Lockstep 2: ELEX

"When you try to see, we'll watch you

When you try to leave, we'll keep you
When you should be dreaming, we'll wake you
But don't scream, we'll make you swallow your words"

 

Metric - Ending Start

 

 

I kinda want to be playing my rashly pre-ordered Baldur's Gate 3 early access version right now, but the user reviews I've glanced at suggest Larian lazily recycled everything I criticized about Original Sin 2 with none of its strong points and a complete disregard for the Baldur's Gate series' precedents. Glacing at character creation does nothing to assuage that fear. Leaving aside smaller quibbles, the oversimplified skill investment and worse, the lack of any hint of the all-important D&D alignment system makes me predict it will prove tailored to the tastes of SUBHUMAN MOTHERFUCKING CRETIN FILTH INCAPABLE OF ARITHMETIC OR FORESIGHT!!!

 

Well, anyway, at least character creation in M&B2: Bannerlord looks promising, but before I start on those items of interest I did want to give half a chance to some of their competitors. So in place of BG3 I fired up Low Magic Age again, and in place of Bannerlord, ELEX. And despite hailing from divergent cRPG subgenres, I gradually realized their different frustrations boiled down to the same fundamental problem: control.

 

Low Magic Age mostly sells as a palliative to anyone sickened by the oversimplification of RPGs, and Dungeons and Dragons in particular.

 

It adheres, as far as I can tell not playing tabletop games, quite strictly to D&D 3.5 combat mechanics and is fundamentally just a randomized turn-based dungeon-crawler. A lack of roleplaying makes the alignment system once again irrelevant, and while it tries to contextualize your adventures on a Mount&Blade-style map filled with towns producing trade goods and issuing quests, the crafting / noncombat half of Low Magic Age offers little of interest. A satisfying quick scratch for your dungeoneering itch.

 

Still, being so faithful to its source of inspiration, it forces into stark clarity D&D's biggest flaw of over-randomization. At the same time, a lack of production values or quality-of-life features and desperation to mask said lacks lead to inventory-sorting and other interface timesinks:

Note, the existence of an active unit bracket is not the problem; neither is a no-budget product trying to squeeze a few sparse animations into an otherwise static landscape, though King of Dragon Pass for instance demonstrates a game can be visually captivating even with zero animations whatsoever. You only run into trouble when you start interposing an animation, no matter how small, between the player and the actions he wishes to undertake. When I already have my next five moves planned out, the last thing I want is to waste precious seconds waiting to be permitted to carry them out, with no new relevant information to fill my attention, while you dramatically pan the camera or pause for effect or scroll some text across my screen that I've seen a thousand times before.

Which brings us to ELEX (yes, the title's in all-caps, even though "elex" as an in-universe phlebotinum is a reg'lar word; don't ask):

Ascending anything taller than your ankles triggers your character to execute a scripted animation, and while it's only a second long, on a landscape composed in the main of boulders, ravines and escarpments, those gratuitously commandeered seconds add up! Don't even get me started on descending, as falling off even the tiniest pebble breaks you out of sneak/aim mode to trigger another animation. Granted, there is room for such hyper-realism in video games. Miasmata for example made a damn good show of it, but that was a game designed around playing a sickly naturalist who had to tread carefully. In ELEX, a science fantasy world full of jetpacking mutants and dogs spitting energy blasts and teleportation and force fields, it's a bit jarring for my super-mutant-magic-soldier-hero-mercenary-badass-dude to spend half his time tripping over his own feet!

Basically, the game seems to constantly try to predict and confirm where the player's keystrokes will take the character, then script the motion in a single action. In theory, this might result in smooth, dramatic, sweeping moves and fewer user errors, but in practice it results in several split-second recalculations and centimeter-depth falls as the game repeatedly struggles to determine your position along the z-axis.

 

Of course, that's only part of ELEX's greater problem. It also features the most idiotic implementation of aim-assist and dodging I've had the displeasure of encountering.

Those two images are not even a second apart during the same combat animation. Note the position of my character's hand as he releases the bowstring if you don't believe me... then note that in the same time-frame (almost literally a singular frame) the soldier I'm targeting "dodged" two meters to his left. What exactly am I supposed to do with this? In the same idiotic vein as GreedFall, enemies turn on a dime and make inertia-less, meters-long lunges: a world filled with nothing but displacer beasts where landing a hit has about as much to do with your aim as it does with stock market trends!

 

Ah, but that idiocy's supposed to be addressed by an even greater display of idiocy, an aim-assist feature which constantly wrenches your camera this way and that, even force-turning your character as it sees fit. Thankfully it can be turned off... but only for in-combat targeting, and only for yourself... yeah. So whether you "dodge" an enemy by clipping through its attack or whether it touches you from two meters away depends entirely on whether the game has already decided it wants the enemy to hit you, ignoring physics altogether. Oh, and all those annoying little movements like climbing and stumbling? Those also disrupt your camera control. If you jump off a cliff, the game immediately forces your camera downwards, assuming that's the direction you must want to look... even if what you're actually doing is jet-packing across a gorge and you need to adjust to your landing spot.

Now, aim-assist might have its place in flight sims and the like where motion is simply too fast for aiming, but for regular old "grunt with boomstick" shooters it seems pointless, coming into play only rarely in multiplayer situations like Savage 2 where healers had to target teammates through enemies. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of placing players in a 3D world with full range of motion. Personally, I don't consider aiming relevant to my involvement as a thinker... so guess what, I play genres with a top-down tactical view instead. ELEX's aim assist is worse than useless. It's active sabotage.

 

The over-riding concern here, as I said when I first discussed Low Magic Age versus Knights of the Old Republic as an example of RPG railroading, is as stated above: what exactly am I supposed to do with this? Crucial difference in creating a game as opposed to less interactive media: nothing you make is self-contained. The player should determine outcomes and events. Both over-randomization (D&D's perennial foible) and over-scripting can detract from a game's quality if they deny player action or render it irrelevant.

Does watching that orange selection bracket flitting about my screen add to Low Magic Age's interactivity? Yeah, I'd say so, looks nice, draws the eye... but how much potential clicking-time is it worth? One second? Half a second? One-tenth? Also, how long should I be spending watching a two-frame crafting animation?

Does being one-shotted by a random crit add anything to the experience of dungeoning and dragoning? Only if I get to select my starting placement with foreknowledge of the danger I'm facing.

Does fighting displacer beasts reward careful aim? Or mindless spam?

Does adding a "climb" animation to every waist-high boulder improve the player's climbing experience, or does it turn into an endless series of disruptive one-second cutscenes belaboring the mundane to no dramatic, comedic or interactive effect?

Does aim assist actually... assist, when even fundamental Countestrike FPS gameplay from twenty years ago would've been more responsive and immersive?

Do you really need to wrench the camera out of my control for every single piddlin' little motion my character makes?

Do you think you can guess which way I want to look?

Do you presume to read my mind?

You lack the bandwidth, code-monkey.