Casual Gamers Hell

I’ve been pretty disconnected from the rest of the CGH group lately, and with no reason other than the bewitching rasta of a busy life.  During that time though, I have had time to explore a few things.

I have been driven to play TF2 to a great degree.  The sheer variety of the classes, and the fact that all of them are useful, is a feat of design that I have not seen matched.  Not even in those MMORPGs that some people get hooked on.

Valve have taken a page from microsoft and a lot of school teachers, by starting to use achievements.  To this day I can still hand kids at school a sticker for completing a task, and they are happy.  That’s all the motivation they need.  Similarly, the average xbox gamer needs only the carrot flavoured achievement, the little ‘ding’ that sounds, letting them know they’ve completed some arbitrary task.  As an experiment in psychology, it’s fantastic.  Now it’s in Valve games too.  Somehow, providing a heap of achievements for medic players is all that was needed to bring them back into prominence.

For some time I played an engineer, hunting for the 10 sentry kills achievement.  I have yet to get that one.  The medic achievements come hard and fast – but unless you have a good partner you’re somewhat ineffective. Few and far between are the medics that can help more than one player.  In a social group the medic is the guy who isn’t so cool, but spends a lot of time with the most cool person.  When the cool person isn’t there, they find that they have no social responses for most things.  When the cool person is there, they can make snide remarks about those outside their cliche knowing they have the safety of Mr Cool to back them up.  That’s how medics work.

4th Edition

If I need to say what it’s the 4th edition of, then you wont be interested in this paragraph.  I’m eager to play it, but there are features I immediatly dislike.  I don’t like the ‘class roles’ they’ve gone for.  That’s nothing but a combat oriented approach to gaming, and doesn’t encourage people to take different groups into gaming.

There’s no place for non-combat characters either.  How do you run a local sheriff trying to solve a series of murders in his small town?  You don’t.  not. in. 4th.  You take a party with exactly one Striker, one Controller etc and hack the badies apart.

There are things I like about it too, but I’ll talk about them more after my campaign has started and I have a chance to playtest everything.