I am writing this, because I am freaking out right now and not entirely in a good way. I need to get this out of my right now, before my heart does something it shouldn’t. Twice today I’ve gotten a shock and both concern free games. read more »
Well I said it was navel gazing week some time ago and I wanted to wrap up, after that monster of a last post, with a few more informal thoughts. Since that time has passed and other things have happened I figure I might as well just mash it all into one post. Really all that’s left to think of are a few musing on how to make game criticism more visible at least in my tiny corner of the world. Incidentally, my best friend who set this site up for me said and I quote, “Yeah, we see you guys in an ivory tower built on an island no one can remember the name of u_u”
Before I get into that, however, I want to welcome Kate Williams to the Critical-Distance slave pit, I mean staff. She had an excellent first outing last weekend after Ben jokingly solicited twitter saying he was feeling lazy and got serious replies. As Kris Ligman said (paraphrased here), ‘no more Smurfette Principle.’ She seems to follow the Ben Abraham school of thought when it comes to weekly roundups (quotations, quotations, quotations). May Kate stick around and become enamored and jaded with the whole process as the rest of us have.
Incidentally, I saw some talk that lead me to believe people still think we are a shadowy cabal who decides what goes in and what doesn’t. That we meet in dark hoods in corners of the internet lit by a single bulb and cackle over everything we’ve read, until the appointed person (mostly Ben) types out our thoughts. I’d like to point out I haven’t had a post featured in TWIVGB for months, since December I believe. Yeah, there’s your disproof right there. Since I refuse to submit my own stuff, since I effectively work for the site, I have to hope Ben or whomever still reads my blog despite that I don’t quote Latour every other paragraph.
No, it’s one person alone at their computer filing through the list of links dumped unceremoniously on twitter and e-mailed by Ben. Remembering to delete the doubles and then reads them, alone, on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, and then has to type them and make them sound good. All in time for someone else to spell check and send it through. (A lot more of my snark has gotten through of late than I’d figure would. Not just to Critical-Distance, but on the GameSetWatch and Gamasutra reprints as well.) One person, hopefully wearing pants, is alone at their computer typing it up for your narcissistic pleasure. So welcome to that Kate.
Lots of talk of RPGs is going on. From executives making rather ignorant comments, to bloggers responding to said comments, to long twitter discussion stretched over days trying to define the term. All of this happening while I’m on an Adventure gaming binge. Yeah. My timing sucks.
In all seriousness I’ll probably get to at least the theory part of the discussion later this week. (Someone stick it to me on twitter if I don’t.) Though Adventure games will probably get their own post and not just because I’m playing quite a few at the moment. I think RPGs and Adventure games have more in common than more people recognize. I have also been informed that there are a few posts, in turn, trying to save Adventure games and toss them under the bus. Yay, relevance.
You may have noticed I’ve started doing my Indie Game Spotlights again. Well CreativeFluff, where it originated has started going again, in part because we were bored and driven. Mostly bored. I have no idea how it will pan out between the two sites. There may be some talk on how to resolve it. Will CreativeFluff get the whole thing or will I just have to do a better job in talking about the games twice via different aspects. Who knows? Also, a new editorially mandated series has started, unfortunately on Wednesday instead of Mondays because we’re a bunch of poorly timed monkeys at the moment, entitled “Basic Game Design 101.” After two years we’ll see how much the lot of you I follow on twitter and in my RSS feed have taught me. I’d like anyone who knows something to call me out over there should I screw something up.
Thank you to those of you that commented on my last post either here or on twitter. I wasn’t in so much a funk after posting it as I was writing because editing will do that to you. But what really perked me up was looking though a conversation I had with Richard Terrell about two years ago where I tried to explain the appeal, mechanically of the Uncharted series and the utter failure I did to express anything properly. Now with two years of time to learn and develop my own critical theories on games I think I can actually explain it. So I will. (Just not right now.)
I got a few more pieces in the works for Gameranx, hopefully those get finished and in the features cue soon. I think it’s more of a challenge to write the lighter, basically fluff, pieces when compared to what I’ve been doing. The step back is nice.
I’ve got a CDC podcast in the editing process. Also, I have a fifth transcribed interview, that I thinking of saying screw it and just publish the audio. So, here’s a serious question, would people mind listening to an hour long interview with Deirdra Kiai or would rather read it?
And finally the part I’ve been trying to put off. Most people don’t care, most people don’t even notice it, but my sidebar needs some serious work. In fact, looking at it I realize one part of it is broken. This is new. Anyway, that Playing Now thing, it’s got to go. It hasn’t worked in years. I am not, in fact, playing either Left4Dead or Chrono Trigger, but I can’t update new games into it and I fear what it will do if I get rid of those games. Unless someone can tell me how Micheal Abbot does his Now Playing sidebar, I think it best just to ditch the damn thing. And then there was the most important thing there, the blogroll.
Most people don’t look at blogrolls anymore, but some do. I know one guy who based his entire entry into the critical sphere because he found my site and used my blogroll to find so many others. It is so out of date. Way over half of the sites listed are dead. It used to just be my RSS feed. That is no longer an option. With over 100 links, it would be come too long and daunting. I don’t know what I’ll cut it down to or by what criteria of what goes in or not. Do I give a broad swath of different opinions? Do I limit it to just the biggest blogs? Do I keep it very small not to be intimidating? Do I try to be comprehensive? Do I stop asking rhetorical questions about something no one, but me and my paranoia care about?
I don’t know, but I’ll find out when I actually change it, so look for that.
I’ve gotten some pretty good buzz surrounding my last post, despite it going up around 2 am when normal people are asleep. I asked if there would be any interest in hearing my opinions on the some of the works I read. That’s read in the past tense, and there was. First realize a single comic issue is about 20-24 pages long. It can be a little more and a little less. That seems to be a consistent with the American, English and Japanese comic publication. No comment, but I do wonder if there is some reason behind the number. Given this length understand what I did in about a month and a half worth of my free time. I counted them all up and I read 605 comic issues.
Also, a lot of it was older stuff. (Older stuff being pre 2010.) Very little were contemporary comics, though there were a lot of Modern Comics. It’s a spread over the 60s, 80s, 90s and 00s. Also, as I finish a work I give a micro review over Twitter, I’m not going to go back through 2 months worth of tweets to find them There’s a lot, so here we go.
DC
-Batman: Dark Victory- I heard this was an all-time classic, with Batman acting like a detective and displays part of the fall of Harvey Dent. It is great to see Batman taking on non-super villains and finishing what Year One started with regards to the mob. But I do think it’s over hyped. It really comes off as a blur as I remember little of any specific details. But I like this Batman much more than the “Goddamn” version that seems to be popular now.
-Batman: Gotham by Gaslight- This is what a serial killer investigation should be. Really gets the Victorian horror/mystery vibe right. This is an Elseworlds story done right, because it’s about the circumstances that are different, not squeezing in every cameo they can fit.
-Batman: Thrillkiller- It’s neat, I guess, but beyond a gander it doesn’t really mean much of anything. At the end it can’t escape the status quo and be interesting. This does try to squeeze in every cameo it can.
-Transmetropolitan- I only read the first 30 issues (out of 60) and does this grab your balls or what. Style, substance and scarily accurate for the shithole of a political arena we are in now. This makes me want to read the original Gonzo journalist. Heartbreaking at times.
-We3- Short and sweat and will probably need a reread to suss out everything within those pages. One of those titles I’m think of buying. It flows too quickly and really requires a close examination of everything happening. Not a complaint, just something to watch out for when you read it.
Marvel
-1602- This is one of those works I wish was better than it was, or rather it’s one I wish stuck to its premise and didn’t try to shoehorn in the existing universe. This story was perfect as it was without the alternative reality being revealed for what it was. Neil Gaiman wrote a wonderful concept with themes of political unrest, loyalty, honor and treachery set within the very real turmoil of the era. It was good, even great in the beginning, but it could have been brilliant, a work of literature. That’s what’s most disappointing about it, it could have become cannon, but it pulls back in the final issues.
-Marvel Noir: X-Men Noir- This is noir at its finest. A reimagined X-Men that grounds it far more in reality than the overly fantastical, right up pulpy nature of the original series. This gets at a lot of what makes both the X-Men appealing and noir great. Though I have to say it lost a bit of its appeal to me when they killed my favorite character. It’s a great ending, just not as personally hard hitting.
-Marvel Noir: X-Men Noir – Mark of Cain- And this is Wolverine: Origins to X-Men Noir’s X-2. It falls into the problems that plague both the X-Men series and noir. Too many twists revealed at the end of shifting alliances, too many cameos, pulp storyline mcguffin, subpar writing and an ending that isn’t noir.
-Marvel Noir: Spider-Man Noir- This is noir, actually this would have made a great Batman story, but it does have the Spider-Man sense to it. It’s kind of sad when Marvel does a better Batman story than what modern Batman has devolved into. What I mean is, Spider-Man in this gritty world is more interesting than Batman ever was as a character.
-Marvel Noir: Spider-Man Noir – Eyes Without a Face- Another great and heartbreaking story on more than one front. I’m not sure if it’s within the sensibilities of the genre as there is a lot more color in this sequel, but the ending hits all the right notes. Nobody wins and everyone is hurt. Beautifully deranged, but on the whole it’s only good not great like X-Men Noir.
-Amazing Spider-Man #666- What the hell is this? I’m sorry, I know there’s a whole new continuity because of a lot of bullshit with the Devil, but why is Peter Parker a member of the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and now selling his Spider tech as patents to pay for a non stop career crime fighting. Isn’t this the character supposed to be about personal responsibility shown through the personal sacrifices willing and unintentional as the price for doing the right thing? If everything is set up to go his way, anything he faces is mere lip service. What I’m saying is: why is the Spider-Man now using the themes from the Avengers? If this was an invitation to ready people for your enormous Spider-Man event, it failed.
I’ve noticed this. All the major Marvel series have a theme associated with them. Spider-Man = personal responsibility, X-Men= prejudice, Fantastic Four= family (the one you’re born with), Avengers= Rock Group (the family you choose). But now everything seems to have shifted over one step to the right. When did this happen and why?
-Spider-Man: House of M- I haven’t read the full House of M event and from the look of it, it will be a while. It’s freaking huge. But Spider-Man’s was interesting because it took the same approach by putting him on top of the world and then pulling the rug out when the truth comes out and he finally takes responsibility. It looks at it from another angle, but remains true to the theme of the character. Plus, it’s great seeing Spider-Man of all people pulling one over on Magneto; and all the bad guys as his personal security detail.
-Rogue (mini-series)- This is my favorite X-Men character when done right. This is a mini-series focused solely on the character and we finally get a story about her origins and coming back home. Again, it makes the mistake of getting way too fantastical and fantasy based. A character study and the reactions of her coming home would have been better. It’s still great to see her highlighted like this though.
-Icons: Rouge- And speaking of character study. This is brilliant from start to finish. Not quite acclimated, but struggling with who she is and what she is. She comes to terms with it, but it is only the story of her first step. It isn’t the whole story. There is way too much Cyclops for a Rouge story though. And as meaningful as the ending was, there was no way not to make the concept of it not silly or contrived.
-X-Men: Age of X- Again it’s the goddamn need for this story to be part of the larger continuity. And I don’t mean that you have to know previous continuity, I mean in how it forces everything to fit so it goes back to the status quo. Maybe it’s okay for a story to stand on it’s own so you don’t totally phone in the ending or undermine the premise that made it interesting in the fucking first place. What could have been the hyper extreme version of X-Men that explored ends of theme that makes it great, it undermines it with that ending and details hinting at that ending that turn it into 3rd rate Sci-Fi schlock.
-X-Men: Age of X Universe- This two-issue companion piece does not have that problem. Here’s the premise, write some stories within it: Go. It’s not excellent, but at least it goes somewhere new and interesting. Plus, it made me cry over Mystique of all people.
-Uncanny X-Men 1-10, 534.1-542- Stan Lee’s writing may be hokey, but I like the subtle mix of ideas and character inserted in. In these early issues it seems there is a lot of synthesis working, most likely unintended, between over explanation and culturally known themes that allow underling meaning to work their way into our brains. It may be reading too much into basic super-hero stuff, but I feel reading more of the older stuff may give me a handle on how to tell stories in video games. Kieron Gillen, I know you are trying, but there is no way you can make Fear Itself work like this and the ending to the previous arc wasn’t so hot, even after the Hitchcock like thriller middle set up.
-X-Men Legacy 248-253- Remember what I said about shifting away from the proper X-Men themes and shifting over to someone else themes. Here we have a team cleaning up the aftermath of Age of X that didn’t really need to happen. This is Fantastic Four territory with the science and camaraderie. Also, if you are going to try to a Japanese style “battle manga” don’t half ass it. I stuck with it because it stars my favorite character, poorly though.
-X-Men Schism 1-3- Much better effort here, though this is where I’m pissed at the news sites and things get too confusing. Rogue in this one is in Iran with Kitty Pride saving Mackmadina-I can’t spell his name-ijad from their faulty Sentinel. Love the line “by the way I’m Jewish.” But in Legacy Rouge got transported across the galaxy to save Rachel (who?) and in X-Force is in Atlantis. I wouldn’t mind, but this is supposed to be the same universe. Not interested in why everyone will go they’re separate ways, but at least we’re getting back on theme.
-Generation Hope 9-10- Everything I’ve read about this series is not good. From what little I can tell, it’s well deserved. I hate perfect characters with no flaws other than the burden of being the Christ stand in. Luckily these two issues, also written by Kieron Gillen, gently excise Hope Summers (yeah) from the picture. In #9 it’s so on message I hate to call it preachy, because it isn’t. It is a little rushed however. It doesn’t let some things marinate so the end really hits hard. #10 had me tearing up. WHY? WHY? WHY? It hurts because it’s true.
-X-Campus- It starts with a great, fresh premise (though Evolution did it 100 times better) at least in comic book terms, and then goes to hell in the second half back to pointless battles and ending leaving me going “really?” Wolverine as a moody teenager gets props though. Rouge as a bland cardboard cutout doesn’t.
-New X-Men 114-122- Much better, need to read more. Why did space become a thing with X-Men? Ruins every story I see it in.
WildStorm
-The Boys 1-10- This is a pretty good series, what I’ve read of it. I recommend it if, and only if, you can take the subject matter. It’s a graphic, over sexualized, mean-spirited, bigoted, painful read, but none of that is done without a purpose. When creators put the same stuff in their works without a purpose it’s awful, but the same vile stuff used purposefully is a different matter. Additionally, I’ve seen people try to use the real iconic characters that many of these supers are based off of and it wont work. They are icons for a reason. You need allegories to those characters to take the piss out of them properly. It’s one reason Watchmen was so great. This is not an easy read merely for content reasons.
Now here comes the hard part. We’re back to Marvel, but not we’re in Fully Developed Alternative Universe Mode. MC2 based off a What if… comic turned full series, turned full universe. And the Ultimate Universe. There will be a lot of one-liners.
MC2
-Spider-Girl- Silver Age mentality with modern writing and a good-natured sense of humor. HOLY SHIT YES. This is the series that has me starting to think I like the Silver Age way of doing things. Mayday Parker is a great character and the themes burn brightly. This is a favorite series of mine now. The highlight is issue #41.
-Amazing Spider-Girl- See Above.
-Spectacular Spider-Girl- See Above.
-Spider-Girl: The End- Well if you have to end it, this is probably the best you could hope for.
-A-Next, Avengers Next, American Dream, Darkdevil, The Buzz, J2, Fantastic Five, Last Hero Standing, Last Planet Standing- All of these are really only necessary to get the story of the whole Alternative Universe. Some like Darkdevil and The Buzz give pretty necessary back-story, but you can get the gist otherwise. They also vary in quality, but none are exceptional or even great.
-Wild Thing- This pissed me off like you wouldn’t believe. Wild Thing is the daughter of Wolverine and Elektra. That’s not the issue. The issue is wasted potential. Yes she is a mutant. Yes she is as somewhat feral as her father and deadly like her mother. Her character throughout the whole series is schizophrenic at best. It seems DeFalco didn’t know what to do with her. (He wrote everything for MC2.) I’ll show you an image that could have driven the whole miniseries or even gotten a larger series.
Yeah, that emotion is never brought up again. Back to superhero ass kicking with no consequences. Also, she has a brother and this never comes up either except in other series where she isn’t. Why is this?
Ultimate Universe
-Ultimate Iron Man I- Crap and not even in continuity.
-Ultimate Iron Man II- Also, crap and still not part of continuity.
-Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra- Love it. The changes they made to the original characters make more sense to me as a whole. Handles real issues, I don’t know how well, but dramatically it does great work.
-Ultimate Elektra- Another great mini-series, but the ending had left me going WTF. Because it doesn’t really mesh with later appearances of Elektra and just leaves me a bit confused. But in story the end is heart wrenching.
-Ultimate Fantastic Four 1-12- Wow, they’ve become interesting. The first 12 are pure set up for the series proper that take their time telling the story. I think we’ve realized beginnings are not to be rushed through to get to the action and super-hero stuff. How Reed Richards became interesting is beyond me.
-The Ultimates 1-6- Fuck this series. Mark Millar stick your grit somewhere else. I know you are trying to make a point, but remember what I said about The Boys. It works because it doesn’t do stuff with iconic characters, but created allegories. Yeah, you didn’t do that. This is just ugly. Especially in light of movies and how they came together. But what finally lost me was the ‘Hitler was an evil alien’ plot point.
-Ultimate X-Men 1-22- Remember last time I said X-Men is my favorite comic property, well the comics themselves are testing me on this. I checked afterwards and I stopped right before this series changed writers, Millar again. But what I read, save for a two-shot that was done by someone else, this series is just so bad and so mean-spirited when it didn’t have to be. I wonder a lot about the child soldier angle to the X-men, and here they don’t even try to ignore it or pretend they are older, no it’s front and center and it says “so what.” And Rouge, what did you do to Rouge, eeegh. I checked 2 issues from the Brian Michel Bendis run, much better, so much better. Not spectacular, but better.
-Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, Ultimate Six, Ultimate Team Up, Ultimate Requiem Spider-Man- Yeah this is what you’ve been waiting for. What can I say, this series, yeah all those titles are pretty much the same series, gets everything right. Remember when I said I was thinking about buying We3, well I went out and bought the first big trade collection of Ultimate Spider-Man and will get the second one soon. The pacing, the weaving of super-hero events with his normal life, everything just works. It’s stays rooted in the characters, not the events. For some reason though, the best X-Men stories I’ve read, are in this series. Something is wrong when the best X-Men stories are in a Spider-Man book. Oh and Aunt May here is da bomb.
-Ultimate Comics X- More set up. It was suppose to be it’s own series, but all it did was set up for the real reboot this September. I guess you need to read it to know who the new people are, but that’s it.
-Ultimate Comics Fallout- This broke my heart. Now reading it straight through, I don’t see how this can’t affect you after reading Spider-Man. Everyone was hit, everyone was hurt. I think more than just within the fiction, in the universe, Spider-Man was what held it together.
That’s pretty much everything I read during my comic hiatus. Those are my opinions on the works I read. I had some ups, I had some downs; I had a lot of meh, and few big disappointments. And now to quote, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
(This was originally written several months ago in the run up to Dragon Age II’s release for another site. The editor at the time was swamped with work and it got lost in the shuffle. As time went by I forgotten I had wrote it until a conversation on twitter reminded me about it. I asked the present feature’s editor if it would be ok to take it back for my site. He said it’s a bit late to use it, so it would be fine. A lot of the my conclusions below are based on more research than I probably should have done for news site feature, but some is merely conjecture and sampling of the zeitgeist at the time. Still I think this cultural family tree holds up. No deep meaning, just some fun looking at the past and seeing what connects to what. Here it is in full.)
With Dragon Age 2 coming out last week, I thought it would be a neat idea to look at the long lineage that led us to this point. The history of the cRPG and really the RPG in general is a long, wide and as I learned when getting the details down, very intertwined. I wont bore you any further with an introduction, because we have a lot to get through. After all the story starts all the way back in 1913.
Wargaming
Wargaming was a hobby derived from tactical schooling and actual military application for decades by this point, but these had been limited to the military and specialized clubs. The niche spread out to include non-war tactical offerings, but it wasn’t until 1913 a book was published that codified a rule set for the general public to use toy soldiers in a war game. Little Wars by H.G. Well (Yes that H.G. Wells. The War of the Worlds, Invisible Man and The Time Machine H.G. Wells.) did just that. It set down the rules and even offered scenarios by which the player could play the game out. Unlike private club installments at the time, Wells believed that the game should not use dice and let what happens happen. The toy soldier sets had spring-loaded cannons and could knock down enemy units.
There wasn’t much advancement in the area of wargaming. It was a niche hobby and soon after there were two world wars and great depression after all. In the 1950s Donald Featherstone wrote the biggest contribution to the genre of game since Wells himself. Wargames and Advanced Wargames among many other books were mainstream publications and inspired many other writers to add their hand to the genre. In 1952 Charles S. Roberts found some success with miniatures, tiles and counter type games. After breaking even with a game called Tactics he founded the game company Avalon Hill. He is now know as the “Father of board wargaming.” The company had success in the 1960s with games that utilized hexagonal boards and historical battles. Things exploded in the 1970s however.
The 1970s brought with it a before untold interest in wargaming. Two new companies sprung up: Game Design Workshop (GDW) and Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). The latter released a game called Chainmail in 1971, a medieval tactical miniatures game that later got a fantasy supplement. And here is where the complexity begins.
Roleplaying Games
Around that time a man named Dave Wesley created a game called Braustein and showed it off to a friend of his Dave Arneson at the University of Minnesota in 1969. It was a wargame set in Napoleonic times where each person would represent an individual instead of division. It wasn’t until a year later they played Braustein again.
Meanwhile, Jeff Derren and Gary Gygax were working on the fantasy supplement to Chainmail. Gygax had codified a new system for resolving combat using dice. Later Arneson got a hold of the Chainmail system and used its combat mechanics in combination with Wesley’s Braustein, but added the fantasy elements of Gygax’s expansion and that combination was Blackmoor. As of 2008 that role-playing campaign is still being run, making it the longest RPG game is history. Blackmoor innovated many ideas at the time including hit points, experience points, character levels, armor class and dungeon crawls. It used many of the same trappings as board wargames, but allowed the players to set their own goals.
Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax eventually got together and developed the system so in 1974 Dungeons and Dragons was released. In addition to the new rule system, setting and purpose of this new genre they added influence of two book series: the Dying Earth novels and stories where they derived the need to memorize spells and Three Hearts and Three Lives which added the concept of alignment, most notable the concept of law, neutral and chaos.
It would take a few years to pick up steam and popularity, but it spawned a cottage industry and many imitators. Some were blatant rip offs while others had their successes like Chivalry & Sorcery and Traveler (Remember the latter one, it will come back up.) In the late 70s a new set of hardcover books were released with a polished system after initial feed back and called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition.
The First Video Games
The 70s also saw the rise of another hobby industry. With Pong released in 1974 and computers coming to universities, video games had got their start. While the arcades were capturing the public imagination, programmers didn’t have a lot else to do with their computer mainframes, because no one knew what to do with them. So they programmed games. Several of those people were looking to bring Dungeons and Dragons to the computer, since there happened to be a lot of crossovers between the two cultures. Some of the games that were directly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons were Tunnels of Doom, Wizardry, and Aklabeth. Each of these was a dungeon crawl game with slightly different implantations. Most used wireframe representation of the dungeon walls and doors or solid blocks of color for the same purpose. Some were shown with a first person perspective, some from an overhead third person perspective. You would create your party of six character, choosing race, class and stats before beginning. Wizardry went as far as to add a rudimentary alignment system of making your characters Good, Neutral or Evil with gameplay consequences. The combat systems were text input only, as the mouse DID NOT EXIST YET. (All PC nerds get on the ground and thank the technicians at Xerox.)
I’m not going to go through every single change, it’s reception, how it interconnects at large and now to PC gamers as it had to wargamers and pen and paper RPG gamer it seems like there are going to be a lot of omissions and dead ends when they really aren’t. Remember this is the lineage of one game, Dragon Age 2, and not everything influenced it.
SSI, a company that mainly dealt with the computer wargaming scene decided to try their hand at tactical RPG genre. Based off Tunnels of Doom they created their third effort at the RPG, their first two being Qeustron and Phantasie, Wizard’s Crown. Wizard’s Crown at the time was described as the most hardcore RPG ever.
Meanwhile, Michael Cranford looked at Wizardry and thought to himself, I can do better than this. Indeed he did, while much of the gameplay is the same, The Bard’s Tale updated the graphics with color and real representation of locals. He wanted the world to feel like a real place in the computer while you were playing, not just a wireframe representation. It came with a map of the town in the box to facilitate this. It also added character and monster portraits to help you identify with the world further.
Again meanwhile, (I swear this will all come together, just be glad this isn’t the whole history.) in 1980 after Aklabeth’s decent reception, Richard Garriot (Yes that Richard Garriot) aka Lord British took his game, almost wholesale, created a new world and story and with a few minor tweaks called it Ultima.
To recap:
DnD -> Tunnels of Doom -> Wizard’s Crown
DnD -> Wizardry -> The Bard’s Tale
DnD -> Aklabeth -> Ultima
Back at SSI, TSR which had published DnD and owned all the rights looked around to see if they could have a company make an officially licensed Dungeons and Dragons game. They liked SSI seriousness to the original material that they had with regards to their wargame adaptations. So TSR chose them. They took Wizard’s Crown as the base design, but also were heavily influenced by the world and nature of The Bard’s Tale. Both games were based off games that were originally based of DnD were now influencing the first official DnD computer game, Pool of Radiance. Known as the first of the Gold Box games it would spawn three sequels and other titles using the DnD license like Eye of the Beholder.
Now we got back to Richard Garriot and his Ultima series. As time went on he made several sequels, some advanced the genre in earth shattering ways like Ultimas III and IV. Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar had a unique design concept that would come back later in all forms of games, the morality meter. The entire game’s goal was about learning to be a moral person to become the Avatar rather than one of killing an evil wizard that nearly all computer RPGs had been up to this point. Others not so much. The big one we are going to talk about is 1992′s Ultima VII: The Black Gate. Ultima VII has one of the best stories of the series, but it also introduced several noteworthy mechanical things about the world. You could pick up and move items on the screen. It did away with the window box that would show the world with everything else being key-coded possible actions and stats. Instead the entire screen was the world and the mouse interface was brand new and allowed direct control of actions. It also had a not quite overhead view that will seem recognizable soon.
That same year at Microprose, designer Arnold Hendrick, who had worked on the board wargames Trireme and Dwarfstar at Avalon Hill (Remember them, they also licensed out their wargames to SSI.) and Sid Meir’s Pirates. The openworld nature and the chose your own objective ideas of the game were his. He convinced his boss to stray from the strategy genre and try and RPG. At the time they were a company with a heavy foundation on history and research and that is what they did. They found a place and time that had not been done before, dark ages Germany, but had certain qualities (ahem, cough, no horses) that allowed for technological limits of the time. The RPG design of the game came from the pen and paper Travelers system (told you it would came up again.) and the open world, open choice nature that made Sid Meir’s Pirates so unique. Darklands is a game with a cult following, but upon release a huge number of bugs, but one in particular rendered it unplayable. It was a memory leak. (It has been since patched out by fans and is worth it if you have the patience of an old school RPG.)
Darklands was mostly menu driven city exploration with multiple-choice dialogue when speaking to people. Combat was rendered in an isometric viewpoint with sprite characters and most importantly featured real time combat (Holy wow) that, get this, could be paused to allow the player to adjust tactics by pressing the spacebar. (You should all know where this is leading by now.)
To recap:
Wizard’s Crown + The Bard’s Tale -> Pool of Radiance -> Eye of the Beholder
Ultima -> Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar -> Ultima VII: The Black Gate
Travelers + Sid Meir’s Pirates + Trireme + Dwarfstar = Darklands
From Dead to Peak
In 1996 many people called the cRPG genre dead. The last Ultima game came out in ’93, the other major series were stalling their new releases and SSI couldn’t seem to get their act together and put out a non-junky product like Pool of Radiance or Eye of the Beholder. I still call them reactionary idiots, but call it dead they did. Then Diablo came out. This has no relevance to the lineage, but is instead one of the biggest f-yous to reactionary idiots in video games ever, always good for a laugh. 1997 gave us Fallout. Both have completely different lineages with nothing to do with anything I’ve said so far. Amazing huh, that’s how broad the whole history is.
In 1998 all the games I talked about brought their elements together. Pool of Radiance, Eye of the Beholder, Ultima VII, The Bard’s Tale, Darklands with the addition of a new copyright license of ADnD 2nd edition came Baldur’s Gate. This is one of those moments in the history of a subject. The first was the original DnD when all the elements before it coalesced into a single thing that then exploded to influence so much after it. Ironic that the second such event would be with a DnD licensed game.
Baldur’s Gate is, let me put this in the only terms I can convey this, the greatest damn computer role playing game ever if not best game every crafted by human minds. It took all before it and added it’s own imagination and fresh perspective in something often ignored in the RPG genre, ironically, story. You can see the influences in the progression and story arc from Ultima VII, but it adds so much. Side quests, actual side quests and dialogue options from Darklands, but expanded and detailed to degree not seen before. And for good measure, probably the greatest critique of the fantasy genre within a fantasy game played for laughs. And then it started off, downplayed at the time, one of the biggest modern trends in video games: the morality meter. It was tied to the DnD alignment you chose and those of your party members. It was limited, but this is where it started. It also broke the trend up to this point in character creation in that you did not create an entire party. Instead you only created the main character, your avatar, and you find your companions out in the world.
And then it spawned a sequel.
Baldur’s Gate not only got a sequel to continue the now epic storyline, but also did so with a villain containing so much flash, distain, methodical cruelty and at times tragic sympathy. All while David Warner’s dulcet tones soothingly terrify you. The original Baldur’s Gate also influenced the other Infinity Engine games like the Icewind Dale series and Planescape: Torment. Baldur’s Gate II of course improved the graphics and added wider options, but also introduced us to the now seemingly mandatory romantic options. The game had four, three for male characters and one for female characters. The game also brought back a feature back from the days of Wizardry: the ability to import your character from one game to the next. In Wizardry it was the only way you could progress in the newer titles, here it was for story and character value. This is where we get the next great split.
The Bioware Era
Despite competition in the western RPG from Bethesda and now Lionhead, it is still undoubtedly the Bioware Era, maybe even the Black Isle era, the people who actually made the Infinity Engine games. But I wont spread my wings too much. Have to stay focused, but first we leave Bioware to go quickly dart back to Ultima VII. (I said this was intertwined.)
Richard Garriot and Warren Spector (Yes that Warren Spector.) got to talking while working on Ultima VII about the changing dynamics of the industry and technology. Doom had put 3D on the map as the way to go. Garriot contracted out a side project of Ultima to a then untested studio Blue Sky Productions which then merged with Lerner Research and changed their name to Looking Glass Studios (Yes that Looking glass studios. How many times do I have to do this?) Their first game Ultima Underworld based off the Ultima series and Dungeon Master which itself spawned from Wizardry, probably by now one of the most influential games of all time. Dungeon Master was a first person action RPG set in a dungeon’s corridors with a click interface designed to let you move and turn. Influenced by Doom as well, Looking Glass upgraded to a more fluid movement style that allowed for much more granule movement. This was 1992. This is important because two years later it would become the direct influence of their next game System Shock, this widened the gap between itself and it’s Ultima predecessor. More shooter than RPG it kept many of the elements of its forbearers. It added new ways to convey story through logs and environment. A sequel came in 1999 headed by Ken Levine (Yes that Ken Levine.) Now that we’re all caught up on that front, back to Bioware.
Baldur’s Gate II spawned a number of little children running with what it accomplished. The three relevant ones are Neverwinter Nights, Planescape: Torment and most of all Dragon Age: Origins some nine years later.
Neverwinter Nights altered the genre by giving us full 3d environments. The Elder Scrolls and others had done this years before, but Neverwinter Nights was the direct descendant of Baldur’s Gate and itself spawned another great RPG Knights of the Old Republic in 2003. KotOR was a revolution. It is the first to get away from the DnD license and instead used the Star Wars license. It changed the party line-up. Instead of a party of six characters, five of which you find in the world, you gather all the playable characters and can choose whom to take with you at the home base before heading out into the world. It expanded on the morality meter and integrated it more in the conversation and story choices aspect of the game. This time is was Light side vs. Dark side instead of Good vs. Evil.
The shooting gameplay of System Shock 2 along with the Bioware RPG touches and structure of advanced by KotOR is the direct lineage to Mass Effect. But Mass Effect brought about another new change. You couldn’t create your main character, your avatar in the game world. She was already created, Shepard existed, you merely molded her from the clay given to you. Even up till KotOR you were creating your shell from scratch and only once in the game did you mold them. This is where Planescape: Torment’s influence is apparent. Planesecape gave us the Nameless One, as empty a shell as any other, except he paradoxically had a name: Nameless One. In that and other regards he was an already formed character, he didn’t know who he was, but that was part of who he was. His amnesia and ability to not die are apart of him you could not choose and were written by the designers before hand. You could only mold him afterwards.
Conversations took a different turn. Instead of having full responses written out word for word what your character would say, instead you have short snippet impressions of what your Shepard would say. This allowed the main character to be fully voiced in conversation because it wouldn’t be tedious. The morality meter also changed a bit. Mass Effect didn’t use a single scale to determine your place on it, it allowed you to gain both Paragon and Renegade points and the game would give you more or less options depended on those point values.
Mass Effect of course led directly to Mass Effect 2. It was an upgrade and streamlining of the first game. It brought in more shooter elements and faster play. It got rid of inventories and focused more on character.
Back to Baldur’s Gate II. I said before that it was the direct influence to Dragon Age: Origins. I know this because the developer’s tag line for the game was “spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate.” The tactical, isometric, pause/play combat was there as was the full dialogue options instead of Mass Effect’s impression system. The interface is just a shinier version of the Baldur’s Gate one. Even the menus look the same. The biggest changed, which was in the original Baldur’s Gate is how characters in party would react to your reputation level, aka your morality meter. Now each character has his or her own meter, which is moved based on their character instead of overarching world metrics.
Now comes the final moment. Dragon Age 2 is Dragon Age: Origins + Mass Effect 2. Hawk is a predefined character that you do not create, but instead mold. Everything has been much more streamlined from the character creation to the action oriented combat. It ditched the dialogue options in conversation for the Mass Effect impression system, with some admitted upgrades as well. But on the positive note it kept the no overarching morality meter. Instead it keeps the individual party member’s approval meter. Really, the easiest and simplest way to understand Dragon Age 2 is that it is the child of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2.
The Wrap Up
It has been a long road up to this point. Starting in 1913 with H.G. Wells we come 88 years later to arrive at Dragon Age 2. There are dozens if not hundred of games left out from this little sliver of history. So many great games in the meantime and many left off on the periphery that went on to spawn and influence other games and franchises, even entire genres. But for now, focusing on this one game is enough. Hope you enjoyed this little history lesson of where the latest AAA RPG came from.
(This probably needed an editor for clean up and someone to tell me no with regards to some style choices.)
I first like to preface this with: I love BioWare. I love their games, I love their worlds and I love their characters and I love the experiences they have imparted onto me. Baldur’s Gate is my favorite game of all time. I think that series is the pinnacle of the CRPG.
Right now that that’s out of the way. YOU SUCK!
Let me explain. For those who follow me, or care to pay attention to anything I have to say at all, know I called Dragon Age: Origins my game of the year back in 2009 even though I was only able to play about 12-14 hours of it. After that the game started to stutter and the frame rate made the game unplayable on a pretty low graphics setting. My computer did not have the muscle to keep up anymore. Then a month or so ago I got a new laptop, this one with enough horsepower to pull off pretty much anything any game asked of it at the highest settings. Then last Monday Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition went on sale on Steam as part of a weeklong promotion. I owned the base game and Awakening already, but none of the DLC. I wanted it and this was a third of the price of buying them individually. It was $20. I bought the game and let it download and install overnight.
So I start it up on Tuesday around noon. As it’s checking DirectX and Microsoft something or other as it will do a window pops up reminding my I have to redeem the DLC with a code I can find by left clicking the game in Steam. No problem. I clicked ok after I copied the code to clipboard and it sent me to a web page sign in. I haven’t signed in for months, if not in over a year because I had no reason to. The BioWare social network thing is not in any way, shape or form useful or necessary. I couldn’t remember which email address I used or what form of my password I used. So I tried them all. One of the worked and I activated the code. I started the game up and checked on the DLC. It was all “Unauthorized.”
I clicked the ‘go to my account’ button. It opened another web page with a different account from a different email address. This was where the game was registered thanks to Steam.
My reaction:
After spending some time calming down before talking to a real person at EA support help desk where the BioWare Social Network sent me. Let me repeat that, Steam connected my account and I registered with a BioWare site and had to fix it with EA support.
The first guy was unhelpful. He misunderstood my original problem. I looked up my report and found the question entered had nothing to do with my problem. He tried and I don’t begrudge him. I calmed down again and tried the chat window help desk this time. (After I tried to get a line with Steam to see if I could get a refund. I couldn’t even find contact information.) Nancy, bless her, as soon as I explained it, came back and told me that she had fixed the redeem code. So I tried it. It didn’t work. I told her that and she corrected me by saying no, she had already done it for me with the correct account. I checked and yes it was fixed. I deleted the other account, which shouldn’t have existed in the first place. I’m wondering how it came to be.
So I start up the game to make sure all the DLC is there only to find it is still “Unauthorized.” Back to EA Support. Luckily there was a question there that already addressed my problem and I followed the instructions by going into an XML file and changing all the appropriate 1s into 0s. Now it all works. In total to get my content running took my 3 hours. That’s 3 hours of highly technical work and knowing where to go, what to ask and in the end knowing how to change file information. Those who were on twitter could see my blood pressure rising at this. As Kateri_t put it:
Hell some of them were right along with me:
I can’t imagine some guy who bought it on Steam knowing even half of this. How would an unplugged consumer who didn’t keep up with news, have a twitter support network of technophiles and an above reasonable amount of computer technical knowledge cope with this problem? Anecdotally this is a pretty common problem for their DLC too if my informal straw poll of twitter is anything to go by. Why is it a problem? Because they put so much bullshit, unnecessary hurdles, stopgaps and walls in the way of registering paid content. It occurs to me now I could have gotten a fan made crack patch and circumvented the whole thing. I am the paying customer and got the shaft by doing things the right way.
I don’t blame BioWare. I blame EA. I think I have compelling evidence for why too. EA set up this stupid DRM scheme by which you have to be logged in to their servers to play a single player game. For it to work it has to be registered and connected. If you want to play the DLC it has to be constantly connected. So if your connection goes out or hiccups, or EA servers go down like they did a month and a half ago, or you play with a PC that just isn’t plugged in at the moment means that your single player game WILL NOT WORK. Then there is the system for buying your content. You have to purchase BioWare points, a dumb enough idea when Microsoft did it, but at least those work for the whole console and not one companies games. Then you have to purchase them on a different website. I was offered EA store credit to rebuy some of the DLC, except they don’t sell the DLC on the EA store. I blame EA because BioWare already has an elegant solution in place.
If it weren’t for this reminder message popping up and then sending me to the Social Network site to redeem the code I could have done it in the main menu of the game. There is a selection called Downloadable content and an option in there that says “REDEEM CODE.” You can also buy the stuff there directly. No fuss, no mistakes, no talking to customer support reps. Keep is simple.
The other issue is, I bought the Ultimate Edition. The DLC was included with this version of the game. It downloaded when I downloaded the game from Steam and installed along with it. I purchased a game where the content came with it, but I had to register the DLC…why? The purpose of the Ultimate Edition was to have there be no need to buy all the DLC individually; it’s on the disc or Steam download as the case may be. Why did I have to register it when you know for a fact it’s part of the game and comes with every copy of the Ultimate Edition?
I don’t see EA or BioWare changing their practices on either front of this anytime soon. I nearly spent $20 for a new desktop icon. I was able to resolve the issue after 3 hours. I got lucky. I was lucky I knew what I was doing and had friends on Steam who could and were willing to help me and put up with me.
So when the inevitable Dragon Age II: Ultimate Edition/GOTY Edition comes out and I get that, I hope they’ll have fixed the user interface and process to getting the free DLC which is already on the damn disc. All I can do at this point is reaffirm my original statement.
YOU SUCK.
Since this weekend was an overall bust with unexpected work hours throwing off a major project undertaking I had planned. However despite that, this has been a really great week for me. Why? Because my new laptop came. And since I have been taking on too much heavy lifting when it comes to all these what I’m calling projects I’ve been starting. (I call them projects because while the end result may just be an essay or a podcast, but the amount of work and research that goes into it.) That and the never finished project that is my RSS reader. Because of all that, I think I deserve to write a fluff piece about something that makes me extremely happy right now.
The story starts last year, around January. I had to stop playing Dragon Age: Origins because my computer of the time could not longer run it as a decent rate. It was about 5 frames a second and moving the camera would stutter the whole game. I couldn’t get anything done. Then a few months later I got Mass Effect 1 for 10 buck off of a great Steam sale. My computer couldn’t even open it and it wasn’t all Vista’s fault. All it had was an internal graphics card and since it was a laptop, there was nothing I could do about it. It was powerful enough to run Mass Effect, going by the specs, but apparently there is some coding that prevents non-main brand graphics cards (NVIDIA or ATI) from working. The same went for Mass Effect 2 and Amnesia: The Dark Decent. Then at the end of ’10 I had heard great things about Metro 2033 and I got it cheep, again at a Steam sale. So that’s five games I cannot play and another one on the horizon (Dragon Age II), plus my 3 gig of RAM couldn’t keep up with Minecraft after 20 minutes.
My old VIAO also ran real hot and would chug if I had too many windows open. And then it got into the nasty habit of randomly deciding my HD didn’t have an OS installed, which the first time it happened nearly gave me a heart attack because I hadn’t backed it up in a few months. This is the same laptop where I had to replace the whole HD with a new one because the original got a scratch internally on the disk. In the last few days when I ordered the laptop the AC adapter died and the the power cable wouldn’t stay in the laptop and had to be held at just the right angle for it to charge. It gave me a good run an served me well for my last few years of college. I’ve known for a while I’m going to need a new computer and it would have to be a laptop, because that’s just how I work.
So I fired up Newegg and started looking. I also ended up with a beginner’s education in computer parts. I learned about the relative strengths and weaknesses of different processors (mostly the weaknesses ended up being their effect on the price) and mostly I learned what all those numbers and letter signified in the name of graphics cards. I checked for weeks and then checked back and the checked again, always window shopping. But then a few weeks ago it stopped being window shopping. when I hit the 700 dollar mark in my account, more money that had ever been in there at one time, I could afford a decent laptop. My eyes were wide and I wanted one that could do what I needed it to do, but also one that could do more for the future.
Then I finally got to 900 dollars with a 200 plus paycheck on the horizon. I could afford pretty much any laptop I wanted. My requirements:
-Intel i5 or i7
-Dedicated Graphics Card minimum RADEON 5650 if exchangeable
-HDMI output
-4 gig RAM
-15.6″ screen
-500gig HDD
-wireless
-Windows 7
The last three came with pretty much every laptop, so there weren’t a concern. I managed to narrow it down to two final choices. The differences were one had a slightly oh so slightly better graphics card, 7200 RPM instead of 5200 RPM, an extra USB port and a lot of extra features. One was also 350 dollars cheaper. The extra RPM and many special features won out even with the higher price tag.
So here it is, my new laptop.
The MSI GX660-260US.
It comes with an i5 460M (2.53 GHz on normal), an ATI Mobility RADEON HD 5870 graphics card, 4 gig of RAM (technically the motherboard can be upgraded to 12 gigs, but this i5 can only handle 2 RAM card so a max of 6 gig) 500 gig HDD 7200RPM, 15.6″ screen output of 720p, 2x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0, 1x HDMI, 1x eSATA, 4 in 1 card reader, 720p HD webcam, headphone + microphone jack, full keyboard with number pad, DTS Surround Sensation Ultra-PC with 2 HD speakers and 1 Subwoofer, a turbo boost button that can overclock the i5 and turbo fan that can cool the whole thing in a matter of seconds, blue tooth and wireless all button activated. It also has Dual HDD support that can run in tandem with RAID 0, doesn’t come with a second hard drive though, not the basic model. It cost 1,099.99 plus tax.
When I got it there were a few problems. Like the hard drive being already partition into C and D drives, almost right down the middle. A quick google search and I figured out how to undo to the partition and that it wouldn’t do any harm. Then a few hours into opening it the special LED lights on the side and the front stopped working, apparently this is a common problem that this model has and might have something to do with the updated Windows 7. It’s a special feature that looked really cool and is annoying that it doesn’t work anymore. Oh well, hopefully MSI will get back with a solution. TI took a full day to back up all my files from my last laptop and then transfer them back. Almost 200 gigs in music, movies, games, programs and other files. Everything works like a dream. Of course thanks to how Steam works I had to re-download every single game. That itself took another two days, but I did test my computer for a spin. (Annoyingly Steam took down the Crysis 2 demo, so I couldn’t test it out on that.)
Dragon Age: Origins was my first test. It was squashed, but it was set to a 4:3 resolution instead. In the options menu I fixed that and set everything to max, textures, graphics, audio and everything else. It went without a stutter, no matter how fast I spun the camera.
Amnesia asked what I wanted before I started to play. It also had a button that detects what you have and sets the options accordingly. I got a smile when everything instantly changed to High.
Mass Effects didn’t break down at the splash screen, but went all the way on max settings. So now the real challenge: Metro 2033. I set it to max settings and then had to fiddle, because one of them but black vertical lines everywhere. It was the DirectX 11 so I scaled it back one. It is beautiful, but then I hit a firefight and the frame rate dropped to the point where I could barely follow the dog monsters in the dark. Two more firefights like this and it dawned on my I have the Turbo button. Once it got going and the turbo fan, because it was starting to warm my leg and it smoothed out.
In the transition I had to refill all my RSS feeds into my reader, because I use a desktop one. I have all the links and names with anotation in a word document, because a few years ago an error occurred that caused them all to be erased. At the time I had only about 30-50 feeds so I could reconstruct it from memory and my twitter followers. now it’s too big to take that risk. One by one I entered the list and checked the feed after they were all in (this took a few hours). I removed all that couldn’t be read, either because the site was deleted or because the owner had moved it to another url or hosting platform. Also got rid of the ones ended by their authors and any that had been around for a while but had not updated since 2009 or did not have enough updates for me to think they’d be coming back. This deleted 18 feeds. In their honor I will list those who have completely died below. ( I should probably update the sidebar, because I have learned that people new to game criticism do use it as a guide.)
Dead Blogs
Banana Pepper Martinis http://literatigamereviews.blogspot.com/ (ended)
Beeps and Boops http://beepsandboops.com/component/content/frontpage (abandoned by time)
Bergsonian Critique http://bergsoniancritique.com/ (deleted)
Binary Swan http://www.binary-swan.com/ (deleted)
Everyone’s Blog Posts – Video Games and Human Values Initiative http://vghvinet.ning.com/profiles/blog/ (abandoned by url)
Fullbright http://fullbright.blogspot.com/ (ended)
Game In Mind http://www.gameinmind.com/game-in-mind/ (deleted)
GamerQuest http://gamerquest.squarespace.com/journal/ (deleted)
Graduate School Gamer http://graduateschoolgamer.wordpress.com/ (abandoned by time)
Graffiti Gamer http://graffitigamer.com/ (ended)
Hit Self-Destruct http://www.hitselfdestruct.com/ (ended)
Level Up http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/default.aspx (ended + deleted)
No More Lives http://www.nomorelives.com/ (abandoned by time)
Noble Carrots http://noblecarrots.com/ (abandoned by leaving internet)
PixelVixen707 http://www.pixelvixen707.com/ (ended)
Press Pause to Reflect http://presspausetoreflect.blogspot.com/ (ended)
SLRC – So Long Rightous Comrade http://drgamelove.blogspot.com/ (ended)
Subject Navigator http://subjectnavigator.wordpress.com/ (abandoned by time)
All in all I’m loving this thing so far. Only have to get used to the keyboard; they keys are a little smaller than my previous laptop. Of course the laptop is only a tool for doing things, but it’s still one awesome tool.
I’ve been only lightly using the internet and got pretty much away from the site due to my summer class. The last class I needed to graduate. Well I passed it this week and minus all the bureaucratic nonsense it will take to transfer the credits to Boston University I am a college graduate. Hurray for me.
Anyway that means I’m getting back to reading my backlog, playing my backlog and back to writing. If I have my way I’ll be start posting again next week.
Side note: if anyone has any PAX prime three day passes they aren’t going to be using, please get in contact. I’ll be interested.
I know it’s kind of pointless to write anything on E3, especially after this pretty much summarizes the whole thing, but it’s my blog and I want to.
Going into E3 I wanted to see only a few things: Beyond Good and Evil 2, The Last Guardian, Dragon Age 2, Mirror’s Edge 2 and anything that hadn’t already been announced. That last one is a little innocuous, because with the exception of The Last Guardian, none of the others on my list have been announced. Well I was heavily disappointed. (You have till TGS to make it up to me.)
Other than great unity that I felt with the twitterverse during the Press Conferences I got two things. One was the announcement of the next project from the studio ThatGameCompany. Journey is visually minimalistic like their other games and because of that strikes my imagination. WE don’t know what it’s about or have even seen any video of it being played. And yet I’m more excited about it than any of the over a dozen shooters put on display.
The other thing this E3 did for me was convince me it might be time to get a Wii in the near future. The number of games I actually want to play on it has reached my threshold to make it worth it. It helps that it can play Gamecube games like Wind Waker and Eternal Darkness. With Epic Mickey, Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 007 remake on the horizon and games (now much cheaper) like No More Heroes, Lost Winds, Zach and Wiki, Lost Winds, and Little King’s Story. I think I may have reached critical mass of quality games I want to play on the system. Good thing I waited until a time when the Wii now does what it was always supposed to.
I think a major blocking point of the system is how much it relies on nostalgia to market their games or at least get gamers to care about them. I have never played a Zelda, Metroid, Kirby, or really a Mario game for any decent length of time. So I have never cared about these franchises based on their name value and that is the only way they have ever been sold to me. I recognize them as great, but I can’t get excited about them. In fact I’ve had to wait for there to be enough non Nintendo franchise games on the system for me to start caring.
Actually going back to the Nintendo Conference nearly all their announced games relied on nostalgia to sell them to us. Plenty of people got excited about them, amazing so. I couldn’t understand it, until they revealed Goldeneye; I was tearing up. That’s great for those have been on the bandwagon the whole time, but what about us that might be interested, but have been with the non-Nintendo systems through their lives.
I didn’t mean to go on. So that’s it. E3, the biggest week in gaming, gave me Journey, a downloadable title for 2011 and seriously considering getting a Wii buying most of the games used.
Note: I am not excited about inFamous 2, more curious and not because of E3, but because of my posts.
(Forget it, this is going up as is. – Eric Swain)
My last post was really only the first half of a longer first draft I wrote on paper. When transcribing it I realized it started to meander and connect too many points, so I cut it down and resettled everything else into another post where it would hopefully make more sense.
I wrote about how my exposure to Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition at PAX East sparked that tabletop creative part of me and I started a new campaign. Well here is where I bring that journey full circle back to PAX. While there I got into a discussion with Matthew Gallant and Alex Horn where we got to talking about structure in video games, namely Far Cry 2.
I was told the story of how, apparently, the other writers of the game wanted to give the player the option at the very beginning of the game to shoot the Jackal while lying in bed in a malaria stupor. CLINT HOCKING shot this idea down, though he had to fight to get rid of it. It may make a nice bullet point on the back of the box, but if the Jackal is dead, why would you play the rest of the game. Your ultimate overarching objective had been removed. Even as the game is, some people feel that the final objective’s presences isn’t felt enough to make it noticeable and via consequence the game is missing direction. It’s one reason I respect CLINT HOCKING, despite hating the first title he worked on, he understands structure. When I heard the story it took me less than a second to realize there was a problem and identify it.
Please correct me if I’m wrong about the story, but from the sounds of it, the other writers didn’t see a sliver of a problem and thought it was a good idea. So many others, like them don’t get it and throw a lot of cool things into a pile in an attempt to racket up the tension higher and higher.
I can’t just be imagining it. It’s lack of structure that had most of us scratching our heads about No Russian’s point in Modern Warfare 2 or the numerous plot holes riddled throughout Heavy Rain. It’s lack of structure that has me rolling my eyes every time someone brings up Prince of Persia (2008)or force catatonic boredom during grind sessions in JRPGs. It’s why Brutal Legend stops so short it gave me whiplash. It’s where the cries of outrage came from the retconning of Fallout 3′s ending. It’s why people call Bioshock’s last third a padding waste of time. And it’s because of structure that Portal is hailed as one of the greatest video games ever made.
It is a complaint that comes up again and again even if it’s not expressly what people are saying. Sometimes they don’t understand why something is bad and they latch on to the most obvious, a shoddy sequence that tries to make plywood take the place of hardwood dining room floors, when really it could be that the termite riddled supports can’t sustain the oak.
Since designers are incorporating story more and more into games, then they have to follow a basic structure. It wouldn’t interfere with gameplay or difficulty. Instead a grasp and implementation of structure would compliment and better the product overall. It would allow for clear and reasoned direction so we wont end up with dead points, ludic gates, anti-pacing amping up of action or failure to end a game properly. (Or begin one for that matter.)
I think some of it comes from most of us having grown up in the 8-bit and 16-bit gaming era where the whole game was set as an extended third act and the backstory relegated to optional material. Now we are setting ourselves up to experience the whole story, with developer only having the skills from an earlier age.
Now this isn’t true for everyone. Bioware knows structure, almost fanatically so. Valve understands pacing like its nobodies business. Bungie doesn’t care for an overall product so much as the next 5 minutes flow and it works. But structure doesn’t just mean pacing it also means setting.
We already know what video games are better at than any other medium. Games are better at setting a world up for players to experience. Fallout 3 put you in the wasteland. The Silent Hill games are terrifying, because the town in a place that becomes real. Rapture was as much a character in Bioshock as Andrew Ryan was. Even Left4Dead story works in its minimalism. The best stories from these worlds were the found stories. Clues and hints in a world that suggested a story outside itself.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor has a story so divorced from its gameplay, I marvel at who thought to put them together. The game is all about feeding your spider and making his way through the mansion. The story is about a love triangle and family betrayal all told through found objects that make up the world. It’s a perfect case study of what games do best.
Uncharted 2, by contrast, gave us such an authored narrative, with linear active story engagement up the ass, but what it had better than every other game was a detailed understanding of plot pacing. Amy Hennig knew that a story arc doesn’t go up and up until the climax; it sweeps up generally with pits and lulls all along the way. Uncharted 2 does this artful precision, even if the story itself is a bit trite.
The Metal Gear Solid series, for all their over verboseness, have marvelous structure when it comes to pacing out the action. (Maybe not so much MGS4.) There aren’t really lulls, but a constant state of tension thrown into sharp relief by the high action sequences. When you are not in alert phase the game is very quiet and toned down, with the ever-present threat of being caught around every corner. It allows the world to keep tension there, but it is such a gradual climb, that it could be said that it was level, until you are spotted and have to run for it.
Tension, action and compelling are not synonyms. I have yawned at over extended action sequences, because I frankly didn’t care. When a system built to pull you into a world is only interesting because the player is metagaming it, you have a problem. When external incentives like achievements and trophies are why you keep playing or why you are expected to keep playing, it’s a problem. If your game is designed to draw the players in on merits of ouroboros like activity, see Farmville, it’s a problem. A game that cannot stand on it’s own merits has a problem. (Another rant for another time.)
Structure, however a designer employs it are the bread and butter of the medium. At its most basic, structure is the rule set that governs its magic circle. At its most expansive it is how all information is delineated from the system to the player and back again.
To paraphrase last weeks post, cause it is such a good line: the designer creates the story, but the player creates the plot. Just make sure you know which part you’re dabbling in. CLINT HOCKING did.
After PAX East sparked my interest in DnD and my players wanted to get back to it, I decided to give it a try. I liked the 4th edition simplification and streamlining of the rules. So I got the core books and read through them in anticipation of trying a new campaign. What I want to talk about came about at the end of our character creation session. Using the suggestions in the Player’s Handbook #2 the players use the possible background bullet points to create their character’s pasts. With very limited input from me, my players came up with the following.
Krieg Fargrim, a Dragonborn Warlord, was a farmer on the edge of a desert before entering the military. His company was sent on a campaign into the bordering desert to fight a war and then they got a certain mission. They found an underground complex that had connection with long fallen Dragonborn civilization. His unit was wiped out during this mission. When he was rescued and brought back, he quit and made his way to the city. The player got this from the background elements geography-desert, status-poor, occupation-farmer, occupation-military, and racial Dragonborn-Brush with past.
Ashley Pliskin, a Half-Elf Rogue, was born to a human mother in the mountains to the north to a community of bigoted humans that ostracized him and his mother for their connection with an Elf and was cursed by his grandmother at birth. Later he escaped the mob, becoming distrustful of others and made his way to the city where he ended up joining a gang for a short time. They weren’t happy when he left. This player worked off the tags geography-mountains, status-poor, occupation-criminal, birth-cursed and racial Half-Elf-outcast.
Midnight, an Elf Barbarian (and the only female of the group), came from a noble elven family. At her birth a prophecy dictated that she would be forced to suffer humiliation and degradation before eventually achieving greatness. Her parents sent her to the city, thinking it the best place to impose suffering on their daughter. The only work she could find there was as a stripper (I am not making this up.) working in a shady section of town. She randomly chose geography-forest, status-noble, birth-prophecy, occupation-entertainer and racial Elf-urban Elf.
Finally, Rain Vavack, a Human Shaman, (for this background I kept a running list of sources as he was telling us his background, see footnote) was a farm boy in the desert before sand pirates attacked it. He didn’t beg for his life and instead of killing him put him to work turning a large wheel. While on the sand ship he learned how to fight. Eventually he escaped slavery and found an old man in the middle of nowhere. The old man explained the mark on Rain’s forehead and the old man revealed his own mark telling him all with the mark where chosen to do battle and suck the power out of the mark until there was only one. (Our group then dubbed him the “main character”) He then made his way to the city being chased by his former owners. He was inspired by geography-desert, occupation-mariner, status-noble, birth-blessed and racial Human-Heir to forgotten god.
Now here is where co-operative storytelling got interesting. Rain showed up late, so the others had crafted how they met so he had to fit himself into the situation. This, with little help from, the DM, was the final product; Ashley was caught by Midnight attempting to rob the strip joint and in return for not turning him in, he would get her out of there. She had had enough. They managed to get outside, but were seen and are forced to run with the bouncers giving chase through the twisted streets before running into an alley bar and ducked behind the imposing figure of Krieg, making him spill the rum down his front just as their pursuers charged in. Krieg demanded to know who spilt his rum and is pointed to the pursuers by Ashley. Meanwhile, Rain sees the men charge in, think they are slavers there for him, tried to slip past. Krieg whirls around and clocks Rain in the head knocking him prone…TBC…
At the point I threw out all my plans. This was such a good setup there was no way I could not run with it. It even comes with it’s own built in cliffhanger. My input to all this was giving bonuses to skills and the act of Ashley and Midnight ducking behind Kreig. The rest was all them. We had to leave it there, but the next session saw them defeating the pursuers, Rain running away like a coward and later meeting at a city square. Here is where a problem arose. The girl who made Midnight didn’t want to play so I took the character over. I interjected her into a conversation the other two were having at an inopportune moment that spoiled the role-play, while I was dealing with Rain taking a bath in the central fountain.
I am not a real experienced DM and because of the lack of players I always did the job and ended up having to run additional characters to pick up the slack. It was even more unfortunate, because this was the first time in a campaign that my players have actually tried to role-play. Through all this and reading the opening chapters of the Dungeon Master Guide #2 I see more clearly what the job of a DM is, to provide structure. It then becomes a question of how much structure to provide.
The DM in this case is the game designer. He doesn’t create the rule system, or at least not most of them, but he does choose which ones to implement. He creates the setting and imparts it to the players. He takes control of all the other characters. He is friend, enemy, designer, and referee all rolled into one. In this case I have become the real world equivalent to the hidden calculators and systems invisible to players in video games.
When I worked on previous campaigns I was always working on the mechanical nature of the world. Dungeon maps and basic interactions, while failing to either utilize or live up to the implications and purpose of a role playing game. Too often I worked from the top down, building a combat encounter around monsters that would attack, instead of the bottom up where I figure out why they are there and learn how they would attack. The latter is much more satisfying. I would stumble across a few of these moments and it would be obvious that they were superior to the other encounters of the game. The more I’m reading and thinking about it from the design aspect the more I think of what I actually have to do to create a fun and compelling game.
Game//Cooperative storytelling designers do their best work when they set the stage and let the players do the action. Or to put it another way, DMs create the story and the players create the plot.
I don’t have any definitive answers, but I feel like I’ve taken another step to understanding what the hell everyone else seems to already know. I’ve stopped looking at the surface and am now looking at the structure. I just have brush up my skills towards this craft.
[Addendum] I had written this, but then Jason Rohrer released Sleep is Death. This is probably the quintessential cooperative storytelling program. I have not yet have had the chance to try it out. I can’t afford it at the moment and when I can I hope it wont be a fad that has flown by. I put this aside for a bit so I could come back to it and edit all the details and clean up the writing, as any decent writer should. In the mean time I read on Sleep is Death and how to be a better player within this particular experience. I couldn’t help but notice that much of the advice is similar to the Dungeon Master Guide. One of them was almost word for word.
If you have a game that’s purpose is to create a story, whether fully or just the details, then putting a person in a sandbox is a bad idea. Putting a person in a sandbox with a shovel in their hand is a better idea. Putting a person in a sandbox and then offering them the choice of different types of shovels seems to be where we are at the moment. The best idea of all, put the player in the sandbox offer them a shovel and have a swing set sitting the background.
* Star Wars, Gladiator, Dune, Conan the Barbarian, Princess Bride, Harry Potter, DBZ, Highlander, Lord of the Rings