be used to not having set classes that heal, they may find being the support-heavy class instead will be just as satisfying, b/c in their own way (not disclosed yet) they'll be able to keep their teammates from falling.

I hope this downed-state is balanced in that, just like Borderlands (b/c Gearbox nailed it), it would be horrible in (say) a game of Capture the Flag, if half the team was in downed-state and the enemy was capping the points needed. What Borderlands allows you to do is to choose to res while in the downed state if you don't think you can defeat the monster, or if its just more convenient to go to the last save point. This would be good if you lost a skirmish and all ressed at the same time to be able to full coordinate with a stronger group than slowly filtering into the fight (and thus getting demolished 1 at a time).

I'm kind of on the fence on whether doing damage to the downed-player should make the downed-time bar go down faster. In the original Borderlands, damage didn't affect the time of the downed-state bar, you always had the same amount of time to defeat a monster. But in the Zombie DLC for Borderlands, if certain zombies (the slow kind) hit you while in that state, your time bar rapidly diminished. I liked that (some monsters cause the bar to diminish faster) b/c you'd have to be very careful when playing against that kind of enemy.

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