May 31 2013!

May 30th 2013

I'm still doing the same thing I was doing yesterday, meaning working on items/crafting/enemies/traps

Cya tomorrow!

Dev Log For May 29th 2013

Dev Log For May 28th 2013

I look at The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

Diablo 3 came with great fanfare, Torchlight 2 had some good marketting, I've read about Path of Exile here and there and the same goes with Grim Dawn, now in alpha. Why am I starting with this? Because I never knew that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was an Action RPG. I never knew it was coming out on steam and I looked at it the day it came out only to see what kind of game it was. I didn't think it was going to be incredible, as the title suggests.

Here I am, in the gloom swamps of dread, near a crashed blimp.

Monster Hunting
You don't pick up a class when you start TIAoVH, Val Helsing is able to do everything, through skill trees and equipment, you select what kind of skills your character will use. Van Helsing can shoot guns, use magic, slice enemies up with his swords and specialize in any of these things. While ranged characters lack proper melee options and melee fighters need to get close to their distance-focused enemies in other games, here it's only a push of the R key away. You switch between melee and ranged very easily, and it's great to shoot a couple of rounds at charging werewolves and then switch to swords to finish them off when they are too close. You could theoritically stand there and shoot everything, but the parry bonus you get while holding swords is not negligible and makes switching strategically worth it. Fire guns, switch to swords, switch to guns again, the action is dynamic and fluid, you have plenty of options.

I once fought about a billion rats

You'll rarely encounter a few enemies, they often come in big packs, numbers and monster chunks start raining everywhere, building a resource called rage each time you kill an enemy. You can use rage to activate secondary power of your abilities (each ability has 3) in the form of 'combos'. For instance, the explosive gun attack I used the most has increased blast radius, increased damage and 20% mana recovery. You could have 3 times the mana recovery (for 60%) or 2 times recovery and 1 time increased damage, etc.  You can either use the spacebar to trigger these rage combos or set them to be used automatically. Rage drains pretty fast so you need to manage it a little if you plan to use combos with all your skills, but otherwise you just kill a few monsters and unleash some big attacks.

You gain new auras and tricks along the way

By speaking to certain NPCs, you can buy 'auras' and 'tricks' that you can use in addition to your usual skills,  the auras are passive abilities (such as increased gun damage when no enemies are nearby, life leech, added gold find, bonus damage at max Rage) and tricks are active skills (like healing yourself, having a mana shield effect, a blink ability, a temporary damage buff) that don't cost any mana but they have a small cooldown. You need to spend skill points to level them up, and that means you're going to reset them when you learn ones you like better, which is a bit annoying, luckily you can reset your skills almost anytime.

Perky!

The perk system is really nice, you get 'reputation' by killing rare/champion enemies and when you have enough reputation, you can choose a perk. Some of them are one-time bonuses like 5 skill points but most of them are weird bonuses like having an extra inventory page, having more strength/higher selling price for your items, making your potions heal you better, saving you from death each 3 minutes... And the best thing about these perks is that they appear based on what you did and how you built your character. The perk that gives you an extra inventory page is based on you using the 'sort' function to replace your items in your bag, the perk that increases your skill points is based on you having skills in multiple trees, you start with a few of them, but the list grows as you play. Only thing I dislike about the perks is how there's no easy way to see how much reputation you have, there's a bar for EXP on the UI, but no bar for reputation, you need to go in the menu.

Stats and skills

I'm not a fan of stat systems where you can allocate points yourself, but TIAoVH fixes this by making the stats plainly explained in the tooltip. Because there is no character class, the only archetype you can follow is yours to build, I'm specializing in guns so I have loads of dexterity and luck (bonus magic find, woo), I don't have to ask myself if this is a right build because everything is useful to every Van Helsing. You get 3 skill points per level and you have a few choices. Active skills, passive skills, tricks, auras, upgrades for your active skills. Skills take more points as they go up in level and for each 10 points you put in a tree, you get a neat little passive bonus. You can reset both your stats and skills for a small fee, so if you take a skill and don't like it, it's no big deal.

Programmable companions ahoy!

Ghost Whispering
You also have a ghost companion that serves both for funny dialogue purposes and for fighting enemies/looting their corpses/going back to town to sell everything and buy you potions if you want. She's a very useful ally and you can decide whether she's fighting with claws or magical projectiles. You assign her stats and skills (most of her skills are passive upgrades to Van Helsing in addition to some of her own such as paralyzing enemies) select what kind of enemies she attacks, when she heals herself, what kind of items she loots on the ground and you can equip weapons and armor to her. Her AI isn't perfect, she will willingly walk into puddles of poison, die there and then take a minute or so to respawn. If you play ranged, you can have her go close to the enemies and tank them while healing you and getting all of the items.

More lines to tell me what I can do with that ring than about what it does.

You can equip her rings, which is too complicated for no reason. All the command keys on my keyboard can be used with this ring! Why doesn't she have some special ghost-only items instead of rings? It would make sense that a ghost can equip mythical things such as souls, I don't know. This just creates a situation where I pick up a good item, equip it on Van Helsing and then equip my old item to Katarina because it was my previous better one. This isn't a big problem, but giving her gear is somewhat inconsequential.

I think this game company created some Arthurian games before.

All the loot all of the time
Besides the normal line of normal/magical/set/rare/unique items, you have epic items that will gain in power when you accomplish certain things. The excalibur sword for instance, gets bonus fire damage when you kill 300 enemies, bonus ice damage after 500 and bonus lightning damage after 800. It also gets +1 in the Bash Skill when you've dealt 15000 damage wielding it. There are plenty of these items and it's not just based on enemy kills/damage dealt, it can be critical hits done, skill usage, times you've dodged, etc. Even if they're not better than the items I have, I always want to use these items to see if they'll get better. They often do.

Gems! Oh wait, no.

Instead of gems, you have essences. They all have a 'cost' and some of your items have a 'capacity', it's a bit different of the gem/socket system because gems have different costs and you can get magic items with capacities. Essences are fused with items and you can fuse any kind of essences together, adding a bunch of effects on your gear. You can also strengthen essences, increasing their effects but also their cost or mix essences together to create a random one.

There's a pretty forgiving enchanting system - but it's currently bugged, although I've managed to use it yesterday - when you pay gold and get random magics on your items, that you can then pay to remove if you want to try again. You can gamble by buying unidentified items, you can also forge 4 items together to create a new one of the same rarity. There are plenty of ways to spend gold in this game and you also get plenty from killing stuff. The biggest gold sink is the respawn system.

I died only to show this I swear.

The game can get tough in spots, I've died my fair share to bombs, tornadoes and lightning, the cost of death is pretty low, when you die you are faced with three options, spend 10% of your gold to just respawn right there, spend 5% of your gold to restart at a checkpoint that can be very close or at the beginning of the map, checkpoints aren't well defined, or just respawn in town. Respawning in town would be fine because there are portals in most of the maps, but the two loading screens (from death to town, from town to portal) break the action too much for me, and paying the 10% fee to just respawn feels a bit cheap, all and all it helps to keep the action fast because you can just retry right there, maybe this time you won't die. 10% is a sizable enough sum to make you think about it.

Enemies come from the red gates at the bottom and leave at the top.

Tower Defending
There's also a tower defense-like minigame where you place traps on your lair and kill enemies as they walk around to try and get out. Spiked floors, flame throwers, lightning traps, blades, werewolves, walls that crush enemies, there is variety to your options and you can research/upgrade new ones as the game goes on and you buy the plans from merchants.

You can upgrade many systems, adding an extra slot for items in the forge, for instance.

You also can upgrade your generator which gives you more trap capacity and various other upgrades to other systems such as the essence enchanting one. Van Helsing can also help defend his lair by killing enemies as they go. A good combination of traps on one half of the maze and you killing everything on the other will clear all waves. I wished it would tell how far you are in the wave tho, they last a bit too long and you never know when they're done.

The world map/loading screen is very stylish

All and all, I'm really happy to have played this
I am not saying that only popular games can be good, but this surprised me greatly and I'm very happy about it. There is a ton of charm in this game, the action feels good for an rpg, the story is interesting, the characters are funny and there are jokes here and there that made me chuckle. This reminds me of titan quest, or dungeon siege 2, an interesting Action RPG that does a few things differently and the rest of them really well so that it's an overall great game.

Watch out for the 

Dev Log For May 27th 2013

It's another day where I can record! Sorry if you're a fan of my poorly produced videos.

The map generating system is implemented! I can't say that it's fully bugproof but now you can walk around and a random map is created! And when you save/quit/come back to the game, the map is loaded as it was! I know this might sound 'obvious' but I took a while to make it work.

I'm not sure I'm going to be doing much programming today, I might take the day to make a list of everything I want to implement in the game now that most of the heavy lifting is done. That means creating a list of recipes/traps/enemies/materials I want done before I release it. Probably in microsoft excel or something! Then when I'm done, I'll implement all of that.

...afterwards, I need music/sound

Then I'm done. This week? Next week? Working on it!

Dev Log For May 24th 2013

Can't record today!

• Save system almost done for now
• Room generation barely started
• Chests are in
• Hooks for New Game+ also in.
• Won't be able to work on it much today, but will try to finish the save system and the room generation system.

poik out

Dev Log For May 23 2013

Sorry! I thought I was recording myself playing dota2 but it recorded my desktop even tho the game was running!

Dev Log For May 22 2013

iLook at Injustice: Gods Among Us

I don't mind fighting games on the iPad, Infinity Blade proved to me that it's doable and you can have complex, fun fighting systems even with the limited control options. I wondered what kind of game Injustice would be on the iPad, being sure that it couldn't be a port of the hit console mortal kombat-like fighter. I was mostly right, it's not.

The fighting system is shallow and gets repetitive after the first fight. You basically have four moves and they always play out the same way. You can either tap the screen to do basic attacks, swipe left/right to do heavy attacks, hold two fingers to block or activate your super move when a meter is full. There is no strategy involved, you tap and swipe and use your special moves when you can and the enemy switches out to another fighter when they're close to dying and usually they unleash a special move right then, blocking should be more effective, you can't block while you're being attacked and all attacks are combo strings, so either you block while nothing is happening, or you can't block at all.

Swiping up and down should be used for something, you can add a few more moves that way, I'm sure these characters had plenty of moves in the console fighting game, more variety would've been welcomed.

"I am going to claw you" versus "I am going to sword you"

Some characters have special abilities but they don't matter much in the long run. Catwoman deals extra damage to enemies suffering from bleed effects (she should've been able to make enemies bleed with her normal attacks or something) and Solomon Grundy can revive when he's down (with low health, low enough to be knocked out by a combo), most of the character's special abilities feel like they don't exist at all and besides basic statistical differences, they're mostly the same. You can equip various items to your characters to make them better in some ways, but these items cost power credits and you only gain a few per battle.

That damage over time special would've been better if enemies didn't tag out immediately.

Speaking of power credits, I know it's something weird to argue about, but why not add a credit doubler or something similar? I'm never going to buy 100$ worth of credits (and that's not even saying it's enough to unlock everything in the game) but 1.99$ or something to get double credits after each fight would be very tempting because you gather them quite slowly and the things you can buy cost up to 100 000 credits. And then you have to buy support cards and upgrade your powers and all that stuff I won't bother with because I can still win fights.

900 000 free power credits, maybe, but that's still not enough to get everything, so why bother?

Otherwise this is a fun little game for a while, even if the energy system makes you hit a wall after you go up a few ranks. Each fight takes energy out of your characters and you need to wait/pay to make the energy come back, the more you go, the more energy you need to spend to fight, so after a while you'll NEED to wait/pay, and that's not very fun, waiting while doing nothing isn't great gameplay.

How many of these in a row can I fight until I run out of energy?

Dev Log For May 21st 2013!

Dev Log For May 20th 2013

Hey there everyone, poik007 with my dev log for may 20th 2013! You might notice that uh, this edition of the dev log isn't recorded like the usual, that's uh, because today I can't, you know, record anything because there's some kind of... holiday? In quebec? Or canada? I don't know, really. But anyways, people are at home and I can't record because it's going to be weird I guess. Or not, I might be able to do it somewhere quiet, eh, no big deal.

My crafting system is mostly done and today I'm going to work on some potions. I'm not sure how the project overall is going tho... Maybe it'll go faster when I'm done building the systems? I'll just need to add content, no need to code everything again if it's new items and enemies and recipes. Anyways, I'll try and be done with the tutorial today, but I'm not sure it's doable, I'm too busy in real life to make the time available.

See ya tomorrow for another edition of dev log!

Look at Sleeping Dogs

There is a great balance act when you're building an open world game; You need to have a main storyline compelling enough to have the player want to go forward with it and at the same time you need to have enough side activities to justify having the game being open world. A big open world without stuff to do in it only feels like a reason to run around (or drive) only to get to the next story beat. Sleeping Dogs succeeds at being a fun open world game with a few weird mechanics here and there but mostly interesting stuff to show.

But I just started up the game!

After being a bit disappointed by some broken scripting at the beginning of the game, I was thrown into an interesting narrative that I wanted to know more about. You start the game with a very small amount of side activities that you can do but they are diverse enough to change things up between story missions. The map is full of small icons to tell you where shops and parkings are, and you're free to go choose if you want to do police missions or triad missions. Of course, there's a link between these two, you can't only do police missions forever, you'll need to mix it up if you want to unlock more of them as the story will go forward by doing these. You also have other things to do such as driving around the city to find lockboxes or statues or shrines, beat up random thugs and buy clothes.

Nothing but the best for freshly out on the streets Wei

I like that you can get set bonuses for equipping clothes that match together. You also need a Face rating to be able to equip some of it, so it's metered that way. There are a bunch of clothing stores in Hong Kong and you'll need to remember where you can buy something when your Face is leveled enough. The concept of Face is interesting, I think I've seen it before in other games based in Asia, it basically represents your presence. You level it up by beating thugs and completing certain missions. You also have a face meter that goes up during fights and when it gets full you regenerate health and intimidate your enemies, I can't say that the intimidation seems that useful, maybe it should be more obvious what the effects are.

Five different things to upgrade, they all go up in different ways.

The game feels schizophrenic in some ways, you are asked to do missions to infiltrate the triads such as driving fast and crashing rival cars on buildings, shooting guns at random things, placing bugs, breaking into places and beating up thugs but you also lose cop experience whenever you fail to jump over railings or when you bump your car into city property while driving around. I understand that the main character is a cop but having me lose exp because I've hit some crates on the sidewalk while trying to escape three criminals is kinda silly. It would've been better to dock Cop Experience when you hit civilians or when you fail certain objectives that are more significant than 'jumping over fences for fun'.

Oh no while doing this very dangerous and illegal street race I have crumpled some papers

You get triad experience by being creative while you fight. I really like the combat system even though some parts of it are too tough for me. While the cop experience starts at 3 and drains, the triad exp starts at 0 and goes up while you execute heavy attacks, defeat enemies and slam people into dumpsters. I don't feel like I have enough experience with the game yet to obtain 100% experience for triad missions, but it's pretty fun to do environmental attacks where you ram people into speakers, electrical boxes and through aquariums (maybe killing them? Isn't Wei a cop?).

That's alot of thugs!

Basic melee attacks are executed with the left mouse buttons, strong attacks are done by holding that button, some enemies will block and you can grab them with the F key, enemies will (sometimes) glow red before they attack, then you press the right mouse button to counterattack. That's all pretty good and I've managed to beat up normal enemies easily. The problem comes with tougher foes that will grapple you and then unleash strong attacks unless you press a specific key in time. I always fail these because I'm mashing left and right mouse buttons to attack and counter, so when a guy grabs me and the F prompt appears, I almost automatically fail and get hit for a third of my life. Maybe a little more time to input the keys required to get out of these devastating attacks? These tougher enemies are my bane in this game. Guns are okay too, there's a small bullet time mechanic and you can take cover, the usual.

This also was a nice story beat

Otherwise you find statues to unlock new melee moves and shrines to increase your maximum life. You can drink Dragon Punch to increase the damage you deal, get massages to get 'face' faster and drink tea to have more defense. There are a bunch of places on the map where you can buy these things so it's no big deal that you can't carry them. 

At no fault of its own, SD does something that I hate in open world games, and it might be a pet peeve of mine, but I'm not a fan of densely populated cities where people yell at you or gasp every time you run by them and otherwise act as obstacles when you're trying to get from point A to point B. I know that running might be a bit bizarre, but no need for every single person to point at me and go 'hey this guy is running, how weird!' This is annoying more than anything else. Driving is okay if you don't mind dodging the traffic and you can always take the taxi.

Hacking vents while singing karaoke!

Otherwise, Sleeping Dogs surprised me with the variety of things you can do in it, I never expected to sing karaoke or to hack things with a little mastermind-like minigame (which is a bit too easy, maybe they should've put it on a timer or gave you less chances) or to do various things in story missions that are more than simply pressing the action button near them, like unscrewing and screwing back on vents.

I like sleeping dogs, and I'll try to see the story through.

Dev Log For May 17th 2013

Dev Log For May 16th 2013

Dev Log For May 15th 2013

iLook at Star Command

I didn't back Star Command when it was on Kickstarter because I rarely back kickstarters, but I decided to give it a shot when it launched on the iPad a few weeks ago and see what kind of space game it was. This game has charm but a few issues that could easily be fixed. Okay, some issues are tougher to crack, especially the crew control, but I'll try to offer some insight on what is wrong with Star Command and what I would do with it.

Space is full of predetermined battles. Every time you go somewhere, it's the same fight.

The token system is fine for upgrades/recruiting, dumb for room abilities
For winning fights and completing missions, you get tokens. Red, blue and yellow tokens. You can use them to recruit people and to upgrade/build new rooms for your ship. This is pretty well explained and the upgrades are pretty straightforward. You also have rooms that need 'ammo' tokens to be used. Such as recharging your shields, firing big missiles and dodging incoming fire.

The flavor text is okay.

The problem is that these rooms wont produce ammo automatically (you need to manually start the process), wont collect ammo they made (you need to select the ammo) and will not tell you how much ammo you've got (you'll click the button and it will say 'YOU ARE AT MAX AMMO'). Why not have the ammo replenish automatically, be collected automatically and stop being made when you're at max capacity? Micro-managing is painful in Star Command and reducing it to the maximum would make a better experience.

The use of tokens instead of complex resources streamlines the game a bit.

This game lacks descriptions and help
There is a fair amount of flavor text in this game, but not much on the descriptive side. Rooms have no explanations at all, leaving you to wonder what their point is. You don't know what you get from staffing a room, more so with multiple people (which would be easy to fix by adding a description of what the room does, what it does if staffed and the effect of additional staff.) and even tho I've staffed all of my rooms, I don't know really why or what would happen if I hadn't.

So, what is the engine for? I can delete it, so it mustn't be very important?

It's the same thing for weapons, you get a minigame without any explanations, even the first time, and I'm still unsure of the timing of some of them. I really like the concept of minigames to fire at the enemy ship as it removes the need for randomness and allows it to be a little bit more skill based but sometimes I'm unsure of when I need to tap the screen and I can fail or win with a seemingly random chance.

You need to tap the big yellow circles when the small dot is in the red circle, I think

Otherwise the game lacks automation
I think that more things should be automatic in Star Command, because the game is hard to control with all these tiny character sprites that you can miss easily and tap on the room and vice-versa. I would add a list of all your crew somewhere on screen, with their current station and a little number of options (such as their behavior if something breaks/aliens board your ship/someone is injured, depending of their shirt color) so they would staff their stations and then move automatically to fix/kill/heal when needed. It wouldn't take much space, enough for an icon representing the crew member and then a button to change the station they're staffing and another toggle to set if you want them to stay at their station or leave to do stuff in the ship.

Because right now it's a bit weird to try and have your characters move in range of the enemies, move your engineers to fires in the ship and move your medics if someone get hurt. If the controls were more precise, maybe that would be fine, but with how small everything is, I don't enjoy it one bit. Also, why can you wait for weapons to shoot when they're ready? Just pop the minigame when a gun can fire, it pauses the game already so there's no worry you're going to die while you're shooting and waiting to fire when a gun is ready has no use.

These characters are so tiny, I can barely move them.

Dev Log For May 14th 2013

Dev Log For May 13th 2013

Look at Neverwinter

I really love Neverwinter, I've had the most fun with it than with any other MMO in the last four years. After my /played is over fifty hours, I really want to play it some more instead of writing this, that can't be a bad thing. The game isn't perfect of course, and some of the F2P systems are quite annoying me, but it's got neat mechanics and plenty of stuff to do, so I'm going to write this and then go play it some more. I'm also trying a new format for my ideas that I will be spreading here and there in bold instead of making separate paragraphs about them. Tell me what you think!

Unconvincing beginnings
I have to say that starting the game didn't warm me up to it instantly, I knew it was based on D&D fourth edition and that it was free to play, but that pretty much was it, so I created my character and chose a race. They all had passive effects and I really couldn't tell what was better than others so I ran with the one I found the silliest, ability-wise. Maybe they should've let the player chose a class before a race, so you know what stats you need?

I love gold find and critical hits!

Then I chose a class, and the classes are a little weird because you have Defender Fighter and Trickster Rogue and Controller Mage. Why not just Fighter, Rogue and Mage? I wanted to make a ranged damage dealer and according to the descriptions, none of the classes were like that, the mage was the closest thing (even if he was supposedly crowd control). All classes can wear certain type of gear and they also can 'open' certain type of chests (arcane, dungeoneering, lockpicking, religion, nature) without the use of consumable items. They all have different skills and talents and class features (The mage has one ability slot that empowers your skill placed in it).

The sixth class is 'coming soon!'

Then it took a weird turn because it asked me to roll for stats. This is pretty crazy for multiple reasons. Either stats are very important in this game (and in that case, you need the highest stats possible to be on the same playing field as the other players and need to roll until you get everything) or they are not important at all (in that case, why roll for them? It doesn't matter anyways) and after a while, trying to get 18 in multiple stats, I realized that you can't, you don't even roll randomly, it goes through sets of stats. This system should be scrapped, give the player 10 in the three 'useless' stats, give him 18 in his mainstat and 14 in his two secondary stats, then he can use his racial stat bonus to increase one to 16. Just don't have fake dice rolls

If it truly was random I would sit here and roll until I get all 18s

Then I got into the game, shipwrecked somewhere, the game ready to tutorialize everything, from movement to combat, without forgetting picking up loot, dodging (each class can do a special defensive move by pressing SHIFT, in the mage's case, it's teleporting away) and the like. After doing all of this, you'll be in the main city, ready to start questing. At the beginning, I thought it was going to be a very classic MMO, and the tutorial helps differentiate how it's not entirely true, it should've started right in the middle of the action instead of having you walk around and right click on containers to loot them.

I thought I knew everything about Neverwinter just by looking at this.

Mechanics!
You start off most of your adventures by talking to a military guy in the city and he will send you to one of the other maps of the game to talk to someone. You'll end up in a quest hub with two or three quests, work your way in the zone until you can do a 5-player dungeon or move on to the next map. All maps have a different theme, being undeads, lizards, bandits, wolves, barbarians, etc. In each map, you can gather tokens by killing enemies and then exchange these tokens for good items later on, it takes a bit of grinding to get anywhere good, so you also can spend a few tokens for a random equipment piece. Most of the quests involve killing things or getting items, so this is not the most original part of this game.

In this map, I was fighting orcs.

The basic battle mechanics are interesting, you have two at-will powers that you can use all the time, three or more encounter powers (that are misnamed because sometimes you'll get to use them more than once each encounter) and two daily powers (that you can use when a bar fills up). I know that they were named like that because of D&D but it's a little misleading to think that you're going to be able to cast that spell only once a day. 

Each power has three ranks and you'll get to level most of them by the end of your level 60

You hit enemies by targeting them and shooting your spells at them, there is no automatic lock-on like in other MMOs and you can move from one enemy to the next pretty quickly. I also like the dodging mechanics, metered by stamina that regenerates slowly. You can dodge most attacks if you get out of the way and bosses/strong enemies will show red areas on the ground where it's not safe to be. Bosses have large health bars and are often immune to stuns and deal tons of damage so you need to be quick with the dodges. 

Ths boss wasn't immune to freezing so I cold beamed him to death.

You also can drink potions to heal yourself and the cooldown is very short, so short that I haven't died yet. Maybe the cooldown should be longer, this game is a bit easy. Then again, death is pretty frustrating so nerfing the potions should come with less penalties when you die. Currently you need 'real money' items to resurrect if you die, or you can call for help if you're with other people. Otherwise you 'release' to the beginning of the dungeon while suffering one injury (giving you debuffs).

I died when someone rang the doorbell, I swear.

Speaking of 'real money' this game is bathing in free to play system. You get purple boxes that could contain awesome items such as mounts and companions and enchantments, but you need keys to open them, and the keys are 1.25$ each. I have about fifty of these boxes in my inventory, it's not too frustrating, but I really wish that you could find keys randomly sometimes. It might even incentivize people to buy more keys to see what you get in the other boxes.

Everyone is doing the free-chest-but-costly-key!

I wanted to spend a few bucks in-game because I've really enjoyed it, more than some games that I've paid 60$ to. However, I think the prices are too high. You could spend 40$ on a single companion or mount, on a weapon or on additional storage, buying everything I would've wanted in this game would've cost me about 200$, and that's pretty crazy. I'm not sure how to fix this, on one hand, it's a valid business model, on the other, I'm sure there are people like me who would like to buy a few things in-game but don't want to spend that much. 

1000 ZEN = 10$. Heavy Worg indeed.

You also can buy 'Zen' using in-game currency, the astral diamonds. These diamonds can be acquired by praying (once an hour at campfires scattered across the game) or by doing certain crafting missions you unlock after a while. It's an interesting idea, but the exchange rate is very low (understandable). After all that time I've played, I've converted all of my astral diamonds into Zen, and I have 25. Another hundred and I'll be able to get one key. That's fine, it's ran by players and the prices are set by supply and demand.

It kinds of reminds me of eve online, a little.

The crafting system is fantastic, I think. It's basically like farmville. You have nine spots to craft with, and they all start locked but one. You unlock them by leveling your professions, leveling your character and completing specific requirements. Then you can use your crafters (tailor, blacksmith, soldier, etc.) to craft different things, and it takes time to craft certain things. Gathering wool scraps takes 10 minutes, creating pants take 20 minutes, getting astral diamonds takes two hours. You level your professions like that and you craft things while questing or being offline (somethings like getting new crafters take up to 18 hours). The only things that I would improve with that system is that it's not good at telling you what you could craft but lack materials, also there should be a way out of the game to manage your crafting since the timers are so long and you could continue 'playing' while being out of the game.

'Protect Caravan' gives you astral diamonds and I just unlocked it, two hours is a bit much.

Right now there are only one paragon paths per classes, which is kind of weird because you have to make a 'choice' at level 40, and there is no choice to make. Maybe they should've waited before releasing this feature. The feats are pretty standard except that you're not locked into one tree. They have pretty impactful effects on the way you fight and you can mix and match them to make a character you really like. I'm all for the life leech and regenerating faster so I can just continue fighting, myself.

First you take 20 points of regular feats, then it's up to paragon feats!

The companion system isn't really great, tho. Your companions are only there to help you fight and when they gain enough experience, you send them away until they train and come back. They can equip runes and some gear, but you're never sure what's better for them, they should scrap that system entirely and have items specific to companions that increase some of their stats or skills. They also have maximum levels where it's confusing to me because some of their gear slots unlock at level 25 and they have a maximum level of 15. Should I get better companions now that they're maxed out? How? I've noticed that they die way more often now, how can I make them better if their levels are impossible to raise further? They should address some of that confusion.

Level 25 out of 15 is what you're saying?

I'm a bit annoyed by the runes because there are so many of them and they take so much space in your inventory. You fuse them in batches of 4 to upgrade them to the a higher tier and they have a chance to break (you can buy things with Zen to prevent them from breaking) and they act like gems (you can socket them in your gear) and equipment for your companions. The game was nice enough to provide you with an extra bag for crafting materials, it should've done the same with runes. Also I might be crazy, but these 95% to succeed rolls have failed more often than they should've, if it's not the real percentage, they should show it.

I've started throwing away my Rank 1 runes because  I lack space.

Conclusions
All and all, Neverwinter is a pretty good MMORPG, even if I never played with anyone else, there were no incentives to do random dungeons with people, I might try that later, but still. You still kill things and get loot, but the setting and systems in it are different enough to keep you interested. It's pretty hard to die with the amount of potions you can drink and the strength of your skills against your enemies, but that just makes seeing all of the content easier. The crafting and companions systems are interesting, the amount of customizing you can do to your character is enough to let you play the way you want, and if you really grind for it, you won't need to spend any real money to buy these Zen-locked items.

Gelatinous cube, I've missed you. (Also that star symbol next to the HP bar means that it's immune to crowd control)

iLook at Random Heroes 2

This game does on-screen virtual buttons in a satisfactory manner, I haven't played many games like that but I found the controls good for an iPad platformer game. You jump with the B button and fire with the A button (and you can drag the A button up to fire upwards) while moving around to dodge enemies and projectiles, jump over pits and collect stars and skulls. There are tons of levels and tons of things to unlock.

Not a fan of on-screen controls, but they work

The collectibles could been more integrated to the game
There is no point really to get the three stats each level (well, after two worlds I still don't know what it does) and the skulls are used for upgrades or for reviving you when you die (which is weird, because I wasn't able to access any kind of real money store, so you just run out of skulls after a while?) so they aren't much more then challenges to find everything. That being said, there is no quick way to restart levels, so if you fail to pick things up (by missing a jump so you can't go back up to pick a star or skull) you need to finish the level and then move to the next one and then go back to the main menu. A restart option somewhere would've been useful. No need for it to be on screen at all times, just letting you restart a level you just beat would've went a long way.

Here's Merio and Princess Peich

Neat characters
You start with a plain guy without any abilities but you can buy upgraded characters from a bandit that gets extra money when you kill enemies (but loses everything if you die) to a character with double jump, to character with other abilities (that you can activate with another button) such as hitting enemies with melee weapons and the like. The best characters attract coins and turn everything into gold. Most of them have nice  effects but some are useless and they cost a lot. Money is a bit hard to get by in the game, later enemies drop the same amount of coins as the easier ones (and that's with the bandit character) and you can upgrade your life, movement speed and jump height two or three times with each characters.

These three guns are a good example 

The guns have a few issues but they're fun too!
Buying new guns instead of upgrading old ones can be a more costly and less effective way to spend your money in Random Heroes 2. Buying a machine gun and upgrading its stat to make it as good as another machinegun really makes the purchase of the second one useless. The upgrade system should've focused on unique ways the gun work to add them better abilities and not just increase their stats. If some gun as 1/3/1 (that's for damage, rate of fire and stability) and another one has 3/1/3, you can get one to 3/5/3 or 5/3/5 without having to buy the other one. Some of them have special effects such as damage-over-time flames or explosions, but most of them shoot bullets

Also, I really wished you could aim downwards in the addition of upwards because most enemies are just a level below you and you can't shoot them, I actually preferred weapons with low stability so I could hit enemies without being in the line of fire.