Killed in a Smiling Accident.

APB has two main features. Firstly customisation; of your character, the way they look, they way they dress, the car they drive, their theme tune. Secondly fast-paced cops n’ robbers driving and shooting action in third-person, haring around after escaping criminals, shootouts over key objectives, a bit like a bunch of dynamic mini Counterstrike matches happening on the same map. Customisation was a big focus of pre-launch publicity like the 2008 E3 presentation, and has generally lived up to the hype; players have come up with some impressive efforts themselves including a Star Trek Squad and a Metropolitan Police clan. The action side of things wasn’t so well received, so it’s not a huge surprise that the developers have announced they’re looking at improving driving, combat and matchmaking.

One of APB’s problems is that the two halves don’t always complement each other. A good example of the inherent conflict is location-based damage; it’s pretty much taken for granted in modern shooters that a headshot will do more damage. Then again in most shooters the player models are the same size, but APB gives you sliders to adjust height and weight, so if the hit box was exactly mapped to your character there’d be a competitive advantage in making the character as small as possible and top clans would be exclusively populated by emaciated midgets. And in the game, ah! (No, not ‘ah’). Instead all APB characters have the same hit box, so a ‘head’ shot would be anywhere from the top of a chest to thin air, depending on the actual character size. There have been some interesting suggestions, such as having the hit box the same size as the character, but making shorter characters move more slowly so there would be drawbacks as well as advantages, but that would just give another avenue of min-maxing, and generally be opposed to the central idea of giving players maximum creative freedom in how they look.

If the customisation was lacklustre but the action gameplay worked really well APB might be able to find a more comfortable niche, though it would be in more direct competition with any number of online shooters without monthly or per-hour costs. As it is, after perfecting your hairstyle, outfit and car paint job, you’ve got one thing to do: go head-to-head against other players. On the Venn diagram of “people who like small group deathmatch shooters” and “people who like composing theme tunes and spending ages making sure their shirt looks right”, APB is great for those in the intersection between the sets, but my suspicion is that’s not a very large segment and many people attracted by the freedom in the character creation would prefer some slightly more relaxed gameplay options. There is the Social district, though that’s something of a misnomer as most people there are clustered around auction or design terminals using the full screen editing options, and apart from the terminals it’s a useful space if you want an in-game guild meeting or something, but there’s nothing to actually do there.

Out on patrol in the action district you hit the problems every PvP game has. Some players want a balanced fight, some just want to win; the latter try to skew things in their favour as much as they can, especially in a persistent game in which unlocks and upgrades provide an incentive to keep playing. With a large enough pool of players and a robust matchmaking system those looking for a balanced fight should be able to find one, but RTW have acknowledged that things aren’t really working out as they hoped in that area. I’m increasingly finding as I potter about the place that more and more opponents have triple character and weapon upgrades, and though an individual 5% boost here and there doesn’t make a vast amount of difference in the grand scheme of things compared to player skill, if they’re a much better player to start out with my chances are somewhere between slim and none, and the upgrades mean slim gets taken out by a rocket launcher before the mission starts. I’m not sure if it’s the cherry picking and other matchmaking problems described by the devs, a lot of really good players on the criminal side, or just my bad luck with district selection, but when you keep coming up against opponents with a 15% health boost who take less damage from each shot things shift from “generally putting up a decent fight and winning a few missions” to “standing less chance than the peace-loving pygmies of the Upper Volta charging machine guns at Mboto Gorge armed only with fruit”. Still, when the matchmaking system does produce fairer fights it’s still fun, so fingers crossed their overhaul does the trick.

It might be that an improvement in the action side of the game is enough to keep APB compelling, but given more time or perhaps focus in development I wonder if it could have taken a different path. I blogged about Grand Theft Auto IV and Saints Row 2 a while back, concluding that one of the main strengths of GTAIV is its atmosphere, setting and attention to detail, whereas SR2 offers comic-book excesses and a wide variety of non-stop action, and I think either could have translated to an MMO.

The Saints Row 2 option of crazy blockbuster action would be, conceptually, pretty straightforward: throw in everything and the kitchen sink. It wouldn’t be so worried about a meaningful game world as setting players loose in a metaphorical theme park; hell, let the players loose in an actual theme park, gunfights on a roller-coaster and candy floss everywhere… Take a leaf from some SR2 activities like races on flaming quad bikes causing explosions around the place, or making players temporarily invulnerable to be hit by as many cars as possible as an insurance scam (that would work particularly well if happening at the same time as other players chasing each other on assassination missions or just in races). Add hot dog costumes and gimp masks to the clothing options, ramp everything up to 11.

A more Grand Theft Auto IV path would be quite the opposite; try and give the world more coherence and reality. The cities of GTA aren’t exactly *the* real world (police generally don’t tend to forget you’re a wanted felon if you hide around a corner for 30 seconds), but they’re *a* real world with people going about their business, news and adverts on the radio, things happening in the city. It’s difficult to take that living city into an MMO; throw in 100 maniacs with assault weapons and it’s not really so coherent and believable, the more real people you add, the less real it is. APB has an interesting enough back story, but it reads like it was dashed off as a quick excuse for criminals to be fighting a bunch of mercenary-like cops, it’s hardly reflected in the game itself when you drop into a district of this supposedly crime-ravaged anarchic lawless city. Have the population barricaded themselves in their homes, or buggered off to the country where there’s significantly less chance of being mown down in a random firefight? No, everyone is wandering about doing a bit of shopping, casually strolling across the road demonstrating a lack of awareness of the Green Cross Code that would be dangerous in a normal city let alone one where high speed pursuit is the hobby of choice, and slowly driving expensive sports cars around that might as well have “STEAL (or commandeer) ME!” emblazoned on the roof. Oh, and there’s the social district, where criminals and enforcers “decided not to fight”. As criminals and enforcers so often do.

It might go slightly against the real-world cops n’ robbers grain, but I think the only way you could really pull off an immersive city setting would be to make it near-future, after some not-apocalyptic-but-quite-major event, something like a cross between Mad Max (the first one) and Brian Wood’s DMZ comic series. Same clothes, cars and guns, but a more dishevelled city; maybe even expand things in a slightly EVE-like way with high-security areas patrolled by powerful (but not omniscient) NPCs giving way to more anarchic zones.

Got a brilliant idea for a new MMORPG, but just can’t come up with a catchy name? Simply follow these easy steps for a guaranteed smash hit:

1. Stick a pin in the thesaurus entry for ‘realm’
2. Add ‘of’
3. Draw scrabble letters from a bag for a fantasy-sounding word
4. Add punctuation of choice
5. Append a portentous verb

KiaSA Studios are pleased to announce that Purview of Lsdqwny – Conflictening will be released in 2011 and feature exciting innovations including Levels, Statistics and Items, and Neck of the Woods of Gassdvhw{ Enthrustening has just started development, based around the novel idea of giving us lots of money in exchange for killing monsters or making swords or something.

After the public beta of WWII RTS RUSE, developers Eugen pushed back the release from June to give them time to work on feedback from the beta (Melmoth would approve). Steam popped up news of a free preview weekend, ending Sunday July 18th, so I got the client downloaded on Saturday evening, at which point there was apparently 35 minutes of the preview left. Something had got a bit confused somewhere between the developers and Steam, perhaps that’s a problem when your game involves the Art of Deception; the game had vanished from my Steam library on Sunday morning, but reappeared later on, claiming 3 days left on the preview.

I only managed one online game; things didn’t seem to have changed very much since beta, but there might be more going on under the surface, I’d need to find some patch notes to be sure. It was rather splendid fun unleashing artillery barrages once more, a timely reminder to put the game back on my radar again. Worth a quick look before Wednesday (unless the extension to the preview is another ruse…)

I may be becoming a terrible cynic, but I did wonder at first if the whole business about real names on Blizzard forum posts was just a money saving exercise to try and get rid of a few forum moderators. Then when they backed down within days it smacked slightly of something else: a highball negotiating technique, like where you want slightly nicer biscuits for your tea break so you open up with a demand for a 25% pay rise, shorter hours, longer holiday and Fortnum & Mason Date & Pecan Piccadilly Biscuits, and eventually haggle your way down to the desired Chocolate Hob-Nobs. The trouble is, from the outside the following all look pretty much the same:

Scenario 1:

1. Blizzard wish to clean up their forums, and think real names will result in greater accountability and improved discussion; aware that it won’t be universally popular, they nevertheless believe that players will see the benefits and go along with the change
2. Following the massive outcry and overwhelmingly negative reaction, Blizzard accept the well-reasoned arguments against mandating real names on the forums and adjust their policy
3. Much rejoicing

Scenario 2:

1. Activision execs decide nine swimming pools full of money just aren’t enough, figure they can squeeze a bit more out of Blizzard by cleaning up the forums and sacking a few moderators
2. People point out this would be massively unpopular, and drive people away from the forums. Activision execs shout “CHA-CHING!” at the prospect of reducing bandwidth bills and sacking even more moderators.
3. Backlash greater than expected, people unsubscribe from games citing RealID, demand removal of personal information. A quick bit of spreadsheet work suggests losses could cancel out savings, policy scrapped.
4. ???
5. Profit!

Scenario 3:

1. A shadowy cabal including Blizzard and Facebook come up with strange and devious plans to link games accounts to battle.net accounts, then to Facebook profiles, allowing all sorts of information harvesting as well as the ability to spam friends with recruitment requests
2. The blogosphere starts to get nervous about security and privacy implications
3. Blizzard pick something they don’t really care about but know people will get worked up over, announce mandatory real names on forum posts (see also: “active decoy”)
4. Internet goes crazy as predicted, massive coverage on news sites (see also: “no publicity is bad publicity”)
5. Blizzard back down, appear sensitive to customer concerns defusing much of the negative opinion, proceed with original plans which don’t seem quite so extreme any more in comparison, eat chocolate Hob-Nobs

How about you, dear readers, do you believe in good intentions, greed, conspiracy, or a bit of everything? Or have you got any better theories, linking RealID to the identity of Kennedy’s actual assassin, the one who faked the moon landings?

“Get privacy right and you retain the trust and confidence of your customers and users; mislead consumers or collect information you don’t need and you are likely to diminish customer trust and face enforcement action from the Information Commissioner’s Office.”

- Christopher Graham, Information Commissioner, from BBC News

Wolfshead’s dusted off the old “game vs world” type debate with some reasonable points on adventure and immersion, and some less reasonable points that I started to comment on before things got sprawling enough for a post…

Starter for ten: … we need to take a time machine back to eleven years ago when MMOs like Ultima Online and EverQuest rocked the video game industry to its core. These new multi-player online games unexpectedly raised the stakes to new levels. No longer was a video game all about having fun and amusement. It was something deeper, visceral, engaging and transcendent; an experience within a world.

I don’t agree with that at all. Ultima Online and Everquest are points on a continuum that includes MUDs and MUSHs, Nethack and Roguelikes, the Elder Scrolls series, the AOL Neverwinter Nights and Meridian 59, among many, many others. It’s not like they mark some Damascene revelation, before which everything was silly and frothy and transient; along with Breakout in 1976 you had the Colossal Cave Adventure. MUD1 and Space Invaders were both 1978. Home computing in the early 80s, as per my favourite chapter of Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys: “The classic action game of the early 1980s – Defender, Pac Man – was set in a perpetual present tense, a sort of arcade Eden in which there were always enemies to zap or gobble, but nothing ever changed apart from the score”, then Braben and Bell unleashed the eight galaxies of 256 stars that made up Elite. Computer games have always spanned quick blasts and deep worlds, pill gobbling while chased by ghosts and conquests of entire galaxies. They’ve always been about playing together as well as alone; prior to widespread connectivity competing for high scores or clustering around Gauntlet and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade machines, then as the internet spread from its largely academic confines so came FPS clans and virtual fighter squadrons alongside MMOG guilds. If anything represents a computer game not being simply about fun and amusement what about, by definition, professional gaming, a field dominated by the FPS and RTS genres? Of course Ultima Online and EverQuest are significant games, but I have a problem with the premise of MMOGs as industry-rocking world-changers.

Moving on, the central thrust of the piece is “Adventure is for Adults”, “Fun is For Children”, which seems to be bringing new terminology to the game vs world, theme park vs sandbox debate. I don’t disagree that there is a terminology problem, I tend to go with game and world which are far from ideal; “adventure” for depth, immersion, meaning, risk, sacrifice isn’t bad, but opposing that with “fun” as a shorthand for instant gratification, transience and triviality is a serious problem. After all part of the provided definition of fun is “what provides amusement or enjoyment”, which is a fairly key part of games for me, and whether by accident or design the piece takes on an air of Puritanism, tutting at the depravity of anyone daring to enjoy themselves, culminating in: “There is something unseemly about the pursuit of fun by grown adults. As a MMO veteran of 11 years, this is not what I signed up for. Part this problem is societal and a reflection of the pervasiveness of our youth culture where people today just refuse to grow up — aided and abetted by their enablers in the entertainment industry. Somehow the purpose of life has been reduced to finding ways to endlessly amuse oneself. Regrettably, our generation seems to be trapped in a culture of perpetual adolescence.”

I’m not quite sure how we got from MMOGs to “the purpose of life”. Tobold posted recently about in-game achievements and the lure of the “ding!”, crucially pointing out: “Our real lives are full of amazing achievements: We learn how the world works during our education, then create value every day in our jobs. We make friends, we love, we build families, and participate in communities.” Games are a *facet* of our lives, to play a game for a bit of fun is no more an indication of some deep-seated perpetual adolescence than watching a light comedy programme with no particular message behind it. Sinking a massive amount of time into “serious” adventuring in a virtual world can *sometimes* be an abdication of real life responsibility, not an inherent demonstration of maturity.

The more reasonable point, though; “But let’s accept that many adults today are chasing the dragon of fun; at least they have thousands of video game titles from which to satiate their hunger. Yet for those of us that seek high stakes online adventure there are barely any choices. [...] Real virtual adventurers have few if any niche based options that appeal to them that are created with a WoW budget.”

Nitpicking, a niche option with a WoW budget wouldn’t be niche any more, but looking at other fields there are art-house films alongside summer blockbusters, painfully cool indie bands as well as pop sensations, or the good old fallback of gourmet restaurants and McDonalds. It’s always fun to rail against the Hollywood machine and soulless record corporations, but I’d be more interested in why the other gaming choices aren’t working out; Ultima Online and EverQuest are still running after all, if they were indeed the high point of the genre. Wasn’t Vanguard supposed to pick up EverQuest’s “Vision”? EVE, as ever, is a poster child of “not-WoW”, and in smaller niches still there are things like Wurm Online. There seem to be other options out there, how are they failing in the provision of high stakes online adventure?

As Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green notes in the comments, if using the steak/McDonalds analogy: “The problem here is that the current audience balks at paying filet mignon prices. It’s silly to go to McDonald’s and ask for filet mignon just as it’s silly to go to a fine steakhouse and demand the filet mignon at McDonald’s prices. Yet, that seems to be the situation we’re in. One of the reasons I’m a fan of business models beyond the subscription is that it elimiantes the need to appeal to the least common denominator, plus it allows some people who want a truly terrific experience to pay filet mignon prices.” After all, audiophiles pay thousands for hi-fi equipment rather than sticking an iPod on a twenty quid dock, wine connoisseurs can enjoy a nice Château Mouton-Rothschild as opposed to Something Around A Fiver From Tesco, serious amateur photographers (nudge, nudge) have “prosumer” kit available instead of a simple point n’ click camera, MMOG players have… maybe a Deluxe Edition at launch for an extra £10, or some stuff from an item shop if the game’s set up that way. A nice island in Entropia Universe, if you really want to push it, but that’s very much the exception.

The drawback of a more direct link between price and quality is you can also end up with $7000 audio cables, f’rinstance, where you have to wonder if the purpose is to actually improve the sound, or to let you say “oh, yeah, that cable, seven grand” at every opportunity, oddly enough similar to something Tam touched on in a recent post on elitism vs high standards, “elitism comes not from superiority but from the desire to be seen as superior”. Opposition to a move away from subscriptions is understandable as a defence against “…some companies who want to charge filet mignon prices but try to pass off Sizzler level quality…”, but accepting that high stakes online adventure is indeed a niche, something’s got to give between price and slick production values.

There’s been an enorm-o-sale on at Steam for the past couple of weeks that I’ve been furiously not posting about in a desperate attempt to avoid adding yet more games to the big pile o’ stuff I hardly have time to play. I was doing quite well, partly due to the plethora of offers giving a paradox of choice, partly due to having a bunch of stuff from previous sales, until I finally succumbed and bought The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom on the recommendation of Melmoth, a couple of packs of Borderlands DLC (skipping Mad Moxxi’s Underdome on the recommendation of Jon Shute), Tropico 3 and Beat Hazard. Less than £20, all-in, a comparative flesh wound by Steam sale standards.

Beat Hazard is what I’d describe as “a bit like Asteroids“, in the modern parlance I understand it to be a Bullet Hell Shmup (true aficionados would doubtless sneer at the paltry number of bullets on screen, though, maybe “Bullet Drat” or “Bullet Heck” would be more apt). Like Everyday Shooter it’s a music-based shoot ‘em up, but it uses your own MP3 collection like Audiosurf. The power of your guns, and intensity of the enemy attacks, are based on the volume of the music, which can lead to interesting gameplay when an otherwise-frantic track has a few quiet moments and your magnificent blazing lasers of death suddenly turn into pop-guns.

The visuals are stunning, fields of colour pulsating in time with the beat, especially as you power up your weapons in a particularly intense song. Definitely one to avoid if you have issues with photo-sensitivity, otherwise revel in the psychedelia.

As with Audiosurf it has the perfect gameplay chunk size, you can have a quick blast in a spare five minutes (or a spare 23 seconds for a couple of early Napalm Death tracks), but the “… just one more song” factor can easily keep you working through your MP3 collection for a couple of hours. Without the audio it would be a decent enough shmup but not really enough to keep me coming back, with a soundtrack of such unquestionable taste it’s definitely worth a couple of quid.

The KiaSA Guide to MMOGs has this to say on guild leadership:

‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.’

The estate of George Orwell protested that this bore striking similarities to 1984, but KiaSA Publications quickly printed a copy in an old font that looked a bit like a typewriter, spilled some tea on it, and claimed it had been written in 1926 so couldn’t possibly be a copy/paste job from Project Gutenberg, although when pressed were unable to explain how a guide to MMOGs could predate MMOGs themselves, the invention of the electronic computer, and the birth of its own authors. Fortunately The Guild Leaders Handbook offers a more forgiving and originally written look at the role of the guild leader with more emphasis on honesty and leading by example than tearing human minds to pieces.

Scott F. Andrews, long-time WoW guild leader and author of “The Officers’ Quarters” column at WoW.com, has collected his experience into a paper-based advice dispensing format known as a “book”, The Guild Leader’s Handbook, which you’ve probably seen a few reviews of as No Starch Press mailed out copies to a bunch of MMOG bloggers, most of whom aren’t as slack as us. Still, our motto is “if something’s worth reviewing, it’s worth waiting a couple of months then reminding people about that thing that sounded quite interesting a while back”.

The book is comprehensive, starting with the formation of a guild and recruitment, dealing with different personalities within a guild and associated drama, the activities you’ll embark on (raiding, PvP, roleplaying), keeping the guild going over time, and dealing with real life. It’s generally aimed at a Guild Leader, as the title rather suggests, but would also be of interest to others with guild responsibilities such as officers, or even anyone who just wants to know a bit more about guilds in MMOGs. Perhaps it could have widened its audience slightly by looking at things from a non-leader’s perspective, though. The section on recruitment, for example, has tips on what to look for and danger signs in a potential recruit; it’s not too difficult to reinterpret “danger signs for a recruitment officer” as “things not to do when applying to a new guild”, but a bit of extra advice on how to find a guild and make a good impression might be handy.

Much of The Guild Leader’s Handbook is applicable to any MMOG guild, and could probably be applied to other online communities, but the primary focus tends to be obtaining loot through large scale PvE encounters, i.e. World of Warcraft raiding, not unnaturally given that’s the author’s background. The chapter on raiding and especially raid leading seems particularly strong, and another chapter is devoted to loot distribution; PvP and roleplaying are combined in a chapter which is a good introduction for those not particularly familiar with them, but very much a whistle-stop tour of key points as in-depth implementation will vary from game to game.

Perhaps the weakest section for me is on People and Personalties, using “Player Personality Classes” (PPCs) as a way of identifying potential clashes. The eight proposed archetypes, each with two specs, are a bit woolly, and as the author says most people are composites of elements from several areas. “Classes” and “specs” are very natural for MMOG players, but with a lot of existing research on personality, motivation, team roles etc. in a business context I would have preferred to see something like Myers-Briggs types translated into gaming roles, or better still picking up some of Nick Yee’s MMORPG psychology research from Project Daedalus developing Bartle’s MUD player classifications into a more detailed study of player motivation. Still, the slight weakness of the personality class model doesn’t really undermine the more important advice on recognising, confronting and defusing drama. A few sections are highly subjective as well, such as what makes a good guild name, but the author acknowledges this and is never dogmatic in presentation.

Something the Handbook really drives home is how involving a guild can be. Course some guilds work fine as a loose collection of friends, but past a point they need time and effort, from members but mostly from leaders, and extend outside the boundaries of a game. Most prospective leaders will know at the outset they’ll need to schedule in-game encounters, lead the guild into them and distribute rewards, I suspect fewer anticipate they may need to confront substance abuse or relationship problems amongst members. The last chapter of the Handbook, “Dealing With Reality”, gives sensible and practical advice for such situations, and though it obviously can’t cover precisely what to do, at least it can prepare a guild leader for the possibility they might need to deal with a criminal confession at some point. It’s not all about the darker side of life, though, it also covers organising real-life guild meet-ups. In some ways it’s staggering that virtual items and monsters, pixels on a screen, bits in a database can provoke tension, envy, scheming, even hatred; but then they also spark joy, camaraderie, passion, the togetherness of a guild which sets it apart from a single player experience.

Overall, you could probably get much of the information in The Guild Leader’s Handbook from websites, blogs and game forums, but (as per Sturgeon) you’d have to wade through an awful lot of crud to get it. The Handbook pulls everything together with a nice, easy to read style, with something for most MMOG players. It’s a must-buy for a WoW player looking to start up a new guild for raiding, though I suspect that’s a pretty small market; even experienced guild leaders should find something of benefit. Steering clear of obscure jargon, it might even be suitable to offer friends and family an insight into why you play that silly game so much and get worked up about someone else claiming The Awesome Sword that should’ve been yours.

To conclude the KiaSA Review Service (available to anyone who’d like to send us stuff), a couple of pithy quotes for the cover of the second edition, bracketed sections optional:

“Better than Joyce’s Ulysses (in its coverage of loot distribution systems)”
“A la recherche du temps perdu has nothing on The Guild Leader’s Handbook (when it comes to advice on leading a raid)”
“(If your local store is out of Viennese spowling tape,) The Guild Leader’s Handbook makes an excellent (substitute, so long as the thrush-plate is) present (and straight, then curved.)

Host: This week, teams, news that China is set to crack down on unwholesome content in games, with the Ministry of Culture “aiming to stop any content that advocates pornography, cults, superstitions, gambling and violence being seen in any game that is targeting Chinese teenagers under the age of 18.”

Zoso: Bioware are reported to be working on an acceptable version of Dragon Age, in which you persuade the Darkspawn that violent conflict is engineered by the bourgeoisie as a method of keeping the proletariat repressed, convince them to join with the people of Ferelden in peaceful agricultural collectivisation, then retire to your party camp for a stimulating debate on Marxism-Leninism. Rumours of a “Hot Coffee”-esque mode, in which Zevran makes mildly salacious comments on the shapeliness of the Warden’s ankles, are hotly denied.

Melmoth: Rockstar Games gave up on attempts to bring their Grand Theft Auto series to China when their initial attempt to remove all offensive content left nothing but the main character standing in an empty field holding a small stick. The Chinese government rejected the game, however, on the grounds that the stick might be construed as an offensive weapon and the field was too open and might encourage desires for greater freedom.

Zoso: After the difficulty in getting Wrath of the Lich King released in China, Blizzard are confident that the next expansion, Land Of The Superstitious Cult of Violently Pornographic Gamblers, will have no such issues.

Host: Goodnight!

Studio lights dim, theme tune plays.

I bought Dragon Age: Origins – Awakenings when it first came out a few months back, played for a couple of hours and… just stopped. I think I was a bit Bioware-d out from thoroughly playing through Dragon Age itself and Mass Effect 2 in fairly short order, and Awakenings didn’t ram a crochet hook of pure stimulation up one nostril and yank my brain out through the medium of excitement alone. The icon was sitting on my desktop filed under “must get back to at some point”, and after the Grand Theft Auto IV expansions with their interminable conversations that you have no control over I though it would be nice to actually pick what I got to say for once, fired it back up, got hooked in this time, and played it pretty solidly through to the end.

[The rest of this post has been rated as "Mild" by the British Board Of Possible Spoiler Warnings. No big twists will be revealed, but if you want to know absolutely nothing at all about any aspect of the game, look away now.]

Story-wise, “solid” is probably a fair description; as I said, it didn’t grab me instantly, but in the right frame of mind it’s engaging enough, and there are some interesting revelations about the Darkspawn as you go. In many ways it’s a slightly cut down version of the original, after a brief introduction there’s A City Bit, A Forest Bit, A Spooky Fade Bit and A Dwarf City Bit that you can choose to visit with some interlinking quests, with a Big Final Battle once you’ve completed the other areas. Each segment is quite neat in its own right, and none drag on too long.

Companion-wise only Oghren comes with you from the main game, and hardly develops past Obnoxious Drunk, I never really cared much for him. A couple of new party members are soon available: Anders the Mage who looks and sounds a lot like Alistair in a dress, and Nathanial Howe, son of Arl Howe, who starts off a bit Inigo Montoya (“you killed my father, prepare to die”), but can be conscripted into the party, and I don’t think it would be a massive shock to reveal he can gradually soften to you over time through the right conversation options. Three more are available over the course of the game, a total of six not making quite such a mockery of going adventuring with a party of four while a massive entourage of slackers just hang around the camp. There are no romance options, though, a bit of flirting with Anders was as much as my female Warden could manage, despite there being a perfect rom-com setup with Nathanial (“His father killed her father! She killed his father! Now he’s out to kill her, but through a whacky bunch of hijinks they end up having to save the world together; while looking for Darkspawn, they found each other…”)

Mechanically there’s quite a bit of new stuff to play with. The level cap is raised, with new spells, talents, abilities and specialisations to pick from as you go; where Mass Effect 2 cut right down on the number of activated abilities, by the end of Awakenings my Rogue must have had around 30 icons on the hotbar for assorted attacks, buffs and skills, and few types of health and stamina potion from the inventory (stamina potions being a welcome addition for non-mage classes, who’d previously fling themselves upon opponents using a wide range of devastating moves, get knackered in about seven second flat, and spend the next couple of minutes panting and occasionally auto-attacking). It teeters gently on the edge of being a bit too much, especially for mages, but with the ability to pause in combat you can always spend a while hunting through the spellbook for that situationally useful ability you’re fairly sure you have somewhere.

I scarcely bothered with the crafting options in the original game, finding or buying potions and ignoring traps entirely; Awakenings adds Runecrafting, and a bit of extra weapon damage never hurts (or always hurts, more to the point) so I thought I’d give it a bit of a try. Very broadly, two runes of the same type can be combined into one more powerful rune, and a vendor sells unlimited quantities of the lowest level runes, so to get a level X rune you buy 2^X rubbish runes, a stack of consumable-type-stuff, and click away. It’s not a bad system, but each rune takes up one inventory slot, so even if you totally clear your inventory (a difficult task for a compulsive pack rat, even with the storage chest provided) you can only cram in enough raw materials for a couple of the most powerful runes at a time. This wouldn’t be a major problem apart from the fact that I trained one of my party up in Runecrafting instead of learning it myself, and the rune vendor is in your keep, the equivalent of the party camp from the original game where all your companions hang around between questing. As you’re not actually in a party in the keep you can only use your own skills, which meant crafting consisted of buying a load of stuff from the vendor, leaving the keep to form up a party including the runecrafter, standing just outside the door of the keep actually making the runes, running out of ingredients, going back into the keep (disbanding the party) to buy more from the vendor, leaving the keep again… I could’ve respecced my character to learn Runecrafting (official respec books are another addition to Awakenings, though plenty of mods allowed you to do it in the original), then re-respecced afterwards to drop it for more useful talents, but that seemed like a fair bit of hassle as well. Nice idea, perhaps a bit of a MMOG-y timesink, so after creating a couple of uber-runes for my favourite sword I decided to skip the 1% benefit of making a bunch more.

Speaking of crafting, another minor annoyance: Wade the Blacksmith turns up again, and can make powerful weapons and armour from certain rare things you find in your journey. A piece of Heartwood, for example, Wade could turn into a bow or a shield with just a flawless ruby, a bit of catgut, and some oil. Great! I’d found catgut and oil earlier (through the traditional RPG hero method of taking everything you ever see that’s not nailed down), except somehow, either through my own carelessness or a glitch, they didn’t seem to be in my inventory or storage chest; maybe I’d got rid of them while trying to clear space for the runes. Still, something as common as oil, that must be lying around all over the place; store rooms at the castle, merchants are bound to sell it, maybe just pop along to the nearest coast line and scoop some up from a spill… but no. No, apparently oil is just as rare as the living heart of a sapient tree, and there’s only one flask of it in the entire world.

With the arsenal of new abilities I never had too much trouble in combat; I have a suspicion this might be from turning the difficulty down to “Easy” when I made a bit of a start at a second play-through of Origins to get a different ending, and not changing it after installing Awakenings. Even the bigger beasties like dragons went down fairly easily with a bit of pausing and health potion use, I can’t remember having to reload due to party death at all, so it was quite nice as a casual wander around Amaranthine with occasional widespread slaughter. Towards the end of the game I had to choose a party for what I thought would be Something Quite Important But Not The Big Final Battle, picked three characters who volunteered, and was plunged into what turned out to be The Actual Final Ultimate Battle of Finality with three rogues (including me) and a mage. Not really the optimal composition, but they still managed to defeat everything without great difficulty.

All in all, if you liked Dragon Age: Origins, Awakenings is another satisfying dollop of Darkspawn-slaying fun.