Category: Game Testing

Steam – Pay $5 First Apparently

So, as you know if you watch things here, I’m a big MMO fan, and recently it’s Final Fantasy XIV. I just remembered that I had purchased a BluRay a while ago of Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, and wondered if I could play that. Not an MMO, but just a single player RPG. So I looked it up.

I tried to install the demo. Figured I’d check it out. I had three choices to get it:

  • Steam
  • Microsoft Store
  • Origins [whatever that is, but the site looks like a steam wanabee.]

First I tried the Microsoft Store. – FAIL. I tried to sign in with my Microsoft account to do that, but I got dumped to a page that said it failed. No real help there.

Try steam. No problem, at first. Program downloaded and installed. Then hung after a few clicks to set it up.

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Just hung there forever like it was trying to reach some website. Although why would it by saving stuff online? It’s a single player RPG.

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Revelation Online – Not Paying Attention

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Well it’s certainly not ugly. But these folks have not been paying attention. While the game looks great, the developers are stuck in a game design from years ago.

What’s wrong out of the box?  I know that the modern way to review games with with a Youtube video where I shout at the screen while I deal with the frustrations of the game. But here is the old style blogging review. Here are my first impressions after a couple of hours with Revelation Online Open Beta.

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ASTA – Nothing to See Here

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ASTA is in Open Beta

ASTA from Webzen is in Open Beta, and honestly, there is nothing to see here.

While it’s written by a Korean developer Polygon, it is nowhere near the quality in any dimension as Tera from Blue Hole.

ASTA is / will be free to play. But so is Tera. I would not even spend the time to download the 10GB of game to try it. Let me count some of the reasons.

 

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Tera – Level 65 Slaying Crystal Test

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Testing Crystals

After the previous test, it occurred to me that there were some additional tests that should be done.

  • Testing at level 65 rather than just at level 47. The discussion where Slaying crystals were mentioned was discussing high level dungeons.
  • Testing the obvious combination of One Slaying Crystal and Three Pounding Crystals.
  • Testing no crystals at all.

These tests have been done. But the results have not been that surprising. They show that:

  • One Slaying vs Four Pounding showed a little more than 9% improvement.
  • One Slaying and Three Pounding vs Four Pounding showed about 22% improvement.

Continue reading “Tera – Level 65 Slaying Crystal Test”

Tera – Slayer Crystal Test

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Testing Crystals

I recently became aware of a method of fighting in dungeons that seemed quite surprising. Apparently some folks equip Slayer crystals in dungeons in an effort to up their Crit stat. These crystals only increase crit however, when your HP is below 50%. This causes some very strange behavior :

  • Healers are discouraged from healing players since they over heal – above 50%.
  • HP Pots are using during combat to manage HP to the correct level so that the Slayer crystals have their effect.
  • This causes an Economy in Pots apparently, where some folks make Gold based on the creation and sale of Pots.

I decided to do a test to see if Slayer Crystals had more benefit than the obvious other choice of Pounding Crystals which have recently been added to the game. I’ve done this test and recorded the video. The video and a PDF file of the data analysis spreadsheet are available for your review.

Bottom Line: Slayer Crystals, under the conditions of this test, appear to be about 20% better than Pounding Crystals. But the difficulty of keeping your health below 50%, and the issue of not being able to use healers, would seem to outweigh this advantage.

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Windows 10 – Upgrading another system

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BTW, I have no idea why this system shows an Alienware Logo in the System Control Panel. I have completely swapped out the guts of this system and reinstalled a new copy of Windows 7.

I just upgraded this system to Windows 10 using the DVD burned last time and did the following steps:

  • Backup everything on the system drive from C:\Users\Yournamehere\My Documents etc., if not to another system, at least to one of the data drives.
  • Uninstall any crufty old programs that I’m not going to need in the new world.
  • Reboot
  • Make a record of all the things you have installed by taking screenshots of the “Programs and Features” control panel list.
  • Download the latest Nvidia drivers for the card for both Win 7 x64 and Win 10 x64.
  • Update the [Nvidia 560ti in this case] driver to the latest and greatest for Win 7 x64.
  • Reboot
  • Run setup from the Windows 10 DVD.

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Test Stencylworks Game

Test Stencylworks game on Android.

Balloons Enhanced

This is an enhanced version of a tutorial game provided with Stencylworks. The enhancements are to add a scene with more balloons and to add a 5 second frame rate measurement.

The desktop shows 60 fps. I see my Android Asus Transformer getting 30 FPS, which is apparently the setting for Flash on this platform. Go Nvidia Tegra 2 ! Looks like Stencylworks is just fine to make games for Android.. What are we waiting for?

-windy