ahoodedfigure

@ArbitraryWater: I read up on the inquisition a bit. Seems a lot of the torturing was done judicially, through whatever civilian system was there. But the word inquisition also means a bunch of different things depending on the time period.

And yeah, I don't get my kicks from torture, even the virtual kind. There are a few such things in certain storylines in SWTOR that make me uncomfortable even when others are playing them. Helps emphasize why a narrow band of choices can be really frustrating: you don't ever free the guy getting zapped by lightning, but you can be snarky about it. You rebel you.

@believer258: Yeah, despite this being a DA2 discussion board unintentionally, it was more my perception of the romance stuff in particular that felt creepy and weird, though others disagree with my framing of it.

In general not many people even try to go into social stuff in games, they tend to be cutscene material. I'll give Bioware and other companies credit for trying to gameify what's a pretty complicated set of human behaviors, but I don't think we've nailed something that feels natural enough that you're not sitting there metagaming it all the time. I do try to pull a bit more of a "what would my character do" angle sometimes, but it depends on the immersion level and how hidden the mechanics are. Once I've figured out too much, I find myself doing things just because I know about the material benefits, not because I feel like it's fun to do.

@Deleth: I think you're more running off what the comments were than what I wrote. This really isn't about DA2 very much, it pointed out a specific aspect, the sexual conqueror stuff, that seemed to push in that direction. The rest of the story wasn't part of the discussion, and as others have said, the main character itself goes in an anti- direction, especially at the end.

When I haven't been playing Darklands or writing essays of varying levels of clarity, I've pretty much been playing all three of Cryptic Comet's releases. I helped playtest one of the games, but I found each of the games different enough that there really hasn't been any replacement when I want to just sit down for a little while and play a game to its conclusion. They all fall under the strategy game umbrella, but there tends to be so much chaos in these games that they feel much more tactical. It's not so much about memorizing development charts or anything, despite all the scary numbers and dry-looking UI that kept me from trying Armageddon Empires for... years I think, the games tend to be light on the rules for specific events. The depth comes in putting all the simple rules together, then dealing with problems while things are flying at you from all directions. It's sort of the difference between games like Doom, where the emphasis is on running and gunning, and more incremental, event-based shooters that have come since. Cryptic Comet games have enough random events that it becomes more about you experiencing the system and getting surprises and cool combinations of abilities that help you pull off a win, and they always have good art and music, as well as doing whatever theme they're setting up justice, both in general atmosphere and gameplay. They're not for everybody, but I enjoy them long after fancier games have faded from my memory.

The games are for sale from the Cryptic Comet website. The prices aren't like you'll see at Steam (unless you get roped into one of those massive bundles); they're a bit more on the hobby side of the pricing divide. These games definitely don't copy anything that's out there, though, which is damned inspiring. I'll talk briefly about each of the games, if you're curious.

Armageddon Empires

Armageddon Empires was the first, and in some ways it's the one I enjoy the most relative to my time investment. In it you take control of forces that survived a global apocalypse, each with different types of forces that develop in different ways and have a whole set of possibilities that, while not mutually exclusive from the others, tend to make them play out in different ways. The game treats this fragmented, post-apocalyptic scramble for resources and allies mechanically with a collectible card game style mechanic where you have a deck of cards that represent troops, bases, leaders, scientists and doomsday devices. Each card requires a certain amount of resources to play. You get these resources at the start of every turn, and can find more as you explore the randomized map to set up resource gathering equipment, as well as finding hidden caches and resource generating buildings. Thing is, at the start of every turn, you also have to roll to see which side in the conflict goes first for the round, and you can modify that chance by spending resources. The more you spend the more likely you are to get a ton more action points and a jump on your ruthless AI opponent (especially useful when you've finally figured out where they are and are looking to strike), but you'll have fewer resources to spend on new cards and to fuel some existing cards' abilities.

The total of all this is exploration, resource management, and strategic gambles. In the generous demo you get 30 turns before it shuts down, but I usually manage to plow through the game in that amount of time and it doesn't feel so much like a limit. The demo has two of the four factions, and I tend to play the humans; the machines are harder for me to do right. I get some satisfaction out of getting an army mobilized and sufficiently strong to blast through whatever the enemy has built up over so many turns, and usually the randomness tends to flatten out enough that I'm able to impose some order on the random draws and random terrain. Makes for a good, relatively short game.

Solium Infernum

The next was Solium Infernum. In it each player is an arch fiend vying for the throne of Hell after Lucifer abandoned it. The games can be long, and unlike with the demo of Armageddon Empires there is no set time limit to completion. There are conclave tokens which are randomly drawn which give you an idea how close you are to the end, but there can be several turns where a token isn't drawn, and this feeling of uncertainty bleeds through to just about everything. The chaos in this game, appropriate for Hell, is ramped up quite a bit. You gather resources through demanding it from your subjects, but the tribute they can give you varies from turn to turn. While sometimes this can mean you don't have enough resources to follow through on your plans, it also forces you, like in Armageddeon Empires, to react tactically to situations that the game hands you.

Players are AI, but can also be hotseat players or PBEM players. The biggest lament I hear from people is that there's no online play, and yeah, that can slow multiplayer with other humans down. I'd bet 99% of my games have been just the single player, but they're still fun enough. This game doesn't emphasize exploration as much as AE, the wrap-around board where you move your legions to secure territory and places of power has completely open information from the start. The source of chaos comes from the archfiends themselves, since they can play event cards that require a legion to be donated to storm the gates of Heaven, or make you master of the bazaar, letting you gain resources when other players spend them in the bazaar, but you're forbidden from buying there until the event expires. A well-played event can often change the course of the game. The legions themselves level up sometimes when they survive battle, and their abilities can be modified through artifacts, and through praetors, leaders which you can also train to send to arena battles to solve disputes. Actually, if there's a mechanic I think is the most original when compared to other strategy games I've played it's diplomacy: since you can't fight everyone directly (even in Hell there are rules) you have to bitch slap other players through insults and demands, which are a really well balanced series of options that force players to think about the consequences.

There are a crazy amount of options too, like rituals that can lay waste to legions or bribe away enemies, multi-part scrolls that can enhance your abilities, tons of relics which can give you extra powers or rituals you can perform, many legions to choose from, all with this hellish, crazy artwork that references popular culture that manages to be both nightmare inducing and funny at the same time. It's probably the single most ambitious of the three current games, and as such takes the longest to learn. The tons of ways abilities and events can combine, too, often bring about some unexpected results, but that tends to happen when you do the board game equivalent of stuffing everything you can into a single box.

Six Gun Saga

The lightest and quickest of Cryptic Comet's games is Six Gun Saga, a game I first mentioned a while ago, set in a fictional town in the mythic old west in the United States. It's a single player card game where you are dealt from a shared deck different "dudes," which are historical and fictional characters with different levels of ability, deeds, which give you locations you can use to get money or leverage certain powers with. On each card, in addition to the stats of the character or the abilities of the place, are special abilities and cash values, as well as a playing card value if you attach it to an existing posse, which is useful in the game's seven card stud style combat. You usually never hire characters or build buildings. Instead you sometimes spend a card to murder one of your opponent's dudes, or to give one of yours more health or gunslinging ability. You can give a character permanent powers that let you draw more cards, hold more cards in your hand, or be able to move the posse they're in an extra space per turn. All of this is in pursuit of victory points, which you gain by occupying story cards with appropriate characters (a lawman will be needed to access the Hang 'em High card, while only Apaches can start an uprising), as well as killing members of rival posses.

The way the game plays out, you often feel like you're telling a little story, where a character might, despite his gout and getting ambushed while going to the outhouse, manages to rob the bank and cost the rival gang, who happens to own the back, much needed influence in the town. Too bad he fell off his horse and died on turn later... While the AI doesn't feel as strong here as it does in the prior games (especially Armageddon Empires), this storytelling angle always pleases me if I bother to exercise it. That, and the game's very fast to play and relatively inexpensive. The demo lets you play 15 turns against a few different opponents, while the full version has a different scenario (the Weird West) and many more bosses to choose from and play against.

Occult Chronicles

Next up in development will be an investigation game where the player is trying to stop the world being swallowed up by horrors, a la Cthulhu. It looks like it'll have card challenges similar to the poker-style combat of Six Gun Saga (only using tarot cards, naturally), and have a bunch of nasty surprises to deal with, I'm guessing.

The blog with updates on the game in development is at http://www.crypticcomet.com/blog/, with the base link giving you access to demos, manuals, and the shop.

I don't think these games are perfect; each has their quirks, sometimes due to all the different variables crashing together. Sometimes the chaos will ruin you with no chance to recover, and sometimes you'll so dominate the AI opponents that your score will skyrocket. Par for the course when chaos is a big ingredient. Also, despite a lot of strategy games out now they're more single player focused, so with the exception of Solium Infernum it's always going to be you versus the AI, and even in Solium Infernum if you want to play multiplayer it's going to be by sending files over email or having friends around the same computer. But while they aren't as polished as big titles, they try things no one else seems to have done, and do them in very interesting ways. This is coming from someone who has played some of these games a lot.

Not sure when Occult Chronicles will come out, given that Cryptic Comet is basically one guy working in his spare time I won't hold my breath, but I'll probably play some of these games while I wait to see what's next.

@Slag: I think that's pretty much where I was going. I probably should have come up with better examples to aim at the target squarer, though.

It also feels more like a complaint than an observation when I read it again, which it wasn't necessarily intended as being when I started. Was more of an observation when it started, but I guess the idea of Mary Sue stuff tends to push in the criticism direction. Anyway, got people talking (and apparently got people playing DA2 again).

@DonChipotle: Haven't played 7, but would like to. It told more of a House history, rather than an individual's history, didn't it?

@Brodehouse: Ah, like subjective visuals? Yes, that makes perfect sense, although I didn't know there were mainstream games that did that. It means that more has to be on the client side, but I don't see that being too big a deal, especially fpr the tradeoff of that feeling of permanence. It's not very immersive after destroying a cannon in SWTOR means it comes back after a little while, if I recall correctly. In general, subjectivity should be used more often in online games for the reasons you're talking about (though I'd hate it if every game did that. Guess it depends on what you're trying to accomplish).

@biggiedubs: Dynasty Warriors! Good example. It's an interesting one too, since whichever story campaign you play, you always manage to change history to make things look good from your character's perspective. Not to mention you blast through entire armies. The story is thin enough that saying that X hates/is rivals with your main doesn't really hold a lot of weight. I say this being a fan of that series.

I wouldn't say all games are about empowerment, although they hand you a few tools and tell you good luck. In roguelikes you're pretty much destined to fail, especially the first few (hundred?) times you play. You get better through exploring the game's world and survive or fail due to stuff beyond your control AND your own abilities getting better as a player. Spelunky's like that too, whether or not it's roguelike enough. I managed to whup that game eventually but it took a lot of deaths.

Good example on Battlefront. There are other games where you're more a contributor to the overall story, too... Star Wars: The Old Republic gave me distant feelings of that, despite the bribe-your-buddies stuff, since you DID manage to make some sort of difference, but the world didn't hinge on your every action. Yet at the same time I wished I'd made MORE of an impact in a way, which is kind of hard given how online games are usually structured. In the KOTOR games it pushed too hard on the you are awesome side, but it was satisfying that there were permanent effects that couldn't be taken back, some of which didn't feel so good. Maybe this whole thing is more complicated than the simple question of empowerment.

And yeah, that feeling you point out, that what you did may have had some sort of story impact but the result felt arbitrary, feeds into why the "it's all good" game design doesn't help to create memorable experiences. It does help if even the game designers didn't see it coming, but if they saw it coming and put a text blurb in there but otherwise nothing happens, then it feels underwhelming.

Finally, your point about rail-roading is taken. I try to get at that in the essay, where I tried to say that a good story is better than bland achievement gathering.

@Brodehouse: It's not what I was aiming for but that's another thing I find a bit disturbing, the buy-friends-gifts-to-max-out-friendship-meter thing. It connects in a way, because it makes friendship merely one more thing to level, rather than being the weird and complex (and interesting, in my opinion) thing it is in real life. It's just a matter of spending the money and effort and suddenly everyone is friends with you.

That DA2 manages to give characters agency in other ways goes against what I was saying, and suggests DA2's strength may lie in its plotting. Since I haven't had the chance to play it myself (stalled out on the first game for various reasons) I can only go off of what others have said.

And I do mention Oblivion, which is exactly the leader of every guild. I assume Skyrim moves in the same direction, though I've not beaten main quest stuff yet.

@Ghostiet: You both make an interesting point, that the Mary Sue interpretation is POSSIBLE in the games mentioned, but not necessary, given that it's still down to the player whether these things actually happen. Other games are less likely to fall out of that. Maybe Master Chief is humble, that the fame is just thrust upon him? Just the lucky one who didn't happen to be wiped out? Hard to say.

@theManUnknown: It's hard to talk about all games at once. Most games WON'T go too far in this direction, probably because of the pitfalls I hint at, that it makes for a boring game. There tends to be more rail-roading lately, though, perhaps to up the appeal to a wider group of people. But that may deaden the impact the game has, if you make things acceptable to all.

It's fair to point out the later Elder Scrolls games seem to let you have it any way you want it all at once, and I wonder if maybe they should just allow that sort of thing on replay. There's nothing wrong with mutually exclusive choices, at least in principle, although I get a bit annoyed if the game bludgeons me with a choice before I'm even given a chance to investigate the consequences.

(See below for a correction)

Maybe you haven't heard the term "Mary Sue"; I hadn't until a few years ago when fan fiction writers briefed me on what the hell they were talking about. The Mary Sue, loosely defined, is a relatively flawless extension of the writer, whose mere presence seems to conquer those around him or her (not bothering to keep it gendered here, it applies to any character as far as I'm concerned), whether that conquering is through battle or just general charisma. The world revolves around the character, and the character can do no wrong.

Sound familiar? Many, many games have us play the role of a Mary Sue, often creepily so. While I haven't played Dragon Age 2, I felt upon reading that you could make any or all companions your sexual playthings to be disturbing, not because I'm opposed to the old in-out in-out, but that it seemed like the characters had no wills of their own. Other Bioware games tend toward this, but it's not unique to Bioware of course. Many, many games have us somehow being better than the rest by default, and sometimes they contrive reasons for us to be so because otherwise it would feel ludicrous in a world where everyone else seems relatively fragile. You probably have a few in mind right now.

Perhaps it's down to taste, but I tend not to feel very fulfilled if these sorts of accomplishments feel preordained. Maybe that's why I like it if the game is tougher; the challenge forces ME to be better, rather than the game simply rewarding me for following the training it gave me. It's also an argument in favor of emergent situations I think, because it prevents the designers from anticipating that we want a predictable ladder of empowerment as our only reward.

There is a bit of empowerment in just about everything. I probably can't shoot as straight in real life as I do in Borderlands, and I certainly can't get shot then take a bit of a breather and be OK again. This is fairly common in games that don't instakill, and they let us experience stuff that would easily wipe us out if we tried it for real. It's that point that many game critics miss; we do it because we KNOW it's bad to do in real life, yet don't mind trying it out, rather than we're training ourselves to do it later.

Yet taking that empowerment too far seems to bring a falsity to it all. Part of the pleasure of games is the unique stamp we can put on it, and I think that's why some degree of character customization is frequently the standard, even in games where the protagonist is already defined. But we're smart enough, usually, to see how this advancement can often lead to a monotonic-feeling game experience if we're bound to win regardless. The stamp, then, doesn't matter, so we're taken for a bit of a ride, then dumped off at the end. That initial feeling can be great, but it's likely to be forgotten.

Another part is challenge, or at least uncertainty. Going into a situation with the feeling that things may go wrong is sorta bothersome, but it helps make the payoff more thrilling. This holds true for losing as well as winning, strangely, because seeing that things can go wrong, while a bummer, can often show us that there's no safety net. Even if we wind up loading again, we learn from our mistakes and, in a way, customize the experience by improving our approach. Too much death can suck, too, but too little not only leads to short playing times, but a sense that we weren't really playing a game.

Even games with little customizability and challenge can still be worth it if the story is decent. A game that lets you try all sorts of different options, or at least tells one strongly narrated story, can make up for the lack in these other aspects, even if it winds up feeling less of an actual *game* in the bargain. Part of what makes a good story, though, is challenging the idea that the character's destiny has to be taken for granted, that there's some sort of conflict involved, either with themselves or with their environment, or at the very least a conflict with our real world expectations (though the latter has diminishing returns if the world DOES change; it's why a film that was revolutionary for its time, for example, may feel dated and overly cautious to us now. That, or if the world's attitudes are exaggerated, like often happens in Mary Sue tales).

A tangent to a strong story is strong characters. Not all games have characters, really, but some of the most memorable aspects of any game are often the characters, because they're things we're very likely to relate to (or hate). I think the essence as to why the DA2 Universal Seduction Initiative bothers me is that the characters lack any sort of center. They exist as extensions of the player character to what seems to be an excessive degree. Maybe this all works for some people, maybe it makes total sense in-game somehow, but to me it's the social equivalent of managing to hold all offices in the land simultaneously, like you can in Oblivion. Characters aren't human, per se, but they're proxies for humanness, and violating their fictional agency takes us in some weird directions.

Remove all of these elements and the work becomes a mindless march toward an inevitable conclusion. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing if you happen to get off on it, this is the internet after all, but too much of the same is withering, and making a game bereft of interesting conflicts and three dimensional characters or cool, unexpected ways to interact with the environment feels like the exact opposite of true empowerment to me: having everything handed to us, narratively or through gameplay, makes the game, and more specifically the main character, and by extension us, weaker.

Any games you tried that managed to subvert that Mary Sue tendency at all? There are entire categories that do, I suppose, like racing games and competitive strategy. It does seem to lean more toward single player experiences, so I guess that's more what I'm thinking.

Edit:

I've been told that, at least as far as some players know, it's not possible to get into bed with EVERYONE AT ONCE. Apparently my half-remembered picture of all the characters on the bed together, their personalities forgotten because the player wanted to [whatever euphamism is in vogue nowadays] with no regard for what happened before or what their individual tastes might be, was false. If it's not possible, then the DA2 example no longer fits, since, despite what some people seem to have gleaned from the above, I wasn't talking about the whole game merely because I mentioned that specific aspect of the game.

As someone told me, at the very least it'll be an excuse to play Dragon Age 2.

Not that I'm eager to do that since I haven't even completed the first one yet. Should have taken the Dwarves telling me I wasn't ready for the caves more seriously.

@ArbitraryWater: Agreed on all counts with Darkside. Art took a significant leap forward, as did the music. One of my favorite game tracks is in there, the doom-sounding dungeon theme. The XP rewards were huge to start, I remember the first quest I completed in ALL of World of Xeen was a Darkside quest that gave me 1M XP, basically leveling my dudes past the starting stuff on the Cloudside of things.

I found the point where I gave up on Arcanum was when a shop owner seemed to suggest that she had some quests for me, like actually talking about it more obviously than usual. It had reached a point where the game's generosity with stuff to do actually exceeded its seeming enthusiasm. Probably not really the case but it felt that way for me as a player. I sort of wish they hadn't shown you the big city so early, that would have been something to build up to. Also I was annoyed that they hadn't thought that a player might want to tell the newspaper about a specific corruption incident, even though the option seemed like it would be there. That was just one quest, though.

Ah, I didn't realize you were actually part of the inquisition. That's fucked up. Not sure who that's supposed to entertain... then again I know who it's supposed to entertain, but it wouldn't be me. I'd be coming up with excuses not to torture people, which doesn't sound like their intent. I'm willing to bet the historical inquisition wasn't trying to fulfill the exact stereotype we get now, either. Not all of them. I hope. What time period is this, and where?

I LIKE Monks in theory. They've always been the slow build kind of character, ever since they were introduced waaay back in the first edition pen and paper. I think the problem has always been that you build the game around standard leveling schema and then you try to insert an unarmed dude in there. You have to make him arbitrarily equivalent, which means he may exceed the party if he does this naturally or be too loot dependent if not, or he'll lag way behind or be way ahead... but because they're outliers they're harder for people who design RPG systems as an algorithm. In pen and paper games it's easier to fudge and adapt while in the middle of a campaign (or the middle of a sentence). I guess that's my primary fondness for pen and paper in a nutshell, with an intelligent person (usually) behind the system, the system itself doesn't run things and can be changed or even annulled if it's not working.