Monthly Archives: December 2009

Please hammer, don’t hurt ’em

I finished Dragon Age: Origins over the weekend; it didn’t quite go to plan, as the game chucked a couple of curveballs (or to use the correct vernacular: bowled a couple of googlies) in the final act, which made life quite interesting. More ruminations on that to follow at some point, but as a bit of a change of scenery I decided to make a start on the THQ pack from Steam’s earlier sale, and installed Red Faction: Guerilla.

Red Faction is certainly a change of pace from some of the dialogue-heavy stretches of Dragon Age. Though you can read a deeper message into it, such as your character being a ludic metaphor for the immortal nature of revolutionary ideals, and the game attempts to set up a bit of a story (“You’re on Mars, I’m your brother, OH NO I GOT SHOT, fight the power”), the scene is really set by the tutorial mission where you get given some explosives and a hammer and told to demolish an old building. That’s what the game is about: smashing stuff with a hammer then blowing it up, and it does it fantastically. The only way they could have improved the introduction would have been to ditch the attempt to give you a deeper motivation for smashing stuff with a hammer then blowing it up by replacing your brother in the game with MC Hammer, who could give you a hammer, tell you to smash stuff with it, then hang around in the background wearing enormous trousers and occasionally shouting “Stop! Hammer time!”

Fifteen men on the dead man’s armoire

I need to get something off my chest. It’s a mace. And a shortbow. And a pair of chainmail gauntlets.

Yes, time for another Dragon Age post as everyone enjoys them so much. Just to be abundantly clear: it’s a really good game and it’s precisely because it does so many things so very well that certain little things stick out all the more. Things like having a camp full of incredibly dangerous people, and offering no explanation of why you only ever bother taking three of them out and about with you; of course there are myriad excellent reasons, technical limitations, replayability, yada yada, but I’d just like some nod towards it in-game. Maybe in a dream at the start:

Archdemon: “LOL u r such a nub u have to zerg me”
You: “NO WAI i r totally leet i cud pwn u solo”
Archdemon: “OK lets both fix party size at 4 thats fair”
You: “yeah OK”
*first fight is your party vs 23 Darkspawn*
You: “WTF HAX!”

All right, so that serves as an illustration of how attempting to explain meta-mechanics within the plot often ends up being far worse than just saying “it’s a bloody game, get over it you nitpicking git”. Still, today’s quibble is chests, and not Morrigan’s unnaturally sticky-back-plastic-dependant top (if alchemists can come up with a flaming weapon coating or health restoring poultice, I’m sure a suitable adhesive is easy enough).

Treasure chests, loot-containing barrels, crates, weapon racks, suitcases, vases, piles of stones, wardrobes, armoires and cupboards are staples of CRPGs in much the same way that staples are staples of stapling. That’s fine, there’s nothing I like more than a good rummage in a chest (and I don’t mean… oh, just take all the hilarious chest innuendo as read from here). If a dungeon doesn’t come with the requisite stock of loot-stuffed containers I’m highly miffed. Dragon Age, though, like Baldur’s Gate and many other games before it, sprinkles loot-containing objects all over the place. Wandering around a town, there’s a sparkly barrel, stroll up to it and… hey, here’s a longsword! And a bow in a crate over there. Slightly incongruous, but not utterly ludicrous. But then you go into a house or an inn, open a door, see a couple of people in the room, barge in, open the wardrobe in the corner, rifle through it, take the dagger that was sitting at the bottom, click to talk with one of the occupants and they say… “Good morrow, Grey Warden”. Not “Guards! Guards!” or “Who the hell are you?” or “Get out of my wardrobe!” or “Please don’t hurt me, you terrifying blood-spattered armed maniac who’s just broken in to my room and stolen my dagger”. There are a couple of instances where attempting to interact with an object actually provokes a response, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. Yes, it’s a very small thing, but picking at that thread of the Pullover of RPG leads on to wondering why you’re in the house in the first place, and indeed why the instinctive reaction upon arriving in any town is to thoroughly explore every single location, talking to everybody (unless they have a generic title like “Peasant” or “Noble”) asking if they have any menial tasks they’d like done while you happen to be in the area like it’s bob-a-job week, stuff you were taking entirely for granted, and before you know it the pullover’s unravelled you’ve ended up with the Crop-top of Absurdism, and then… Oh, wait, we’re back to Morrigan’s top again.

It is your destiny.

My primary problem with Dragon Age:Origins is the same as it has always been with Bioware RPGs, and it is currently my primary concern for their Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. Dragon Age comprises a world which is ruled by old and powerful Gods who control the fate of all existence, which they bend to their will and whim.

We call these Gods developers.

And they are fickle.

A small spoiler now follows for Dragon Age, you have been warned.

One of the early objectives of the game is to enlist the help of the Arl of Redcliffe. When you reach Redcliffe village you find it under attack from the undead, and after defending it from attack you make your way into Redcliffe Keep to find the source of the evil and rescue the Arl. The source of the evil turns out to be the Arl’s child who has been possessed by a demon. When you confront the boy and his mother she pleads for you not to harm him and to find another way to defeat the demon, with the more immediate option being the death of the child by your hand. At this point you are presented with a choice: kill the boy and thus the demon, or travel to the Tower of the Circle of Magi and try to get the help of someone there to exorcise the boy. My offer to go and get Jane Fonda and exercise the boy was met with quiet contempt.

Now I already knew that the Tower of the Circle of Magi was in some sort of trouble, so getting there and back was going to be tricky and possibly involve epic quests. For a change. Since the boy was possessed by a demon that was bent on slaughtering all the local population (which had been reinforced by my having to defend the village first before entering the keep) I took what I thought was the hard decision to kill the boy, sacrificing one innocent life for the many. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that his mother was an annoying whining bint who had caused the whole problem in the first place, honest. Of course the game let me know through various lengthy patronising conversations what a monster I was for doing such a deed, and yet I imagined the situation if I had gone to the Magi to have been worse: coming back to find everyone who lived in Redcliffe to have been slaughtered in the intervening period. Zoso happened to choose that route, and so happily informed me that, no, you can take as long as you want to go and get the help; the demon seems to be distracted from its previous plans to destroy all life in Redcliffe for the entire time you are away. Perhaps a really good episode of MacGyver was on Fade TV, who knows?

I became a bit fed-up at this point because I was being made to feel like I had done the wrong thing, when in fact I felt that I had taken the harder choice with every good intent in mind; but my good intent was negated by the fact that the developers had decided that the seemingly obvious thing that would happen if you went away – demon enjoys its temporary reprise by slaughtering everything with a pulse and then raising them as an army of undead slaves in an attempt at world domination – doesn’t happen at all, instead the demon suddenly has a pang of existential crisis long enough for you to conveniently fetch help. There are villains in the 60’s TV series of Batman that feel less contrived. I couldn’t help but feel that the developers were laughing behind their hands “Oh ho ho, you thought *that*? Ha, surprise!”.

I’d put this all down to my unreasoning belief that all game developers are out to get me, but I have another brief example from a different Bioware RPG.

You’ll have to excuse any inaccuracies because I’m recalling this from old, worn sections of my brain. In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic you encounter, at some point, a beggar in the street asking for credits. When you ask them how much they want you can choose to give them nothing, the amount they ask for, or more than they ask for. Being a noble Jedi Knight of the Shining Order of Smug Superiority I gave them more than they asked for, since I could spare it, it felt like the right thing for a Jedi to do, and because you never know – help someone out now and you may run across them later on and gain something in return. Now altruism like that, as opposed to genuine generosity, is possibly a learned perversity that these games encourage, but regardless of the fact, I thought I was doing a Good Thing. You do indeed meet the chap again later on, dead in an alley, mugged because of all the credits he had on him. Credits that you gave to him.

“Oh ho ho, you thought *that*? Ha, surprise!” say the developers in my mind.

And that’s what annoys me about these dialogue choices in Bioware RPGs, and why I really worry for Star Wars: The Old Republic at the moment. The result of your actions is based on the fickle whim of the developer writing the story, and it is entirely too easy for them to set things up in a way that appear very obviously to suggest one thing, whilst actually delivering something entirely the opposite. This, when used very carefully can make for an excellent plot twist and following dramatic dénouement, but Bioware seem to use the trick far too often in their games for no better reason than to keep players second guessing what the actual outcome may be.

It’s a tricky problem to solve because the opposite end of the scale is a game like Mass Effect where there were generally always three options, one piously good, one tediously neutral and one blatantly moustache-twiddlingly villainous, and whichever option you chose, you got the reaction and plot progression that you’d expect. It allowed you to build the kind of character you wanted but at the expense of any real surprises.

I still feel that Bioware are trying to experiment with telling an interactive story in their RPGs; they have a strong foundation for telling a good tale, but it seems that how the player interacts with and affects the plot is still very much being explored and trialled with each new game. I don’t know which route Star Wars: The Old Republic will follow with respect to story choice, or perhaps it will beat a new path all of its own, but the problem comes from it being an MMO. Without the chance to save and reload as you would get in a single player RPG, you will have to be very careful of any choices that you make because they may affect your character for the rest of its career. In fact, I plan to setup ChottBot right after I finish posting this, it will be an Internet database filled with every conversation choice you can make in the game and thus allow players to pick whichever options will build the ultimate munchkin character, or open all the contacts with the best loot rewards; plot, motivation or immersion be damned, because frankly the outcome of your choices are a lottery anyway.

My concern is that where conversation options in Star Wars: The Old Republic are concerned, ‘It’s a trap!’ may become a fitting mantra.

Have I Got MMOnews For You

Host: This week, teams, science news from Slashdot who point out a research paper from Dr Johnson on “Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic”, which suggests “a common team-based model can accurately reproduce the quantitative features” of both “potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly by disaffected male youths” and “the massive global guilds in online role-playing games”

Zoso: We put this to the leader of the popular guild Knights of the New Phoenix Dawn, who replied “Clearly this so-called paper is a nonsense, and at best the mathematical model in question must be so generalised as to apply to almost any grouping of individuals, suggesting the online guild component is simply a ruse to justify claiming an MMORPG subscription as an expense. The Knights of the New Phoenix Dawn bear no resemblance in any way, shape or form to a street gang, and I’ll pop a cap in the ass of anyone who says otherwise. Word. Noun. Adverb.”

Melmoth: Mr Juan “Cougar Hob-nobba” Perez, leader of the Whipped Gat Slingas gang of Harlem, Manhattan, speaking between gunshots from behind his sofa had this to say on the research “What the dilly yo, noobs? I told you to purge the disease on those bitch skank hoes before letting them aggro more adds, now the boss is enraged and we ain’t got enough benjamins for the repairs. You shiznits hate playing, huh? You playa hatas? Day-amn.”

PJ: As the initial list of quantitative features included fickle loyalties based on short-term goals, artificially poor language skills to create to a specialist vocabulary, and an attraction to new objects with a constant discarding of the old, the first draft of the research paper was quickly withdrawn when it was realised the model also applied to LOLCATS.

Zoso: Dr Johnson, pressed for a quote, said “’tis a most obvious thing that URCHINS and NE’ERDOWELLS change not in nature whether ‘pon street-corner or MAGICK BOX of MISTER BABBAGE”, though it was later pointed out the author of the paper was Dr Neil Johnson, not Samuel.

Melmoth: Reports that World of Warcraft’s next expansion will be titled ‘Hatin’ of da Bling King.‘ are currently unfounded.

Host: Goodnight!

Studio lights dim, theme tune plays.