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.