Category Archives: Game Reviews

Ermergerd, erts Mernercer – A Monaco Review

My head hurts. I can’t tell if I’m dying or my body is trying to do that obnoxious migraine thing again. It’s also gotten warm here recently. I can’t tell if the two are connected. Neither can modern science.

So, in my agitation, what better topic to write about than a review of Monaco – What’s Yours is Mine!

Accessed from http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2013/04/22/monaco0419131600jpg-acb114.jpg

Monaco: What’s yours is Mine belongs to Pocketwatch games and all associated media belongs to everyone appropriately that isn’t me.

Now, I know I haven’t done a review of a piece of media for awhile. What between my procrastinating, ranting and own scribblings it’s not like I haven’t consumed media in that time. Granted, on the video game front I’ve mostly been taking a look at older work. I decided that, since I’m a PC gamer, it was foolish of me to be spending gobs of money on new releases when I have easy access to a large library of very inexpensive games. That is a Steam endorsement, if you did not catch it.

What this means, however, is that I’ve been focused on clearing my growing backlog of older titles as well as achievement grinding while I wait for the annual Steam Summer Sale to purchase something of moderate relevancy at an affordable price (mainly $2). Thus, between my rage inducing games of Dota 2, I have mostly been focused on a modded playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas in order to try and get as many achievements as possible, and working through this article’s titular piece with Derek when both of us are too tired of doing our respective writing.

So, what is Monaco? Well, it’s an independently made 8-bit inspired four player heist game which sees the player playing one of eight possible personalities as they work through the French gibbering city-state in an attempt to collect as many ambiguously shaped valuables as possible without getting bludgeoned, beaten or shot into a skeleton.

Accessed from http://images.gizorama.com/2013/08/Monaco-Whats-Yours-is-Mine.jpg

I warned you about the graphics, dawg.

It isn’t a looker, I’m not going to lie, but part of the charm and difficulty arises from trying to parse and understand what the stylized graphics are trying to display. I can tell you, there have been many botched missions due to Derek’s inability to perceive alarms and I’ve been stuck more than once in adrenaline pumping retreats upon the peculiarly impassable edges of a swimming pool. However, graphics are one thing that is often sacrificed in independent games. It would be like expecting Little Miss Sunshine to wow people with its CGI effects. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel that the game would work with a more cleaner style if, at the very least, to provide the player with more distinct objects with which to interact.

Now, normally I would spend a great deal of my review discussing the characters, narrative and world of a game as usually those are my focus. This is impossible with Monaco. Partly because of its multiplayer aspect, the narrative elements are diminished in the name of gameplay. The window dressing for why we must steal into a museum and rob its eight great works is inconsequential to why we are performing this task. Due to their interactivity, telling a narrative in a game is tricky enough with one person who can and often will wander away from the points of interest the story-teller wishes to focus upon. Throw in upwards of three or four people wandering in all directions and you have a veritable narrative nightmare.

This isn’t to say that Monaco doesn’t try to tell a story. This is mostly to say that Derek and I completely avoided it. The only thing that I can remember are the wild proclamations of “Gyaaaard,” “Oui. C’est bon,” “C’etait seulement une chat,” and “Cerveau?” Each mission begins with a short description to set up the reason for whatever haphazard task we must accomplish. But the justification is terrible and not just because the developers were trying for some cutesy unreliable narrator shtick. I mean, you can only blame character bias so far when one of the missions is you breaking into a diamond store to steal the redhead a bunch of jewelry so she can get over having to murder people in cold blood.

I will say that the one narrative element I enjoyed about the game was its setting. Not that it was used to any useful degree, but the fact that the story took place in Monaco was refreshing and highlights the sort of lazy writing which I have complained against in past articles. Most stories do not necessitate a specific location and the vast majority of settings default to a handful standard locations. Typically, in American media, this will be New York City or Washington D.C. If you’re in Britland, the place where everything happens is almost always London. The number of movies that involve the poor Statute of Liberty being destroyed makes you wonder why people would want to visit such a high value target for just about every terrorist plot imaginable.

Which is a shame because we live in a large world filled with interesting locations. Monaco demonstrates that you can take a very standard, unremarkable tale and set it somewhere that isn’t a tried and tired locale. Nothing in its game truly requires it to be in that specific setting but it is able to adopt certain elements to give it an interesting flair. The guards and workers now shout French sentences when pursuing or fleeing you and even one level has you break into Prince Albert’s palace which, obviously, is impossible if you’re in the Big Apple.

Granted, I am not immune to this criticism. My first story takes place in a fantasy city analogous to London. I truly understand the automatic impulse of picking one of the default locations to set your tale especially if you don’t have anything specific in mind. The media we consume creates an almost internally feeding loop where we read about stories in New York, London and Tokyo so we write stories set in New York, London and Tokyo. However, I imagine a lot of us have lived or visited other places which we can draw on inspiration. And you never really know what you’ll get out of shaking things up and packing your protagonists to more remote, exotic or even mundane areas. It also gives a really great excuse to travel – you see, we have to do it for our research!

Anyway, my head is getting distracting again so I’ll wrap this promptly up.

Accessed from http://images.wikia.com/monacowhatsyoursismine/images/archive/1/12/20130426013345!Monaco_What's_Yours_Is_Mine_Wallpaper.png

I like how big the mole is. Probably to represent how absolutely broken he is.

I wouldn’t recommend Monaco to anyone unless you had friends who would play it. It is certainly doable with one or two people but the levels (especially the later ones) are designed with three to four players and I think a large part of its appeal is in co-ordinating your team to successfully pull of these heists. It is much the same as Left 4 Dead only you aren’t saddled with atrocious AI teammates if you are misanthropic.

Call Forth Consistency – Summoner Wars Rant

2 Replies

So, it appears even with my post on resolutions, neither of my co-contributors managed to put something up despite their promises to the contrary. I am shocked – shocked I tell you! But mostly I’m just happy they demonstrated my point about New Year’s resolutions. Never fear, though, I will never leave you dear reader. I am enduring just as are my misguided rants. Today’s is going to be on Summoner Wars.

For some background – I was introduced to Summoner Wars first by Derek who raved online to me about how great the game was. Then, when Jeremy picked it up and I got to play it, Derek had nothing but harsh criticism for it. Go figure. However, that didn’t dissuade me from the little past time. It’s cute and quaint in its own way but it isn’t Netrunner for all the positives and negatives that entails.

But that doesn’t really tell you anything about the game.

All cards and therefore art belong to Plaid Hat Games and whatnot.

Summoner Wars features a slightly asymmetrical confrontation between two players on a custom but simple board. Each player chooses a faction represented by a pre-fabricated deck of cards containing one Summoner, three walls, three different types of commons and three unique champions along with a handful of summoner specific events. I would probably liken the game as a mixture between Chess and Magic: The Gathering but with a focus on simplicity and accessibility. It offers some synergy between the cards, most of it focused on proper timing with events. The factions offer their own unique abilities, however, whether it be from the Swamp Orcs and their spreading walls that cover the field or the Deep Dwarves who all feature special abilities that each cost magic but have powerful timing events that make all of those abilities free for one round.

Most interesting is the economy of the game is focused around magic. Well, that in of itself isn’t interesting, but magic is built either through conscious discards from your hand or by landing the final blow on a monster or wall. A player is forced to make tough decisions about whether they want to play their little common minions or discard them for magic to build up a large enough pile to bring forth a champion (all of whom cost far more than the commons). Positioning becomes important as players try to control the board and ultimately the flow of dead bodies by their movement and placement of walls. More importantly, my sister and I have found that it is almost as valuable to kill your own guys as it is to kill the enemies. You only have the opportunity to attack with three cards per turn, however, so it becomes yet another balancing act of choosing whether to go for a full out assault or making quick strike forces which you then murder before the enemy has the opportunity.

The unique and inspiring Tundra Orc Smasher.

It’s quick to pick up, taking a game or two to grasp the basics fairly easy. And the fact that it’s a deck based game with very simple deck building rules as well as pre-constructed armies means introducing new players is a breeze. While I applaud Netrunner for its complexity, it does have the issue of forcing players to keep up with new releases in order to stay competitively viable. But almost a third of a Summoner Wars deck is locked; you can’t mix and match events between summoners, can only have three champions and you must stay within faction when building (or include mercenaries). There’s a very limited pool that doesn’t grow nearly as fast as Netrunner. Especially when new releases for Summoner Wars are often new factions.

So the simplicity is Summoner Wars greatest strength. You can sit down and play it right out of the box without having to construct a deck and when you’re done you can just shelve it knowing it’s ready to go next time you want to battle your opponent.

This isn’t to say the game doesn’t have its flaws. What I want to focus on today, however, is less on the game systems on more on its “fluff.” Specifically, one of the biggest issues I have with Summoner Wars is its art and its themes.

The artist apparently hates feet.

Each faction follows the same formula: stereotypical Tolkein fantasy race preceded by a generic adjective. You have the likes of Swamp Orcs, Sand Goblins, Tundra Orcs and Guild Dwarves squaring off against one another. Elves are on display in the delightful Phoenix (fire), Shadow and Jungle varieties. The closest we get to a unique offering are the Mountain Vargath which are goatmen… from the mountains. So, bonus points for representing goatmen which don’t see ubiquitous fantasy representation but it’s not like we really ran off with the idea here.

Even worse is that the themes of these factions is absolutely lazy and thoughtless. My biggest gripe with the game is that I detest the art. And I don’t mean this just from a style perspective. Though, style is one of my biggest issues. The direction they went with is a very simple, painterly direction. There’s few details and each card is over dominated by the three primary colours used to distinguish each faction. The event cards for the summoners show a zoomed in section of their face which just further highlights the basic design. You could argue that this helps to place the emphasis on the text but Summoner Wars, as mentioned, isn’t a particularly complex system and if Netrunner and Magic: the Gathering can afford to have some rather beautiful art than so can this game.

Best part about the jungle guard is that they’re supposedly reclusive hermits on the fringes of their society, eschewing the rest of their people’s ways and luxuries… while looking the exact same as their kin.

But outside of the direction, I think the biggest problem with this approach is that it makes all the cards from one faction blend together. Distinguishing between an Jungle Elf Archer and elite Jungle Guard is based more on posture than unique silhouette or form. Summoners and champions lack visual punch to really make them stand out amongst the crowd as well. And this isn’t even broaching the ridiculous use of high heeled battle boots on the few females that show up either.

This bland art flows directly from the rudimentary theming of the factions. I almost can’t blame the artists for providing little visual interest in their designs when they are given something to work with like Glurp the champion of the Swamp Orcs. Course, this isn’t an excuse, for a talent artist would be able to design something from practically nothing. If the art is uninspire, however, the theming is just downright apathetic. The Swamp Orcs main feature is that they grow vine walls across the battle field. Let me throw some emphasis on that last sentence: the Swamp Orcs grow vine walls.

I don’t know if the designers at Plaid Hat Games have seen a swamp so let me link some pictures to demonstrate:

I’m even being generous with this one. It’s a mangrove swamp and could have worked with their design theme if they’d just chosen to go with Root Walls instead.

Not a vine in sight. I’m not sure why the Swamp Orcs are focused on vines but the Jungle Elves are not. In fact, the Jungle Elves are equally contentious with the majority of their faction filled with elephants, hyenas, rhinoceroses and lions. For those not fluent in basic ecology, all these creatures are to be found in African Savannahs, not the tangled undergrowths that are typically associated with jungles. To top it all off, their second summoner about to be released is wrapped in a white wolf pelt because apparently the artists can’t even be bothered being remotely close to the faction’s theme (yes, I know it’s to keep with the white primary of their faction but they didn’t even need to choose white as one of the three distinguishing colours of the Jungle Elves in the first place).

This gets back to my earlier complaint about how fantasy seems to be drowning beneath the cliches of its genre. On one hand, Summoner Wars attempts to subvert the tropes of typical fantasy by giving some of their races uncharacteristic ecological backgrounds. But then, when I look at the Tundra Orcs, there’s nothing that really makes them unique from a standard orc other than they have blue skin. They’re still barbaric savages decorated in bone and scraps of cloth. Why aren’t the Tundra Orcs wrapped in hides and furs to keep them warm? It seems like such a logical conclusion from their name.

To finish, I just want to include a picture of a dwarf from the upcoming Obsidian game Pillars of Eternity. Little has been revealed about the setting but I think the image will do most of the talking for me.

Concept art for Pillars of Eternity copyright to Obsidian.

At the end of the day, Summoner Wars isn’t ruined by it’s poor art and horrific faction themes. But it’s not made better by them either. Other games are celebrated for their different factions and spend the appropriate time developing them and distinguishing them. The Corporations in Netrunner are all very well realized and I think it makes the game as a whole a lot better for it.

Running the Future Part 2

Leave a reply

I like Netrunner.

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this unnecessarily lengthy review, I suggest you do that now before continuing. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Finished?

Good.

All intellectual property associated with Android: Netrunner belongs to the artists, Fantasy Flight Games, Wizards of the Coast or someone else that isn’t me.

Netrunner is everything that Magic isn’t. Magic is swords, dragons and planar expanding, epic fantasy. Netrunner is hacking, code gates and futuristic, dystopic cyberpunk. Magic focuses on the exploits of ridiculous wizards in an overly elaborate arm wrestle with roaring dragons and magical faeries as wrist proxies. Netrunner features two asymmetrical sides attempting to win the game on their own terms. Magic forces the players to keep up with an ever increasing pool of cards that focuses on building decks to best utilize very specific combinations. Netrunner has an incredibly small pool of cards with an emphasis on creating more options for the factions that allow them different methods to achieve the same victories.

Most importantly, Netrunner adjusts the emphasis of its strategy on the moment of the game than the construction of the deck. It’s a hard thing to explain. It’s even harder to understand.

My introduction to Netrunner has been spread over many weeks as Derek has slowly taught me the rules of the game and its goals. Supplementing this, I have spent uncounted hours perusing the web to understand its base mechanics. I want to repeat that. I’ve spent hours reading up on the basics of the game. This game isn’t built around surprising your enemy with never before seen tricks that they’ll be unable to counter. On the contrary, Netrunner runs best when its participants are intimately familiar with the full capabilities of each other. And that’s because Netrunner incorporates one of my favourite mechanics – mind games.

My absolute favourite boardgame is Diplomacy and that’s because it is solely based on strategy and… well… diplomacy. There are no dice. There are no components that have to be bought with yearly releases. There is just you and six other players and you have to read your enemy and get inside their head. Through either silver tongue, precognition or open threats you have to force your opponents into doing what you want in order to win.

And Netrunner is similar.

In Netrunner, you take the role of either a Mega-corporation or a Runner. There are four corporations to choose from, each of them specializing in a different market. You have NBN the news agency with global control of almost every aspect of information and entertainment; Haas-Bioroid develops artificial intelligence and cybernetics; Weyland Consortium specializing in resource redistribution and corporate hegemony while creating futuristic expansions into oceans and space; Finally, there’s mysterious Jinteki who dominate cloning technologies. Pulling on cyberpunk themes and motifs, all four corporations are irredeemably evil. NBN channels the attitudes and feelings of Big Brother from 1984 with the grace and aplomb of Fox News. Haas-Bioroid pulls upon themes of slavery and the nature of personhood with the mechanical coldness of an uncaring master lording over sentient AI as well as mandatory implementation of cybernetics into their work force. Weyland Consortium have almost a mythical Illuminati vibe with their integration and manipulation of government bureaucracies couple with Exxon’s love and devotion for protecting the environment. And Jinteki has clones: clones which they fuse into their computers in order to murder anyone without authorization to access their servers. They also use clone fetuses to… I don’t know – be more incredibly evil?

Arrayed against them we have the intrepid Runners. But not every hacker is created equal. First among them are the Shapers. These individuals are more artistically inclined. They run the servers of the Megacorps as a test of their abilities, to prove that they are capable of it or just to look around at what is going on behind the scenes. Next, are the Criminals. These people have more tangible reasons. They’re in the game for the money. Lastly are the Anarchs. These Runners despise the control and moral bankruptcy of the Megacorps and are there to bring their whole system crashing down around them.

A game of Netrunner represents a skirmish between these two sides. One player is the Corporation. His goals are to advance hidden agendas and further the questionable aims of his organization. He sets the playing field by creating the servers that the Runner runs. In order to protect his investments, the Corporation utilizes programs called Ice which act as barriers and programs designed to discourage, disrupt or destroy the Runner’s attempts to breach his systems. All the while, the Corporation is hiding his agendas, hoping to advance them long enough for them to come to fruition before they can be exposed.

The other player is the Runner. Her goals are to undermine the Corporation’s defences and bring to light their secrets. She builds up a suite of tools to crack the Corporation’s base: codebreakers for breaking through Ice, viruses for weakening the system’s effectiveness and modified hardware designed to strengthen her programs into unstoppable battering rams. But the Runner has to always be on her toes for the Corporation is always trying to track her down. If the Corporation can get a strong trace then the Runner may be looking at having all her funds drained, her programs destroyed or even her life forfeited to the bullets of hired mercenaries and security squads.

It’s a game of cat and mouse with predator and prey changing from turn to turn. As I mentioned, the Corporation sets the battlefield, building up servers and installing assets or agendas behind impenetrable walls of Ice. But these cards are placed hidden. The runner can’t know if the Corporation has set down an asset that will help them draw through their deck (referred to as Research and Development), generate money (referred to as credits), trap the Runner and deal damage or if it’s one of the required agendas. There are only two ways for the Runner to win. Either she scores seven points worth of agendas first, or she “mills R&D” which requires destroying the Corporation’s deck until he has no more cards to draw. The Corporation’s win conditions are to advance seven points of his own agendas first or to “flatline” the Runner by forcing her to discard more cards than she holds through traps and covert operations.

Good luck understanding any of this card on your first try.

At first the game is incredibly impenetrable. Between the asymmetrical gameplay, four Corporations, three runner factions and a whole score of different ice, hardware and programs it’s easy for the beginner to feel completely overwhelmed. Thus, my weeks of training. I am nowhere near fully understanding the game but I stand at a pivotal moment in my learning. I am at the point of deck creation.

In my first part, I mentioned how Magic: The Gathering is dominated by its deck building. Games are won or lost almost solely on the creation of the deck before hand. The actual playing of the game is nearly a formality. But Netrunner is almost the opposite. I’ve been playing, and beating, Derek with decks that I did not construct. Victories are won and games are lost on the turn by turn plays more than the cards held in the deck. Almost every game I can think back and go “Oh, if only I had done this I could have won” or “I’m fortunate that Derek didn’t do that or I would have been screwed.” This isn’t to say that building the deck is irrelevant but the emphasis is more on how well you can predict your opponent’s actions. I may not have a Hadrian’s wall protecting my HQ which contains the last agenda needed for either of us to win, but I could play a Chum over an unrevealed Shadow. The Shadow on its own won’t stop Derek from doing the run, but if I reveal the Chum he may suspect there’s something worse waiting for him and “jack out” before snatching my winning agenda.

This requirement to understand your opponent is why it’s so important to bring your adversary to your own level. As any poker player will tell you, it’s almost impossible to play against beginners. New poker players not only are awful at bluffing but they’re terrible at being bluffed since they don’t know what they should be paying attention to. They are unpredictable because they don’t understand how the game is naturally won and lost. Any attempt to obfuscate the information you have is in vain because they aren’t even looking at you to get that information. The same is with Netrunner. You can’t fake playing an Adonis Campaign to mask an agenda on an unprotected remote server if the Runner doesn’t even know that agendas should be protected. They’ll just run it because they don’t know what else to do. Certainly, you can trounce them because they have no idea what they should be doing with their turn but that’s no better than sitting down a bunch of preschoolers at the poker table and winning their lunch money because they’d rather build a house with their cards.

And that’s perhaps what excites me most about Netrunner. While you have your deck that you’re constantly tweaking and playing with, you’ll never develop something that’s unstoppable. Even the best combinations can be undone by an unprepared Runner because you two are playing separate yet simultaneous games. If you have a fast advancing NBN deck, I could still end up milling your R&D before you get all your Psychographics fuelled to instant score your winning agendas and scoop up victory from your unprotected Archives. You’re forced to generalize to a point and to react to your opponent’s play if you ever hope to win.

Netrunner brings strategy back to the game. And I will always pick ‘play to win’ over ‘pay to win’ design any click of the week.

An accurate portrayal of Derek and my match to come.

Now I just need to finish the final touches on this Haas-Bioroid deck so I can crush Derek next time we play.

Running the Future Part 1

Leave a reply

I hate Magic.

magic_the_gathering_symbols_by_thekagestar-d37388h

The five colours of Magic: The Gathering. All intellectual material associated with the game is property of Wizards of the Coast.

Well, I don’t mean to say that I hate generic magic of the hand-waving, Latin spewing variety. Though followers will certainly know I have a certain amount of disdain for its general deus ex machina application, I do like a certain amount of fantasy and wonder in my stories. No, dear reader, it is Magic: The Gathering for which I hold an especially dire attitude towards. For those unfamiliar, Magic: The Gathering (abbreviated to M:TG though I’ll probably just refer to it by Magic with a capital) is a collectible card game by Wizards of the Coast. Many might recognize its name for it is probably the most successful collectible card game on the market. It is certainly one of the longest lived. As such, it has a long history and thusly I with it.

I got into Magic in those early formative middle school years. My predilections for nerdy endeavours is well recorded and I am not ashamed to admit that one of the biggest draws to the hobby was the art. In my young eyes, I saw an array of menacing dragons, heavenly angels, daring wizards and diabolical cultists. The texts spoke of far off planes and glorious battles between mighty conjurers. To have these wondrous creatures in a game with powers that reflected their design tickled by boyish interest. I hobbled together a deck of my favourites and sought out worthy competition to pit them against.

I don’t know why I liked this stupid looking critter. But I knew I had to run the maximum number I could.

I’m fairly certain my first game was an utter disaster. I’m not sure I even included any land cards which are required to summon your critters to the field of battle. Course, when you’re young, you don’t really care. All that matters is planting that Scaled Wurm and letting it rip into your opponent’s line. In my mind’s eye, I could see the mangled bodies and corpses of my opponent’s useless soldiers slowly sliding down into a monstrous gullet. In time, my collection grew as I sifted through the discard and junk bins of hobby stores looking for the coolest art and best prices. I met some like minded individuals and we would spend our hours battling decks against decks sometimes in chaotic five or more player free for alls.

But then a change took hold one of friends. He was a later adopter, joining us in our small circle to peer with wide eyed wonder and the incomprehensible battle lines drawn between us. With enthusiasm, we indulged his curiosity and showed him the basics of the game. Little did we know this innocuous moment would herald the end. For, you see, this friend was Steve and much like me, he had a very competitive spirit.

Of course, there is a very distinct difference between my competitiveness and Steve’s. I approach any sort of challenge with the intention of winning but through fair application of the rules and masterful strategies. Steve, on the other hand, wouldn’t let something as inconsequential as “fair play” get in the way of his victory. He was an incorrigible cheat, often requiring a keen eye to insure he wasn’t stashing some cards up his sleeves or rigging his deck. As with all cheats, their reliance on breaking rules to gain victory stunts their natural tendency to learn and master the game. Unfortunately, because I alone kept a close eye on Steve’s machinations, he was forced to find other avenues to trump me.

This came along with the development of the Internet. For we were in the throes of the digital revolution. Information was spreading at a faster rate than ever before. The World Wide Web provided an unimaginable wealth of knowledge to those with the drive and persistence to sort through it. While most our age focused their use in forbidden images of erotic titillation, Steve discovered the realm of competitive Magic: The Gathering. Here was a new way to view the game the likes of which none of us had imagined. What was a friendly and casual battle of wits between my friends held a completely alien and dark world beneath. Steve showed up one day to our little circle in the quietest and forgotten of halls, proudly plopping down beside us and gloriously revealing a new deck. We were curious and excited, new cards often being a cause for celebration as we enjoyed what flavour the handful of printed diabolical critters could bring.

What Steve unleashed upon us that day, however, was nothing short of the apocalypse.

All of us fell in turn, even my mighty control deck brushed aside like it was a gnat before an irritated hunter. Steve was out for blood, and it would be ours that would first stain his sword. He hadn’t arrived with a few new cards integrated into the old but with an entire suite of entirely new and baffling rules and mechanics. Now, he didn’t need to cheat to win. His deck would do it for him.

It was then I learned about Magic’s deck-building structure. As with any arms race, I too turned to the Internet to understand this new foe before me. But what I found was horrifying. Untold combinations and competitive decks were listed about. I learned that we had simply been playing a quaint themed game like children holding a match of checkers with Mahjong tiles. There were lists of cards and combos that were banned because of their ability to complete destroy the nature of the game. There were great debates over adjudicating the reams of cards in order to keep an even playing field at the highest level of play. And in order to enter that field, you had to have the expense to acquire any of the legally sanctioned cards on the lists.

In short, I learned that Magic: The Gathering was a pay to win game.

That may be a bit reductionist, but the essence is still there. For me, I approached the game as a hobby. I got my decks from the 25 cent bin over the course of months. Some of the best cards could sell for twenty or thirty dollars a piece and that’s not even touching the out of print cards worth hundreds of dollars. Put simply, I was too poor to play the game. I quickly retired, shelving my cards in a box for years until I found someone to offload them on. Meanwhile, I watched as a slow change came over my friends. In order to keep up with Steve, each one of them begun to buy more and more into the hobby or drop out entirely like I did.

Magic-The-Gathering-Duels-of-the-Planeswalkers-2012

I don’t even know who the hell these dudes are but I suspect they’re probably expensive to get, incredibly important in current deck building and ultimately dominate the focus of the game.

As for Steve, he eventually entered into tournaments. He was the sort of person that would go full throttle into whatever he set his mind into. He borrowed my Mist Dragon – a favourite card of mine that I happened upon by serendipitous fortune. It managed to “go missing” during the tournament. I’m convinced that he lost it in a match, likely holding it as ante before succumbing to someone with some new devious twist of the mechanics.

Course, this long story has nothing to do with what I wish to discuss today. For I have been tasked with creating two decks before Derek returns home from class. But these decks are not for Magic: The Gathering. This is for Android: Netrunner created by the man behind Magic: The Gathering and totally not the same thing.

And on Friday, I will tell you why it isn’t.

More of the Same – Fallout New Vegas DLC

Leave a reply

“Ya know sometimes the journey beats the destination, and especially when your spurs go jingle, jangle, jingle and you meet some nice gals along the way.” ~ Mr. New Vegas

Review of Dead Money and Honest Hearts

So, I’m still working my way through a full second playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas. I’ve written before of my love for the game and spoken at lengths with those closest to me about it. It’s a wonderful little piece of design that highlights some of the points we’ve cover on this blog in regards to world building. While I enjoyed Bethesda’s Fallout 3, the expertise and skill that Obsidian brought with their spin-off just can not be rivaled. I like to compare them as such: Fallout 3 is a spectacle but New Vegas is a world.

After its release and my first time running through the deserts of the Mojave, Obsidian released four DLC (downloadable content) packs for the game (technically five but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend three bucks on a bunch of guns). These are almost closer to actual expansion packs of the nineties style of design. They’re pretty meaty additions themselves, typically sporting a couple of main quests, side quests, handful of NPCs and companions and entirely new locations chalk full of villains and loot. They are, from every angle of design, more of the same. And when I loved the original so much, that is probably the best praise I can give.

However, as they are still the same, both feature very prominent issues. So while most of this post will probably be detailing where things went wrong, I do want to stress that I’ve enjoyed both of them. They exhibit the intriguing thematic driven stories that draws me to Obsidian’s work time and time again with well fleshed out characters and creative transformations of real world locations re-imagined in Fallout’s post apocalyptic world.

But let’s get on with the show.

Dead Money is the first of the released DLC which I chose to play second. After searching the Internet, many people recommended that they be played in order, however as you’re about to start Dead Money it comes with a pretty hefty warning that the add-on was designed with higher level characters in mind. Being below the recommended level, I turned my sights to Honest Hearts first. However, the two are wholly independent so order between them is irrelevant whereas it is heavily hinted in both packs that the latter two DLC (Old World Blues and Lonesome Road) should really be played last.

But I digress.

My first issue with both DLC is their jarring insertion into the game. The moment they’re installed and you load up the game you are given a text prompt that these quests have been activated. Whereas with quests within the game you are required to at least learn about them through some in-game method, whether that be stumbling across clues or portions of the quest on your own or initiating them by an interested NPC who offers you the details and promises rewards. Personally, I would have liked to see both of them inserted in a more natural way. Both have associated radio broadcasts that could have triggered by proximity to their starting locations which would have been enough. Likewise, the end of each DLC features the same slideshow style narration that the main game ends with but it would have been better if they incorporated those slides with the final game’s show.

Of course, they weren’t, because their final design takes into account people who finished the game and just bought the content to play as extra instead of considering it as a part of a greater whole. Which is a shame, since both of them integrate into the greater New Vegas world.

Anyway, Dead Money has you discovering a mysterious broadcast that gives off tantalizing messages of a grand opening for an unheard of casino title The Sierra Madre. The sultry voice of Vera welcomes you to come and explore its exotic streets with an air of old world charm that has faded to all but a memory in the wake of the nuclear war that devastated the world. Seeking the source of the broadcast finds The Courier (the player) descending into an abandoned bunker and towards a radio left curious in a well furnished room. Approaching the device immediately proves to be a mistake as your vision blurs and the walls shake in your vision right before you collapse to the floor.

Queue the blackout.

You awake in a desolate town square looking up at a lavish fountain with the projected head of some old geezer. He quickly informs you of the situation you’re in. Namely, you are going to assist him in breaking into the beautiful building up on the overlooking bluff and your service is insured by the thick bomb strapped around your neck. Elijah then tells you that there are others in the villa with matching bomb collars and all of you are intricately connected to each other. Should one of your collars go off then so will the rest. He then pats you on the bum and sends you on your way to “gather your crew” as it were.

It’s immediately apparent that the game is pulling from the old fashion heist movies. Much of the design for the levels involves navigating twisting and confusing corridors and streets. You need to call upon the unique strengths of the others wrapped in this adventure with you in order to proceed. And along the way you begin to learn more about the other characters. Each has his own motives for being in the villa and they look hungrily towards the casino overhead. Greed and curiosity are thrown together as constant themes throughout the piece and more than once you’re questioned why you came yourself.

It’s all well done with my only complaints being a slight dissonance between the world and the gameplay. We’re informed that the Sierra Madre is a deathtrap, luring in its victims with the sweet promise of honey before clamping its jaws irrevocably around them. Unfortunately, the three characters you are assisting weren’t truly brought for those reasons. Elijah also spends much time complaining about the confounding greed that caused the previous failures with past victims. You have the overwhelming sense that this is a ploy that has been run again and again but with very little success. I would have really liked to see more evidence of that either through more footprints left by the ones before or even having some rival “thieves” still lurking in the dark corners of the villa.

Otherwise, the level design was really focused on their goal. Combat is less emphasized over survival and stealth. The world is designed to make you desperate. The collar around your neck is more than just a pretty souvenir. The transmitter is affected by radios which can set it off prematurely if you spend too much time in their presence. Furthermore, should one of your allies unfortunately fall whether from triggered traps or the swarming “ghost people” that stalk the empty streets then you are allowed only five seconds of frantic despair before your own head is popped like a spring cherry tomato.

Further emphasizing the survivalist aspect is the thick “Cloud” that hangs over the area. This blood red mist is a constant drain upon your health, forcing you to find whatever healing you can. You become a veritable pin-cushion after the number of needles that are required to keep you alive as you explore and perform the tasks needed to break into the Sierra Madre. There are even concentrated areas of the Cloud that will hurt you even faster creating a tough decision of whether the unknown materials lying inside are worth the trade-off of health required to get them.

The ideas and designs are all great. The problem is that the game is running on the Gamebryo engine. Unfortunately, this means that all this stealth/survival gameplay is wasted on a system that can’t really model stealth gameplay all that well. Too often are most situations best resolved by brute force. Once I had a large enough stockpile of munitions, I just fought my way through the ghost people filling the streets. Even more unforgivable, the game had an obnoxious tendency of just respawning more ghost people after completing objectives as if they realized that the stealth aspect was for naught but that these awfully limiting combat situations would be better. The problem is, the game wasn’t designed for such a strict restricting of weapons so my character – who was built around explosives – had to slough through the combats with weapons that were far inferior in his hands because of the way I’d been specializing him. Eventually, I got a weapon that let me two shot the enemies and I just charged them head on after that since I couldn’t be bothered trying to sneak (which I also wasn’t good at even when I was trying to use the items that would help shore up that weakness).

Furthermore, the game was built so that you could only have one companion with you at a time. This is incredibly cumbersome for a heist story, especially given the large focus on the other members involved. The method for breaking in was rather contrived (and remarkably easy when all was said and done which makes me wonder why it took so long for people to perform it). But once you broke into the Sierra Madre casino itself, you and your gang were immediately split up because the game just couldn’t run with all of you together.

The casino section was also aggravating since instead of the mysterious ghost people to deal with you had holographic security officers and a lot more radios. This forced a very “trial by error” approach to navigating the space that seemed to deflate the sense of a grandly schemed heist into a “run into the room, die in order to locate all the guards and radios then reload and repeat until the one exact path is mapped out.”

Which is unfortunate because the story surrounding the casino and its characterful inhabitants was really engaging. It was bogged down by its own game systems which, at times, made it a chore to play and drained the life out of it much like the omnipresent cloud drained your character’s.

Honest Hearts, however, was almost the opposite.

Honest Hearts has you answering the call for guards from a desperate caravan company called Happy Trails. They’re hoping to lead an envoy to the remains of Salt Lake City to re-establish the routes with the settlement of New Canaan that had inexplicably ended. To get there, the caravan master informs you that they are going to travel through the Grand Canyon.

As with Dead Money, your companions are told to go away and you’re informed that you are only allowed a limited amount of your own gear to carry since you’re expected to shoulder some of the caravan’s supplies yourself. It was a cute explanation for the loss of your gear but Honest Hearts didn’t benefit thematically from the restriction. All it did, once again, was make obstacles artificially more challenging because my character was not designed around the equipment they provided in that area.

Anyway, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that once within the canyon your caravan is attacked and everyone is slaughtered by a bunch of rather effective savages called the White Legs. After battling your way from the ambush, you meet a young man by the name of Follows-Chalk who claims affiliation with the Dead Horses (assuming, of course, you don’t gun him down because you first spot him at a distance and he looks really similar to the jerks that blew off your friends’ faces when you first arrive). Follows-Chalk mentions that his warband’s leader, Joshua, would like to speak with you and he becomes your temporary guide through Zion National Park.

Unlike Dead Money, there isn’t as great of an urgency for following the path and you’re given some freedom to wander around and explore the area. The Grand Canyon makes for a rather nice location even if it is swarming with danger in the form of wildly mutated Preying Mantises, Bears and some devil spawned insect called Cazadores. When you finally do meet up with Joshua, you discover that he isn’t some primitive tribal dressed in skins but a heavily bandaged man wearing a bullet proof vest and displaying remarkable skill with pistols.

He also believes in God.

The one curious thing about the Fallout world that I had never given much thought to was its lack of religion. It’s all too typical for science fiction and fantasy stories to shy away from real world faith. Its absence didn’t strike me as anything other than developers not wish to cause offence. Apparently, that wasn’t entirely the case with Fallout where its explained that in the years following the dropping of the bombs, recognizable religion as we know it had almost completely disappeared. The New Canaanites are the only faction to still lay faith in the old believes. This isn’t to say that everyone is an atheist (though many are) but most claims to supernatural or spiritual worship is typically reserved for tribal communities that are seen as far more primitive than the major factions vying for control (though there is a sort of religious reverence towards old technology in the Brotherhood of Steel, it is pretty understated).

As it turns out, Joshua is the Joshua Graham who is mentioned quite frequently in the main game. He was the Legate for Caesar’s Legion during the first assault on Hoover Dam. After their embarrassing defeat, Caesar had Joshua covered in pitch and thrown burning into the Grand Canyon as a warning to others of the cost of failure. And while little else is mentioned of Graham after, it becomes clear that though Caesar doesn’t speak of him again, he hasn’t forgotten him. The White Legs are a tribe of raiders hoping to join Caesar’s Legion and to prove their worth, they’ve been given the task of hunting Graham down.

But the interesting thematic elements are tied to the relationship between Joshua and Daniel. Daniel is a New Canaanite missionary, much like Joshua was before he joined with Caesar. Their conflict is based on the atrocities that Joshua committed while working with Caesar and how that experienced shaped each man’s viewpoint in the canyon. Joshua wishes to crush the White Legs and protect the home of the tribals who currently live in Zion Park. Daniel seeks to maintain their childhood innocence and evacuate them to a place the White Legs will never find them.

And this gets into my complaint of Honest Hearts. Ultimately, the story revolves around the tribals that live in the caves of Zion. The Sorrows Tribe are a rather naive people, even when compared to their contemporaries in the Dead Horses. They have little knowledge of warfare or how to defend themselves and even their survival skills are severely lacking (as Daniel was required to show them simple medicines and procedures to save some of them during childbirth). The interesting thing is that the origin of the Sorrows is explained not by their stories but through the hidden journals of a long dead protector referred to only as the Survivalist. It was an interesting method to convey their history and I found it more rewarding to search the trapped caves for his hidden entries than I was doing many of the other quests in Zion.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the writers weren’t as clear on their themes and Honest Hearts really lacks focus. It should have been all about the Sorrows tribe and made it clear that the fight was over their proverbial soul. I would have liked to see more debate between Joshua and Daniel, especially over religious matters. Here are two men of the same faith with vastly different views and opinions and I would have liked to see them justify their believes both to the player and each other. There also should have been a greater focus on the effects of your actions and decisions on the Sorrows tribe. Instead, we’re introduced to them halfway through the DLC storyline and you don’t get a lot of attachment to them in the little time left.

I would have liked to see them introduced much earlier. Possibly even have the Sorrows the first tribe you meet in the canyon. They should have presented the player with more quests and these quests outcomes should have affected the beliefs and decisions of the members. At the end of the day, I felt that the proper course for the Sorrows was to not baby them, as Daniel wanted, but to let them grow and decide what they should do for themselves. But that option wasn’t truly available in game. I couldn’t confront Daniel about his need to defend these people’s innocence as a way to justify his faith’s beliefs in a world so hostile to a peaceful religion. I also couldn’t confront the hypocrisy of Joshua’s bloodlust with the rest of his religion when really the personal conflict of the two missionaries should have been the undercurrents of all the interplays between the tribes.

At the end of the day, even with the length that they were, I felt both Dead Money and Honest Hearts had a lot of interesting elements at play. Both of them could have been expanded, possibly into their own full fledged stories themselves. So much of their writing was devoted to universal themes such as salvation, redemption, greed and trust that they had the potential for so much more. Even in their current state, they’re still damn good side quests. I can only hope that the next two DLC are just more of the same.

The Stars Were Right – An Elder Sign Review

Leave a reply

As informed, I spent last week assisting Derek move his things across the street. It was a labourous endeavor despite the assistance of a car and all parties involved were thoroughly exhausted afterwards. But fear not, intrepid followers, I did drop one of his boxes in my glorious rebellion against his tyrannical posting rules however I think that the point had been lost.

I shall strive to find some other method to communicate my displeasure.

While there, however, Derek felt it necessary to spend his government funding and award us with a delightful evening of a card game called Elder Signs. It was flavoured and stylized after Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos which won me over. Derek was convinced by its 7.9 ranking on boardgamegeeks which is, apparently, rather good for the site.

The game is pretty fun, I have to admit. The flavour and mechanics really conjure the right feel for a Cthulhu game and I enjoyed the fact that it was a co-operative challenge that tested the players against the board instead of each other. My only complaint, and it would be a big one, is that the game is far too easy. Especially for something dressed up in horror trappings.

You see, there are certain expectations one has when they pick up a Lovecraftian game. Yes, we’re looking for weird, tentacled beasts and insane cultists. Alien worlds and indescribable horrors are a necessity. But there’s a certain feeling that we’re trying to conjure with all these unspeakable monsters. Lovecraft was and always will be a horror author and if you can fill your audience with a sense of dread then you are missing the point of Lovecraft’s writing.

Now, I feel that Elder Signs can be easily fixed with a few houserules and tweaks to its mechanics. There are elements in place that should work to build a sense of unavoidable doom. The aptly named Doom Track is perhaps the best mechanic and only needs more elements that move it along and force players to deal with challenges that they aren’t properly prepared for in order to work. Course, there are some other balance tweaks the game could use as well. Every player is dealt a random investigator and each possesses a unique talent or ability which they bring to the board. There is the Nun who ignores half of the ill effects of midnight cards and can’t be weakened by locations that lock away dice (dice are used to defeat challenges and resolve combat so each one denied makes each challenge more difficult). Other investigators receive greater rewards when completing challenges like the Magician who draws an extra spell when rewarded or the Scamp who gets additional common items.

But then you have the author who always rolls the extra dice when tackling an otherworldly challenge. Before we played, Derek and I thought she was perhaps the most useless. However, after a few rounds, it become quite clear that the otherworld challenges have the greatest rewards and the author essentially makes them a walk in the park, bring victory closer in great leaps whenever you draw a portal onto the board.

Deesis Range: The Saviour by Andrey Rublyov (1410)

And then there is the Scientist.

The Scientist is a curious investigator. She has a fairly balanced split between her health and sanity (because what is a Cthulhu game without the ability to be driven insane?). But it is her ability which makes her truly shine. She is immune to fear effects from any challenges which, arguably, didn’t play a great deal in our three games since we generally avoided them or threw the Scientist at them to complete them. But more importantly, she prevents monsters from spawning on her round allowing her to tackle the challenges which give a mix bag of positive and negative rewards since she removes the concern for accumulating additional elder signs (the quest coupon the players are attempting to gather in order to lock away the Old Ones) at the expense of making the other challenges more difficult.

I like the character as her special ability is both strong and very characterful. But Kate Winthrop brings to light a greater weakness in the overall Cthulhu world than just making balance in a card game difficult. It is her scientific skepticism which makes her such a good investigator against the Elder Gods and it is the same scientific skepticism which locks Cthulhu safely away in the 1920s.

For I think there’s more reasons why we don’t see a lot of Cthulhu stories beyond Lovecraft’s times and not just because other authors are paying respect to the grandfather of the style and the period he wrote in. Lovecraft was obsessed with the cosmic horror – an idea that life was wholly incomprehensible to human mind and that the plumbing of the universe’s secrets would ultimately lead to such revelations that would lead the explorer into madness. Forbidden knowledge is rife through his work and more than once scientific study and its failure to address the mystic and occult has led to a protagonist’s unavoidable defeat.

But this concern over science isn’t that surprising given that he was writing at the turn of the century. The world was undergoing a great upheaval in scientific thought. Einstein’s theory of relativity essentially upended the entire field of physics, tearing to shambles the established doctrines and leaving uncertainty in its wake. Furthermore, the coming of the World Wars were heavily influenced by technological developments and the machine gun’s use on the field of battle produced unheard of casualties to a population unprepared for modern war. In that day and age, no doubt technology looked like some horrific instrument quickly tumbling from man’s grasp and the further they delved the less anyone seemed to know.

This is, however, in stark contrast to our current age. Einstein’s relativity has become so widespread as to be taught in high schools. The breadth and depth of human knowledge is greater than at any single point in history. We understand more. We develop more. We research more. I feel that there is no coincidence between the rise of the Information Age and the apparently neglect of Lovecraftian horror. So much of Lovecraft’s creatures and world relied upon the unknown and the hidden that as we become more educated and enlightened we dispel the dark shadows that clung to the corners of our knowledge. Uncertainty washes away and in this new light we find not terrifying creatures to behold, the strings and fates of man wrapped in their tentacle appendages.

Which is a bit of a shame, really. Despite Lovecraft’s personal flaws, there is a source of wonder and excitement in his stories. True, they seem almost quaint in their crafting of horror. People driven mad by things that to the modern eye seem so much more manageable. What place does a wandering mountain of a monster with tentacles for a mouth when we live in a time when a single bomb can destroy an entire nation? A simple look at our own current media portrays science as this indomitable force capable of overcoming any obstacle that arises. In Pacific Rim, we had invaders from another world being thrown down before the mechanical might of giant exosuits. Independence Day saw the collapse of a technologically superior race through the application of a computer virus (a clever spin on War of the Worlds but nevertheless demonstrating that even technological horrors are brought down by our own scientific mastery).

Science isn’t something to be feared but embraced and there is seemingly nothing to fear from it save itself.

So, Kate Winthrop represents something rather curious in the Elder Signs. The game seems less about a group of investigators racing to lock away an ancient evil before it escapes and destroys existence. Instead, it almost feels like we’re looking back at a battle that was already fought. And this race was not between the investigators and the forgotten gods but between Cthulhu and Kate. It almost seems inevitable now that the Ancient Ones end would come. And I can only begin to imagine what horror they must have felt as Ms. Winthrop turned her microscope upon them.

What’s the appeal of MMO’s? Nevernevernever

2 Replies

MMOs – the games of waiting.

Today is another posting day that I’m wholly unprepared for. While my colleague gave me an excellent topic involving algae, I feel a more pressing matter is at hand. And I do have some backup D&D stories waiting in the wings so don’t fear that I’ve been posting more opinion pieces and less trashy shorts. Those are coming in good time.

You see, my friend has wrangled me into playing a delightful game called Neverwinter. And he’s done this mostly for the title. And because he knew it would annoy me.

Neverwinter is a free-to-play massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO). These delightful beasts have been around for some time, the first notable ones created back in the late 1990s with Ultima Online and Everquest. The most famous, without a doubt, is World of Warcraft (WoW). Millions of people log on to Blizzard’s behemoth every month and it has worked its way into the public consciousness through television shows like The Big Bang Theory and South Park. I’d be very surprised if someone hasn’t heard of it at least in passing. For a time, WoW’s success had a huge impact on the gaming industry. The amount of money it brought in through the combined revenue of the game’s purchase ($60 – and Blizzard is loathe to ever put anything on sale) and it’s monthly fee ($15) made it one of the most profitable ventures in gaming. Its success inevitably spawned numerous copies and clones with many industry experts predicting that this new online development was the wave of the future. And, for a time, that almost seemed right.

But whatever WoW was, one thing became clear: it was one of a kind.

A strew of failed games and collapsed companies piled at Blizzard’s feet. No single contender could match the subscription base even with some developers reportedly throwing billions of dollars into the development of their own monstrous MMO titles. The core base of WoW was reticent to leave and unlike the early predictions, it didn’t seem that this game was the next evolution in game design so much as the birth of a new genre. Thankfully not every company chose to chase this new market and their titles those sold well prompting the multi-million dollar publishing houses to pursue those next ‘big things’ that will undoubtedly revolutionize the industry this time! In the meanwhile, small studios have attempted to carve out their own niches in the shadow of WoW. Neverwinter is such a creature, wielding two unique weapons it hopes to win its player base with.

For one, Neverwinter is the first MMO to use Wizards of the Coast’s D&D brand combined with its 4th edition ruleset. This is a little surprising, since out of all the editions the king of table-top role-playing developers have made, 4th edition is the one most like a video game. The designers even admitted to drawing inspiration from none other than WoW itself when creating it. Wizards had quite a bit of success shopping around the D&D property in past years. Games like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape and Icewind Dale have achieved various degrees of critical acclaim and commercial success. Perhaps the largest brand is Neverwinter Nights which saw two separate releases from different developers. It was also the most recent releases which doesn’t surprise me that it’s become the setting for Cryptic’s MMO.

Now, I’m no expert on the genre. I played WoW for a grand total of five hours and promptly deleted it from my hard drive. I played it at the bequest of a friend but knew I was never going to get into it. Its price scheme I disagreed with and I don’t think any game could justify both a full price purchase on top of monthly subscriptions. Especially when I’m so used to free multiplayer as a PC player. But there’s no doubt that Blizzard makes the majority of its money through subscriptions so most of its competition has attempted the same. The only MMO I played to any serious degree was Guild Wars which required a one type purchase of the core game though it sold expansions to keep up its revenue flow.

So, Neverwinter is rather the perfect offering to return to the genre. For Derek, it’s in the damnable Forgotten Realms and has us treading through the old familiar stomping grounds of Neverwinter Nights 2. For me, the game doesn’t cost a dime.

I’ve found the experience so far to be… interesting. These games are billed as role-playing though there’s even less of that than in your regular RPGs. There’s a decent character creator with standard D&D characteristics like hometown and religion but none of these have any sort of impact on either the game or your interactions. It’s strange to me that the greatest appeal of MMOs is the idea that you’re inhabiting a shared world with others that should make it more realistic and engaging. You aren’t interacting with scripted NPCs anymore whose dialogue is limited to what is written and usually walk the same paths doing the same activities every time you greet them. No, in an MMO that stranger on the street is another player – another human being – with their own goals, quirks and attitudes. It’s the sort of situation that should give rise to an unending series of unscripted play. However, in execution, this is never the case.

I don’t know what it is, but massive multiplayer experiences seem to strip all of the creative layerings of a game and focus almost primarily on the mechanics. The quest systems are nowhere near as dynamic as a single player game and are essentially variations of ‘go here and fetch this.’ You will either be directed to spacious maps filled with static camps of enemies and asked to scrounge around for four feathers, heads, crates or whatever and watch as other players run by on their own menial errand. Given the free-for-all nature of these areas, it is not uncommon to come across your goal only to find someone has already cleared it before you. This requires you to stand and wait for whatever it was you were sent after to poof into existence before your very eyes. There is no real excuse or explanation for this in the world itself. It’s as if the game is kindly asking the players to ignore its bare gears while they churn distractingly before them.

There are also dungeon instances which are a little better. These are areas you enter by yourself or with a group and it locks you out from the global maps. While you’re rummaging around these dungeons, you won’t ever run into some random player who stumbles in after you as each of these instances are generated separately for every visitor. Here is where you’ll find the slightly more complicated quest sequences reminiscent of your single player RPG since the designers don’t have to worry about the player arriving only to find everyone already dead. However, even these instances have an artificial feel to them since they are so removed from the experiences of the rest of the game solely because they remove that ‘massive’ component. Furthermore, the design for these areas inevitably turns into a long corridor, encouraging the player to power through all opposition in a race to the finish. There they will expectedly have a big fight with some large boss, get whatever treasure they came for then are spat back out into the world where other players are rushing past with a conga line of enemies pursuing them on their way to the next checkpoint.

The result is this sort of mutant world that is far more plastic and unreal than if you were to strip the players from it. You load into a town and are flooded with trading messages, bunny hopping elves, and stampedes of horses or other exotic mounts trampling the poor citizenry into dust in their haste to complete the next big collectathon. Crowds of players will just stand idly before vendors waiting for auctions to finish or the start of some new quest or dungeon. It really feels like an amusement park than an actual world with queues forming before the next ride and visitors waiting their turn before rushing to the next line. It’s a bizarre product in a genre that’s always strove the most for immersion and the illusion of real worlds. Role-playing games arguably spend the most of their development trying to realize these fantastic worlds to such a degree that the players will – even if for a moment – get lost in them or believe them to be real.

Now, the reasons for this are obvious. Because the goal of games are to entertain, developers strive to make a homogeneous experience for every player. This way, no one person will feel like they missed something great or exciting because it was done before they got there. Thus, every NPC stands rigidly in place, waiting patiently for the next visitor before doing its routine, retiring and waiting once more. Players are aware of this, and likely feeling they are in a playground, they just fool around in the manner of the system they’re in. The world never takes itself seriously – at least in any sort of execution with NPCs having barely any character at all and everything working on a rigid timer – so players react in kind. Interactions are left strictly to discuss the bare mechanics before them. You aren’t grouping up with some fellow adventurers to stop the evil frost giants from descending upon the halfling villages. You are grinding the dungeon skirmish in the hopes that it’ll take less then a dozen repeated runs for the orc shaman halfway through to drop the blue totem you want to improve your item build.

Now, I’ve spoken very little on whether the game is enjoyable. I think there is some entertainment here, but it’s mostly in the shared experience you have with your friends. Unlike other games, MMOs feel like a board game. They’re something you sit down to play. With single player games, discussion between players is often about the story or character development. With board games the story and dressings are always nice and a brief amusement, but no one plays Settlers of Catan to imagine being an individual on the edges of some frontier trying to carve out the the foundations of a society. They play to get the most points to win. I’m not entirely sure what winning constitutes in an MMO but hopefully I can find out and tell you whether the journey there is worth it or not.

Assassin’s Creed Review Part 2 – everything is permitted

Leave a reply

< Return to the Assassin’s Creed Review Part 1

The nice thing about reviews of games is that I don’t have to source my own screenshots.

Continuing with my summary of Assassin’s Creed II, I’ll just preface now that this is heavy on spoilers. Though you should know this as it’s a part two. If you haven’t read the first then what are you doing here?

Now, I’m sure no one is reading this just to get my opinion on a piece of entertainment. Most who know me already write me off as ‘the man that hates everything’ and naturally assume that I… well… hate everything. This isn’t true, of course, as I have a number of things I absolutely adore. For books, I’m a huge fan of the old Thieves’ World anthologies. They’re a fascinating piece of literature that would actually make a rather decent discussion for this blog. You see, the world of those books – named Sanctuary – is actually a collaborative work slowly pieced and patched together by the numerous contributors to the books. They are like a professional take on a D&D role-playing session, where each author plays with the setting and their fellow’s creations in a manner well beyond what the original creator intended. How they created a comprehensive world with very little direction is rather impressive, as is seeing the impact of even the smallest details from one story rippling out amongst all the others. It’s a neat format that captures the creative process where you can see some authors begin to lay the foundations for one story idea only to be wholly swept up in the grand events of another.

I also really enjoyed WALL-E. The curious thing with movies is that often times anticipation plays a large role in the enjoyment I derive from it. With WALL-E I was expecting some middling affair but was really curious how they would try and create a full length feature film without dialogue. Well, if you’ve seen it, you know that expectation is not accurate. What I didn’t expect was for the movie to have some pretty deep themes and to explore them as much as they did. For that, I was caught off-guard and between the greater story that it told and the general skill in the telling, I really enjoyed it. I think its an excellent example in audience misdirection as well as demonstrating that character development doesn’t require brilliant dialogue and can be achieved even with Pokemon-esque entities that only repeat their names.

Then, we have Assassin’s Creed II which is just terrible.

When discussing with some friends about the game, I generally get the argument of “I don’t know why you focus so much on the plot” or “It’s just a silly video game.” I want to point out that neither of these are justifications. They are excuses. It’s a lazy defence that dismisses criticism without trying to properly analyze or examine the work in question. Put simply, I care because the writers don’t. And if no one cares then we won’t have improvement. While the vast majority of people might not care that their video games have ridiculous stories with unbelievable plots and paper thin characters, the vast majority of people will recognize something that has compelling stories and deep characterization. The average dribble that is ‘just good enough’ is often lost and forgotten amongst the rest of the mediocrity released yearly. When pressed for what are their favourite movies, books and games people will gravitate towards those of quality and excellence. There might be the odd nonsense here and there but in general things that are done well stand out far better than things that are done ‘well enough.’

And Assassin’s Creed II really isn’t even that.

Apparently these continents do exist. I imagine they have yet to be discovered. Or rediscovered...

Apparently an ancient civilization preexisting prehistorical humanity was able to accurately predict the plate tectonics that would form modern Earth. Which they then recorded with lemon juice on old scraps of paper.

I was originally going to rant about the bonfire scene where Ezio charges a tied Savonarola to run a knife through his face because he thinks public burnings are barbaric but indiscriminate murder is perfectly acceptable. He then gives one of the most heavy-handed and ham-fisted speeches on free will and personal liberation that seems so wildly out of character for an individual who only recently learned the secret organization he’s been following holds these ideals. He condemns the people for seeking vengeance against a tyrant, then hops off his podium to run after the man who killed his family in order to run a blade through his throat. It was a crystal clear moment of a writer breaking ‘voice.’ This was no longer Ezio talking but the author espousing personal beliefs and feelings. It was so bizarre and distracting because not only did it run against the setting of Renaissance Florence but it even went against the very motives that drove Ezio for this thirty hour adventure. The moment Ezio charged the stage, he had ceased to exist and the writer had suddenly and obnoxiously inserted himself into the fiction. It might have been forgivable (or at least forgettable) if the same moment hadn’t come immediately in the next chapter.

No. Killing you won't bring my family back... or these thirty hours of my life.

Says the man as he strangles the last breath out of the Pope.

I’ve already mentioned how the series is constrained by its attempts to adhere to historical events but completely ignores them despite forcing its characters to do stupid things to make them occur in the first place. The revolt against Savonarola is portrayed as some bizarre abuse of an ancient MacGuffin but ignores that he was excommunicated by the Pope for accusations of corruption. Which would paint the character in a surprisingly sympathetic light since the Pope is the leader of the secret Templar society whose sole goal is to obtain ancient power without any consideration for the organization he’s leading. And the finality of the game involves literal fisticuffs with the Pontifex Maximus. Why? Because.

I am at a bit of a loss though, since the story for Assassin’s Creed II not only falls from its precipitous hangings in the closing scene but plunges so far into a deep, yawning chasm as to disappear from any sort of logical or reasonable basis as humanly possible. And its quite clear that the inanity of its endings is solely due to poor writing. Our final reward for slaying the man that murdered our family and leading us on a merry chase through the tourist vistas of Italy is a holographic recording that makes BioWare’s Mass Effect look positively Shakespearian.

were more... advanced in time. Your minds were not yet ready.

Translations: We have no damn idea of what we’re talking about.

We basically get a recording telling us “we are beyond understanding” because the writers have no idea what this ancient society is suppose to be. The hologram then turns to the audience and informs us that whatever goal you thought there originally was is wrong and that the series is now suddenly about stopping solar flares and hunting down lost temples scattered across the Earth to do… something. It’s all vague and unsatisfying because the writers have zero clue where they are going with this. They recognize that they need to explain something but they just don’t know what that thing is. The process is embarrassingly fumbled and so transparent that it is ultimately unrewarding to the players that have sunk over 30 hours into achieving it.

As a writer, you need to consider what your pay-off is for your reader. They are going on this adventure with you, often investing numerous hours into following your characters and your plot. It is your responsibility to give them something for that investment. In video games, this is usually something cheap and simple. There are achievements that mark your progress or little cutscenes with smiling kids and sappy music. It is a rare company that actually rewards its audience with dialogue and manages to make it satisfying enough to actually justify the work. Knights of the Old Republic II is remarkable in that regard. At the endof its story arcs aren’t grand combats with floating fat Popes but a conversation tree with an important NPC. We have one in Assassin’s Creed II but instead of revealing something important about our character or the world it’s treated like an advertisement for the next game. “Congratulations, player, on achieving success. Tune in next time when you can run off and add eighteen lost temples to your collection of pointless objects. All anchored by a character so bland that he makes beige look positively festive.”

No, Ubisoft, I don’t think I will. You see, the reason writing is important is because it can be used as a reward and incentive for keeping your audience intrigued. Cop out and your audience won’t be engaged or invested enough to commit to where things go from there. They may even be like me who will turn to a company that can write decent stories and characters and forget all about your work in a couple of months. You’ll be little more than another leaf in the sea, drowned out in the mediocrity and washed into the horizon, never to be seen or remembered again.

Assassin’s Creed Review: Nothing is True (1)

Leave a reply

Pay no heed to the man burning behind me

Assassin’s Creed – Where we limit ourselves by history in order to completely butcher it anyway.

I’m not going to play ‘spot the paradox.’ It’s not the first time something meant to be profound ends up being completely inane and devoid of any meaning. Words have been written on the famous ‘Only a Sith deals in absolutes’ and I have no intention on delving into how these slight slips of the writer’s pen undermines their goals. I’m of the opinion that, if you can’t get profundity, you’re better off shooting for clarity. Otherwise you end up with such delightful gems like Assassin’s Creed II’s motto of ‘Nothing is true and everything is permitted.’

Now, I know that there’s an in-game explanation for that silly expression. And it’s true that Assassin’s Creed is a franchise that already starts on shaky ground. For a brief summary: Assassin’s Creed (AC) is a hybrid stealth and platforming game that follows a secret sect of assassin’s as they navigate historical events and cities trying to stop a secret organization from… doing… stuff.

I’m going to be completely honest, I’ve played the original and almost thirty hours of the sequel and I can say I have very little idea of what is going on. Some of that is due to laziness since details of the plot are revealed through exploring the cities and hunting down collectibles. While I enjoy the free-roaming/parkour system they developed for the game, collectible hunting doesn’t actually turn my crank and ends up generally being a large time sink with little payoff. However, the other reason I fail to follow the plot of this series is because it makes almost zero sense.

Point of discussion – http://youtu.be/hrz044bM_RE?t=5m30s

So let’s jump right into it. My first issue is this scene in the final half of the game. It’s the moment that all is revealed to Ezio about the Assassin Order and the secret motives of the Templar. It’s a rather tricky situation, as you are required to relay information to a character that the player is wholly aware of from almost twenty hours earlier. What’s really bizarre about this point is both its execution and it’s timing. First, it comes so incredibly late that it feels almost like an afterthought. It’s like the developers realized right before the finale that they never actually informed Ezio who he was actually working for. It’s a scene that feels it should have been performed much earlier. But what I found more bewildering is the complete fumbling of this encounter.

It’s obviously meant to be a grand reunion of all the characters and a twist reveal that all of Ezio’s friends have really been fellow assassins this whole time. Course, it makes you wonder why you were sent to do all the killing when Venice has no less then three full member Assassins stationed there and Ezio still hasn’t officially been welcomed into the ranks. I like this scene because it highlights the amateur attempt for cinematic flair for a complete disregard for the verisimilitude of the world. It’s been well established at this point that the Assassins are on the losing side of this war. The Templars are always better organized, connected and armed. And here, at the moment when they are known to be bringing in one of the most dangerous objects known to the Assassin Order, they all decide to randomly reveal themselves to the only identified Templar? And they just rush head long into a fight with him without attempting to set up a blockade or corner the man responsible for so much turmoil over the entire game?

This isn’t just blind foolishness but utter suicide. The game itself says that the Assassin’s greatest weapon is their anonymity and now their chief rival knows who they all are. None of them even have the decency to try and arrive masked! Even Ezio had the foresight to throw on a guard uniform. Ok, strike one for this scene. But wait, why are all these people here in the first place? I can’t even tell you who some of them are because their relevance to the story is so inconsequential. Why are the few Assassin’s no name leaders of street ruffians? Half of these characters don’t even live in Venice so either they all got the memo that Ezio’s surprise party was being held that night or they just showed up because they were needed to leap senseless to their deaths from the campanile at the end.

But my favourite part is when Machiavelli says, ‘the prophecy foretold that the prophet would come and it was you, Ezio, that arrived.’ Apparently, these characters are so profoundly shocked to learn that Ezio arrived at this midnight rendezvous even though they were the ones that arranged the meeting for him in the first place! Considering how Ezio has been a rather faithful lapdog this entire time, it shouldn’t really be shocking that he followed orders and came to this spot just like he was instructed. Course, these are the same people that took a year to find a shipping manifest from the warehouses they captured in the prior act so perhaps insight isn’t their strongest characteristic.

So, let’s ignore these piling issues and forgive the Assassins (whose sole activity is assassinations yet the Spaniard runs off rather effortlessly despite all of them being present) and examine this scene further. Ezio arrives in disguise to deliver the MacGuffin of great importance to the villain and though the Spaniard manages to sneak off, the first thing the Assassins do is not secure this device that apparently has the power to destroy the world but instead climb the largest tower in the city in order to fake brand Ezio’s finger before swan diving into the city’s smallest pile of hay. While I’m sure this scene was meant to be awe-inspiring, what it actually did was lend a real world explanation to a strict game play mechanic. In having every character Lara Croft into St. Marco’s Square, the game has now established that every Assassin possesses the super power to lock on to the nearest haystack and defy even the simplest physics without so much as a sprained ankle. For a game trying so desperately to ground itself in reality, this is one of those moments that completely shatters a person’s suspension of disbelief. The ‘leap of faith’ (as the game describes this action) is easily understood by the player as a mechanic of convenience. As the game encourages players to human fly up the largest buildings, the designers rightly assumed that once scaling the precious landmarks, players wouldn’t want to turn around and slowly descend the way they came. Having a quick jump to return to the ground saved time and was an easy reward for the player’s hard work. It was something that never needed grounding in the game’s world because it never served a real purpose in that world.

And in a game that’s trying so desperately hard to make a grand conspiracy involving every known historical event play into this grandiose struggle between two fictitious secret societies, they need as much help in maintaining that suspension of disbelief that they can get. But this isn’t the only time these characters actions don’t make sense with their motivations. Acquiring the MacGuffin was one of the most important motives of their Order but… you know… it’s okay to put that off and not worry about securing it because we have a hazing ritual to complete first for a guy that’s essentially been part of our order for almost ten years now.

However, character motivations and beliefs are a pretty universal problem for this game. I’m going to pull a Derek and leave the second part of my rant for another day where I discover that characters aren’t treated as living people but as vehicles for ham-fisting the most hypocritical heavy handed themes I’ve seen all month. Hopefully I can retain my fury to remember all of these grievances.

Continue to the Assassin’s Creed Review Part 2 >

Mask of the Betrayer Review

Leave a reply

Don’t ask about the image, there wasn’t a whole lot of options.

I have a friend and he hates me. After forcing me to finally finish Neverwinter Nights 2 the Original Campaign (OC), he was adamant that we begin the expansion. As a brief overview, Neverwinter Nights and Mask of the Betrayer are two computer role-playing games (cRPGs) set in the fictitious world of the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms, themselves, are one of a myriad of different D&D campaign settings published by Wizards of the Coast. Forgotten Realms has the auspicious distinction of being, arguably, the most famous of all the settings. So here, you get a Mask of the Betrayer review.

You have your dwarves, elves and halflings all running around such exotic locations as a city in the north (Icewind Dale) a city in the south (Baldur’s Gate) and a city with stupid names like Neverneath (Neverwinter Nights). It’s all very derivative Tolkien-esque fare made quite palpable for the masses. There isn’t any weighty christological morality, however, so it’s freed to explore more complex situations and conflicts than Biblical good vs evil.

It usually doesn’t, mind you, but the opportunity exists. Now, as I mentioned, my friend and I finished the OC and there hasn’t been many words devoted on my blog to this monumentous achievement mostly because the OC was probably about as exciting as parliamentary debate over a new highway infrastructure. Actually, if given the choice, I’d probably go with the debate to be honest. The plot for the OC was uninspired, convoluted, irrelevant and most offensive of all – boring. And to top it off, it was long.

It also had an annoying dwarf. Screw dwarves. The stumpy midgets aren’t useful for anything beyond dragon kibble. But given they’re all developing alcoholics, you’re more likely to upset your dragon’s stomach more than anything. At least they’ll slide down nicely.

I am pleased to announce that Mask of the Betrayer is everything that the OC is not. It’s short, interesting, explores the nature of love and faith and is, shockingly fun. I find this in direct negative correlation to the number of dwarves present. Which is to say there are none. Though the game adamantly insists on reminding you that there used to be dwarves like some sort of dangling punishment that they’ve been so benevolent in staying their hand over. However, we’re on the final act and we haven’t seen hair nor stench of the runty creatures so I’m feeling quite in the clear on this issue.

The story itself, however, poses a curious conundrum. I’m going to discuss spoilers but given the brevity of the game and the way it constantly reminds you about every plot point no matter what you do, I feel this isn’t too disruptive. Now onto my discussion!

For those not aware, there are two essential “magic” systems at play in your standard D&D setting. You have the arcane – purview of wizards and sorcerers – that often requires rigorous study and is usually theorized to shape the very fundamental nature of reality and the universe(s). Then you have the divine. This is the domain of clerics and is the powers bestowed upon them by their god for their strict piety and devotion. So separated are these two sources that they have unique interactions with their own spells and other profane creatures that stalk the realms.

Which is to say, it’s really, really, really obvious that when a cleric says he’s getting powers from a big bearded dude in the sky there’s probably some truth to that. Couple this with the fact that the Forgotten Realms has a serious issue with gods coming down from on high, getting killed and promptly shuffling around their seat in the celestial bureaucracy like a minority government trying in vain to oust their opposition, it seems that their existence based on the very nature of the world really isn’t one of uncertainty. For the Forgotten Realms, gods are and it would take an incredible amount of ignorance to deny this fact. Worship is more like a trip to the tracks where you chose the horse you think is likely to give you the greatest pay-out at the end.

But the story for Mask of the Betrayer revolves around a curious structure called the Wall of the Faithless. As the name suggests, it is a wall… formed of faithless individuals. As explained through their own characters, for all the people who insist on not laying a bet at all, when they die their souls are shunted into this ever stretching, moaning and howling structure to add their body onto its swelling length. The major events of the story are propelled by a character’s faithlessness but I find it most curious that the actual reason for this lack of belief rather perplexing.

It’s like basing a story on the actions of a globe-trotting journalist who insists that the world is flat. At some point there must have arisen a conflict when it seemed reality factually contradicted this person’s own beliefs. At the end of the day, Mask of the Betrayer doesn’t really delve into true issues of faith and faithlessness but uses these concepts as plot points to further the story. It tells a great tale without actually examining the elements that compose it.

Which is a shame since it’s almost a third shorter than then OC. I can’t help but feel like this is a gross missed opportunity. Wherein the OC had this plodding tale of some swamp man stumbling out of coddled ignorance into a world filled with two dimensional individuals and hours of inane fetch questing, Mask of the Betrayer jumps erratically between some rather heavy existential ideology with barely a moment to even ponder its own intrinsic consequences. There’s so much stuff here to actually explore, like self identity and the nature of souls, but it gets shuffled to the sidelines to push the story further at it’s frantic pace.

Why would someone believe? What causes people to lose their faith? What is the nature of man and gods and are either intrinsic or important to its own world’s functioning. For example, the nature of good and evil, justice and law. Are these the true creation of these divine beings (remember, they get shuffled about any time one of them has the misfortune of stumbling into the machinations of an epic level character) or are these concepts something far grander and primordial than petty deities squabbling over who gets the worship of stubborn hicks who refuse to move out of their swamp.

At one point, your party comes face to face with a dead god and have a brief conversation about how this divine hierarchy functions. The god then points out that one of your companions himself is faithless, and yet standing on the enormous spine of this echoing skeleton, said companion continues to profess his beliefs that gods don’t exist. Yet you’re given no time to actually point out or examine this contradictory moment as the narrative quickly pats you on the bum towards the next big point and click killing moment.

It’s the stuff you can write great stories about but they’ve given themselves so little time to actually explore it. The brief taste you get is tantalizing and I really wish that Mask of the Betrayer was the OC and that the OC was… well… just a unfortunate memory much like the dwarf.