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Lord Love a Duck! Stop Calling "It" That!
I recently noted with vague interest that Gas Powered Games (the game company started by Chris Taylor of Total Annihilation
* fame) has just released another game in their "Seige" series.
*Total Annihilation of course being a fairly infamous "old-school" RTS (Real Time Strategy) game that introduced numerous original elements to the RTS formula and most likely paved the way for games like StarCraft
, which is, of course, the grand-daddy of all RTS games (sequel coming soon!).
I actually used to be quite the RTS fan, going back to the awesomeness that was Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty
. (Atreides Unit Destroyed! = Evil Grin), but lost interest sometime around the point where Warcraft III
forced me to play the single-playing campaign as the (puny) humans after a promising first act as the orcs (anything remotely related to a "Horde" is an automatic trump over any puny human alliance in my book!)
But I digress, my point here is not to rag on the mostly stagnant world of RTS games, but to finally bring one of my biggest pet peeves into the light of day, which takes us back to where I started with Gas Powered Games and their "Siege" series.
Back in the day, I was actually totally stoked over this new game that I had read about in PC Gamer (gads, I can't believe there was actually a time where I had subscriptions ot magazines like this!) called "Dungeon Siege**
".
**Don't ask me about Dungeon Siege II
(or any of the expansions), I was so ticked at actually having paid full price for the original that I vowed to never aid in the enriching of Gas Powered's coffers ever again!
Previews and then eventually reviews of Dungeon Siege were so overly whelming and promising that it was hard not to be caught up in the furor, heck, I think I even pre-ordered a copy from Electronics Boutique, just so I could get a fabric map of the Dungeon Siege world (some that harkened back to what is still one of the greatest CRPGs I have ever played, which is Ultima V***. Man, what ever happened to truly non-linear games, interesting villains, cool puzzles and intriguing plots?).
*** It seems that some fans got together and actually used the Dungeon Siege engine to recreate Ultima V in the form of a mod called "Lazerus". Hmmmmm, might actually be worth swallowing my pride and installing Dungeon Siege again, just to check it out!
Among the promises of Dungeon Siege were a seamless world with no loading times, pack animals to carry extra look and Diablo-like game play. Now, as anyone who has read my blog knows, I am an utter sucker for anything that features "Diablo-like" game play (ok, with the exception of the abysmal Loki
and Dawn of Magic
and other crappy pretenders to Diablo
's greatness).
However, shortly after installing and playing Dungeon Siege I realized that beyond having Diablo inspired random item generation system (with different statistics and power of items being differentiated through nomenclature and colour, respectively, which is now the defacto standard for items in many types of games, including the ubiquitous worlds of most MMOs) there was nothing in Dungeon Siege's game play that was even vaguely Diablo-like!!!!!
In fact (unsurprisingly, if you consider Chris Taylor's history), Dungeon Siege is, in fact, a sub-genera of RTS, with the player's "characters" being nothing more than slightly more complicated "hero" units from games which correctly identify themselves as being Real-Time Strategy games, in that you can control what they're learning, what they're learning and when they heal or gain mana, with slightly more "finesse" than a standard RTS. In fact, I would even hazard genera-bending ridicule by labelling Dungeon Siege as a "micro-managing RTS". Not that micro-managing is a bad thing per se, just that it's heinously NOT Diablo, which is an ACTION game (you click on things, things die, lather, rinse, repeat).
In Dungeon Siege, you pause, you click a character, you click an action, you click a target, you repeat with your entire party and then wait as the "fun" ensues! If things are going badly for you, you pause and tweak your strategy, etc, etc, etc…
And not that this is a bad thing, in fact, the first games to use RTS style combat that I'm aware are the excellent Baldur's Gate
Series (and the other AD&D games that game out around the Baldur's Game engine, such as Planescape: Torment
, one of the finest CRPG's ever, or the Icewind Dale
series, which never really caught my fancy). However, what separated Baldur's Gate and Torment, were that the games had truly compelling storylines and lots of side quests and adventures (in fact, Baldur's Gate 2
is still the king of cool side quests in modern CRPGs).
The reason my reaction to Icewind Dale was so cold (sorry) was that the designers decided that they should focus on the combat side of the Baldur's Gate engine, as opposed linking combat with a good story and ultimately, this was one of the other main reasons that Dungeon Siege fell short to me. Gas Powered Games created what promised to be an interesting world, but then gave us an utterly forgettable A to Z linear campaign through said world (what was that about non-linear games being fun? Well, ok, it's not a necessity, but for cripes sake, at least give us a few little side quests that aren't solved by plodding from main point to main point!)
Other quirks in Dungeon Siege that sealed its fate permanently in my book were things like bad pathfinding (remember those oh so lovely pack animals? Ya, well, don't even think of trying to navigate them through dungeons with movable platforms) and I can't tell you how often I saw them die in a hail of magic or arrows or whatever. I mean, please, the point of the animals is that they use a spot in your character roster in exchange for the ability to haul more stuff. The only thing that happens if they die is that I'm inconvenienced in that I had to redistribute said (more) stuff. The pointless P.I.T.A. factor pretty much grew exponentially with that design decision!
I will admit that I liked the whole seamless world concept, as linear as it was, up until the point that I realized that the seamless loading of the world was pre-determining loot drops****. And in a world with a set number of creatures to fight and a set number of chests that drop rare items, which in and of itself always felt far too controlled for a CRPG to me. I like random encounters; I like the chance for extra loot or the openness to take a couple of hours to level up my characters to deal with a particularly challenging section of a game. If there's a set number of monsters, then there's a set amount of experience, you will only ever be able to get to a certain level by the end of the game, that's just far too controlled for me. Modern games with scaling difficulty are a much better design in my ever so humble opinion, as they also avoid the other side of the loop, such as Hellgate: London, where the second time through the campaign with totally pnw your ass if you don't take the time to build extra levels.
****Basically, the seamless world works by loading X number of "steps" around your characters at any given time. So, say you're at a door in a dungeon and the game is loading 200 steps in all directions around your party and 201 steps beyond that door there's a chest that is set to drop a rare yellow item. You go through the door, you are now 200 steps for the chest, so the game has just loaded the content of the chest, you now fight through 200 steps of tough monsters, get to the chest, open it and discover a super rare swizzle stick of might that is utterly useless to your party. What do you do?
Well, you can go back to a save before the big fight and slog your way through again, hoping for a better drop or you can save the item to sell, of course, you can't buy anything comparable with your gold, so basically, one of a handful of opportunities at food loot has just been ruined. Now, if there was some random adventures or if you could go back and replay certain areas, there would be a chance to counterbalance this loss, but there isn't. Either you take it or you leave it. And if there's anything that separates Dungeon Siege from Diablo (beyond the very style of game play), it's this bit of conceptual thinking; How Dungeon Siege plays out is set in stone, the adventure of Diablo can involve as much or as little treasure hunting as you chose for there to be.
To me, walking through a completely controlled world just isn't fun, I kind of literally feel like Neo from The Matrix
(original only, please), in that I'm seeing through the illusion of the game world and into the programming code that makes up said world. The suspension of disbelief is ruined and it feels like I'm playing a spreadsheet, not immersed in a game world.
I guess ultimately that's the problem I have with a lot of modern games, especially the MMO's, everything seems to break down to damage per second calculations or optimal builds for character classes. Back in the days Ultima
's Avatar trilogy, there was none of this, it felt like I was playing with real characters, watching them interact with the world, grow from their experiences, etc… And this was all played out in terribly ugly worlds of repeated tiles and yet it was fun and adventurous. I'm not saying that we need to return to those days, I'm just saying that will all of today's cool technology for building game worlds, why can't designers at least take a little inspiration from the past and figure out how to make fun games?
What makes a fun game? Well, I can't say for sure, but I'd say that a few important keys are: Exploration, cool things to find, variation, if not full non-linear play, at least some side quests, a good story, avoid the feeling of playing a graphically impressive spreadsheet and bugs that break the suspension of disbelief.
And actually, there are some games on the horizon that may actually deliver. Of those, the hotly anticipated Diablo 3 (gads, all those gameplay videos from E3 got me pretty damn excited!) probably has the most potential, but we also have other offerings, such as Sacred 2 (The original Sacred
and " Underworld
" add-on were a simple, but surprisingly fun Diablo clone with a non-linear world to adventure in!) and Mythos (now in vaporware limbo), an offshoot of Hellgate: London
from Flagship Studios, that sounds mighty cool, but with Hellgate still leaving a sour taste in my mouth, I'm not holding out much hope!
P.S. - The best Diablo clone released to date is Titan Quest
(and the Immortal Throne add-on).
In the meantime, please, please, please, everybody, stop comparing Dungeon Siege to Diablo, it should be considered a crime against decency! Oh, and if you're listening Gas Powered Games, if the reviews for your latest "opus", "Space Siege" are to be believed, you're taking a huge step in the wrong direction (here's another hint guys, players actually like loot drops as a reward for killing baddies!) by turning from game to graphically boring playable spreadsheet!
P.P.S. Oh, gawd, for the love of humanity, only watch the Dungeon Siege
movie if you're with a group of good friends that are willing to give it the right proper MST3K (Mystery Science Theatre 3000) treatment that it deserves! My own personal MST3K of the movie was so "intense" that people were actually leaving the theatre before the movie was over! (Normally I am much more reserved and considerate; I guess that Uwe Boll just brings out the worst in all of us!)
Posted by Dylon on August 18, 2008 11:21 AM |
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