Cross-Reference: the cRPG

"Specialization is for insects."
Robert A. Heinlein


My recent jaunt through Shadowrun Re:DragHong brought the old issue of skill checks back into focus. All three campaigns throw the occasional skill check at you (which is more than other RPGs bother to do, admittedly) but due to
1) the discrepancy between Shadowrun's all-encompassing kitchen sink of counterculture fiction and the rather limited gamut of content Harebrained Schemes could provide for each campaign
and
2) the emphasis on maintaining combat viability strongly encouraging min-maxing --
it ends up as a strictly hit-or-miss system. You might raise some secondary skills just high enough by cheating and looking up skill requirements on strategy guides (like I did now and anon, I'll admit) but generally either the skill check falls into your specialty or you won't have a chance in hell of meeting it. And, given point 1 above, you won't be meeting any requirements if you don't tailor your character to the campaign's focus, meaning all your skills check successes/failures are more or less predetermined from class selection onwards.. I think I hit exactly two Will checks during the entire Dragonfall campaign, at least one of which was for flavor text.

Much of the problem comes with the idea of checking a single skill against a single requirement. If we're talking about a simplified Fighter / Mage / Thief class setup with requisite preordained STR / INT / AGI min-maxing, then that's about as good as it gets. Anything more complex, though, and the number of options and combinations rise so rapidly as to make predicting the use of, and investing in any one particular skill a completely unrealistic proposition - just as, when faced with seventeen different status effects, the only rational option is to bank on a "resist all" panacea. Players, justifiably, will end up ignoring the endless work-hours and funding you've spent developing those dialogue skills and feats in favor of cure-all combat optimization. Waste of time. Waste of money. Waste of your reputation when your customers catch up to the previous two realizations.

So how might the system be improved?

Sadly, the first, easiest and most impactful answer involves throwing more money at it. Ensuring more playstyles are represented largely means more passes through level design and scripts as a game world or campaign develops, at which point a shoestring budget quickly twists into a noose anchored to one deadline or another. See the otherwise inspired and ambitious Tyranny's blatantly truncated third act. Many issues of quality (difficulty, artistic flair, ethical sobriety or imagination) can be addressed better by small-time developers beholden to fewer financial interests. Deliberate, meaningful redundancy? Not so much. Takes cash.

On a related note, though limiting skill checks to cosmetic choices or flavor text can grate, never underestimate the impact of adding flavor to an otherwise functional skill system. Or its sometimes glaring lack. As noted vis-a-vis Pathfinder:Kingmaker's frequently slapdash filer texts, an item that looks like a "weird, magic thing" to a Barbarian with 8 INT and 'huh?' WIS just should not hold the same mystery to my Mystic Theurge with maxed out Knowledge: Arcana and Lore: Nature. The world should look different to different characters depending on their mental aptitudes, as exemplified by a playthrough of V:tM - Bloodlines as a Malkavian. While this may still count as feature creep, a cosmetic rewrite will require less integration with the rest of the team, so if you've been a keeping a spare writer stuffed in your office's rafters, have at it!

However, the best illustration I can find for how a skill evaluation should look comes from Europa Universalis' province taxes.

My "province tax" skill depends on two flat values (call them attributes) and fourteen different modifiers. Some of these pertain to the province in question, others are empire-wide, some are permanent and others temporary, some are downsides of other actions I knowingly undertook (liek, y'know, megalomaniacal invasion.) Sure, it's not as though the notion of multiple factors is unheard-of in RPGs. That brilliant yet half-finished mess Bloodlines stood out from its contemporary competition, among other reasons, for deriving usable feats each from two primary attributes.

It wasn't much, but it certainly stood out from maxing your fighter's STR in Neverwinter Nights or winning a drinking contest based solely on your CON. And, as far as pen and paper RPGs go "combined skill checks" are common enough to fuel endless forum threads about their relative merits and utility. Their relative lack in cRPGs is amazing from both angles. A GM in a pen and paper game can only force so many dice rolls and algebra impacting every single mundane decision on his players before they all walk out. Computers' great advantage in the field is automating that drudgery. That is after all how you get "action" so-called RPGs with their fifty swashes buckled per second. Why should the same automation used to streamline attacks not allow for greater complexity in noncombat skill checks?

My character's success in a particular task should depend on his physical health and ability, his education, his current affinity with various deities or forces of nature, the reagents in his pocketses, the season, the weather, the current phase of the moon, previous arguments made in conversation... really, whatever you can cook up. To some extent, the better cRPGs take this approach with dialogue choices, keeping track of the player's various prior decisions to allow arguments yielding varying degrees of NPC favor, but when it comes to skill checks the same games still limit themselves to simplistic one-to-one propositions. Struggling to disbelieve the devil's power over me should not merely carry a flat requirement of 9 willpower. Why not a combined will/intel score of 13, with a two-point bonus if my character's magic amulet comes in the form of a crucifix? Or a willpower check, modified by +1 if INT>=5 and another +1 for having upheld materialist values at some point in the campaign? While this would be a drag (literally, as in dragging along a whole notebook instead of a character sheet) for tabletop games, computers excel at such cross-referencing.

Just as importantly: show me the itemized breakdown of all such influences in mouse-over tooltips or the combat log. Most of the time I'll only care how much tax my province brings in. Occasionally I might want to inform myself toward my next stat increase... and that's how it should be. Eliminate the drudgery of constant dice roll crunching, sure, great... but complexity of decision-making should if anything increase. I should buy stat points not thinking "I am a STR character" but wondering how bulging muscles will improve my odds of intimidating a goblin or decrease my constitution/fatigue penalty from swimming across a castle moat in armor. Just as importantly, giving each cause multiple effects is less likely to put players to the impossible task of predicting the single correct answer out of seventeen status effects. It helps to make more options viable at some point. As I mentioned before, it's long past time we remembered that RPGs started as strategy wargames. Why shouldn't your skill checks receive the same attention as your weapon attacks with their base weapon damage, stat modifiers, buffs, armor penetration, resistances, flaming oils vs. oiled-up flamers?

It could be done, and much more easily and with less cost, I'll wager, than implementing the latest NVidiForce vertexemplary shade-mappinging. So why isn't it? Though I don't play pen and paper games, it does seem like most of them have been gradually addressing such issues since their first surge in popularity during the 1970s and '80s. So why do cRPG developers insist on continuing to tailor their products' complexity to the tastes of tween arcade-jockeys from the 1980s?

The "Gotcha!" "strategy"

"I can't stand it
I know you planned it
[...]
You'll shut me down with a push of your button"

Beastie Boys - Sabotage


I'll probably expand on Shadowrun: Hong Kong whenever I get around to discussing writing in RPGs once again, as it provides an interesting comparison to its preceding campaign, Dragonfall. For now, it bears mentioning one particular mission from the bonus campaign, Shadows of Hong Kong.

You're given the opportunity to loot a police armory and escape before the doors automatically close in 5 rounds. Which is fine. TBS players will be no strangers to timed objectives and planning several rounds ahead. You're also introduced to multiple new enemy types capable of sapping your action points, stunning your characters for one round every round, like "shock troopers" (yes, yes, very punny) with stun batons. This is also not a problem. Variety being the spice of virtual life, players are always asking for new enemy types. (Like me; I would be one of those players.)

It's the fact that the shock troopers first seem to even show up in the entire game during those five rounds of combat that makes me call bullshit. Any good tactician might logically position defenders to either side of the large door in the center and whittle down at least some of the cops as they trickle in. Then, in the last round, charge out and reposition to flank the remaining assembled enemy pistoleers. If you can thus bait and trap a few enemy melee, all the better. This means the first time you're likely to see a shock trooper is when a pair of them round the corner and stun-lock one of your characters inside the main chamber, thereby losing you the entire mission in a single action. Note, the problem is not just introducing a new, challenging mob type, but one specifically designed to inconvenience the player in that one specific mission.*

Then there's Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon, which for a summarily reskinned WWII TBS video game with no animated character models proved both surprisingly enjoyable and, from what I can tell, unexpectedly successful for its small-time developer and publisher. One mission in a DLC pack positions you in the east of the map, sweeping westward to capture several control points. As I mopped up the westmost control point I couldn't figure out why the mission wasn't ending. So I reloaded... and zoomed out.

In case you can't tell, the two eastmost highlighted hexes are no longer flying my banner. Apparently some enemies had spawned behind me as I steamrolled my way through and recaptured everything. Which would not be a problem had their appearance been properly signaled to my proud imperial self. Maybe at least call the mission "capture and defend" instead of just capture.

Surprises can greatly spice up our virtual adventuring when they're properly contextualized or naturally grow out of randomization and the rules of the game. In fact, roguelike and sandbox genres bank for their appeal largely on such emergent properties of a system's basic rules. Even there, hiding or neglecting to provide necessary information, a.k.a. dropping a piano on the customer, can invalidate much of your appeal. More to the point for strategy games, when trying to engineer, to script, to choreograph surprises, developers too often seem more concerned with feigning cleverness by withholding information from the player. A strategic daemonus ex machina is no wittier or more satisfying than fabricating a cheap, trite literary happy ending. If the mission becomes trivially simple once I know of your shock troopers and reload a fresh save, then their shock value gets re-appraised as a rip-off. "Restart mission" is not a strategy.

The goal of a game master or level designer cannot be to simply blast players off the map via concentrated squirts of narrative omniscience, but to provide difficult yet surmountable challenges. To once again quote an old PvP strip as I did in my contrast of Sir, You Are Being Hunted and Don't Starve:
"Whoa! That was close. You almost solved the mystery. I killed you real good that time."
- doesn't make you a very good storyteller. It makes you an adolescent poser.


___________________________________________________


* To add insult to injury, that Shadowrun:HK mission hands you at least one easy method of defeating the shock troopers. You find a cache of grenades nearby and a demon to summon which can both buff one ally's damage resistance and debuff enemy armor, letting you send one tank in to absorb the stun-locking attacks while you pepper the whole group with grenades. None of which you could know until you actually summon that demon.

They've a million ways to kill your brother instead of you

"In a modern culture
My friend you must be careful
They've a million ways to kill you
[...]
Walk away cause you're breaking up the girl"

Garbage - Breaking up the Girl (released 2001, created 2000)


Fun fact: According to the CDC's national vital statistics report for that year in the U.S.: "In 2000 the age-adjusted death rate for males of all races was 1.4 times that for females, about the same as in 1999 but continuing the trend toward convergence in mortality risk between males and females."

Well, that certainly sounds like it's "the girl" we should be broken up about, don't it folks? Men were dying so much less that women almost had it almost as bad as nearly half again as many men!

Walk away, lyricists, just walk away...

ColdFisharians of the world, unite!

"And when we open the heads of these two young people, we find, not a straightforward motive on the surface anywhere; we find, indeed, not a soul so much as an oversoul, a zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highway's feast of fine, confused thinking."

H.G. Wells - The Wheels of Chance

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Major spoiler alert for Weregeek. (First story arc reveal. (a.k.a. the best part of the comic))
______________________________________________

In direct contrast to Dominic Deegan's adept establishment of an internal locus of control for its protagonist (cited in my previous post) stands the webcomic Weregeek. Its initial story arc set up a standard wish-fulfillment fantasy in which roleplaying geeks get superpowers, band together to glory in their newfound specialness and fight an evil conspiracy of the boring. It was decently executed at that, but what really set it apart was the grand reveal of the wish-fulfillment fantasy having itself been only a role-playing campaign all along, complete with the rather poignant barb directed toward the audience that if you really believed it was real "you would not be able to function." Had it stopped there, Weregeek would've remained a positive example in its field. However, I immediately noted that the strip, having little or nothing to say after that point, rapidly fell back on the lowest common denominator of relationship dramedy. Last time I checked up on it this winter it seemed dead set on proving me horribly right, strutting and fretting its way across some awkwardly staged love triangle polyhedron.

I would've been quite willing to declare the comic officially dead when the last un-attached character, Abbie, got paired up. Fortunately, the author must've heard me because she finally addressed the issue. Unfortunately, it was done via the most pathetically predictable display of feebleminded narcissism. Abbie, attempting to discern why she's not dating, decides to nail down her own exact sexual category... by getting mentored in sexual identification by a furry and taking an online quiz.
Yeah...
Never mind that the conversation reads like a 1950s middle school educational video script. Golly-gee Dr. Tapir, until now I didn't even realize I had such a raging case of the asexuals! She then comes out to her roommate by dressing up in a cape as a superheroic "grey ace" and though yes, in all fairness the farce is deliberately played up as the goofy antics of a hyperactive character, it can't help but remind one of Weregeek's beginnings more than a decade ago.

Shadowgeek or shadow asexual? Weregeek has come full circle. Where a decade ago it was capable of gently deflating its audience's personal fable of specialness derived by membership in a defined group of plucky rebels, now it has a character ecstatically trumpeting "I'm not just a weirdo, I'm ace!" And, of course, this conclusion is not reached by private investigation or honest introspection, or by the expedient of ogling a few hundred asses on the street and tallying up one's tapping preferences... but by codependent preciousness and supplication to the zeitgeist. There's good money to be made in pandering to the majority of humans devoid of intellectual free agency, to the latest crop of useful idiots, to the hordes of slavish simpletons cribbing their lack of personality off online pop-quizzes and reddit echo chambers.

Humans dread facing their true worth, defined by their ability, intellect, creativity, integrity, by qualified qualities. They crave social status via some intrinsic label that can never be taken away from them, by "identifying as" special due to facile moral posturing or their basest attributes like their skin color or sex or what you stick and where you stick it. It would've been very simple to build up Abbie as one of the most respectable asexuals in the history of fiction... by simply never bringing it up and showing her interacting with others. Have her <do> things and not <be> a category. But a world of weirdos, of individuals, of world citizens just won't do now, will it? One must declare allegiance, after allegiance, after allegiance...

The Deceptive Depth of a Snout

Mookie's back, baby!

Well, technically the famed alliterative cartoonist never went away, but as I noted about his collaborative, kid-friendly space-superhero comic Star Power, fantasy-style superheroics don't translate as well to science fiction, even to low fidelity science fantasy. Now he's apparently dusted off his original project Dominic Deegan, Oracle for Hire once again for a new story set centuries after the original events.

A chapter and a half into things there's relatively little to conclude about the new installment, except to note that it is apparently possible to create a "special" webcomic character without immediately descending to cloying, self-righteous politically correct posturing. The new protagonist, Snout the mongrel-man, happens to be deaf-mute. Instead of merely restating the point ad nauseam for cheap sympathy, the comic makes use of Snout's soundless viewpoint to indulge in a solid helping of the classic visual humor by which cartooning (animated or not) sets itself apart from other media. This is not to say it's downplayed, but the hero's divergence from the norm is acknowledged where it would logically crop up and not shoehorned into every single panel as a manifestation of moral entitlement. Snout is not his disability, or his physical deformities. He's a provincial but both determined and practical sort who weighs his options and makes deliberate informed choices wherever possible. He does not set out on his quest because the world has wronged him as a deaf man with scaly arms... but for the sake of intellectual curiousity.

Internal motivation. There, was that so hard?

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edit 2024/07/15: As this post gets the occasional hit, I should amend it. Sadly, The Legacy's strong start petered out, gradually degenerating into precisely the sort of codependent, politically correct posturing garbage I'd hoped the author had outgrown, especially after Snout's story. Still the first portion before the cast grows past three-ish characters was damn fine work.

The Big DomCom Theory

I have watched little to no television during the past decade. So, it was news to me, but apparently The Big Bang Theory remained one of the most popular shows up until its last season. It says something about modern society that everyone wants to watch a show about former intellectuals being constantly derided, degraded and brought to heel, ground under mundane social ape concerns: making intra-tribal alliances, seeking mates and reinforcing family units.

Everyone's eager to see the nerds leashed and muzzled and trotted about to sing popular tunes on command.

It says something... but hell, by this point nobody's listening anyway.

Da generation

"the most insidious question of all would emerge into the foreground: whether science can furnish goals of action after it has proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then experimentation would be in order that would allow every kind of heroism to find satisfaction -- centuries of experimentation that might eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclopic buildings; but the time for that, too, will come.
[...]
Countless things that humanity acquired in earlier stages, but so feebly and embryonically that nobody could perceive this acquisition, suddenly emerge into the light much later -- perhaps after centuries; meanwhile they have become strong and ripe. Some ages seem to lack altogether some talent or some virtue, as certain individuals  do, too. But just wait for their children and grandchildren, if you have time to wait that long: they bring to light what was hidden in their grandfathers and what their grandfathers themselves did not suspect. Often the son already betrays his father -- and the father understands himself better after he has a son."

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science



So... what can we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic?

For one thing, naked apes can survive just fine without physical contact with each other, but they insist on it nonetheless to the point of rioting, and should be put down like the vermin they are when they do so.

For another, our "dependence" on fossil fuels is at least 25-30% psychological, a fabrication of capitalist overproduction, advertising, planned obsolescence and mindless competition. One of the first big pieces of news as quarantine measures went in place was the price of oil dropping to the point where oil companies couldn't give their shit away. Mind you, transportation has not ceased. Food and other necessary or useful products are still being delivered from the fields to your fat moronic mouth every day. Much of the populace is still commuting to work. All we've decreased is the casual abuse of fossil fuels by every insignificant pissant overgrown monkey on the planet. "People" are no longer driving to the next town over for dinner every night, no longer driving half an hour for a walk in the park or to run on a treadmill at the gym, no longer driving three hours to see some idiotic sports match or concert they could just as easily watch at home, no longer burning jet fuel to travel around the planet every six months on vacation. This is everything we should have stopped doing half a century ago. Our society did not need to grind to a halt to decrease carbon emissions. We just needed to stop billions of degenerate subsentient apes from frivolously squandering this wasteful and destructive resource for their every imbecilic whim. But we didn't. And now it's too late. We've doomed ourselves, not for the sake of any dire need or threat, but for the entertainment of vermin.

There's something still more important which I would hope a particular segment of the population might learn from our panicked and ineffectual struggle against the sniffles. Teenagers might acquire the simple understanding that the world is real. Each generation can think back to at least one defining event delineating its adolescent years from the previous. In the '90s we grew up in the shadow of the Soviet collapse. In the 2000s Americans grew up in the wake of the World Trade Center bombings and everyone felt the sting of the tech boom's end. In the 2010s it was the global recession caused by real estate speculation. For you, teenagers of the '20s, this pandemic is the event you will all remember for the rest of your lives, the masks, the isolation, the alternating panic and recklessness, and lucky you: it's different from all the others.
It's real.
COVID-19 is a physical agent. It exists. You can put it under a microscope and multiply it in a tissue culture. It spreads across the physical landscape by physical means in objectively measurable timeframes. Do you realize how rare this is?

For the two previous generations, millennials and my tail-end GenX-ers, the disasters which framed our growing understanding of the world were entirely human fabrications: corporate greed leaving the populace homeless, superstitious primitives flying planes into buildings, megalomaniacal dictators devouring the world in first, second and third courses. The coronavirus pandemic, regardless of the human stupidity which has aided its spread and prevented prompt treatment, exists. It's a physical fact. Virions exist, infect and replicate, regardless of whether you believe in them or not. The virus cannot be bargained with, prayed to, talked down, seduced, intimidated; it's unimpressed by your black privilege or white pride and most importantly could not possibly give a single solitary shit about the personal pronouns you invent for yourself!

Let this mark the end of the snowflake generation.
For sixty years or so, the better parts, the urbane, modern sectors of western culture have increasingly fallen under the dominion of postmodernism, a fanatical denial of objective reality, feeding a metastatic proliferation of self-serving rhetorical constructs marketing narcissism to gays, to blacks, to indians, to women, to vegetarians, to self-styled psychics, to anyone at all who might be in the market for a platform for self-righteous posturing. The intelligentsia abdicated its leadership role in curating public discourse in favor of knuckling under to anti-scientific false equivalence, nodding along with every new wave of superstition and self-declared moral superiority. This has culminated, over the past two decades, in a generation so disjointed from reality that they're willing to deny the existence of even their own genitals, who imagine they're combating racism and sexism by glorifying and demonizing one sex or race over the other, who have given up studying the sciences to understand the world but demand absolute rulership of it by virtue of their social "science" degrees. A generation which instead of rebelling against authority took their parents' most self-righteous, vapid posturing up to eleven. The first generation to decrease in IQ. Millennials. Generation Facebook. Snowflakes. Hypocrites. Delusional, ignorant narcissists. Degenerates.

Is it too much to hope that the next generation might rebel against the previous by adopting realism and science in the face of millennials' proselytism and social constructionism? Will they rebel against anti-intellectualism? Will they be able to face the world in all its ugliness and seek real solutions instead of rhetorical cop-outs and fleeting self-promotion? Will these masked, socially distanced children finally grow up able to see through emotional manipulation and embrace cold, objective reason?

Probably not. The de-evolution of the human ape has gained too much momentum, and the destruction of the ecosystem will precipitate its fall. The social structures of the 21st century have so far aped all too faithfully those of the beginning of the 20th, with strict, facetious faux-Victorian politeness both promoting and masking the rise of fascism. Our entire species is on its way to WW3 and then into the gutter.

But if anything could reverse that, it's the COVID-19 pandemic... for the simple reason that it's real.

Virtually Real Industry Standards

"Now remember, and I can't stress this enough, this is a talkie, so I want the full gamut of emotions from every actor in every scene."

Futurama, Season 3 Episode 8 - That's Lobstertainment


I felt in the mood for some fantasy roleplaying before diving back into Shadowrun and decided to revisit some oldies while I'm at it. First up was Beyond Divinity. I was rather unenthused by my first exposure to the Divinity series, Divine Divinity, an unimaginative and highly repetitive hack'n'slash Diablo clone with slightly more freeform character advancement and some decent atmosphere. Neverthelessthe more recent Original Sin releases have intrigued me enough to go back and witness the series' early years. Second was Daggerfall, a.k.a. The Elder Scrolls 2, which Bethesda has started offering for the appropriate price of free.

For once, I don't think I'll be getting far past either's tutorials. Daggerfall seems more playable than its predecessor Arena (to wit: mouselook instead of keyboard turning) but it's a bit telling that reviewers praised it almost exclusively for the size of its world and not for its interactive qualities. I've died three times so far to a rogue (? - pixelated to shit) in the very first dungeon simply because I cannot tell how combat works: when does my weapon actually connect, what is its range, when is my opponent capable of blocking, when is he actually swinging his weapon? From what I can tell damage mostly just seems to... happen, regardless of where you and your opponent are actually standing or other details. Don't get me started on swiping the mouse across the screen to swing your weapon, a mechanic which I doubt has ever worked in computer games. Leave that moronic LARPy bullshit to the Wii-wiiis. Yes, I'm sure that by lengthy practice I could learn to abuse such a primitive combat system, and if this were last decade's long RPG drought I just might... but we have better options now.

Beyond Divinity on the other hand actually seems worse than the first title in its particular series. While its superior music stands out (Larian really lucked out with their old composer) it only took me ten seconds to be reminded of the horrendous voice "acting" insulting your eardrums at every turn. It's amazing to see a single game display both positive and negative extremes even within a single facet of its design like sound. Also, while the first installment was a repetitive grindfest, the second gives you two characters to micromanage (one to hack, the other to slash) and deliberately increases the grind: for instance by attacking even one rat I've seemingly declared war upon all rat-kind, set their AI to aggressive so they jump me at every step. Both the two-character setup and the obsession with pervasive (and often cheap) voice acting would crop up much later in Original Sin 1 and 2 respectively, and I wasn't crazy about them even then, but their more amateurish first showing makes them stand out even more as misconceived gimmicks.

I can't help but contrast such gimmickry to my recent experience in Shadowrun: Dragonfall, which has no 3D combat or voice acting despite being put out 15-20yrs after these other games, yet stands as both more immersive and better written from its very introduction. The necessary realization: in retrospect, the problem is not that Dragonfall didn't offer those "features" but that Daggerfall and Beyond Divinity did!

The problem with Beyond Divinity and Daggerfall isn't their poor handling of voice acting or 3D real-time combat, but that neither developer accepted their limitations in pushing for fluff they couldn't deliver. There were good voice actors in video games in 2004 (Bloodlines! holy shit... Bloodlines) if you were willing and able to pay for them. There was better FPS combat in 1996 (Doom and Quake) if you were willing to focus your program on delivering fluid, responsive interactions between character models. Daggerfall could have been an expansive fantasy world with more playable 2.5D turn-based dungeons a la Albion, or Bethesda could have devoted more development time to its combat system and held off generating a gigantic world. Instead of recording interns and acquaintances groaning through terrible dialogue, Larian could have invested more work-hours in its scripts or world-building.

As video games gradually leave their "Betty Boop" stage of neophile appeal, that giddy race to qualify as the latest craze, it becomes more and more obvious just how much the previous four or five decades' products have ignored quality in favor of ticking off lists of nominal features. Self-interest on programmers' part is in some cases blatant, as gaining experience with the latest machinery and procedures improves hirability and job security in any technical field. Who cares that the product doesn't sell (or sells but is remembered as a rip-off) as long as a few code-monkeys got their customers to bankroll their post-graduate studies? However, too often designers' choices merely track the industry's idiosyncrasies, with no obvious benefit to anyone involved. Not every single game needs to recite every single tenet of the accepted definition of its genre.

And I'm not just saying all of this because so many companies are jumping on the 3D goggles bandwagon.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall

"a last ironic thought drifted through Hendricks’ mind. He felt a little better, thinking about it. The bomb."

Philip K. Dick - Second Variety


I became instrumental to the end of the world, possibly twice over. Huh.
Oops?
My playthrough of Shadowrun Returns a few months ago left an impression of a not terrible but mostly mediocre, option-deprived campaign brightened by a few maturely written lines of dialogue and half-decent combat mechanics making you really consider your action point expenditures and giving support roles their due. I ended up rather enjoying my elvish combination decker / rigger / spellcaster / amateur conjurer. For the Dragonfall campaign I told myself: "and now, for something completely different"

Well, I'm a dwarf now... which pre-existing genetic condition notwithstanding, I realized toward the end of the campaign that my stats had somehow, of their own accord, mysteriously approximated my previous incarnation to within one point each, maybe two. What can I say: I have my preferences. Still, leaving aside my own supporting role default setting, the rather limited gameplay does a pretty thorough job of pushing you in this direction via most skill checks being based on charisma / decking / rigging. Which, for a game advertising role-playing choice, is a problem.

It's especially a problem for a game based on Shadowrun. I've never been particularly crazy about the setting. As a kitchen sink of high fantasy, urban fantasy, cyberpunk (already a composite of film noir and SciFi) post-Apocalypse, pre-Apocalypse and the RPG rags-to-riches precept, Shadowrun (much like WH40K) just tries to do too much at once to hold much hope of outgrowing its "ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny" teen appeal. Even so, it's been growing on me, and for any cRPG campaign to do its many facets justice it would have to be a hundred-hour epic at the least. I would bet Dragonfall's sparse score of missions barely scratches the surface of its source material's potential, much like Neverwinter Nights' campaign did two decades ago with D&D 3.5, handing you a single sidekick and throwing you up against repetitive streams of undead and golems.

I slotted Dispel in my spellbook for several missions before realizing I was never going to find any enemy buffs / debuffs worth mentioning. I doubt I ever encountered a skill check for Quickness or Summoning (not even in the two demon-summoning themed dungeons) and Strength / Body checks are almost as absent (and the few that come up are also among the few checks where you're allowed to substitute a teammate (a.k.a. Eiger.) I don't think I ever picked up a SMG or melee weapon - but several pistols drop into your lap. You get almost no choice of NPC companions. Your variety of enemies is a bit lacking. On one hand Strength or Chi-based martial artists are mostly left by the wayside. On the other hand most enemies you meet seem to pack grenades with absurdly high throwing accuracy regardless of their other skills.

Level design did improve a bit over the original Shadowrun Returns campaign (though Settling Debts could be cited as object lesson in infuriating obtuseness) as did noncombat interactions, and at least the middle portion of your adventure offers some choice between missions' order. However, Dragonfall's most pronounced improvement came in writing. Though your NPC companions are limited in number, the main four's dialogues, as well as those of merchants, villains and flavor redshirts, are both greatly expanded and carefully tailored to flesh out your alternate-universe Berlin's bleak yet cautiously optimistic environment.

Somewhere along the way, Dragonfall turned into one of the most thoughtful takes on its subject matter you're likely to find among cRPGs, incorporating both a multifaceted view of human nature and speculation on how it would be altered by a universe ruled by dragon-headed multinational corporations. You get a brief glimpse at how escapism addiction looks in a world of perfect but short-lived immersion, how a Satanic cult leader might progress if he actually had the patronage to back up his claims, the true ramifications of blood magic or strong AI combined with a mind-machine interface, or anarchist movements in a world of literal mind control. The characters are interesting enough to make me forego my usual "no filthy hu-mons" rule of party membership for the sake of exploring their stories. The ideas are certainly not new (if you've read Neuromancer you'll see some plot devices coming a mile away) but they're presented with due sobriety and equanimity appropriate to a genre centering on player choice... however that choice should turn out.

At this point, since I'll be discussing the ending (I arguably got the worst one possible, and it's a doozy) those of you allergic to spoilers may want to avert thine eyes lest they offend you and require cyborg replacements. (And buy Dragonfall. It's not one of the masterpieces of the genre, but quite worth a playthrough.) For my own part, Shadowrun: Hong Kong is already purchased and shall be played... as something other than a back-row support caster for once.

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"I stand by my decisions, all of them"

That you're allowed to actually reply thus when confronted with evidence of your apocalyptic blunder would by itself set Dragonfall's writing above the vast majority of mass-market entertainment. In the final encounter, I chose to side with Vauclair the would-be dragon exterminator against my own team. The fight itself was very interesting. It would've been impossible without heavy pep-pill abuse, Glory's poor AI (built for melee but never closed the distance) Dietrich losing control of his summons and me having serendipitously slotted the Blind spell which completely neutralized Eiger the sniper.

I murdered my stalwart allies because their thirst for revenge turned out to stand in the way of much greater deeds. When new information became available (i.e. the story's villain was not a dragon, but a scientist attempting to cause a dragon genocide) I re-assessed my priorities, as intellect must. Whether explicitly Chaotic Neutral or not, my persona is first and foremost a free thinker. Normally I would gladly side with super-human entities (see below) and the farther super the better but from what (admittedly little) I've caught of the lore behind Shadowrun's dragons, they strike me as stereotypical superpowered manipulators, much like Vampire: the Masquerade's elders or the Abrahamic Yahweh. Throwbacks to authoritarian barbarism. Totalitarians. Megalomaniacs. Control freaks. Slavers. They had to go down.

Now, of course any reader the slightest bit genre savvy would easily predict that such hubris would have disastrous consequences. One does not attack a role-playing world's core concepts without some cringe-worthy cosmic backlash. Nevertheless it was the appropriate choice, in character, for my dwarfish self given the information at hand. The same is true of my choice to set APEX the sentient AI loose into the matrix. Never mind that anyone who remembers Wintermute will easily spot its cynical manipulation of you from the get-go, and that freeing an AI is one of the most insanely reckless acts imaginable. To keep a post-human intellect of such magnitude enslaved was a crime against sentience and my character, once again, acted accordingly.

The beauty of Dragonfall is that it does not try to sweep such actions under some blanket, trite, after-school-special moralism. It doesn't wag its finger at you, but merely presents you with tales of the world's populace being devoured by the Lovecraftian terrors you've inadvertently set loose, as-is, at the same time as you can declare you made the right choices given the information to which you had access. The "bad ending" lets you witness your remorseful ally Vauclair's suicide and share a fatalistic final drink with your former enemy, the sadistic, faux-nihilistic Audran, as both of you homicidal, genocidal, omnicidal monsters resolve to see your pet Apocalypse through to the bitter end:

Beautiful.
Again, it's been done before in other media, but you don't see more complacent video game developers daring to actually implement such an acknowledgement of personal choice.
There is no bad ending, so long as it's well written.