On the Change to the Dark Adventurers Sails

In a video post on November 8th, Rare, the developers behind Sea of Thieves, announced that they’d be looking at the designs of several sails, and would be changing them to be more inline with all the other sails in the game. While there are several sails that are differently designed, the sails that most people are talking about are the Dark Adventurers sails. The Dark Adventurers sails are unique in two ways. The first way that the sails are unique is that they are very, very expensive. Like all the other Dark Adventurers items, the sails are incredibly expensive,… [Continue Reading]

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On Ammo Nerfs

So, part of the Veilbreaker update came with some form of balancing. For a while now, explosive weapons have dominated throughout all areas of Warframe’s PvE content, and people were getting tired of it. I can understand why, because no one likes running after someone just picking up loot. However, rather than just nerfing everything into the ground, we ended up with, well, ammo. Both in magazine sizes and how much ammo we can hold.  It’s quite interesting. Only two types of ammo. We used to have loads of types of ammo. Ammo for most weapon types, funnily enough. But… [Continue Reading]

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On No Longer Worrying About Balance

Back when Deimos first cane out, the infested room in the back of our ships was reworked. After obtaining a module from Son, one of the Entrati family on Deimos, we could rework the fleshy infested space into a way to, well, change things. By sacrificing a Warframe to the Helminth, we could take one of that Warframe’s abilities, then put it on another Warframe. The Helminth system ended up proving to be be quite popular. While it is a pain having to re-farm for Warframes we already had or needed to subsume, we gained the ability to be quite… [Continue Reading]

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Are Zaws and Kitguns TOO Strong?

Zaws and Kitguns, added alongside the Plains of Eidolon and Fortuna, are basically DIY weaponry. You buy the blueprints for the sort of gun you want, you craft from the blueprints and then you give the parts to a vendor to build it for you. Generally, the blueprints for the components contain various open world resources, but once you have reached level 5 with Fortuna or Cetus, you’ll probably have enough resources to build anything. And you’ll want to reach rank 5 before you start on DIY weapons. Doing so gives you access to not just the best components, but… [Continue Reading]

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Balancing and Being Overpowered in a PvE Game

One argument that comes up a lot in PvE games is how do you balance them? After all, you’re fighting AI, so balance should be easier, right? After all, there’s no human players around to bother you. You can’t hurt the feelings of AI characters and NPCs. They’re not alive, so they don’t care how badly they get their asses kicked by us. A common argument is that it’s just PvE stuff, so balance doesn’t matter. We can be overpowered all we like, nothing can stop us. But in all honestly, this argument just doesn’t hold up. There needs to… [Continue Reading]

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Death is the Best Crowd Control

I’m having a bit of a problem with Warframe lately. There’s no reason to crowd control things. Like, ever. Well, maybe sometimes. But 90% of the time, it’s easier to just murder everything in sight, whether you’re doing a spy mission or an inteception or a survival mission. In fact, in a mission type like Defense, you do way, way more killing than actual defending. You really have to because each wave won’t end until everything is dead. Crowd control is only good from stopping the defense target (either a dumb operative or a stationary object) from being damaged, but… [Continue Reading]

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On Requiring Guns for Bosses

Assassination missions in Warframe fall into three categories: bosses that have invulnerability phases, bosses that die to a stiff breeze once their time-gating phases are over and the Sergeant. For example, Lt. Lech Kril, the boss on Mars, forces you to shoot little pipes when he does specific animations, being invulnerable until he does said animations. Once you get rid of his magic shield, he has normal health and dies pretty quickly. Or how about Captain Vor? You shoot him, he goes invulnerable and regains his health, then you shoot him again. Grineer bosses mostly work the same way. Corpus… [Continue Reading]

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A Blaze Restrained – Ember and Chroma Nerfs and an Opinion

In the recent Shrines of the Eidolon update, there was a ton of buffs to both weapons and Warframes. There were also some nerfs though. Mainly in the form of Chroma and Ember, two rather popular Warframes, one of which is due a Primed frame and one of which is currently unvaulted for a short period of time. Chroma’s nerf changed the way he used his buffs. Basically, the way his abilities worked, he would multiply both his armour and his damage by a certain amount (based on how much shield and health damage he’d taken) and this multiplication would… [Continue Reading]

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Counter Triangle Counter Square

Woo boy, it’s been a long time since I wrote a Team Fortress 2 article, but even though I hardly play any more, there’s something to be said about the unusual balance in TF2. Team Fortress 2 has always been a circle of classes and class counters. This counters that. That counters something else. Really, you have two kinds of counters. The counter triangle and the counter square. It’s all to do with how classes counter each other. The Counter Square is somewhat obvious and obscure at the same time. You know how a Pyro counters a Spy, right? Well… [Continue Reading]

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A Weird Lack of Cooldowns

People don’t tend to notice things until they don’t have them any more. You don’t realise how much you miss someone or something until it’s gone. Alternatively, you don’t notice how annoying  something can be until it suddenly hits you. Like cooldowns in video games. You know what I mean. You’ve got this awesome power, you want to use it. You save it up for the perfect moment. You use it. Now you’ve got to wait until you use it again. How long that is depends on the ability and the game. For example, the cooldown on Unrelenting Force, everyone’s… [Continue Reading]

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