About choices and endings

Tags

bioware, cd projekt, deus ex, fallout, human revolution, neverwinter nights, new vegas, the witcher

Like I said in my previous post, where Deus Ex: Human Revolution really falls apart is the ending. I can see how designing multiple endings is a complicated story and, from what I remember, the first Deus Ex had something similar, but the way HR ends takes you out of the game and leaves a sour taste in your mind. To reiterate and expand a bit, here is why it fails: imagine you end up in a room and someone tells you that you can choose one of four things. That person tells you what every choice means, and how it will affect the future of the world. This is not the major downside, as you can still role-play and choose whatever fits your character and go with that choice. But the decision losses a bit of its impact, knowing that you are just five minutes away from redoing this decision, so you might as well choose whatever and, if it doesn’t work for you like you hoped you would, you can reload and try again. No think that these different paths were split somewhere one hour ago – how would you feel making a decision knowing that you’ll have to face the consequences of your actions for the next hour? Of course, the bigger the distance between spit and ending the better, but even five minutes of more gameplay might make the difference between “woaw” and “meh”. Again, this isn’t the major issue, but it could have been done better. The worst part is what happens after you decide what path to follow: you are being told how the world’s focus will shift based on your decision, and that it will have a major impact on future civilization. What would you expect to see after you take your pick? See, there’s a whole theory about why we take the decisions we take, but I always sum it up by “we choose the best thing for us”. This goes, once again, into theory, but let’s just say “best for us” means something that fits our psychological profile and that has optimal consequences. What the game actually does? It takes a big shit on both my previous points: it offers no glimpse at any consequences, as if saying “Wow, you guided humanity towards an era of enlightenment? Who gives a shit, we won’t show you what happens. What we’re going to do is how you why you took that decision.” Really? But I know why I took that decision, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last minutes, explaining to myself what would be better. No, the game just take a big sign and smashes in into your face: this game is not about you, it’s about Adam Jensen, and all we really want to show is how he feels about the whole thing. The world? Fuck the world!

Mr. House

Let’s look at another example, a game that has four endings and, incidentally was the first post of this blog: Fallout: New Vegas. The game is all about choosing the future of Nevada, and your part is to ally with a faction and lead it in a battler. You can choose between NCR, a bureaucratic/democratic organization that tries to go back to how things were before the war; or Caesar’s Legion, which has a pyramidal leadership, with strict rules and horrible punishments; or Mr. House, the ruler of New Vegas, who want autonomy for the city and for him to rule supreme; or you can even choose to ally with yourself if you don’t like any of the other options. How you know about all of these factions – because the main quest take you through every camp, having you talking with all the leaders, hearing their vision. (Side note: HR also does this well, as you always know which faction represents what.) NV doesn’t even push you for a choice: you can do some missions for NCR, see what they are all about; some mission for Caesar to see how much can that psychopath push; some missions for Mr. House, in order to find out more about his plans. Like I said in my first post, I want to go with Mr. House until he told me to destroy the Brotherhood, and I really love those guys and couldn’t do it. So I switched sides and tried to do some NCR, but they didn’t seem to care that much about the people and more about their rise to power. And here is the great thing: knowing how Fallout games usually end (we’ll get to that) and the fact that I’ll be playing for some more hours facing the consequences of my actions, I just couldn’t do “Heh, kill the Brotherhood, see where this leads and then reload and try something else.” No, having immersion and right time decision-making make you go for the ending that you really want to push for. And speaking of the ending: there’s this thing Fallout games do (and it’s done by more and more titles), that at the end of the game the put on slideshows with what happened with everybody that you met. Did you decide to rape and pillage that village in chapter one or help the fight off the bandits. You though you could do better that Mr. House? Well, see what actually happens…

Because “multiple endings” is all about choice, and in order to have choice you must have two things: give the player enough information so that he knows between what he’s about to choose and (at some point) show him the consequences of his actions.

Qara, the betrayer

But choice doesn’t have to be all about multiple endings. There are lot of games were you have multiple ways of doing quests. Bioware now does the decision thing through characters: at one point in the game to characters start to argue and you have to side with one, gaining his loyalty, but also getting a frown from the other guy. But where this is really well done is in Neverwinter Nights 2. Here you gather a party of followers and throughout the game there would arise different situations where they would challenge you. In my party there was this really powerful mage, but she was also a snobby bitch that had all sort of crazy ideas, and at some point I couldn’t stand her nagging any more (she resembles Anders from Dragon Age 2 a lot). So from time to time I would say “Bitch! Shut the fuck up, we’re doing thing my way!” (in game language, of course). She didn’t say anything, just give me that look and we went on with our quest. All fine and dandy, except that the last boss was feeling chatty and challenged me being the Chosen One. Not only that, but he started asking my followers if there were sure their allegiance stood with me. Guess who the only person that betrayed me was. Now guess who the first person to die in the fight that followed was. What I like about it was that I could never see this coming; sure I knew the mage girls was not that happy with me, but I had done some nice stuff for her like saving here from some mages that wanted to take her back to the academy (long story). So, yeah, be nice to your followers.

This is getting a bit long, but we really can’t talk about choices without mentioning the wonderful people from CD Projekt RED. I’ll start with the short one: although I haven’t played The Witcher 2 yet, I read that somewhere in the second chapter (out of four or five?) you can choose a path and follow it to the end, having a different experience than if you had chosen something else. How’s that for great replayability? (Probably more about this when the game hits the 360 and I actually finish it). On the other hand, whenever I talk about the first The Witcher I always highlight it as the game with the best decision making system. To see why, here are two examples, but there are probably better ones in the game. In the prologue you get to choose if to fight a giant monster or to go and follow the villain. Having chosen the latter in my first playthrough, I decided to stay and fight the giant grasshopper. All went well and I continued my quest, until some (good) hours later when I was attacked by bandits accompanied by mutated dogs. After I killed them the game went into a cutscene explaining that because I didn’t follow the villain, he had stolen the witchers’ secrets and could now create giant dogs. The other example: in the first chapter there’s a quest to guard some goods; an elf appears and tells you that he had paid for those supplies, but he had be double crossed by the man you are working for and now he’s friends were dying because they were missing those supplies. With a tear in my eye I let him took the crates, hoping his friends will be well and thinking that this is the last time we met. But when I got to the second chapter, I really needed to speak with the local drug dealer in order to advance my main quest. Imagine my jaw dropping when I found him killed with the weapons in the crates that I had previously guarded.

I’ve talked about consequences at the beginning: they don’t have to present themselves as soon as you make your choice, because you might just hit reload if you don’t like the outcoming. It’s a nicer feeling when they come back to haunt you some time later, making the world more alive, as it doesn’t just sit around waiting for your every move. The world around you has its own agenda; it’s just that your paths might meet again at some point. (There’s something like this in Fallout 2 – I just remembered: there’s this guy in front of a casino that ask you for money since his is broke; give him a loan and you’ll never hear from him until somewhere close to the end when he’ll cover you in caps as a reward for your good dead.)

Let’s end this is a personal note – some time ago CD Projekt has a design contest, and in the first stage you had to write a design document. There were some other rules, but the story was supposed to have two possible endings. You can still find the results of the first stage on their forum, here, but I’ll just go ahead and quote them. Unfortunately the links don’t work anymore.

We are happy to announce that project “Birth, and Virgins” written by Simon Brooke and Game Widow won the first stage of our contest!

Congratulations!

We also present other projects, which were appreciated by The Witcher designers.
Artur Ganszyniec (Lead designer of The Witcher and Katarzyna Kuczyńska (designer of The Witcher) added their comments to all presented projects.

Comments are added to the project files.

WINNER – “Birth, and Virgins” – Simon Brooke and Game Widow (read)

RUNNER-UPS:
- “Cursed Village” – Master Samurai X (read)
- “The Killing Fields” – Eleftheria, Giorgos Chrysochoos (read)
- “Blade of Atonement” – Roman Zorin (read)

What’s the big deal you ask? I go by “Master Samurai X” in some obscure circles. If you do want to have a look on what’s the Cursed Village all about, I uploaded it to Google Docs (but it’s missing the CD Projekt commentaries). Give it a read anyway.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Tags

adam jensen, deus ex, eidos, human revolution, rpg, shooter, square enix, warren spector

Back in the (very) late 90s, shooters were starting to be quite the thing, challenging technology and at the same time making players all around the world want to put another rocket in their best friend’s face. But, unlike today, this didn’t mean that everybody was copying the same recipe, releasing the same shooter as the competition, but with a different name, or the same yearly iteration of their own IP. No, back then designers took the shooter mechanic and looked for ways to improve it. One of these designers was Warren Spector and he though he can improve the shooter mechanic by creating a steampunk stealth game (Thief), a survival horror (System Shock) and a cyberpunk conspiracy opera – Deus Ex. All of these are cult classics, but we’ll just focus on the last one – there’s this meme that every time you mention Deus Ex someone installs it. So how is it that it took 11 years to make a good sequel of it?

In Human Revolution you play as Adam Jensen, an ex cop that is now chief of security for Sarif Industry. The game opens with a cut scene a la Deus Ex, with some shady characters having a conversation over secure links. You don’t understand what they are talking about, but some mystery is good. Sarif Industry is a company specialized in human augmentation and is on the brink of a huge discovery. So, as expected, some unknown mercenaries attack the Sarif headquarters, kill the scientist handling the research and leave Adam in a pile of blood. Six months later Adam is called back to duty, as some anti-aug fanatics have seized a Sarif factory. Oh, and Adam is now pretty much machine, as this was the only way to keep him alive.

The story is good, filled with conspiracies, twists and secret organizations. But what really draws you in is the world – it has a noir feeling to it, everybody is curious and worried about the future of humanity. This is especially noted in the side quests, as they send you to face the horror of the new world of 2027. You will be asked to investigate a corrupt cop, investigate a murder committed by somebody whose family is in the board of every big corporation, or save a hooker from a group that wants to augment her for the customer’s satisfaction. Every person you meet during these quests is interesting and believable, and fills a piece of the puzzle that is the world of tomorrow. And all the quest are not there just to give you some more XP, but also to reveal parts of your past, painting a more detailed picture of who Adam is. The final fight is real creepy, but I won’t say anything about it since it might be a bit of a spoiler. Just be prepared for a “wtf” moment towards the end. Although not as big or twisted as Deus Ex’s story, the new one does its job really well, making you want to play for just one more hour to see what’s behind the next corner. It would be perfect if it didn’t leave some things unexplained, but luckily enough there is a lot of stuff going on around you so you won’t ask those unanswerable questions.

Adam Jensen - badass extraordinaire

The game is structured in hubs, each hub representing a city. You can walk around, pick up quest, talk to people (although they don’t say much, they do offer their one line about what’s going on), sell or buy weapons. I like this way of design, but its strong point is also its weakness. I first encountered “hub-worlds” in Bloodlines and found it to be a really interesting way of spanning a long game using little scenery. On the other hand, although I spent more than 40 hours in the game, it feels short, and at the end I started asking myself how I spent my last two weeks.

You can tackle mission as you wish, be it stealthy or gun blazing, but the game rewards you more if you go for the silent approach. The game play is really focused on this and you can actually be a silent spy if you wish to. I remember the first mission in the first Deus Ex, when your brother tells you that you are a member of the police and you shouldn’t just shoot everything you see. To which I said “okay” until I found out what a chore it was to not shoot terrorists in the head: you had either a tranquilizer rifle that made the guys you shot run around for five minutes, gathering the whole army on  their back; or the stun gun that barely had ammo for just one terrorist. So, yeah, I’m police, but they were all filled with bullets when I got here. HR changes that and you can go through the whole game without firing one shot – unlike JC Denton, Adam can punch people in the face, or silently put them down while he’s sneaking behind them. All it takes is one full battery of whatever juice is powering him up. And here’s the funny thing: you can have as many as five (I think) batteries, but only one fills automatically. So you’ll have to carefully watch your energy, perform one takedown and then hide and wait for the battery to fill. This was probably done in order to not allow godly characters: one of Adam’s powers is invisibility, and if all your batteries would fill up in some seconds, you could just go around invisible taking down every dude you see.

Speaking of powers (augmentations) – shooting, stealth and basic hacking are available from the start, and you can switch between them at any point. Then, if you’re a real pervert that violates everybody’s privacy, you can go for mega hacker and read all the emails. Or pick up the invisibility we’ve talked about. Or the typhoon upgrade which makes grenades come out of your arms in a five meter radius, destroying everything. And if this is not enough, you can mod your weapons, adding a silencer to your pistol, making your revolver fire exploding bullets or your tranq-rifle do some movement estimations. The game doesn’t force you to choose a path, and you’ll have enough points (praxis) to evolve in any direction. They are a problem just in the beginning when you’ll have to choose some sort of specialty.

Frank Pritchard, the IT guy. A prick, like all IT guys.

One thing everybody complained about is the boss fights – they force you to just use your guns, and there is no other way to tackle them. And boy does this get frustrating, especially after you spent the last hours sneaking around, never taking a shot, only to be forced to face an overgrown psycho that keeps throwing grenades at you. This was actually the only moment when I started cursing and had to reload more than twenty times. The first boss is really frustrating, but after that you know what to expect and will pack a small arsenal, ready for whatever. It seems Eidos outsourced the boss fights and that’s why they don’t fit the picture that well.

Choices? Well, they sort of exists, especially (if not only) in the first chapter. Remember how I said Adam is called back to work to handle some fanatics? Your boss asks you to head to the helicopter as soon as possible, but if you decide to explore the offices he’ll call again saying that the situation just got worse and the hostages are dead. Also, at the end of that mission, the terrorist in charge takes a hostage, and you can decide if you want to save the victim and let him go or just fill him with bullets. If you do let him live (which I did) he’ll come back later with some help for one of your missions. Other than that, the game takes you on a straight path towards the end. You have some other small choices on how to handle things, but nothing memorable.

And now, let’s talk about the end. Since this might be a bit of a spoiler, I’m going to write it in white, so just select the paragraph if you want to read it. It’s just about the structure of the end and nothing about the story, but just in case you want to see everything for yourself, you can skip this part. Where Human Revolution really falls flat is at the end, having all its four possible endings in the same room. This means you don’t really feel there’s this great choice you are making, since it only takes you 30 seconds to reload and see another ending. At the end you are told to make a choice that would impact the future of humanity, and I got a bit curious about what is going to happened with the world around once I made a choice. But instead of delivering anything, the focus shifts to Adam’s thought, who explained how he came to take that decision. Dude, I already know why I chose that, there was no need to explain. You could have, instead, tell me how much I fucked up by choosing that. Also, I get how having multiple ending is tricky and it’s hard to decide where to put the split point, but just putting them in the same room doesn’t seem like the right way to do it (not that the first Deus Ex does it different).

To conclude – Human Revolution is a really good game, and deserves its Deus Ex name. I might be inclined to call it the game of 2011, but there are a lot of good releases coming up so I think it might be a good idea to wait a bit.

(DLC for Deus Ex: HR is planned for October)

Fable 2

Tags

fable, lionhead, peter molyneux, rpg

Whether you know it or not, the game industry has its rockstars. And I’ll start with the obvious one, and actually the exception to the list that will follow – John Carmack, the only game programmer universally known. But the other game-stars are designers, so I’ll throw some name and try to see how many you know (and if you never heard of the use Wikipedia – you’re going to find interesting things in their CV): John Romero (the actual rockstars – look at his career, give him a blonde wig and call hit Britney), Tim Cain, Tim Schafer, Chris Avelone, David Jaffe, Richard Garriott, Warren Spector. They probably don’t mean much to you, but these are some of the names I grew up with.

And somewhere in that list belongs Peter Molyneux. And rightfully so, since he is the creator of some really good games like Populus, Black & White and Fable. His latest creations (starting with B&W) tend to focus on morals and choices, but, as the title suggests, keeping them in the monochrome area, with no gray colors. Which is not so bad for the beginning of the 21 century.

To end this long introduction, Fable was a pretty good game – when it was released to PC in 2005 everybody (even the snobby PC gamers) agreed it had an interesting story, a solid gameplay and, although simplistic, seeing how your actions influenced the look of your character was a nice touch. So why wasn’t the second iteration all that good?

The short answer is because Molyneux hyped the shit out of it. I first heard about Fable 2 in a presentation, where Molyneux was praising the combat in movies like Kill Bill and said we’ll have the same thing in Fable 2. Here’s the transcript I found (link):

“Swords are sharp,” he repeated a few times, pointing out that in one scene of Kill Bill, every single time Uma Thurman swings her sword, somebody dies. Molyneux theorized that this concept could be put into a game, with parries and other types of attacks included for boss fights and scenes that the designers would want to last longer.

All this added up to a few lessons learned by the team at Lionhead after some experimentation in this area: realistic fighting needs to use environments to alter player attacks with context sensitive moves, one button fighting can be possible if the designers use proximity and timing/charging of button presses to require player skill, one hit “fatal blows” could be done well to raise the “drama of combat,” and the lack of an on-screen HUD or GUI allows a lot of things to be done easier with a new combat model.

Sound pretty darn interesting, doesn’t it? (If you read what he had in mind for Fable 3 – pretty much the same thing (link)). So what was the combat in Fable 2? Not at all as described above, but rather formulaic sword swinging. Actually the game didn’t do anything at all in regards to combat, but kept the same old third person button mashing. Even more, he crushed whatever combat there actually was with not punishing deaths at all – once you died you were respawn in the exact same place, with full HP and got to try it all over again. So what was the point of trying to improve your combat skills when you could just press one button and that was it? Actually, the best tactic was to invest all your skill points in magic (fire spitting kind of magic, of course) and spam the “cast magic” button. Results? All living things dead, all the time.

Before I get into the heavy stuff, a few words about what makes a RPG great: story and loot. I can’t remember much about the story except the fact that you were a special orphan hunted by some mage. The loot was semi-okay: there were lots of weapons, usually obtained by questing and exploring, and this kept thing going for me for a while. Where I found it lacking was in the armor area, with just cloth and visual dressing. Really, Peter, I can’t go around proclaiming myself the greatest warrior alive if I’m dressed like a fairy.

"Of I go to marry some more hoes!" I'd be smiling too.

But back to the hype. Another thing Molyneux promised was a living world, filled with memorable characters, influenced by your actions (citation needed). And of all the people who promised this, and there are a lot, he failed the most. Yes, the world is alive, if by that you mean that the world is populated by puppets. And this was a killer for me – not having any relatable character killed the game for me. What would usually happen is this – I went to a town, talked with the same stereotype characters which game me some quest. Then, because there was nothing else to do I started to talk with villagers trying to improve my reputation with them. Not because I wanted to be liked (or disliked) by them, but just because it was a gimmick of the game. And how long can you abuse a gimmick before it get very old. So then – go to city, complete quests, look for the best looking hooker in town, marry her, buy houses until you spend all your money and rent them. Exit game, wait a few days, load your save (rent would be gathered as if you never left the game in this time) and repeat. Does this sound like an action RPG to you or like a Sims game? The only character that I found interesting was a blackmailer hidden under a bridge that said he’ll tell my wife in town A that I have another wife in town B unless I paid him. Ah, an interesting choice you might think – but usually choices are good if there is some background to them. For example: both of my wives had something interesting about them, and instead of marrying them because I was bored, I married them because one is the most beautiful girl in the land, while the other one is the greatest mother my children can have. Also, I’m low on money, which are hard to get, and killing this asshole has high chances of me ending up in jail, with both of my wives finding out. What would I do now? Kill him? Go on questing and gather the money? Decide which one of your wives you like the most and leave the other? What I actually chose? Pay him the money, then kill him, then never talk with those two bitches ever again.

Making a sequel is pretty hard. And Fable 2 is a decent game; just that it gets boring and you’ll abandon it for any game that has at least one believable character. But hyping it sky high and then doing all of the above, and then promising the same things all over again for the sequel, well, Peter, that’s a no-no.

PS: Writing this I actually came up with two ideas that I hope to expand over the next post. One is a bit historical and the other on the theoretical side. Just to spice things up.

Heroes of Newerth

Tags

dota, heroes of newerth, hon, league of legends, lol

Most of my gaming on PC happens in LoL. I never thought I’ll be into this sort of games, especially after my traumatic experience with DOTA, but I guess this game does everything is does right so I keep coming back to it. Actually, what’s really catchy is its noob-friendlyness: the interface is very clean and helpful and the community rarely says a word in random matched teams. So, with that in mind, I thought I’ll give the competition a try, and installed Heroes of Newerth.

I don’t like to quit in these games, because the team will lose its balance, so even if I suck I can still provide a moving target for the opposition, while the guys that know how to play do their thing. Well, after 5 minutes in HoN I was desperately looking for the quit button. Which is not that easy to find, because the interface is a mess: while LoL has a big Play button which opens a menu with what king of games you can play, HoN has… something, not easily definable, that you do press, but you are taken to a menu where you don’t understand a thing. I guess you can setup stuff there, but I didn’t know the meaning of any word. If I have to read documentation to understand the f’in start screen, maybe you don’t want any new customers. And I think that between my two plays some of the ingame interface has change: while I was playing the tutorial, the game gave me a mage (fire spitting kind of one so no complaints here), and he has skills but there was no description to any of it; I was just pressing button, curious myself as to what I’m about to cast; when I played now I saw descriptions to each spell, so it seems they are trying to improve.

Finally I found the “go kick some ass” button and got into the hero selection screen… which I found to be a mess. This time I could understand what was going on, but it’s just eye disturbing how everything is placed. Plus, for the first game you’re sort of blind picking, as there’s not much information about everyone is good at. And there’s the other screaming “pick and start!” again and again. So I pick a monkey king or something, and entered the game – and there was that DOTA flashback all over again.

The store is a mess, you don’t have the nifty “suggested items” from LoL, but that’s wouldn’t have been the biggest problem. As I picked some sort of axe and went up the top lane, my lane partner wrote “monkey words words words”. To which I replied with a blank stare, but I’m sure he didn’t the silent irony. So he wrote some capital letters, so I put the poker face again. Here’s the problem with hardcore gaming – the community sucks and they hit you in the balls every chance they get. So this words-letter scenario repeated as my monkey dude died – he was a bit retarded and I had no clue how to use his spells. Finally, after a few deaths and a lot of letters (some of them I assume were curses) and one noob calling, I pressed quit. And then uninstall.

To conclude – HoN biggest problem is that is not more like LoL when it comes to keeping new players by their hand. But even without that, its biggest flows are:  it has no coop mod (or I didn’t find it) – we all need some way to practice before we meet the big boys; its interface is a mess, confusing you more than helping. The internet says it has better graphics, but I found the ones in LoL to be cleaner, even if they are cartoonish.

The internet also says that HoN is a direct successor to DOTA, with tools for esports and a hardcore player base. So if you are into that sadomasochism shit go for it. I’ll be in LoL having fun.

Alpha Protocol

Tags

alpha protocol, espionage, obsidian, reviews, rpg, spy

Sometimes I wonder if I played the same game as the big name reviewers – I read the reviews, do feel that they tell the truth, but at the same time feel that the missed the overall feeling. And since Alpha Protocol is a one of the games that the press hated and I absolutely loved, I’m going through this by pointing out were exactly they were thick as a brick in the Great Wall of China. (I should probably use quotes and follow up links to most of the things I’m going to mention, but I’m a bit lazy for this, so stuff might get inaccurate. Go with it. Or pay attention to the clues and Google it.)

First of all, and this might be a clue to why I love the game, this is an Obsidian developed game. It puts you in the role of Michael Thorton, a secret agent working for a secret agency that does secret stuff. Point one – how many espionage RPGs do you know? And, by the way, the game manages to stay RPG and not fall to the dark path of action-RPG or shooter-RPG. What this means is that you won’t be able to sharp shoot an enemy 2 miles away unless you invested your heard earned experience points in pistols. This is the mechanic – you have about 10 skills (pistols, rifles, hacking, lock pick, gadgets etc) and you can choose four, I think, that you can max out. Every time you level up you get Action Points that you can invest in the skill of your choice, but if it’s not one of the four you can only upgrade it just to somewhere equivalent to medium level. Also, leveling up a skill opens up special actions: for pistols you can do that Splinter Cell thing where you stay hidden, mark targets and then jump up and execute them; for stealth you can go invisible, and so on.  The whole skill mechanism feels so nice, especially since you’re a wuss at the beginning and end up being godlike, hiding behind corners and throwing headshots, turning invisible whenever someone spots you.

And you get perks if you know your spy bussiness.

The next thing you’re going to like is that your actions have consequences. For example, I was supposed to get something from a warehouse when I met up with some spec ops goggled pricks. My contact entered curiosity mode and told me that it would be nice if I went undetected so that in the end we could hack into their cables and find out what they were up to. So I listened to her and went out gun blazing, so in the end the baddies covered all their tracks and, to this day, I have no clue what the hell they were doing there (except getting shot that is). You can choose allies for some of the missions; you can choose love or revenge at one point. And, if you’re Mike “Deranged Mass Murderer” Thorton, you can leave a trail of dead bodies from start to end and have no one talk to you. ‘Cause their all dead.

Let him live and he'll help you lter with intel.

Here’s what reviewers complained about, using one of my fashionable lists:

• Buggy and unpolished – it is. But it also is an Obsidian game. Are we really expecting no bugs from them? And how is it that we let indie games get away with this and bitch slap big studios games for every pixel that is out of place?
• Stupid AI – also true. But, it only gets stupid when you let it. I saw this in the desctructoid.com review: enemies run towards you, punch you in the face and then back up and shoot you. Some objections to that: why are you letting them see you or take one step after they saw you? Point being: you are the uber spy, but you decided to stop and pick daisies and examine the enemy’s artificial behavior. I can only imagine what goes through their head “Look, another idiot. Let’s just wave around and pretend we’re as retarded as he is so he won’t feel bad”
• “If it looks like a shooter it should play like a shooter.” (gametrailers.com) – I have another one of these funny riddle thingies for you guys “If it look like a shooter, it might be Deus Ex or System Shock 2.” Get it?

Sneaky Thorton is sneaky.

• On the same note, from the retarded prick who goes by the name of Angry Joe. Dude had played the game as a mass murderer, gun blazing, but found out that playing stealth-pistol the game is broken and unplayable. I just described how you can get god mode from this conversation, but it seems the words patience and angry don’t go together.
• And one more from destructoid.com – to hack stuff with ease you have to invest points in hacking, so the game offers you no choice, you have to invest in hacking else you can’t hack. Do I need to explain this? Don’t… fucking… hack… if… you… don’t want to invest points in hacking. What is this the mass murderer obsession syndrome, where you have to read every person’s mail in order to find out if you shot him in the face like he wrote in his will?
• Yahtzee also said something, but at least he was funny.

Thanks to all of this and the “fans” preferring military tea bagging simulator, the first of Obsidian’s intellectual property remains without sequel. So, if you haven’t played it yet and you like old fashion RPGs, do yourselves a favor and go pick it up.

Good Old Games

Tags

deus ex, gog, painkiller, steam, ultima, vampire the maquerade

I do most of my gaming on my consoles. It’s all about the comfort and the certainty that I’ll be able to insert the disc and just play, without tweaking for that extra frame. But lately (and this weekend especially) I’ve been fiddling with my mouse and keyboard (and not just playing LoL). And I think I rediscovered PC gaming. Consider the title a spoiler, but I don’t have red eyes and a twitching neck because of the extra shinny graphics in that new 3D shooter. I’ve just reinstalled some classics and I’ve been wondering around – to my surprise, they pretty much pass the test of time: the graphics are bearable and game play is playable. Although they get a bit tedious, like they were made for a time when I was younger, I didn’t need sleep so I could just spend 24 hours in front of my monitor. Let’s not make this any longer and just throw some names. If you never heard of any of the titles bellow (you are too young) click on the picture and it will take you to Wikipedia. (Also, some of them might get a full post if I the fall triple A titles get delayed any longer and I remain stuck with my monitor.)

Painkiller Black Edition – The newest of the pack, it’s exactly how I remember. I wrote about it a bit in my Bulletstorm post – you’re some dude in hell and you have to kill the generals of Lucifer. Or something… I remember the cinematic being really good back in the day, but now my standards have changed, so they’re just alright. To do your mission, you get guns and are sent to face the armies of hell. It’s pretty simple, it’s fun and it’s very stylish. The gothic look lasts through the years, and it would have looked superb if the textures were a bit sharper. You can get it on Steam for around 10 Euros. It also has some expansions, but I never tried those, I heard they didn’t match the original.

Deus Ex – Since the new one is due to arrive on Monday, I thought I should give this old gem a try. I don’t remember much about it except for being the only good cyberpunk I ever played. I was so impressed back then that I wanted to find out more about cyberpunk and ended up reading Neuromancer. It’s weird how it hasn’t spanned any clones, just a sequel that was really bad received. The game is a first person RPG; you play as a secret agent filled with nanites, and for the first hour you are sent to “pacify” NSF terrorist. The game plays like an actual RPG, meaning that if you want accuracy you must invest in that skill. Graphics look like Quake 2 – I found it bearable, but don’t expect picture perfect; plus, the character models look funny as hell. Also from Steam.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption – One of the classic hack’n’slash games; also, the other good vampire series (guess the first one). I got this because I first played it without voices and movies and when I finish it I had no clue what happened. What’s fun about it is that you start in the Middle Ages and end up in contemporary times. How many games manage to do that? And at least get away with it? Not much to say about it since I just installed it and played about 20 minutes of it. If you are interested you can get it from gog.com. Also, it has a sequel, Bloodlines, which is actually good, although buggy. I hope to write about both games someday. (You are going to laugh your ass off when you’ll see who the publisher was)

Ultima IX – Ascension – I didn’t play this when it came out, because my PC just couldn’t handle it. I installed it now because, for some reason, I’m very curious about Ultima games. This one is the only 3D one. It looks pretty good, but the controls are absolutely retarded – what were they thinking when they didn’t put a “customize your keys and set your mouse sensitivity” button? Apparently you can set them from an init file but, really, wtf? Also, the internet says it’s the bastard child of the series, and there are community stuff to fix its shit and make it part of the legacy.

And speaking of the community and my Ultima obsession – looking for patches for IX I found a site(it’s linked here, click it!) with remakes of the old games. The reason why you would want remakes and not the originals (which you can also get from gog.com up until the 6^th game of the series) is that the originals look like shit. And why not, since they were developed in the 80s and early (really early) 90s. So, yeah, remakes, let’s try those:

- Ultima IV – it actually has two remakes, both of the first Neverwinter engine. Played about 10 minutes of each, the maps are completely different, but maybe the follow a common story line.

- Ultima V & VI – remakes using the first Dungeon Siege engine. I had no clue DS was used for modding. I’ll look over them when I finish with IV.

- Ultima VII & VIII – these are not actually remakes but improvements of the original engine to make it work on current OS. VII is also available for PSP, but it’s a bit weird to control (or I haven’t figured it out yet).

And as this is not enough, I have the classic JRPG’s from the PSone era on my PSP – Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, Legend of the Dragoon. And others. If I continue this way, soon I’ll be using the PS3 to play PS2 games.

So, yeah, I guess that’s it – fuck graphics, give me old school. Oh, there are no remakes of Baldur’s Game (there’s a work in progress on Dragon Age: Origins engine) or Planescape Torment.

Diablo II

Tags

blizzard, diablo, hack'n'slash

Since Dan is on a trip ( have a good time buddy, and don’t forget to buy me something :-”), this week’s article will be written by *drum rolls*….. *wait for it *… Me! . Although I kind’of lost touch with the recent gaming world, I’ll blabber about some old stuff that reached out to me. So, without further ado : DIABLO II ! Do you feel the tension? I do.

Blizzard was one of the studios that guided me through my childhood. Starting with the first instalment of the above mentioned game (Diablo, duh! – released in 1996), it got me hooked to a new “style” of gameplay. Good imersion, almost non-existing bugs, complex story, are just some of the perks of playing a Blizzard game (Dan would disagree, but he’s not here now, is he? ). So, after my jaw droped at the sight of the famous Starcraft (1998), my respect for the stormy guys reached its climax with the release of Diablo II (published in June 2000). The premise was simple: you’re this character here, those are the bad guys .. and, well, click on them ’till your nose bleeds. Fair enough, I think I can do that, let’s play!

The first thing your eye beholds is the character selection screen. Five characters (+2 in the expansion Lord of Destruction), stand in front of you (trying to impress, I guess) and you can have your pick from a Barbarian (no, it’s not Conan nor a Dothraki), a Paladin (Arthas?), a Sorceress (aka Frozen Orb chick), an Amazon (Xena reloaded) and a Necromancer (lead caster for Shaun of the Dead). The other two guys added by the expansion are an Assasin (gothic version of Nikita) and a Druid (Getafix ).

Dan is the type of player that goes by the theory “let’s kill it with fire”; I, on the other hand, have a different aproach to gaming. It’s called “let’s kill it with swords and axes”. So, naturally, I chose the big guy in the middle of the screen.

Hey, look, I’m in a village. What am I supposed to do now? Clean out the Den of Evils? Sure thing. Kill a corrupted rogue? Why not? Travel to Tristam? Yay, old friends. Hi Griswold, what’s u*Suckerpunch*… The hours kept pilling on, one by one, whilst I was clearing out quests, collecting better equipment and decimating the hordes of undead. By the time I ended my first day of playing Diablo II, I was already in the second city, pursuing the Traveller. After a month of gameplay, I conquered Diablo’s forces even on their home ground (Hell dificulty), but I couldn’t get enough, which brings me to another thing I like about Blizzard: replayability. Every Blizzard game I’ve played has a good replay value, but Diablo II took it way up in the charts for me. It’s in a constant battle with Heroes 3 (awesome game!!). As I was saying, after my Barbarian retired, I couldn’t get away. The Assasin was my next pick. Trap, claw, poison, shadow .. and the game was done again. This went on while I played with every character, analyzing their weak and strong points and experiencing the story over and over again.

Ah, the story. I found it to be one of the most attractive and well put togheter stories in the gaming history up until that moment (I may be wrong, but I liked it a lot). I’ll try to summarize it for you: Diablo, the Lord of Terror, was defetead by an unnamed adventurer, but managed to corupt the hero through his soulstone (the soulstones were created by the Horadrim and contained the souls of the three evils). He is now on a quest to release his brothers, Mephisto – Lord of Hatred and Baal – Lord of Destruction. You have to defeat them, using the knowledge left behind by the Horadrim and with the help of Tyrael, a Seraphim from the Angiris Council. I’ve always wanted to read the books (yeah, they ahve those) and learn more about the world of Sanctuary but I couldn’t get them in my grasp. Oh well.

To wrap things up, Diablo II was one of the greatest games I ever played. It had a good gameplay, an amazing story, decent graphics and sound effects and interesting development trees. What more could a gamer want?

League of Legends

Tags

dota, free to play, heroes of newerth, hon, league of legends, lol

Back in my days as a game developer (don’t think anything big, I was just moving sprites one pixel at a time) there were rumors of this thing called DOTA that everybody was playing. So, tired of getting my ass kicked in Warcraft 3 multiplayer, I’ve decided to give it a chance. I’ve even convinced some of the people that made me cry in War3 to give it a chance. This led to a four player coop versus bots. And the game was not half bad. If you have no idea of what I’m talking about, this is what the game is all about: there are two bases and you have to destroy the enemy base. To do this you can choose one of n heroes, level him up, cast spell and all that stuff. There are three paths leading to the enemy base, there are some turrets along the way, and minions (called creep) are spawned along the way. So you kill creep, level up, buy items, destroy turrets, kill enemy heroes, cleanse and repeat. It’s pretty fun while you’re winning, and against bots that’s pretty doable. And then, one night…

We were in the office and people around were asking for DOTA players, since they had open spots. Hey, I played some DOTA, why not. What I didn’t consider was that these people were really passionate about their game. But it’s just a game, right? We entered the game, random hero pick, so I ended up with a thing called Magina (or something else that rhymes with vagina). Now, in case you didn’t notice from the Dungeon Siege post, I’m not impressed with spells unless they properly state that they turn mother fucker to ash. That’s my definition of a good skill/spell: using whatever elements borrowed from Mother Nature or designed by humans, it can turn mother fuckers to ash; or dust; or just a rotten corpse. You get the picture. Guess what – Magina was not an ash creating person. He was more of a sissy that offered support, somewhere in the back casting his fairy spells while the other guys did all the other work. Even more, he was an overpowered (I think the actual term is “imba”) sissy. How did I found out? Because while I was thinking “Negate magic power of enemy? Neah, let’s just cut them up!” the rest of the hall was screaming “Who’s the idiot that’s playing Magina?! Negate their magic!! Stop fucking around with your knives!” Which is not that bad unless you end you phrases with “If I catch that idiot I’ll beat the shit out of him! Learn how to play, noob!” I haven’t even though about DOTA since.

This might happen when you're tired of bots.

League of Legends, also known as LoL, is a DOTA game. I started playing it because this sort of games started to hit the press since Valve announced they were working on Dota 2. But until that comes out, its main competitor is Heroes of Newerth, and I chose LoL because the internet said it was more casual (and playing the tutorial for HoN I then to believe that – they don’t even tell you what spells do, they just show you an icon and rtfm).

First of – it’s a very nice implementation of Free to Play. Every week you get about ten heroes that you can play for free. If you do get attached to a hero, you can buy it within game points. From what I noticed so far, you only have to take money out of your wallet if you want different skins for your hero. Everything else – play and unlock it.

It has a coop mode that sets five players against five bots, which can actually win a match if you aren’t careful (and this on the easy mode, I haven’t tried intermediate). You don’t want any drama from PvP – killing bots is the way to go.

Some of the playable heroes (champions).

It has a lot of heroes, and I’m always a sucker for a lot of heroes. And its matchmaking system should theoretically place you in matches with players as dumb as you. I only played two PvP games, in one I murdered everything, in the second one I spend 20 minutes respawning.

Not much to say – it’s free, it’s the DOTA recipe, it has lots of heroes. Give it a try and let me know of your id. If you can settle playing alongside someone who’s not that good at computer games, see you in the arena.

PS: A very nice article about the history of the Dota genre can be found here.

Dungeon Siege 3

Tags

diablo, dungeon siege, hack'n'slash, obsidian

There’s nothing to write home about in Dungeon Siege 3. It’s not even a great sequel (which comes as a surprise, seeing that it’s developed by Obsidian) – maybe because it was launched after so much time has passed since we played the first two. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad sequel, just that it’s a different game, which just shares the same name as the old Diablo clone/contender. For those that remember, the first DS were technically superior to Blizzard’s games, they just didn’t have that “wow” factor that the classic hack’n’slash game has. DS3 on the other hand is an action button masher, and a pretty decent one. And if you’re wondering what the difference: hack’n’slash means mouse destroying clicks, and it feels at home on the PC, while button masher is more pleasant on consoles – you don’t click, you just point your character in a direction and start pressing buttons like crazy.

So, since there’s nothing impressing, and you’ll hear that a lot in the next lines, here are some ideas about the game, in no particular order:

- Level design is actually quite good for a leisure game. It’s linear, but quite diverse and looks good. You’ll be taken from forests to frozen wastes, to a castle cave and some sort of tower. Maybe there aren’t that many locations, but those that exist are well made.

- Speaking of – this game is short. It took me somewhere between 10 and 15 hours to reach the end. Not what I expect from an Obsidian RPG. But, then again, this was more of a cash cow than a true Obsidian game, so between two deaths in Demon’s Souls, it fits pretty well.

- It uses its own engine, and it does its job well. It looks nice, moves well and I haven’t had any bugs, not even a small one (or maybe I had but I didn’t see it). It seems Obsidian can make bug free games. Or maybe just bug free cash cows.

The old dude exists in this game because he always knew how to run from the action. But boy, does he complain.

- Story is… well… there. It has a story, cliché, and you’ll not remember much of it since it’s boring. What’s nice about it is that you have choices, and the game end with a Fallout-like style slideshow explaining the consequences of your actions. I guess Obsidian couldn’t help trying to fit some dept into the game. You won’t remember much, but you’ll wonder what would have happened if you would have chosen the other thing, that you can’t quite remember right now.

- Characters are awful. Not the classes, I’ll get into those later, but the characters. You have a warrior, who is retarded and nice; a sharpshooter witch, who is retarded and nice, but she looks good and walks around half naked, so who cares about the fact that she better not say anything (but, in dialogues you just see here from the back, and while she does have a nice neck, a lot of the “nice chick” factor is lost); a mage that looks bad ass as hell, but he talks like a retarded monkey, and, instead of setting things on fire, is concerned about understanding the world around him and the essence of good and evil… what? And finally, a spear wielding, ass kicking, fire spitting half-demon girl. She’s just retarded and boring. Easy to guess that I chose the “nice chick” and kept the warrior as side-kick, since he could take a beating and I could run around avoiding enemies.

Gay mage. Retarded demon. Wimpy warrior. Nice chick.

- The classes and the RPG elements – they start from a nice idea, and they feel very good on a console. You have two fighting stances: one huge weapon (like rifle or giant sword) and two weapons (two pistols or shield and sword). Each fighting style has 3 skills, and there are also 3 defensive skills (heals and some buffs). So, 9 skills in total, with the only problem that at least 6 of them are boring. For example, two or three of the mages skills are about setting traps, and not spitting fire from every pore. Come to think about it, this game is anti fire mages. At some levels you choose a new skill, but you’ll have all nine in the end. Next, you tweak your skills – there are 5 or 6 squares on a bar and you have two options to fill them. Do you want your pistols to spit nails or life steal? That sort of thing. And finally you have some generic skills that you can update (increase pistol damage with 1% per skill point invested). The problem with the last to screen is that they have that MMO syndrome – they don’t sound impressive. This is not a competitive game, having 1% more damage is not that impressing. Why not make fire go out of my heels instead. Now that’s exciting!

- Finally, the loot – there’s a lot of it, with the usual coloring, but the bad thing about it is that there are about 4 skins per character, and one of them you’ll get in the last hour of the game. It’s a bit frustrating to pick up 50 shirts, and when I put each one of them on, I continue to look the same.

Cute girl. Ask her for directions to the "cave". That makes sense.

There’s nothing to write home about in Dungeon Siege 3. But it’s not a bad game. It’s a decent action game for those brain dead moments when you want to just kill hordes of stuff.

PS: I wonder what Obsidian is working on now, besides New Vegas DLCs.

Bulletstorm

Tags

3d shooters, bulletstorm, epic games, gears of war, painkiller, people can fly

I have never finished a game before in just one day. It’s just not something that I do – either I don’t have the time for this, or I get bored with it, or it’s just that sort of a game that encompassed 50+ hours of gameplay. So, having finished Bulletstorm in just one Saturday, one has to ask himself the question: how come? Was the game too short? Was the game really good that I couldn’t step away from the controller? Was I that bored? And, to each and every question, the answer is yes.

Bulletstorm is a first person shooter developed by People Can Fly and Epic Games. It’s very important to note these two names, as you’ll be hearing about them a lot as you read this. It puts the played in the body of a space pirate with an army background, and your purpose is to fight your way through murderous mutants and lunatics and put some bullets into the confederate bold head of a general that once betrayed you. It uses Unreal 3 engine and looks very pretty; so I’ll guess we still have a lot of U3 games to see, as the engine matured very nicely (and it will be getting some polish when the new Gears of War is out).

Now, what separates this game from all the other shooter is its subtitle: “Kill with skill”. This means that you are awarded point for every degenerate you murder, and the more complicated the kill, the more points you are going to get. Just watch the trailer to see what “complicated murder” means.

And this is where People Can Fly steps into the picture – these are the same guys that brought us Painkiller, and I wouldn’t expect anything else from them than to give them a shotgun and an impaling gun and to let me loose on the new incarnation of hell’s army. They pretty much managed to do this: weapons are interesting, although not all of them as that useful ( I ended up using just 3 out of 8 for the most encounters, the other five I just equipped when I was bored and needed explosions). The levels are well design and changed scenery from chapter to chapter. And enemies splatter in the most satisfying ways. For example: you take a shotgun, wait for one of the mutants that has exploding bits on him to get closer, then blast him in half, sending the two pieces left into a wall of spikes. Does this sound like fun time to you or not?

On the other has, this is also an Epic game. Even without reading the game’s box, you realize this pretty soon: main character looks like Dom and sounds line Marcus Fenix (which bring to mind the fact that Dom kind of looks like Marcus), it’s a story about space marines, everything has to make sense in some explainable/realistic manner (you see, you don’t kill mutants for fun, the points are used to upgrade your weapons), pressing A makes you jump over walls, you can’t carry all your weapons on you and so on. In fact, this is the same sort of action packed game of the summer that Gears of War 2 was, just with less marketing and a lot more swearing.

So, yeah, Bulletstorm is not the old school shooter that Painkiller was. It doesn’t have one minute of cinematic and then sets you lose in a cathedral filled with zombies. It’s more of a story focused game, with the “just shoot” elements integrated into how AAA shooters have to look these days in order to sell. But that doesn’t make it a lesser game – it might be just 8 hours short, but I didn’t get of my couch until those 8 hours passed, and that should say something about it.