Lockstep 6: Porosity

"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken."

SMAC

 

 

Having polished off newbietown's side-quests I decided to break from Cyberpunk 2077 before continuing the main event. Time fer sum-a-dem stragety. But not only did my insectoid imperialists take me many tries to get right (they depend heavily on early expansion where I usually prefer to turtle) but halfway through my one successful campaign with them, AoW4 decided to wreck its crafting system.

 

When introduced a year go, crafting ran the straightforward old premise of breaking down loot you don't need for parts used in making whatever you want, learning new effects from magic materials in your territory. Uncreative but useful and satisfying. The addition of dragons threw a kink into it by rewarding you for maintaining unused loot for a draconic hoard economic bonus, but it still worked fudamentally the same. The new system now adds a second crafting currency. In order to make high-tier crap, you need to break down high-tier crap. And only high-tier crap. A reminder of how often crafting ends up a half-assed freebie in any genre not built around it.

 

While conceptually sound to prevent hobbits from leaving The Shire with mithril chain shirts and vorpal excaliburses, the lack of permeability between tiers wrecks the very appeal of gradual improvement directed by the player, creating upgrades and not just side-grades. Moreover, they now allow looting items from defeated player armies, which mostly happens in the end-game. All this fabricates three needless problems for a previously functional system:

1) Since your trash loot can only create more trash loot, it tends to just pile up uselessly.

2) By the time you find your first few 3rd-4th tier items, the amount of vespene gas you'd get by dissassembly wouldn't compensate for their own utility, so you're better off just using them even if they're not ideal for your heroes. Meaning your crafting is still stalled.

3) Once hitting the late-game wars you're looting so many top-shelf baubles that you blow through your heroes' demand pretty much instantly. Then ALL loot is worthless.

 

It's especially annoying to see bad decisions made to compensate for other bad decisions. The way AoW4 starves you through the early game then inundates you with overpowered gear later can't help but remind me of Tyranny, a brilliant game in its own right... except, infamously, for its pacing! In the screenshot above, I broke down my stockpile toward my AoW campaign's end. I could afford to outfit several more heroes than I could even recruit, and that's after gorging my existing goons on all the vorpal they could swallow. An inelegant, overcompensating strut to support a crafting system which itself needlessly breaks a principal rule of gaming: allowing the player to invest directed effort into advancement.

 

You may as well have only two item tiers in the game to begin with. Setting a hard limit between (1-2) and (3-4) is like setting timers on when wars can or can't be declared, or level scaling in RPGs or officially declaring all D&D characters must be hopeless one-shottable murderhobos until lvl 10 then unstoppable demigods from lvl 11 onwards. It's designers micromanaging the player. See D&D's skill points built so closely into your class role, upping exactly the same skills every level from 1-20, or DA:O's skill points in the fade, tossing freebies into what should be YOUR progression. But a core element of building either a character or a faction is picking your strengths and weaknesses, advancing different aspects at different rates.

 

If I want to melt down all four hobbits' shortswords and cooking utensils to make one chain shirt for Frodo, that should be my decision, damnit. And don't just throw a pile of mithril chain shirts at me right at Mordor's doorstep; that should be something I've worked towards all along. Not that there shouldn't be different phases to a campaign's progression, but they need more overlap, more permeability. Stellaris has early/mid/late phases, but events don't all just instantly pop up when the calendar flips over. EU4's institutions spread slowly but can be mitigated with a cash buy-in. In fact I've recently jumped into Medieval Dynasty. Much like other sandbox crafting / survival games, it sticks to a gradual climb up a tech tree.

 

Sticks and stones form the very bottom rung. But you don't just use them at the start. Stones begin as hatchet-heads and transition to construction materials. Trees, of which you'll be chopping an ungodly amount for logs, give sticks as a bonus (in addition from growing on every bush) to where I was getting annoyed at them piling up uselessly.... until I discovered I could just toss them into a resource chest for my villagers to grab as firewood instead of using up my precious logs. Then when I start crafting more arrows I'll likely want to save up a few again. See that? A bit of back-and-forth, a bit of leeway, a bit of player decision in allocating scarce resources, a bit of... I don't know... game-playing!

 

(And weirdly, in every other respect except the crafting, AoW4 displays masterful escalation.)

Lockstep 5: Closing Doors

"Upwards, onwards, I hope I can rebound and flow
I just hope for one more chance to prove what I can do"

 

Prong - Close the Door

 

 

I did end up buying Darkest Dungeon 2, having heard it places more emphasis on team interconnection, but the way that's implemented is... wrong. Oh, so, so wrong...

 

Could've been worse. Could've been the flagellant.

Yes folks, the plague doctor and the leper are in love. If you'd like to buy them a wedding present, they're registered at "gauze and brain bleach 'R us" - but I guess this plays aptly enough in a game about horrible revelations.

(apropos, since when's da peedee a dame? I always thought it was just a stereotypical shrimpy little male nerdling)

But aside from socially awkward the relationship system is also (like every other part of the game) overly-randomized. Characters mostly stack random points with each other during combat, and though you can use whiskey to make them socialize at inns, its availability is also randomized, and depending on their point total they randomly might get a positive/negative relationship upon leaving each inn.

That quirk is also, of course, random

Using skills tied to that relationship buffs/debuffs each other respectively. The only nonrandom part? If negative relationships pick a skill you hadn't slotted, the game forces you to do so, ruining your range/melee/defense/support balance in the process. Meaning this emphasis on team strategy actually does more to ruin your team strategy compared to DD1. To add insult to injury, you discover only upon leaving the inn, as you're boldly going into a new adventure, that you've basically received an automatic game over. Seriously, there is no coming back from that level of dysfunction above.

I also got nostalgic for Stellaris, and though I'm not shilling out the absurd release prices Paradox demands for the latest DLCs, I did grab a couple from years ago and opted for an origin I hadn't tried yet: clone soldiers!

While their clone vats spew them out lightning fast, outstripping all but the fastest explosive breeders' baseline, their top population is hard-capped at 5 vats x 20 pops each. Combined with my rustiness at the game and some welcome (but surprising) changes made to governance (multi-leader governments and dual roles) and policing (rebellions are on a hair trigger now) this yielded a few embarrassing failures. Not to mention I neglected that my "incubator" trait doesn't affect cloning.

But finally I adjusted to leaders that die by 30, nailed down a good rate of building construction to deal with the initial overflow and then learned not to overdevelop and overshoot the hard-capped population, and got an archaeologist high enough (it was "the guest") to finish these guys' origin quest, at the end of which you decide whether to remain dependent on clone vats or switch to regular breeding while losing some of your bonuses.

I chose... poorly.

I had assumed that remaining dependent on clone vats would remove their construction limit or in some way make it scale with empire size, which would still leave your early pop cap memorable and give you a later economic hurdle of maintaining clone vats on every planet. But no, apparently not. The five you can build to start is the absolute limit. Which means, first off, my founder species could only be present on five planets so I couldn't even use them as a sparse ruling class. But more importantly, in a thousand-star galaxy one hundred is a comically, insultingly, uselessly, irrelevantly low limit. Even with a low number of habitable planets my previous empire by the end had accrued fifteen thousand total population and while sure, much of that will be other species and robots, if I'm completely dependent on those others... I may as well pick one of those others to start.

And it's a real bitch learning so five attempts plus fifty years into your campaign!

Then there's Homeworld 3, where I got annoyed and abandoned the campaign weeks ago at mission 9 (Warsage Citadel) to be picked up after I'm done gnashing my teeth. Even from back in the days of HW2, the series' developers got a bee in their bonnet about making you fly around gigantic space megastructures. That big dumb object fetish is back in force with #3.

Much of the original's charm lay in the uniquely grandiose mothership itself being the biggest, most important structure on the map, sole lifeline for your species after your homeworld's destruction, a ponderous and stately "delocalized center unto itself" for all your endeavors. Now they sped it up and every mission has you rolling past space malls a hundred times your size. Why they would go to such lengths to cheapen their own most memorable symbol is beyond me. If I wanted anachronistic subway tunnels, I'd fire up Dwarf Fortress! In case you can't tell, that's the new mothership outlined in green above, hidden behind scenery. Not quite as impressive, is it?

But the outlining brings me to the more practical impediment those big dumb objects pose. Homeworld is a game about maneuvering in space, in three dimensions. "Terrain" such as it was, consisted of ship formations and the odd asteroid. Mission 9 crams you between gigantic walls and debris, scrambling to destroy objectives on those walls as enemies just spawn infinitely everywhere around you. Meaning that half the time you're bumping your camera into the damn scenery or you find your vessels hovering in place getting shot to pieces because the AI formations can't navigate and adjust to vertical surfaces at the same time.

Leave aside the question of reasonable difficulty vs. just spawning infinite adds from random points. A claustrophobic escape room scenario is just not what I signed up for when ordering a SPACE game! In SPACE! With plenty of SPACE!

 

One of the core caveats in game design concerns control. Never actively take control away from the player, or even give that impression. Yes I must contend with inimical forces acting of their own volition, but by and large my own character, my own domain does what I tell it to do. That's the point of actively playing instead of being told what happened.

Once I set up my skills, don't change them for me.

A completely fixed constraint in a genre based on escalation retroactively cancels out all my plans and needs a clearer warning as departure from normal mechanics.

Turning spaceflight and fleets into yet another guerilla cityscape feels like false advertising and robs me of that sweeping, grandiose 3D motion.

 

Be wary of cancelling out basic gameplay features after you've established them. I do get that basic concepts need to be expanded, but if your idea for keeping things fresh consists of strangling your own baby... maybe keep brainstorming.

Lockstep 4: Banner+Lord= Bannerlord

"She's a bit whimsical, loves a romance

She sponsors comebacks, gives just one more chance

His is the tension, the plotting, the strife

He smiles as he writes, like the edge of a knife"

 

Mary Crowell - Pas De Deux

 

 

Having secured the Eastern marches for the Northern Empire unto the Southern comfort of a Best Western, I turned my Bannerlord's attention to securing my clan's succession only to discover goin' a-courtin' with charisma as your dump stat doesn't warm the sheets in any particular hurry.

Having struck out with my most promising prospect, I turned my attention to the ruling family's two youngest princesses. And struck out again. But! Third time's the charm (especially when you cheat a couple times by reloading) and I finally wooed the lovely young Gala of the Osticos, grand-daughter of now-defunct Emperor Lucon. I repaired with my blushing bride to my own territory, eager to begin producing heirs. First order of business: plant a few javelins in Gala's uterus in a tournament.

A-yup.

Them's sum medieval romance, alright.

(Hey, at least I won the tournament.)

 

There's a favorable comparison to be drawn between this amusing situation growing out of otherwise disparate game elements (marriage and tourneys) and in counterpoint a much worse game called ELEX. Both are ostensibly open world adventures but where Bannerlord owns its sandbox, ELEX tries to copycat Skyrim's winning formula of mixed open world and nannied questing. Too bad that implies talent here absent.

Yes, in the fine tradition of "lesser magic missile" and goldfish named Goldie, their small healing plants are called: "Small Healing Plants" which should give you an impression of their overall creatvity. Granted, just last year as I wrapped up my old playthrough I criticized Skyrim itself for imposing scripted quest status on what should have been freeform exploration, but at least Bethesda's flavor text tasted less rancid. ELEX's unimaginative lore has you fighting painfully generic mutant rat-dogs as an even more generic mercenary-super-mutant-spy-rebel-psychic-soldier-wizard-cyborg in a science fantasy mishmash of all the usual fireball-slinging, boomsticks and space lasers given no particular rhyme or reason. I can't even explain the need for a named protagonist, as "Dax" had all the personality of a freshly divided amoeba. All this wasn't as bad when just running around the landscape, but every scripted quest just focused your attention on the Bollywood-quality scripts, and ELEX was utterly obsessed with denying the player control over the action, in everything from quests to camera angles to randomly teleporting enemies to stepping on a knee-high boulder.

In much the same vein, my recent complaints about Ancestors Legacy focused on its undue focus on fixed construction sites, scripted story missions and over-the-shoulder action scenes, despite it being an inherently fluid, top-down RTS. But hey, don't take this to mean I'm in any way opposed to story-based gameplay, when properly executed. Narrative-driven adventure and RPGs have provided many of the most memorable titles in computer games' short history. The skillfully penned Tyranny, for instance, with its more mature setting, multifaceted characters and complex interactions, managed many instructive counterpoints to the above two's intrusive control.

Technically, the above is just a minor reputation event, allowing you to cozy up to your snarly bolverk, Kills-in-Shadow. Despite being entirely top-down scripted, its ultimate effect grows naturally up from the situation at hand and the player's overall grasp of beastwoman mentality. Unfortunately, rare is the computer game with the literary talent to back up a preset plot.

 

Both scripting and random generation have their limits, but in both cases you're supposed to be fueling interactivity, not just making a show of your artistic/programming prowess. Draw the line too far on either side and you end up tripping over it. I've also been trying my hand recently at ADOM, a text-based dungeon crawler from thirty years ago given an RPGMaker-ish graphic interface.

 

It's a quaint reminder of why, despite some charm, I've never considered those old roguelikes worth my time. Over-reliance on randomization results in either:

1) Giving the algorithm too much freedom, resulting in random deaths, inaccessible locations and otherwise broken content.

2) Giving it too little freedom, resulting in everything feeling suspiciously monotonous despite a few pieces being shuffled around.

The end result being that it's boring until it just kills you for no reason, and given roguelikes' obsession with permadeath you're also expected to get bored all the way around again, every time, until the dice go against you. Aside from the one monster type that seems immune, (floating eye) I've crawled my way to level 10 so far using exactly one spell (magic missile) against everything. Appropriately for a game made the same year as Arena, the randomized combat prompts much the same summary: "as you trot about [dungeons] at night, figures jump out of the shadows at you: rats, goblins, thieves, wolves, orcs, swashbucklers, mages... it doesn't particularly matter, as excepting the odd fireball toss, they'll all perform identically" - and in ADOM I've yet to see a fireball.

 

Still, you'll never quite get away from automatically generated content in games, because when it combines properly with other elements or player choice, the result is usually more memorable than mere preordained storytelling. Take RimWorld's encounter-generating AI, which normally pisses me off for its inherent level-scaling nature. One of its dirtier tricks is teleporting enemies into your base past your defenses, in one case dropping through my roof into the artificially lit, indoor corn field at the back of my base.

I rallied a panicked defense and reloaded a couple of times until I noticed the attackers had managed to light the corn aflame with their crashlanding and first explosive volley... in a space that, apart from their own hole in the roof, was nearly unventilated. Pull back, close the air vent, and every raider simply died of heatstroke, cooked to death by their own stupidity. Given my foresight in positioning a fire extinguisher in the middle of the field, I even lost less than a third of my crop.

 

Or take my last Stellaris run as a Void Dweller Fanatic Xenophile and Pacifist, a combination I just could not make work for several attempts due to a combination of scattered habitat inefficiency, low population capacity during early game and the near impossibility of capturing territory. Even when I wheedled my way into the galaxy's most powerful federation, my allies kept declaring offensive wars (pacifists can only claim territory when defending) and getting rich at my fleets' expense. I almost threw my hands up in despair until noticing the fatter my federation mates got, the more their political influence was worth. And these people liked me. Trusted me. It was easy to get favors from them via espionage.

With my huge tracts of land cordoned off early on, xenophile mixed breeds providing well-adapted population boosts late game and most importantly a slew of political favors and a dozen emissaries tripling my votes in the Galactic Community, I simply outvoted the rest of the known universe and crowned myself Galactic Emperor, dissolving the federations providing my competitors with economic and score bonuses. Shah mat, biznatches, long live the new eternal shah!

 

And while we're talking about tracts of land:

 

Pons Aelius is under attack by dastardly Persians! How shall we reinforce it, your adorable majesty? The Apennines funnel reinforcements from the south into a desert pass which cannot be improved with a road. The Carthaginians are more than happy to allow faster passage... to both Rome and Persia. We keep getting weakened by those damnable sky-darkening Persian archers behind their lines and can't break through on the main front, with reinforcements either slowed to a crawl or whittled down before they reach the action.

Luckily, in order to ambush our reinforcements the enemy also has to circle around the volcano of Thera... and their archers, being closer behind the mountain, are quicker to take the bait. Solution? Let my front line crumble while baiting their ambushing archers into exposed positions, then rally a cavalry charge to flatten them. Without support, their infantry's now easy prey.

Responsiveness. It's a beautiful thing.

Pounding my new wife's uterus with javelins? Freakin' hilarious, and not a scenario you'd find written into official content. She even congratulated me on my win afterwards. Fattening my allies up for a galactic coup? Only one cRPG I can think of in recent years toyed with such a plot. Enemies roasting themselves by setting fire to their objective? In a story-driven game that would actually be anticlimactic, but when it arises organically from a player being able to respond to threats in multiple ways (like closing a vent) it's a completely novel experience. Sure, you could write a convoluted plot about Roman legions getting bogged down in a sandy mountain pass or baiting Persian archers onto an exposed volcanic flank for a heroic cataphract charge, but it can also grow out of the middle ground between customization and randomization.

 

You'd think game designers would more often remember their product's principal advantage over other media: adding player creativity to the creators' own.

Stop prompting one right answer. It's supposed to be a dance, not a recital.

If you want to control every challenge, then you'd damn better have access to some Tyranny-quality writing to make it interesting, or you'll strangle every plot by every damn trite, predictable twist (super Greedfall spoiler: noble savages are noble.) If you try to randomize everything... then once again you end up needing to control the parameters so tightly that you just end up with fifty breeds of interchangeable melee mooks to be magically missiled in a mundane monotone. Talented writers can do better than algorithms, but good writing remains taboo in an industry still refusing to acknowledge any other audience besides shithead tweens. So at least put some effort into giving players the tools to make their own fun, and let the interesting scenarios you're too incompetent to orchestrate... orchestrate themselves.

Lockstep 3: Or, there and back again

Minor spoiler for Vagrus: The Riven Realms

__________________________________________________

 

Unable to find any half-skim guanaco milk for my eyebrow perifoliation treatments, instead I've been trying my hand at That Game That Misspelled My Name In The Preorder Credits and so far it looks quite promising, if still awaiting some fleshing out of its various features. Despite taverns including a hint system pointing you to various content, for instance, I've been having a devil of a time finding the various NPC companions to fill my roster, which in turn is preventing me from questing. About to rail against this lack, I ended up glancing at an online cheat-sheet only to discover I'd hounded circles around what should have been an obvious freebie.

Repeatedly.

Plotting all three of my trips to Deven so far with a view both toward accumulating fetch quests for simultaneous delivery and taking advantage of market prices to waste as little inventory space as possible entailed avoiding the unprofitable direct route along the main road, and consequently the hidden ambush site where you can rescue Finndurath the Spellweaver. I'd still have missed her if not for a damn reddit thread.

While Vagrus explicitly advertises a lack of handholding as one of its core selling points, given the importance of companions to questing and logistics, this one's proximity and the location she asks you to visit, you're obviously expected to run into her quite quickly. It's supposed to be a gimmie, a nice surprise while starting out. She's even located in an obvious spot. Too obvious, in fact, so that any gamer worth his salt will instead hit other locations (like the salt mines) for fun and profit instead of plowing forward. Is sweeping for side-quests before main objectives not a core strategy in cRPGs? Is maximizing logistics' profitability not in fact my exact job description as Vagrus? Why am I being denied an early reward for putting more thought into things than running there and back again horse-blindered, ignoring possible rings of power and profit?

It is possible for game designers to predict their customers' reactions so perfectly as to give the illusion of free choice while laying out a linear path. Off the top of my head, Half-Life 2's introduction (running through the apartment building) managed it beautifully. But it ain't easy, and the nerdier the genre the harder the players are to predict. A managerial cRPG exploration sandbox? Quite nerdy.* So why did you predict I'd simplemindedly rush from big city to big city? The more I play Vagrus, the clearer becomes the devs' very, very precise idea of how your early game should unfold, and entirely too much of it depends on foreknowledge of where and in what sequence to unlock stores with discounts, companions and free stacks of loot... while hoping for lucky fetch quest randomization. Its tendency to over-predict player actions clashes with its fundamental randomization.

Oh well. With a third rusty side-chick in tow, at least now I can re-attempt to lick the neck romancer's swamp hole. Later, comes.

________________________________________________

* edit 2022/12/05 - And that's not mentioning the gratuitous LATIN. No really, why did you ever assume your target audience would go for the obvious?

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.

Goal: de-Locks

"It's hard to win, easy to lose

We play a game we cannot choose
As steady as a rocking horse, as subtle as a bruise"

 

Oi Va Voi - Waiting

After Knights of the Old Republic, I didn't want to jump straight into another oldie so I installed Low Magic Age on the assumption it would turn out to be some amateurish rip-off like Sanctus Reach or ATOM RPG which I could uninstall before the first act's finale, providing me with a couple hours' worth of entertainment mostly from bitching about it. But damnit it's a surprisingly decent dungeon-crawler in a half-implemented landscape, a lamentable case of wasted potential given it's still listed as "in development" in 2021 after a 2017 launch. Unlike some of its competitors it makes a big show of sticking to D20 combat rules... in both good and bad respects.

 

I slapped together an all-elven chaotic neutral (not that it matters) party: a barbarian and a versatile rogue/fighter as front-line beef, a squishy duel-wealding rouge (Shadow, my recurring backstabbing Jungian companion) and a cleric (the noble Bann D'Ayd) covering the flanks, plus bringing up the rear the only chaotic neutral character in the stock henchman roster and myself in my usual role as support wizard, this time specializing in necromancy.

Thus I set out on my first exciting adventure.

Thus I started my first combat of my first exciting adventure.

Thus the first enemy I encountered took its first action:

Game Over.

 

And sure, sure, I didn't have to turn perma-death on, and I could've hidden behind my barbarian or put Lobby (he lobs things) in front of myself if I were more careful, but even that would've only shaved what, 5-10% from my chance of instant death. Low Magic Age spawns your party and your enemies randomly on each randomly generated map. Bottom line: no matter what I did, that goblin shooter would still have been in range of me and there was nothing I could do to stop it from critting me.

 

Now, given my preference for playing support casters, this is not even the first time I've died in the first round of an RPG's first combat. For the sake of my already brittle self-worth, let us not keep a tally. Still, even taking into account my gluttony for punishment, I would contend there's something fundamentally wrong about a system whose first message to the customer after half an hour's worth of party creation and tutorial is: Game Over.

On a completely unrelated topic, KotOR's companion roster was more bearably written than I expected, so I took quite a shine to Canderous the stalwart warmonger and the casually biocidal HK-47... only for the last act to force me to use other, plot-centric NPCs instead.

Wrong.

In a multiple-character single-player RPG, fleshing out your adventuring group is as much an expression of the player's personality as choosing between light and dark sides. Except for companion side-quests you should never force me to use a particular NPC for any mission, especially not for the grand finale. This is supposed to be my moment of glory not your writers', and by extension it's supposed to be the moment of glory for the party I've gradually developed, the loyal minions who've bled (and leaked motor oil) for me, not for your pet diva whose existence I've barely acknowledged so far.

 

Games are not movies; conversely, games are not dice.

In an interactive medium, no matter how clever you think a feature or plot twist might be, tread exceptionally carefully if you run any chance of invalidating the player's choices.* This is not a pitfall, but a narrow middle ground between pitfalls. You can choke a player by exerting too much control, as with KotOR's narratively-integrated companions**, or fob off too much decision making via randomization as with Low Magic Age's combat maps. Properly subtle balancing of player choice against a solidly playable environment can make or break an otherwise mediocre title like Fallen Enchantress.

Try to remember you're making a product to be used by others, not just to show off your algorithms or shiny plot-rails.

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* Yes, it can occasionally work wonders, but keep in mind Faust Capital shone precisely as a calculated, dramaticaly precise counterpoint to an otherwise ironclad rule.

** Other Black Isle / Bioware / Obsidian games did a much better job of lending your companions their relevance and stature within the game world without anchoring them too fixedly into the PC's main plot. Take Durance from Pillars of Eternity as one brilliant example. Freakin' Avellone, man...