Fantitsy Gaming

Anyone else think it's weird that game designers now spend half their time pandering to the self-important fops pretending they've transcendended biological sex (the "theys") ... and the other half still forcing sexual dimorphism where it really, really shouldn't apply?

 

Really. What the hell am I looking at?

 

The 2 wonders of Age of Wonders 4.

 

The real kicker is that it would've been easier for them to just use one character model for both croaker sexes, and no-one in the audience could've claimed to know the difference anyway.

 

Can these boobs* get any more ridiculous?

Of course they can!

from D:OS2

 

What are those? What is even under that garment? Is she fostering a pair of hedgehogs on her bleached rib cage?

 

Oh, gods below and above, I recant, just leave it at frog boobs!

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* Pun very much intended.

P.S.:

Lest we forget the giant tentacled worm with glowing nipples.

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.

Piano / Forte! (A Dimension of Sound)

"One thousand cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air
We found a place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there"

Judas Priest - Ram It Down
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"And whomsoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And Rrroht inside a corpsy shell"

Vincent Price, in Michael Jackson's Thriller *
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Though its most memorable moments tended to come from its more tech-driven episodes, The Twilight Zone only rarely qualified as SciFi. I'd speculate that, as Paramount would with ST:TNG forty years later, CBS just found it cheaper to reuse the copiously superfluous cowboy hats and fedoras it had lying around its studios than to pay to build the more unique cardboard rockets and fishbowl helmets by which to ennoble a SciFi production. Looking at it now, the whole series seems anything but a lavish affair (at one point they were even denied the cash for film) and it shows. We might praise the stark realism or the poignancy of one episode after another in which a lone protagonist wanders about an empty town (or an even emptier alien planet) but let's remember it precluded paying extras. And the deserted alien planets were quite depopulated of props and decor as well.

What it did have was sound, from Serling's narrated bookends to details like the sharp pinprick noise of eyeglasses shattering on concrete, to immortalized one-liners like "there was time now" or "it's a cookbook!" More than one episode centered on ventriloquism, of all things, but then it's rare for the real world to provide such sinister props pre-made for a televised thriller. In fact, the show had at times more in common with old-school radio dramas than with the more lavish visuals of its successors, with much of the plot expressed through dialogue instead of action. I had the fortune earlier this year to catch a marathon running through not only the big hits but some of the less popular episodes, including Sounds and Silences, in which a big fat loudmouth is sentenced, in standard Serling style, first to one aural extreme, then the other.

It hit closer to home for me than for most, since I happen to be just a tad sensitive to incoherent noise. When I was young and my ears even sharper, I was even annoyed by those supposedly ultrasonic vermin-repellent devices. (Please try not to draw the obvious conclusion.) I've occasionally gotten up in the middle of the night to close my bedroom door against such noises as... my refrigerator... from six meters and two corners away. Advertisements, with their deliberately intrusive, attention-grabbing flood of white noise, still drive me into a frothing rage. I'm the type to stop dead while walking and track the wind as it hits the trees or the side of a building. Though active noise control has remained slightly too expensive for my tastes, I've come to view a good solid pair of ear-covering headphones as essential to sitting at my computer. My stance on voice chat noise pollution in games is well documented, and it's not too far from my stance on voice chat noise pollution in the physical world.

So in context it's no surprise that so many things remind me of a song I once heard, or that I keep returning here on the blog to the topic of audio in computer games. Watching and listening to Sounds and Silences made me more attentive to how sound was used back in the days of radio and the first grainy, barely discernible flashes of the cathode ray. To some extent we can still hear the same quality these days in a well-narrated audio book, because regardless of technological improvements the main problem still lies in conveying intent. Good narration will relate apprehension and tension by halting, ponderous sentences, will rush awkwardly through relating shameful events, will threaten in a stony monotone, letting the microphone do the work of amplification. Where televisuals fall short, well-placed sound effects will not only color an event but will mark different phases of the action or provide new information. (You -know- the glasses have broken before you ever see the shards.) And, perhaps most importantly, good music is more than filler. It sets the mood and provides nuance.

As far as games go, I more or less started off this blog by complaining about the non-massive nature of MMOs, microtransactions as legitimized cheating, and the decay in game music quality. And I never let up on them. For a long time after Y2K, sound degenerated, as far as I can see for three main reasons:

1) Video cards continued to rule the tech specs while sound cards plateaued fairly quickly. It might shock younger gamers now to see old game boxes from the '90s advertising the number of sound channels a particular title was capable of occupying, right alongside its polygon count. Or Diablo 2 advertising itself for having hired an orchestra. As everyone started getting the same quality sound cards and sound stopped being a mode of conspicuous consumption, companies also invested less and less in what was no longer a selling point.

2) Graphics really did improve. Tremendously. Thus, much like TV shows stopped conveying information via sound in favor of displaying it visually on ever-larger, ever higher definition TV sets, video game sound became more vague, relegated to the background.

3) For ten to fifteen years companies were tripping over each other to widen their market base from obsessive wer-nerds to the mass market. This meant providing more instant gratification, simplifying and dumbing down everything from controls (there were no noteworthy 3D strategy games after Homeworld) to cultural references to level design, to shrinking party / match sizes in multiplayer and eliminating secondary roles in class-based games.... to, as a matter of course, music. It was especially noticeable in online games where you could at times still hear the more recognizable, launch-quality music even as newer patches added more generic white noise. But it was not unheard of for companies to actually go back and vandalize their own previous work, scrapping more interesting original tracks to replace them with blander, more generic, more forgettable, lowest-common-denominator fare.

And sure, it hasn't all been bad. The Secret World, a game from 2011 which failed miserably as a game but dressed up its failure via surprising artistic panache, recently held its yearly Samhain event, part of which treats players to a collection of radio dramas from the days before video killed such stars. While it's unforgivable of Funcom to charge its customers subscription fees for public domain radio as a timesink, I do have to thank them at the very least for their selection, which includes not only the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast but The Thing on the Fourble Board (**) Give it a listen. It's twenty minutes of sane, didactic, low-key narration punctuated by a few precision strikes of otherworldly presence. And you will know it when you hear it, trust me. In turn, TSW was one of the few games which managed to emulate that old-timey radio drama attention to sound. Its colorful yet still nuanced NPCs set a delightfully mundane backdrop against which its various boogey men can boogety-boo!

In fact, horror games and horror themed segments in general have invested more in sound. Shrieks, groans, creaks and ominous footsteps add a great deal to their suspense, especially since they so often need to hide their boogeymen until the last second and can't bank entirely on graphics as other genres do. But, banking on a contrast with eerie silences unfortunately leaves no room for a real soundtrack. While voice acting has always oscillated in quality between titles and sound effects have had their high points, music consistently diminished. My recent jaunt through System Shock's introduction reminded me how much more expressive that '80s/'90s synthesized backdrop was. While some series (Heroes of Might and Magic, Divinity) were lucky enough to latch onto a good composer from the start and clung to them as selling points through many reiterations, most did not, and they really should've paid more attention to how effective a well-integrated, memorable soundtrack can be in other media. Don't believe me? O.K., three, two, one, let's jam. And it's not like animation was new by that point.


But I am happy to note some signs that music might once again be considered a distinctive element of game design and not simply white noise to fill the background silences. Justin Bell's sound direction wasn't bad in Pillars of Eternity but still largely generic, unintrusive medievalism. It wasn't until he really cut loose two years later (2016) in Tyranny that he put out something worthy of having his name mentioned. What's more, I've been seeing some amusing signs of companies reversing the old trend of downplaying music after release. Stellaris' more noticeable tracks seem to come from its later DLCs like Synthetic Dawn (2017). Warframe, launched in 2013, has some surprisingly engaging tracks... most attached to content added since 2015-2018.

MAKE SOME NOISE !

Yes, music can sometimes intrude on other gameplay elements (those thunderous old '90s tracks were partly meant to cover up the lack of other sound effects or ambience) but intruding can also be a good thing. The Tristram theme did as much for the original Diablo's popularity as any other of its high points, and many a mediocre game has remained fixed in gamers' memories for its soundtrack. And there are endless ways to mitigate the potential nuisance factor. Set it in-character or in an appropriate locale. The sea shanties in PoE2: Deadfire were more immersive than half its chauvinistic abortions of storytelling put together, the Sleepless Lullaby along with Lilith's monologue or the Siren Song rendered their little corners of TSW unforgettable, no-one who's played STALKER can forget the NPCs randomly breaking out their guitars and We All Lift Together defined Fortuna better than any other location in Warframe. V:tM-Bloodlines made its night spots come alive with Isolated, A Smaller God, Lecher Bitch... and appropriately enough, Come Alive... and nobody and I mean nobody was complaining about Bloodlines' music being too intrusive!

MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE !

Even completely out of character, let music symbolize your setting instead of just underscoring it. Even a twenty-second flute solo can stick in your customers' minds years afterwards for marking their call to adventure. I sure as hell have never met that wailing banshee in Tyranny's soundtrack in all my replays of the game, but she fits her imaginary world every bit as perfectly as The Thing on the Fourble Board's inhuman meowling.

It's not unreasonable to assume that people still remember that often painfully jarring 8-bit tootling from 1980s computer games for its sheer nostalgia factor... but let's not exclude the possibility that they memor it for being memor-able. Yeah, that's a quality we really should get back around to recapturing.

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* You know, on one hand I'm disappointed that after three decades that's still one of our most satisfying portrayals of lycanthropy. On the other hand... might as well enjoy it!
Aaroooooo... AAAHAHAHAHAHAHA !

** Shockingly enough, that is, officially, a word.

Strategy TurnsTile

"Turn-based squad behavior in games makes more sense to me if I imagine everyone involved to be incredibly British."
Full Frontal Nerdity



Once upon a time, the Banished village of Nyctimus suffered a fire. Its heroic, brilliant and dashingly handsome mayor Werwolfe sprang into action, directing a team of stalwart mountain-folk to rebuild the ruined houses immediately.

And then they got stuck because they rebuilt a house with their backs to impassable terrain, and that was the end of their story because they starved to death a little while later. Ugh. How can you be "educated" and still not find your way out of that situation, Tellen? But hey, at least they died happy. No, really, five happiness stars. Wow. That is some new kind of stupid. Now, of course the real issue is that some of the workers finished construction while others were on the other side, and masoned them in faster than you can say "Amontillado" but visually you also would not have guessed anyone can even become stuck on that wide riverbank. It would be nice to see the tiles which obviously underlay the terrain.

I'm griping about this now after struggling through Pathfinder: Kingmaker's endgame, which was crammed full of repetitive fights against obviously cut and pasted groups of enemies to artificially inflate its length. It does too good a job of aping (in both good and bad points) the old DnD adaptations like Neverwinter Nights and the Infinity Engine titles, cRPGs' answer to stop-motion animation. "Real-time" anything was a point of pride back in 1998, so Baldur's Gate and its offshoots featured real-time combat... which you had to pause every second to order another attack. Real-time combat works fine for a simplified system like The Elder Scrolls: one weapon, two spells, let's rock! Yet even there it was necessary to implement pausing to switch said weapons and spells, even for a single character. When it comes to party-based single-player RPGs, it becomes obvious that you'll spend most of your campaign paused. When every single game that's copied the Baldur's Gate formula keeps running into the same tedium, isn't it about time to admit that "real-time" adds nothing to the recipe except inexact frustration?

The problem is that RPGs in the DnD tradition encompass not only the "feels" of narrative immersion but tactical and strategic planning. Strategy is not a dreamy release. It's wide-eyed, precise, predictive and calculating. Random number generation inserts some unpredictability, but even there it's important to know where the unpredictability comes from. Games have rules, and imprecision in what should be a constant feels like being deliberately cheated. I can handle not knowing what trade boat will pass through my town next (because I'm not supposed to know) but villagers in Banished usually know better than to get stuck on terrain, and to see that steadfast rule broken is both injurious and insulting. I'm supposed to be defeated by my own poor decision-making, not by the interface. For RPGs which promise not only a strategic but a tactical element, knowing exactly when and where something is happening becomes paramount. I've lost quite a few fights in Kingmaker for holding my finger off the PAUSE button just a second too long.

I've lost even more for mistakenly thinking my character was out of range of a melee attack or for thinking I was behind cover when I wasn't. And while such games usually do offer some user interface helper features, they simply can't compensate for the inherent imprecision of their terrain. Take Divinity: Original Sin 2, which was thankfully turn-based but ran into constant problems with its range calculations.

The demon-bat I'm shooting there refused to follow me across the bridge, presumably to prevent players from exploiting its patrol algorithm to split enemy groups. Of course, in more than one fight like this, it was quite possible to exploit the anti-exploit feature itself to arrow the damn thing to death while it refuses to chase me, all because that ravine was a pixel or two too narrow. Rivers again. More trouble than they're worth, I tell you. Building the map out of tiles could've solved that, plus any number of more frustrating situations where you end up misguesstimating unlisted distances.

Here's M.A.X.

Mechanized Assault and Xploration was (despite the stupid name) an exemplary strategy game from Interplay's sunset years, followed by a best forgotten sequel which tried (and failed miserably) to jump on the Dune 2 / Warcraft 2 RTS bandwagon. The original was turn-based and tile-based, dealing in small integer values when it came to everything from unit stats to resources. Its greatest challenge was arguably constructing a contiguous infrastructure with a continuous defense, as the AI had an uncanny knack for exploiting even a single-tile unguarded corridor or cutting off your reinforcements. Hence the convenient bank of map overlay toggles on the left of the screen. Not in the options menu. Information at your fingertips, not in your backpack. Nonetheless estimating radii diagonally still proved a crap-shoot. That's probably why, two decades later, another square tile strategy game, Into the Breach, simply doesn't *do* diagonals, approximating such moves instead by letting your units move and fire separately. Suck on that, Pythagoras.


A hexagonal grid offers smoother, more intuitive turning and circling

- though it should be noted a hex grid doesn't guarantee good strategic balance. The Heroes of Might and Magic series, despite their hex appeal, sacrificed it in endless ways in the interest of providing overpowered yet thematically coherent gameplay options (*cough-cough* VampireLords *cough*) Adopting any actual theme beyond the abstractions of Chess or Go will inevitably entail such sacrifices of function to form. Nevertheless, the pattern is obvious: strategy means discrete tiles and turn-taking, and in fact the first more or less implies the second. Even hopscotch is turn-based!

It's safe to say the Real-Time Strategybutton-mashing genre has not stood the test of time. Starcraft's many copycats from the early 2000s have largely drifted out of memory and Starcraft 2 is by all accounts being kept on life support by a narrow clique of "competitive" powergamers while Civilization's less trendy recipe has retained about the popularity it always had and Master of Orion styled 4X has been making a comeback. As regards roleplaying computer games, let's just make 3 points:

1) Nobody salivates at hearing the phrase "real-time" anymore. It was more of a technological than a stylistic achievement to begin with, a way to push the envelope back in the late '90s, and the pulse-pounding zerg clusterfuck is an artifact of that era. Looking at a hybrid like Spellforce renders the realization doubly glaring, as both its genres suffer from the same undue time pressure. Strategy means turns and tiles and precise execution.

2) For all the immersive, Hollywood envious, amateur theater appeal of role-playing games, let's remember they began as strategy wargames. Other, single-character genres, like survival horror or stealth-based games, are more apt to incorporate the time element smoothly. The option-rich, multi-unit setup was a board game to begin with and still functions best on a board with discrete distances and timing. The central question of an RPG is not how to add strategic value to good/evil 20-level wizard/fighter/thief archetypes, but how to add moral and stylistic roleplaying choices to chess.

3) It's not like you can't build atmosphere in a turn-based, tile-based combat system, as InXile's RPGs (referenced in the Full Frontal Nerdity comic linked up top) readily demonstrate. I specifically chose M.A.X. as my strategy game example because it so regularly gets described as "immersive" or "atmospheric" due to its interface, music, combat sounds, etc. without the need for constantly streaming action-action-action. Alpha Centauri might make an even better example for all the times it's been described as "playing a novel." In fact, a better alternative to the stop-motion claymation of Baldur's Gate was developed at about the same time by some of the same people: let players run around town in real-time and hide the grid while adventuring, but enforce turns and tiles when combat starts. And, for the life of me, I can't imagine any sane analyst claiming that Fallout lacked immersion, no matter how British its combat sequence.

Divinity: Original Sin 2

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Spoilers follow for Divinity: Original Sin 2.
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Five years ago I tried Divine Divinity and I have yet to finish its first act. Despite passable visuals, good music and slightly more freeform character advancement, it was still at its core an unimaginative, endlessly repetitive Diablo clone and nothing more.

A couple of years ago, news of Chris Avellone's marginal involvement in D:OS2 got me interested in the Divinity series' relaunch as party-based, story-based linear RPGs in the Baldur's Gate vein. My completionist side gave me no choice but to play the first D:OS beforehand. It boasted some refreshing game mechanics but was hampered by an utterly failed attempt at setting a dramatic roleplaying campaign in a childish, whimsical fairytale world. As for the sequel, it tries and largely fails to shore up its narrative side of things while saddling itself with a slew of half-implemented features.

Like Pillars of Eternity 2, D:OS2 decided to record full narration for all its descriptive text. Though at least the narrator they hired is less prone to breathy over-emoting than the "Ms. Piggy" impersonator whose endless chatter poisoned every god meeting interlude in PoE2, this pervasive intrusion still comes across as more immersion-breaking than immersive. On the more abstract game-playing angle, D:OS1 made a name for itself not least because it re-implemented puzzles and riddle-solving into a genre which sadly has largely lost its nerdy roots. Divining the correct sequences of pressure plates and colored symbols to open a series of doors, that sort of thing. Unfortunately it also came with a lot of moronic 1980s-style pixel-hunting. Predictably, that was the only puzzle-solving element which made it into the sequel, albeit with an added "glow" to newly-discovered items.

The writing did improve slightly... but only slightly. The blandly generic medieval setting is jazzed up considerably by the addition of elegant elvish... cannibalism... and snooty imperialist lizardfolk. D:OS2's basic plot is also quite intriguing if you stand back and take it all in, more so than even the overall better-written Pillars of Eternity. Conceptually, this could've been the best RPG to hit the virtual shelves, possibly ever. Unfortunately, all secrets are out by mid-game and individual scenes vary wildly in quality from engagingly fresh to droning monotone or perfunctory "here's a troll, kill it." Too much immersion was sacrificed for the misguided aim of shoehorning half-assed multiplayer into a single-player sub-genre. In terms of game mechanics, the interplay of ground AoEs was actually rendered less interesting by the addition of "cursed" surfaces which cannot be removed by normal means, and are less satisfyingly implemented than in the first game. Any remaining potential for tactical depth is ruined by nonsensically giving teleportation abilities to each and every single enemy you encounter, with the effect of homogenizing the class system rather than letting the player's personality determine a playstyle.

And that previous sentence encapsulates D:OS2's biggest problem.

No, I didn't shoot all those deputies. I'm only here to shoot the sheriff. Yet there they are, all conveniently laid out for me to loot. Sure, all similar games have random loot containers. Treasure chests are intrinsic to the D&D derivative experience. D:OS2 however introduces a "luck" passive ability which triggers upon opening crates and barrels, and places endless numbers of these all over the map. Meaning the way to get rich is not to deliberately undertake challenging endeavors, but to obsessively loot every single thing you find.

Not that money will do you much good. Vendor items are auto-leveled, meaning that aside from buying a couple pieces of vastly overpowered loot at the very beginning of each act (MMO fans should be familiar with all their loot becoming instantly obsolete with every new expansion) you'll find nothing worth investing in or saving for. I reached the last act with over a hundred thousand gold, found four or five items worth buying... and was still left with over a hundred thousand gold.

Like the first D:OS, you'll have access to an extensively coded and varied crafting system, but where you used to at least be able to craft a few decent items (or at least use crafting to improve your loot drops) it's now utterly useless. Aside from potions and a few rare skill books whose recipes are so counterintuitive you'll have to look them up online, the only items you can craft are vendorable trash loot. Also, since using potions or scrolls take up one or two of your exactly four action points per round, even consumables are not worth investing in. Either your enemies will one-shot you or your party's hydrosophist will juice you back up to full in a single round. Combine this with a level system so stringent that enemies even one level above you can easily teleport to and one-shot your back row casters, and an encounter two levels above you will usually wipe your whole party in the first round of combat. Meaning that at any particular time, you'll likely face only one or two tasks which you can realistically accomplish.

Top this off with a sad over-reliance on having enemies simply pop out of the ground at you, and D:OS2 resolves to an incredibly annoying first playthrough. You have no real chance to plan out your course of action beforehand. Just wander around the map looting hundreds of containers and trigger every encounter to see which are actually doable, then reload endlessly until you find the weak links in the leveling chain. While this overall pattern does result in a pleasingly elevated reliance on exploration compared to most single-player games, it kills every other game element.

Your crafting is irrelevant.
Your buying low and selling high is irrelevant.
Your tactical positioning is irrelevant, since all your enemies teleport every round or two.
Your choice of story progression is irrelevant.
Your scouting is irrelevant, since you can never tell beforehand how many adds will jump out of the ground.
About the only strategic or roleplaying choice the game offers you is ensuring you can cover all the different types of magic to clear certain ground or status effects. Aside from that, it plays all too much like an MMO-inspired gear grind.

I can certainly see why both the Original Sin games made such a stir. They're something fresh, and cRPG fans have long suffered seeing the promise of the genre betrayed, until the recent revival of Torment: Tides of Numenera and the like. But in all honesty I can't see Larian's efforts have entirely outgrown their initial 2002 offering of perfunctory "Action"RPG drudgery. It is not unreasonable to expect games to be gameable systems, driven by player choice and decision-making. OS2 pushes you into making a party of four high-constitution, teleporting, self-buffing battlemages (and, as usual in such games, summoning spells are stupidly overpowered) and it relies entirely too much on trial and error on a first run instead of prediction and careful resource management.

That being said, while your playing style is certainly cramped, you do get a pretty constant stream of roleplaying choices to make as you quest, choosing which NPCs to execute, recruit or ally with. Some characters like Meistr Siva come across as amusingly trenchant, and the basic story of the gods' true nature as "shepherds" is long overdue to replace traditional fantasy divinities. The lizards, dwarves and elves all receive interesting canonical revamping. Even the basic gameplay retains the opportunity to play around with status effect combos, something none of the product's competitors have offered so far but which we're likely to start seeing more of after these two proofs of concept. The implementation of different race relations in NPC reactions is impressively detailed and extensive. The physical / magic armor system lets you build some synergy among your party members. Overall, D:OS2 is a good, if slightly overhyped game. At the very least there's room to grow for a third installment.

Hopscotch, The cRPG

"And running is something that we've always done well and mostly I can't even tell what I'm running from"

Amanda Palmer - Runs in the Family

Leap
Burrow
Flight
Shade Shift
Void Glide
Oil Splatter
Leaping Flames
Tactical Retreat
Cloak and Dagger
Phoenix Dive
Nether Swap
- and of course, "Teleport"

... are all teleportation spells in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Not to mention all the abilities which approximate the same effect:
Blitz Attack
Battering Ram
Backlash
etbetera.

I could probably find more but I'm only halfway through the game. I've repeatedly made this point in previous posts. Some superpowers prove so consistently immersion-breaking or game-breaking that they should be allotted much more sparingly than mere laser eyes and lightning bolts: time (or turn) manipulation, telepathy (or mind control) invisibility and, of course, teleportation.

D:OS2 handles three of those four quite well.
Manipulating action points or turn frequency is restricted to a couple of abilities and effects.
Invisibility is easily countered by AoE and doesn't yield the usual griefer-friendly one-hit-kill we've been taught to expect by MMOs.
Mind control is difficult to achieve and readily countered.
Teleports on the other hand were handed out like candy on Halloween.  At least four different skillsets offer them at early levels and every single encounter after newbieland seems to feature teleporting enemies. And enemies which can teleport you. And enemies which can teleport both themselves and you. With little to no cooldown.

All this leapfrogging might be less aggravating if I weren't officially playing in "tactician" mode. You keep using that word... Tactics is out-thinking, prediction, positioning, forming ranks and deciding order of engagement. Some degree of stochasticity is quite welcome, but when your enemy gets to ignore all the ground effects you lay down, when every positional gain gets reversed every single round... usually more than once... you lose the entire point of having front and rear guards, ranged and melee attackers. Overusing teleportation not only shrinks worlds but yields "a toilet-bowl swirl of players getting rewarded for taking the easy way out." It invalidates the main combat dynamic of a team RPG.

Divinity: Original Sin

For the love of critical fails, tell me how anyone thinks they can build an immersive interactive experience around crap like this:

Yes, that's a chibified skeleton with a bomb strapped to its back. The first time I encountered one in Divinity: Original Sin, it put me off the game for days... but not before screenshotting it for bitchery purposes. Priorities, people!

As I complained vis-a-vis Wasteland 2, there's a crucial line between telling a joke and being a joke. No reason RPGs can't include humor, but it must be in-universe humor, based on actions undertaken by characters within that universe. And sure, it's entirely possible for games to fall into needless self-indulgent drama, but the extent to which absurdity and farce can work in an interactive medium depends on the genre. One of the improvements brought by the second Baldur's Gate game over its first installment, one of the reasons it became such a classic, was ditching BG1's random goofiness. Almost to the same extent as old-fashioned adventure games, the success of RPGs depends on maintaining immersion. Hard to play my role when all the NPCs keep breaking character.

At one point some NPCs in D:OS say they're "shaking like chihuahuas" which might mean something if Rivellon actually included a place named Chihuahua from which the dog breed could take its name. It makes no more sense then a French poodle or an English bulldog in the absence of a France or England. Tip of the iceberg. Larian tried to build a whimsical fairytale world and fill it with personal drama but instead wound up with a bunch of personae lacking personality and fairies with no tales. Don't get me started on the way, waaay too many talking animals with completely mundane human personalities. Or the fact that being The Chosen One got old a long time ago. Add to that the aforementioned nuisance of unjustified medieval stasis (no matter how far back in time a prequel goes, it will always hearken back to an even more distant, even more glorious past... which looks exactly like the present and even more exactly like the future) and the terrible decision to base the entire game on 2-player online co-op, constantly interfering with any single-player playthrough. I have to say it looks like a fault in project leadership. The visual artists, voice actors and music score were otherwise top-notch.

In addition, much of its interface functionality rendered combat a chore, like pointlessly locking almost your entire interface while a spellcasting animation executes, compounded by such animations' undue length. Or a crafting system which is half crucial to your success and half pointless flavor-text chore, with no way for a starting player to discern valuable items. Or the "dynamic" combat camera constantly rubberbanding around in fights, potentially twice in a single combat action. At least that nuisance can be disabled, which can't be said for the exaggerated idle animations constantly making me miss-target attacks as my targets wobble about randomly. Or characters gaining no experience if knocked out during a fight, a universal no-no for any party-oriented game whether single or multiplayer.

So you have to wonder what's made D:OS even borderline playable. As with Dead State I must note an undue amount of amateurishness despite its creators having been at this game-design game for quite a while. And, just as with Dead State, it's salvaged in part by a nerdy dedication to creating interesting tactical options.

That's me about to rain icy death on some poor unsuspecting zombies. The bushes lining that cliff overlooking their campsite block simple ballistic projectiles like arrows or grenades, but not the scroll of Hail Attack my thief had in her pocketses. Line of sight can be blocked both by terrain and clouds of smoke or dust kicked up during a fight, and in a fair show of cutting the Gordian Knot, smoke clouds also block LoS out of combat, which can make thieving possible in otherwise counterintuitive situations. Positioning matters, as do attacks of opportunity, status effects and specific counters for same. Spells interact in logical ways. A wet character is more susceptible to electric shock or freezing and a frozen character can be thawed out by fire. Monsters possess resistances up to and including being healed by their native element (don't shoot fire at a fire elemental, dumbass) and such immunity can even apply to your own characters.

D:OS' greatest claim to fame however has to be its "surfaces" or ground effects left behind by magic. Using a poison spell leaves behind a poison cloud... a combustible one. Oil patches can both slow you and be ignited into a stable AoE firestorm. Fighting in a puddle can turn an otherwise minor shock effect into an AoE stun. You can slip and fall trying to cross ice patches. All in all, Larian took an excellent stab at elevating wizardry above stupid old magic missiles, at enabling magic to alter the game environment, to change the physical laws of the universe.

It's also interesting to see a modern RPG with a heavy (very heavy in fact) puzzle-solving element, even to the main quest itself. Placing objects, activating sequences of symbols, good stuff. But here I must once again bemoan some awkward implementation. Too many of the puzzles either relied on pixel-hunting (and that idiocy belongs back in the 1980s) or were blatantly meant to be brute-forced by simply trying various options, usually over several reloads. The entrance to the Source Temple was especially heinous.

Overall I can't say I'll be re-installing this frustrating little gem anytime soon, but D:OS definitely earned its fame and it's easily worth at least one playthrough. If you want creativity, look to Europe.

What else? - Oh, never mind...

"And die young"

Kill Hannah - Kennedy


Around 2011 I started watching Christopher Hitchens videos online, in my usual meandering, aimless fashion. By 2012 I'd grown to admire him enough that I eagerly looked up what he'd been doing lately. As should happen, what he'd been doing lately was dying, at 62 years old.

In the early 2000s I first read Cat's Cradle then Slaughterhouse Five. About a year after reading A Man Without a Country, just as I my mind was wandering back to the topic of Kurt Vonnegut, the morning news decided to ruin my breakfast by announcing his death. At least he made it past the average lifespan for a male in the developed world, at 84.

One of my favorite movies has remained Whisper of the Heart. Immediately after seeing it fifteen years ago I looked up the director to see what other movies he'd headed. None. Yoshifumi Kondo died after directing the one flick. He was 47.

And speaking of anime, after seeing Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika and Paranoia Agent I was eager to see what Satoshi Kon was doing next. Dying at 46, of course.

I just finished the game Divinity: Original Sin and I've been gathering notes for a post about it. As one of its positive aspects I was planning to praise the Divinity series' composer, whose superior work had stood out to me even while playing the otherwise dull aRPG grind Divine Divinity. So I finally beat the final boss, ran my victory lap and the credits rolled.
"In loving memory of Kirill Pokrovsky."
Man oh man, by this point in my life I had a pretty good inkling who that must be. 53 years old.
(Incidentally, for the love of Apollo and Marsyas both, someone check Paul Romero's pulse! He's exactly 53 now.)

If I'm about to look up a name who's impressed me, I'd give even odds he just recently kicked the bucket in middle age. Hell, I was a teenager in the '90s, and arguably the defining moment of our shift in youth counterculture from punk and grunge to goth was Kurt Cobain's suicide at 27. Edgar Allan Poe made it to 40 before winding up dead in a ditch. Literally. And as prissy as the bastard was, that would NOT have been the way he wanted to go.

The good die young damnit. Good news for me. I'm a worthless piece of shit and I'll never create a single thing worth mentioning. I'll outlive the lot of ya! Haaahahahahahaha!

The Least Original Sin

I've been giving Divinity: Original Sin a chance, just to see what all the hype's been a-hypin'. Not all too crazy about it so far. Interesting combat mechanics get held back by a goofy atmosphere, almost actively hostile towards roleplaying immersion. For now, one thing's bugging me.

The first Divinity games were mindless hack'n'slash ARPG Diablo clones set amongst generically Tolkienish fairy-tale medievalism. The Original Sin games seem to distance themselves from that, attempting some actual roleplaying mechanics beyond just racking up an orcish head count. This first of the new batch is supposedly set a thousand years before the old Divinity titles... yet it's still set in the same generically Tolkienish fairy-tale medievalism.

Why not ditch the Medieval Stasis? A game series spanning several titles could set each installment in a different stage of its imaginary world's development. Once you've established your "everybody knows what elves are like" fantasy baseline with its kings and mage guilds, expand upon it.

Set the next game before the elves and humans had met, so that nobody knows what elves are like. Take me to the time before kingdoms had coalesced and let me adventure as part of mammoth-chasing nomadic tribes just discovering the rudiments of magic. Fast-forward to when the kingdoms collapse and let me play Mad Max with magic wands. If one game's set among warring kingdoms worshipping various pantheons, then set the next one in a monolithic monotheistic theocracy. Real history has its Akhenatens and Alarics after all. Why not fake histories?

Allow magic to change. Let some schools die out, let some antediluvians get diablerized, let the light of the rings fade. You're probably going to make gameplay changes to those combat mechanics anyway, so why not incorporate them into your cosmology? Hell, give me a fantasy game set in the stone-age, with primitive humans scraping by in the shadow of elvish or draconic civilizations. Let me play as the first adan. Let me build the monuments which become ancient ruins in another game. Make a plot point out of minotaurs becoming extinct in between your games, or of vampirism being discovered. Show me the fire and water spells I tossed around in one game become entire academic disciplines five hundreds years later in the sequel, the basis of a steampunk revolution. Let me be an ancient astronaut invading the Earth in one game, and in the next an archaeologist trying to unravel the mysterious technology brought down during the invasion.

Just stop recycling the same quaint rustic medieval villages and the same swashbuckling at the orders of the same kings and the same robed clowns tossing the same fireballs around at the same kaleidoscopic dragons in thirty-one flavors.

Five Minutes of Divine Divinity

I don't bother with so-called "action" RPGs much (if you've played Diablo you've played 'em all) so I'm not sure what possessed me to pick up Divine Divinity. However, I did spend a bit of time nukin' nasties in Torchlight and as a result of some bundled sale on GoG, Divine Divinity made its way into my collection and is therefore beckoning me to justify the $2-3 I must've spent by at least running the stupid thing once or twice. After five or ten minutes and fireballing down a dozen or so skeletons I realized I'd forgotten to enter a character name so that's about it for now.
I feel that I've given the game a fair shake. Call me jaded but I can pretty much see where it's going and I've been there a few times already. It's not that golden of an oldie - not a bad game in any technical sense, but then the ARPG formula is so simplistic by definition that it's hard to get wrong. Or at least wrong-er than any of the other endless Diablo copycats out there. My glorious abortion of divinity has however prompted a couple of thoughts.

Thought the first:
Can we at some point please stop humping Tolkien's corpse? Two or three dialogues into things, I'm told by an NPC to go fetch something from a snooty elf but it might take some convincing because he's an elf and you know how elves are. Yes.
Yes, unfortunately I know entirely too well how elves are. I have praised in the past both the whimsical, graceful good-nature of the Sindar and the pride and dignity of the Noldor. However, unless you're working under the umbrella of a licensed fictional universe, you need not outright copy these motifs even if you're copying gameplay. Diablo became memorable because it broke away from the largely Tokien-inspired Forgotten Realms and cobbled its own dusty, hopeless setting out of medieval Christian iconography. Most other game worlds at least tried to put their own spin on things and even in 2002 you'd have been better off avoiding elves and goblins altogether. For instance, if you're selling a product dubbed doubly divine featuring a decidedly non-androgynous angel performing a strip-tease on the box cover, you may want to speak of heavens and hells, Faustian bargains and fallen angels to grab my attention... or at least don't outright tell me that I already know what your elves are like.

Secondary cogitations:
One nice aspect of Divine Divinity at first glance is its relative blurring of the RPG/ARPG line. With more of an InfinityEngine-ish than Diablo-ish interface and dialogues, it throws an uncomfortable light on its contemporary NWN's own simplicity, not to mention on predecessors like Icewind Dale. What exactly do game designers and reviewers mean when they spout a designation like "ARPG" - more monsters to fight? NWN itself featured hordes of goblins and endlessly-spawning imps. Less dialogue? Without meaningful consequences, less is more. So many dialogues in RPGs are nothing but pre-fight rituals and even where choice seems possible there's always one "right" choice. You don't gain much by clicking through an endless branching dialogue only to find out you have to hit that goblin over the head anyway or you don't get paid. Is "action" supposed to be a condemnation of a streamlined combat system? Not in my book. If your game limits me to shooting fireballs or swinging a sword anyway, then I'd much rather have the more fluid Diablo-ish click-casting than an unjustifiable target-lock mechanic. Fewer classes? Everything D&D-inspired is still based on either a nuker/tank/healer group dynamic or a purely cosmetic hitter/shooter/fireballer single-character split so you may as well be honest about it.

Lack of backstory or immersion seems a more constant delineation of "action" than anything else, and here's where ARPGs limit themselves unnecessarily. Much information can be conveyed without sifting through NPC dialogues, through voice-overs, snippets of overheard conversations, or simple observation. There's no real need to stop the player in his tracks and put him through the ritual of watching your oh-so-clever cinematic. Games like Half-Life or Stalker showed how even the most basic concept of gunning down zombies can be spiced up with world events which play out as you advance through gameplay. It should be role-playing, not role-saying, as I'm so fond of repeating, and it's more the lack of variation and consequences which makes ARPGs so uninteresting than a lack of explanation. This flaw, however, is shared by supposed high-brow RPGs as well.