Friday, 22 May 2009
dungeon diving
Reinstalled Avernum 3 recently, but got sidetracked after designing my party and playing for all of 10 minutes, heh. I love the Exile / Avernum series, one of the few shareware titles which I actually shelled out money for, but they’re somewhat of a heavy investment in time.
Oh, nothing’s stopping you from playing them in lunch-break 10-minute sized bites; their turn-based Ultima-like nature pretty much lends them to being played in chunks. But it’s hard to stop once you get rolling. You discover something, which reminds you of another thing, and before you know it you’ve got a chain of clues begging to be investigated. It’s pretty cool actually, especially if you’ve got the time to burn. Like say if you’re a college kid with no classes for the day.
As I was saying, I got sidetracked. It happened to be Sudeki‘s turn to be resurrected, I think I last hit it 3 years ago or so. The PC version. Originally it was StarForced (yuck), and the cracks unfortunately never got around to update for the patch (v1.0 to v1.1 of the game). Minor bugs actually, most of them being external controller issues – however, the main bug was the speeded up sound. Sound effects, music, and speech sound like they were done in chipmunk style. Extremely annoying, and a near-turnoff from playing the game. The game itself is pretty generic as stories go, and the dialog is bland, uninteresting, and the tale never really builds up. You just go here and there from one quest to another until whammo, endgame. The only saving grace is the combat gameplay, and it speaks volumes about gameplay that this single element alone is good enough to make you consider playing something that you’d normally avoid touching with a barge pole.
Unfortunately Sudeki also falls into the same equipment trap, i.e. little variety, and endgame weapons pretty much outshining everything else. Armor’s even worse; it doesn’t show up in your inventory, you just have what you wear at the moment – and at certain points in the story it’s upgraded for you. Can’t get any more hands-off than that. Actually most weapons are also given to you only after certain points in the game too.
I’d like to touch on equipment – specifically weapons and armor – for a bit. For far too long, in far too many games, we get very little variety, and what there is can usually be laid out in a linear progressive manner: crap wooden/stone stuff you start the game with, moving slowly up the scale through the usual suspects: iron, mithril, magical, then finally some ultimate weapon. Most weapons pretty much make previous weapons in the same category obsolete. That’s pretty fucking stupid. You don’t need a database of 10 swords to keep track of 10 swords if they’re all going to simply be upgraded versions of previous swords. All you need is a variable to hold ONE sword, and upgrade it’s stats to pretend you get a new sword when you find the next better one.
Seriously. I’m sick of the stupid linearity. Wood sword, stone sword, iron sword, gold sword, ultimate sword. Jesus. This kind of unimaginative crap probably sufficed back in the day of 8-bit console RPGs, where memory space on the game cartridges was at a premium. Nowadays computers have like fucking gigabytes of hard drive space - a simple excel-type list of 100 items doesn’t even fill a one-thousandth of this. Sure, graphics take space, but you don’t store the fucking item graphics in the same database.
It’s way past time RPGs used the equipment system pioneered by games like Diablo, where lower-tier items could have useful mods on them, like inflicting status effects, elemental damage, inflicting curses, etc etc. Even the Diablo games didn’t quite get it right, since they had mods like +1 hp. Christ… if you’re going to put mods on, at least make them have a noticeable effect, hey? In the game, you can eventually end up with 5-digit hp on your character, so a mod that changes that value by 0.01% is fucking useless.
Only one game does this right so far, from what I’ve seen: Fate. It’s a somewhat mindless dungeon crawler of a PC game, with a forgettable story. It’s quite like the first Diablo game: there’s a town, and there’s a dungeon underneath it. You delve into the deeps, kill stuff, and get better loot. The thing about Fate though is that items can sport multiple mods, unlike Diablo and most clones. These games usually have things like “prefix {item} of the suffix” – example: sly sword of blight (I’m making this up). The prefix “sly” would stand for something like +5 intelligence (usually a prefix has a range, so “sly” items may add anything from 1 to 5 points of int, not necessarily fixed). Ditto for the suffix. Some games get this wrong, and have fixed values for the affixes (so for example in those games, “sly” will always give 5 points of int).
However Fate treats mods as lists, not affixes. So instead of being confined to a “prefix-item-suffix” model, Fate goes like item-mod,mod,mod,mod… For clarity’s sake, you only see the base item name, e.g. “broadsword”. It’ll usually be coloured though, and the colour can be used to indicate mod quantity/quality (say, white for basic items, yellow for items with 1-2 mods, green for items with 3-4 mods, purple for items with 1-2 very high level mods, etc). And you simply mouseover the item to see a popup of the mods on it, like in most games.
Not only does Fate break out of the 2-affix mould, the game’s mods are also actually useful. No measly +1 hp modifiers here. Fixed modifiers are pretty limited anyway, 100hp might seem a lot to a starting character whereas a seasoned end-game one might not even blink at being hit for that much damage. Yep, you guessed it, Fate sports mods with percentage differences. Like +25% life drain. No lame pussy +1 damage mods in this badass game.
This immediately ups the enjoyment factor by a lot. Suddenly everything can be useful. Of course, the trick is NOT to drop so much stuff – that only results in a Monty Haul situation – oldschool RPGers might recognise this term, referring to players who get jaded because they keep finding so many good items. No, the trick is to drop quality stuff. It shouldn’t be like in, say, Titan Quest, where the vast majority of drops are immediately throwaway material, and the player quickly learns to only scrutinize special drops (yellow-name quality or better), while everything else either gets left on the ground or sold in town.
Fate‘s dungeons aren’t particularly large, so you don’t really get too much mileage out of it – even though the game is an enjoyable romp. Still, it’s quite sad that a pretty-much unknown game in the huge RPG genre seems to be the only one which does equipment right. I’m goddamned tired of seeing RPGs with only like a selection of 5 weapons that don’t suck, and $5 says that 4 out of 5 best weapons will – naturally – be swords. What is it with swords anyway? Polearms are fucking cool weapons too. Hell, daggers ought to feature more prominently as well, seeing as how lots of fantasy stories usually have the bad guy sporting a wicked dagger. Bows are almost universally neglected too, and blunt weapons almost always get the shaft for being stuck with the “slow, heavy” stereotype. You almost always find powerful swords that deal as much damage as the supposedly stronger mace-types, and naturally they’re “better” for the player since swords have a faster aspd (attack speed), which naturally results in a higher dps. And speaking of dps, I find that catch-all term too simplistic. Especially because it puts too much fucking emphasis on plain old damage, as if modifiers like stun don’t mean anything. Oh, they don’t, in most crap games, which is why relying on dps isn’t too bad most of the time. Still, even plain damage doesn’t take into account stuff like hit rates – it doesn’t matter if you can deal over 9,000 damage at 5 strikes a second if your hit rate is like 0.01%.
I just bailed out of re-playing Freelancer too, but that’s another rant. I think I’m actually going to be playing Avernum 3 for a while – a pretty damning testimony to the crap state of games nowadays that I’d avoid most of the junk out there in favour of a years-old shareware game. Heh. Well, like Sudeki showed, gameplay is important. I fucking hate games that keep pushing the graphics envelope. Oh please. A shiny turd is still a turd. Movies are in fucking HD nowadays too but it hasn’t made me want to watch them more.
