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ahoodedfigure

I guess it's sunk cost. No need to torture myself over what are effectively phantasms.

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If Skyrim and Rage Had a Baby

By ahoodedfigure 29 Comments

Once you get all the images out of your head that the title gives you, I'm wondering if all the complaints I've heard about specific problems people have with Skyrim, as relatively minor as they seem, could be alleviated by some of the strengths of Rage. Since they're both under the Zenimax umbrella I don't think it's too far-fetched to imagine a future Elder Scrolls game being fueled with IdTech, but you'll have to do like I do and take the criticisms of both games at their word (I can't really help but take people at their word, since I have yet to upgrade my PC and actually play either game, so there you go). Id has often tried to distance itself from its own games, saying the tech's the thing and hoping for people to license their engine even after the love for their launch game may have faded, and I want to see if that sort of long-term analysis is possible. Naturally, if you have different interpretations of either game this formula's not going to work, but if you have any other suggestions for improvements feel free to mention them in the comments, assuming you feel any improvements are necessary. 
 
With that out of the way: 
 

In Very Big Letters I Declare this to Be the Beginning of this Article

 

The Old Stare-Down


Complaint:

 
Skyrim's NPCs still do the lock-on, stare-into-your-soul thing, and don't emote a whole lot.
 

Solution: 

 
Build and animate NPCs the way Rage does.
 
If there's one thing I saw people comment on throughout the criticisms of Rage, it was that the characters, while somewhat exaggerated, all had a stylistic cohesion and emoted well. They were a step removed from the stiff automatons you'd expect, with gestures, weight shifting, head tilting, and a bunch of other little quirks that helped sell that these were supposed to be people, and not so obviously puppets. 
 

Drawback:

 
There would be fewer NPCs, because each NPC would take a lot more work to make human enough to stand the test. You could still have hapless peds that wander about, but their lack of interactivity would be noticible. 
 
 

Lincoln Logs Before Lincoln

 

Complaint:

 
Although Skyrim's dungeons are varied and hide their modules well, they're still modules, and the more you run into the more you notice repetition.
 

Solution:

 
Megatextures.
 
Alongside all the complaints about Rage's core gameplay were raves about the beauty of Rage's ugliness. It was like walking through a concept drawing, rather than a pieced-together recreation of a conceptual artist's idea using in-system Lego bricks. So you could have areas that looked unique because an artist made them unique. Level designers and tech folks may still make the general layout, but concept artists could perfect the mood. Even dungeons that are ostensibly the same could be both memorable and FEEL very different because an individual artist interpreted this dungeon's past in a way that makes it stand out.
 
Megatextures also could extend to the world at large, allowing for wide open spaces to feel like a landscape carved by natural forces. Or godlike ones.
 

Drawback:

 
In addition to the pop-in and high system requirements, you may wind up having less room for the kind of stuff that makes overworlds fun to explore in Elder Scrolls games: stuff. Rage solves some of its storage problems by having much of its action inside dungeon-like environments, breaking up the monotony with high-speed vehicle battles. This might wind up making the exploration of Akavir (or wherever) feel a bit cramped.
 
 

Damn those Zombie-- Bandits


Complaint:

 
Combat is much improved, but still feels a bit awkward and a bit robotic (with the exception of dragons, that is).
 

Solution:


Make the combat feel a bit more dynamic by adding Rage's NPC hit detection behaviors.
 
One of the more charming revelations I had when reading and watching Rage reviews was how hitting an enemy in Rage would cause different behaviors based on where you hit them. Hit them in the leg and they limp, hit them so that they fall over, and they struggle for a moment before standing up. Add behaviors, add melee styles the way the gangs in Rage have different approaches, and you would have about the same amount of different types of enemies while expanding how each individual enemy feels when you do the usual killing of dudes and taking of stuff.
 

Drawback:

 
Rage's enemies are much more numerous than those in Skyrim, and spawn in waves. Assuming they stay away from that, will this dynamic combat wear thin, while not adding a whole lot to a given battle?
 
--
 
If you can think of other ideas that might fit, other solutions or problems aren't covered here, or why Skyrim's current formula is just fine, let me know below.
29 Comments

Combating Copying: A Board Game Comparison

By ahoodedfigure 7 Comments

I've been trying to combine a lot of ideas I've been seeing in different games into some sort of Frankenstein dream game that I've been wanting for a while. Since the design right now is a board game, I don't have to worry about my coding abilities to be able to pull it off, which is a relief. The reason I bring this up though, is not to advertise for yet another one of my projects that may never get anywhere, but to talk about how the board game industry and the video game industry handle piracy. 
 

The Board Game Angle

 
People will sometimes contrast movies, music or even books with video games when talking about piracy, trying to draw parallels or contrast the methods used to protect copyright, publisher property, and creator output. I think board games though, which are a completely analog format, are actually pretty closely related, at least in their approach to entertainment. Whereas vidya games need consoles or other machines to run, board games are dependent upon the players' own brains and the cardboard and plastic machine that lies between them. I think they're similar enough, at least conceptually, that the board game industry's methods of tackling piracy provide an interesting contrast.
 
Since you can't exactly be proprietary with human brains (thankfully) the cardboard-and-plastic machine of a board game is all that the publishers and creators can protect. You usually have a rulebook, game components, and often a board (though not always). Unless they're terribly complex, boards can be copied in one go, and technically just about anyone could construct a game out of the rules from a rulebook (which many companies offer up for free as pdfs as a sort of preview of the game), assuming all the details of the game were in there. 
 
Game components like plastic miniatures, individual cards, and dice are harder to duplicate without having similar things already, with cards being the hardest, since they usually need to be made of thin, tough cardstock, be laminated to prevent fraying, all be identical on one side so they can't be differentiated from the back, and be clear enough to read if they have a lot of complicated instructions or symbols on them. Cards are actually where many bigger game design firms have been helping to prevent copying; you will often see that rulebooks are missing specific examples of character powers or events because the rules are printed entirely on individual cards. This does discourage all but the most diligent of copiers. It also makes a lot of games feel like glorified Magic clones, with plenty of rules exceptions that wind up making things more confusing, and lead to a very specific flavor of game that doesn't translate well across genres and themes. While it may work fine for some games, it puts so much focus on individual cards and their interaction that it makes a lot of the more ambitious games a huge mess to play, reducing focus on unifying elements and making them more arcane and niche than they really ought to be.
 
Thing is, most people don't copy board games. The amount of work to hand-build a game is a bit too much for most people, and even when people do it they often modify the existing game to suit them, which results in technically a new game at the end. But it's also that board games often give you little trinkets to help you play, whether they're cards or miniatures or dice or little cardboard tokens or whatever other gimmick. They give you higher quality components than you're likely to be able to make yourself, full color print, glossy paintings by professional artists, and playtesting of the final product to (hopefully) make the game not broken (and online errata if they screwed up). In a way, board games fulfill the suggestions of folks like Gabe Newell make for video games; they say you should provide users with a better service to discourage piracy, rather than punish those who legitimately bought the rights to use the copyrighted work. While board game piracy has natural limits that discourage most people from copying, it also as natural benefits because it's a physical product.
 

Back to Video Games and the Bonuses They Provide


Video games are often a self-running package. You don't necessarily need people skilled in its execution to run it, you just need an electronic brain that's up to the task. You don't need extra bits to get it to run, unless you have DRM or other code wheels that prevent you from just using the thing, sort of like what some game manufacturers like to do with card text. Publishing a rulebook would be the equivalent of making it open-source, which doesn't often happen with major commercial works, but rulebooks allow for human logic to take over a bit, whereas open-source projects are limited by user interest and ability in a way most board games could never limit users. It's because video games are so self-sufficient that many publishers feel that copyright protection is the only way to prevent their software from being widely distributed. 
 
Yet, as I've said, others argue that improving what the legitimate package offers diminishes the need for DRM. Gabe Newell of Valve was using his company's service, Steam, as an example of that kind of  improved service. There are constant software updates, cloud saves that can be ported between systems, controlled but unlimited downloads, and prices that are, at least in this writer's opinion, a bit too low to make all but really high volume games successful, yet help encourage impulse buys and lower the theft threshold (although it could be argued that if people are willing to steal a game, the price doesn't matter a whole lot). I'm not sure how much of his opinion was self-aggrandizing, but I've heard enough positive words from users of Steam that it seems to be working. 
 
[EDIT: While in principle Newell may have a point, some have pointed out that individual sellers can add DRM to their products in addition to Steam's prtections, effectively negating the streamlined Steam interface.]
 
Good Old Games, a service I'm much more familiar with, has a similar tactic of providing users with documentation and little bonuses like stripped audio files, captured icons, that sort of thing. None of these things are far beyond a user with even a small amount of skill in fiddling with game files, but it makes the product look a lot more enticing if you see a bunch of extras underneath. Their major feature is their unlimited, no DRM downloads and forwards compatibility, which I imagine kept users happy long after the pain of their stupid monk stunt faded away.
 
Both of these companies are, like the board game companies I mention, providing more than just the "rulebook", which in a video game is the software itself. They're providing services which help you play the games; the digital equivalent of dice, cards, boards, and errata.
  
But these are major distributors and services, which are often connected to popular games. Small publishers, like Cryptic Comet, don't often get to play ball with such companies, as they produce games that may be a bit too specialized a market. Theft often affects smaller companies even more adversely just because their volume of sales is usually so much lower. If cut out of these distribution networks, such creators wind up having to resort to DRM, or depending upon the good will of players interested in their games. For smaller groups this seems like a tall order to fill. If Newell et al. are right that the way to a user's heart is through features, it may be down to individual smaller companies to find solutions on their own.
 
It should be noted though, that piracy seems to be cultural, varying between groups. This suggests to me that there is no absolute amount we can expect any given game to be illegally copied, and that attitudes toward digital rights are more flexible than they might seem. I don't think it's hopeless for people who believe in protecting copyright, but those that believe that strong DRM restrictions on their software is the only solution may actually be reducing the perceived quality of service that others are trying to improve. 
 
Any other game services or publsihers worth mentioning that provide you more than just the software without resorting to annoying levels of DRM? This would include DRM that's acceptably tolerable.
7 Comments

Quest Variation and Thematic Flavor

By ahoodedfigure 1 Comments

In order for games not to go too crazy with options, and thus break easily, you will often find that quests fall into easily definable categories. My hopes are high that the random questing system in Skyrim allows for enough variation that you won't get bored of it too quickly, but I know that as time passes people will eventually figure out the behavior of that system and it will become somewhat predictable.
 
This is pretty much inevitable, because it's a system made by human beings for human beings. There is a lot to be said, though, for even side quests to have strong thematic flavor, and for them to vary substantially enough that the theme is a major feature and not a distraction.
 
Since I'm still sitting outside of the Skyrimbox I've been playing a different game than most of you are probably playing, called Wizards. It's a java conversion of a board game from the 1970's. You can get it here, though it has some qualifiers for who the intended users are. It runs smoothly enough, has tons of options, and is as lo-fi as you might expect a java conversion of a board game to be. But it also has a quest system that I enjoy a lot, primarily because the flavor text of a given quest, and there are many quests, help elevate the go-there-and-collect-that tasks into minature stories, all centered around protecting a land that's slowly being corrupted by the forces of evil. Demons spring up everywhere you go, usually ruining you if you wind up in the same hex with them, at least to start, the portions of the lands that are the weakest fall permanently into darkness every few weeks, reducing the safe places you can go and wiping out entire quest lines. The game is mad frustrating at times, and you can be quite unfairly sidelined for long enough for it to be game over. I can already think of many ways to improve on the basic ideas, but there's something in this game, something I can't quite put my finger on yet, that is doing things in a way I'd like to see now. 
 
It's definitely tough, and sometimes impossible, but I feel really good when I manage to actually beat the game (I've only done so once out of the ten or so times I've played it since I started playing again. Got lucky, finished tons of quests, built my character up to a top-level sorcerer and managed to avoid the traitor through blind luck, collect all the gems and deposit them in the sacred circle before the end of the world. No, that's not a euphemism).
 
For those of you playing Skyrim (or other games with quest-giving systems), without going into too many specifics, what's your general feeling about the quest system so far?  Things feel varied enough?

1 Comments

The Contest Blues

By ahoodedfigure 1 Comments

I've entered my share of contests in my years. For some reason it's not the same thing as a lottery because you're not spending money, but you are spending time being hopeful, and in the case of yesterday, expending effort.
 
As a conclusion to my mild Skyrim hysteria I attempted to enter a contest in which you could write a work of short fiction set in the Skyrim universe. The guy holding the contest said you could write "anything", be it tragedy, comedy, or mystery, but the main character had to have a rather silly name, and it had to be set in Skyrim. I sat down the day the story was due and cranked out a simple story full of fan service for a certain minor character. I stayed up late waiting for the results to be posted, and I wasn't even a finalist. 
 
I tried to tell myself that it was good practice for my writing, and in a way it was, but the time I spent waiting for the results (when he could have easily let us off the hook and told us he had selected the finalists or something) could have been spent sleeping so that I'd have a normal day the next day. It was also a little rough on my sense of pride, because I thought it was good enough a story to at least be considered. At least with most submissions you get a rejection slip, which I've learned to appreciate, especially if there was feedback.
 
But because this was a contest, the writing wasn't the point. The point was, as in most contests, promotion.
 
GOG kicked off a similar glut of promotions with a crossword puzzle where you fill in answers and send it off before a deadline for the chance to win a game. Having obliterated my normal (if usually eccentric) sleep schedule I awoke with maybe 20 minutes to spare before the context expired. Like a machine I rattled off answers, not even looking at the crossword puzzle itself unless I needed to check for word length, but I may not have made the deadline because of an ambiguously worded clue (not the first time they've done that) and an oversight of my own.
 
All of this isn't that big a deal, but it reminded me that the contests aren't really for anyone but the winner, and the people doing the promoting. You can't know you'll win, so you wind up hoping like the rest of us for a prize that only you will get. The rest of us don't get much of anything for the effort we put in, whatever amount of effort that is, except the lesson that we're not destined to receive everything. Even though it isn't a lottery per se, it's stranger to lose time and effort than it is to lose money. At least with money you can make up for your losses through further effort in a method you're already familiar with. It's trickier to make up for effort that was aimed squarely at a contest.
 
In a way it reminded me of my recent attempt to get a job in the games industry. A lot of hope and effort, a lot of waiting and stress, and in the end it went to someone else. This was much more than a simple contest since I could have used the job, and I believe I would have been good at it. But it's not the only job in the world; I have to keep telling myself that. At least they gave me a nice rejection slip.
 
Yesterday I joined many of you in watching Greg Kasavin ravage the countryside of Skyrim, and it didn't cost any of us any more than our investments in computers, connections, and time spent listening and watching. Unlike those contests I knew I wasn't going to win anything, but I could still learn about the game and see it in action. Throughout a good chunk of that program, as well as the Morrowind and Oblivion sessions that came before, I enjoyed myself quite a bit, geeking out with fellow Bombers. I even helped the Morrowind team out a couple times, if unintentionally anonymously. These types of games don't railroad you too much, so each person who plays them leaves their particular stamp, and you get to see a piece of their psyche up on screen in a way, sharing in their experience of a weird world. Skyrim seems particularly good at that, although I'll never really know how well the game suits me until I actually play it. And I will, eventually. Like my finding a decent job, I hope it'll only be a matter of time. 

1 Comments

Tales of Maj'Eyal (TOME)

By ahoodedfigure 5 Comments

Not sure if I feel like a full writeup on this game, but after playing the hell out of TOME for the better part of a week I have the need to at least spill the basics. I first learned of Tales of Maj'Eyal from Giant Bomb's own Dave Snider when he mentioned it in a video. It took me a little while to even find the thing because of its cryptic spelling, but I finally found it here and downloaded the latest build, number 34 I think it is.
 
TOME is a roguelike that isn't afraid to update the visuals and the interface for people who are a bit tired of an endless list of keystroke commands. It is still a roguelike in the old mode, with a top-down map, static little characters, plenty of powers and random loot to find, tough creatures lurking in higher-level dungeons that will splat you no matter how great you think your level 2 archer is, tons of classes and races to choose from (many you have to unlock by discovering them in the game world), and what I feel to be some pretty good music.
 
It even does something I'd like to see in more Roguelikes, which is vary where you start based on certain factors. Most of the time you get started in a forest filled with the usual compliment of trolls and absurdly angry wildlife (which you can instantly back out of if you want, though it's good to stick with it the first few times you play just to bring your character to level six or so), but dwarven characters start in a very different starting area, and archmages another. These starting areas play out similarly, but are differently configured each time you create a new character, with new loot to find that might help you decide what sort of character you want to build.
 
The game is heavily skill based, and has skill cooldowns and resource points for just about all the skills no matter what the class. Non-magic classes tend to have stamina as their resource and mages have mana, but as you unlock new characters you'll find other powers and power sources. It's kind of impressive to see just how many different kinds of characters you can get, although the racial powers and attribute mods aren't total game changers.
 
Character builds can go in a bunch of different directions, although some choices, at least to start, are certainly better than others. My mage characters didn't survive very long unless I maximized some offensive spells right off the bat, and archers do better if you just stick with stuff that helps them shoot many painful arrows. My most successful character class so far has been the alchemist, which in addition to some cool gem creation and minor offensive abilities, it has a golem pet that acts independently, can shoot beams from its eyes, carry heavy weapons, wear heavy armor, and explode when its master dies, taking out a good chunk of bad guys.
 
Of course death is prevalent in this game; it being a roguelike you normally get one life, although you can pick an optional multiple lives mode where you get a certain amount of resurrects, and you can find items that will give you extra lives. I think this option is really welcome, having been crushed by the loss of some pretty cool characters in the course of play, but so far I've stuck with the single-life option. When I have managed to get brought back to life, I get to keep EVERYTHING I was carrying, which is such a relief. I can't imagine lasting for long if I had to recover my stuff. If you're not into dying at all, those who register (for a fee) with the game designer can actually have unlimited lives as a thank-you for your support.
 
If someone had told me about all this stuff and said it was one of the old ASCII character style presentations I would nod approvingly, but I might not ever play it. I guess I'm a bit burnt out on ASCII style games for the time being because that is often synonymous with arcane interfaces and needless complications. For the most part Maj'Eyal skips all of this, with point and click power usage, movement and attack, a verbose and fully transparent GUI with ways to figure out EXACTLY what powers will do, and you can see how long until the cooldown expires and how much resources you used, with plenty of pop-up explanations when you mouse-over, adequate graphics, and some pretty cool music (don't let the starting area get you down, there's plenty of diversity in environments and music once you explore a bit). 
 
On top of all this, the game has a nice difficulty tree if you're willing to follow it (I'm not, thus I run off and get killed like a dumbass), although some of the bosses can be surprisingly brutal, especially on certain character classes. Still, it wouldn't be a roguelike without nasty surprises. The loot varies decently, and the loot and monsters seem to scale a bit based on where you decide to go first, but not so much that every place seems tailored to your character; some places need to be skipped until you're strong or suicidal enough.
 
Overall I'm quite pleased with TOME. I have encountered what seems to be a memory leak, which makes it so I have to reboot if I play the game too long, but this is on a PC that's nearly a decade old. The crashes did result in the loss of a game or some progress, but you can optionally save it after a major accomplishment, just like you would in a plain old RPG, and even the errors won't be a big deal, assuming you run into them at all. It's still a work in progress, though, so I expect these problems may be smoothed out eventually. 
 
Ask in the comments about the specifics if you want to know more.

5 Comments

Pet (Gaming's Alteration of Terms)

By ahoodedfigure 5 Comments

Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, and fires the dog-zooka as a last resort.
 
Pet is generally considered a term of affection. While many people, arguably justifiably, are trying to recast the role of "the family pet" to a family companion, where the human beings are considered the animal's guardian and not so much an owner, it's generally understood that if you have a pet you watch out for it, provide for it, and treat it humanely. Others will say the term owner has a secondary meaning in this case, and is closer to "guardian" than this contentious re-imagining would suggest. Pet as a term can even be used on humans, with the affection usually in place, although it at times can explicitly imply ownership or dominance (I won't get into it; if you want to learn more, the internet is waiting for curious little innocents to wander into its deep, dark forest). The argument against using the term pet often points toward this parallel meaning, where those who call another pet are establishing a hierarchy, and that the "pet" is somehow lesser. This is fine for some people, but others, even though they still use the term pet to describe the animal that lives with them, will still treat this creature as a full member of the family.
 
In gaming, usually in online RPGs, the source of alternate languages the likes of which only crazy cults can rival, "pet" tends to mean something very specific, a semi-NPC companion that travels with or is summoned by the player character, used to supplement the player's arsenal of abilities and, most importantly, act as a secondary tank of sorts, to distract attackers so the main character can pummel them from a distance. Here the hierarchy is obvious: the pet's well-being is sacrificed for the sake of its owner.
 
Contrasted with real life, you would rarely meet anyone who would use a "pet" in such a fashion. Focusing on dogs, some cultures and families can't get past the idea of dogs being little more than trainable guardians, sort of a meat shield for the home, but I like to think that this is usually thought of in a defensive sense. Still, as I began writing this I realized that yes, real life does have examples of animals, most often dogs, being used in ways similar to the way pets are used in MMOs. What's crucial, though, is that the terminology tends to change when they're employed in this way. The term pet gets taken out and replaced with guard dog, police dog, bomb-sniffing dog. If they're at any time a pet, it seems this term would be used when the dog is not at "work", when it's at the home of its caretaker, being treated as a member of a family or at least being given decent food and a place to sleep.
 
I think in games the term pet is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and may stem from the way MMOs are played. You often show off, even if unintentionally, with your character, so the term pet may be applied just as often when you're showing off the creature to your friends to show what level of ability you've reached. Even affection could be applied, because you know that, unlike in real life, the creature you call a pet won't get mangled or die as a result of combat (even if the pet is a robot, golem, spirit, or shambling undead). At worst you'll need to re-summon it, and it'll be just as dutiful and bright-eyed as the day you first got it. Fallout, Dragon Age, and Fable try to add a bit more consequence to the pets they introduce, but in so doing, I feel, they sort of move out of the feel of the term "pet" and approach companion, because the animals aren't just a source of empathy, however forced, but they're also able characters that love biting genitals for justice. Pet, again, seems only to apply when they're not doing their jobs as combatants or treasure finders.
 
(Don't get me started on how Rinoa treated her pet, though.)
 
No matter how much one protects a real life pet from harm, it will eventually die. In some games, like with main characters, there is an implicit immortality. So, while the virtually brutal treatment of an animal in a game suggests one doesn't care about its welfare, when the rules are such that you can get that animal back without consequences, suddenly the two definitions of pet don't seem so far apart.
5 Comments

Skyrim: Survival Mode Musings

By ahoodedfigure 72 Comments

I don't need games that are arbitrarily harder, but I like it when there are little requirements that make me feel like it's an actual game universe I'm visiting, and not just a colorful screen where I pull a lever and get pleasure pellets.
 

Maintenance in Games

 
When I heard that Fallout New Vegas was going to have a hard core mode with survivalist traits, I think that was the first time that I felt like this generation's big titles were actually aiming for old grognards like myself. But from what I've heard, it's not that intensive an increase in difficulty. Water is plentiful, is the example I usually hear.  Still, I can't say I always like those sorts of requirements in games. The older Ultima games seem ridiculously sped up and my adventuring party a bit too ravenous. I remember fighting to fill their black hole stomachs, hurrying to steal food off tables just to stay alive. Kind of tedious, really.
 
In the Elder Scrolls, weapons have had durability. Even in Arena, the very first ES game, your weapons wore down over time requiring a visit to the blacksmith. Daggerfall continued the tradition, but in subsequent games fixing items actually felt LESS fun to me. The difference was that you could give a blacksmith in Arena a big pile of objects to repair, and then you could pick whether they would be done quickly, or cheaply. The more items you wanted fixed and the cheaper you wanted it, the longer it took. The more items and the quicker you wanted them, the more expensive it was. Those choices actually enhanced the experience for me somehow, that choice made it feel less like a stupid task and more like I was spending my ill-gotten gains for a nice convenience.
 
It all comes down to balance of course, but I DO like a certain amount of maintenance in my games. It helps separate adventuring time from reflective downtime a bit (though of all the RPGs I've played, I think Darklands still does downtime the best), and as long as it's not too much work I think it adds some flavor. I imagine if Skyrim has any maintenance requirements that they'll be minimal, but one of the nice things about recent Elder Scrolls games has been the simultaneous release of content creation tools, meaning that someone with enough time, resources, and knowledge can create some pretty epic mods.
 
I'm not sure if you could ever mod in hunger and sensitivity to cold using creator tools, but it doesn't hurt to hope. Below are some of the things I'd like to see in a Skyrim survival mode:
 

Hunger

 
Since Morrowind, eating has been there to provide bonuses. One of the first items in Morrowind was a loaf of bread that restored stamina, a stat that recovered slowly in that game unless you slept. Potions and edible materials (no matter how gross you imagined they'd taste) would give you basic stat increases or penalties, but they were never really necessary. I guess I like the idea of slow hunger, perhaps represented by stamina drain. In the newer games, Stamina is something that comes back quickly, and is basically used during combat when you're zipping around doing fancy maneuvers, and possibly for running but I don't quite recall. It's used to show short-term exhaustion, but since it refills quickly enough it's not that big a deal. But say that over time it doesn't refill quite as quickly, and maybe its maximum is a bit lower, all until you sit down to a bowl of yeti stew.
 
When in the wild you might prepare food from animals and plants you find, or when in town you could order something from the local tavern, or buy stuff from the market and fix it yourself. It adds a bit to that downtime feeling I'm talking about, making it feel like there's a point to cities other than being a source of quests and gear.
 
Even tougher: When stamina bottoms out, restore it at a cost to health, and don't let stamina recover until you heal properly.
 

Cold

 
In Skyrim this seems especially appropriate to me. Like hunger it doesn't need to be too dramatic, but I like the idea that the cold will wear you down. Maybe in order to avoid freezing in a blizzard, you decide to hide in a nearby cave, which might reveal something to you that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed. Or it might force you to camp every once in a while, instead of walking for days on end with no apparent loss in composure. At the inns you can seek out fireplaces to warm up, or maybe hold your hands over a lit torch in the dungeon. Here I'm thinking of games like Cryostasis.

Even tougher: go ahead and make the cold deadly, and depending on what you're wearing and how cold it is around you, this could cause damage pretty quick. Makes sense given that Nords in this game don't have frost resistance like they did in earlier games. Let me emphasize: should be important what you're wearing. At least in survival mode, I want to be punished for running naked in the snow.

Gear Durability


There may not be a durability mechanic in Skyrim, but when I talk about durability systems I more mean bringing back some of the ideas in Arena, where you can go to a blacksmith (or if skilled in smithing, do it yourself) and get all your gear repaired either quickly or cheaply. Assuming you spend the night in town, perhaps an apprentice will deliver the equipment to you in the morning (for a gold piece), so everything in the downtime portion of a game is centralized around that inn. If you do it yourself, time-lapse it like it does when you sleep. This could open up magical gear which has a self-recovering durability feature (extending this further you could have items that provide you with at least minor relief from certain conditions or diseases; buy an herbal kit that can heal a specific disease, rather than generic curing of all diseases), or gear that can't be repaired (like ethereal items in Diablo, but they don't need to be magical).

Even tougher: Make the expense for keeping your gear in working order a sliding scale. Make consistent repairs cheap, and make last-minute repairs so expensive that you might as well buy new stuff. This actually might not be a whole lot of fun, but it will add a bit of realism if that's what you want.
 

Ingredient Rot

 
Freshly collected potion ingredients should be more potent. You should also be able to prepare ingredients to make them slightly less potent but last a long time, or keep them in treated pouches that slow down decomposition. Tangential to this, I think it might be cool that you don't just loot skins and meat off of your kills; the process should take a little time. I always thought it was weird that you could bash the hell out of a wolf and then loot the hide from it like it was carrying its own skin in a backpack.
 
Even tougher: Not that this sounds appealing to me, but: make stuff become useless if it's out too long.
 

Thirst


In snowy regions this can be solved by just chomping on a little snow, but that will bring down your body temperature. Melting snow at a camp might be a better idea, or drinking ale or water at an inn if that's what's available. If there's ever a desert setting for an Elder Scrolls game this will make more sense, but NV had thirst despite the ubiquity of water so I don't see this as being too big a deal.

Even tougher: Perhaps certain creatures or traps can cause conditions like thirst to get worse, or even extensive bleeding when you've lost a lot of health. And this goes for Hunger, Durability, and Cold: let monsters cause damage conditions that make these survival things worse. Give the player a bit of lore ahead of time maybe, saying these creatures sap heat from their victims, so that players will be prepared with Warmbrew potions and plenty of furs. 

Injuries and Crippling Wounds


I wouldn't want you to be stopped in your tracks, you might as well load at that point, but for those of us stubborn enough to suffer through minor inconveniences, the loss of use of an arm after getting your shield arm smacked by a dragon, or the reduction in speed due to a hit to the leg, would make surviving in time to get healed all the more rewarding.

Even tougher: Let disease creep in more often when you get hurt badly, and let natural healing either take longer, magical healing, or need a bit of the old-fashioned "surgery". Yeah, sounds masochistic, I know.


The Greatest Challenge of All: Convincing Anyone this Is a Decent Idea


A lot of these things can be play-acted, of course. I guess what I like is when the game actually confronts you with these obstacles to see if you can handle it, but doesn't do it so often that it becomes a game about feeding and clothing yourself ( Roman calling you on the cell phone all the time is an example of things maybe going too far). I figure it wouldn't be for everyone, so I'd more like it for the people who get a bit of a rush overcoming these sorts of challenges. It still comes down to balance, and it comes down to variation. Like with the blacksmith example, I think I liked Arena's system more because it wasn't just an obstacle, it felt like it had weight to it, like fixing my gear took a degree of effort that could be ameliorated with money or time, and that if I wanted I could skip it for a little longer, and THAT would be my way around the obstacle for the time being.

What these features would need is a way to figure out when it would be a good idea to bring them in. It might step away from the simulation aspect a bit, but having a "director" or "dungeon master" AI that decides when there's a lull in the game would help with that, inserting a hunger, thirst, or disease obstacle like older games might do random encounters, but do it in a way that only pops up if you happened to be walking a long, long way.

But hey, I don't think random encounters are necessarily a bad thing, so I know I'm not going with the popular sentiments on this! :)

Any games you care to mention with survival or maintenance elements that actually worked for you?
72 Comments

Might and Magic Heroes Kingdoms of Heroes of Might and Magic

By ahoodedfigure 3 Comments

I've spent the last few weeks playing Might and Magic Heroes: KingdomS. (I think the colon should be there, I'm not sure.) It's been said before: how do you judge a game that is ongoing and slow to build? Would one have to play it a year before one could give it a review? If so, some stuff could never be reviewed.
 
I think I've got a good handle on its gameplay now and I can tell you what I think without knowing much about where it's going or what the endgame is.  Here goes.
 

MMKH overview

  

The game is a browser-based, multiplayer strategy game where you build up your kingdom through build actions and brief, managed battles.  You accumulate gold, wood, ore, gems, sulfur, mercury, and crystal to spend on build actions, and find mines that help with this. These mines can be upgraded, effectively doubling their output once the process is completed, and you can build up your town with creature dwellings and their upgrades, resource storage, and a tower for magical research. The surroundings, once cleared of enemies, can also be used to create enhancements that incrementally boost mine output, creature dwelling output, and your defenses.
 
Once you reach enough influence you're able to expand to a completely new town, founding it within your sphere of influence in an untamed region with a randomized set of mines. You always get four mines in each region, and depending upon which town type you have, you will need certain materials more than others. This makes picking a new town crucial to your continued growth, although you can trade in the marketplace with other players for resources, or buy them from NPC merchants who usually charge high prices in gold.
 
Each hero has an attack, defense, and magic statistic, and can upgrade through the use of accumulated skill points they earn every time they level up. Beginning skill fields or starting skills within those fields each cost one point, but the next upgrade of the same skill costs 2 and then finally 3 to max it out. Each hero may have a total of three skill fields, and each skill field has 4 skills that can be upgraded. The skills range from kingdom management stuff to stats that directly affect spellcasting or battle. Depending upon the hero's class, they have access to different skills, and their increase of attack, defense, and magic when they level is based upon different types of progression, so some gain a lot of attack, defense, or magic early on but fail to gain points in the mid-range, while others gain in these stats steadily.
 
If you don't like the way your hero has been going, you can spend two skill points to respec your character's skills, which is something I would have liked to have seen in the original Heroes games that I'd played, although the idea that you could never change them did make your skill choices more meaningful. The skills are not randomly presented to you, however; you choose from all of the skills available and craft your team to suit your needs. Since each hero can do one task at a time, the more heroes you have the more you can do, sending some off into battle to kill monsters for experience and treasure, while using others to build structures outside of town. In a sense, the amount of heroes you have means the amount of actions you can perform, beyond building up your town, which doesn't require a hero to complete.
 
If this sounds a lot like Heroes games you've played over the years, or even an improvement on the formula, hold on a sec. I've deliberately left out details just to show you how the above description can be used to draw you in to a game you may not recognize when you actually get into it. The very strong differences between MMHK and the HoMM/MMH games come in combat, options, and how tasks are completed. Only read below before judging if this is something you want to get into.

Combat

 
Combat in MMHK is markedly different than any Heroes title you may have played. You still get multiple levels of creatures which you can hire from creature dwellings and that you get free when you hire heroes. You also get them as part of the game's reward structure for completing certain "quests" that are there to teach you the game's fundamentals. You place these creatures under the command of your heroes to form an army, and this army can be used to free up mines, buildings within your own town(!) so that they can be developed, and clear areas of wilderness around your town. Destroying a monster army yields experience for the hero and resources if out in the wilderness, or extra troops of your troop type if they're killed within your town. You will rarely also get an artifact from the wilderness armies, which may or may not be useful for your particular heroes (but that you can sell on the market to other players if you want to get rid of it, assuming they'll buy it), and even more rarely, although I've never seen it, if you overwhelm troops of your own type with your forces, you may get a few free troops in the bargain.

Combat itself is rock-paper-scissors, with ranged troops being hit by cavalry (usually flying units like dragons, sprites, and gargoyles, which in Heroes games were often used to neutralize ranged units), cavalry being weak against melee units, and ranged dicing up melee. The bonuses provided for these interactions is that the strength of a unit is one and a half times higher when they're up against a unit weak to their troop type. You organize your army such that the top stack of your army hits first, followed by the next until one army or the other is defeated. A unit's strength is a number that stands for the units attack strength AND its hitpoints. There are no random numbers generated like in Heroes games you know, and once you've committed to a battle you wait a little while and get the results. You do not tactically control creatures; all the tactics are in setting up for the battle, and applying any spells you may know.

This means that the battles are entirely determined. You get modifiers for certain artifacts and for your hero's attack power if attacking units (your defense is only useful when defending against others' attacks, which in a PvE server, the kind I've been playing on, is rare), you can cast spells if you're able, and your skills can provide modifiers to creature strength. But all the thinking is done before you enter battle. The game is so deterministic, in fact, that one can use a third-party online battle calculator to guess what the optimal strategy for a given battle is. You enter troops into the attacking and defending sides, pick spells, define your hero, and then it computes the outcome. Maybe some people are able to do all of this in their head, but I use the calculator when I really want to know what the optimal battle outcome should be, and skip it when I just want to get things over with.

Experience is awarded based on how many casualties you take, and how strong the opposing army was compared to yours, measured in total strength. If you take on a foe much greater than yours, using the rock-paper-scissors system to your advantage, you gain much more experience. If you overwhelm them with strong troops you may not gain a lot of XP, but you do get favor in that you expend less troops to get that experience. Personally I LIKE this dynamic; it adds genuine choice to battles that remind me of the choice you get with treasure chests in HoMM games, where you either got experience or gold.

The problem comes where you realize that the meat of Heroes games, the battles, winds up being more about calculations than desperate ploys and flanking. Since none of the creature stacks have any special powers, they're just a picture with strength and an attack type, it doesn't feel nearly as rewarding or personal as the battles in the old Heroes games. You do, however, feel the sting when you sacrifice troops for your own hero's benefit, which is nice, although the calculator you may use will tell you the optimal choices either way, sometimes counter-intuitively showing that reducing certain troop stacks will reduce casualties. It all comes down to whether or not you find such fiddly systems fun.

Building and Training: It Takes Time

 

In the old Heroes games, you got as much out of it as you were willing to get. You would start a day, get your resources posted in the corner of your screen, send your heroes out, expending their movement points, running into creature stacks and getting into battles. The battles could be long, with huge ones taking quite a while to complete, but the movement was as fast as you wanted it to be. When you built a part of your town, assuming you had the resources, the building basically appears out of thin air, and when a hero trained in a skill they learned it instantly.

In Kingdoms, everything takes time. Real time. It cannot be sped up by paying real money, if that's what you're thinking. If you want to build that peasant hut, it's going to take as long as it's going to take. You can make it go a bit quicker by spending more resources, or longer if you want to save on expenses, but it will take a while. The more advanced a building is, the longer it takes. Since this is a browser game that you can just drop in the middle of play and pick up days later, this makes more sense than it would for a game you play against AI players or in direct competition with others. You can get all your build orders together and leave the game, coming back when you feel like it, but you can't get instant builds, and you can't make build queues. When a character spends skill points to increase a skill, that takes about two hours to complete, and they're going to be doing that until they're done. Some tasks are so huge that they may take a half a day, or even a full day. There's even a skill that reduces build times by a bit, but it's not a dramatic reduction. Battles, however, take a few minutes, unless you're going to trek across the map to attack a player (in PvP servers) or attack an outbreak of creatures from the underworld who are trying to attack the players (in some PvE servers).

I have to admit that if I had read that, I would probably not even have bothered to play because it sounds annoying to get into a game only to have wait; it's less annoying in practice, and you actually feel like you're building a real place, but I think it's designed to keep you coming back. There's a training version of the game, though, limited to an hour of play, where these time limits expire in a matter of seconds and minutes, letting you know if the game is for you without a huge investment in time, although the version of the training mode I played seemed buggy and prone to the occasional crash, unlike the full version of the game. Since this is a PvE server I don't have to worry about attacking players, and attacking NPCs are rare, so it's more about creating this place and managing resources to do it. There's a challenge in making the right decisions on how to upgrade places, what needs to be built next, what territory to occupy, what quests to complete to get bonus resources and which to ignore. But it's not what Heroes was like at all in this regard. The game didn't move at your pace, it moves at its own.
 

Options

 

The elephant in the room is how you pay for all of this. I've built up a town and started in on a second, I have a few heroes with plenty of experience in skills. I've almost wiped out all the hapless NPC monsters in the wilderness around my starting town and have completed a lot of the quests for free loot. I supplement my income by selling off resources I collect to other players, and I have an army strong enough to challenge some of the bigger NPC armies that threaten one of my towns, and I haven't paid a cent.

As part of the whole free-to-play movement, this game, which has been out for a few years in French speaking servers and has since been passed on to German and English servers, has introduced an optional try before your buy system that exists alongside its subscription service. You don't buy direct in-game advantages, but everything that is free or for a virtual cost for subscribers costs "seals", which must be purchased with real money or earned very slowly through advancing the in-game ladders and defeating creature stacks.

The things you can purchase, though, are largely not very enticing, and seem like mid-game level stuff. You can reduce your aggro such that invading NPCs may not choose you as a target, you can earn the right to build more vaults on your property that you can delve into to gain treasures, you can change what the mines around a given city yield, you can make cosmetic changes to heroes or respec your hero's skills without paying in skill points. You can also hire more than three heroes using this system; you're limited to three if you play for free, although I imagine this restriction is absent for subscribers.

I don't feel that my not subscribing or not paying incrementally has hindered my towns much at all. Shrewd trading in the markets and auction house, resource management, and use of battle calculators has made me jump up the ranks fairly satisfactorily, and I don't feel any strong pressure to buy anything. It's not like other games I've seen where you feel truly hindered, and it shows a bit gentler way to leverage payments than what I've seen in other games. It does feel like a game to me, but it isn't what I like in Heroes. It has Heroes elements, it feels like Heroes at times, but exploration and tactical battles are pretty much absent. It's not a farming simulator, much, but it's more kingdom management and less adventure.
 

Conclusions(?)

 
I'm not sure how long I'll play it, but because I've reached a point where I can make a bunch of decisions and leave it to run for a day I don't feel that it's all that big an investment of my time. I've seen so many free games that actually reduce time duration as part of their payment system, but this is not one of those. For the most part, everyone's on the same playing field, and it makes it feel less oppressive that way. Still, if you subscribe or if you use micropayments you will have little advantages for dungeon delving or a hero roster; it comes down to whether or not that's going to bother you. Since the advantages seem minuscule I don't really care, especially since the world I'm playing in is just PvE.

I guess I keep coming back to the game, despite my misgivings, because I have built this little world up, and I'm proud of the accomplishments I've made relative to other players, and relative to the board. I've made some mistakes, and unlike in old Heroes games I can't really load and try something new, so it creates a bit of a challenge in picking the right action the first time. But underlying this game there seems to be an ideal path. There are random elements in where mines are placed and how you're placed relative to other kingdoms which will affect your progress, but overall I feel like there are paths to follow. Some of the quests feel misleading, in that if you follow them without knowing all the rules you can set yourself back by losing too many troops. And the documentation, to be honest, is spotty, with some entries being decent, and others being full of misspellings and confusing terminology. I learned how to play by doing, but there are still some finer points that are a bit lost on me. I imagine this will get better over time (hey, Ubisoft, you need a document writer? My rates are reasonable), but it pays to read the forums and not just the FAQ or the adequate online strategy guide. I'm not sure if the rules are much clearer for French speakers, though, since if everything would be laid bare, it could be instantly optimized by people who love spreadsheets.

I wouldn't keep playing if I didn't feel there was something to this. It's not a deep game, but there are lots of little threads that combine together that I don't understand as well as others might. If any of this seems interesting you can always try the training mode and see what you think, or play for a day or two, since it's free. I'd not recommend it to anyone who assumed it's just Heroes translated into the world of MMOs. Too much has changed, although some of the flavor is still there. As to whether or not the game is ultimately rewarding to play, I won't be able to tell you definitively for a while yet. Such is the nature of the massively multiplayer online beast.
3 Comments

Death and Life (Gaming's Alteration of Terms)

By ahoodedfigure 5 Comments

Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, just in time for Sunday services. 
 
The use of the word death was the very first schism between common culture and game culture that I was aware of. I still remember hearing on the radio explaining that when kids said "they died," they were just talking about video games. It piqued my interest; I'd done the same thing without even realizing it. I'd "died" countless times, and I'd describe it as such to others. It'd never occurred to me how absurd that might sound.
 
In the real world, death is the universal tyrant, driving us to distraction with its constant threats. It holds our loved ones hostage, it taunts us, it fuels our nightmares and our  hopes, and we spend most of our lives avoiding its truth so we don't collapse. Thanks to our ancestors, who pushed through despite death's grin, we carry the torch with the hope that life will be easier, or even better, for us and those in the future.
 
Death in games is rarely permanent. Even the "iron man" mode in roguelikes doesn't kill US or stop our ability to play the game, it only kills our character. (I guess an analogy would be a game you purchase once, can play as much as you want, but if your character dies you have to buy it again. Hmm... sounds like arcade games!) Here, even death is just another obstacle to surmount. It's something we deal out unthinkingly and try desperately to avoid, but we can still examine the phenomenon indirectly, as Perseus had spied Medusa.
 
We've even got "lives", something that was probably always a side-effect of the early arcade game's tension between payment and character death. Rather than tell a player "tough luck" right away, you tease them into thinking they can conquer a game through a little experimentation, allowing multiple tries. You may initially die on purpose or act recklessly to learn the rules of the world, but through multiple lives, or multiple coins, you may be able to master it; death only happens when you give up.
 
God, if only real life were that simple.
 
Even though I use the term "real life" knowing that gaming is part of common reality, there's still a sharp divide between the world we all share, and a hobby where death is a temporary setback, and a new life is awarded every 10,000 points. 
5 Comments

The Blurbs

By ahoodedfigure 3 Comments

I have spent the past few days playing Heroes of Might and Magic: Kingdoms (I know it's not quite called that, but the other title is too undignified).  I'm willing to talk about it, if anyone wants to hear it. It's both not what you expect, and totally what you'd expect.
 
I'm also thinking about talking about Darklands in depth for any RPGrognards out there. If you haven't tried it yet I think you're missing out. I still feel that the menu system in cities, the saints, the alchemy all make the game very fun. I'll probably get it on GOG, but I secretly wish that someone would see what they did and totally make a modern version of it, smoothing out the wrinkles.
 
Daggerfall is taunting me with its weirdness...  I'm still in a mood to play it so I'll try to see if I can get any further. 
 
ROM Check Fail is now released as open source! If you don't know what I mean, go to farbs.org
 
Solium Infernum has a new content patch, which should be awesome.
 
Hm... I guess that was it.
 
EDIT: The Farbs link was fucked up. Sorry about that.

3 Comments