A month of games
It has been such a long time since I last blogged. I gather Rosi has been religious in her wordpress updates as I barely recognise the wordpress interface. Hopefully I can work it out, though.
Over the course of the last month I have played a wide assortment of games, some of which have been thought provoking while others have been more banal. I will now go through each of them, probably chronologically as I imagine I have a lot more to say about the games I have played more recently than I do about those I played a while back.
The following games will be talked about/mentioned and may or may not contain spoilers: Planescape Torment, Titan Quest, Bioshock, Anno 1701, Team Fortress 2, Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, Exodus from the Earth, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Icewind Dale, Baldur’s Gate, Darksun: Shattered Lands, The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Guild Wars, Serious Sam, Doom, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Pipemania, Arcanum, Starcraft, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, Neverwinter Nights, Settlers 2, Diner Dash
Planescape Torment:
In the last two weeks of university I played and finished Planescape Torment. For those who are unaware, Planescape Torment is an RPG that was produced around the same time as Baldur’s Gate, the first two Fallout games and the first Icewind Dale game (around 1997-2000). All of these games share similar elements in which you play as a person (or group of people) in an environment and have a specific central goal you need to complete. In addition to this goal (quest), you may have sub-goals (sub-quests) which may affect the ease or manner in which you complete your main goal. What makes these games stand out is firstly that there are multiple ways to complete a quest. The first game I played which featured this mechanic was Darksun: Shattered Lands, although great progress has been made since that was released. Secondly, the environment the game is set in is as interesting as the main quest. Of course, this isn’t the same for all of the games I’ve mentioned, but for many of them, there is a lot more to playing them than simply completing the main quest.
Anyhow, back to Planescape. Planescape has both of the features I mentioned above. Another thing Planescape has in common with the other RPGs I mentioned is that you play the role of a ‘relative’ amnesiac (in the case of Planescape, you play a total amnesiac); that is, your character doesn’t know or remember anything. From a plot perspective, this is sensible because the player will usually be ignorant of the setting/environment of the game prior to playing it. In Planescape, your character’s identity is your goal, so this mechanic works very well in this instance. This is contrast to, say, Fallout where your character’s identity is irrelevant and so their lack of knowledge stems more from naivety.
Here is a plot summary:
In Planescape, you play The Nameless One. You wake up on a stone slab in a room filled corpses, blood, skulls and a couple of zombies doing menial labour. Your body is covered in scars and your back is aching. When you get off the slab, the first thing that happens is that you are introduced to Morte, a floating skull who accompanies you on your quest thereafter. Upon asking Morte what the deal is with your back, Morte says something is tattooed on it. It’s a passage which tells you to things: find Pharod and find your journal. Later you discover that you were actually dead and had woken up in a place called the Mortuary; a place where a strange sect known as the Dustmen reside. The Dustmen pay people for corpses and then use those corpses to reanimate them to carry out labour. The Dustmen play a crucial role in the economy of the city of Sigil. The Mortuary resides in Sigil, which seems to be a sort of endless city.
Anyhow, the Dustmen’s demand for corpses means that an underclass of people known as collectors has sprung up. Collectors collect dead bodies and sell them to the Dustmen. Some of them kill people so that they can then sell their bodies to the Dustmen. It turns out that Pharod is the leader of a group of collectors, so you immediately set about meeting him. While carrying out a quest he gives you, you come across an elaborate tomb which you later discover is your tomb! In there you discover what could be said to be the ‘journal’ you told yourself to find. You even find a slab with the message written on your back on it. Alas, when Morte read it out to you, he neglected to read the last line which said ‘Whatever you do, don’t trust the skull’.
It’s at this point I should note that, for me, this game went from being very interesting to being incredibly awesome. Unfortunately, my imagination of the implications of this was far more radical than the reality that played out.
After finding the tomb, the game story enters a sort of lull period as you get side-tracked by other quests not strictly relevant to your quest of establishing your identity. One of the things the tomb you found teaches you is that you have been a busy man prior to waking up in the Mortuary. As the game goes on, you will discover that each of your incarnations has been radically different and, in seeking out your identity as those incarnations have, some have deliberately made that quest more difficult (not each of your incarnations has been of sane mind).
Midway through the game you discover that the holes in your identity are related to your absence of mortality, so you then set about trying to reclaim your mortality. It turns out you’re immortal because of a deal you made in the past, you never work out why you made this deal, but after you died the first time, you lost your memory and so that information is lost. At the end, you face your mortality, an incarnation of yourself that, like you, is immortal because it was divided from you. Unlike you, however, it has not ‘died’ before and so it knows everything. It is satisfied with the state it is in, so it has no interest in refusing with you. It can be persuaded to, either by force or by dialogue, the end result being… your condemnation to hell (there’s no escaping the sins of your previous incarnations).
Planescape is fascinating. The environment is fascinating. Your character’s predicament is fascinating. Unfortunately the game mechanics are somewhat less fascinating. The combat is clumsy, but thankfully you don’t have to fight often. Instead you spend a lot of your time reading, which is… well… it makes it a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure story, only you always get the good ending. Looking back, I have to concede that what made the game ‘fun’ wasn’t so much the game as it was the setting and story it was telling. I found The Longest Journey and Dreamfall a bit like that, too. That said, the story of Planescape is a bit like The Bourne Identity but set in a sort of steam-punk Dungeons and Dragons world.
That which made Planescape awesome stands in direct contrast to the next game I played and finished, which I found disappointing and almost embarrassing. What redeemed Planescape’s clumsy combat and excessive reading was the ingenuity of the story being told; but what if Planescape’s combat had been more polished and if all the text had disappeared, would it still be the same game? And more so, would it still have been ‘good’.
Titan Quest:
The next game I played was Titan Quest along with its expansion, Immortal Throne. Titan Quest is Diablo 2. It is not ‘like’ Diablo 2. It is not ’similar’ to Diablo 2. Titan Quest is Diablo 2. I can’t remember Diablo 2 all that well. I do recall it took me three attempts to finish it and I only managed to do so on my work computer in China (it was one of the few games that would run). I have also since replayed Diablo 1, which I actually found a lot more playable. This might seem strange given how many improvements were introduced in Diablo 2, but, looking back, it makes sense.
In Diablo 1, there was the town, Tristram, where you buy and sell stuff and heal; and then there was the dungeon. The dungeon was divided into four ’sections’ each consisting of four levels; meaning that there were 16 levels altogether. Each level was the same size, although the monsters got progressively more difficult. You couldn’t run and I don’t think you could reassign your mouse buttons either. You would sporadically be given quests when you returned to Tristram to buy and sell all your stuff; although you would need to talk to each person in town to get any new quests. This all sounds pretty bad, but it was fairly well spaced-out. I suspect the game could be completed in about 4-8 hours of continued play, including exploring each of the levels, although one might be persuaded to re-do the first 4-6 levels to get one’s level up. It’s an all right game, but when compared to Diablo 2, Diablo 2 is, or should be, by all accounts a better game. Yet I finished Diablo first time, while Diablo 2 took me three attempts. Why is this?
In Diablo 2, the four fairly short sections in the first game are now acts of varying length. Each act consists of a number of regions one visits, at the end of each is a boss. Improvements over Diablo 1 include: hero skills, the ability to run, the ability to assign the left and right mouse buttons, accomplices and a number of equipment enhancers (runes, jewels, charms). These are real improvements and, from my experience, they did make the game more fun; but at the same time, something was taken away. What it was? I can only guess. I have two theories, though. The first of these is that Diablo was shorter and, thus, it was just as ‘bad’ as Diablo 2, the agony just didn’t last as long. I don’t think this is the case, though.
The second theory is that, in Diablo 1, you can play your character however you like, within reason (using weaponry for warriors and spells for sorcerers) and still perform very well. In Diablo 2, however, you are ‘encouraged’ to adopt a particular play style (refer to any Diablo 2 walkthrough for a list of the various character moulds you should adopt), deviation from which will result in you being punished quite heavily. Actually, that’s not true, the game doesn’t ‘encourage’ you to build your character in such a way, instead it just punishes you for not doing so. I think this is more likely the reason why I found Diablo 2 a less enjoyable experience to Diablo 1.
Anyhow, back to Titan Quest. I think Titan Quest fixed this weakness of Diablo 2. You can play your hero however you like and still perform fairly well. That said, should you play multiplayer, certain character builds are still technically ’stronger’ than others, so you may yet find yourself playing a supporting role if you don’t play your cards right. The control system of Titan Quest is the same as Diablo 2, and either Jamie or Rosi assure me it plays very similar to Guild Wars. One thing that works against Titan Quest very heavily is its setting. Titan Quest is set in, presumably, Ancient Greece. The first act is very good and all until about mid-way through when you meet a character that has an unmistakable Chinese accent. For me, that moment was an omen of things to come. Sure enough, in Act 2, I found myself traversing ‘Egypt’ and exploring Pyramids and Sphinxes. It became rapidly more kitsch as the game went on or, rather, it became a source of comedy.
Act 3 takes you to ‘China’ which you run to from Babylon. That’s right, you run from Babylon to China along, get this, the Silk Road. Your trek also includes a stint along the Great Wall and you are also required to clear Chang’An, the capital of China, of Terracotta warriors that have come to life and taken over the city. What’s more, half of all the warriors you kill drop things like ‘Babylonian shield’ or ‘Alexandrian helm’. It just reeks of cheese. It’s depressing in how seriously the game takes itself despite pooing all over human history. Contrast this to, say, Serious Sam in which a redneck fights aliens in ancient Egypt, Babylon and Central America. Serious Sam, despite its name, doesn’t ever take itself seriously. Titan Quest, however, the developers have even gone to the trouble of putting storytellers in each of the towns to tell players stories from the various cultures (whether true or not). They are irrelevant and didn’t need to be added, but they serve to show how committed the game designers were to producing, what they thought was, a convincing game experience.
The best Acts, stylistically, of Titan Quest are Acts 1 and the expansion Act. I found Act 1 okay because I hadn’t really studied Greek history or anything before, and so I wasn’t as affected by the historical liberties I’m sure the game took. The expansion Act is set in Hell, so the designers could be forgiven for anything they did with it. I should note, however, that my ‘vision’ of Hell isn’t the same as the game designers’. I’ve always viewed hell as looking a bit like an abattoir but with people instead of animals. I think I have Doom and Diablo to blame for that. My biggest gripe with the last act was that, like the rest of the game, it was repetitive and I don’t just mean in terms of gameplay (the gameplay doesn’t change much from that of the first 15 minutes of the game), the levels looks the same and ‘just don’t end’. It felt particularly as though it was dragging when I entered the Fifth Domain… and 40 minutes later, the Fourth Domain… and then the Third. I felt as if the developers had just given up naming their monotonous landscapes and instead had resorted to numbering them.
As the gameplay of Titan Quest is the same as Diablo 2, its weakest in the various boss battles you encounter which, incidentally, are resolved in the same way every time. Of course, that could be because I chose warrior classes in building my character. Every single boss battle was won in one of two ways. Either you run up to them and hit them until they go down, or, if you take too much damage, you pull back, heal up using potions and then run back in again to finish off the job. There are no variations except maybe with other classes, but even then I imagine one will find a working strategy with that class and use it for every boss. Maybe one of the reasons why I feel so disappointed with Titan Quest is just that; having just played Planescape, being forced along a linear path with only one method with which to complete quests seems like a step backward.
When I finish playing a good game, I feel a little hollow inside as I know that there is no more to play. This is how I felt with Planescape, but it is not how I felt with Titan Quest. While playing that last act of Titan Quest, I couldn’t wait to move onto a better game and once it finished, I resigned myself to the fact that I would be quite happy not loading this game up again. This may have also led to the subsequent elation I felt when I started playing the next game I had lined up to play.
Bioshock
When I first loaded up Bioshock, I didn’t quite know what to expect. All I had heard about the game was that it was 1950s-themed, it was set underwater, it had little sisters and big daddies and it put the player in ‘contentious moral situations’. What I didn’t know about the game was that it was scary in much the same way as the Ravenholme part of Half-Life 2. I wasn’t prepared for this and so I felt uncomfortable playing it for long periods at a time. It affected me so much so that I actually replayed the first part of the game on ‘normal’ difficulty instead of ‘hard’ as I had originally selected. Of course, it was only later after I had reached the same point at which I had stopped that I discovered I could adjust the difficulty in-game.
In a nutshell, Bioshock is a first-person-shooter (FPS) set in Rapture, an undersea metropolis built by the industrialist Andrew Ryan. It was built as a kind of free-market Mecca away from the constraints imposed by big government and religion on mankind’s capacity and endeavours. You arrive in the city following a plane crash in the mid-Atlantic of which you are the sole survivor. You are then introduced to Atlas over a hand-held radio and he then proceeds to guide you around the city. He is effectively your only friend in the city as you rapidly discover that the very few people you come across are all crazy and try to attack you. Atlas reveals (or perhaps you discover on your own, I can’t quite remember) that the reason why everyone is crazy is because they are tanked up on a substance known as adam. Adam is a substance which is used for genetic modification. These modifications then give the recipient superhuman abilities. The setback of adam, however, is that it is like a drug and quantities of it are needed thereafter to stave off insanity. Most people in the game don’t have adam, though, so the city is filled with people who attack you or others in search of adam.
As first-person-shooters go, the gameplay has potential, but I found it on the one hand too easy, and on the other hand overly complicated. The ease of the game probably stems from the difficulty level, but I don’t think the difficulty changes the game as much as it changes the ‘numbers’. By numbers I mean the values of certain things, e.g. pistol shots do 10 damage instead of 20, enemies have 40 health instead of 30 etc. Maybe the AI was different, I can’t remember, I didn’t find the experience of playing on hard really all that different from playing on normal. I think the only difference was health and ammo, both of which I felt I had less of when playing on hard.
The complexity of Bioshock stems in part from the controls which, prior to changing them, I found clunky. In Bioshock, there are effectively ‘3′ types of weapons to cycle through. The first of these are regular weapons which include a wrench, pistol, tommy gun, shotgun, grenade launcher and a couple of other ‘oooo’ weapons (I stuck to those 5 mostly). The second of these is the ammunition used in each of these weapons. This I feel was a mistake. All it does it add a level of complexity to the game that is just doesn’t need. Examples of ammunition types include: anti-personnel rounds, armour-piercing bullets, electric buck, explosive buck and others. These are a mistake for two reasons. First, changing between bullet-types requires reloading and reloading in this game is slow. As such, you cannot (should not) change bullet types mid-battle. That doesn’t mean that you only get attacked by one kind of enemy at any given time. Ultimately, if you use anti-personnel rounds, you’ll take out the regular guys easily enough, but the turrets will take more shots; vice-versa, if you use armour-piercing rounds, you’ll take out the turrets easily, but the other enemies will take more shots. Now admittedly, turrets don’t move, but they do more damage than the splicers (the ‘human’ enemies), so nothing stops you from dealing with the splicers first and then moving onto the turrets (and changing ammo in between); but why not instead of introducing this frustrating mechanic, we have one gun that is good at splicers and another that is good at turrets? Changing guns doesn’t require reloading and can be done with limited penalty mid-battle.
Secondly, the bullet-types mean you effectively need another mouse wheel. I got around this by using mouse 4 and 5 (both thumb buttons on my mouse) as scroll through ammunition types. Oh, I should point out that each gun had three ammunition types. So maybe another mouse wheel is over the top; but the variety is enough that a single button doesn’t work because there is always one kind of ammunition which works better, and one that works less well against each kind of enemy. I think this can be overcome by either eliminating ammo varieties altogether, or by having only two types of ammo. Furthermore, when you switch ammo, you should be told somewhere near the centre of the screen exactly which ammo you are switching to. At present, the icon in the bottom left hand corner changes, but in a battle, you’re not looking in the bottom left hand corner.
The third ‘weapon selection’ is not really weapons so much as skills. In the game you pick up things called ‘plasmids’ which give you additional skills. These skills might be things like telekinesis, electro-bolt or incinerate. Changing to plasmids is, by default, set in right-click. I found this very strange as I don’t think I’ve ever had right mouse button set effectively to a ‘change weapon’ function before. As such, I found it impossible to use and instead changed the plasmid-weapon change key to ‘q’ (aka change to last-weapon in Team Fortress 2). I found it worked much better for me this way, but I found then that I didn’t have anything set to right mouse button. In the end I changed it to ‘zoom’, which… argh… ok… here’s another problem with Bioshock’s weapon system.
Ideally weapons are used for killing things and plasmids are used for doing things. That said, certain plasmids can also be used to kill. Unfortunately, there is one weapon which CANNOT be used to kill, this ‘weapon’ is the camera. The camera is used to research enemies and, thus, give you bonuses when fighting them later on. The problem is, after you’ve taken all the photos you can, you need to kill the target before they kill you. Now, up until you get the camera, you might find that you leave your plasmids on because there is stuff that needs doing, but when a monster suddenly appears, you switch to your weapon (using the weapon-plasmid switch button) and kill it. When you use the camera, I don’t know about other people, but I did the exact same thing, only instead of having a weapon in my hand, I had electro-bolt (used for stunning enemies, from what I recall, though, it can’t actually kill anything). What? I can’t kill with electro-bolt, so I switch again. What? Camera again? What cruel punishment is this? This happened to me repeatedly until I had finally finished researching all the enemies and never switched to my camera again.
The nightmare controls don’t end there, however. There is one particularly useful plasmid you pick up that is very helpful in both combat and in exploring Rapture. This plasmid is telekinesis. The first time I wanted to use it, though, was funny and a concern at the same time. In Bioshock, telekinesis is like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2. Actually, that’s incorrect, telekinesis is the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. The gravity gun in Half Life 2 worked as follows: left click nudges the target (I found this pretty useless in Half-Life 2, but it’s helpful to nudge things that are too big to pick up) and right click picks up a target. Once you are holding an object, left click throws that object and right-click drops it. This system is so simple, it is genius. Unfortunately telekinesis isn’t nearly as intuitive. When using telekinesis, left-click and hold picks up and holds onto an object. Letting go of left-click throws that object. (the first time I used it to get a key hanging on a wall on the other side of a room beyond a broken window, I left-clicked only to see the key vanish somewhere I couldn’t possibly reach it) If you want to search/use the object you have picked up you must push ‘e’ while holding the left mouse button. If you want to drop the object (rather than throw it) you must push ‘v’. ‘v’? What? The mind boggles.
Once you are used to the abysmal system, however, telekinesis is an awesome skill. In fact, it became my main weapon for a good part of the game. Walking around unarmed, getting ambushed and taking down your opponents using just the environment is very satisfying. Often the ‘target’ of your telekinesis is hard to judge. I frequently found myself using the skill in a wide open area or at the target of my attacks only to take the target’s hat or pick up a barrel I hadn’t noticed before to throw at them. Sometimes it can be a bit funny, but overall I found telekinesis very satisfying to use.
One thing Bioshock does very well is style. The game is stylish and the environment is so captivating that you’ll spend ages just exploring the city. The game is filled with tape recorders that function in a similar way to the PDAs in Doom 3. This seemed a little out of place in Bioshock, though, because I’m sure using a pen and paper would be easier for most people to record details (often the recordings sounded a bit like blogs) than recording their experiences on a voice recorder. Even Doom 3 had the guts to assume its audience was able to read, even though it would have been a lot more justified in using voice recordings instead. That said, exploring Rapture and piecing together its short history is a wonderful experience. I only wish that the city had… well… people. Usually cities have people, that’s why they form, but Rapture doesn’t have people, it has millions of crazy splicers and about three people, all of whom seem to think the city is thriving or at least is able to thrive again in the immediate future.
One last thing to mention about Bioshock is hacking, an aspect of the game which falls flat. Throughout the game you may be required to ‘hack’ safes, electronically-locked doors and you can also hack vending machines (which you can purchase health and ammo from), turrets sentry-bots. The idea of this is nice, but the manner in which it is done isn’t. ‘Hacking’ essentially involves playing the game Pipemania, i.e. you create a pipe that allows goo to travel from the start to the finish while navigating around obstacles. Pipemania is good. Bioshock hacking is not. As you play, you will pick up plasmids that will enable you to slow down the rate at which the goo flows or will create fewer obstacles while hacking; one thing a plasmid won’t do is skip the hacking process altogether. Throughout the game you can pick up ‘auto-hack’ tools which will skip the process, but you can only carry five at any one time and, well, in a setting such as thing, I don’t think you can hold hoarding against a player. I don’t like the idea of skipping through parts of a game because they are boring, instead I think those parts just shouldn’t exist. Options like the auto-hack tool, for me, should only be used for obstacles that are actually very hard or time consuming given the situation; by time consuming, I mean in game-time not real-time (i.e. If a terminator is hunting you down, an auto-hack mechanism would be a more sensible option than manually opening a machine up, twiddling some wires and carrying out a fairly extensive operation).
I have looked online and on youtube for information on Bioshock 2 and, well, I feel a little disappointed by what I saw. One interesting thing I forgot to point out about Bioshock is that, despite the game being set in an under-water city, there is no swimming! There is wading, which significantly slows down your movement, but no actual 3D swimming. It’s not that I have a problem with swimming, but I do find it less enjoyable than navigating in the presence of gravity. Back to Bioshock 2, there is one segment of the level where you actually go through the water. In the video you don’t actually swim in it, it’s just another environment you walk through, but, well, we’ll see what happens.
In the Bioshock 2 video, the player takes control of a Big Daddy. This seems like an odd move to me as I never recall wishing to be a Big Daddy as I was playing Bioshock 1. Furthermore, you actually do play as a Big Daddy in Bioshock 1 and that was one of the less enjoyable parts of the game. The changed identity added little more than numbers to you character and made your field of vision marginally less attractive. That said, it’s hard to say what I’d like to see out of Bioshock 2… There’s only one thing on my list of things that I’d really like to see in future games set in Rapture and I already mentioned it: people.
Oh, before I move on, there’s one thing I did forget to mention about Bioshock that all the reviewers and what-have-you raved about: the confounding moral dilemmas the player is forced to contend with. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Bioshock, I can safely assure you that this is all balderdash. The dilemma you are faced with is actually a choice between ’saving’ a little sister (to get a little bit of adam now and a lot more later) or harvesting a little sister (to get a lot of adam now, and nothing more later). Either way it sort of evens out, but of course you don’t know this while you are playing. The other issue is that, well, it just doesn’t arouse a ‘moral’ conflict within me. To me, a ‘moral conflict’ is most obvious when you, as the player, reload a previous save game to see what would have happened had you made the other choice because you weren’t satisfied with the result of the choice you made. One game where I did this was Dreamfall where at one point you are forced to make a decision just before a main character gets killed. In the end, it doesn’t matter which choice you make, the result is always the same; but at the time I was so sure that there was some way I could save the character.
Another example of a real moral choice is in a game like Arcanum or Fallout where you are required to adjudicate in a situation where you have limited information or where the ‘moderate path’ is not all that clear. I can’t think of an example off the top of my head, but in both Fallout and Arcanum, the decisions you make in the game affect the ‘conclusion’ of the game; although that isn’t all that different from Bioshock. The core difference I suppose is that in Fallout and Arcanum you have many conclusions while in Bioshock you only have one. How about a situation where the player is forced to, say, choose between doing what the society wants or doing the right thing? I don’t mean this in a sort of cheesy inter-society diplomat sort of role, but, say, a person in the society has picked up a baby-enemy-species-thing. The townspeople want to destroy it, but you know that that isn’t the ‘right’ thing to do. You know this, not because speech bubbles, dialogue and log books keep saying ‘killing babies is wrong’, but because you as a person know that killing babies is wrong. I think Bioshock had the potential to do something like this by making a bigger deal of Andrew Ryan’s small government anti-welfare movement in contrast to a big-government enabling conception of the ’state’. Both of these approaches are valid (why should I have to surrender my earnings to some ‘government’ vs. what about those who are unable to take care of themselves?) and I’m sure this conflict is able to manifest itself in moral issues, too. Well, maybe if Bioshock did do this, it would have been a different game; so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what 2K Games do with morality… maybe legitimately bring the concept in.
After finishing Bioshock, I got that hollow feeling; that feeling that comes after reading a good book, watching a good movie/trilogy or watching a good TV show (or anime, American TV shows don’t really do this for me). It’s the feeling that was noticeably absent after I finished Titan Quest and it’s the feeling that followed my completion of the next game I played.
Anno 1701:
While I was living in China, I played a game called Anno 1701. In Anno 1701, you play the role of… well… I guess of a capitalist. The idea of Anno 1701 is colonialism but while history tells us colonialism was all about taking over foreign cultures, getting the locals to do your labour and shipping the profits back home, in Anno 1701 it’s a little more… well… Marxist I guess you could say. Trade is intrinsic to the gameplay and is the vehicle through which success is achieved.
The game plays from a top-down perspective and involves turning a group of pioneers in the New World into Aristocrats. In the beginning of the game, your settlers’ demands are few and their housing is dodgy, but by the end their houses are enormous mansions housing dozens of people and demanding about a dozen different resources. Anno 1701 has a cycle: you spend money to build your initial settlement including houses, a town square and a port; the houses only contain one person each, but this can increase provided the people are happy; the people are happy when the taxes are lower, but of course this means you have less income (that said, more people = more income over time); if you meet the pioneers’ demands, they will be happy to pay more taxes; once you have met all their demands and they are happy, they will ‘level up’ to the next civilization level; at the next civilization level (or class) the people at that level will pay greater sums of tax than those of the previous level; however, if the people at the higher level don’t have their lower level demands met, they will riot and burn your settlement to the ground (meaning you’ll have to start all over again… always make sure their demands are met). There are five civilization levels, so the game takes a fair while to play; that said, there is no building time, so the moment you have the resources to build something, you can build it.
This might sound very straightforward (albeit a modicum complicated), but I should point out that the game takes place on islands. Not all resources can be gained from one island, so you will need to settle several to accrue all the resources you need. Furthermore, once you have facilities on an island to start producing those resources, you still need to deliver them to your settlers on your main island; this means you need to establish trade routes. In some of the scenarios, you might face a situation whereby you can’t build facilities and, thus, must gain these resources through trade either with the free-trader (an NPC that exists solely to trade) or with the other players. You can also take over those other player’s islands by force, but the combat is pretty woeful… perhaps to discourage you from trying to use force.
Although Anno 1701 is a great game, it’s missing one thing… an objective. The game has a sort of objective, that being ‘independence’, but even if you reach independence, the game doesn’t end. As such, the game ends when you’ve had enough (I’ve usually had enough after I’ve achieved independence). Now, I should mention, I ‘finished’ this game while I was in China. The game has an in-built achievement system whereby you get medals for meeting certain criteria. The game has three difficulty settings which reward you with bronze, silver or gold medals for meeting the criteria within those settings. Easy and normal are both fairly easy, but hard is hard. In easy and normal, the computer players, at worst, will cancel trade relations with you. In hard, they will kill you. The way you play the game is completely different on hard compared with playing it on easy or normal. At first I found it frustrating, playing on hard essentially requires that you be intimately familiar with the mechanics of the game. I avoided doing that by getting a walkthrough from someone who was intimately familiar with the mechanics. I believe that last game on hard took me about 25 hours of gameplay (including time that was artificially sped up with the ‘+’ key), but the feeling of ‘euphoria’ at the end of it was great. Achieving independence in Anno 1701 on hard is very hard, but I can be said to have done so. The game also includes ten scenarios all of which are incredibly easy (especially after finishing the game on hard); but once all that was done… There was nothing left to do.
So why did I start playing it again recently? Well, when I played the game in China, I didn’t actually own the copy I was playing. I had bought a copy of it in China and I gave it to my nephew back home, but when he tried to install it, it didn’t work. It turns out the disc didn’t come with a CD key. When I had come to Sydney later, I wanted to get a copy of it for myself, but I could never actually find it for sale. Earlier this year, though, this all changed. One morning, when I logged onto Steam I was welcomed with a page saying ‘1701 A.D. now on Steam - includes The Sunken Dragon Expansion’ (I’m not sure why it is called 1701 A.D. instead of Anno 1701, I gather it’s only called that in the US). Not only had this game I had gotten so much out of been released on Steam, but it added more content. I believe I bought it on the very day it was released and have had it sitting in my account, waiting to be played.
Going back to it, it’s still a very good game. Just yesterday I started the expansion missions in The Sunken Dragon and they seem exactly like what one expects from a expansion. I’ve played lots of games and lots of expansions. Some expansions just add new missions, some add things that were missing in the original, others tweak the gameplay and others still take it to a whole new level. The first expansion I ever remember playing was Warcraft 2 - Beyond the Dark Portal, but, in truth, the game didn’t really add much. It only added one thing: heroes. Oh, sorry, did I say heroes? I mean units that look like all your other units, but have different names, more health, more mana, do more damage and fire further; and what’s more, there’s only one of each. From a developmental perspective, I guess the Warcraft 2 expansion was something of a letdown. I believe it added story as well, but I was so young then I think that I didn’t pay any attention to the story.
An expansion which went further was the Starcraft expansion, Brood War. Brood War introduced new (and very interesting) units and a much more engaging storyline than what Warcraft 2 offered. That said, from what I remember, aside from adding new units, Brood War didn’t do anything ground-breaking. I could be wrong, though. I do remember some of the Brood War missions being fairly unique, but then I can’t remember if the original Starcraft missions were all that stale. Perhaps one of the main things Brood War did was to teach budding map-makers what the Starcraft ‘platform’ could do. Well, maybe Brood War didn’t do this, but Warcraft 3 and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, certainly did.
Warcraft 3 didn’t revolutionize Real-Time Strategy (RTS) gaming, but it did have an impact. It took the Role-playing Game (RPG) genre and brought it into the RTS by introducing actual heroes that level along with inventory and shops. That said, the Warcraft 3 expansion didn’t add all that much to the gameplay. It added new heroes with new abilities, a new content delivery system (as manifest in the orc campaign and thus causing subsequent patches for the game to be enormous), a shop building that each race can build and… I think that’s it. On the other hand, it show-cased what the Warcraft 3 platform was capable of by showing us a whole heap of radical new levels (such as the caravan push level and the completely functional yet peripheral Naga race). The Frozen Throne was a real eye-opener, much like Warcraft 3 before it, and it paved the way for the explosion in the number of unique maps (or more like games in their own right) that were developed using the platform.
An expansion which provided what the original game was lacking was The Immortal Throne expansion in Titan Quest. I don’t remember what the Titan Quest expansion added because I didn’t play the original all the much, but I do remember the absence of ’storage’. Can you imagine Diablo without Storage? I can, because Diablo didn’t have storage, that was a Diablo 2 invention, but Titan Quest regressed! Thankfully the Titan Quest expansion brought us what we had all been expecting, and all we had to pay for it was another gruelling act and new items to pick up to make that agony a little less noticeable. The Immortal Throne also added a new class (much like the Diablo 2 expansion) which, as I discovered when I played with someone who was using it multiplayer, is horribly overpowered.
All these expansions are good and all, but I wouldn’t call them ‘taking it to the next level’. For that, the premier game that comes to mind is Neverwinter Nights. Neverwinter Nights was a bad game. I played it, finished it, and was terribly disappointed. The original story was predictable, the characters were uninteresting, the gameplay was boring and it felt long. I cannot in good conscience recommend that game to anyone, but if you want to see what an expansion should do, that is the game to play. Neverwinter Nights had two expansions, the first was ‘Shadows of Undrentide’ and the second was ‘Hordes of the Underdark’. Shadows of Undrentide wasn’t all that special. The story was mildly better than the original campaign, but it didn’t push the engine all that much further. Hordes of the Underdark, however, that took some liberties. The story was much darker than in any of the other games and it did some crazy stuff; or at least it seemed like crazy stuff given how inflexible the original game was. I remember finishing the expansion, not by fighting some lame boss, but by talking to him and, I think, by paying him off. I can’t remember all that much about Neverwinter Nights and its expansions, but I do remember feeling at least slightly sorry after finishing that expansion.
Back to the Anno 1701 expansion, it’s important to note that it doesn’t really add anything aside from new missions. What should be noted, however, is that these missions are a greater departure from the original game than the scenarios included in the original. In the in-built scenarios, you cannot lose. You can take one hour per scenario or you can take two hours per scenario, but you cannot lose. In the Sunken Dragon, you can lose. Furthermore, not all the missions are identical like they seem to be in the original. Every second mission involves building a base (unlike every mission in the original). I can’t evaluate it much more than this at the moment as I haven’t completed it yet, but so far I’m fairly impressed. They’ve gone ahead and given the game a story, but it remains to be seen if it is anything ground-breaking (so far it seems pretty cheesy).
The game that first drew me to Anno 1701 was actually Anno 1701 on the DS. The DS game was all right, nothing too incredible, though; but it was one of the first RTSs on the platform. Really all Anno 1701 on the DS is is a scaled back version of the PC game. I think the other thing that drew me to Anno 1701 on the DS was that another game I had been waiting for on the DS was a disappointment. That game was Settlers 2.
Settlers 2 was and still is a great game, but the original version at least fills a bit dated. Settlers 2 is similar to Anno 1701 in that you have a plethora of resources to work with. I find I like the idea of having lots of resources, because, to me, it makes more sense than just gold, wood, oil, stone, iron, minerals or gas. The way resources are used in the two games is very different, though. In Anno 1701, it’s a bit like Diner Dash, people want stuff and you must supply it. In Settlers 2, you have goals. Usually your goal is to wipe out the enemy (or occupy the exit gate, which is usually located on enemy territory), but you might have sub-goals to acquire the necessary resources to achieve this goal. To attack the enemy, you need strong troops. To make troops, you need swords, shields and, funnily enough, beer. To make swords and shields, you need steel and coal (to heat the steel), to get steel, you need raw iron and coal (to melt the iron). To get iron and coal, you need to mine it from the mountains and miners will only mine if they have food. To get food, you either fish it out of the lakes, ponds or out of the sea; you can grow wheat fields, mill the wheat and produce bread, or you can feed that bread to pigs which you can get butchered. Wheat can be used to produce beer, too. From this you can see very directly the relationship between your goals and your means.
Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble & Exodus from the Earth:
That just about winds up all I had to say about the games I’ve been playing this month and what I’ve thought about them. Before I finish this. I’d like to mention two other games I bought a while back and tried recently, but which I found didn’t really ‘make the grade’. The first of these was Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. From what I can gather, this game involves a series of lame minigames with a loosely told story set in an all-girls high school in the 1920s or so. I wish I could say something good about it, but I just can’t. The minigames aren’t intuitive and the story is too poorly told to hold my interest.
The last game I want to mention is a fairly bland FPS I played called Exodus from the Earth. Graphically, the game looks dated. It looks very similar in style to Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64, but the graphics have been marginally improved. It tells what sounds like a moderately interesting story, nothing ground breaking, but well-executed enough to grab the player’s attention. One area in the game that has fallen flat is the editing. From what I can gather, very little of the in-game text has been edited or formatted. So when you pick up a PDA, it appears on your screen in much the same way as a word-wrapped paragraph in notepad. For me, this significantly lowers my interest in the content of the message and so I ignored subsequent PDAs I discovered.
Both Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble and Exodus from the Earth are games I have tried out, but haven’t finished. Maybe they have redeeming qualities when played in their entirety, the question is: will I have the patience to go through them? I am not sure what I will play next. I have moved Beyond Good and Evil to my favourites and I am similarly tempted to try Assassin’s Creed; but I’ll have to see how I feel. There are still plenty of smaller games I have yet to try.