Hidden D&D games

After some sort of foolish hiatus, my friend Chris has returned to playing and writing about video games with a reflective post on Dragon Age Origins.

He doesn’t like its combat system:

I can see how true fans of the genre would enjoy it — if you really want to delve into tactics and planning and manage a handful of characters down to the smallest detail, I imagine you’re in heaven.  For me, it boils down to wanting to click a mouse button to swing a sword, not click a mouse button to activate an icon to swing a sword.  If I hit someone or block a blow, I want it to be based on my reflexes, not on an invisible dice roll behind the scenes.  Simple as that — it’s just not for me, and I knew that before I bought the game.  I’m not criticizing it, it’s just not the style of combat I enjoy.

I think he’s put his finger on an oddity of Bioware games.  They used to do explicit D&D games like Baldur’s Gate, and to some extent all their games are still hidden D&D games.  For some reason this is particularly evident in KOTOR, where your character will fight (though badly) entirely on her own if you do nothing, and if you like (and if you are a Cheeto-stained geek) you can call up a screen that shows all your dice rolls.

Chris loved Mass Effect, which does a much better job of looking like a pure shooter, but it really has the same mechanism… you can pause combat and micromanage your party and what spells, er mass effects, they are using.  I tend to agree that this is more annoying than fun.  I’d rather focus on the main character and trust the others to do their jobs.  There’s just something unsatisfying about the base D&D mechanic of “rolls to hit’, especially in a computer game.  Look, the dude is right there, two feet away, of course I hit him.  I don’t have a problem with my skill or my rusty iron blade being so bad that I didn’t do much damage, but this “you missed with a sword” stuff feels wrong.  If you want to make missing a game dynamic, make me use the mouse; I guarantee I’ll miss plenty.

Jade Empire feels different, without all the micromanagement… though you don’t really have to worry about aim, you just have to keep close to your opponent.

Chris apparently feels not very connected to his character, partly due to the lack of voice.  That’s kind of a poser.  Do you want to be following a character (in which case you want them to have a personality, like Jade in Beyond Good & Evil, or Sam in Sam & Max), or be a character (in which case the on-screen character shouldn’t have too many reactions of their own, in case they don’t match yours)?  Some games take a middle ground– e.g. Left 4 Dead, where your character may have some funny lines but remains pretty generic.

Bioware generally takes the path of letting you choose from a small set of PCs, and then making moral decisions along the way.  In Mass Effect, for instance, you can choose between three possible backstories, which will be referred to throughout the game.  In KOTOR and Jade Empire you play a very specific and key figure– though you can play them your own way.  I think it works pretty well, but for full immersion I like Bethesda’s games, where you feel in full control of your character.

Chris also has some words that all fantasy writers should take to heart:

Basically, you’ve got orcs from Mordor running wild and the “good” races must align to stop them from taking over Middle Earth.  So, nothing really new in the main storyline.   (Question: if the monsters ever did take over, what the hell would they do then?  Stand around roaring?  Do they have other marketable skills besides stabbing villagers and operating catapults?  Can any of them grow crops or improve roads or manage an inn?)

Obviously people like stories about battling eeeeeevil, but there’s always a part of my mind that rebels at this, since no real-world struggle is like this.  No one is an actual minion of eeeeevil; the bad guys simply have a different conception of good, and they think we’re bad guys.  Isn’t that a more interesting setup anyway?

 

Add Panjandrum of Pandora to my resume

So, rather suddenly, I’m done with the main quest in Borderlands.  There are still some side quests to finish, but a first playthrough works out to about 60 hours.

It’s best not to think of it as an RPG.  There are no actual roleplaying options, no morality, not even alternative means of doing a quest.  It’s a shoot n’ loot.  One advantage is that quests are highly replayable– which is good because due to the confusing way quests are handled in c0-op, you’ll probably be doing the same quest multiple times.

Krom is up there, unaware of the invention of sniper rifles

Above is one of my favorites, taking out Krom.  It’s not hard, but it’s just a really fun approach, up a set of walkways attached to the sides of a canyon, sniping at bandits the whole way.  One of our party kept falling to his death in the canyon, which was hilarious for the rest of us.

Quest sharing is good and bad.  If a quest is ahead of you in the storyline, you can accompany your friends but won’t get credit for it.  That’s not bad since you can just do it again once you’re eligible.  If you are eligible, you get credit– but you generally don’t see the quest dialogs, have little idea what you’re doing, and possibly miss out on quest rewards. 

Well, it’s of a piece with Borderlands’ overall design philosophy, which seems to be to lavish attention on the core gameplay and art, be just adequate in UI and story, and quite annoying in setting up co-op and in voice support.  I didn’t think anything could make me miss the Left 4 Dead lobby system, but Borderlands does. 

Fights range from easy to awesome-difficult.  They’re most fun in co-op, especially once you figure out the shield system.  (I had a fast health regen shield for most of the game, which was nice becaue I rarely needed to heal– but in a battle I’d die way too often.  It works better to have high shield capacity and retreat when it’s exhausted.)

I’m somewhat frustrated with the looting mechanic.  You don’t get enough inventory slots till near the end; this means you’re constantly evaluating new guns, and I find this hard to do in co-op when everyone’s rushing to the next checkbox.  You can compare guns, but you can’t directly see damage per second, and it’s hard to evaluate how this is affected by other features, such as elemental damage.  It’s cumbersome to change what weapons are equipped, and you can’t even change weapons if your inventory is full.

Picturesque Eridian ruins

The planet of Pandora is mostly a trashed, polluted nightmare… but it can be quite beautiful at times.  It’s about as close as you can get to walking around in a Moebius comic.

People seem to either love or hate the Claptraps, the little robots.  I think they’re cute.  There’s an amusing cutscene that plays off the movie convention that to show that a character is really evil, he kills a small animal: one of the villains blows away a Claptrap.

The UI is full of annoyances.  E.g. the key to turbocharge your vehicle is different from your sprint key; you should be able to fill up on ammo with a single action; you can get class mods that increase skills but there’s no feedback as to what the effective skill level is; completed quests seem to be unsorted.  One imagines Randy Pitchford in bug triage sessions asking “Is this related to shoot n’ loot?  If not, forget it.”   But don’t pass on the game because of it; these things are liveable.

 

Borderlanded

So Borderlands came out yesterday, and I’ve been playing it madly– last night in single-player, tonight mostly in co-op. 

It’s kind of a genre mashup– FPS plus MMO plus L4D.  It’s big shtick is an endless variety of weapons drops– there are said to be a million possible weapons.  You start out with 12 inventory slots, so you’ll spend a lot of time deciding between similar weapons.  (The color-code rarity and the price may help you decide.)

Co-op allows up to 4 players, and it’s a lot of fun– it’s nowhere near as hard as Left 4 Dead, so you mostly run around finding things to shoot and loot.  The quests can be a bit confusing in multi-player… if you return to single-player, you keep loot and skills you acquired in co-op, but also quest progress, which is good and bad.  It’s nice that you don’t have to repeat, but it can mean that you run quests out of order and in a bit of a rush.  You can play with people of different levels, which is nice.

They’ve come up with an interesting rendering scheme that puts black outlines round anything above a certain size.  It’s pretty and distinctive, and makes the game look like European comics.

In general it feels a lot like a four-player Fallout 3.  The world looks and feels similar.  There’s no save-the-world plot though; instead you’re basically a scavenger/mercenary, and the plot revolves around the ultimate haul: finding advanced alien technology.  It’s kind of refreshing not being the Chosen One of Legend, but rather an honest rogue with an itchy trigger finger. 

There are four playable classes; you can have any mixture in a group.  I’ve been playing Lilith so far; she gets to be quite a lot of fun once she starts doing mega-damage with her Phase Walk.

On the whole the UI is good– you don’t have to read the manual or find walkthroughs.  There are minor annoyances with loot gathering– it’d be nice if ammo you can’t pick up was highlighted in a different color.  And major annoyances with the friends system; it’s not integrated with Steam, it’s not easy to get groups of friends together, voice is a bit wonky (to solve those issues my gaming group has been using Steam to hustle up players and set up voice chat), and to host a game you have to use a highly arcane process. 

More later, no doubt…

 

Assassins without hashish

Partly based on the rec of alert reader Andrew, I picked up Assassin’s Creed, not to be confused with Apollo of that ilk.  It was on sale for just $5, though it’s back to $20 now.

So, you’re this assassin, Altair, and you wander all over the 12th century Middle East assassinatin’.  You’re a member of an order of assassins, presumably a nod to the original assassins of Alamut, but much nicer.  No hashish, and apparently we work for justice ‘n stuff.  Also no screenshots, because I couldn’t get them to work.  It’s a really gorgeous game, though– huge beautiful cities, great animations.

I’m just one assassination in, out of nine.  Most of the game you spend riding to cities, climbing up vantage points, rescuing citizens from guards, and doing reconnaissance (eavesdropping, pickpocketing, chasing informants, and more– you somehow sense where they all are, though).  You get additional weapons and skills as you go… my latest is Counter-Kill, a fancy counter-attack that generally brings a gruesome kill.

Perhaps the best part is the parkour.  In some ways it’s more fun than Mirror’s Edge, and that’s saying a lot: you are not restricted to a more or less linear path, but can go anywhere.  It’s a lot more vertically oriented, too– you can climb straight up a wall, though maybe Faith could too if she had this many handholds.  Running over the rooftops is not only fun but is generally the easiest way to get around, especially as the game has the concept of high and low profile actions.  High profile actions can attract guards, who must be killed or evaded with special, rather cute actions– e.g. blending in with passing scholars, or hiding in a haystack.  Just walking down the street can be tricky– people will get upset if you knock them down.  Fortunately you can gently shove them aside. 

There also isn’t ME’s emphasis on falling to your death, which is good.  Altair will usually recoil from a jump that’s too far for him.  It’s possible to hurt yourself anyway, but correct timing isn’t nearly as important.

There’s some grinding involved– e.g. there are reasons to save every hassled citizen in a town– but the reward, really, is the excuse to use more parkour.  Instead of running races or replaying chapters, as in Mirror’s Edge, you just fulfill all these in-game side missions.

The emphasis on stealth is fun, though it requires some suspension of disbelief.  You’re not exactly a master of stealth when every mission requires slaying loads of guards and running acrobatically over the rooftops.  (A nice touch, though, is that passersby who see you will comment on how crazy you must be.)

There is a framing device, set in the present, which I’m not even going to get into.  It allows a few neat ideas during the actual gameplay, but I’m not convinced it was a good idea.

The Middle Eastern atmosphere is well done, complete with accents and references to historical figures… though it somehow feels decultured.  Presumably Altair is Muslim, but there’s no exploration of this so far.  Everything looks right, but it doesn’t give a feeling of being in Arabic culture– not even a fantasy version of it, like Jade Empire’s version of China.

Also see my friend Chris’s review.  He makes some entirely justified criticisms, especially about the absurd exit sequence.  It’s also dumb that you can’t simply save a game.  As a result you may end up replaying some bits when you start up again.

 

On the longest journey

I’m playing The Longest Journey, the predecessor game to Dreamfall.  (It’s interesting, in fact, to see the first appearance of a lot of elements from Dreamfall.)

It has a very high reputation among adventure games.  It’s certainly very pretty, the acting is top notch, and there are some great moments of humor.   Ragnar Tørnquist likes female characters and April Ryan is fun; she’ll offer sarcastic comments about the scenery and express a good deal of Frodo-like reluctance to get on with saving the world.  Still, she’s ready for most everything.

April saves the Ewoks

It’s from 1999, which definitely shows.  The character models are primitive, and though the game seems to be 3-d-modelled, the action takes place in static scenes, which is unattractively retro and leads to a lot of time spent watching tiny figures of April Ryan running.

You have to save the world… two worlds, actually.  I have to say I don’t care much for Tørnquist’s cosmology.  Magic vs. Science is better than the usual dark lords, but it feels wrong to me somehow, perhaps because “magic” isn’t something we can actually believe in, which makes all the stuff people say about it a little too artificial.  Plus, I dunno, does every fantasy plot have to make the heroine the One Spoken Of In The Prophecies? 

Beyond that, I think the basic format of the adventure game needs some jazzing up.  It’s mostly watching talking heads, alternating with trying out your inventory of miscellaneous junk on the obstinate devices on the screen.  It’s a pretty limited repertoire for storytelling.  Beyond Good & Evil managed to get beyond this by keeping the cutscenes very short and piling on a diversity of types of gameplay.   

Anyway, sorry to be cranky about it.  I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes games fun to play or not.  On that note, in fact, this interview with the developer of Borderlands is interesting.  I like the bits about guiding gameplay without making it feel like you’re doing so, and about making the player’s motivation match the character’s; also about whether the player feels like going along with the developer’s ideas or not.  Some games encourage non-linear exploration, but it’s probably a bad thing if what the game is offering you is not that exciting.  Maybe I’ll go design the perfect video game… back later.

 

Tamriel, Wasteland, galaxy all saved

I just finished Knights of the Old Republic, which, I remind you, is just $10 on Steam.  As you can see, I am one light-sided dame.  I gave in at the end and wore the goofy Jedi robes, losing 4 defense, because I foolishly followed the game’s recommendation and got Force Stasis, which not only doesn’t work with armor, but gets rid of Stun which does.

The Light Side makes you sparkly

The ending is good– mostly intense combat.  (Spoilers ahead.)  I defeated the final battle droids very easily, but to make up for this the fight with Darth Malak was quite hard, since I couldn’t do anything to the imprisoned Jedi, so he had his full nine lives.  I’d still say he was rather overconfident, but Sith managment skills do not emphasize reflection on one’s mistakes, or even frankness from subordinates.

Annoyingly, though so far as I can see I said all the right things to Bastila, she wouldn’t abandon the dark side.  Also Carth just wouldn’t warm up to me, perhaps because his son ended up dead, the poisonous little Sith punk.

Some of the best later dialog is from Jolee, the disgrunted old guy you meet on Kashyyyk.  Mission is fun too.  And perhaps the most interesting decisions to make are found at the Sith Academy.  You’re in a tricky position: to defend the light side you have to not only pose as a Sith but gain prestige in Sithy ways.  On the other hand, I figured that even for the persnickety Jedi, Sith are always in season.

I didn’t try the dark side path, but the game gives you a fairly clever dark side motivation for defeating Malak in pretty much the same ways if you were good: you want to supplant the dude.   It’s certainly a starker and more satisfying choice than the one at the end of Mass Effect.

On the whole the game is well balanced… combat remains fun; the dialogs are well done; the party members are all attractive enough that I wanted to spend some time with each of them.  Some of the non-combat skills are severely under-utilized though.  I used computer a few times, stealth not much, repair almost never.  Hacking was more interesting in Fallout 3, but less annoying than in Mass Effect.

Now I’m tempted to watch the original trilogy again, for the first time since it came out.  You may place your bets now as to whether this will be great fun or a huge disappointment.

 

Poor Sith management

I can see why KOTOR has such a good reputation.  I’m digging it.  The first two planets were fine, but it really gets rolling in Tatooine.  The creators probably figured they had to get this planet right, and they obviously put their heart into it.  (In memory, much of the charm of the original triology comes from Tatooine as well.  Fantasies are often best in the first chapters, when the heroes are unpromising nobodies and all the strangers are mysterious.)

Then you get captured by the evil admiral himself.  (This being ancient times, they apparently hadn’t yet developed the scary title of Grand Moff.)  Your top characters are all immobilized, so you have to pick one of the others, who is responsible for freeing everyone else.  I chose Mission for this mission since she has high stealth skills.  After getting used to combat with backup and plenty of Force powers, this was a really fun challenge, using the stealth belt, hacking computers, and picking off Sith one by one. 

Malak is evil but his office has a nice view

By this point in the game combat is pretty interesting, as you have three characters to manage, generally with different styles and powers, and you rarely rely on the default automatic attacks.  The fight with the admiral is fairly hard as there are seven opponents… you really have to watch those health bars.  Other fights could probably be harder.  Malak, for instance, somewhat foolishly fights alone and is susceptible to grenades.  However, he has the unstoppable power of being able to trigger cutscenes. 

Not that there aren’t oddities.  I wish I had a screenshot of the Evil Door.  I couldn’t unlock it, so I started to bash it… the feedback screen (which pedantically lists all your d20 rolls) said I was whalloping the hell out of it, but its health never went down.  I sent Carth to keep bashing and forgot him for a few minutes; I went back and the poor boy was still firing uselessly at it.  We went around the damn thing. 

Then there’s the bit on Tatooine where you put on Sand People outfits.  They’re taken off when you reach their village.  At first I thought the resulting outfits were the sexy casualwear of the Sand People:

KOTOR swimsuit edition

But no, that’s just the characters’ underwear. 

Often it’s the minor quests and characters that offer the most diversion.  The vengeful hunter’s wife was fun, as is the cheerfully dangerous droid HK-47.

I’ve been playing Light Side.  Sure, the Jedi are sometimes annoying… what do they have against romance, emotion, and flashy outfits?  What’s wrong with getting paid for your swashbuckling services?  But, you know, the Dark Lord is just a piss-poor manager and I wouldn’t work for him.  (Spoilers ahoy.)  His reaction to his minions’ losing Bastila on Taris?  Blast the planet into ruins from space.  Not only is this scorched earth policy economically foolish, but it fails in its primary purpose. 

He also commits the standard Evil Overlord mistake of sending his thugs out in small groups, learning nothing when each one is vaporized.  He might think his #2 is hot stuff, but since he knows perfectly well Bastila has allies, wouldn’t it have been more prudent to send, say, twenty Dark Jedi as backup instead of two?  Plus there’s the attacking-alone bit mentioned above– he nearly gets wasted in a corridor of his own flagship. 

After playing KOTOR I can see that Bioware has in some ways kept remaking it.  Mass Effect  is virtually a do-over with fancier graphics, while Jade Empire has some of the same plot structure.  I also lean toward thinking that RPG games should jettison explicit alignments.  The later games try to get away from the pure good/evil business, but I’d prefer to just allow multiple options.  If you act in appalling ways, the game doesn’t have to label you appalling; it’d be better to see the reaction in NPC behavior, new options or enemies appearing, etc.

 

Cut-rate KOTOR

So, Knights of the Old Republic was on sale for $10 on Steam, and I’ve heard it recommended a lot.  So far it’s a lot of fun.  Bioware gives good RPG.  (It’s also blessedly free of the prequel trilogy– no midichlorians in sight.  It’s supposed to take place 4000 years in the past, so there are also no character cameos.  It looks like clothing style and technology hasn’t changed much in this galaxy far far away between long long ago and even longer ago.)

Strangely, it’s transitional between their D&D roots and the simpler, real-time combat of Jade Empire or Mass Effect.  It looks like real-time combat, but it’s all d20 rolls– there’s none of this hifalutin “aiming”, and you can let your character handle the first fights all by herself (as she doesn’t have any special attacks yet).  Fortunately combat gets more interesting later on, as you direct three characters with varying abilities and special powers, including the Force. 

Sith vanquished... by liquor

Battles vary between easy and really annoyingly difficult– it’s good to have a dozen medpacks on hand before addressing anything in the plot.  On the other hand, sometimes you get unexpected help.  I was invited to a Sith party, above.  They commented on the strength of the local liquor, then all of them immediately collapsed.  Bottoms up!

Some bits linger on the wrong side of the difficulty curve, in either direction.  You have to run a “swoop race”, which is absurdly easy (and nowhere near as fun as the races in Beyond Good and Evil).  But I was stymied for awhile by the first space combat, which was all the more annoying because you can’t save the game at that point– if you fail, you have to sit through a whole load of cutscenes again.

The wages of dueling: stomach upset

There’s a duelling stage on the first planet; one amusing bit (shown above) is that all the fighters you vanquish hang around afterwards with one hit point, clutching their stomachs.

More strangeness: the introductory tutorial is given by one of the characters; it’s probably meant to be immersive, but it’s anything but as this Republic soldier tells you how to use your mouse.

Probably more reporting to come, because this is a long game.

 

Inbred mutants

No, this isn’t about the birthers; I just finished two of the DLC for Fallout 3: Broken Steel, which extends the main story, and Point Lookout, which adds a new swampy area to explore.  (I got both on disk; fie on GFWL.)

Tribal gear, accessorized by Pip-Boy and sunglasses.

Point Lookout is great: it’s big, creepy, and refreshingly amoral.  Nothing you do here saves or destroys the world; you have to choose sides in the main quest, but neither combattant is attractive.  (I went with Desmond, the slightly less arrogant one.) 

Fights are surprisingly hard, thanks to a buff all the swampfolk and tribals get: every hit they do gets a 35 hp bonus.  (I learned this from the wiki; I was wondering why they could deal so much hurt with lousy weapons.)  I had to snarf stimpaks like candy; fortunately there’s a load of them around. 

Creepers are butt-ugly, except when they're dying.

You get two good weapons here, the microwave emitter and the double-barrelled shotgun, which packs quite a wallop.  It works nicely with the perk that resets your action points if you make a kill.  (VATS can feel like a cheat, but it becomes very attractive on the weapons with long reload times.)

Broken Steel is not as quirky– you have to expect the main quest, with its save-the-world overtones, to be more earnest.  But it’s done better than the ending of the pre-DLC game itself, largely because it focusses on what the player is best suited for– infiltrating missions– rather than large-scale battles alongside more powerful allies.  There are a couple of really difficult fights– one in a cellar filled with deathclaws, one in the Presidential Metro overflowing with very tough ghouls. 

At one point you get your own personal, adorable deathclaw. Not that useful though.

The final fights against the Enclave are much easier, and that points out some game balance issues as the level cap is raised to 30.  At level 26, with nearly all skills maxed out, and armed with toys like the Gatling Laser, Heavy Incinerator, and my personal standby, A3-21’s plasma rifle, a lot of the challenge drops, especially in non-DLC areas of the game.  It’s nice to be powerful, but the game is always the most interesting, I think, in the single-digit levels.

Interesting family name

Finally, something for my SpinnWebe pals– note the name on the townhouse above.  Don’t forget to loot the house for DVDs and HeroClix.

Bethesda is apparently now done with Fallout 3 DLC, and hard at work on the next big single-player game, which won’t be Elder Scrolls V either.  As with Valve and Bioware, I trust that everything they do will be well worth it.

 

Mass Effect

I started Mass Effect last year, but it got lost in a storm of Fallout 3 and TF2.  Finally I went back to restart and finish it.  It’s a great game, with reservations.

Like Jade Empire, which I loved, it has a complicated main plot, different specializations, romance, fantastic art direction, and superlative voice acting.

It’s a lot more explorable than JE– you can go all around the galaxy, and there’s an impressive amount of backstory available on everything from your squadmates to the major weapons manufacturers.  The side quests are rather watery, though.  (Though it’s cute that you can visit Sol.)  There are also side side quests that are really dull– find X of Y macguffins.

The Enterprise with mood lighting

Reservation one: it’s just.  so.  Star Trek.  You’re a starship captain, all the sapient species have a taste for ’60s decor, and everything is washed in earnestness.  (Thankfully, the world is a hell of a lot more internally consistent.)  You can choose to be a “renegade” (which mostly means being arrogant, impatient, and xenophobic), but there’s nothing like the moral range (and dark humor) of Fallout 3.  Some of the more corrupt choices just seem jarring… it’s like watching Capt. Kirk take bribes.

It was so entertainin' when the boogie started to explode... possibly some sort of mass effect explosion

A special attraction of Bioware titles is romance, and this is definitely one of the fun parts of ME, complete with a tasteful sex scene.  (Two, if you’re a bit naughty with the Asari Consort.  What can I say, Ms. Cmdr. Shepard has a thing for mysterious blue aliens.)

The combat isn’t as fun as JE, though it may just be that I played it on too low a level.  The biotic abilities are neat, especially once they get powered up; but combat gets a little repetitive and the energy weapons don’t feel different enough from each other.  (TF2 and Fallout 3 have both spoiled me since they both excel in that area.)  Inventory management also gets tedious.   Merchants also seemed kind of pointless since you can get everything as loot anyway.

I almost always ended up with Liara and Garrus as squadmates, which made for reasonable balance with my weapons/biotics abilities.  It seemed like a pity not to be able to use Wrex and Ashley more.

Pretty much a highway, but such a nice one

It’d be nice to have more varied gameplay, and maybe some physics or puzzles.  All too many missions just involve going to point B and clicking on something, or talking to person A then B then A again. 

The last couple missions are great, however: lovely environments, good fights, crawling over the broken Citadel.  The game knows how to go out charging.  (I have a bone to pick with the ending, though.  I chose to concentrate forces on the Reaper ship.  It was the biggest threat, and I figure you could always elect a new Council.  But it seemed that there was no actual distinction between “concentrate on Sovereign” and “let the Council die”.)

One bit from JE that I missed: the “what happened to everyone” vignettes.