Aside from providing a satisfying outlet for my megalomania, I think the biggest strength of Sid Meier's Civilization series is how well the games balance their massive amount of material. They're so rich and varied that no two people have the same experience.
I'm not saying this format is the pinnacle of gaming or anything. There is a place for the chaotic, fast-paced action game as well, it's a matter of personal preference. The point is that as long as we're talking about the extremely complex and consequently extraordinarily time-consuming simulation/strategy games, I don't think any series has done it better than Civilization.
Although I know others disagree with me, I think that the fourth installment really is the best thus far. Each edition introduced new layers of complexity to the format, but it was always integrated logically. A game of Civ IV, even on the biggest map on epic length, is manageable. This is the great success of the franchise. They manage to fill it to the brim with choices, but they stop just short of overflowing.
Sadly, no one can resist all those console gaming dollars, so Meier and Firaxis watered-down the concept and shoved it into a format that is far from friendly to the strategy genre. The result is Civilization Revolution, a sad shadow of the game I love.
I played the Xbox 360 demos for both Halo Wars and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. I was actually going to review them along with the new Civ game, but all I would be able to muster in the way of commentary would be placing my hand over my mouth to generate farting sounds while I bash my own forehead with a claw hammer. Seeing as how that is neither pleasant nor easily translated into blog format, I decided against it.
What the hell happened to PC gaming? I've never been able to keep up with computer technology. It's expensive and time-consuming. I have never owned a machine capable of playing the newest PC titles, and I don't have one that can today. That's what console gaming is for, in my opinion. It is suited for action and spectacle because with a few exceptions (screw you, N64 expansion pack), you buy the console, and you can play all the games associated with that console.
On the PC, you need to constantly be aware of the specifications of games, and you will be required to upgrade your hardware to keep up with new releases. This is not usually the case with strategy games. They are graphically simpler than top of the line action games, but they rely upon the more adaptable control options the PC provides. Thus, I've found it useful to get my action and adventure on the console and my strategy on PC, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
You can see where this is going. Hardcore gamers insist that first-person shooters need to use mouse and keyboard controls to compete at high levels. Maybe they're right. I don't actually care. Strategy games, on the other hand, rely upon the mouse and keyboard to function at all. No dual analog setup is precise enough to manage all the settlements, units, and minutiae that make a good strategy title. The crossover must, therefore, choose between complexity and playability. Of course, in a perfect world, they'd choose not to make these abominations in the first place.
Civilization Revolution comes out a little better than the train wrecks I mentioned earlier because its turn-based system and grid map are a little better suited for console controls. Rather than wrangling of a mass of blobs you assume are infantry, you select a unit and move it from one territory to another. What ends up a complete disaster elsewhere is reduced to a simple mess.
Congratulations, I guess.
The real problem comes with the other adaptation Civilization had to make in order to become a console title. I'm talking about the target audience. Now this is where I'd usually make generalized disparaging comments about the intelligence level of a group of people. However, I won't do that today because Civilization Revolution beat me to it.
It's Baby's First Civilization. It's short and it's simple and I can't help but wonder why they bothered. Ostensibly, to introduce the series to new players. That's all well and good in theory, but there's absolutely no reason it needs to be a simple as it is. They don't even trust console gamers to adjust the game speed or world size. On top of that, while the player has a few different victory conditions, there are essentially two games you can play: You can either conquer the world or defend yourself until you build your way to one of the other victory conditions. Oh, and if you thought you'd try a balanced game that relies on culture and diplomacy instead of war, you'd better think again. Even on low difficulty settings, the AI opponents are so aggressive you will have to appease their outrageous demands every turn lest you provoke a war.
So, it's an introduction to a series that boasts superbly-balanced micromanagement, a plethora of viable strategies, and loads of customization options? And it's doing this by removing all that good stuff from the game?
Yeah, that'll work.
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Spore
I delayed playing this game for so long not because I thought it would be bad, but because I feared it might actually live up to its grandiose aspirations. The whole PC god game/strategy/simulation style of gaming usually gets me into a lot of trouble. I sit down to play a few turns of Civilization and then barely manage to pull myself away sixteen hours later because my weak human body requires food and water on occasion. It got so bad I had to force myself to quit playing that one, and they don't make a patch for that. From the beginning, Spore looked to be right up my alley, so I hesitated. But I can only resist something like that for so long.
Creator Will Wright's previous work is in the same general category as a lot of other games I enjoy, but I was never really sucked in by any of it. I have always been terrible at SimCity. My population centers were so mismanaged they ended up looking like faithful re-imaginings of The Wire viewed from some sort of dirigible. I do appreciate a game that assumes I'm not an idiot, but I'm a little too obsessive-compulsive for that much micromanagement. I simply cannot deal with the ubiquitous background noise of guilt about a housing block without adequate fire safety or an increasing pollution issue or one of the million other things I'm doing wrong. Naturally, I run out of money trying to keep everyone happy and have to squeeze the poor residents to fill my coffers (there are only about four people not living in squalor at this point). This makes me feel even worse. Eventually, I remember that it's a game and I should be having fun, and I go do something else.
Wright's other major title, The Sims, is a game that is really impressive in a pointless sort of way. You can take it at face value, but then you're essentially just playing Normal Life: The Game. You can instead do what everyone else does, which is to assume the persona of an evil god with powers oddly limited by the family's bank account, and set about ruining these digital beings' lives. This is immeasurably more satisfying than unleashing catastrophes to punish your lazy citizens in SimCity. They're not much more than dots. In The Sims, you can be as sadistic as the game will let you, and it is surprisingly accommodating. I know this was not what Wright had intended, but what did he expect from a market so saturated in testosterone?
However, it turns out there is an upper limit to the enjoyment which can be derived from utterly destroying Mortimer Goth's life by, I don't know, driving his wife into the arms of the neighborhood bachelor, forcing social services to take his daughter away, turning his home into a fetid nightmare covered in rotting food, and selling any useful appliances until he cries himself to sleep every night in the middle of the road, face-down in a puddle of his own urine. What's cool is that the game is so well-equipped that such nonsense is possible. The building and editing tools are both powerful and intuitive. I have always felt the series is to be commended for that, even if the subject matter is somewhat vanilla.
Spore, I think, was intended to be the ultimate god game; a simulation in five distinct chapters representing steps on the path of life from single-celled organism to space-faring civilization. It is built upon the Maxis tradition that video games can be about creation and management, not just running, jumping, and murder. It also takes considerable inspiration from other sorts of games which share little besides a common camera angle. The game has a real-time strategy section and Sid Meier's Civilization series is clearly the foundation for the entire later portion. The creature phase, on the other hand, reminded me of that old SNES game EVO. I loved that game.
The player's responsibilities and goals change considerably as their species and culture becomes more complex . Each of Spore's eras is essentially a different game, although after your first run through, you are free to skip ahead. You must, however, deny yourself access to powers earned for completing the earlier segments.
The cell stage is a relatively simple 2D combat game in which your tiny organism must swim about in the tide pool and find food. Along the way, you'll pick up new body parts, mostly defense or mobility-related, and apply them to your body by mating, thus giving birth to the next, more advanced generation. I have to admit, I didn't expect much from this part, but it's constructed very well. Every part has a function, but they don't just add to your creature's statistics, the positioning and application has a lot to do with their utility. It's rather complex, and I expected it would just be something I'd rush through on my way to the creature phase they're so very proud of. Eventually, as you eat algae and/or other simple creatures, your species grows a tiny brain and climbs up out of the water. A little too soon, in my opinion. This phase could have been twice as long.
You've probably seen at least one preview of the creature stage. It was the game's biggest selling point, something they started showing off years before they even had an expected release date.
To be perfectly honest, this phase was painful to experience.
The design tool is impressive. No, to be fair, it's an incredible achievement. I created a gaggle of ridiculous animals, but no matter what I did, it managed to convincingly animate the poor things. That is why it's such a shame that the actual gameplay is so boring. I was expecting something dynamic, a unique ecosystem every game. What I got was each species huddled around their own little nest waiting for my creature to show up and either entertain or devour them. I would have liked to have a little more direct control over my creatures' movements, but I accept that may have been a necessary sacrifice if the builder was going to work properly. However, there is no excuse for how static the world is. They've had much of this in place for years now. I know. I saw the videos. It just seems like they finished the creature builder and then knocked off to go have a cold one instead of thinking about the application. It's stifled and repetitive and no one seemed to notice. I'm not expecting some outlandishly complex functioning ecology. The simple, cutesy aesthetic gives them considerable latitude, but I don't get the feeling they were even trying to make it interesting. It's sloppy.
Eventually you sing and dance or kill and eat your way to to sentience. Your creatures discover fire and tools, they get together and form a small tribe. The goal here is to establish your tribe as the dominant culture in the region. You can do this by giving the other tribes gifts and playing music for them until they become your ally. You can also steal their food, kill their warriors, and raze their village. As with the creature phase, you can tailor your strategy to suit the situation, make nice with the axe-wielding berserkers and slaughter the peaceful musicians. When you make the jump from creature to tribe, your choices don't affect too much. It grants your culture access to different powers, but friendly herbivores are perfectly able to take up arms and conquer their neighbors as a tribe. However, the results of the tribal phase determine a lot about your first city in the subsequent one and the game is pretty picky about whether or not you were opportunistic enough to qualify for the middle ground award. The tribal phase is adequate, if simple.
The civilization phase is a mess. Maybe I'm spoiled by my years of playing Meier's series, but Spore's take is so horribly managed I almost quit playing before I got to space.
Okay, that's a lie. Skipping the space phase was never on the table for me, but still.
I thought the idea was for the gameplay itself to become more advanced as the player's species grew in intelligence and complexity. The reality is just tedium. It's like Civilization with all the good stuff like city management and technological advancement cut out, leaving only the grind and repetition. What scant variation this era offers isn't available unless you conquer the right cities. I think it would have been a better idea to allow military, cultural, and economic vehicles from the start, and instead add another layer of strategy based upon which category your cities are in. Instead, you have exactly as many tactics available as you have different cities, with a maximum of three.
It gets worse. Despite the severely limited complexity, it still manages to bungle the presentation of the information you need with an over-burdened clusterfuck of a heads-up display. Bright blue and white flashing buttons clutter the screen at all times. It's as if they'd heard of strategy games, but had never actually seen one in action. Before I played Spore, I was worried they would simply rip off Civilization, and now I wish they had.
Finally, it's time to go into space. After you establish your world government based on religion, greed, or bloodshed, your society will be ready to spread their disgust for others throughout the galaxy. You'll first design a spaceship using essentially the same builder tool you used to create your creatures, and it's still very good. You also used it to clothe them in the tribal phase and design buildings and vehicles in the civilization phase, but you almost never see any of that in action and it comes off as just a periodic reminder that even though you're not always having fun, the game is not without its accomplishments.
This is where things finally get interesting. The game gives you the freedom to fly around and visit other stars. A successful space empire uses all the different societal tools. You can focus on colonization and trade, or you can fight and conquer. There is also a terra-forming game wherein you settle alien worlds, give them atmosphere, and create a functioning ecosystem. This makes your colonies larger and more profitable. It is sort of fun but it suffers from issues similar to those of the creature phase. It's rigid. Everything plays out according to some simple gauges. If the planet has room for only one predator, placing another will cause the newcomers to die off. They should at least fight it out, right?
The chief success of the space phase, and one of the big strengths of the game as a whole is how tactile it all is. They really did a marvelous job with the builder program. There is considerable depth to it, and yet someone with little experience with gaming in general can learn how to use it in minutes.
There is a similar philosophy at work in the control mechanism of the space phase. It feels very hands-on because it takes the floating third-person view Spore shares with all the games that inspired it and attaches the player's avatar, the ship they created. Every weapon and tool is a piece of equipment on board. It pulls the player into the action in a way that I've never seen in a strategy or simulation.
There is a catch, of course. The final phase of the game involves many details which require quite a lot of attention. This is good to a certain extent, but I wish the player's increasing level of technology opened up some optional tools to help streamline and automate some of the more tedious aspects of managing a space empire.
It's not easy to put all that together. Spore is an ambitious project that overextended itself a bit. At some points I was really impressed with what they have achieved, while just as often I was furious at those segments which felt rushed or incomplete.
Should you play Spore? The short answer is yes. It is equal parts groundbreaking and derivative, visceral and monotonous, but there is nothing quite like it. I feel comfortable recommending it for the sheer spectacle, but I don't think they got it quite right yet. This is probably good. I don't know if I would have been able to stop playing long enough to write this if they had.
It's hard to have faith in this industry sometimes. If these companies spent more time designing than on marketing and hype, we could really start elevating gaming as an art form. I have even less faith in EA, but I always thought Wright and his people were really interested in pushing the limits of electronic entertainment and I still do. Spore isn't bad, it's just incomplete.
It's an awkward lurch in the right direction.
Creator Will Wright's previous work is in the same general category as a lot of other games I enjoy, but I was never really sucked in by any of it. I have always been terrible at SimCity. My population centers were so mismanaged they ended up looking like faithful re-imaginings of The Wire viewed from some sort of dirigible. I do appreciate a game that assumes I'm not an idiot, but I'm a little too obsessive-compulsive for that much micromanagement. I simply cannot deal with the ubiquitous background noise of guilt about a housing block without adequate fire safety or an increasing pollution issue or one of the million other things I'm doing wrong. Naturally, I run out of money trying to keep everyone happy and have to squeeze the poor residents to fill my coffers (there are only about four people not living in squalor at this point). This makes me feel even worse. Eventually, I remember that it's a game and I should be having fun, and I go do something else.
Wright's other major title, The Sims, is a game that is really impressive in a pointless sort of way. You can take it at face value, but then you're essentially just playing Normal Life: The Game. You can instead do what everyone else does, which is to assume the persona of an evil god with powers oddly limited by the family's bank account, and set about ruining these digital beings' lives. This is immeasurably more satisfying than unleashing catastrophes to punish your lazy citizens in SimCity. They're not much more than dots. In The Sims, you can be as sadistic as the game will let you, and it is surprisingly accommodating. I know this was not what Wright had intended, but what did he expect from a market so saturated in testosterone?
However, it turns out there is an upper limit to the enjoyment which can be derived from utterly destroying Mortimer Goth's life by, I don't know, driving his wife into the arms of the neighborhood bachelor, forcing social services to take his daughter away, turning his home into a fetid nightmare covered in rotting food, and selling any useful appliances until he cries himself to sleep every night in the middle of the road, face-down in a puddle of his own urine. What's cool is that the game is so well-equipped that such nonsense is possible. The building and editing tools are both powerful and intuitive. I have always felt the series is to be commended for that, even if the subject matter is somewhat vanilla.
Spore, I think, was intended to be the ultimate god game; a simulation in five distinct chapters representing steps on the path of life from single-celled organism to space-faring civilization. It is built upon the Maxis tradition that video games can be about creation and management, not just running, jumping, and murder. It also takes considerable inspiration from other sorts of games which share little besides a common camera angle. The game has a real-time strategy section and Sid Meier's Civilization series is clearly the foundation for the entire later portion. The creature phase, on the other hand, reminded me of that old SNES game EVO. I loved that game.
The player's responsibilities and goals change considerably as their species and culture becomes more complex . Each of Spore's eras is essentially a different game, although after your first run through, you are free to skip ahead. You must, however, deny yourself access to powers earned for completing the earlier segments.
The cell stage is a relatively simple 2D combat game in which your tiny organism must swim about in the tide pool and find food. Along the way, you'll pick up new body parts, mostly defense or mobility-related, and apply them to your body by mating, thus giving birth to the next, more advanced generation. I have to admit, I didn't expect much from this part, but it's constructed very well. Every part has a function, but they don't just add to your creature's statistics, the positioning and application has a lot to do with their utility. It's rather complex, and I expected it would just be something I'd rush through on my way to the creature phase they're so very proud of. Eventually, as you eat algae and/or other simple creatures, your species grows a tiny brain and climbs up out of the water. A little too soon, in my opinion. This phase could have been twice as long.
You've probably seen at least one preview of the creature stage. It was the game's biggest selling point, something they started showing off years before they even had an expected release date.
To be perfectly honest, this phase was painful to experience.
The design tool is impressive. No, to be fair, it's an incredible achievement. I created a gaggle of ridiculous animals, but no matter what I did, it managed to convincingly animate the poor things. That is why it's such a shame that the actual gameplay is so boring. I was expecting something dynamic, a unique ecosystem every game. What I got was each species huddled around their own little nest waiting for my creature to show up and either entertain or devour them. I would have liked to have a little more direct control over my creatures' movements, but I accept that may have been a necessary sacrifice if the builder was going to work properly. However, there is no excuse for how static the world is. They've had much of this in place for years now. I know. I saw the videos. It just seems like they finished the creature builder and then knocked off to go have a cold one instead of thinking about the application. It's stifled and repetitive and no one seemed to notice. I'm not expecting some outlandishly complex functioning ecology. The simple, cutesy aesthetic gives them considerable latitude, but I don't get the feeling they were even trying to make it interesting. It's sloppy.
Eventually you sing and dance or kill and eat your way to to sentience. Your creatures discover fire and tools, they get together and form a small tribe. The goal here is to establish your tribe as the dominant culture in the region. You can do this by giving the other tribes gifts and playing music for them until they become your ally. You can also steal their food, kill their warriors, and raze their village. As with the creature phase, you can tailor your strategy to suit the situation, make nice with the axe-wielding berserkers and slaughter the peaceful musicians. When you make the jump from creature to tribe, your choices don't affect too much. It grants your culture access to different powers, but friendly herbivores are perfectly able to take up arms and conquer their neighbors as a tribe. However, the results of the tribal phase determine a lot about your first city in the subsequent one and the game is pretty picky about whether or not you were opportunistic enough to qualify for the middle ground award. The tribal phase is adequate, if simple.
The civilization phase is a mess. Maybe I'm spoiled by my years of playing Meier's series, but Spore's take is so horribly managed I almost quit playing before I got to space.
Okay, that's a lie. Skipping the space phase was never on the table for me, but still.
I thought the idea was for the gameplay itself to become more advanced as the player's species grew in intelligence and complexity. The reality is just tedium. It's like Civilization with all the good stuff like city management and technological advancement cut out, leaving only the grind and repetition. What scant variation this era offers isn't available unless you conquer the right cities. I think it would have been a better idea to allow military, cultural, and economic vehicles from the start, and instead add another layer of strategy based upon which category your cities are in. Instead, you have exactly as many tactics available as you have different cities, with a maximum of three.
It gets worse. Despite the severely limited complexity, it still manages to bungle the presentation of the information you need with an over-burdened clusterfuck of a heads-up display. Bright blue and white flashing buttons clutter the screen at all times. It's as if they'd heard of strategy games, but had never actually seen one in action. Before I played Spore, I was worried they would simply rip off Civilization, and now I wish they had.
Finally, it's time to go into space. After you establish your world government based on religion, greed, or bloodshed, your society will be ready to spread their disgust for others throughout the galaxy. You'll first design a spaceship using essentially the same builder tool you used to create your creatures, and it's still very good. You also used it to clothe them in the tribal phase and design buildings and vehicles in the civilization phase, but you almost never see any of that in action and it comes off as just a periodic reminder that even though you're not always having fun, the game is not without its accomplishments.
This is where things finally get interesting. The game gives you the freedom to fly around and visit other stars. A successful space empire uses all the different societal tools. You can focus on colonization and trade, or you can fight and conquer. There is also a terra-forming game wherein you settle alien worlds, give them atmosphere, and create a functioning ecosystem. This makes your colonies larger and more profitable. It is sort of fun but it suffers from issues similar to those of the creature phase. It's rigid. Everything plays out according to some simple gauges. If the planet has room for only one predator, placing another will cause the newcomers to die off. They should at least fight it out, right?
The chief success of the space phase, and one of the big strengths of the game as a whole is how tactile it all is. They really did a marvelous job with the builder program. There is considerable depth to it, and yet someone with little experience with gaming in general can learn how to use it in minutes.
There is a similar philosophy at work in the control mechanism of the space phase. It feels very hands-on because it takes the floating third-person view Spore shares with all the games that inspired it and attaches the player's avatar, the ship they created. Every weapon and tool is a piece of equipment on board. It pulls the player into the action in a way that I've never seen in a strategy or simulation.
There is a catch, of course. The final phase of the game involves many details which require quite a lot of attention. This is good to a certain extent, but I wish the player's increasing level of technology opened up some optional tools to help streamline and automate some of the more tedious aspects of managing a space empire.
It's not easy to put all that together. Spore is an ambitious project that overextended itself a bit. At some points I was really impressed with what they have achieved, while just as often I was furious at those segments which felt rushed or incomplete.
Should you play Spore? The short answer is yes. It is equal parts groundbreaking and derivative, visceral and monotonous, but there is nothing quite like it. I feel comfortable recommending it for the sheer spectacle, but I don't think they got it quite right yet. This is probably good. I don't know if I would have been able to stop playing long enough to write this if they had.
It's hard to have faith in this industry sometimes. If these companies spent more time designing than on marketing and hype, we could really start elevating gaming as an art form. I have even less faith in EA, but I always thought Wright and his people were really interested in pushing the limits of electronic entertainment and I still do. Spore isn't bad, it's just incomplete.
It's an awkward lurch in the right direction.
Downloadable Content
I've been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto IV's expansion The Lost and Damned lately. I really enjoy it and I've been trying to put my finger on the reason for this. After I got my hands on it, Saint's Row 2 basically ended my time with Rockstar's newest sandbox. Where the former is light, colorful and self-aware, the latter takes itself a bit too seriously and comes off a little stifled. Not to mention Saint's Row is all about the good feeling you get when you destroy a school bus with a rocket launcher while diving out of a flaming car while GTA IV is more about about first world guilt.
Like the kind you get writing blog entries about video games.
It's not just the fact that I can better relate to the characters in The Lost and Damned compared to those in the main story, but also that I have the option to play one or the other. It is an excellent use of the online functionality of the current generation consoles. The city is already there on your game disc. They can conceivably tell lots of stories each with their own cast of characters. I had originally criticized the game for abandoning a lot of the humor and freedom that always characterized the series in favor of a strong narrative, but now I think it was the right decision.
Way back when I first read about the XBox Live Arcade and Nintendo's Virtual Console and the like, I was skeptical. I assumed Nintendo would use it to re-package all their old titles to gamers not smart enough to emulate them on their personal computers for free a decade ago. While it turns out I was right on the money about that, the function is used well with the XBox and PS3 (or so the internet tells me, I don't have that much first world guilt) by providing ports of hard-to-find older titles and original works by small developers. It is also nice to be able to download free demos of major releases before spending sixty dollars to discover whether or not the developer in question has been lying to you.
When I envisioned the market for downloadable content for games you already have, I wasn't skeptical at all. I didn't think it would be anything more than a money pit and an excuse for publishers to put off bug testing, balancing, and generally finishing the game and instead giving us the promise to do so if we give them four months and twenty dollars.
I admit I was only half right about that. I forgot that there are developers who can use these expanded functions for good and not for evil. The first Fallout 3 expansion was good, and I expect good things from the next two. Games like Halo 3 which are played mostly online can remain fresh for years by adding maps and removing glitches.
I will not, however, pay for the Fable 2 expansion. I think it needs to be made clear that the DLC function is not a mulligan for Peter Molyneux. If a game is flawed and the system can fix it for free, that is good use for it. If a game is excellent and I can pay a few bucks to keep the good times rolling, that is also acceptable. If you didn't bother to finish your game, but sold it at full price anyway and now you want me to pay you even more in case it doesn't still suck, you can go to hell.
The good thing about console gaming is that it's self-contained. No compatibility issues or minimum system requirements, just game + console = fun. The addition of online functionality hasn't changed the way most games are made so far, but it could. Lack of internet service or adequate funds may eventually result in you as a gamer receiving a half-formed product because they know you're not on the line for as much future payment as others.
It's a mighty decadent society that can produce something like the electronic gaming industry. Unsurprisingly, that same society is going through a bit of a rough patch right now. From an artistic standpoint, there are some really good things coming out of it, but the problem, as usual, is that between us and the artists are the moneymen. I suspect that as the economic environment gets worse, these services are going to find we have less patience for overpriced content and cleverly-portioned game currency we have to buy if we want the privilege of giving them our money. The gaming world needs to tighten its belt as well, because when it falls, it will be sudden and an entire artistic medium will go with it.
Like the kind you get writing blog entries about video games.
It's not just the fact that I can better relate to the characters in The Lost and Damned compared to those in the main story, but also that I have the option to play one or the other. It is an excellent use of the online functionality of the current generation consoles. The city is already there on your game disc. They can conceivably tell lots of stories each with their own cast of characters. I had originally criticized the game for abandoning a lot of the humor and freedom that always characterized the series in favor of a strong narrative, but now I think it was the right decision.
Way back when I first read about the XBox Live Arcade and Nintendo's Virtual Console and the like, I was skeptical. I assumed Nintendo would use it to re-package all their old titles to gamers not smart enough to emulate them on their personal computers for free a decade ago. While it turns out I was right on the money about that, the function is used well with the XBox and PS3 (or so the internet tells me, I don't have that much first world guilt) by providing ports of hard-to-find older titles and original works by small developers. It is also nice to be able to download free demos of major releases before spending sixty dollars to discover whether or not the developer in question has been lying to you.
When I envisioned the market for downloadable content for games you already have, I wasn't skeptical at all. I didn't think it would be anything more than a money pit and an excuse for publishers to put off bug testing, balancing, and generally finishing the game and instead giving us the promise to do so if we give them four months and twenty dollars.
I admit I was only half right about that. I forgot that there are developers who can use these expanded functions for good and not for evil. The first Fallout 3 expansion was good, and I expect good things from the next two. Games like Halo 3 which are played mostly online can remain fresh for years by adding maps and removing glitches.
I will not, however, pay for the Fable 2 expansion. I think it needs to be made clear that the DLC function is not a mulligan for Peter Molyneux. If a game is flawed and the system can fix it for free, that is good use for it. If a game is excellent and I can pay a few bucks to keep the good times rolling, that is also acceptable. If you didn't bother to finish your game, but sold it at full price anyway and now you want me to pay you even more in case it doesn't still suck, you can go to hell.
The good thing about console gaming is that it's self-contained. No compatibility issues or minimum system requirements, just game + console = fun. The addition of online functionality hasn't changed the way most games are made so far, but it could. Lack of internet service or adequate funds may eventually result in you as a gamer receiving a half-formed product because they know you're not on the line for as much future payment as others.
It's a mighty decadent society that can produce something like the electronic gaming industry. Unsurprisingly, that same society is going through a bit of a rough patch right now. From an artistic standpoint, there are some really good things coming out of it, but the problem, as usual, is that between us and the artists are the moneymen. I suspect that as the economic environment gets worse, these services are going to find we have less patience for overpriced content and cleverly-portioned game currency we have to buy if we want the privilege of giving them our money. The gaming world needs to tighten its belt as well, because when it falls, it will be sudden and an entire artistic medium will go with it.
Dungeons & Dragons, 4th Edition
I think we may have been too young to appreciate it the first time we played Dungeons & Dragons. Either that or our dungeon master was being a douche bag for no reason. I think I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to inexperience. After all, he has plenty of embarrassing stories about me and I'm writing about my first D&D experience, so you can imagine how bad they must be.
Despite the rocky start, I tell anyone who'll listen about how great I think tabletop role-playing games are. Even as video game technology advances, paving the way for more realistic simulations and allowing greater freedom and individuality, I'd still rather spend an evening with friends and dice. Entertainment is all the more rewarding when you're intellectually engaged with it, and there is no better example of that than the tabletop RPG.
Unlike most uber-nerds, D&D was not my gateway to that magical land of imagination and social ostracism. It happened years later, in a different basement, playing White-Wolf Games' Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
White-Wolf was notorious for their other game, Vampire: The Masquerade. You may remember the story. It was sometime during the nineties and some stupid kid did something stupid and happened to own a copy of the rulebook. The next thing you knew, one television news magazine or the other broadcast an alarmist expose on "the game which will turn your kids into children of the night, delusional killers, maniacs!" It gave housewives something to worry about until they caught the obligatory choking hazard toy segment on the eleven o'clock news the following week.
Werewolf is probably more violent than Vampire, but it's a charming, Earth First!, righteous anger of the natural world sort of violence. However, there were far more brooding goths than stoner post-hippies back then, so it was never as popular. Indeed, the company had many different titles, most of which were set in a somewhat darker version of our world where supernatural forces worked their magic behind the scenes. It was a rich setting, well-conceived and inspired by the mythology and folklore of many different cultures.
I bring this up because the White-Wolf titles and Dungeons & Dragons represent two disparate forms of tabletop RPGs. This is a review of the new D&D, but I think it will be useful to compare it to other examples of the hobby, since most people probably never knew there were different kinds.
The main characteristic which sets the two styles apart is their approach to setting. D&D games are set in a sort of amorphous stock fantasy world. Although a creative group is free to bend the rules, it's still just picking through J.R.R. Tolkien's bowel movements. You typically have to break the game and rebuild parts of it if you want to go outside the lines, setting-wise. This would be fine if said setting was innovative at all, but it's not. You're supposedly paying for both the balancing work that goes into creating the gaming system and the artistic work of establishing the setting. If the setting is going to be paper-thin, the system should at least be robust and adaptable.
I remember the previous versions being better at that. My second D&D experience was with the 3rd edition rules and a group that ended up spending more time creating the world than we did playing in it. I didn't even have to invent too many rules to add steampunk elves to our game. That's right, steampunk elves.
The 4th edition carries with it the stink of That Guy. You know who I'm talking about. That Guy insists on playing some sort of ridiculous crossover character and then when you finally work out something you can both live with, That Guy is the first one to strike off on his own and leave the group behind, messing up the session for everyone and then you wish you hadn't included him at all. That Guy has a character sheet so smudged with graphite it's barely legible from the constant, unending revisions to his stats because he started min-maxing before you gave it to him and you're lucky if he stops before the first session. I've been playing games for a while now, and I'm certain That Guy has been asking to play a half-dragon or half-demon since D&D was invented and now he has what he wants.
Shame on you, Wizards of the Coast. Shame on you.
Yes, the new edition has three new playable races: The Dragonborn are exactly what they sound like, the Eldarin are elves, but elfier, and the Tieflings are the previously mentioned half-demons. in my world, they all went right out the window before I even invited people to play, but it's a lot of waste when you cast aside big chunks of the game. Those races belong in the appendix to the Monster Manual, not part of the core game and they know that. They are vindicating That Guy behavior and I will not stand for it.
One thing I do appreciate is the incorporation of miniatures and a grid into the rules. I know that this looks like a way to squeeze more money out of their players... Okay, that's precisely what it is, but you don't have to use their miniatures or anyone's, really. Krogdan the human Cleric can be represented by the shoe from Monopoly if you want.
I have yet to play a session of any RPG in which the game's pace doesn't slow to a crawl once a fight starts. This is unfortunate, but difficult to avoid. Miniature Strategy games, on the other hand, are one of the best examples of streamlining simulated combat, thats pretty much exactly what they do. When they party is investigating a room or questioning an NPC, D&D 4th Edition works the same way it always has, but when it's time to throw down, you break out the minis and the grid. It's much easier to keep track of who's in range and who can do where than when that information is only in your head. Or even worse, in six heads.
I don't give them too much credit. That option has always been on the table, and it was recommended from day one, but I do think it's a good idea to build the game with that assumption. The group is always free to abandon it if they feel it cramps their style.
That's really the key to D&D in general, but it's particularly important with the 4th edition so far. You're not playing a video game with design flaws, you have the power to change the rules, adapt he setting, kick That Guy out of your home forever. On top of that, the official game is added to by the professionals often enough that none of the class omissions or other thin areas concerned me too much. After all, it is in their best interests to expand the game.
This new edition is just starting out. I hope future content expansions will not be quite so cheesy. I pray they'll add useful classes and not, I don't know, Badassatron (like a fighter, but also fast like a thief and can use magic, too). It doesn't look too promising, seeing as how the game in question already features Elves II: Revenge of the Smug, but I can dream, can't I?
Despite the rocky start, I tell anyone who'll listen about how great I think tabletop role-playing games are. Even as video game technology advances, paving the way for more realistic simulations and allowing greater freedom and individuality, I'd still rather spend an evening with friends and dice. Entertainment is all the more rewarding when you're intellectually engaged with it, and there is no better example of that than the tabletop RPG.
Unlike most uber-nerds, D&D was not my gateway to that magical land of imagination and social ostracism. It happened years later, in a different basement, playing White-Wolf Games' Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
White-Wolf was notorious for their other game, Vampire: The Masquerade. You may remember the story. It was sometime during the nineties and some stupid kid did something stupid and happened to own a copy of the rulebook. The next thing you knew, one television news magazine or the other broadcast an alarmist expose on "the game which will turn your kids into children of the night, delusional killers, maniacs!" It gave housewives something to worry about until they caught the obligatory choking hazard toy segment on the eleven o'clock news the following week.
Werewolf is probably more violent than Vampire, but it's a charming, Earth First!, righteous anger of the natural world sort of violence. However, there were far more brooding goths than stoner post-hippies back then, so it was never as popular. Indeed, the company had many different titles, most of which were set in a somewhat darker version of our world where supernatural forces worked their magic behind the scenes. It was a rich setting, well-conceived and inspired by the mythology and folklore of many different cultures.
I bring this up because the White-Wolf titles and Dungeons & Dragons represent two disparate forms of tabletop RPGs. This is a review of the new D&D, but I think it will be useful to compare it to other examples of the hobby, since most people probably never knew there were different kinds.
The main characteristic which sets the two styles apart is their approach to setting. D&D games are set in a sort of amorphous stock fantasy world. Although a creative group is free to bend the rules, it's still just picking through J.R.R. Tolkien's bowel movements. You typically have to break the game and rebuild parts of it if you want to go outside the lines, setting-wise. This would be fine if said setting was innovative at all, but it's not. You're supposedly paying for both the balancing work that goes into creating the gaming system and the artistic work of establishing the setting. If the setting is going to be paper-thin, the system should at least be robust and adaptable.
I remember the previous versions being better at that. My second D&D experience was with the 3rd edition rules and a group that ended up spending more time creating the world than we did playing in it. I didn't even have to invent too many rules to add steampunk elves to our game. That's right, steampunk elves.
The 4th edition carries with it the stink of That Guy. You know who I'm talking about. That Guy insists on playing some sort of ridiculous crossover character and then when you finally work out something you can both live with, That Guy is the first one to strike off on his own and leave the group behind, messing up the session for everyone and then you wish you hadn't included him at all. That Guy has a character sheet so smudged with graphite it's barely legible from the constant, unending revisions to his stats because he started min-maxing before you gave it to him and you're lucky if he stops before the first session. I've been playing games for a while now, and I'm certain That Guy has been asking to play a half-dragon or half-demon since D&D was invented and now he has what he wants.
Shame on you, Wizards of the Coast. Shame on you.
Yes, the new edition has three new playable races: The Dragonborn are exactly what they sound like, the Eldarin are elves, but elfier, and the Tieflings are the previously mentioned half-demons. in my world, they all went right out the window before I even invited people to play, but it's a lot of waste when you cast aside big chunks of the game. Those races belong in the appendix to the Monster Manual, not part of the core game and they know that. They are vindicating That Guy behavior and I will not stand for it.
One thing I do appreciate is the incorporation of miniatures and a grid into the rules. I know that this looks like a way to squeeze more money out of their players... Okay, that's precisely what it is, but you don't have to use their miniatures or anyone's, really. Krogdan the human Cleric can be represented by the shoe from Monopoly if you want.
I have yet to play a session of any RPG in which the game's pace doesn't slow to a crawl once a fight starts. This is unfortunate, but difficult to avoid. Miniature Strategy games, on the other hand, are one of the best examples of streamlining simulated combat, thats pretty much exactly what they do. When they party is investigating a room or questioning an NPC, D&D 4th Edition works the same way it always has, but when it's time to throw down, you break out the minis and the grid. It's much easier to keep track of who's in range and who can do where than when that information is only in your head. Or even worse, in six heads.
I don't give them too much credit. That option has always been on the table, and it was recommended from day one, but I do think it's a good idea to build the game with that assumption. The group is always free to abandon it if they feel it cramps their style.
That's really the key to D&D in general, but it's particularly important with the 4th edition so far. You're not playing a video game with design flaws, you have the power to change the rules, adapt he setting, kick That Guy out of your home forever. On top of that, the official game is added to by the professionals often enough that none of the class omissions or other thin areas concerned me too much. After all, it is in their best interests to expand the game.
This new edition is just starting out. I hope future content expansions will not be quite so cheesy. I pray they'll add useful classes and not, I don't know, Badassatron (like a fighter, but also fast like a thief and can use magic, too). It doesn't look too promising, seeing as how the game in question already features Elves II: Revenge of the Smug, but I can dream, can't I?
Fable II
It is easy to make fun of Peter Molyneux and his tilting at windmills when it comes to game design. I admit that I do it for cheap laughs at this point, even though it may be a little unfair. It is a worthy and honorable goal he has set for himself, to change the way the player and setting interact in gaming. However, it is also worthy and honorable to shut your yap long enough to try and achieve your goals.
When I purchased my Xbox console years back, there weren't many games available at all, and few and far between were really immersive RPGs. Having just finished Deus Ex: Invisible War, I was naturally a trifle starved for challenge and... what do you call it? Oh yeah, good game design.
Now, at the time, searching for "Xbox" and "RPG" together would point you to dozens of articles about the upcoming Fable which began as something called Project Ego. The whole thing started years before as an idea to take role-playing games to the next level and was actually approaching completion around the time I started making inquiries. I was interested, but not just because I had recently taken up residence in Xbox Land, a bleak landscape at the time, where finding a game concerned with intellectual stimulation or emotional depth was even more difficult than finding a spot in my entertainment center big enough to accommodate the thing. My interest was piqued also because I had played Black and White (another Molyneux title). It was a game that, despite its many, many flaws, touched on something unexpected and visceral by incorporating the actual hand of god into the "god game." Not only could you interact with the world via a series of commands, "go there," "build that," "attack them," but you could actually grab and pound and throw. The cursor actually existed in the world in a way that was superbly fulfilling for a longtime RTS player like myself who had always longed to punish my soldiers for their failure by flinging them into the sea.
Sadly, Fable was months away and always had a bit of a problem with deadlines. After getting sick of the almost daily updates which read more like sermons from Molyneux and his acolytes which the gaming media faithfully relayed to the pliant consumers, convincing us that it wasn't so much a delay as it was a three-month long awesome injection, I decided it was time to look elsewhere. I told myself I was going to find something to play until I had Fable.
I found Morrowind, but that's another story.
Fable was eventually released. It was a solid action/RPG with some very entertaining skills and magic attacks, an intuitive combat control setup, but a touch on the short side, and... you know, completely fell short of the world-changing, balls-blasting, epic masterpiece over a decade in the making. In other words, it wasn't the game we were promised.
I'm certain that the gaming public would have been fine with it if they hadn't felt the need to talk it up so much. As it happened, Molyneux looked like an ass and the gaming media sources (I'm looking at you specifically, IGN) were exposed as the corporate shills they had always been and still are.
The story of Fable is a cautionary tale, really. A parable for the benefit of the industry, the media, and gamers alike. The morals being "Don't make promises you can't keep," "don't parrot ridiculous promises just because they let you hang out at Lionhead Studios for an hour," and "those other two just want your money and think you're stupid," respectively.
Now we have Fable II. Yes, I know it's been out for a while. My console was at the Xbox Repair Center over the holidays, so cut me some slack. Things seemed a bit quieter this time around. Granted, there wasn't enough time between it and its predecessor to even attempt to match it in pure hype volume, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here. I intend to at least feign journalistic integrity and try to review the game on its own terms.
In one promotional video, the protagonist is shown leaping a fence as if to say, "Remember how the first game was just a series of paths strung together? Remember how we promised something more sandbox-like? We actually did it this time." The problem is that there are maybe three open field maps like that and the rest of the game is the same linear point A to point B stuff from the first game. This is normally fine, but not when they advertised something entirely different. Make no mistake, the level design is basically the same as the first game, it just broadens somewhat at a few points, and there really isn't much out there to discover when it does. Just a few piles of junk for your dog to find and an angry beetle or two.
While they should have fired that guy, it appears they shitcanned whoever was responsible for the original Fable's outstanding control setup. In the first game, you can alternate between one melee weapon, one ranged weapon, and four spells without accessing the menu screen. It was very smooth and quite possibly the game's chief success. In Fable II, however, the targeting system feels slippery, the spells take too long to charge up, and the melee combat is slow and heavy. I played the sequel expecting at least the same standard of gameplay, but it didn't feel anywhere near as dynamic.
On the other hand, I appreciated the tweaks to the leveling system. Fable II is a title that combines action with role-playing character-building. What I like about it is that, in certain cases, the actual mechanics of combat actions evolve as you play. Dodge rolls, aimed shots, and melee flourishes are all unlocked as the player gains levels in the appropriate skills. You could end the game unable to perform simple maneuvers available to characters with a different focus. This may seem restrictive, but I think it's actually a very good idea when you look at it next to the Elder Scrolls' method in which every character is capable of every action, they just fail a lot. Since levels only influence the invisible dice rolls that happen when you try, you can still attempt something even though it's way out of your skill range. Admittedly, it is hilarious to take on a powerful foe with a bow and arrow when your character only has a passing familiarity with it, and you find yourself backpedaling rapidly and filling your opponent's face with projectiles to no avail. Unfortunately, it's far from realistic and breaks flow. In Fable II, a skilled gunslinger can take aim at an opponent's head for massive damage whereas a sword-swinging meat head can only clumsily fire from the hip.
I think Fable II it could benefit even more from my previous advice to Bethesda. If they want to go the sandbox route, then cut out the main story altogether because every quest you finish, hell, every step your character takes along that hideous glowing path pointing you to the next objective is time that could be spent exploring and personalizing. New players will be taken by surprise when the game story skips forward a decade while those of us who were around for the first one tiptoe about the map for fear of the cutscene that will end the current phase of the game because we're in the middle of something. The game's brevity and rapid pacing draw the player inexorably to the end and you can miss a lot of the ancillary material they're so very proud of themselves for including.
The game outside the main story isn't even very good. You can work tedious jobs, purchase homes and businesses, and attract a mate. None of these are particularly challenging activities, and they offer essentially no reward other than a few different lines of dialogue from the NPC you shove by on your way to the market. Fable II, like its predecessor, is unable to decide what kind of game it wants to be to the detriment of the whole experience.
I have yet to sample the downloadable content for Fable II, as I've been too busy liberating Anchorage from the communists in Fallout 3, but I fail to see how the addition of new content is going to save the game that can't properly organize the content it had at release.
I don't think the Fable games should try to be bigger than they are because there's nothing wrong with taking the time to really hone the action/adventure game, personalizing it with bits of RPG along the way. Peter Molyneux just needs to pull his head out of his ass and admit that's what he's doing. If it had a little more focus it could really be something special.
When I purchased my Xbox console years back, there weren't many games available at all, and few and far between were really immersive RPGs. Having just finished Deus Ex: Invisible War, I was naturally a trifle starved for challenge and... what do you call it? Oh yeah, good game design.
Now, at the time, searching for "Xbox" and "RPG" together would point you to dozens of articles about the upcoming Fable which began as something called Project Ego. The whole thing started years before as an idea to take role-playing games to the next level and was actually approaching completion around the time I started making inquiries. I was interested, but not just because I had recently taken up residence in Xbox Land, a bleak landscape at the time, where finding a game concerned with intellectual stimulation or emotional depth was even more difficult than finding a spot in my entertainment center big enough to accommodate the thing. My interest was piqued also because I had played Black and White (another Molyneux title). It was a game that, despite its many, many flaws, touched on something unexpected and visceral by incorporating the actual hand of god into the "god game." Not only could you interact with the world via a series of commands, "go there," "build that," "attack them," but you could actually grab and pound and throw. The cursor actually existed in the world in a way that was superbly fulfilling for a longtime RTS player like myself who had always longed to punish my soldiers for their failure by flinging them into the sea.
Sadly, Fable was months away and always had a bit of a problem with deadlines. After getting sick of the almost daily updates which read more like sermons from Molyneux and his acolytes which the gaming media faithfully relayed to the pliant consumers, convincing us that it wasn't so much a delay as it was a three-month long awesome injection, I decided it was time to look elsewhere. I told myself I was going to find something to play until I had Fable.
I found Morrowind, but that's another story.
Fable was eventually released. It was a solid action/RPG with some very entertaining skills and magic attacks, an intuitive combat control setup, but a touch on the short side, and... you know, completely fell short of the world-changing, balls-blasting, epic masterpiece over a decade in the making. In other words, it wasn't the game we were promised.
I'm certain that the gaming public would have been fine with it if they hadn't felt the need to talk it up so much. As it happened, Molyneux looked like an ass and the gaming media sources (I'm looking at you specifically, IGN) were exposed as the corporate shills they had always been and still are.
The story of Fable is a cautionary tale, really. A parable for the benefit of the industry, the media, and gamers alike. The morals being "Don't make promises you can't keep," "don't parrot ridiculous promises just because they let you hang out at Lionhead Studios for an hour," and "those other two just want your money and think you're stupid," respectively.
Now we have Fable II. Yes, I know it's been out for a while. My console was at the Xbox Repair Center over the holidays, so cut me some slack. Things seemed a bit quieter this time around. Granted, there wasn't enough time between it and its predecessor to even attempt to match it in pure hype volume, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here. I intend to at least feign journalistic integrity and try to review the game on its own terms.
In one promotional video, the protagonist is shown leaping a fence as if to say, "Remember how the first game was just a series of paths strung together? Remember how we promised something more sandbox-like? We actually did it this time." The problem is that there are maybe three open field maps like that and the rest of the game is the same linear point A to point B stuff from the first game. This is normally fine, but not when they advertised something entirely different. Make no mistake, the level design is basically the same as the first game, it just broadens somewhat at a few points, and there really isn't much out there to discover when it does. Just a few piles of junk for your dog to find and an angry beetle or two.
While they should have fired that guy, it appears they shitcanned whoever was responsible for the original Fable's outstanding control setup. In the first game, you can alternate between one melee weapon, one ranged weapon, and four spells without accessing the menu screen. It was very smooth and quite possibly the game's chief success. In Fable II, however, the targeting system feels slippery, the spells take too long to charge up, and the melee combat is slow and heavy. I played the sequel expecting at least the same standard of gameplay, but it didn't feel anywhere near as dynamic.
On the other hand, I appreciated the tweaks to the leveling system. Fable II is a title that combines action with role-playing character-building. What I like about it is that, in certain cases, the actual mechanics of combat actions evolve as you play. Dodge rolls, aimed shots, and melee flourishes are all unlocked as the player gains levels in the appropriate skills. You could end the game unable to perform simple maneuvers available to characters with a different focus. This may seem restrictive, but I think it's actually a very good idea when you look at it next to the Elder Scrolls' method in which every character is capable of every action, they just fail a lot. Since levels only influence the invisible dice rolls that happen when you try, you can still attempt something even though it's way out of your skill range. Admittedly, it is hilarious to take on a powerful foe with a bow and arrow when your character only has a passing familiarity with it, and you find yourself backpedaling rapidly and filling your opponent's face with projectiles to no avail. Unfortunately, it's far from realistic and breaks flow. In Fable II, a skilled gunslinger can take aim at an opponent's head for massive damage whereas a sword-swinging meat head can only clumsily fire from the hip.
I think Fable II it could benefit even more from my previous advice to Bethesda. If they want to go the sandbox route, then cut out the main story altogether because every quest you finish, hell, every step your character takes along that hideous glowing path pointing you to the next objective is time that could be spent exploring and personalizing. New players will be taken by surprise when the game story skips forward a decade while those of us who were around for the first one tiptoe about the map for fear of the cutscene that will end the current phase of the game because we're in the middle of something. The game's brevity and rapid pacing draw the player inexorably to the end and you can miss a lot of the ancillary material they're so very proud of themselves for including.
The game outside the main story isn't even very good. You can work tedious jobs, purchase homes and businesses, and attract a mate. None of these are particularly challenging activities, and they offer essentially no reward other than a few different lines of dialogue from the NPC you shove by on your way to the market. Fable II, like its predecessor, is unable to decide what kind of game it wants to be to the detriment of the whole experience.
I have yet to sample the downloadable content for Fable II, as I've been too busy liberating Anchorage from the communists in Fallout 3, but I fail to see how the addition of new content is going to save the game that can't properly organize the content it had at release.
I don't think the Fable games should try to be bigger than they are because there's nothing wrong with taking the time to really hone the action/adventure game, personalizing it with bits of RPG along the way. Peter Molyneux just needs to pull his head out of his ass and admit that's what he's doing. If it had a little more focus it could really be something special.
Fallout 3
The first time I played Morrowind, I picked up everything that wasn't nailed down. I completed the character creation interview and immediately started pilfering flatware. I was halfway through the grain sacks in the basement of the first house in the game when I was informed that my stealthy thief character was overburdened and unable to move.
It was the first game I had ever encountered that did so much for the cause of immersion. I had, of course, played Grand Theft Auto's contemporary incarnation, but this was different. I felt as if I had entered a virtual world that was even more open than the GTA sandbox, not to mention it had a vocabulary wider than "run, steal, kill." That first session lasted hours. I was awestruck with the extent to which I could improvise. There may have been drooling.
In Morrowind, I had no fewer than twelve different characters. Each one had a different set of skills and attributes, they had different allies and enemies and went through the game in different ways. I also gave them personalities, but that was just for me.
I'm probably crazy.
Morrowind is perhaps the earliest success in a genre I like to call "RPG fusion." You see, as video game technology progresses, the old turn-based, random battle-plagued, attack-magic-item, Final Fantasy-style RPG becomes less and less attractive. The modern personal computer or gaming platform is capable of so much, it's not easy to sell a title where the players have to wait their turn. In response, many designers have started adding RPG elements to other forms of gaming.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's progress. Back in the day, the RPG was distinguished from its rivals by being immersive, persistent and by granting each player a unique experience, even if the story always ended the same way. These are good things, and they live on in the many RPG fusion titles. Granted, they still make old-school RPGs, but honestly, I'm done with them. I like steampunk, I liked the premise, but I could not play Lost Odyssey. Maybe I was a more sophisticated gamer back when I was into Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, but I also lived in a basement and didn't know anything about girls.
I consider Fallout 3 to be a successor to Morrowind by way of Oblivion, at least as far as the technical construction of the gaming world is concerned. It differs from its predecessors in that the setting has changed and ranged combat is far more important, but the general formula is the same. Although there have been many shooters which incorporate RPG elements, I don't think I've seen it done as successfully as Fallout 3 since Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.
The inherent problem with merging the shooter and RPG genres is that the player's combat effectiveness in a shooter is based not on levels or attributes or dice rolls, but on sheer twitchy aiming skill and an understanding of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses. These two gaming styles are fairly disparate, and Fallout 3 makes it work using V.A.T.S. It stands for Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System and I refuse to put all those periods in there every time I type it, so just get used to VATS.
A Fallout 3 character can specialize in a variety of skills that allow him or her to interact with the world, but the wasteland is a rough place. Sooner or later, you are going to find yourself looking at a charging super mutant, and they are seldom impressed by your hacking skill, Junior. It's an action game, so you need to be able to defend yourself. Naturally, a gamer who favors shooters is going to have an advantage here, but VATS lets you pause the game and queue up a series of shots the quantity and rate of success of which are determined by the character's agility and level of familiarity with the gun in question.
The catch is that at the bottom end of a gun's skill level shots will occasionally go wild even if the player decides to eschew VATS altogether and go with pure first-person shooter skill. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I for one will not kowtow to the Red Bull- swigging, trigger-happy, homophobic FPS purist demographic and I'm glad Bethesda didn't either.
VATS does a good job of smoothing out the edges where FPS action meets RPG character-building. Unless the character you've created is Numbnuts the Fingerless, Who Knoweth Not Which End of the Gun is Dangerous, then most of your shots will hit their target when you pull the trigger, but if you're taking a time-out from World of Warcraft and you prefer to let your numbers do the talking, VATS takes you by the hand and kills the mean old rampaging mutated bear for you (if you've got the skills, that is).
It's like Footprints in the Sand for simulated violence.
As I've come to expect from Bethesda, the quests and general world design are fun and inventive. The game is a bit shorter than the Elder Scrolls titles, but there seems to be quite a lot of ancillary game material and you could spend hours or days just messing around exploring the map.
Lest I forget, there is an upcoming expansion which will allow your character to explore post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. The core story could be a big steaming turd and it would still be worth it just for that. Can you say "easy supplemental review?"
Here's the problem. I practically shit my pants as I grasped how vast the game Morrowind was. That feeling was tempered by disappointment when I started Oblivion because I realized that they had dumbed the system down a bit to attract a wider audience. I still played it, because the graphics got a serious bump, the melee combat was superbly visceral, and the physics engine made the setting immersive enough to forgive the more limited stats and abilities aspects. However, it still infuriates me that a good game could have been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that sixty dollars from the wallet of an imagination-deficient simpleton is worth the same as my sixty dollars and I hold a grudge for that. Oh yeah, and I preferred the aesthetic in Morrowind to that of Oblivion. Where the former takes place in a unique alien landscape, the latter was the same castle-and-cottage tripe that makes me throw up into my mouth a little bit when I try to read traditional fantasy.
Fallout 3 is basically just an Oblivion clone which substitutes the Elder Scrolls' original leveling system for the more traditional one found in Fallouts 1 and 2 (presumably to reduce the frequency of crazed Fallout fanboy assaults on their studios), and takes place in a nuclear wasteland other than a cut-and-paste medieval fantasy world. Right off the bat they get points for the new setting, hell, they get points for just doing what they do because nobody else makes games like these and I'm thankful that they do.
But Morrowind was innovative when it was released in 2002. Since then, its progeny have seen changes, some good and some bad. However, that openness that allowed my first Morrowind character to fill her pockets with junk until she couldn't move has remained fairly constant. Now, I don't like to think about how much time I've spent in their games because during that span I could have learned a marketable skill, trained in some exotic fighting style, or collected a really intriguing assortment of sexually transmitted infections, but the point is that there's a very strong draw to letting the players go their own way and I was hooked. What I want to see is Bethesda (or someone else) take this to the next level. Yeah, I can break into someone's house and re-arrange their personal possessions while they sleep. And yeah, that is as innovative as it is utterly pointless and completely balls-out insane. However, couldn't that energy have been put to better use making the world a little more dynamic? I understand that, unlike my paranoid fantasies about reality, everything in a video game is put there for my benefit. I'm also fully aware of just how daunting it is to fill a virtual world with enough stuff to even make the sandbox, non-linear thing worth doing at all.
The problem is that it's all about stuff. I had really hoped to see major improvements in the area of social interactions and AI, but it's more of the same. I like the game, but I feel like it's capable of more. Maybe I've just spent too much time with Bethesda titles. I know where the walls are already, and when I looked for them in Fallout 3, they were right were I left them when I pulled myself away from Oblivion.
My advice for you, dear reader, is to play Fallout 3 if you haven't already. It's charming and fun and utterly unique. If you've never played Morrowind or Oblivion because you think you're too cool or whatever, this advice goes double. You can vacation in Fallout 3, but playing the Elder Scrolls series is a lifestyle choice.
My advice to Bethesda is to do away with the central story in these games. I'm serious. The biggest selling point for me, the thing that made me run out and buy Morrowind way back when was the fact that I could ignore the story, strike out into a fantasy world and weave my own tale, even if it involved random acts of pointless vandalism, petty theft on a massive scale and public indecency. This should not be a sideshow to the game, it should be the game. Will Wright already proved that you can sell a game without grand goals, you can just build things and dick around. I'd like to do that in an inventive, dynamic fantasy world. I don't know what this would look like, but I honestly believe you can do it.
And please do it before Peter Molyneux takes another stab at it because it's getting so embarrassing to watch him try I'm tempted to remake The Office and set it in Lionhead Studios.
It was the first game I had ever encountered that did so much for the cause of immersion. I had, of course, played Grand Theft Auto's contemporary incarnation, but this was different. I felt as if I had entered a virtual world that was even more open than the GTA sandbox, not to mention it had a vocabulary wider than "run, steal, kill." That first session lasted hours. I was awestruck with the extent to which I could improvise. There may have been drooling.
In Morrowind, I had no fewer than twelve different characters. Each one had a different set of skills and attributes, they had different allies and enemies and went through the game in different ways. I also gave them personalities, but that was just for me.
I'm probably crazy.
Morrowind is perhaps the earliest success in a genre I like to call "RPG fusion." You see, as video game technology progresses, the old turn-based, random battle-plagued, attack-magic-item, Final Fantasy-style RPG becomes less and less attractive. The modern personal computer or gaming platform is capable of so much, it's not easy to sell a title where the players have to wait their turn. In response, many designers have started adding RPG elements to other forms of gaming.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's progress. Back in the day, the RPG was distinguished from its rivals by being immersive, persistent and by granting each player a unique experience, even if the story always ended the same way. These are good things, and they live on in the many RPG fusion titles. Granted, they still make old-school RPGs, but honestly, I'm done with them. I like steampunk, I liked the premise, but I could not play Lost Odyssey. Maybe I was a more sophisticated gamer back when I was into Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, but I also lived in a basement and didn't know anything about girls.
I consider Fallout 3 to be a successor to Morrowind by way of Oblivion, at least as far as the technical construction of the gaming world is concerned. It differs from its predecessors in that the setting has changed and ranged combat is far more important, but the general formula is the same. Although there have been many shooters which incorporate RPG elements, I don't think I've seen it done as successfully as Fallout 3 since Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.
The inherent problem with merging the shooter and RPG genres is that the player's combat effectiveness in a shooter is based not on levels or attributes or dice rolls, but on sheer twitchy aiming skill and an understanding of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses. These two gaming styles are fairly disparate, and Fallout 3 makes it work using V.A.T.S. It stands for Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System and I refuse to put all those periods in there every time I type it, so just get used to VATS.
A Fallout 3 character can specialize in a variety of skills that allow him or her to interact with the world, but the wasteland is a rough place. Sooner or later, you are going to find yourself looking at a charging super mutant, and they are seldom impressed by your hacking skill, Junior. It's an action game, so you need to be able to defend yourself. Naturally, a gamer who favors shooters is going to have an advantage here, but VATS lets you pause the game and queue up a series of shots the quantity and rate of success of which are determined by the character's agility and level of familiarity with the gun in question.
The catch is that at the bottom end of a gun's skill level shots will occasionally go wild even if the player decides to eschew VATS altogether and go with pure first-person shooter skill. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I for one will not kowtow to the Red Bull- swigging, trigger-happy, homophobic FPS purist demographic and I'm glad Bethesda didn't either.
VATS does a good job of smoothing out the edges where FPS action meets RPG character-building. Unless the character you've created is Numbnuts the Fingerless, Who Knoweth Not Which End of the Gun is Dangerous, then most of your shots will hit their target when you pull the trigger, but if you're taking a time-out from World of Warcraft and you prefer to let your numbers do the talking, VATS takes you by the hand and kills the mean old rampaging mutated bear for you (if you've got the skills, that is).
It's like Footprints in the Sand for simulated violence.
As I've come to expect from Bethesda, the quests and general world design are fun and inventive. The game is a bit shorter than the Elder Scrolls titles, but there seems to be quite a lot of ancillary game material and you could spend hours or days just messing around exploring the map.
Lest I forget, there is an upcoming expansion which will allow your character to explore post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. The core story could be a big steaming turd and it would still be worth it just for that. Can you say "easy supplemental review?"
Here's the problem. I practically shit my pants as I grasped how vast the game Morrowind was. That feeling was tempered by disappointment when I started Oblivion because I realized that they had dumbed the system down a bit to attract a wider audience. I still played it, because the graphics got a serious bump, the melee combat was superbly visceral, and the physics engine made the setting immersive enough to forgive the more limited stats and abilities aspects. However, it still infuriates me that a good game could have been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that sixty dollars from the wallet of an imagination-deficient simpleton is worth the same as my sixty dollars and I hold a grudge for that. Oh yeah, and I preferred the aesthetic in Morrowind to that of Oblivion. Where the former takes place in a unique alien landscape, the latter was the same castle-and-cottage tripe that makes me throw up into my mouth a little bit when I try to read traditional fantasy.
Fallout 3 is basically just an Oblivion clone which substitutes the Elder Scrolls' original leveling system for the more traditional one found in Fallouts 1 and 2 (presumably to reduce the frequency of crazed Fallout fanboy assaults on their studios), and takes place in a nuclear wasteland other than a cut-and-paste medieval fantasy world. Right off the bat they get points for the new setting, hell, they get points for just doing what they do because nobody else makes games like these and I'm thankful that they do.
But Morrowind was innovative when it was released in 2002. Since then, its progeny have seen changes, some good and some bad. However, that openness that allowed my first Morrowind character to fill her pockets with junk until she couldn't move has remained fairly constant. Now, I don't like to think about how much time I've spent in their games because during that span I could have learned a marketable skill, trained in some exotic fighting style, or collected a really intriguing assortment of sexually transmitted infections, but the point is that there's a very strong draw to letting the players go their own way and I was hooked. What I want to see is Bethesda (or someone else) take this to the next level. Yeah, I can break into someone's house and re-arrange their personal possessions while they sleep. And yeah, that is as innovative as it is utterly pointless and completely balls-out insane. However, couldn't that energy have been put to better use making the world a little more dynamic? I understand that, unlike my paranoid fantasies about reality, everything in a video game is put there for my benefit. I'm also fully aware of just how daunting it is to fill a virtual world with enough stuff to even make the sandbox, non-linear thing worth doing at all.
The problem is that it's all about stuff. I had really hoped to see major improvements in the area of social interactions and AI, but it's more of the same. I like the game, but I feel like it's capable of more. Maybe I've just spent too much time with Bethesda titles. I know where the walls are already, and when I looked for them in Fallout 3, they were right were I left them when I pulled myself away from Oblivion.
My advice for you, dear reader, is to play Fallout 3 if you haven't already. It's charming and fun and utterly unique. If you've never played Morrowind or Oblivion because you think you're too cool or whatever, this advice goes double. You can vacation in Fallout 3, but playing the Elder Scrolls series is a lifestyle choice.
My advice to Bethesda is to do away with the central story in these games. I'm serious. The biggest selling point for me, the thing that made me run out and buy Morrowind way back when was the fact that I could ignore the story, strike out into a fantasy world and weave my own tale, even if it involved random acts of pointless vandalism, petty theft on a massive scale and public indecency. This should not be a sideshow to the game, it should be the game. Will Wright already proved that you can sell a game without grand goals, you can just build things and dick around. I'd like to do that in an inventive, dynamic fantasy world. I don't know what this would look like, but I honestly believe you can do it.
And please do it before Peter Molyneux takes another stab at it because it's getting so embarrassing to watch him try I'm tempted to remake The Office and set it in Lionhead Studios.
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