Review: Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City (ATLUS, 2010)

It took long, but two days ago I finally beat The Drowned City's three endings, so at last I can say that this is, accompanied by Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, at the top of my DS charts by a decent margin.

Etrian III is built like a good post-rock/post-metal/prog album or song, as any decent game should be. A common thematic undercurrent and instrumentation (story, mechanics, general rules) encapsulates the whole, slowly progressing so it never repeats itself, revisiting previous moments with a new twist, and always insinuating the breaking points when everything will come together gloriously. Also, there must be something unexpected inbetween, plus new things to discover when we decide to play the album again.
EO3 follows this rules almost to the letter, with its level design getting more complex as time goes by. All of the 5+1 strati our guild must conquer start conservatively, introducing minor changes to the basics and new monsters to get used to. Once the player got used to the new environment, new game elements are introduced in the following levels (new FOE patterns, currents, mission types or traps) to expand the world as we go down, one level after the other, always yearning for the next surprise.

EO3 also feels like the great comeback from that band that so deeply dissapointed you with their second album*. After identifying everything that failed in Heroes of Laggard, ATLUS removed almost everything new, refined the formula and added some amazing new tricks.
Once sea exploration, weapon forging and the new classes are introduced at the beginning, all goes back to old style Etrian, until the real additions are revealed half way through: a second city, subclassing and story branching come quickly one after another, setting EO3 as a whole sequel, instead of the expansion feeling that surrounded all of EO2. And, eventhough story branching seems irrelevant at first, it is later put to good use at the end of the 4th stratum, when the consequences of each choice are finally introduced. And with this the pieces are set for the final feature introduction: meaningful replaying in a proper New Game+ mode for the first time.
All this together manages to make this third entry in the series superior to the original, including its amazing revelation of the 5th stratum.

Princess, Ninja, Pirate. Add water. Mix.

Subclasses alone have such an impact on the way the game is played and exploited that it is the core of The Drowned City. If the series was known for the freedom it offered when creating a party, subclasses add completely new levels of customization, making it quite hard to share more than one or two combos with everyone you know who playes the game (unless, of course, you all follow the same guides and dislike independent thought). The most common combos would include a cross between Ninja or Buccaneer and a Zodiac or Arbalist, plus a Monk/Ninja or Ninja/Monk, but that's already a few possibilities. Add in the other options and you can satisfy most RPG players' dreams. And, to top it all, there are few and unlikely choices that would produce a party unfit to beat the game.

Another addition, although less notable, is the existence of invisible areas,  where auto-mapping is disabled and in which FOEs don't show in the map. It is, however, quite a minor feature, requiring just a bit more caution and attention from the adventurers.

Too many bundles

Cave Story seen by @naramura. Shared by @Nicalis.

Today, 14 Dec. 2011, a new Humble Indie Bundle has begun, barely a week after the previous Humble Introversion Bundle concluded. And with it, we've already had 6 bundles from Wolfire in a year: Frozenbyte, Indie 3, Frozen Synapse, Voxatron Debut, Introversion and Indie 4.

Add in Desura's Indie Royale bundles, with its 3 weeks cycle, UK's The Little Big Bunch, supposed to start today, and the fact that indie developers were already quite fond of selling their games in packs, and you have way too many offers like this in a considerably small territory.

Although I like the idea of selling games this way, which clearly works and benefits every participant, I'd like it to stop for a moment and take a breath. Think of the consequences this madness is bringing.
Right now, we live in an ecosystem in which players start wondering whether buying an indie game at release makes sense. If it is any good, chances are it will be sold with some other games at very low prices, even as low as 0.01€, in less than a year. Early buyers are heavily punished.
The standard price for games is also being established at a dangerously low margin of "as little as you want", potentially harming developers who prefer to set their one prices and use sales or gifts to attract new buyers as time goes by.

If anyone involved in this madness reads this, I urge you to reconsider. Keep the good work, release and promote bundles, but slow down. Don't burn the formula or your clients' pockets too fast, or the market will be saturated and possibly damaged. Now that the indie scene is starting to flourish, we must take special care that it grows strong and at a good pace. By watering it to much we risk rotting its branches and roots.

Disclaimer: I'll still acquire HIB 4, of course. It's the best bundle I've seen since Introversion's Anthology! And I love playing from Linux.

Roguelike Line of Sight by Eric Lippert

Isn't it wonderful when two passions get intertwined in ways you never expected? The passions in question are Roguelikes and the C# programming language, joined in the person of Eric Lippert.

In this week's post Eric has tackled the problem of developing a line of sight algorithm for roguelike games, which he'll apparently follow with an implementation. An interesting read for programmers and players alike, which saved me the time required to read through the forums myself =) And don't worry, the technical details are not enough to blow anyone's brains*.

For those not in the know, Roguelikes are top-down view computer role games of unusual graphical simplicity (environments, objects and characters are usually depicted using ASCII symbols) and extremely complex worlds. The genre's identifying marks are random generated dungeons, permanent character deaths (the save file is deleted if the character dies) and cumbersome controls. You should check ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Magic) or NetHack, if you haven't already.

And Eric Lippert is a respected member of the .NET community, having worked on the compilers of Visual Basic and C#, and lately leading the development of Roslyn, an on the fly VB.NET and C# compiler and analyzer.

* Disclaimer: No guarantees regarding the rest of the blog. Tread with caution.

Fragmented lives

Two days ago I watched, once again, Trois Couleurs: Bleu, the first movie in Kieslowski's Colours Trilogy. In that movie music is used to illustrate the main character's missing links with its family. And all the while I wondered: why do games so rarely use music and game elements to such effect. I've seen this done, from time to time, although not to its full potential, and usually limited to the music. Character themes and such.

But how could this be turned into something exclusive to video-games? The usual is removing characters which enable secondary actions (Beyond Good & Evil's partners, Dark Souls's Fire Keeper), or an object (Sands of Time's dagger), but I can't think of an instance in which the player's actual ability to interact with the environment was limited or bolstered by changes in the protagonist's motivation or expectations. Except, once again, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls' human/ghost/undead forms come to mind.

I'll give some thought to ways this could be accomplished, or other games I've seen something like this.

And that's it for today.

Running out of games to buy

Update (2011-12-14):  The way things are looking, STALKER 2 might finally include no "always connected" DRM protection at all. The dust is still setting, but GSC seems to have closed its offices. A sad day for Ukranian game developers and players all around, for sure. Please, guys, if you have the opportunity to finish the game, respect your clients and protect the game in a sane way.

Original post:

Today I have learnt that the next chapter in the STALKER (no more s.t.o.p.s., please) series will come with a little present: DRM requiring constant internet connection. Another thing I've learnt today is that I will not play that game. And that realization hurts, because I am a huge STALKER fan. I own the trilogy: Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat. The last two, I bought them on release date, and was proud of having supported GSC.
Why not buy STALKER 2? I will not accept been treated like a criminal by default, and I have already been bitten by this DRM stupidity. Clear Sky in Western Europe was distributed by Deep Silver, who slapped TAGES into it. TAGES, I found out, is incompatible with my DVD reader, and what did Deep Silver's support recommend? Get a new DVD. Haven't bought a Deep Silver product since, the same as I do with any company who betrays my trust.

But, sadly, during the last years my boycott list has grown non-stop. The videogame industry is becoming more and more unfriendly to its clients, constantly creating barriers between games and players: DRM, online passes, activations and even DRMed save games. The joy of playing is gone, replaced by the absurd requirement of registering, activating, checking the internet, writing codes and what not.
CEOs of the world: I am tired of all this. I don't see the point in giving money to your companies, when you only think of ways to make me pay full-price and give as little as you can in return. I refuse to ask for permission to play my games and I sure don't like having to rely on your servers, either.

After more than a decade of faithfully buying several games per month, I find my options limited, but not for lack of promising games, but for an excess of stupidity in the industry. I've gone from buying 3-4 games a month, even if I had no time to play them, to 1 or 2, with luck. And that average only holds because of independent developers and Good Old Games. For me videogame news are just a list of games I will not play, either because I am boycotting the company as a whole (Ubisoft), or because I find the security measures excesive (all the rest). And you read it right: not play. I won't even bother pirating the game, because I talk a lot about what I play to friends and acquaintances, and I will not give free advertisement to Ubisoft and company. You are not getting even an indirect sale from me.
Once DRM is removed, as happened with Mirror's Edge and Mass Effect, I'll gladly buy the game. But, most probably, by then I've already lost interest in the game and the publisher will have lost a sale.

Nowadays PC gaming is almost completely lost to me, and I fear that Valve's intentions to integrate Steamworks into PS3 releases will bring console games to the ground, too, as online passes are starting to do. If things keep going this way, I'll have to forget about playing, and bring books and movies back as my main hobbies.

And I won't feel sorry for any of the developers who forced me out of gaming.

League of Legends Dominion: impressions

For those not in the know, Riot just released a new 5v5 game mode for League of Legends. It's selling point is that it is based on control points, rather than base defense and lane control, and offers a faster paced experience.

Short introduction

In Dominion each team base starts with 500 energy points and, each second, the team controlling more towers removes as many points from the rival's energy as the difference in controlled points. In order to make things interesting faster, Heroes start at level 3 and with enough currency for a couple of items, experience and gold are much easier to obtain and almost every fight is to death, especially the first encounters. This is because the time spent dead has been drastically reduced, to ensure players are more aggresive.

Is it any good?

It is fun, that's for sure. A match consists of 20 minutes of running around, attacking, defending bases, chasing and escaping, with the tide of battle changing easily. So easily that most games are won by very close margins. I have even lost a game to a team with only 1 point remaining.
But all this tension is continuous, without a pause or moment for reflection. While dead, you barely have time to look for your next item and buy it. There's no sense of progression, narrative or strategy, because all actions are more imrpovised than thought out. In this stressful environment communication is too difficult, to the extent that almost noone speaks more than monosillables. Also, the absence of secondary objectives, like guarding Baron Nashor's lair in the classic 5v5 map, takes away from the experience.

In the end, after a battle in Dominion, little more than the result is left. Each encounter in Summoner's Rift, on the other hand, feels like a story in which you evaluated your opponents and tried to counter their strengths, coordinating with your allies*. Also, since death is a lot more relevant, you learn to fear those characters which kill you in a breeze (Annie, Kata, hello!).
Like in narrative, the ideal is to introduce rest periods after moments of great tension, so the player can take a breath before going head first into the next fray. The tension must also go in crescendo, after each pause. This way, each new peak of excitement feels more pronounced**.
On the contrary, when exposed to constant action, as in Dominion, every new encounter is treated by the brain as the same thing, eventually losing part of its interest. If Dominion matches where any longer, it would soon become tiresome. Riot did well keeping things under 25 minutes, but even at that lenght I still get tired of this game mode.

Conclusion

Maybe Riot will some day manage to add extra depth to its new child, but until then it will probably remain a distraction from repetition. Its advantadge is that rival DotAs don't have a secondary game mode to break the monotony, once the competition from Valve and Blizzard arrives.
LoL's best card, its extremely wide and varied hero roster, might not be enough to fend of the attacks by itself.

However, I am not convinced that Dominion will save LoL from Valve and Blizzard's attempts at stealing its market share. The genre has a small fan base and big companies can do a lot of damage to Riot, through advertisement and simple brand awareness.


* Of course, there is always a black sheep who only complains about the noobity of the team. Welcome to the sad reality of online societies.

** Check Schell's The Art of Game Design for more about narrative in videogames. Or any good book about narrative, actually.

Adding replay value

Today I'll explore the diverse mechanisms I've seen commercial games use to make them replayable or longer than it takes to end the main story itself. The main idea is that players are social animals, so they talk about what they play with friends, work colleagues or their families. The longer they play your game, the longer they'll talk about it and the more likely it is their acquantices, be them physical or virtual, will buy your game too. Of course, they'd better have good things to say about the time sink you've built: bad press does not beat no press at all in this kind of close relatipships.

Trick 1: Irrelevant secrets
Hide things not that relevant to the main story around, like ammo, modified weapons or photos of the development team. Players will spend a long time checking for secret walls or trying weird stuff. If their wild ideas succeed from time to time, they will keep at it. Otherwise, they'll stop trying and focus on the main game.
Pros: Easy to add.
Cons: They must be placed around evenly. Too many secrets or too few in one region of the world can create false expectations.
Examples: Any game with hidden power-ups or easter eggs.

Trick 2: Added background
Hide stuff which gives some insight into the world, the enemies or allies, which is not essential to ending the game. Jokes and logs fit well here.
Pros: Easy to add, since most of it should already be in the game reference documents. Role players love stuff like this.
Cons: Do not break the continuity. These extra dots in the drawing must be perfectly alligned with the ideas presented in the main game.
Examples: System Shock, FEAR, Baldur's Gate, Riven.

Trick 3: Super-objects
Hide game breaking equipment or abilities. Make most of them really hard to discover and even harder to obtain. If they are painfully boring to get, much better.
Pros: Bragging about the übersword feels so good.
Cons: Requires creating new items and/or puzzles. Most players are not willing to spend hours trying to achieve a secondary element.
Examples: Final Fantasy (VII, IV, V, VI, VIII, IX, X, XII...), Deus Ex.

Trick 4: Super-enemies
Add and extra challenge by including side missions with hellish fiends.
Pros: Once again, bragging rights. This comboes with Trick 3.
Cons: Make sure players understand they are not required to kill them and keep them away from the average player's path, or they will be very upset. Designing god-like monsters which can be killed requires a great understanding of your world's rules.
Examples: Final Fantasy, Castlevania.

Trick 5: Challenges
Add challenge rooms independent from the game whose only purpose is testing the player's ability. Time attacks or score rankings can hook players for a long time.
Pros: These are relatively easy to implement. Discarded levels, as well as parts of game sections can be reused.
Cons: It relies completely on your game being absolutely fun to play.
Examples: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Braid, Lara Croft and the Temple of Light.

Trick 6: Completion marks
Fill the world with riddles or puzzles which are there just to be solved. Nothing is earned from solving them, save reaching the desirable 100% completion.
Pros: They can be easily added to almost any kind of game.
Cons: If they don't integrate well with the world, the suspension of disbelief is at risk.
Examples: Batman: Arkcham Asylum, Castlevania (map completion).
 
Trick 7: On-line
Story be damned. Let's shoot at other players in the same maps until the end of times.
Pros: It works, often.
Cons: Competence is legion. Creating this along a single player experience is like building two different games with shared assets.
Examples: Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid 4.

That's for no replayability at all. Now, how about starting the game again...

Virtual economies

When facing a rough problem it is common to study similar environments, looking for potential solutions. Virtual worlds, being all the rage, should have been the first place academics turned to, looking for advice, but they didn't, so I have the honour to publish my findings first. What can we learn from videogame worlds that would help us get out of this supposed crisis? After carefull study I've found that, apart from "beating the bad guys with the biggest sword you can find", there's nothing for us in here.

Really, videogame worlds have it much worse than us. Capitalism's main flaw is in its reliance and dependence on inflation to prosper, but worlds like Hyrule, Hillys or Final Fantasy Land are burdened with the much, much worse phantom of hyperinflation, and each tries to decrease its effect the best they can.

Origins of the inflation

One common issue in RPG worlds is the recurrent monster invasion, which brings chaos and suffering. It happened in each of the Phantasy Star games, in Hyrule, the Mana world... everywhere. But its direct effects are not that bad. I can't remember many towns destroyed by the monsters in any of those games, but what I remember is that all monsters, from cacti to dragons, drop legal tender, be it Gil, Rupees or Meseta, in generous quantities.
The direct impact of this simple fact is staggering: in whole worlds, when travelling from empire to empire, or even between planets of the Algo System, you'll use the same currency everywhere. Monsters provide the common ground for a planetary economic system that the UN can only dream of, with almost free manufacturing costs and little rewards for forgers.
The catch is that there is always new currency being coined, at an uncontroleed rate. If you want to eat roast vegetables, you just need to go out, kill a Giant Onion or Carrot, pick the loot and use it to buy the roasted version of whatever you killed. And the same happens every morning, in every house, in every town. And the amount of coins in circulation increases constantly, maybe not too fast, but in a year you might find that it takes killing two Giant Onions to buy one roast onion. And in a hundred years, when the next monster invasion starts, the value of the currency will drop so fast that it won't be even funny.

So how do you control inflation in a chaotic system like this?

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (HD) (Capybara, 2011)

Platform: PSN, XBLA, (DS)

The high definition craze is hitting with force this year and Ubisoft is making sure it is at the front line of this new fashion. In its zeal to outnumber anyone's HD rehashes it is now releasing re-skinned versions of one year old DS games. Well, at least they've had the decency to spearhead this new idea with a decent game, which did not get the attention it deserved. Unfortunately, the port didn't get the love it deserved, either, and it is just a port, with small fixes and brand new outstanding problems.

I will not go in depth into Clash of Heroes' mechanics and merits. To cut a long story short, it is an interesting and entertaining mix of your average tactics RPG with Magical Drop and Magic: the Gathering. Or something like that. It is quite unique. For more info, internet is full of reviewes of the DS original, and the modifications made to the new version do not invalidate them.
Regarding the common ground between both versions, I'll say that my favourite part remains intact: the puzzles, in which you are given one turn to prepare a number of attacks. They serve as tutorials for advanced configurations and how to best take advantadge of the rules. The bad is mostly the same, too: the last chapter is too simple and uninspired, consisting of, basically, going forward to advance, backwards to grind, fight the two final battles and that's it. Balance could also be improved, with random battles sometimes featuring too strong enemies for the current level of the player, or the level of bounties being inconsistent. Also unfixed is the possibility of losing bounty hunts without being warned, if the player decides to try a different one.

About the HD remake, I will say that the new art is, in most cases, great and very well designed. The only problem here is that some generic portraits are direct high resolution exports of the DS's vector graphics, looking like crude drafts in comparison with the rest. Also updated were several powers, units and objects, which were greatly needed. Things seem a bit more balanced now in multiplayer, which was absolutely vital for it to have a change to succeed. Also, the story mode difficulty has been reduced, but you'll still want to throw the controller a couple of times, specially during the last chapter.

Multiplayer is almost the only ocassion when the game's heroes actually clash

Review: Mass Effect 2 (BioWare, 2010)

Platform: PC, X360, PS3

Mass Effect, the first game in BioWare's intergalactic saga, turned out to be one of the best RPG blenders of the past decade. Despite some flaws, it might even be one of the best in video game history. It is up there with System Shock and Deus Ex, becoming part of a trinity of very different games with very similar concerns, each of them a testimony of how far available technology could go to create believable environments, characters and plot, and how to take advantadge of constraints.

System Shock, Deus Ex and Mass Effect have something else in common: their sequels departed considerably from the original. In System Shock and Deus Ex it was, mostly, a matter of technology and standard shifts. System Shock was released when the FPS genre was still crystalizing and its, admittedly overcomplicated, control and inventory schemes failed to become the rule. Deus Ex 2, on the other hand, changed the reference platform from PC to the booming console market. In both cases, the result was a considerably simplified version of the first game. However, Looking Glass used the opportunity to create a completely new kind of game, while Deus Ex: Invisible War remained a dumbed down version of its predecessor.

System Shock 2 is nowadays a classic, while Invisible War is just not.

Between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 no such technology or standard shift happened. All the modifications to the formula were the result of fans feedback, internal development and, I guess, some pressure from EA. And those changes left a mark even bigger and scarier than anything done in Deus Ex: Invisible War.

What happened?

Sequels of the world be aware of the tale of Mass Effect. Quite a start for a saga, raised from illusion, care and depth, by many loved, despite its flaws, into change it was compelled by EA's suits and internet boards.
Not too good a shooter nor much of an RPG, that was its cross, but the way of the bender was never meant to be easyly walked. Still it sold in the millions and, once DRM was gone, I bought it and rejoiced.

Things looked bright for BioWare and its new step-father, dollars in the pocket and still two sequels short, there was much to win, while little could be lost. Yet, greed took its toll, Mass Effect 2 was rushed to market, changed for the sake of change, dumbed down to please the masses of FPS, TPS players who about Mass Effect complained.

"The Mako is plainly a bore, with little to do in outer worlds, the arsenal too ample, the stats a ton, too much to watch and learn, overheating weapons are plain odd, and why is not Tali in my bed?"
"Just let us run and gun, the next gun better than the rest, picking weapons' not that great. I play to have some fun. Oh, and could you add some mini-games?"

Someone compiled all these requests, wrote them in a chart and forced them into the game. They might not fit well, or needed more thought to blend, but the release date must be met. "Just work less on the PC port. Like anyone will care."

And Mass Effect 2, my friends, is what we have left. By the way, this is the farthest I could take all this prosaic verse.