This weekend, the Gamespot ExtraLife stream closed out on a game of Sid Meier's Pirates! Reminded of how much I loved that game, I began replaying it for the 5th time in a decade. It's one of my favorite games of all time, up with the likes of Deus Ex and Chrono Trigger, which ain't bad for a game that consists solely of minigames. But that description sells it short. The key is it combines simple minigames with an extremely malleable open world that is easy to influence and change.
Pirates! is set in the 17th-century Carribean, when the colonies of the great European empires were duking it out and privateering flourished. Note I said privateering instead of piracy; instead of being a lone wolf, the game encourages you to work for 1 (or more) of the 4 empires against their enemies. Each empire has several ports in the region, which are where you repair your ship, hire more crew, sell your stolen goods, and woo the governor's daughter. Each of these ports has 2 traits, Wealth and Defense, graded on a scale of 1 to 4. Wealth determines what goods and prices each port has, while Defense determines how hard it is to raid a town. Each port can also switch hands to a different empire if you raid it while its Defense is weak enough. You have a vested interest in ensuring your patron's ports are strong and your enemies' ports are weak. The tools the game gives you to influence this include:
Escorting ships carrying soldiers or immigrants.
Destroying ships carrying soldiers or immigrants.
Convincing a group of immigrants to settle in a certain port.
Escorting a new governor to a port.
Convincing pirates or natives to raid a port.
Destroying a raid before it reaches a port.
Destroying an invasion ship before it reaches a port.
Attacking the port yourself.
These also happen without your interference, and you'll pass by such ships regularly in your travels. This is how most players are introduced to the system: you pass by a pirate ship heading to St. Kitts to raid, or a sloop carrying a new governor to Guadalupe. At first it seems like a nice bit of flavor, until you actually see one of them dock at their destination. The pirate raid drops a port's Defense or Wealth, while the governor increases a port's Wealth, and since each port's Wealth & Defense are visible on the play area, you notice they changed. You've just learned the special ships actually factor into the mechanics, and it's relevant whether or not the special ships reach their destination. Now you're purposely taking out certain ships and defending others. Then you realize you can dock at native villages or pirate havens and convince them to raid specific ports to soften them up for your own attack, or escort a ship carrying a declaration of war to make two nations start fighting. Soon you're inciting wars to get rewarded for conquering a port after softening it up with native raids. All of this gives the open world a malleability you rarely see in games like GTA or AC; the only AAA game I recall that even came close to it is Shadow of Mordor.
None of it's mandatory, or even alluded to. You can play an entire game without utilizing it, but learning how to use it gives you new tools, new goals, and lets you (try to) mold the Caribbean as you see fit using just a few symbols and mechanics, whether it's making a prosperous, heavily-guarded home port, establishing a friendly port in the midst of Spanish waters, or conquering the entire region for your empire.
After finishing their work on Spec Ops: The Line, Riad Djemili (senior programmer) and Johannes Kristmann (senior designer) left to form their own company: Maschinen-Mensch. Their first game is The Curious Expedition, a 19th-century exploration roguelike. This spring, they released it on Steam Early Access, where I found it. I spent some time playing it...
...and enjoyed it. Its turn-based pace makes it easy to play while doing other things, it emphasizes resource management and exploration over combat (you gain experience from discovering locations, not killing creatures), and it's set in Victorian-era exploration. Eventually, I got ahold of Curious Expedition's developers, and they agreed to answer some questions I had about the game. Here is my interview with them:
Your previous game, Spec Ops: The Line, was heavily influenced by Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The Curious Expedition is also influenced by Heart of Darkness, although from a different angle. Is this just a happy coincidence? Was The Curious Expedition conceived while thinking of Heart of Darkness during Spec Ops' development? Or is it because you were always big fans of Heart of Darkness?
I think the similarities to Spec Ops: The Line are more happy coincidence than anything else. A lot of different inspirations went into the setting of the game, like Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft, Indiana Jones and historic figures. Once we looked into the setting, we of course also rediscovered Heart of Darkness which we already knew from Spec Ops (and actually school before that). Inspiration works in pretty random ways, so its really hard to exactly say how much working on SOTL contributed to the ideas of TCE. If anything though our experience on SOTL reaffirmed us that games can also tackle more mature and serious topics.
On its surface, The Curious Expedition is a bright & colorful vision of exploring "because it's there". However, the subtext of the game gets quite disturbing with villages being destroyed and valleys being laid to waste just so an explorer can get a statue of himself built. (Explorers unleash disastrous curses when they steal treasures from shrines like volcanoes, chasms, and black holes.) Would you rather have the game seen as a celebration of exploration or a condemnation of it?
The fact that you ask this question is very satisfying to me, because it is exactly what we want the players to ask themselves. I don't want to give a definitive answer to that because it should be up to the players to make up their own minds. If the answer to this question would be too obvious I would say we would have failed in making an interesting game. We don't want to make a straight educational game, but if players reflect on their own doing within the game world, that is very welcome to us and we put a lot of thought into aiming for this effect.
Is trying to strike a balance between "exploit natives" and "respect natives" a factor in game balancing? Or is that affected more by trying to make sure there's a variety of ways to win? Back in the spring alpha builds, the easiest way to win was to steal everything that wasn't nailed down. Did you consider keeping "exploit" an easier way to win than "respect" in order to drive a point home?
Yes, your last point was actually our intention from the very start. The thought that even if you have good intentions, it is hard not to get corrupted. I was actually a bit surprised to see how many people picked up on that and asked for other ways to win the game. That's why we've been working also on giving more peaceful players more variety and chances to win the game. In the end there will still be a certain bias though as we feel it's important to the overall statement.
Currently dinosaurs are the main exotic theme of the game. Are there plans to add more exotic/supernatural themes, like Lovecraftian horrors or strange mythical humanoids?
Our idea is that the game starts somewhat realistic and then becomes more and more fantastic as the player digs deeper into the world. Kinda similar to the Indiana Jones movies. Dinosaurs are just one example of that fantastical element. In the latest versions its possible to recruit lizard people for your party or to travel into other dimensions. There are also a lot really weird items that you might find, like the infamous Necronomicon. Also watch our for those cultists and their shady doings. We still have plenty ideas for more fantastic things in the game, maybe going as far as adding Lovecraft as a playable character himself. (Appendeum: The devs confirmed Lovecraft will be released as a playable explorer for the Halloween update.)
I recall you saying in a post years you didn't want to include occultist Crowley as a playable explorer. Why did you change your mind?
I honestly don't recall that we ever said that Crowley wouldn't be a playable explorer and I don't remember us changing our stance on that, so I can't really add to that.
I got that impression from a reply to this thread here. I also vaguely recall a blog post stating you didn't want Crowley to be a playable character because he did some shady things in real life, but I'm having trouble finding that now.
That forum post could maybe have been worded a bit clearer . What it hints at is that our initial idea was to have the expedition leaders and the person sending expeditions into the world be two different characters. In that sense your avatar would have been that person in London, instead of the person going on the expediton. That is all the forum post was alluding to. It was not specifically about Crowley.
We're actually in the works of adding H.P. Lovecraft to the game, and even though we love the whole Cthulhu mythology, you also can't ignore some of the problematic world views of Lovecraft. I think this works for our game since we don't portray the expeditioners as heroes, but more as flawed characters, so this gives us liberties adding personalities like Crowley, Lovecraft or the others without glorifying them.
Does this mean Lovecraft starts out with the racist flaw?
Lovecraft does not start with a racist trait, since our explorers don't have traits or we would also have go through all the other ones and check if we need to apply sexist trait or other traits. We're thinking about adding custom Lovecraft events that reflect some of his specific (negative) traits/beliefs though.
Why are some of these expeditions set in Florida and the US Midwest? Weren't these sufficiently explored in the 19th century?
The world map showing the different locations is not in a final state. Once we finish it up we'll also make sure to fix up those issues. In all honesty I have to say that in the current state we take some liberties here and that the exact location where the map marker appears on the world map currently does not have any influence on the map generator that is used in the backend. That one is only influenced by what you see inside of the info box that appears when you click on the destination. So its influenced by the biome type, the types of locations and the text that is shown in the info box, but not by whether that marker now appears in Florida or somewhere else in the US.
What feature/addition do you think the players will want most that you won't be able to add until after its official release?
I think modding will be a huge feature for the community. We're working hard on bringing it into the game as soon as possible and it is using exactly the same interface that we're currently using to build the game actually, but there is a chance that it won't make it into the game for the version 1.0, as for that we're focusing to polish and tune our existing and upcoming official content so that the players have plenty of content to experience without having to get into mods right away. We don't want to use mods as an excuse for having too little content in the game.
The 1st expedition feels harder than the 2nd expedition for characters that don't start with machetes, and I've gotten frustrated with its lack of optional quest variety & inability to buy supplies or choose a destination. Do you plan to revamp the 1st expedition before public release? Or will it probably stay in its current form?
We're recently adding more metrics to the game which allow us to tune the game better and catch those tuning irregularities from a high-level perspective. The reason for having just one expedition to choose from at the beginning of the game was done to ease new players into the game and not to overwhelm them with lots of choices right away. We agree that for veteran players it can become a bit boring to always having to play that starter expedition over and over again, so we're thinking about ways to increase variety here. Most probably we'll offer the choice between a beginner expedition and a more advanced expedition right away at the game start.
Why is there just one meter for Sanity instead of two meters for Sanity & Hunger? Was it always one meter from the start? Or did you consider 2 meters for a time, then scrap it because it was too complex?
Just having one meter was the outcome of over a year of prototyping. At some point we had individual sanity bars per character and a hunger meter per character and a complex mechanic of having to distribute the food per character and having to take their personal diet into account and so on. We are believers in "its easy to make something complicated, its hard to make something easy", so we streamlined the system more and more and removed all the repetitive micro interactions until we got to where we are now. Our goal was to retain the interesting complexity, but remove boring book-keeping tasks.
Why did you add magnetic mountains to the game? I swear I've had more runs end due to their fake compass readings than anything else. (Aside from accidently destroying moon stones and rendering a map unwinnable.)
We're keen on having interesting interactions appear right on the map. There wasn't a specific reason, apart from the fact that we thought it would be an interesting challenge and an aha-moment when you discover that the thing you were chasing for days turned out to be a false end. We also try to make the game as fair possible though, so when you have magnetic mountain nearby the compass behaves visually slightly different than when it is tracking the real pyramid, so as a experienced player you have the opportunity to anticipate instead of relying on luck.
Speaking of getting moon stones destroyed, what safeguards do you use to keep the player from getting in an unwinnable situation due to moon stone loss? (Moon stones are required to unlock some pyramids and thus finish the expedition.) Do you make sure shrines with moon stones aren't near active volcanoes/geysers? Do you spawn other moon stones if one gets destroyed by a player-caused chasm curse? Is it no longer a problem thanks to the escape balloon mechanic?
The spawning of moon stones depends on how many moon stones you have so far. So if you don't have enough yet, there is a bigger chance that they spawn randomly and then we hope for the best. We know that this approach won't be good enough for the final release, so it's something that we're still working on. Also not just in terms of tuning but also in terms of making it at least as spectacular as the buried pyramid. And we have thoughts about adding more goal variations too.
What gave you the idea for the competition mechanic? This is one of the few roguelikes I know of where how quickly you win matters. Did it come early in production? What gameplay problems did it solve and what issues did it create?
The idea was there early in production, but it took quite some time to figure out how to do it exactly. When you have treasures that have been in a shrine for hundreds of years, it can be hard to deliver that feeling of urgency that you usually want in a game. Actually that's also the reason why you always have a strong antagonist in Indiana Jones movies. It acts as a kinda of hunger clock driving the player forward and forces some hard decisions. Also real-life expeditions were often about this idea of being the first, the first person on the north pole, the first person on Mount Everest, the first person crossing a continent. It's just a big part of the setting, so we had to have in the game somehow.
The Curious Expedition is currently in Early Access on Steam for $15. Screenshots grabbed from S.E.C.R.E.T. and Skutatos on Steam.
Quite a bit to cover quickly, it's been a busy week on my end.
First, I have several interviews cooking: the Curious Expedition, Cradle, and Rebel Galaxy devs have agreed to answer my questions via Email. Once I finish getting their answers back, I'll be able to post them on my blog. (I'm hoping to have the Curious Expedition and Rebel Galaxy interviews posted by the end of the week, but I think it'll take the Cradle answers a month to get back, if they even do... problem with requiring someone to translate them.)
Second, several things occured due to me pondering adding procedurally-generated characters/plots to Rebel Galaxy. First, I bought Shadow of Mordor on sale on Steam and plan to play through once the 42 GB download is finished... in approximately 3 days at this rate. Second, digging into the difficulties with making a procedurally-generated plot led me to a Procedural Generation blogpost stating that November is NaNoGenMo month, an offshoot of National Novel Writing Month with this goal: Write code that generates a 50,000 word novel. I'm tempted to see if I can code a 50,000-word plot about various space pirates competing with each other; it'll obviously be as dry as a newsfeed, but just making something coherent would be a triumph.
Third, I've just finished Mission 21 in MGSV, which means I'm finally getting into the FOB invasion stuff... right after Konami fucked us on the FOB invasion stuff. I still want to invade a few FOBs myself, though... I might post a recollection of my experiences in it later.
Fourth, I've been playing through Kentucky Route Zero lately. My thoughts so far:
It is not the mind-blowing experience some of the hype made it out to be.
It's still a pretty damn good adventure-walking game (similar in mechanics, if not aesthetics, to Gone Home, Dear Esther, etc) with a unique style.
It's set in a magical-realist Kentucky, following the travails of a delivery driver trying to deliver one last piece of furniture before he retires. Unfortunately, the only way to the delivery address is down Kentucky Route Zero, an underground highway that has an... unusual sense about how directions work. Things go wrong, and it turns into a melancholic journey about places and people left behind. You visit an abandoned mine, an empty bar, a cathedral converted into a bureaucratic office... and you (usually) choose how different characters respond. It's less puzzle-solving and more establishing identities; you decide whether characters are stoic or whiny, rude or comforting, or whether they listen to a tape of a gospel or talk with the nearby janitor.
There's also a lot of hidden locales to find. I think I've only seen 50% of the locations in the game after doing a straight playthrough. I've enjoyed playing it during late nights where I'm trying to relax enough to get rid of my insomnia, and while I think it's currently only worth $15 instead of the $25 asking price, I suspect my opinion will change once they release the last 2 episodes. It's certainly unusual enough to justify a look.
Fifth, today I bought a strategy game called Chaos Reborn, a Kickstarter project from the developers of the original X-Com. It is... weird. I'm still not sure how well the mechanics work with each other. Here's a list of the various quirks & decisions to be made in this game:
You and your enemies are all wizards on a hex grid, summoning creatures to do battle. The last wizard standing wins.
Your summoning spells have a chance of failure. If you succeed, you summon a creature. If you fail, you get no creature, but get some Mana you can use to improve the chance of success of other spells.
Spells are divided into Order, Neutral, and Chaos. Order and Chaos spells tilt the battlefield's alignment towards Order or Chaos. You have a higher chance of success if the spell's alignment matches the battlefield's.
When you summon a creature, you can choose to summon an illusion instead, which has a 100% success rate and can move & attack just like a real summoned creature. The difference is, if your opponent casts a Disbelieve spell on an illusion, it disappears and he can cast another spell. You're basically bluffing and hoping he doesn't call you out on it.
Creatures don't have HP. An attack either misses its target completely or kills them outright; there's no middle ground. This includes your wizard.
I've never seen a strategy game lean this heavily on chance before. I haven't played enough to see how well it works overall, but it's piqued my interest. I hope to report more on it once I've put a few days into it.
Like I said, it's been a busy week, and expect a load of content from me soon.
I've been mulling over the procedural generation in Rebel Galaxy and how it could feel less lifeless, using such references as the popular Shadows of Mordor, the cult classic Sid Meier's Pirates!, and the depressingly obscure Drox Operative. And I've realized I should encourage more people to try Drox Operative.
Not buy, try. It's not a great game, it's a decent game with unusual mechanics, and I'm lukewarm to the actual gameplay at best. Luckily there's a demo of it available, so you can see why this game is so unusual without paying for a game you might hate. It's unusual because the universe is quite happy to let things happen without your interference to an alarming degree.
Each mission is a procedurally-generated sector with multiple empires vying for dominance and random events to spice things up. You play as a lone Drox Operative ship trying to either ally with the winning side or build up enough of a reputation that everyone fears you. You lose if all of the empires hate you, a race you're not allied with takes over the whole sector, or you go into the red from expenses (namely replacing blown-up ships). Oh, and occasionally Drox Operative Command has specific goals for the sector, such as "Protect this race" or "Destroy this race". From there, you go about interfering to ensure your side is the winning side (or, at least, no one wins until you build up enough of a reputation).
In practice, this is like conducting a pile-up by blowing up cars in midair. Or wrangling a hurricane. Or herding cats. Two dozen different things are happening all the time and, if you hurry & are lucky, you'll have time to interfere in 10 of them. Some problems will solve themselves without your help. Some problems will just get worse: the aspiring bandit captain you ignored because you had to kill a giant space amoeba halfway across the sector suddenly has a posse and now they're raiding every planet in the system and you curse as you wonder why you didn't take 10 minutes to handle this before it exploded into this huge problem. But if you did that, the amoeba would've eaten half the colonies in the other system before you arrived. And meanwhile an empire you're trying to kill has gobbled up a quarter of the sector and you're wondering how you're going to handle that once you're done extinguishing the local fires. When you barely eke out a win 4 hours later, you are mentally exhausted.
Of course, not every mission ends up like that. Sometimes the Random Number gods smile on you and you get a sector where you can complete all the optional goals & win in an hour flat. But it's the excruciatingly tough ones that stand out, because the out-of-control sectors feel alive. It is the organic alternative to XCom's gamey "you can only stop 1 of these 3 invasions" choices. And it is so unusual compared to most games' "everything revolves around the player" mentality it should be experienced at least once as a sign of what games could be like if the player was treated like a participant instead of a protagonist.
After several hours-long marathons yesterday & today, I've finished the main campaign of Rebel Galaxy. I'll write a formal review later, but here's my initial thoughts:
It's the Destiny of spaceship games. Combat feels good, better than any other spaceship game I've played besides Escape Velocity: Override. However, the plot, characters, and sandbox options are all light. They lasted me through my time with the game, but I wish there was more of them.
Combat gets really easy if you spend the time to upgrade everything to Mark 6 gear. I beat the final fight without breaking a sweat.
Your defenses don't depend on your ship size at all; a Light Frigate gets the same protection from Mark 6 shields as a Dreadnought. The only tradeoff is speed vs firepower, which makes light ships feasible for the whole game.
Some of the best grind I've seen in a game. There's plenty of ways to make credits, and you'll often stumble across several bounties, transmitters, and abandoned cargo on your way from Point A to Point B. Sometimes you'll even arrive at a station only to see it's getting attacked by pirates.
All the different enemy factions tend to blend together, and it's hard to tell whether they favor certain weapons or not. Only the (human) pirates have stations of their own, so the main standings decision is whether to ally with the (human) pirates or the militia.
Trade is decently implemented but vague. Each station has a focus (Agrarian, Militaristic, etc) that determines what's in supply & demand. This is further influenced by random events, which are caused/negated by ships you can intercept. Unfortunately, if you play a goodie militia type the only ships you really intercept are pirate fleets sieging stations. It's also near-impossible to get info on where goods have high prices; for some reason every bartender is obsessed with where they're selling low.
Most of the solar systems feel generic and unimportant. A common problem in procedurally-generated games.
The systems/stations can't change sides, like planets in Escape Velocity or cities in Pirates! could. Pity; I always like to stretch buccaneer sandboxes like this to see how far they can bend before they break.
I noticed the stations have health bars. Can you blow them up?
Very few memorable characters. I wish procedurally-generated environments would also have procedurally-reacting characters, but that's a topic for another post. (In the meantime, check out any of the Soldak games for a crude example of procedurally-generated characters who react to you.)
Nearly all of the different equipment types are introduced early on & are not changed, just improved with upgrades. This would make combat stale if it wasn't so blood-pumping.
The custom soundtrack works great. I easily mixed Cowboy Bebop tunes in with the default country songs for more variety, and with a little care about which categories you put the songs into, they really strike the right mood. (Or an utterly wrong one, if you want to be subversive.)
Currently very little replayability. I went with a light, fast, close-range frigate my first time; suppose I could play a giant, long-range dreadnought on another run, but I'd rather mess around with the sandbox in my frigate. I like the setting, I just wish it was more lively. It would be interesting if they released an expansion that fleshed out the current game instead of just tacking on more quests/locations/enemies/items onto the existing game.
In summary, it's good enough I wish it were better so I could get a few dozen more hours of enjoyment just from toying with the sandbox. A good, stylish game that will probably be at the bottom of people's Top 10 lists if it's even on them at all. It's aggravating to look at the game where the basics & style are this good and wonder what it would've been if they had a bit more funding/people. Perhaps they'll build on it in future expansions.
How come Persona 4 has spinoffgames while Persona 3 doesn't? The thought struck me while watching the Persona 4 Dancing All Night QL. You could just leave it at "Persona 4 built upon Persona 3's cult hit status to become the more popular one", but I think that's selling P4 short. I think it's because it nailed the proper scope for a game featuring high school protagonists.
P3 focused on stopping a world-ending threat and its protagonists fit it well, with most of their problems & quirks stemming from it. The problem is, dealing with secret labs, giant corporations, and the end of the world is a far cry from the problems facing most high schoolers. P4 tossed out the usual world-ending plot for something closer to home: stop the strange murders plaguing your town. The Shadow antagonists were tied to your companions' repressed feelings, which revolved around seeking a purpose in life or worrying about others accepting them; issues everyone worried about at that age. Rather than the typical save-the-world plot, the game focused on a coming-of-age story about accepting hard & bitter truths to turn into a better person. (This also allowed for much more characterization of the P4 Investigation Team than the P3 protagonists, which made them more endearing.)
I suspect Persona 5 is the team's attempt to make a Persona game in the big city (like P3) with more down-to-earth plot & characterization (like P4). Between the prison motif & "stealing people's desires" theme, I think it will focus on the desires that crop up during adolescence (excitement, purpose, respect, sex) and how they cause trouble for people who don't learn to control them. This could not only be a symbol of growing from adolescence to adulthood, but Buddhist ideals as well, tying the personal conflicts with larger ideals & struggles.
Will keep this quick, in middle of doing other things when brainstorm hit me. Game difficulty covers a wide spectrum of requirements, from lightning-fast reflexes to critical thinking to spending a lot of time grinding. Instead of saying a game is "easy" or "hard" and then trying to detail why, attempting to jot down a 4-point difficulty measurement for games. Two contribute to traditional difficulty, while the other two measure whether someone's in the right situation to finish a game. (For example, a new dad trying to finish MGSV.)
A recent Twitter discussion with Austin drew a comparison between people's obsession with "finding everything in Undertale" and the gaming cliche of the protagonist being the only person who can solve problems in the world. If you overhear a problem in a game, you can be confident you're the only one who can, and will, solve it. If anyone else tries to, they will either make it worse, die, or require the protagonist's help before they're done. Even if it's something minor, like the overheard conversations in Mass Effect 3, the solution is never "have Shepard relay the problem to someone else who can solve it". No, you're going to have to do it yourself to ensure it's done right. Pondering that for a while made me realize something:
Games have taught us to be terrified of delegation.
One part of this is bad plotting. You want to make the protagonist a world-saving hero? Simply make it so everything goes wrong until he arrives to fix it. No one can solve problems until he is somehow involved. Your character thus turns into a supercompetent jack-of-all-trades. The other part is bad coding. How many games have given you the choice of delegating some mundane tasks to an AI? How many of those AIs have you trusted to actually do the job right? I suspect most people, like me, would rather waste hours micromanaging building queues than risk the mysterious AI screwing something up. Years of this combination has led to loathing giving up influence in... well, anything. It vindicates the paranoid fears of our inner control freak, turning an invasive, obsessive real-life behavior into a necessity if you want to get anything done right.
I do a lot of role-playing, including some solo stuff with other D&D gamemasters to experiment with plots that don't fit well into the typical 4-fights-per-day dungeon-crawl. One of these involved helping a teenage boy with his abusive dad. The optimal solution was also the bare minimum: convince the boy to leave while honoring his request not to interfere with his father. Every other solution- talking to the dad about his son, trying to help the dad with his problems, threatening him if he attacked his son again- only made the problem worse. But years of gaming had made me so accustomed to intervening in everyone's problems that the mere thought of leaving a problem alone felt disturbing.
It reminds me of Spec Ops: The Line, another game where the more you intervene, the worse things get. Granted, that example is heavy-handed, but it's rare for a game to reveal you aren't the best person for the job, or that the wisest course of action is to let someone else handle it. Yet realizing that is a vital part of cooperating in real life. Is this why socializing and interaction are underutilized in games?
I break down "social gameplay" into "using people skills to solve problems". Manipulating them into acting like you want them to (ala most of Bioware's games) is one aspect, but games have barely touched the challenge of making a cohesive, effective group. Metal Gear Solid V, for example, doesn't do a good job of making the Diamond Dogs feel as important as Snake thinks they are. They are a set of letter grades that work generically well with every other set of letter grades, without any of the quirks that make actual humans complex. None of them have friendships, rivalries, phobias, virtues, or vices. You never have a high-ranking soldier that works best partnered up with a lower-ranking soldier. You never prefer a veteran lower-ranking soldier over a newly-recruited higher-ranking soldier simply because you've worked with him long enough to know what makes him tick. You don't have to remember that one soldier does best when constantly complimented, while another wants you to leave him be. You don't even have their mission success rate influenced by whether they all speak the same language! They are nothing more than stats, so there is no gameplay reason to know them like actual people, which undercuts the player's/Snake's motivation. I eagerly await the day someone manages to adapt Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system to your allies to make them feel more human.
Still, as long as Snake can act like the legendary Big Boss, able to take on any challenge and win, it would let the player get away with not delegating anything, with being the control freak that insists on tackling every problem by himself. Breaking that would require a Kojima-level troll: give the player a mission they can't win themselves. Let them hurl themselves at the mission over & over again, never coming close to succeeding, frantically wondering what the key is. Then hint they should assign someone else to the mission. A pilot with decent stealth that can also fly a jet. Someone good at disguising himself and speaking Russian to infiltrate the base. Assign the NPC to the impossible mission while you go off to do something else, wait an hour... and then the report comes back: mission successful. Would you feel incompetent he did what you couldn't? Or just happy the mission got completed?
Then emphasize the crux of the game isn't figuring out how you can complete every mission, but figuring out whether you can complete the mission. Do you know your strengths & weaknesses enough to realistically assess what you can & can't do? Can you figure out when you should call in reinforcements? Or withdraw and let one of your men handle it? You may be the legendary hero, but you can't, and shouldn't, handle everything yourself.
Too many games insist the protagonist do everything himself. I want more games where the protagonist can't and shouldn't.
This week, a remaster of Grandia 2 was released on Steam. Unlike other recent remasters, this is for a game that's A)15 years old, and B)was primarily released on the Dreamcast. I was on the fence about it until a friend that had played the original told me, "You have to buy it. You won't regret it." So I bought it, and after playing it for 7 hours I definitely don't regret it. Apparently the combat system I was clamoring for in JRPGs was actually made 15 years ago.
You see, I grew up on the old SNES Square RPGs. Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6defined JRPGs for me. I remember Chrono Trigger's combat system in particular for extrapolating complex strategies from simple mechanics (characters can do different combos depending on who's in the party, enemy position matters for some spells). I stuck with Nintendo as Square shifted to Sony, and when I got back into JRPGs around the time Final Fantasy 10 got released, I was disappointed at how the JRPGs I played were relying more on convoluted combat systems to keep people interested instead of going back to the drawing board and figuring out a better way to do the most basic JRPG commands: Attack and Defend. Finding a JRPG that made basic Attacks interesting and Defending useful became my holy grail of JRPGs for a few years...
And apparently they succeeded at it 15 years ago. I just didn't realize it at the time.
Note the action gauge in the lower-right, along with its Commit and Act markers.
Grandia 2 uses a variation of FF6's Active Time Battle system. Each character has a gauge that fills up; at 66%, they choose (Commit to) an action. When it completely fills up, they Act on it. Once they've Committed, allies and enemies alike are locked into that choice. Enemies also become vulnerable to Criticals, a variant of the basic attack that does less damage but interrupts attacks and depletes 50-70% of their gauge. You can also see which heroes the enemies are focusing on, removing the guessing game from choosing when to Defend. In addition, Defend is beefed up compared to other games: Defending will drop an attack's damage by 60-75% (compared to the seemingly industry standard of reducing it by just 50%) and reduces the chances of getting debuffed (useful for negating Confusion attacks). The trio of Combo (high-damage basic attack), Critical (lower damage basic attack, but can delay enemies), and Defend forms the crux of Grandia 2's combat system and turns random encounters from a button-smashing spree to a tactical dance.
Let me take a standard 4-monster fight as an example. As the battle starts, I'm tempted to have my mage break out an area attack to hit all 4 of them, but as I select them, I notice 3 of them are focusing on him for their next attack, so I have my mage Defend instead. My next 2 heroes are just ahead of the enemies on the gauge, putting them in a prime position to Critical them after they've Committed and interrupt their attacks, so I have them do that. My last character goes just after the last enemy, so I have him Combo one of the Criticaled enemies to focus him down. The scene unfolds with the monsters trying to throttle the Defending mage as my other heroes charge them from behind and interrupt their attacks. In the ensuing chaos, my mage's turn comes up (Did I mention Defending cuts the delay for your next turn in half?) and he's no longer being focused on by the monsters, so I have him break out the area spells. My other heroes alternately defend or Combo, whittling the monsters' HP down enough that a single Tremor spell wipes most of them out. After that, I mop up the survivors.
In just about any other RPG, my play-by-play of that would have been "I have everyone Attack until they're dead", with maybe a Cure or a Fire spell to liven things up.
It gets even better in boss fights, with bosses tossing out powerful attacks with long charge times that will mess up your party good unless you handle them. Some turns you have to bunker down with Defends & Criticals to survive/interrupt the onslaught, others you get an opening to inflict serious damage on the boss, and sometimes you have to figure out a window for your healer to get off a Heal without getting pulverized in response. These fights have a noticeable ebb & flow to them between defend/recover and all-out assault, which is more interesting than the usual constant-attacking of JRPG boss fights.
I love it. I honestly love it. This game uses the simplest commands to do what Final Fantasy has tried to do by bolting increasingly-convoluted systems onto its combat: make fights interesting. Why hasn't another series shamelessly stolen these mechanics?
The rest of the game is pretty good so far, too. Equipment, magic, and special abilities are okay- serviceable, but nothing standout. The plot is a generic "mercenary accompanies priestess to save world" that reminds me of the first chapter of Tales of Symphonia, with a global Church that will inevitably turn out to be corrupt to the bone. (Seriously Japan, at this point an authentically good Church would be a shocking plot twist.) Most of the characters feel generic, but the game gets a lot of mileage out of its incredibly snarky protagonist. Seriously, just read his dialogue:
It makes his constant griping about the priestess wanting to stop and help everyone tolerable and even entertaining. It also livens up his companions, who are trying to play their roles completely straight and thus make great targets/partners for our would-be stand-up comedian here. Well, almost all of them are trying to play it completely straight:
"...Gotcha."
Occasionally this evil sorceress will pop up to fight and/or help you, alternately chewing the scenery and matching the protagonist for sheer snarkiness. No wonder the game implies a masochistic crush between the two of them; you could probably kill a monster just by putting it between them and letting them snark at each other.
The game's now available on Steam for $20 (on sale for $15 this week); if you have any interest in JRPG combat systems, I'd suggest picking it up.
Well, it was more informal than a report. After I explained a bug about disappearing plants to PixelJunk's Twitter account, they replied to me saying they couldn't replicate it. Rather than getting frustrated trying to explain it in 120 characters, I decided to just show them. I had downloaded OBS weeks ago for streaming a stupid event on EVE Online, and I still had everything set up. So I streamed 6 minutes of gameplay showing the bug and posted a link to the archive to their Twitter account along with a timelog of when the bug occured.
They replied to me within minutes, stating it was a known bug they had already fixed internally. Still, they couldn't replicate my report of other types of plants disappearing too. So I invited them to my Twitch channel to watch as I livestreamed the bug for them. What followed was one of the strangest half-hours of my life: I streamed a game for just one viewer and chatted with one of the developers while I tried to break his game. Sure enough, between the 10:00 and 18:00 marks the bug cropped up over 3 times, and not only did the developer see it with his own eyes, but he got an archive he could show to the rest of the team.
Between Twitter, Twitch, and a responsive developer, I got video proof of a bug to an Indy developer. In retrospect, I'm surprised how easy and useful it was; it wouldn't surprise me if more Indy devs began encouraging similar video evidence of bugs to fix.
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