With Metro: Last Light due out shortly, I’ve been playing some Metro 2033 to refresh my memory when it comes both to Artyom’s story and the mechanics of the game. Before anyone chimes in to say that Metro isn’t an RPG — yes, thankyou. I already know that. I’m using the game as an illustration of something that I wished RPGs did, and that’s give currency some kind of real meaning within the game.

In the vast majority of RPGs, gold (or rupees, or whatever currency is accepted in that particular world or realm), functions much like a de-facto extra statistic, and one that is simultaneously the most powerful and most meaningless in game, enabling players to buy the most powerful weapons, armour and abilities available whilst also being fairly easy to obtain either through questing or via farming. This empty currency, whilst effecting the balance of the game, really has little impact on the player when it comes to the decision whether or not to spend said currency.

This adherence to an artificial and meaningless currency is not a new phenomenon. It was relatively easy in the early Gold Box D&D games to amass enough money that you needn’t worry about it running out, and even beloved genre classics like Planescape: Torment fell into a similar trap with players being able to quickly amass a fortune they could never spend, even after buying the most powerful spells and weapons available in the game.

Whilst there’s nothing overtly wrong with this approach to in game currencies, the more games I play the more frustrating I find it. Without having any significant meaning to the player outside of being something to collect and use to for upgrades, artificial currencies, for me at least, are starting to feel somewhat divorced from the rest of the game and the world as a whole.

This is where Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light come in. In those games, the currency of the land used for buying new weapons and gear is the very ammunition you need for said weapons. It’s a simple but clever system that forces the player to think about every purchase, making them seem far more weighty and meaningful in the long run.

The upcoming, New Zealand-made ARPG, Path of Exile takes a similar path (geddit). The game features a number of different crafting materials that allow players to upgrade items, improve skill gems, enchant desirable objects, respec points in your passive skill tree and generally make life in Wraeclast a little easier. These crafting materials also serve as the currency in game, both for the AI shops in each quest hubs and for inter-player barters. Every time the player makes a purchase or barters for an item they are forced to weigh up the value of the item compared to the value of the crafting material, weighing up the pros of an immediate character upgrade against perhaps needing that crafting material somewhere down the line.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with an artificial and all-but-meaningless currency, and in some ways I can see the appeal of amassing huge wealth in game and being able to spend said wealth with impunity — but I see more appeal in the opposite approach. Much like in the real world, I find a purchase has more meaning and is more satisfying if I’ve had to work and save for it or otherwise sacrifice. Without simply aping the mechanics of the games I’ve mentioned I’m not entirely sure how to go about making gaming currencies more meaningful, but I’m sure there are some bright sparks out there who can find a way.

Following on from my last column, in which I looked at some of the most interesting looking RPGs on Kickstarter at the time, I thought I’d take a look at some of the most interesting Indie RPGs that are either in development or have been recently released. I’m a huge fan of the epic AAA-RPG and all the attendant production values and sense of scale that are usually attached to them, but there’s a special something that a small and dedicated team of true believers can bring to the table.

Indie RPGs might lack the polish of some of their higher budgeted brethren, but many of them are packed with some unique style, substance and character that would often be deemed too risky for a big budget title.

Card Hunter

Jon Chey may be a name familiar to some of you — you see, along with Ken Levine and Robert Fermier, Chey was one of the co-founders of Irrational Games. After leaving Irrational, Chey set up a new studio called Blue Manchu, and Card Hunter is their first game. Card Hunter is a hybrid of CCG (Collectible Card Game) and old school tabletop RPG, with cards taking the place of both gear and dice rolls.

What gear a character in the player’s party can equip determines what cards they have in their hand, and what cards they have determines what attacks and moves they can make. It’s honestly one of my most anticipated games of the year -  I can’t wait to get some hands on time.

MORE INFO: Official Site

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

I’d never heard of this game until I received an email from the devs the very day I started writing this column and I’m more than a little disappointed in my ignorance. Van Helsing has been getting some great press for its fast paced ARPG combat and lovely art, but what interests me most is the clever sounding combat system. Each skill in the Van Helsing skill tree has three “PowerUps” – skill modifiers that can be used to add special effects to a skill when they are charged with Rage, one of the resources in the game.

A full rage bar can charge all three PowerUps, ensuring that the next time the skill is used it has all the additional effects, but players can also choose where the rage goes, so players could choose to charge a single PowerUp three times (for triple the effectiveness) or charge one PowerUp twice (to make it doubly effective) and another PowerUp once. It all sounds a little fiddly but if the controls are well designed it could well make for a very robust and challenging combat system.

MORE INFO: Official Site

Claustrophobia: The Downward Struggle

I love roguelikes. There’s something very primal about making your way through a procedurally-generated dungeon, knowing that any mistake can be your last thanks to the ever-present spectre of permanent death. Claustrophobia: The Downward Struggle is a graphical roguelike by Indie Forge with a rather sweet sounding set of features. There’s the random generation as you would expect from such a title, but Claustrophobia also boasts crafting, multiple levels of difficulty and a combat system that gives every character six abilities bound to the QWERTY keys for easy and quick access.

The Q and W skills are determined by your chosen weapon, E and R by your character and T and Y by your chosen profession. There’s no word of a plot, but honestly, who really needs a plot when you’re killing your way through infinitely replayable dungeons?

MORE INFO: Official Site

Sully: A Very Serious RPG

Ben McGraw, AKA “Ben Grue” describes his new Final Fantasy-inspired RPG rather succinctly.  “Sully: A Very Serious RPG is the 80′s summer romcom of RPGs.  I’m not saying I have John Cusack in my game, but if John Cusack were going to be in any RPG, it’d be mine. It’s mainly focused around two teenagers, Crystal and Darin, and what happens the last summer they have together before Crystal goes to college at the prestigious Magi Tech.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m totally down for John Hughes Movie: The Game, but then again I’m old enough to have seen The Breakfast Club at the cinema. Anyway, mechanically, Sully is described as a mix of Valkyrie Profile, Final Fantasy and Super Mario RPG, combining the full frame animation and real time battle interaction as being similar to Valkyrie Profile and Super Mario RPG respectively, and the general combat being a Final Fantasy inspired turn based and menu driven affair.

MORE INFO: Official Site

April is turning out to be quite the slow month for retail releases, RPG and otherwise. It’s not a total dead zone as it has often been in the past, with a few AAA titles being released during the month as well as a few smaller games. The lack of boxed copies isn’t really going to effect how much of an impact gaming has on my wallet, however, as once again a number of interesting projects have made their way to Kickstarter, all but demanding that I give them all of my available cash in anticipation of a finished product somewhere down the line when I will inevitably not have enough time to fully enjoy them.

Unlike the last number of projects I backed, such as Torment: Tides of Numenera or Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, the new batch of interesting games aren’t asking for huge amounts of money and aren’t set to break any records for the most funded game on Kickstarter. This doesn’t stop them from being every bit as interesting.

Consortium

The idea behind Consortium fascinates me. It’s a locked box first-person RPG with NPCs that is fully reactive to the player’s actions and dialogue choices. Nothing too out of the ordinary for an ambitious modern RPG, aside from the limited world. What makes the game so interesting to me and forced my funding hand into action is the fact that Consortium is designed to break the fourth wall. Instead of taking the role of a character, players instead physically control a character in a parallel world, Consortium Agent Bishop Six.

The idea is that players play themselves controlling a person in another world, bringing their own knowledge, experience and personality to bear as you interact with the crew of the Consortium Command Vessel C-3800-D “Zenlil”. Making the project even more interesting is the fact that the developers say you can complete the game without firing a single shot if you play your cards right and learn what you can about the NPCs before talking to them.

Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/idgi/consortium-0

Planet Explorers

Planet Explorers isn’t the most innovative or awe-inspiring of names, but the game it’s attached to is shaping up to be massively ambitious and potentially amazing. Bizarrely enough it basically seems to be an amalgam of Monster Hunter and Minecraft, with a little bit of Skyrim, Meccano and tower defence thrown in for good measure.

Players will take the role of one of the first settlers on the planet “Maria” in the Epsilon Indi star system. During the landing sequence, the colony ship crashes, stranding the survivors on a potentially hostile world teeming with potentially deadly plant and animal life. Players are charged with helping to explore this new world, defend the survivors from the hostile native fauna, build habitation, vehicles and weapons, all the while discovering the truth about the planet and why you crashed.

Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1757963851/planet-explorers

Divinity: Original Sin

I’ve already banged on about Divinity: Original Sin in a previous column so I won’t bang on too much here. Here’s all you need to know in a nutshell – Divinity: Original Sins is the latest in the Divinity series, which includes Divine Divinity and Divinity II: Dragon Knight Saga and goes back to the series roots with an isometric viewpoint and turn based combat. Nearly everything in the world that looks like it should be interactive is actually interactive. Elemental effects react to other elements naturally – lightning will conduct through water, fire melts ice, ice freezes water and all that jazz, making for interesting combat synergy.

It features a massive single player campaign and supports drop in-drop out multiplayer and will ship with the editor used to design the game, allowing for extensive modding and user generated content.

Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin

Reload

OK, so I lied – this last one isn’t an RPG but it could definitely be a lifesaver. Reload is a save game manager that synchs saves between multiple PCs, backs up saved games, backs up checkpoint saves so you can go back in a game that normally doesn’t allow you to and generally saves you from the frustration of a corrupted save, HDD crash, poor Steam or Origin synching and the like. I’ve lost enough saves, some with hundreds of hours of gameplay in them, to never want to have to face that frustration again.

Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kratossoftware/reload-the-game-save-savior

In real life, I’m a planner. I think through everything, weighing up the pros and cons of any given situation before committing myself. I’m not exactly spontaneous, if you get my drift — I’m more a “measure seventeen times, cut once” kind of person.

When it comes to games, however, I’m far more likely to adopt a “suck it and see” kind of mentality, jumping in with both feet, doing what seems fun and damning the consequences. Sometimes this works well — there is fun to be had with randomised characters that force you to play differently from how you normally would, and there are rarely any game breaking problems by casually misusing a couple of stat or skill points in most RPGs.

After spending a week or so with the beta of Grinding Gear Games action RPG Path of Exile however, my opinion of taking a haphazard approach to character design has changed rather drastically.

I’ve never been one for theorycrafting. In fact, I’ve written more than one column making fun of the people who take more time working out how to play a game than actually playing it. After a first rather disastrous run at Path of Exile during which I went with my gut instead of actually taking the time to work out how I wanted my character to work, my approach to character building in this game, and, I suspect, many more to come, has made an abrupt about face.

Path of Exile doesn’t so much encourage theorycrafting as it does mandate it. The terrifyingly big passive skill tree has been constructed in such a way that each of the six character classes has multiple branches they can expand down, each holding special passives that can be greatly appealing, with added damage, health regeneration, bonus armour, special attack effects and the like. If you don’t check carefully, however, some of these branches can and will force you to spend points that are useless to your chosen character, making for an inefficient and sometimes not particularly useful build.

In the case of my first character I thought it would be awesome to create a stealth, dual-wielding Shadow (the rogue style class) and just put points where I thought I needed them every level. As a result I wound up with a melee fighter almost entirely dependent on gear who didn’t have enough mana to use any of his good attacks and could hardly hit anything even when he did. Not the best thing to be playing when the game heats up in the second act.

I normally dread trawling forums or using spec calculators because there’s usually some type of cookie-cutter spec that is considered the best, and in many games the skill trees are taken up with multiple filler talents placed in between important skills, making coming up with a spec rather straightforward and/or boring. The theorycrafting required in such games to come up with an optimal spec is straightforward but ultimately unnecessary.

Path of Exile makes thinking about how you want to play your character a necessity. I’d even go so far as to say that it gamifies the entire idea of theorycrafting, making it a rewarding experience rather than something that is a necessary evil. Grinding Gear Games does this by making every decision count, not by making every skill spectacular, but by limiting respeccing. Instead of being able to simply buy complete respecs, Path of Exile instead rewards players with limited respecs as quest rewards and random drops. These respecs only give you a point or two to change at a time and in a skill tree that can support up to 120 skill points, that’s not a lot, and as a result every decision made about your character feels weighty.

It’s a clever point of differentiation in a market that is fairly glutted. Whereas games like Diablo III, Torchlight 2 and the upcoming Neverwinter offer tight, coherent games in which most players will have similar experiences by having tightly structured skill trees (or none at all in the case of Diablo III) and easy respeccing if you place a point wrong in your skill trees, Path of Exile appears to be attempting to turn the act of thinking about and creating a character into something as important as the content of the game itself.

Something that has become readily apparent over the last six or so month is that crowdfunding has become both the salvation and the refuge of “risky” gaming ventures. I use the term risky advisedly, hence the inverted commas. I don’t mean risky in terms of hard to achieve or of dubious legality, but rather those projects that are deemed too risky for major publishers to want to touch.

Games that aren’t either the first part in a leveragable franchise, or belong to a long standing and popular series, games that can’t be advertised in the most basic, brotastic terms with wonderful hyperbole and flashy screenshots boasting all of the pixels. These “risky” projects are the ones that get a handful of fans frothing at the mouth and get some games journos waxing lyrical about how they are the future of gaming.

Whilst I’m not quite ready to go that far, the resurgence of smaller, more personal and for me at least, far more interesting RPG projects rarely fails to put a smile on my face.

In the last week and a bit, two new projects have made their way to Kickstarter, and both have a hell of a lineage. I’m speaking, of course, of Torment: Tides of Numenera and  Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. At the time of this writing, Torment has just surpassed 2.39 million dollars in pledges with 25 days to go, eclipsing their $900,000 goal by more than double, and Shroud of the Avatar has raised just shy of $700,000 of its $1 million with 27 days to go before the project closes.

When you add these games to already funded projects like Wasteland 2, Project Eternity and Grim Dawn, it becomes apparent that there is a definite, if limited market for this style of interesting, innovative or old-school style games.

Taking the most recent two, Torment and Shroud of the Avatar, you can see some interesting trends when it comes to pledging. Both games definitely have star power to draw upon when calling for money — Torment has Brian Fargo, Chris Avellone and the almost holy name of Planescape: Torment to draw upon, and Shroud of the Avatar has the legendary name of Lord British himself, Richard Garriott, the man who is pretty much responsible for the rise and shape of the computer RPG — and whilst a great deal of the hype for these games comes from the star power behind them, I think there’s slightly more to the story.

Richard Garriott is a legend when it comes to game design, but that legend stems from his ability to innovate within his chosen genre, and to do interesting, if not always successful things with the structure and content. He’s a rockstar in his field and an icon to other developers. Perhaps this is why some of the first pledges to be snapped up on Shroud of the Avatar have been the $10,000, $5000, $3500 and $3000 tiers.

As of this writing there are only two slots each left for the $10000 and $5000 categories and none left for $3500 and $3000. Torment, a fan favourite, by comparison, has far more backers at the lower, sub $100 rungs and fewer at the top end. Whilst this could mean little in the grand scheme of things, I have a theory — and it goes a little something like this.

Richard Garriott, the man who gave computer RPGs their shape and who can be argued has done more for the genre than pretty much anyone else, is all but venerated by other developers and has been absent from the development scene for a long while. This could account for why so many of the high end pledges were the first to be snapped up (these are often taken by other developers, studios or industry professionals looking for alternate avenues of investment) and why there are relatively few lower tiered pledges.

I think some other RPG developers may be curious enough to see what has drawn Garriott back to the table and what innovations he’ll bring to his beloved genre to make them willing to drop the big bucks. Torment, on the other hand is a sequel to a fan favourite game talked about in reverential tones. It’s no wonder then that almost 44,000 people have pledges smaller amounts of money to the cause.

Of course, I could be wrong — it could just be that Richard Garriott has a bunch of fans with far too much money to throw around. Without a real breakdown of contributors I’ll never really know, but I like my theory, and until someone proves otherwise, I’m sticking with it.

In a discussion about game stories I was having a few weeks ago with some game-writer friends of mine, the subject turned, as it inevitably tends to do, to Planescape: Torment. We all agreed, as we inevitably do, that the game features one of the best, if not the best narratives in gaming — but an interesting comment was made that forced me to start replaying the game for the first time in a number of years, and re-examine my opinion.

We all agreed that the game features an amazing an engrossing story, but a single dissenting voice questioned whether that necessarily made Planescape: Torment a good game — or whether it made it an average game elevated to legendary status by an exceptional story.

Whilst I was the first to jump up and poo-poo this almost heretical question, it did give me reason for pause. In my mind, a truly great game is a combination of multiple factors. A great story can elevate something but it can’t be its only saving grace — the long-in-gestation Inquisitor is a perfect example of this. The story and the writing are fascinating and engrossing, but no matter how interesting the story it couldn’t make up for the fact that the moment-to-moment gameplay is intensely slow and unwieldy.

To test the theory I booted up my copy of Torment, to quickly discover that my friend had a point. Although the gameplay is far from average, being one of the best AD&D computer games ever produced, it does feel somewhat constrained by the rules. The Planescape: Torment story is grandiose, larger than life and deeply melancholy, as does the Planescape campaign setting upon which it is based,  but the AD&D rules set that underlays all of The Nameless One’s actions does not feel particularly up to the task of living up to the premise.

I think the problem, to the extent to which it exists, may be that what the AD&D rules need to make them feel like a living system is a mind to judge when rolls are necessary, something that cannot be had in a game.

In a tabletop game of AD&D the rules act as a framework around which the GM can construct an adventure. The GM has the ability to know when to ignore the rules in favour of story and when to fudge them to advance the action. On a basic level the dice rolls work as a randomiser and catalyst for action and the other rules are there to offer a framework but not a prison, leaving the story and players the focus instead of the system.

The problem with some computer games, Planescape: Torment included, is that there has to be a certain consistency throughout the game. There isn’t a GM ready and willing to continue tailoring the game to both suit and cater to the actions of the players. Instead there are the rules, and… that’s it. This is good from the standpoint of knowing how the game will react at any given time, but it does dampen the overall feel of the game, sometimes leaving the rules and the story at odds with each other, with the former clearly showing through the latter.

This, of course, isn’t the case with all games. There are numerous RPGs with systems that work brilliantly with the story to create a overly satisfying whole. Gothic II and The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings spring immediately to mind. Both games feature dynamic combat systems that feel as though they empower the character rather than constrain them, and the systems of alchemy, character advancement and item creation feel like they are part of the world rather than a set system.

It could be argued that many of the problems I’ve had with the Planescape: Torment rules stems from the age of the game, and whilst that may be true, I don’t think it would be any more possible to create an AD&D game today in a setting as amazing and varied as Planescape without the system feeling like a hindrance. For this reason (amongst many), I’m very curious to see what happens with Torment: Tides of Numenera, the spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment. The game is being built around a rules set specifically created for the setting by a veteran of tabletop rules creation, and the man behind Planescape: Torment‘s original setting. If inXile can mesh the rules and story into a seamless whole they just might create a game that not only lives up to the legacy of Planescape: Torment but may, in fact, eclipse it.

As you could probably guess, I’m spectacularly excited by the prospect of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — despite its somewhat cumbersome title. I’m excited by the idea of it being an open world game with a landmass a little bigger than that featured in Skyrim, and I’m eagerly awaiting the conclusion to the ongoing story of Geralt’s death, rebirth and amnesia, and why the hell The Wild Hunt keep sticking their bony faces into the White Wolf’s life.

More than anything else in the announcement (and Game Informer’s first look that accompanied it) the thing that made me happiest about the announcement of The Witcher 3 was the fact that it is the final game in the series. The end of the line. The last.

It may sound strange for me to be celebrating the end of a series I genuinely love, but it’s not so much the fact that the series is ending that I’m applauding but rather the reasons for which it is ending. According to their interview, the developers want the series to go out on a high point and on its own terms, rather than continuing for as long as it makes money, slowly becoming more and more diluted and generic with every additional outing.

Whilst this habit of annually exploiting a franchise hasn’t really been seen in the realm of the RPG since the end of the Might and Magic and Wizardry franchises, it’s something we see all too often in nearly every other genre. Business wise it makes a certain short-sighted sense to milk your profitable franchises for all they are worth, as long as you can, so it’s both surprising and gratifying to see a publisher and developer willing to end their highly successful and popular series rather than keep it running.

If the details released in a recent video interview are anything to go by, The Witcher 3 will definitely be the high note that CD Projekt Red want to go out on. The developer has a long track record of listening to their fans and responding with game changes, updates and fixes. The news features to be integrated into The Witcher 3 all seem to have been developed in response to complaints made about the second game.

Players complained about the dearth of side quests in Assassins of Kings, especially in the concluding chapter, so Wild Hunt is set to include far more side quests peppered throughout the game. The combat system was criticised for locking players into combos, so the third game will feature a new combat and animation system that will see each click equal one swing and one animation, enabling players to break combos at any time. A new camera and targeting system will allow players to switch between targets easily and will automatically move to show you attacking targets.

Players who complained about the insane difficulty curve and lack of tutorial and explanation in the opening chapter of The Witcher 2 will be glad to know that an in game tutorial will be integrated into The Witcher 3, but in such a way that it’s simply part of the introductory gameplay and won’t piss off series veterans.

There will be better balance with level so the end game won’t be nearly as easy as it was in The Witcher 2, and the story will go back to being the personal tale of Geralt, rather than a larger, political story in which the White Wolf is only a player. This main story will be much longer than those of previous games. And perhaps most importantly, CD Projekt Red are doing away with the QTE style battles that hurt the second game, replacing them with “intuitive RPG combat” — whatever that means.

Still, it can’t be worse than QTE’s.

January/February is usually a really slow time for releases, with few AAA titles hitting shelves before March and even fewer of them being RPGs. In recent years the number of early year releases has noticeably grown, with numerous publishers pushing pre-Christmas release dates a little so that there is some space between major releases. Unfortunately that hasn’t really lead to more RPGs being released in this slot. In the place of releases, however, seems to have come a heap of interesting news and controversy. Let’s take a look at some of that, shall we?

There has been quite a bit of debate about the Cyberpunk 2077 teaser in recent weeks, with some claiming that the imagery of a passive, supine woman being shot at is sexist and stereotypical, whilst others have argued the opposite. Personally I found much of the imagery a little  crass until the kicker at the end of the teaser – the woman is not killed but is instead recruited – brought it all together.

Perhaps in response to the outcry, or perhaps simply due to an already established schedule, CD Projekt Red has released a new Cyberpunk 2077 video, this time with Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk 2020 pen and paper RPG talking about the collaborative process and the feeling of the genre. There is also a tiny hint to the plot of the game in there as well – the events of Cyberpunk 2077 take place after the fourth Corporate War. I’m excited.

Speaking of controversy, there has been an inordinate amount written about the introduction of same-sex relationships in Star Wars: The Old Republic. For those of you in the know, same-sex relationships are being introduced in the new expansion and will be limited to a single (new) planet. Some people have claimed that this is deliberate segregation, whilst others have kicked up a stink for the game going “gay for pay”, complaining that the fact that gay people will have to pay to have a relationship is blatantly discriminatory.

BioWare put themselves in a difficult position with The Old Republic from both a licensing position and from a technical one. Every decision made in the Star Wars universe had to be parsed by the rather notoriously vanilla LucasArts (now Disney, making the prospect even more daunting) but more importantly, choosing to have the entire game voiced has driven the developer into a rather tight corner when it comes to expanded content.

If same-sex relationships were to be introduced into the wider game world, every voice actor who played a potential love interest would have to be called back to record new dialogue which would then have to be integrated into already established interactions, as would the voice actor that has any gendered reaction to a character’s relationship. This is by no means an impossible feat, but it’s definitely a very pricey one, and one that can’t be paid for by free to play content. Delivering same-sex relationships as paid content is an awkward solution to a problem caused more by expectation than anything else, but it’s really the only solution BioWare have.

I loved Mass Effect 3. I thought it was a great way to end a wonderful story and I spent as much time as possible savouring the final journey of Shepard and the crew of the Normandy, completing every side quest, every conversational strand and following every interpersonal relationship to its ultimate limit.

Likewise I loved Skyrim, albeit for other reasons. The story wasn’t particularly great but the sense of place was superb, with the rewards for exploration being constantly surprising and tangible. Over 180 or so hours I explored every inch of the world, investigating every cave, climbing every mountain and opening every door, portcullis and chest I came across.

The thing is, however, that I have had absolutely no impetus to play any of the DLC for either title, though admittedly for quite different reasons.

Mass Effect 3 was a self-contained ending for me, a culmination of Shepard’s epic fight against the Reapers and something of a eulogy for the series as a whole. The game was essentially made up of a series of vignettes of characters the player had met over the course of the first two games in which Shepard did right by someone from his or her life and said goodbye to that companion, wrapping up their story thread and allowing them to go on with their lives in some fashion. More than any other game in the series, Mass Effect 3 is self contained – it’s all about endings, and even though there is a post-script that I suppose is meant to leave the story a little open ended allowing for DLC, the story, at least to me, felt finite. Over. Finished.

I was initially excited to have the prospect of more Mass Effect 3 on the horizon, but the closer it came to the first batch of DLC being released the less interested I became. In some ways the idea of new stories being slipped into the canon after it had been finished felt a little off, even a little disrespectful. It began to feel to me like (and I usually hate how casually this term is thrown about) a clumsy retcon of the story to fit in some extra chapters/money.

A lot of this comes from the fact that I played the game as soon as it was released, and so had very much finished everything the game had to offer before the first batch of DLC even dropped. If I hadn’t finished the game before the DLC was released I would almost certainly feel different, but that brings me neatly to Skyrim.

The narrative of Skyrim is no great shakes, so additions to the story have no real impact on its effectiveness. The joy of the modern Elder Scrolls games for me is in exploring the world and discovering the new. The problem I have with the Skyrim expansions isn’t so much the content — although I personally have absolutely no interest in building and furnishing an in-game house — but rather with the system into which they integrate. It’s easy to level in Skyrim, to gain extra skills and abilities, strength in combat and the tools required to survive.

It may not have been a problem for everyone — as a matter of fact I’m sure I’m in the minority — but the time I spent exploring the world of Skyrim levelled my character an extraordinary amount, to the point at which all of the combat content seemed trivial. I didn’t set out to game the system, but by sheer dint of the actual mechanics that was the end result, I was playing such an extremely powerful character that it actually removed much of the fun from the game.

My problems seem to boil down to two things; context and timing. In the case of Mass Effect 3 I feel that the context of the DLC is off, that it’s shoe-horning content back into a story that has already finished and thereby somehow lessening the experience, much in the way Walter Hill weakened his masterpiece The Warriors when he cut in some terrible comic book style scene transitions for the BD special edition, or, as a more contemporary example, the publishing of the Before Watchmen prequel comics. In the case of Skyrim it feels like a case of bad timing, as the more time you spend in the main game the less interesting the DLC becomes.

Is there a middle ground? I’m not sure. Borderlands 2 has done pretty well so far with their two DLC drops so far (and the third on the way this week), with a mixture of funny, expansive content and some great narrative choices, all released with impeccable timing, coming fairly soon after release and at regular intervals to ensure continued interest. But there are problems there as well. The lack of a level cap raise in any of the expansions so far makes the content, no matter how entertaining, feel somewhat like filler due to the lack of any actual character progress being made.

Is it possible to balance timing, context and content with DLC, or am I just being overly picky?

The year (or world, perhaps) that is just about to end has been a fairly good one for the old RPG – there have been some stand-out AAA titles, some excellent indies and a few great sleeper hits as well. The following, in no particular order are my picks of the 2012 releases.

Best Narrative RPG

There is really only one possible choice for best narrative RPG this year, and it’s a choice that is all but guaranteed to get someone’s knickers in a twist. Mass Effect 3 was always going to be a contentious game. As the last in a trilogy, any small flaw could and would be blown out of all proportion, and any narrative misstep, either real or imaginary would be the metaphorical “slap in the face” that people on gaming forums are so often the victims of.

Some people hated the ending, and more power to them if they did. Everyone has the right to their opinion, even if that opinion is wrong.

The way I see it, the entirety of Mass Effect 3 was the ending of the series. It was essentially a series of goodbyes, a series of encounters with individuals important to Shepard, giving the player the chance to spend a little more time with their favourites and say farewell to each of them individually.

The climax may have been a little muddled, but as a culmination of the multi-year mission to save the galaxy from an alien intelligence bent on wiping out advanced civilisation, I thought it worked a treat.

Best Action RPG

2012 has been a busy year for action RPGs, with Diablo III, Torchlight II, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and The Binding of Isaac: Wrath of the Lamb monopolising a hell of a lot of my time. No matter how good they are, none of these games are my pick for action RPG of 2012.

I’m going to cheat here and mention two games that exist within the same kind of game space but are polar opposites. Borderlands 2 and Dark Souls: Prepare to Die are both excellent action RPGs but have entirely different approaches. Borderlands 2 is all about fast paced action, loot, questing and levelling, whereas Dark Souls is about a measured approach, careful, timed combat, learning from mistakes and the careful hoarding and spending of the eponymous currency/experience system, souls.

Best Indie RPG

It has been a good year for indies, with Spiderweb Software releasing their best Avernum to date, FTL turning the Roguelike on its head by placing the player in the dual roles of captain and ship instead of adventurer, Torchlight II effortlessly showing up the far higher budgeted Diablo III and Half Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy both parodied and paid tribute to old fashioned JRPGs in 30 second chunks.

Despite all the competition my favourite indie RPG of the year, and one of my favourite games of the year is Legend of Grimrock, the painfully difficult, relentlessly old-school first person dungeon crawler that had me reminiscing about Bard’s Tale, Wizardry,  and Eye of the Beholder within minutes of booting it up.

Biggest Surprise

I have a friend who worked for Funcom as a mission designer and dialogue writer, so I had a fairly constant drip feed of information about The Secret World and how muddled the project was looking. I’d been looking forward to the game since it was first announced, so having some fairly negative insider information kind of flattened any enthusiasm I may have had. Said enthusiasm was further flattened when Funcom laid of half its staff part way through development, then laid off more again just before release. The final nail in the coffin came when I spent some time in the horribly unpolished, buggy and unstable beta.

When I was called upon to actually review the final game my dread knew no bounds — but somehow, miraculously, the final product turned out to be really quite excellent, featuring a great skill system, some truly fantastic quests and a bunch of really enjoyable dungeons. The Secret World has just gone free to play, so if you’re looking for something pleasantly different in the RPG/MMO space, you really have no excuse not to check it out.

What are your picks for the year? Let us know in the comments.

A couple of weeks ago I had a little rant about all the challenges developers face when trying to create a real world RPG, such as trying to make a real world place as thrilling to explore and discover as a fantasy realm, and how to keep things historically accurate whilst still being thrilling.

Well obviously someone heard me, because only a few weeks here I am immersed in a real world location, fighting real world enemies and solving real world problems in Legends of Eisenwald. Okay, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. Legends of Eisenwald has a tinge of low fantasy to it, but the emphasis is definitely placed squarely on people and places rather than fireballs and the omnipresent power of petty gods and demons.

Funded via a modest but successful Kickstarter campaign, Eisenwald is a turn-based strategy/RPG that sees players creating a hero from one of three classes, Knight, Baroness (an armoured archer) and Mystic (not available in the pre-beta code we played), recruiting an army and then conquering castles, completing quests and generally carrying on like the protagonist of a rather grim medieval tale. If you think something along the lines of Heroes of Might and Magic you’re not too far wrong — but rather than being just another also-ran in the realm of turn based strategy/RPG, Eisenwald bring some rather interesting new features to the table.

From what I’ve seen so far the world map is rather lovely to look at, if somewhat old-school, but the real point of difference between Eisenwald and anything else in the game space is how the combat system works. It’s at once more restrictive and more action-oriented than pretty much anything else I’ve seen from similarly themed games. Instead of focussing on troops moving around the field of battle to gain strategic advantage, the combat engine in Eisenwald revolves around the idea of each unit being able to do something every turn.

Melee units are considered to be in combat any time they are next to an enemy unit and cannot leave combat until all adjacent units are incapacitated. Ranged units act similar to artillery, taking up position and raining down fire on any unit in their line of sight. The combat system feels simple at first, but even in my all-too-brief time with the game some rather deep tactics have begun to emerge. Placing melee troops in such a way as to create an effective shield wall whilst leaving enough lines of sight for archers to fire through seems to be of utmost importance. Flanking, angle of attack and range all feature into combat calculation as well.

The game is still clearly in the early stages, and there is some definite polish that needs to be done. What I’ve seen of the story so far seems to be a little cliche, and the animations definitely need some tightening up to do the combat justice, but aside from complaints about final polish, Legends of Eisenwald is definitely shaping up to be an interesting — potentially great — (almost) real world strategic RPG experience.

I wasn’t able to capture any screenshots or video of Eisenwald but this Youtube clip, whilst very slow, captures some of the essence of the combat engine. Enjoy!

If, by some outside chance, the world makes it through 21/12/2012 in the same manner we have made it through the untold number of other apocalypses that have been prophesied over the last two thousand years, 2013 is shaping up to be a great year for PC RPGs. We’ve got another Dragon Age on the horizon, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Neverwinter,  and successful Kickstarter backed games like Grim Dawn, Shadowrun Returns and Wasteland 2 – but there are a number of smaller, interesting games set to hit shelves and Steam throughout next year. I’ve picked a handful I’m especially interested in.

Dungeonland

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of killing monsters and collecting loot. I’m also quite a fan of the silly or ridiculous. These are but two of the reasons that I’m looking forward to taking my frustrations out on the hapless minions of the evil Dungeon Master in Critical Studios’ upcoming action RPG, Dungeonland. Set in a dungeon themed theme-park, players take the role of one of three fantasy stereotypes and turn cuddly looking theme-park staff into gibs and puddles of viscera on huge, randomly generated maps.

The game supports drop-in, drop-out multiplayer for up to four people and will also feature a Dungeon Master mode, in which one player takes the role of the dungeon master and choose the enemies that will face the players, what loot drops, and other various other metrics.

Divinity: Original Sin

I’ve been a fan of the Divinity series for quite some time, having spent way too many hours with the isometric action/exploration RPGs Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity and the fantastic, full 3D Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga and Flames of Vengeance. With Divinity: Original Sins, Larian Studios has chosen to go back to basics with a top down presentation and turn based combat system.

Whilst the presentation of the next Divinity game definitely appear to be old-school, the mechanics below the surface appear to be anything but, with highly interactive environments, a reputation system that tracks everything you do (no more busting into random houses and stealing their stuff) and a focus on party-based multiplayer that includes a conversation system that allows all players to take part in conversations with NPCs. Larian has apparently wanted to make a turn based RPG for some time now, so it should be very interesting to see what they have come up with when the game is released early next year.

The Dark Eye: Demonicon

OK, the trailer below is a little bit crap, but I’m still pretty hopeful for The Dark Eye: Demonicon. The most popular pen-and-paper RPG in Germany, The Dark Eye has formed the basis of a number of games that have been released in Australia, but up until now none of those games was actually an RPG.

The most recent The Dark Eye game, Chains of Satinav was a point and click adventure with some lovely graphics and an excellent story, but as good as the narrative was, the player had little impact on the story aside from solving a puzzle and prompting the next cutscene. Demonicon will feature actual player agency, a real time implementation of the pen and paper rules set and takes place in the grim fantasy world of Aventuria.

Nuclear Union

For a game that is supposedly set to be released in 2013 there are few details as yet available about Nuclear Union but those that have so far are more than a little tantalising. Set in an alternate history in which the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t peacefully averted, the game takes place in a modern day Soviet Union ravaged by the lasting effects of nuclear war. Though decimated, the remnants of the Soviet empire have gathered together into a new city state called Pobedograd.

I don’t know anything about the actual plot as yet, or the presentation, but a serious RPG about a world ruined by nuclear war sounds right up my alley.

Anything I’ve missed or that you think could be especially interesting? Let us know in the comments below.

I’ve played what could politely be referred to as an “obscene” amount of Borderlands 2 since I first got sent it for review. According to Steam, I’ve put in 152 hours so far. That’s more time than I put into most games before moving on to the next thing. I only played Diablo III for about 40 hours before I got sick of the grind, and only made it to 149 hours in Skyrim after a year, three different playthroughs, and some DLC all combined. What is it then about Borderlands 2 that is keeping me playing long after I’ve hit level cap with two characters?

It’s not going to have an appeal to everyone, but Gearbox have capitalised on a few traits commonly found in MMOs designed to keep people playing after reaching level cap and “completing” all the questing content in the game. I’m speaking, of course, of repeatable bosses and the gear grind. Those words are anathema to some people, and it’s understandable why they don’t like the idea of doing something over and over again for the eventual promise of incremental reward, but to me there is an all but irresistible draw for two reasons.

For one, I’m a completionist. I like to explore everything, open every chest and unlock every door, so if you tell me that once you finish your second playthrough and reach level cap that some bosses in the world have a small chance to drop level 50 unique items, I’ll be there to collect them all.

Once I have those items, the other part of the game begins.

Years ago when I used to be a regular on the RPG convention circuit, occasionally I would partake in what was known as a “Roulette”. These games were essentially RPG gladiatorial combat. Each of the players is given the rules, usually D&D slightly modified so that every piece of equipment, spell and stat point has a points value. Players are then given a set amount of points to put together the most powerful character they can conceive, and the characters are then pitted against each other to see which is the most powerful.

A lot of that time the power comes from cleverly exploiting the rules. One year a player worked out that the Polymorph Other spell could be the deadliest in the game – all you needed was a bag of mice. Throw a mouse at the enemy, Polymorph it into a massive creature like a whale and roll a ton of dice for the ensuing falling object damage.

When I’ve “finished” a game, I like to do that. I don’t exploit or play with the rules when they still matter, but once I’m done with a narrative I take a lot of pleasure from gaming the system, finding ways to use the rules to do things that were not necessarily intended. I haven’t managed to solo Terramorphous yet, as I don’t want to use any terrain based cheats — but these repeatable bosses afford me the opportunity to keep playing with the rules to see what I can do with some overpowered gear and just the right skill trees. I might bang on about narrative and character all the time, but sometimes a pile of loot and some big red numbers can be just as satisfying.

For years, a number of gamers have been clamouring for a sequel to one of the greatest games of all time — Planescape: Torment. Unfortunately, thanks to some rights issues, we’ll probably never see a second Planescape game — and to be honest that’s probably for the best as any slight flaw in the game would be transformed into a crippling error by the powers of nostalgia. But for old-school RPG fans, a recently finished Kickstarter campaign could give us the next best thing. I’m speaking, of course, about Project Eternity, the isometric RPG by Obsidian Entertainment scheduled for a 2014 release.

To many backers, myself included, Project Eternity is something of a dream project; a veritable super-group of RPG developers, including Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment), Tim Cain (Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura) and Josh Sawyer (Icewind Dale II) teaming up to create an old-school epic. By the end of the campaign, just shy of 74,000 people backed the project on Kickstarter, with another undisclosed number contributing through Paypal, After asking for $1.1 million to make the game, Obsidian Entertainment raked in over $4 million, making the project the most strongly backed Kickstarter game campaign so far, and increasing the size and scope of the game far beyond the original parameters.

With only a single screenshot of the game existing, it’s far too early to speak about the game itself, but the amount of money raised, the way the stretch goals for the campaign were structured and some of the comments on both the Kickstarter and on gaming forums say some very interesting things not only about Project Eternity but also about the industry and community as a whole.

For anyone slaving away behind a desk (as long as that desk isn’t a giant mahogany number at the top of some high rise somewhere), four million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but in the world of game development it’s a drop in the bucket. Game development budgets frequently range into the tens of millions, with equal amounts of money being pumped into marketing. Compared to that, $4 million is pocket change.

One of the more frequent claims of game Kickstarter campaigns is that the project isn’t something that the major publishers wouldn’t touch, and that’s a claim we’ve seen repeated with Project Eternity. Whilst it’s disappointing to see beloved genres and styles falling by the wayside because of fiscal concerns, if you look at some of the base numbers you can really understand why major publishers don’t want to touch niche projects like Project Infinity. The game may have broken Kickstarter records for the amount pledged to a game, but when you take a step back you see that the 74,000 people who backed the campaign have in essence already bought it.

Sure, there will be extra profit made through GOG, Steam and retail sales, but if that went through a normal publisher they probably wouldn’t pay for the marketing campaign necessary to push the sales on launch.

Sidestepping the traditional publisher/developer deal should enable Obsidian to ride on something they have a lot of — goodwill. The clever way in which the Kickstarter rolled out stretch goals, each adding something beloved to both old and new school RPG players – new races, classes and areas, crafting, player housing and the like — has garnered them a lot of love in the community, but there is also another interesting thread of goodwill that has run alongside the Kickstarter campaign.

It’s not that controversial to say that Obsidian is a name almost synonymous with rushed or buggy games. KotOR II, Fallout: New Vegas, Alpha Protocol and Neverwinter Nights 2 all featured a number of bugs on launch, prompting many gamers to question whether the company ever did any kind of QA. That particular reputation appears to have been ditched with the Kickstarter campaign. Although a few people have commented on the Kickstarter itself or on forums that they wouldn’t contribute to a game they knew would be buggy, it seems as though the majority have decided, rightly or wrongly, that it is the traditional publisher/developer relationship that was responsible for Obsidian’s infamous bugs and lack of final polish, that budgetary restraints and unrealistic deadlines imposed by publishers were the cause of all ills.

I have no idea if that is true of not, but the mob has spoken and developers seem to be as virtuous as publishers are villainous. In the span of one campaign, Obsidian has transformed from a developer renowned for bugs to being all but beyond reproach. Now it’s time to see if it can hold up.

When it comes to playable characters I have a very definite type. I don’t mean blonde or brunette, lithe or curvy. I mean the type of characters I choose to play or create usually fall into one very certain set of parameters, personality types and skills. It doesn’t matter if the game is a turn based strategy RPG, an old-school isometric, real time/turn based, action RPG or FPS hybrid, I usually choose to play exactly the same kind of character. Or at least I did, up until about a week ago.

The characters I usually play are, for the most part, rogues (in the D&D definition of the word), both in personality and skill set. I like to open every box, unlock every locked door, move quickly and quietly and kill swiftly, preferably from a long way away. In more traditional RPGs like Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights this means that I create a straight thief character or a multi-class or dual-class thief/something hybrid. In action RPGs it means I choose the nimble characters with avoidance or dodge skills, like the Demon Hunter in Diablo III or the  Outlander in Torchlight II.

With FPS RPG hybrids, my character type is even easier to fall into – all it takes is either choosing some stealth skills or, failing that, picking up a sniper rifle and keeping to the shadows. I ghosted Deus Ex: Human Revolution and my first two play-throughs of Borderlands 2 were with Zer0 and Axton, the former using the sniper tree and the latter with a longbow nuke turret and a massively overpowered sniper rifle.

There is definitely an element of expediency that factors into my rogue-like choices. One of my goals in any game that allows for exploration is to see everything there is to see and discover everything there is to discover. Being able to pick locks and sneak makes achieving this goal much easier than having to fight your way through every obstacle that may be standing in your way, but it’s more the sense of familiarity and certainty that attracts me to these characters, both in style of play and the general personality type that either goes with them or I impose upon them: good natured rogues doing wrong things for the right reasons, opportunistic and mercenary but not villainous.

I’m not going to play pop-psychologist and extrapolate anything about my own personality from my game choices, but I’m sure someone else probably will. The reason I mention all of this is because, about a week ago I deliberately set out to play a character that I normally wouldn’t, nominally to give me fodder for this very column, but mostly to see if I would enjoy it as much as my usual style of gaming.

Salvador in Borderlands 2 represents the opposite of what I usually play. Short range, skills factoring more towards brutish run and gun survivability than finesse and he’s an idiot (though a good natured idiot) to boot. Surprisingly I’ve found myself enjoying my third time though Borderlands 2 more enjoyable than my first two precisely because I’m not falling into my comfortable old patterns. I’m finding myself having to approach everything in a different manner. I can’t hide at extreme range and pop off head shots or turn invisible when things get too tough.

Changing up my typical choice of character or play style has, in essence, redefined my play experience.  Not exactly a revelation, but I’m definitely surprised at the extent to which my enjoyment has been heightened by stepping outside the familiar and comfortable.

My eyes are gritty and I’m not regulating my body temperature too well. It’s a sure sign that I haven’t slept enough in a while. As an insomniac I’m used to the sore eyes and fatigue sweats, but today there are some lovely extra symptoms nagging me. My lower back is killing me, and depending on which way I hold my neck I get a stabbing pain in the back of my head. I haven’t felt this way in over a decade, since days passed unnoticed outside as I was first playing Diablo II. I have all the warning signs of loot fatigue and it doesn’t look as though it will be getting better any time soon.

Depending on how you look at it, the last week or so has either been very bad or very good for the addictive gamer or obsessive. In the space of only a few days two games have released, both almost entirely predicated on a scaling system of reward that keeps you hanging on for just a few more minutes in the hopes of snagging that next iterative gear upgrade. Borderlands 2 and Torchlight II are very different games, but at their core they both revolve around the same thing – the primal desire to have the biggest and best thing and the almost pure distillation of the relationship between risk and reward.

The two games couldn’t be more different in approach outside of the fact that one is a first person shooter and the other is old-school click-to-kill. Borderlands 2 features a great story, characters and dialogue that give the world of Pandora both a real sense of place and a villain who all but begs to be shot in the face, whereas Torchlight II has the most perfunctory of plots and NPCs who function as nothing more than quest vendors and occasionally expositrons. The approaches may differ, but the same heart beats inside both games. Frequent loot drops are the order of the day, and a system of  colour coding that it all but part of gaming DNA ensures an entirely disproportionate flash of excitement every time you see the glint of blue, purple or orange.

Most of the appeal of loot based games is built around getting the next big thing, be it a gun, piece of armour or some kind of other treasure that improves your character in a noticeable way, but for me at least, some of the appeal comes through the ludicrous way in which some of said loot appears. I’m not simply talking about the way that enemies often seem to be little more than pressurised sacks of gold, gear and goo that explode when you poke them, but rather the sometimes nonsensical distribution of loot. The rather brilliant 2004 action RPG, The Bard’s Tale, parodied this rather beautifully in the opening of the game when the eponymous hero kills a random wolf only to have the narrator question the logic and logistics of the amount of treasure it drops.

I love that ludicrousness in games based around loot. I love seeing a tiny monster drop an item far larger than they are, or drop something that they have no right in having in the first place. Torchlight II is a case in point. My Engineer now wields a giant vampiric, flaming axe that was dropped by a sword. That’s right – I killed a cursed sword and it dropped an axe. Forget the sound of one hands clapping or that stupid tree falling in the woods, Torchlight II is responsible for a modern day Zen Koan – “Why does a sword carry an axe?”

About this time last year I wrote a column about the fact that sometimes you can go back and revisit old games and still be impressed by how forward thinking, clever or good they are — despite any technological failings they may have.

In that particular case I was talking about Gothic 3, an ingenious but stunningly ugly game. This month I’ve had the somewhat dubious privilege of reviewing a game that has long been on my radar. Unfortunately the long wait for this “old-school” RPG has done it no favours, and unlike the case with Gothic 3, it has shown me that sometimes you definitely can’t go back.

The game in question is the long in-gestation Inquisitor, a Czech-developed isometric RPG with hundreds of hours of play, a massive story and interesting world. On paper it sounds like something that is right up my alley. I like rooting for the underdog, so a game that has spent 10 years in development and three years translating the 5000 odd pages of text should instantly fall into my good graces, but unfortunately nearly everything about Inquisitor simply seems to rub me the wrong way, triggering nausea rather than nostalgia.

Many of the classic isometric RPGs were, and still remain, rewarding — packing their maps with secret locations, encounters and stashes to reward the player for slowly lumbering around, but many others simply used large maps and slow movement speeds to extend the length of the game.

The first mission of Inquisitor –- the very first mission — takes forever. You can’t go into a town until all of the giant bats in the area have been dispatched. Completing the quest entails slowly walking around the entire map searching for bats, then heading back to the quest giver to check if you’ve killed them all because there is no indicator of numbers or locations.

Character creation is a hit and miss affair that all but entails multiple restarts until you finally work out how to properly min-max a character — and you’ll want to min-max, because the difficulty level is such that anything other than Easy inevitably results in death when you meet your first bat.

Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have minded the slog. I would have happily hunted down all of the bats and not batted an eyelid at a single opening quest taking half an hour of aimless wandering and click-to-kill combat but now — when the pace and interactivity of even the least ambitious RPG has increased exponentially — it’s hard not to look at old mechanics with a mix of melancholy and disdain.

Even the reams of well written, interesting text have begun to grate because I have become so used to voice acting and short, punchy paragraphs and brief snippets of incidental text.

I hate when someone uses the term “dumbed down” when referring to a game, as it usually has something to do with a platform bias or someone simply being a troll, but hate it as I do, I still feel it’s appropriate to use here — albeit in a slightly different context.

I don’t feel that games have been dumbed down, so much as I have.

Tasks I wouldn’t have shirked a decade ago now seem daunting and pointless thanks to the instant gratification of modern gaming, and the pace at which the story and action are delivered. Mechanics for the most part have been simplified, to the point of easy accessibility and malleability. Difficulty levels have been calibrated to entertain rather than challenge.

I’m not sure whether this indicates a failing on my part, on or the part of modern gaming. As an ever-evolving form, gaming is always going to redefine the way in which story and action are delivered. But have we lost simple pleasures under a slick veneer and instant gratification, or have I simply become too used to having content fed to me rather than hunting it down? Enquiring minds want to know.

Many many moons ago when multiplayer PC gaming was pretty much just LANs or hot-seat sessions, I used to play in a rather epic PBEM RPG campaign. For those not old enough to have partaken in this particular initialism, PBEM stands for Play By Email, an evolution of the age old Play By Mail system of gaming in which players from around the world would take part in the same campaign by exchanging letters.

The campaign I was in was set in the universe of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series. The central conceit of Amber is that there are two true worlds, Amber and the Courts of Chaos, and myriad shadow worlds that are reflections of the real.

In the campaign I took the role of a shadow world H.P. Lovecraft who discovered that everything he’d been writing about elder gods, alternate planes of existence and things that should not be was entirely true (though not in the way he thought), so he formulated a plan to walk between the worlds and build an army of Lovecraft shadows and other like minded loons to lay siege to the Courts of Chaos.

Needless to say, after over a year of emailing back and forth it didn’t go too well, but I had a grand time sending and receiving my little stories about my own losses and triumphs as well as those of the other players with whom I interacted. This was my first real taste of asynchronous multiplayer.

Asynchronous multiplayer is an interesting thing. The idea of being able to play with other people when and where you want without them having to be online is great, but strictly asynchronous gaming has its flaws. The PBEM model meant that the turns took as long as it took for the last player to send in their missive so one tardy person could slow the whole thing down, and writing your piece could often take a long while as well, as emails could sometimes span thousands of words due to the fact that detail in PBEM works much in the same way dice rolls do in a table top game – the more detailed a description the more likely the outcome.

Due to these factors the game that took us over a year to play could probably have been completed over a leisurely weekend if all of us had been face to face or if there had been some type of actual interface other than just email involved.

It’s this last reason that makes me very interested in Conclave, the most recent Kickstarter I’ve sunk money into — not because I particularly want to play this particular game, but because I want to see if the idea works.

The idea behind Conclave that has me so excited is a seamless transition between synchronous and asynchronous multiplayer – if all of the players are online at the same time, turns take place in real time, if they’re not it transitions to asynchronous and send the turn to the other players much in the same way Frozen Synapse or Words With Friends does, for example.

The fact that the game will be playable on any device that can support a HTML5 browser is also very interesting, making it a virtually omnipresent way of playing both synchronous and asynchronous games. Whilst the very old school tile based nature of Conclave has no special appeal to me other than some pleasant Gold Box nostalgia, I find the ambition worthy of both praise and donation. It will be interesting to see what, if anything comes from the developer’s ideas and innovations.

A few weeks ago, Czech developer Warhorse announced they had started work on a new RPG set entirely in real world, historical locations. The pedigree of the Warhorse team alone is enough to make me more than a little interested in the game – Dan Vavra, the studio head was director of Mafia and lead designer on Mafia II, two of my favourite open world games, and other members of the team have worked on ArmA, Operation Flashpoint and UFO: Aftershock – but it’s the other detail for the as yet unnamed RPG that make me really excited. The game will be developed around the rather spectacular CryEngine 3, will be open-world, massive and entirely set in historically accurate locations.

There aren’t too many historically accurate RPGs around. Whilst there are no concrete reasons for this, I would posit that the reason for the dearth of historical RPGs would be the difficulty of keeping historically accurate whilst giving the player a compelling story, choice and consequence – compounded with the difficulty of open world development when you can’t populate the world with monsters, loot and random encounters to keep players busy between scripted encounters.

The closest we’ve really come to a historically accurate RPG in recent years is the Mount & Blade spin-off With Fire and Sword, a game based on a the first novel in a hugely popular Polish trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz. The trilogy and game are set in the 17^th century and revolve around politicking and warfare during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, a Cossack Rebellion in the Ukraine that lead to the Ukranian war of liberation from Poland.

Although the setting for the game With Fire and Sword is undeniably fascinating (far and away my favourite Mount & Blade game) it does suffer somewhat from the adherence to real world values. The open world is vast and features a number of real world locations, but there is a general lack of form or direction that is in part due to the nature of open world games but is also a factor of the real world setting and how unused players are to dealing with the real world in role playing games.

In fantasy and science fiction RPGs, especially open world ones like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout series, players are used to random encounters, loot drops and being rewarded for exploration with new new stories, locations, monsters, dungeons and loot. For the most part such a thing is not entirely possible in a real world RPG.

Unless there is a valid reason for interesting loot you really can’t justify a randomised loot system in a real world RPG. Likewise you can’t feature dungeons or other such locations unless they should actually be there. Naturally you can’t populate your world with monsters but you can’t exactly feature frequent random encounters either without breaking the realism of your setting.

So how then do you go about creating compelling RPG content in a historically accurate setting? One solution would be to concentrate more on character interaction, choice and consequence than on combat, allowing the player to live and interact within a historically accurate setting without risking either breaking the setting or risking repetition by putting the emphasis on the normal staple of the open world RPG, exploration and combat.

On the other hand, you could take the opposite route and base your game entirely around exploration and combat, sending a character into a strange new world to explore and conquer, like a Conquistador in America, a Portuguese sailor in Macau, an escaped African slave freedom fighter in Brazil, an explorer in the Amazon or any other setting that could make your character a stranger in a strange land. There’s also the possibility of an interesting middle ground, setting the game within a lesser known historical period that could be as new and interesting to players as an original fantasy or science fiction world.

It’s way too early in the piece to know what route Warhorse is going to take with their as-yet-unnamed historical open-world RPG, but as someone who is both a lover of history and a person who constantly craves something new, I can’t wait to find out.

Banner image via jOuey.

It’s the middle of July, the month in which people frequently complain about the cold and then turn around and question the guy upstairs as to why it’s so damn hot in the middle of winter (in my case the guy upstairs is called Tony and he has the rather disturbing habit of answering his door in this underwear). It’s also the start of the dead time for game releases, that disappointing period in which releases slow to merely a trickle in the lead up to the year’s end and the flood of AAA titles that come out in the months before and after Christmas.

Luckily this time of year is also when Steam steps up to the plate and offers some insane savings on games for a few weeks. Due to the daily and flash sales the prices of games are a little unpredictable but even so there are a host of treasures you can find for cheap throughout the sale and beyond. These are just some of the games that have chewed their way into my credit limit.

Mount & Blade

http://store.steampowered.com/app/22100/

Medieval sandbox RPG’ing with a realistic bent. Mount & Blade isn’t the easiest game to get into thanks to some rather arcane controls but it’s a fascinating attempt to create a genuine sandbox environment that is entirely player driven. There are no story elements to Mount & Blade, simply five different factions, the option to remain neutral or turn outlaw, castles to sack or buy and towns to pillage or protect. A small but dedicated modding community keeps things interesting.

Two Worlds 2

http://store.steampowered.com/sub/13656/

The original Two Worlds had a fascinating but ultimately flawed item stacking mechanic that meant you could upgrade any item by combining it with another item of the same type and a rather cruddy plot. Two Worlds II takes a much more Elder Scrolls approach to the story and free form character development. It’s not the best RPG by any stretch of the term but it’s solidly enjoyable and will fill in 50 or so hours whilst you wait for something better to come along. Be warned – the final fight is one of the very worst ever to disgrace a game.

The Binding of Isaac

http://store.steampowered.com/sub/15408/

From the makers of Super Meat Boy comes The Binding of Isaac, a Rogue-like, Robotron-esque procedurally generated bullet-hell action RPG thing with seriously disturbing biblical overtones. Little more needs to be said.

Divine Divinity

http://store.steampowered.com/app/214170/

One of the finest and most expansive post-Diablo action RPGs, Divine Divinity has finally made its way to Steam. Even with a facelift to support higher resolutions, Divine Divinity isn’t the most attractive game but it is huge. There’s around 100 hours of isometric questing to be had over the four massive maps (totalling around 20,000 screens in all) and the character creation system makes for dozens of unique character builds. It also has a really stupid name.

Divinity II – The Dragon Knight Saga

http://store.steampowered.com/app/58540/

The Dragon Knight Saga is actually an expanded remake of Ego Draconis the direct sequel to Divine Divinity, featuring a wealth of extra content and the Flames of Vengeance expansion. A very different game to Divine Divinity, Divinity II moves the action to full 3D third-person. The combat is fast paced and fun and, as an added bonus your character can transform into a dragon for fast travel and engage in Panzer Dragoon-ish combat.

E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy

http://store.steampowered.com/app/91700/

Despite the word divine showing up in the title, E.Y..E.: Divine Cybermancy has nothing to do with the previous two games but is instead an action/RPG/FPS based on A.V.A., a Cyberpunk RPG. There is some rather shoddy English translation to be found, some of the mechanics are rather clunky and the interface is too convoluted but even so it’s hard not to be immersed in the atmosphere, intrigued by the idea of psionic Cyberpunk and impressed with how much freedom players have to tackle quest objectives in their own fashion.

Serious Sam: The Random Encounter

http://store.steampowered.com/app/201480/

Before the release of Serious Sam 3, Croteam had the rather brilliant idea to farm the IP out to a bunch of small developers to see what kind of creativity they could bring to the table in the form of some small downloadable Sam titles. Serious Sam: The Random Encounter is far and away my favourite, transforming the circle-strafing, old-school FPS into a turn-based Japanese-style RPG. Players control Sam and other party members as they run backwards shooting at all manner of monsters. Players control weapon selection, attack angle, all the time moving up and down the screen to dodge a torrent of bullets.

Are there any finds that I’ve missed so far? Let me know in the comments.

I like games that do things differently. When you play little but RPGs and puzzle games you need that variety to keep things running smoothly. With your grandiose epics, like Mass Effect, Dragon Age or Skyrim, that difference can come from story and character as the mechanics kind of play second fiddle to the narrative. Action RPGs, or games of acquisition as I still prefer to call them, are pretty much the exact opposite.

The differentiating factors between them have to be mechanical more than narrative, because it’s the combat and loot that keeps you playing (and replaying) them rather than the compelling story. When the most nuanced character interaction in a game is how far the loot flies from a body once it is eviscerated you really have to have solid fundamentals to keep people interested.

For games of acquisition this is where things get a little tough. While there are some mechanical elements that can be played with to create an interesting point of difference, others are so fundamental to the nature of the games that they are all but sacrosanct. You can really see this in the way different ARPGs handle character creation and loot.

Nearly every ARPG will have some unique point of difference in their character selection. Whether it be the hybrid multi-classing of Titan Quest, the universalist approach of Diablo III in which every player of the same class gets the same skills but can augment them in different ways, or the very straightforward character-speccing of Torchlight, pretty much all of them use similar styles of randomised loot tables. Occasionally an ARPG will play with the fundamentals of combat somewhat, such as the omnipresent companions in Diablo III, the reliance on ranged combat over melee in games like Space Siege or a shift to first person as in Borderlands, but they are the exceptions, not the rule.

I bring all of this up because I recently had the dubious pleasure of reviewing Krater, an interesting but ultimately doomed strategy/ARPG hybrid that fails because it tries to reinvent too many wheels whilst ignoring most of the fundamentals.

Instead of allowing players to choose and create characters, Krater puts the player in charge of a team of three rather generic, gas mask wearing staples: a tank, DPS and healer. Instead of skill trees or advancement, each character has two skills and a number of slots that unlock with levels for augmentation to add effects to one of their two skills and raise their stats. Loot drops are limited to the single weapon each class can wield, augments, crafting items and vendor trash. There’s no sense of character development or continuity as players are encouraged to employ new characters rather than spend ludicrous amounts of cash to increase the level cap of the characters they already have, and no sense of advancement thanks to the lack of loot or skill advancement.

I may complain that things get too samey, but sometimes I think you have to admit that some of the omnipresent tropes in gaming are there for a reason. The wheel has already been invented.

I didn’t pay much attention to E3 2012 until it was all over. I swooned over a few trailers and was impressed by a few announcements but for the most part I found the show this year to be extremely disappointing, especially when it came to PC RPGs. Not one exclusive was announced or shown (thank Jebus for CD Projekt Red and Cyberpunk!), so all we were left with is a direct port, three multi-format titles and an expansion pack. Slim pickings indeed.

That said, there are a few titles in the mix that sound genuinely interesting. South Park: The Stick of Truth has the potential to be brilliant if the developers can balance the humour with actual gameplay, whilst keeping the two in tone with the show, and Dark a vampire stealth RPG could have some legs, just so long as the developers played the abominable Vampire Rain and vowed, under threat of eternal damnation, not to commit any of the same, broken, bug ridden sins.

Dark Souls, a direct port of a console game, is still shaping up to be one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting upcoming PC RPG – not so much for the game itself, but for what it represents and could potentially lead to. All reports from E3 stated that the PC port of Dark Souls is a bit of a mess. Although the new areas and bosses look great, the game showed serious frame rate problems, even when running on a ridiculously overpowered PC.

The fact that the developers have also openly stated that the game is their first attempt at a direct port and not really optimised for PC, because there isn’t much of a PC community in Japan, doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence either. But – and this is a but big enough that Sir Mix-a-Lot would find it appealing – Dark Souls represents something new in the PC RPG world, and has a style that could potentially thrive much better on the hardcore aesthetic and always-online nature of the PC.

It also represents something that is all but lost from the gaming scene at the moment – horror-themed gaming that is actually, if not scary, then truly tense. Unlike most horror games in which monsters are an obstacle to be surmounted (usually through excessive force) and rarely come as a surprise, monsters in Dark Souls are always a challenge, always have the potential to kill you and almost always have the upper hand. It plays on the same kind of themes that form the basis of most good horror, that you may be in command of your actions but you are never truly in control.

There’s still a long way to go for an RPG to be as frightening as, say, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, or its sequel, the recently announced and amazingly titled Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs but if it’s going to happen anywhere it’s going to happen in a PC environment thanks to the indie gaming environment and digital distribution networks like Steam. As such, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Dark Souls works on PC and sells well enough that a few enterprising developers decide they’d like to take a tilt for themselves.

Screw E3 – the most exciting upcoming game announcement has already been made.

CD Projekt Red, the developers of The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings announced at their annual summer expo that their hitherto unnamed science fiction RPG in the works is in fact, Cyberpunk, based on the classic Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020 pen and paper role playing games. Not too many details have been announced as yet, but what there is should definitely make any RPG fan rather happy in the pants.

The game is being developed by a stable of Witcher veterans, and Mike Pondsmith is also on board with the project. During the announcement all the right key phrases were hit doled out, such as “advanced RPG mechanics”, “mature content” and “cutting edge looks”, as well as mentions of things that will definitely please both fans of the pen-and-paper game and CRPGs in general, including customisable characters, different character classes, non-linear structure and a huge number of weapons and items.

For those not familiar with the pen and paper game, Cyberpunk 2020 is set in a dark corporate future based on the 1980s works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and the rest of the so called “Mirrorshades Group”, a collective of authors who set the groundwork for the genre and collaborated on the highly successful short story collection, “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology”.

Set in the year 2020 (originally 2013, but the second edition of the game pushed the timeline forward seven years and retconned some game history to fit better with real-world events such as the reunification of Germany), the Cyberpunk RPG plays on all the most recognisable tropes of the genre; man vs. machine, transhumanism and what it means to be human, corporate government, conspiracies, oligarchic rule and the substance of style. Against this oppressive backdrop, teams of marginalised characters fought for freedom, knowledge and cold hard cash.

Now for some rampant speculation. Whilst the pen and paper game had nine character classes when the game launched, its unlikely that the CRPG will have as many. The original classes, Cop, Corporate, Fixer, Media, Netrunner, Nomad, Rockerboy, Solo and Techie all have a place in the pen and paper world, but in the videogame spectrum a few of them probably won’t be as relevant as the others. Cops seem like a natural fit for the game, as do Solos (mercenaries and assassins), Nomads (think Mad Max) and Techies (mechanics and doctors).

Corporate (business leaders and deal makers), Fixer (information brokers and smugglers), Media (news men) and Rockerboy (underground musicians composing the soundtrack to revolution) characters have potential if the game allows characters to talk their way out of situations, but I’d be prepared to put decent money on only one or two of the archetypes being available, if any.

The character class I don’t think will be appearing at all will be, oddly enough, the single most iconic Cyberpunk character class of them all – the Netrunner. These hackers jack directly into the Net via a neural interface, allowing them to take control of computers and networks, fighting on a virtual plane against AI, countermeasure software, malware and corporate ‘runners hell-bent on taking them down. The reason I don’t think this character class won’t appear in the game is because it makes sense for every character to be able to jack into the Net, both from a development and gameplay standpoint. The virtual realm of the Net would probably have to feature a whole new suite of gameplay features to make it anything more than a mini-game, so it wouldn’t make sense to develop them for a single class out of many.

No details of the story have been announced as yet, but fingers crossed some of the key characters from the RPG show up, like Alt Cunningham, the virtual ghost of a brilliant Netrunner who had her mind fried and uploaded when one of the mega-corporations extracted her conscience, or Alt’s boyfriend, Johnny Silverhand, a famous rocker with a chrome arm. No release window has been announced as yet, but you had better believe I will be stalking CDP until I hear something more.

Like pretty much everyone else on the face of the planet (or at least it seems that way, from how clogged the servers have been) I’ve spent the lion’s share of the last week playing, or at least trying to play, Diablo III. Although I am want to jest about the server stability, erratic ping, the infernal error 37 (and the fact that the bloody game somehow defaulted my server selection from America to Europe so not only did I contend with a pretty poor ping, I now have a level 40 monk I can’t use in multiplayer with some mates), I still love the game.

I bang on all the time about narrative and structure, choice and meaning but sometimes, just sometimes the only narrative I want is the excuse to run around killing things and the only choices I want to make are those concerning which skills I want to specialise in and what gear I want to wear.

Way back at the beginning of this column I tried to define what an RPG is to me, and I lumped action-RPGs like Diablo into a category I call “games of acquisition”, so-called because the primary goal in all those games isn’t the narrative, or in many cases isn’t even the strength of the combat engine, but instead the wealth and consistency of loot that gives a constant cycle of reward for the risk taken to obtain it.

Ever since pulling my first accidental all-nighter with Diablo in 1997 I’ve been a fan of the loot grind, always willing to put in that extra hour or extra random dungeon to see if the piece of loot I really want drops, or if a weapon that will help me kill monsters that little bit faster so as to expedite the whole recursive process. Over the years I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours going through this grind. I don’t have statistics for all the various games of acquisition that I’ve laboured away at, but rather shamefully Steam does inform me that I’ve put 107 hours into Titan Quest, 149 hours into Torchlight and a night’s sleep shy of 200 hours into Borderlands. The question isn’t whether or not I like these kind of games. The question is why.

I’m usually the first to complain about grind in RPGs or MMOs – that horrible cycle of having to kill things over and over again to level, make money or hopefully get a random loot drop that will make progress a little easier. Why is it then that I love the exact same mechanic when it is the very essence of a game? I think that ultimately it’s that very directness that I love. Other RPGs strive for immersion and emotional resonance, but games of acquisition, from Diablo in 1997 to Diablo III in 2012 and beyond to Borderlands 2, Torchlight 2, Grim Dawn, have a brutal honesty about them.

There may be bells and whistles attached, but ultimately each of them has, or will revolve around a randomised loot system calibrated all but perfectly to constantly put that magic carrot in front of you, urging you to kill just one more monster to see what explodes from the corpse. The sheer volume of randomised items means there’s always the chance that you’ll see something new or something amazing and there’s no pretence that there’s a deeper meaning than that. There’s a certain purity to that I can’t help but find immensely appealing.

Or it could simply be that I’m attracted to shiny things. Now to try the server again – fingers crossed I won’t time out.

I love pirates. In the eternal battle of pirates and ninjas (I am leaving out the cowboy wild card) I will always go for pirates. To me, the only real ninjas lived and died in the 80s, when Franco Nero battled Sho Kosugi, or Godfrey Ho forced all of his filmic ninjas to wear headbands with the word ninja on them. If they were really lucky the headbands featured a picture of a person actually dressed as a ninja as well.

Hell, my love of pirates even prompted me to watch the episode of Deadliest Warrior in which the pitted a pirate against a knight. The trauma prevents me from remembering exactly who came out on top, but I think they both died in the end due to the rampant stupidity of the premise.

I think my love of pirates over ninjas comes down to the fact that they were a real thing, not something made up of film cliches, myths and apocryphal accounts of their semi-mystical martial prowess. Every seafaring culture has some kind of piratical history, and those histories are as varied as you could expect. There is a staggering wealth of pirate history to draw from. There are great tough guy (or girl in this case) one-liners, such as when Anne Bonney, a notorious pirate in her own right, told her husband, Calico Jack Bonney, as he was captured by pirate hunters, “if you’d have fought like a man you needn’t hang like a dog”.

Or horrific, and verifiable acts of villainy, such as when Black Bart Roberts burned 80 something slaves alive because it was more expedient than setting them free. With such a rich history to choose from, why is it then that pirates in pop-culture in general and games in particular as so dull?

As I’ve said many a time before, I’m a big fan of the Gothic franchise. Whilst ArcaniA was pretty terrible, the previous spin-off, Risen was pretty good if you could get past the community theatre level voice acting and the horrible first 10 odd hours. When I heard that the sequel would be pirate-themed, I was overjoyed, thinking it would be a case of two great flavours together at last. I got my wish – there are pirates in my Gothic but they’re not what you would call the most original characters. While some of the non-pirate characters follow the interesting and morally grey path that previous Gothic franchise games have taken, the pirates are a far more well-worn path, echoing both that of Hollywood and that of the uninspired.

]The pirate characters fall into the same broad categories as seem to make up most pirate-themed entertainment – there’s the drunk guy, guy that wears a hat, angry drunk guy, guy who used to have a hat but doesn’t any more, old pirate who is angry and drunk, sassy pirate princess, the superstitious one, and all the other characters you’ll recognise from umpteen movies and the few recent games in which pirates have appeared.

There is some effort made to be mature in the approach to pirates, but that pretty much boils down to swearing and talking about rape a fair bit. The story itself is interesting and follows on nicely from the first game, it’s just that many of the main characters, aside from the swearing, seem to fit better into a spectacularly unsuccessful Renny Harlin film than they do a dark RPG.

So why is it then that a group with a wealth of history and stories gets such a short shrift when it comes to the few games they appear in, whilst the omnipresent ninja gets all sorts of different treatment? It would be easy to say that the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (the second of which spawned one of the few interesting, though not fun, pirate games in recent memory), the most recent mega-popular pirate themed entertainment, was to blame, but that doesn’t sit right.

I think, ultimately, the problem comes down to how old people were when they last thought seriously about pirates. Like dinosaurs, pirates seem to be a thing that little kids obsess over, but as they age such childish obsessions are left behind, leaving a few remaining weird beardies to turn their childhood obsession into either a career or a hobby they can annoy other people with at parties. Whilst that handful think about histories and collect stories, the rest only really remember the watered down and heavily sanitised tales of youth, leading to the endless cavalcade of peg legs, parrots, eye patches and sea shanties.

Of course, it could also simply be that the majority of people (erroneously) think that ninjas are more interesting.