When Ragnarok Online first launched in 2003 it was many people’s first step into the MMO genre, including mine. Something about the mix of art, music, setting and character the game seemed to have drew me in and didn’t let me go for a year. For me the game was never about the endless grind - it was about the pursuit of hats, meeting interesting people and setting challenges for yourself. I never managed to max level a character, I made my own fun.

Sometime when I was still playing the pay-to-play version of the game some people I met in the game told me about another version of the game that was totally free - that’s right, free! Not only was it free, but it had several changes to the game that made it easier for players to get started. The drop rate was higher, some items had more slots than normal in them, and leveling was much faster. There was an official server that had a higher drop and experience rate but it wasn’t nearly this high, so I assumed it was a testing ground. After coming back I was raving about the double slotted novice armlets that were hopefully going to be on the official servers soon. I was quickly pulled aside and told to shush in case a Guild Master was hiding nearby. They told me these servers were a legal grey area and I shouldn’t speak of them in the official server.

As interest in the core game waned, most of my friends started to splinter off into different private servers because they didn’t have to pay a monthly fee, or they were unhappy with some aspect of the main game that could be alleviated by the private scene. At this point there are a lot of private servers, many of them run on eAthena - a very powerful emulator based on the official Aegis server infrastructure which had been leaked even in Ragnarok Online’s beta period of development.

Due to these leaks, eAthena was a very complete emulation even in its infancy. Not everything was perfect - a lot of the numbers for drop rates, skills etc had to be estimated for example - but it was close enough that it was hard to tell the difference for most players. There were some other games that had private servers as well, but none of them were nearly as complete. You could play on a private World of Warcraft server but it was basically a shell of the full game: most of the quests were missing and the game was kind of buggy and broken, leading to a hollow experience that wasn’t nearly as satisfying as playing the real thing. This speaks either to the power of the eAthena emulation or the bare-bones nature of Ragnarok Online, I can’t tell which.

One of the great things about eAthena is how easily moddable it is. Someone running a server could change the rate of leveling, the drop table for monsters or what the max level was very easily. If you dig a bit deeper you could add custom maps, custom NPCs, custom classes and do other things like turn PVP on for every map, something normally reserved for special areas. With these scripts you could add a lot of depth to the game though many just wanted the classic experience with boosted rates. Servers were getting so specific that sites like RateMyServer opened up to let you advertise your version of the game, letting you write a description and the leveling rates for all to see and vote on.

Even though it was fairly easy to maintain a server with a small population, some servers ballooned to sizes that matched an official server and had to find a real host. Many people probably didn’t see this coming and suddenly had server costs to pay for, so two new systems were born - voting and donation. High population servers still saw a fair amount of turnover, so voting became important to keep new people coming in. For voting, a server would often give you a special currency that could be used to purchase items in game. Some of these items couldn’t be found in game normally, giving you an incentive to keep voting every day - not only to help the server you like, but to get you closer to that exclusive hat that was more powerful compared to regular equipment.

Usually the other way to get that equipment would be for donating. You could pay from $10 to $100 on donations, and for your donation you would be given special items that could trivialize the standard game. Often, the server owner would stress that you’re not paying for the items, you’re donating to help the server and being rewarded with stuff in return. These things would usually be the shiniest and would stand out due to their rarity so you could easily admire and desire them. Only 200 more days of voting to get your own - or for $20 you could own one for yourself!

This is a fairly common tactic in current free to play games. The free currency is drip-fed to you and spending real money will rush you to the endgame, whether you’re ready or not. These hats were in the pay-to-win tier before such terminology ever even existed. Spending money on a free game makes you more likely to play (and spend) more, so these hats were a fairly effective feedback loop to a new player - start playing, start voting on their free system, see some people with endgame gear and take a look at that donation page and maybe for $10 it’s worth it… “I’ve had $10 of fun out of this, right?”

The one thing that current free-to-play games have that Ragnarok didn’t was the whale tier of customers. There were only a finite amount of items you could buy and I personally never played on a server where they rotated out exclusive items on a limited time basis. That would have been a good way to keep players playing and purchasing as we now know. Certainly there were people that spent a lot on the server they liked the best, but they may have run out of reasons to keep spending money, making them lose interest. Official Ragnarok Online servers eventually took to the free model too, but in exchange of being free to play they stripped the game from a lot of its original functionality and put it behind a paywall. Instead of asking for donations in exchange for hats, Gravity made a special server exclusive for paying customers that had all those features in tact, which quickly crumbled. They never did the business end quite as well as private server owners could; it became an emulation of the emulation.

I know that Killing Floor 2 is in Early Access and is a moving target, but I have had some thoughts about it for a while that I wanted to write down about the way this game flows.

I'm not a fan of shooters but I put 40 hours into the first Killing Floor because it was fun and silly. It's not really a horror game despite it being billed as such, and I think the community agrees with me; the first map I ever played was Ganja Farm Reweeded, and one of the more popular maps is just a Doom level which has no atmospheric tension in it at all. I was surprised that I liked it so much and hoped that Killing Floor 2 would have just been a bigger, better version that changed some of the few flaws I felt it had.

Even though it’s still in Early Access, right now Killing Floor 2 seems to be a game entirely about engines.

Their lighting engine is supreme and maps quickly turn from well-lit safe havens to dark hallways, forcing players to move places or fight entirely in the dark. Their M.E.A.T. system is cool and silly, a gore tech that makes enemies blow up real good (especially nice when slow-mo is turned on) and allows for a lot of variety in the hundreds of enemies you end up killing each round. Adding to this is their blood splattering which is just a paint job under all the regular textures that is slowly revealed but it’s really effective as you step back and see just how much blood you’ve spilled. The game looks amazing, but does it play as good as it looks?

Honestly I think the game itself plays fine. The guns they have all shoot pretty well, you have more options in fights with a quick melee (think Left for Dead) and a sprint that lets you escape. Zeds - their term for the various enemies you fight - are much more varied in how you fight them compared to the first game. For example, the Gorefast turned from a plodding minion who happens to have a sword arm into a frighteningly fast swordsman, lunging at you and being very hard to headshot due to his erratic movement. This is all fine, it’s really fun on paper actually but there are some things I wish they would change before this game is properly released.

Many of the perk have an identity crisis. Some are too good at what they do and some others really struggle. The Firebug is a prime example of the former, as it’s so greedy and easy to play that I feel it actively takes away from other perks when used. You earn money based on your kills or assists in the game which you spend on weapons and armor between rounds, but the Firebug can actually just hoover up all the kills with the very effective flamethrower which can leave others feeling weak and poor. That greedy playstyle isn’t really a problem as long as the player helps the other classes with money woes, it’s the wide gap between that and some different perks that is worrisome.

Let’s talk about the Commando. I think that Commando is at least tied for worst perk in the game right now. In the first game Commando was the perk that dealt with trash mobs, leaving the heavy hitters to Sharpshooters and Demolitions perks. It was a run-n-gun style that worked pretty well for that game, but every class in this game is good at dealing with regular enemies now and Commando is worse. Now that enemies dodge more and are more mobile, they really struggle to find their mark compared to the likes of the Firebug. Commando’s most unique ability is that it can see invisible enemies, and (optionally) let allies see them too, but they’re not that hard to see or deal with anyway and there’s only one enemy like that in the game.

A lot of the perks in this game feel like they have an identity crisis actually, or will when new classes are released. The newly released Gunslinger is sort of a blend between KF1’s Commando and Sharpshooter, so where does that leave those perks? Sharpshooter hasn’t been released in KF2 yet, but the Commando is in a poor place right now and could really use a bit of love before the next big patch. Demolitions is no better, and it’s sad that they seem to be nerfing the good stuff rather than bumping up the stuff that could use the help. That exploding pistol is a joke.

I think that the engine updates have actually made things a bit worse still, as you don’t need lighting to set fire to everything in front of you but the lack of light sure does make it hard to see or shoot sometimes. A lot of the things I've been talking about might end up being damage tweaks or perk bonuses, although Commando feels like it needs an overhaul to let them shine.

Should all perks be viable at all points in the game? Should classes like Support and Demolitionist only be brought out in the latter half of the game, and everyone just plays firebug/gunslinger/medic before that?

The Medic has the only truly unique mechanic in the game - they can heal others. It changes up the gameplay a little bit so you're not simply focused on shooting others, which is nice when you're killing hundreds of enemies that only vary in six ways. With KF2 I feel like they are missing an opportunity to add more unique mechanics to classes.

One thing I think they could do to add a bit more variety to the game would be to have special grenades or items that would replace your grenades. They wouldn't be mandatory, but would spice up some of the more bland classes a little bit and give more options to already good classes.

Released Perks:

Berserker: Adrenaline shot that takes your armor away and gives you 0 health recovery but lets you do 4x damage for a while.

Commando: A flashbang that stuns high-value targets momentarily.

Firebug: Alt-fire on the flamethrower opens the valve more, burning your ammo at a very fast rate but also increasing the damage it does.

Demolitions: Put all your grenades and a stick of dynamite in a box and throw it at a target. Detonates on impact.

Unreleased Perks -

Sharpshooter: Gives you steady aim and no recoil when firing.

Martial Artist: Smoke bomb that lets you and anyone in the radius turn invisible momentarily.

Not only do I think this would add some variety to the game but it also might add a bit of perk synergy and more defined reasons for wanting to take a particular perk to a fight.

Even though the game looks and plays better than it ever did, something about the class diversity and class options right now just make it feel a little hollow. It's still not formally released on Steam, but to me this is Early Access done half-right. I'm glad that they listen to their community.

I know that making games is hard and Tripwire have struggled with their timetable for this game (originally slated to release holiday 2015), but right now I think it falls just a bit short of what could be a great game right now. I wish all the best for the developers and wish them luck in releasing this game in a timely fashion.

This year I reached a personal milestone in that I beat over 100 games. Not a lot of them were games from 2015 but I liked a lot of them just the same, so I wanted to give them some love and talk about some not so good games I played as well!

Top 5

5. One Finger Death Punch

Fantastic, fast-paced game with a good ramp-up of difficulty as you progress. Gameplay is left click and right click, but they slowly add new enemies and conditions that add depth and challenge to the game. All the characters are different colored stick figures so it's very easy to tell them apart (not sure how hard this game would be if you were color blind). Simple and fun, a pleasant surprise from Silver Dollar Games who mostly published below average games on the Xbox Live Indie Games store.

4. Rune Factory IV

I've only ever really played one other game from this genre - Harvest Moon 64. I love that game, so this was a very strange and fun game to play. Having the split of combat and farming wasn't that appealing to me at first but I grew to like it and started to plan my days more around exploration and keeping the farming part light. The combat isn't especially deep and the game is fairly easy overall, but the farming part has a lot of layers to it and was a bit overwhelming. I don't have much to say about the context of this game compared to others in the genre but I think it's a worthy addition and worth picking up if you like the genre. It might even be worth grabbing if you're just curious and want more 3DS games to play. Take a look on youtube!

3. Saints Row IV

I wish this game had a better story because the game itself is really fun. Part of the appeal of the last game was that it was a relatively grounded set of characters being thrown into a ridiculous story, and just saying "what the fuck?" throughout, which made it more relatable to me. This game throws all of that out the window and just has the characters flying around in ridiculous world that makes absolutely no sense, but they don't really react as much to their own silly setpieces. The game itself is really fun and I 100% completed it, and the story goes to some weird places but it was just too far out for me.

2. Crypt of the Necrodancer

Awesome roguelike with a unique rhythmic twist. Has a lot of content in it if you're looking for extra challenge, but beating the game with Cadence alone was hard and rewarding enough for me. Great music with a lot of different variations and a way to put in your own custom music as well, so you won't ever get tired of the music in the game either which is really important in a rhythm game.

1. Super Mario Maker

This game is just so good. Playing other people's levels is fun, making levels is fun too. Playing this game with my friend was one of the best experiences I had this year, even though it's a single player game it's just fun to collaborate on making levels and talking about ideas or other stuff I saw in the game some other place. The game feeds itself in a really cool way - when I play levels, it gives me ideas for making levels and when I make those levels I want to get back in and see what other cool levels people are making. The tools they have are great and there's a lot of room for improvement or expansion on things they're lagging behind in (online stuff specifically). It's made me care about user-made content, a segment of games that I previously never had much interest in.

Bottom 5

5. The Last Remnant

I wrote a longer review on Steam, but I'll summarize it here: this game is for crazy people. It is needlessly complicated, to the point that most people recommend you playing with a program that hooks into the game to give you important stats about characters and enemies like what skills they have or can learn. Battling random enemies can be as scary as fighting bosses sometimes. It's very peculiar, and trying to understand the game was almost as much fun as playing it. Six months after finishing it and I'm still not sure if I would recommend it to anyone, but I liked it well enough that I'm still thinking about it. I'm not sure if it should go in the bottom five or the top five games for the year, but it was pretty weird and memorable at the very least, for better or worse.

4. Titan Quest: Immortal Throne

The fact that this game has an active modding community astounds me, considering the base game is such a poor offering to the hack n' slash genre. Most of the game I spent one-shotting regular monsters and then being crushed by bosses. Mid way through act three is where I gave up and started to enhance my character with the TQ Defiler, but I found that most skills and stats added so little to my character that I felt I would have never reached a point where she felt powerful or fun to play.

The setting is ridiculously repetitive, in act four you finally start to see interesting and new places but until then it's mostly desert and plains. They also don't do a lot with the enemies, you mostly fight birds, pigs, spiders and horned demons. Bosses are the only place where the setting of this game shines and they're mostly health sponges that force you to play very defensive which is unlike just about every other game in this genre I've played.

I've since read a lot about the mismanagement of this game and it's a little sad, as it seems really good on paper. I'd like to see this game get a modern sequel where they could (hopefully) do the setting justice and have fun gameplay to back it up.

3. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I bought into the Skyrim hype around launch and didn't much care for it then or now once I really dug into it. The combat is boring, the story is plain and the idea of exploring a million miles of snow and caves in search of spiders and ice trolls doesn't do anything for me. So I gave myself a large jump, more damage, no fall damage and doubled the character's movespeed. At this point the game was fun for me but it was basically a different game. "Just not the kind of game for me" is what I find myself saying whenever Bethesda releases anything, but I inexplicably think about buying their games for far longer than I typically do with other games. I think it has to do with the idea of the game being far more interesting than the execution.

2. Overlord & Overlord II

The first two Overlord games are almost depressingly at odds with each other. The first game is a large, sprawling open-world Pikmin clone where it becomes very easy to get lost wondering where to go next. Each minion color you unlock has a medium-sized dungeon associated with it, usually a tutorial area showcasing the uses of their various powers. The minions in the first game had personality and the game around it was a little lacking, but had potential. You got useful spells and the overlord felt very powerful (almost too powerful with the best armor), but it was hard to find new minions without grinding, the gameplay was a tad repetitive and I found myself wanting a map. Other than the last couple of bosses being a pain I found the game to be quite entertaining if flawed.

Overlord II has almost the inverse problem. Getting new minions was never an issue and I ended up with hundreds of them by the end of the game. Rather than the short tutorial dungeon, you simply found minions hanging out and then they were unceremoniously added to your horde. They add a lot of new mechanics at a rapid pace and quickly get rid of them completely. New systems like mounts, mind control and more are used to varying degrees of success and in some cases completely forgotten once introduced until the very end of the game. There is a map but the game's more linear so you rarely need it to find your way, it is still a much-needed addition. In the hub world, they added a lot of needless waiting time between moving from map to map, often making you watch lengthy animations involving the overlord do something pointless like sit down or fly away to the next zone before letting you do what you actually want to do.

Even though Overlord II is probably the better game I am more fond of the first. Overlord does too little pretty well, while Overlord II does too much pretty poorly.

1. Pid

I've never been happier to have finished a game. For a platformer, this game has such a ridiculous difficulty curve that often goes beyond unfair and into the "stupid" territory. This game feels like it was made by artists who didn't have someone who knew about game balance, as it looks quite pretty but is frustrating to play. Most of the bosses past the first one are frustrating and offer no checkpoints, the game feels about two hours too long and the game in general is very tough. They rebalanced the game with an easy mode which I didn't play but unless you're looking for a serious challenge I would stick to easy. In the developer's own news post they claim that nearly every room and boss was rebalanced in easy which probably makes the game a lot more pleasant.

Stupid Miscellaneous Categories

Best game every year: Super Mario World

Most fun simulation: Cook! Serve! Delicious!

Most confusing game: The Last Remnant

Most Anime Ending: Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone

Stuff I'm Looking Forward to Next Year

Grand Theft Auto V

Xenoblade Chronicles X

Fire Emblem: Birthright

Thanks for reading, hope your year was good, here's to another great year.

I know that Killing Floor 2 is in Early Access and is a moving target, but I have had some thoughts about it for a while that I wanted to write down about the way this game flows.

I'm not a fan of shooters but I put 40 hours into the first Killing Floor because it was fun and silly. It's not really a horror game despite it being billed as such, and I think the community agrees with me; the first map I ever played was Ganja Farm Reweeded, and one of the more popular maps is just a Doom level which has no atmospheric tension in it at all. I was surprised that I liked it so much and hoped that Killing Floor 2 would have just been a bigger, better version that changed some of the few flaws I felt it had.

Even though it’s still in Early Access, right now Killing Floor 2 seems to be a game entirely about engines.

Their lighting engine is supreme and maps quickly turn from well-lit safe havens to dark hallways, forcing players to move places or fight entirely in the dark. Their M.E.A.T. system is cool and silly, a gore tech that makes enemies blow up real good (especially nice when slow-mo is turned on) and allows for a lot of variety in the hundreds of enemies you end up killing each round. Adding to this is their blood splattering which is just a paint job under all the regular textures that is slowly revealed but it’s really effective as you step back and see just how much blood you’ve spilled. The game looks amazing, but does it play as good as it looks?

Honestly I think the game itself plays fine. The guns they have all shoot pretty well, you have more options in fights with a quick melee (think Left for Dead) and a sprint that lets you escape. Zeds - their term for the various enemies you fight - are much more varied in how you fight them compared to the first game. For example, the Gorefast turned from a plodding minion who happens to have a sword arm into a frighteningly fast swordsman, lunging at you and being very hard to headshot due to his erratic movement. This is all fine, it’s really fun on paper actually but there are some things I wish they would change before this game is properly released.

Many of the perk have an identity crisis. Some are too good at what they do and some others really struggle. The Firebug is a prime example of the former, as it’s so greedy and easy to play that I feel it actively takes away from other perks when used. You earn money based on your kills or assists in the game which you spend on weapons and armor between rounds, but the Firebug can actually just hoover up all the kills with the very effective flamethrower which can leave others feeling weak and poor. That greedy playstyle isn’t really a problem as long as the player helps the other classes with money woes, it’s the wide gap between that and some different perks that is worrisome.

Let’s talk about the Commando. I think that Commando is at least tied for worst perk in the game right now. In the first game Commando was the perk that dealt with trash mobs, leaving the heavy hitters to Sharpshooters and Demolitions perks. It was a run-n-gun style that worked pretty well for that game, but every class in this game is good at dealing with regular enemies now and Commando is worse. Now that enemies dodge more and are more mobile, they really struggle to find their mark compared to the likes of the Firebug. Commando’s most unique ability is that it can see invisible enemies, and (optionally) let allies see them too, but they’re not that hard to see or deal with anyway and there’s only one enemy like that in the game.

A lot of the perks in this game feel like they have an identity crisis actually, or will when new classes are released. The newly released Gunslinger is sort of a blend between KF1’s Commando and Sharpshooter, so where does that leave those perks? Sharpshooter hasn’t been released in KF2 yet, but the Commando is in a poor place right now and could really use a bit of love before the next big patch. Demolitions is no better, and it’s sad that they seem to be nerfing the good stuff rather than bumping up the stuff that could use the help. That exploding pistol is a joke.

I think that the engine updates have actually made things a bit worse still, as you don’t need lighting to set fire to everything in front of you but the lack of light sure does make it hard to see or shoot sometimes. A lot of the things I've been talking about might end up being damage tweaks or perk bonuses, although Commando feels like it needs an overhaul to let them shine.

Should all perks be viable at all points in the game? Should classes like Support and Demolitionist only be brought out in the latter half of the game, and everyone just plays firebug/gunslinger/medic before that?

The Medic has the only truly unique mechanic in the game - they can heal others. It changes up the gameplay a little bit so you're not simply focused on shooting others, which is nice when you're killing hundreds of enemies that only vary in six ways. With KF2 I feel like they are missing an opportunity to add more unique mechanics to classes.

One thing I think they could do to add a bit more variety to the game would be to have special grenades or items that would replace your grenades. They wouldn't be mandatory, but would spice up some of the more bland classes a little bit and give more options to already good classes.

Released Perks:

Berserker: Adrenaline shot that takes your armor away and gives you 0 health recovery but lets you do 4x damage for a while.

Commando: A flashbang that stuns high-value targets momentarily.

Firebug: Alt-fire on the flamethrower opens the valve more, burning your ammo at a very fast rate but also increasing the damage it does.

Demolitions: Put all your grenades and a stick of dynamite in a box and throw it at a target. Detonates on impact.

Unreleased Perks -

Sharpshooter: Gives you steady aim and no recoil when firing.

Martial Artist: Smoke bomb that lets you and anyone in the radius turn invisible momentarily.

Not only do I think this would add some variety to the game but it also might add a bit of perk synergy and more defined reasons for wanting to take a particular perk to a fight.

Even though the game looks and plays better than it ever did, something about the class diversity and class options right now just make it feel a little hollow. It's still not formally released on Steam, but to me this is Early Access done half-right. I'm glad that they listen to their community.

I know that making games is hard and Tripwire have struggled with their timetable for this game (originally slated to release holiday 2015), but right now I think it falls just a bit short of what could be a great game right now. I wish all the best for the developers and wish them good luck in releasing this game in a timely fashion.