Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall to Make an Old-School RPG (or Two)?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 3, 2012

I love that “Old School RPG” is such a marketing thing now that it’s being used as the working title of this project. Worries about shark-jumping notwithstanding…

An Old-School RPG by Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall!

As have many other fans, I’ve told Brenda that I would be absolutely thrilled if she were to helm another RPG in the future. It’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is. Which I will do gladly, in spite of lingering Kickstarter fatigue.

Once again, the Kickstarter thing baffles me. Am I, too, more willing to spend money on a promise than on a deliverable? I don’t think so, but I don’t know for sure.

Another thing that makes me scratch my head. A lot of these mainstream / former mainstream game developers are doing Kickstarters for budgets that are nowhere near the kinds of budgets they are used to. Okay, maybe these guys (Loot Drop – Romero, Hall, Brathwaite, etc.) have been in the lower-budget realm for a while, and (hopefully) know how to handle it. And I guess InXile and DoubleFine have been starting to live in that realm as well. But Obsidian? And it’s quite the range – though the seven-figure budgets are getting all the attention, there are some pretty high-profile titles by industry vets out there working with less than that.  Supporting a real meat-space office with actual employees instead of partners & contractors raises the burn rate pretty fast.

I think the line between “indie” and “non-indie” just keeps getting smeared. I do consider a project fully funded by Kickstarter or something along those lines to be indie, as backers have contractual say in the project.  I think the spectrum of indie production quality will be broadened considerably in the near future. Many years ago at the IGF is was considered somewhat scandalous that a finalist (Savage) had an actual $2 million budget. In 2013, that won’t be common, but it will hardly be unheard of.

That was a AAA budget when I first entered the games biz. Not adjusted for inflation, but still… things are getting very interesting.  We’re getting to the point where we’re just looking at a continuum of games, from games made with nothing but spare time in a 16-year-old’s bedroom, to the biggest 8-digit budget blockbusters.  This has always technically been the case, of course (at least since blockbusters started costing 8 digits), but this is becoming the new normal. I think I’m down with that. But the landscape is definitely nothing like it was ten years ago.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Build, Buy, Bestow, or Bereave: Equipment Acquisition in RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 2, 2012

Back in the old dice & paper days, equipment upgrades – the cool, magical kinds – were things you acquired as loot and as rewards. Occasionally there’d be some low-level, generic magic swords for sale at a shop, but magical gear was mainly a reward bestowed by the DM or module designer for surviving and clever play. While it was left the the Dungeon Master’s discretion, the modeling in game modules didn’t include many opportunities to buy powerful gear in those days.

The rules were very vague on making magical items of your own – it involved a lot of money and time spent not adventuring, and weren’t much more than an explanation of how such magical items came into existence in the first place. In other words, YES, high-level magic-wielders like you COULD make ’em, and so can you if you have a LOT of down-time, but it’s generally not worth it to the active adventurer.

Most old-school western CRPGs, following the lead set by Dungeons & Dragons, generally stocked the stores with little more than starting gear for low-level characters.  Over time, as Eastern console RPGs started building up steam, stores tended to be stocked with progressively more powerful gear, generally equivalent to hard-earned gear you could have obtained in the previous area.I guess that way there was a minimum baseline of gear, but it felt weird that the ultimate ubersword of the dungeon near the previous city was just sitting on a store shelf in the next.

At some point, crafting became a thing. I blame Ultima (starting with Ultima VI, circa 1990).  However, crafting in Ultimas  – at least as I recall – was pretty low-key. You either crafted simple weapons that you could easily buy in a store, or crafted as part of a quest to create an uber-item.  Otherwise, it was pretty much baking bread and milking cows for personal consumption. As the 1990s came to an end and we started getting cross-pollination between fledgeling MMORPGs and the single-player RPG genres, we got more and more instances of crafting – though still more often than not quest-based with very specific recipes

D&D 3.0 came out, and … well, things changed. Effectively, magic items were put in the hands of players, rather than the Dungeon Masters (or, for CRPGs, the game designers). Go to a large enough city, and you could buy anything short of artifact-level that you wanted, according to the rules. Alternately, you could craft your own, for an expenditure of experience points and gold for the requisite materials. Easy-peasy. I was not too fond of this latter change, as it really turned what I’d always treated as an in-game reward into little more than a revenue source. In other words, instead of being thrilled with a really cool magical item found amongst a dragon’s horde, any item that wasn’t exactly what the player wanted was simply thrown into the ol’ Bag of Holding to be sold in town for cash to buy a specific item. It also seemed to take what was once a source of mysterious and … well, magical… possibilities (at least to less experienced players) and turn it into little more than a shopping list.

Pathfinder has resolved this somewhat, by getting rid of the rules that specified that all items were always available within a price range dependent upon settlement size, and instead making random items available. This, in my mind preserves the excitement and … well, I guess the gambling thrill… where you never know quite what you are going to get. Finding out what seemingly random items are available for sale within a town is almost as exciting as identifying what seemingly random items you discovered in a dragon’s horde. I suspect this change was also made to make crafting feats more valuable. In D&D 3.x, crafting wasn’t really much more than a way of getting items for half-price (but at an experience cost that really sucked). Pathfinder did away with the XP cost and reduced the availability of items.

So what’s best in an RPG – particularly a shorter, indie-sized RPG? I asked about crafting on Twitter and received a wide variety of responses.  Overall, the bulk of the responses came out – unsurprisingly – to “it depends.” Some people love it, some find it a distraction, but overall people felt that it really depends upon the nature of the crafting system and the focus of the game.

For me, as an old-school gamer, I tend to prefer seeing the traditional approach of having the best items in the game as rewards, with the exception of “quest-style” crafting where you can put together a more powerful item out of hard-to-obtain components. Buying or crafting items is better for maintaining a baseline standard of equipment or stocking up on expendable items.

But I have to admit – the extremely free-form, unrealistic, and (in my view) completely non-optional crafting system in the D20-based Knights of the Chalice was pretty awesome. And I can certainly see a number of non-traditional approaches that would make building or buying the focus of the RPG over looting and questing. (For that matter, I’ve enjoyed RPGs with significant equipment component whatsoever).  In fact, I have some ideas on the back-burner simmering right now about just that kind of game.

Do you want to weigh in? How should “magic stores” work in an RPG? Do you prefer something like Knights of the Chalice where your most critical equipment in the late-game will be crafted as they are needed? Do you prefer a game where any non-quest item in the game can be made by the player? In a traditional RPG, is crafting something you normally pay attention to?

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 17 Comments to Read

Rolling A New One…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 1, 2012

With another (short) campaign completed, I stepped out from behind the Game Master’s screen Saturday night and joined the rest of the group creating a character for a new campaign.

I really do enjoy this. I always have. I remember creating heroes and villains for Champions in geometry class while Mr. Droneburg lectured on using his overhead projector. Hey, it was how I stayed awake (usually), what with the lights off and stuff!  I enjoyed the mechanics of character creation – particularly in Champions – coming up with what kind of “niche” a character could fill, his strengths and weaknesses, etc. But I also loved imagining the stories they would have. Who would they be? What would happen to them?

I still get that, rolling up  a new character for dice-and-paper RPG.  The anticipation of new adventure, my thoughts on how to manipulate the stats to match a particular backstory or concept, is a great feeling. Incidentally, my new character for the upcoming Pathfinder game is a paladin (haven’t played one of those since that unfortunate childhood incident in the Abyss) with the “drunken brawler” feat* and the “iron liver” trait. Yeah, this is gonna be interesting…

I want character creation in CRPGs to be just as fun. But it’s got several things going against it.

First off – there’s system unfamiliarity. Learning a new system is already a challenge, and tends to reward “safer” choices rather than experimentation. Even with a game that seems to be pretty replayable, I’m not too inclined to play through a 40+ hour game several times. I have other games to play!

Second, CRPGs have pretty fixed storylines that may not allow me to really “play” my character. With a good game master, in dice-and-paper games there’s always the chance that at least part of the game will be customized for your particular character choices and personality. You don’t get much of that in CRPGs, and what is there feels pretty “canned” (because it is). It’s the nature of the beast. Computers are poor at creativity and storytelling.  And that’s even a rough task for humans on the fly.

Third, “roleplaying” feels pretty weak in a game where there are no other human players to share it with.  You may be making up your own story in your mind, which is a great exercise for a writer, but I guess I’m too accustomed to having an audience / fellow players when I do that.

Fourth, character creation in many games is kind of a stale, unexciting process – one that many players would like to avoid altogether so they can jump right into the “meat” of the game. Many games now choose to skip this process (or at least delay it, a la Bethesda’s RPGs), but I maintain it can still be a fun stage of the game.

These are not insurmountable obstacles. The first one is a game design issue. There are ways of making the process easier (and fun) to learn. And there are ways of making it a very repeatable process, so the player can take advantage of his familiarity later in the game that he might not have had in the first few minutes. The fourth challenge is similar. Maybe the solution isn’t burying or avoiding the character creation process, but doing a better job of making it part of the game. As I said last week, things like incorporating lore into character creation can really make this process a lot more interesting and help the player get acclimated to the new game world more quickly. We make entire games around the process of building things  – civilizations, tower defense setups, cities, houses for our simulated people – and there are very addictive “life sim” games that wrap an entire game around building & improving your character. There’s no reason this has to be a dry, boring experience.

Adding multiplayer is an obvious solution to the third problem, but it’s not an insurmountable problem in single-player games. Facebook has shown us that there are all kinds of ways to make a basically single-player game feel like a social experience. In my opinion, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. We have tons of options available today, in a world more connected now than at any point in our history.

The thorniest problem is the second, and while it may not be ‘solvable,’ I do feel it can be alleviated. Emergent events and behavior, and procedural content, can supplement canned behavior to customize a game around a particular playstyle. Soldak’s RPGs can give us a glimpse into a few of the possibilities here, as can roguelikes, Minecraft, The Sims, and dozens of other examples.

One of my goals with Frayed Knights was to go back to the dice-and-paper well a little bit for inspiration. I feel like CRPGs kinda branched off from the tree a long time ago, went its own way, and rarely returned to see if there were more fun elements that could be incorporated into the genre today that were perhaps impossible to recreate back in the early 80’s, or perhaps didn’t exist even in the dice-and-paper world back then. There are still a lot of cool things that could be done. And making the character-creation process more fun and exciting is only one example.

 

* He’s human, so he gets the extra feat at first level, needed to obtain the prerequisite (Endurance).

Filed Under: Design, Dice & Paper - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Lore

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 28, 2012

How many of you actually pay attention to the optional “lore” in an RPG? Reading / listening to exposition about the background, paying attention to the little details about the setting and backstory?

I’m kind of middle-of-the-road. Frankly, too many game worlds have some pretty boring lore. Many tomes end up going into the “TL,DR” category for me. However, sometimes a game world really grabs me, and I can’t get enough. I read the books, I piece together the details, and these days I look up stuff online on a Wiki somewhere.

I think a lot of it depends upon the amount of effort the designers took into making an interesting world. In the case of a game series, this often evolves, with haphazard world-design in the first game, with a bunch of retconning and revisionism bringing it all to life a couple of games later. To be honest, while Dragon Age never grabbed me, it was clear the designers did put a lot of thought into their world. At first, I was convinced it was going to be yet another paint-by-numbers fantasy universe, but early in the game they provided some very interesting background tidbits that made it come alive. Once my interest is piqued, I want to learn more.

But it takes something to get me there.  Lots of exposition early in the game will leave me cold – as it will most players, I expect. Usually I’m uninterested in the game world until later in the game. At some point I cross a threshold where I begin to care about the game world and the characters in it, and then I want to find out more. Maybe it’s a commitment thing.  Maybe it’s even more of a craftsmanship thing.

And also, as I’m fond of saying, the Clone Wars were a lot more interesting when they were only hinted at in Star Wars than when we actually saw it unfold in the prequels. Perhaps the best use of “lore” in an RPG is not to explain the game world, but to fire up the player’s imagination to fill in the blanks for you.

Another thing – for designers – to bear in mind: The best “game lore” comes out not in straight-up exposition, but is hinted at in art, style, off-hand comments, and the details of the game world. While the “character generation screen” has kinda gone out of favor in recent years (but seems to be experiencing an indie-driven revival, huzzah!), one of the things I did love about it was the anticipation and hints at what I might come to expect in the game before me. While letting the player choose the face of his avatar is no doubt important, perhaps it is more important to give the player a sense of how his new character belongs in this world he’s about to explore.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 14 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights 2: Stripping!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 27, 2012

Judge:Sergeant Highway. Drunk and disorderly, assault on an officer, urinating on a police vehicle?
Highway (Clint Eastwood): Well, it seemed like the thing to do, sir.
— Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

Hindsight is a great thing. Sometimes it reveals that the thing that seemed to be the thing to do, maybe wasn’t the best thing to do. Which is useful if you find yourself in a similar situation in the future. Like if you are making a sequel…

I had a lot of very cool ideas when I started work on Frayed Knights.  By “cool,” I really mean, “naive,” “stupid,” “impractical,” “useless,” “boring,” “unnecessarily complicated,” or flat-out “wrong.”  Fortunately, I weeded out the worst of them pretty early.  Things like having “only” seven different cities your party would visit. Or having really complex conversation systems with a detailed reputation and knowledge-transference system (across said seven cities).

But a lot of over-design still made its way to implementation – at least partially.  I never came close to really meeting the potential I spent so much time trying to manufacture. And in retrospect – though it seemed to be the thing to do at the time – it’s probably better that I never took advantage of it. Just ‘cuz you can do something doesn’t mean you should. For example, the ability to ‘stack’ armor. I thought it made sense that you would be able to layer on armor that was historically worn that way – like wearing a padded gambeson under chain mail, which was in turn under plate mail.  Yeah, I totally went there. It’s in the code – partly – in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. Thankfully unused.

That’s not to say I can’t envision a game where that wouldn’t be a cool – or even critical – element. But Frayed Knights was not that game. And in retrospect, I put a ton of effort into things that were more in danger of distracting the player from the core gameplay than improving it.

Sometimes – such as with the spell system – I made a sincere effort to take advantage of the complexity and flexibility of the system. I don’t know if anyone playing Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon – other than myself – has ever cast all of the available spells (or had them cast upon them). People pick a few and stick with them – especially in a system that allows you to “upgrade” spells quite a bit, as Frayed Knights does. And as a designer, I didn’t create a compelling need for all of those spells. I took pains to make them all different, but those differences tend to get lost in the jumble of numbers and heat of battle. Equipment and enemies were in the same boat.

While having all kinds of intricate detail sounds good and works well in a game where you may only have a dozen spells or items, it scales poorly. And in reality, in order to have a prayer of keeping things remotely balanced, I ended up with a ginormous spreadsheet full of formulas that I used to help me keep everything more-or-less balanced. In a sense, it calculated all the stats for me based on certain parameters, and then I’d fiddle with the final results. That was still a ton of work for a game with spell and item counts well in the triple digits (and monster counts very near to that).

But in the end – does it really matter than this spell does 5% more damage for 5% more endurance cost, with a -1 to its attack chance, over another spell? Not really. It was cool that I could do that (and a WHOLE LOT MORE), but those kinds of subtleties aren’t very interesting to players. To be honest, that’s not all that interesting to me, either, and I’m a junkie for that kind of detail. In many ways, my efforts to add so much flexibility actually obscured my end-goal: It’s easy to lose the forest for the trees when you are overwhelmed with stats, particularly when you (the designer) are up against deadlines and have to re-balance a bunch of monsters and equipment to fill a “hole” between levels 5 & 6 where there isn’t enough going on, etc.

After a lot of effort put into getting the technology for Frayed Knights 2 up-and-running on a new engine, I’m finally to the point where I’m starting to “port” the actual game mechanics from the old codebase.  This is actually way more fun than it sounds, as it’s going faster than expected; it helps when you are working in familiar territory. But it is also giving me the opportunity to correct some of these problems, strip out a bunch of useless / boring / non-functional / obsolete / poorly implemented stuff, and clean things up. I get to address these kinds of problems, as I am in the midst of creating a bunch of new content for a whole new level range that I’d barely touched before (Frayed Knights 2 is currently addressing a level range of around levels 10 – 20, with an upper cap currently set at 24).

One approach I’m moving to is to take all those separate formulas from my ginormous spreadsheets, and put them in-game. So instead of calculating and tweaking and transcribing tons and tons of stats from spreadsheet to game, it’s all built into the game rules, and all I have to do is define these game elements by their deviations from the “norm” for a particular type / level.  Not only is this tons easier to create, balance, and maintain – but it really helps me focus on the important aspects of the game. It’s easier to avoid getting drowned in subtle differences, so I can really focus on the role of that element in the game, and how it remains interesting.

After all, as a player, I am rarely concerned with subtle differences in an enemy’s hit points or chance of resisting spells. What is interesting to me is how I have to alter my tactics to best deal with the threat. It’s even more interesting when I’m dealing with a mixed group of enemies with complimentary special abilities.

So while there’s still a lot of numbers going on in the background, the focus right now is on me stripping away the obscuring variables and getting down to the essentials. A lot of this can be done with zero impact on the player – the game still looks and plays the same – but they provide me with an easier interface as a designer.

Some things, however, should be done which would have an impact on the game. For example, in Frayed Knights 1, there were lots of pieces of equipment that offered very little difference from each other. The differences were so subtle as to be completely uninteresting.  Ditto for spells. Should I reduce the number of spells, feats, and items available in the game, to make things much more straightforward for the player?  I’m still mulling this one over.

The challenges here include:

1. I don’t want to “dumb it down.”As an RPG fan, I tend to prefer the games with deeper mechanics. I like exploring the gameplay possibilities, and testing out weird builds. That’s fun for me. That’s where Frayed Knights got its complexity, and I don’t want to lose where it came from. But complexity for the sake of complexity is not “smart” – it is its own brand of dumb.

2. It must remain compatible with the original game. Characters from game 1 can be imported into game 2, and while I’ve always acknowledged that they may undergo some changes in translation, I’d rather it not be too extreme. The core of the system must be intact.

3. I’d like to preserve (and enhance) some of the cool side-effects of throwing in everything but the kitchen sink in the original design. For example, having a gazillion spells meant that I could make several spells completely optional in the game, and let players find these spells by having them taught to them or learning them from scrolls. If anything, this would be enhanced by fewer overall spells (so it’s less of a “ho-hum, yet ANOTHER spell” feeling when you acquire a rare spell).

4. Part of the charm (IMO) and genesis for Frayed Knights was in its homage / parody of the RPG hobby, which often included an overwhelming plethora of options (particularly as the games matured, and the publishers kept wanting to crank out more source material for players to buy). Will I lose that by streamlining things? Did I take that too far in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon? Did anybody even appreciate the joke?

5. If I keep things the way they are – well, how can I improve the player’s experience? I caught a bit of grief with interface design that I ended up optimizing for the “worst-case scenario” – but I don’t know if anybody other than my testers ever came close to a worst-case scenario, and instead found themselves frustrated by what felt like an unnecessarily cumbersome approach for what should have been pretty straightforward (for example, Arianna using active feats).

These are all things that I would appreciate feedback on.

If you haven’t played Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, you can get it here. There’s even a free demo. Even better, to see what I’m talking about when I mention the depth and tons of detail and content, you can check out the free strategy guide. Yeah, there’s a ton packed in there. I’m rather proud of all that, really… but going forward, I want to make sure I’m truly improving things.

 

 

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Utah Indie Night – September 2012

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 26, 2012

Utah Indie Night was at Utah Valley University this time – another new venue!

Pizza was served, but alas, our hosts only imagined a moderately large crowd.  I’m not sure how many were actually there, but for the formal presentation we had standing room only, in spite of several extra chairs brought into the room. The pizza ran out, the chairs ran out, and people kept on coming. While that was unfortunate, it’s also AWESOME. Utah Indie Night has grown quite a bit over the years. I think our original night was something like 14 people. Or was it 9? I can’t recall. Anyway – there were people. Plenty.

The presentation was by Grayson Richie (sorry if I misspelled your name, dude), on HTML 5 games – primarily the business aspects. I really appreciated this approach, because there’s just not much time to go into a technical “how to” session, and technical stuff is often well-served by numerous websites. But distribution, the “m” word, penetration, compatability… we indies get focused on game making and tend to neglect these critical pieces of knowledge. Grayson spoke quickly, covered a lot of territory, and the information was extremely useful. While he went over time, it was pretty information-dense and I personally didn’t mind. The only real criticism that I’d make is that he was a bit of a cheerleader for HTML 5, and made some blanket statements about its suitability and market penetration without qualifying those statements or explaining his own background and why he has reason to believe these things.

As far as the rest of the evening is concerned – I showed my tech demo for Frayed Knights 2 and my engine (codenamed “Gygax”) which included the editing tools and everything else. A lot of people had not played Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon yet, which possibly means I’m an utter failure at marketing, but I loaded up the original and let them play it. It’s nice not having to make excuses for a work-in-progress, anyway.

As far as I could tell, several of the games being presented were repeats of games shown at the last indie indie night or two, but I’m sure there were several new ones. Curtis of Califer Games showed me his newest work-in-progress, now that March to the Moon is out — an educational game to teach players Japanese. Curtis was a Japanese teacher for several years, so it combines two areas of his expertise into one.

My favorite part of indie night is talking with other indies. One interesting conversation with Herb Flower (of LinkRealms) involved Kickstarter – and a little bit of mutual grousing about how people seemed to be far more willing to pay – and willing to pay much more – for a hope and promise than for an actual product. He shared an experience from early in his career (in the 1990s, I think – the Half Life 2 era) with a mentor in the games industry. This guy told him that it’s five times easier to pitch a design document than an “almost finished” game. It’s the same psychology at work.

This bugs me on several levels, primarily because I’ve seen far too many broken promises and failures to deliver.  It’s easy to sell hope. It’s a lot harder to deliver a finished, final product. Maybe it’s because I’m so jaded, but I give 1,000x or more credit to people who actually finish a simple game than to the biggest dreamer with lots of charisma but nothing to show for all his “smart talk” and big ideas.

But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway…  I feel like I missed about 2/3rds of the meeting, but that’s bound to happen with a good group (and on a night when I’m showing my own stuff). But it was – as always – a great experience to meet and chat with other indies. I think we need that. Sometimes it’s really nice to know there are other folks in the same trenches as you, even if out-of-sight most of the time.

UPDATE: Greg’s write-up, with list of more of the games that were shown, can be found here.

Filed Under: Utah Indie Game Night - Comments: Read the First Comment

History or Hate?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 25, 2012

So while I theoretically approve of the sentiment, there’s a problem with blanket policies preventing games from using real-world cultures, races, and governments as “enemies.” Like this one:

App Store Rejects World War II Game Over Japanese Flags

This is about a full step worse than banning games (and movies, etc.) on account of swastikas.

Dumb. Yet, I personally don’t know where I would feel comfortable drawing the line. Maybe that means the line shouldn’t be drawn anywhere? Knowing the kind of fringe folk that thrive on the Internet, I have my suspicions about what kind of stomach-turning crap might get released without it. Would it be enough (or too much) to allow exceptions for historical simulations?

To be honest, there was some propaganda from that era that is pretty dang shocking to modern eyes. (Although much of what happens during war would be pretty shocking to modern eyes accustomed to peacetime… and even so, some of what happened in World War II and preceding it went beyond the pale) – so a game authentically re-creating the experience with period media for “authenticity” could be either an even-handed (and educational) representation of the era… or it could simply be an outlet for racism.

It’s tough to call. I have a pretty libertarian streak, so my inclination is usually to err on the side of unrestricted access and let the audience or marketplace decide. But Apple made iPads and iPhones a closed system with the app store as a gatekeeper – and therefore responsible (and, arguably, liable) for the content that appears on the system. Better to have a blanket policy in place for easy rejection of the obvious crap, and then use good judgment on exceptions,  I guess. I doubt it’s possible to write a blanket, unbiased policy that covers all situations without the need for human adjudication.

I do worry about things like this having a chilling effect on game design and the potential of the medium to encourage thoughtful discussion.  Not that this happens too often – but it does happen, and the potential is always there. While I’m by no means well-versed in the history of World War II, much of my knowledge has actually come from gaming – either directly from the games (usually simulators & strategy games), or because my curiosity was piqued by a game set in that era . It’d be a shame if all that rich detail and history were to be whitewashed in an effort to avoid controversy and possible rejection from major game portals.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana.

Filed Under: Politics - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

What Is an Old-School RPG?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 24, 2012

I’m going to make a confession. This is a big one, coming from a designer of an “old-school style” CRPG, and from a guy who’s constantly harping on the joys of old-school gaming.

I don’t know what the hell “old-school” means.

Sure, I was there playing these old classics when they were new, and I still play some of them today (Hey, I just re-played Ultima III a few months ago!) I remember clearly when The Bard’s Tale was the hot new thing. I was reading “behind the scenes” articles in magazines and books when the big players of the era seemed like they’d be pumping out RPGs until the end of time … and are now long shuttered.  I’ve chatted with some of these guys at length at GDC (back when it was called CGDC, even).  But that doesn’t mean I know what I’m talking about.

And sure, I’ve got my own little pet ideas, but they apparently conflict with other people’s ideas, so apparently I don’t really understand what it means. That, or  old-school is in the eye of the beholder.

For example… turn-based vs. real-time (or “action”). Action-based, “real-time” RPGs have been with us for a very, very long time. I like to refer back to Gateway to Apshai, published in 1983 (yeah, over a decade before Diablo), which was pure action-arcade-RPG. You had the trappings of an RPG, gathering loot and gaining levels as you used the joystick to do action-based battle against pixellated bad-guys. We can also go back to Ultima III or Telengard, two of the earliest CRPGs I ever played. These were “real-time turn-based” if that makes any sense. You had time limits to choose your actions. Worse, the only “pause” command was getting into some input loop where the games were asking for additional details or confirmation of your action.

So really, as far as I’m concerned, and as much as I like to refer to “turn-based” games as “old school”, the truth of the matter is that both have been with us about as long as we’ve had commercial CRPGs.  There’s absolutely nothing inherently new or improved or better about action-based gaming. And there were absolutely no technical limitations preventing RPGs from being real-time / action based back in the day, Mr. Findley. (Hopefully he’s repented of that attitude now that they’re working on Wasteland 2). There were lots of action-RPGs back then.

I guess I’m echoing Rowan Kaiser here, which was not my intention.  But the variety runs the gamut. Perspective? We had top-down, first-person, iso, side-scrolling, hybrids, and variations like crazy. Even many games that changed perspective when combat started. Complexity? You’ve got dirt-simple titles from back in the day that makes the most “dumbed-down” modern offerings seem like piloting the space shuttle by comparison. And then you have some pretty awesomely over-the-top tactical stuff, like SSI’s Wizard’s Crown.  And humongously detailed systems with tons of dynamic-generated content and gazillions of factions, like Daggerfall. And everything in-between. Old-school games had you exploring a single, open-ended dungeon. Or an open-ended world. Or led you along a very constrained path, level-by-level.

We can’t even agree about a time-period for “old-school.” Maybe it’s my age, but I still have a tough time thinking of any game published in a year that begins with a “2” as “old-school.” It’s like… for me, you take the history of commercial computer games, which for me begins around 1979, and mark it at the halfway point between then and now – which would be about 1996 – and set that as the “old-school” demarcation. Yeah, I’ll give it a little bit of extra slosh, but I have a tough time thinking of a game like Oblivion as old-school. Friggin’ kids. Plus, as I’m a retro-gamer who is still playing older games for the first time (I just recently finished Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords), I  have a tough time thinking of some of these games as being all that old.

When I talk old-school, I tend to talk about the classic games that I personally played, which included some classics as well as some stinkers. Back then, I didn’t worry about whether Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse was a “real” RPG or not. Hardly anybody worried about that until the “boom” of RPGs hit its peak in the early 90s and then started contracting.  Sure, you occasionally had an article explaining the difference between the two popular genres, RPGs vs. Adventure Games. How quaint that seems now. Really – it was all good.  Except when it was bad.  When did we start worrying so hard about what box we fit these games into, anyway? And how did that happen?

So you wanna know what “old-school” means? Maybe it means all the amazing variety of game styles that used to be sold but are no longer “in vogue” amongst mainstream publishers. Instead, they’ve narrowed their scope down to just a tiny handful of crowd-pleasing styles that they keep trying to perfect. But as the whole “mainstream publishing” thing is also losing relevance (at least for PC development),  I don’t even understand how important that really is anymore.

I’m still going to refer to some of the things I do as “old-school,” but like the word “indie,” it’s really just a poor shorthand to potential players to reset expectations. But old is the new new. Or something like that.

But really, I still don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 16 Comments to Read

Swords & Sorcery Underworld Gold Released

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 21, 2012

OlderBytes has released Swords & Sorcery Underworld Gold.

It’s amazing how much time can be spent in polishing and tweaking, huh?  While he’s already begun work on the sequel, creator Charles Clerc has been putting a lot of time, effort, and money into creating what I’d term a “remake” of his original game. I had dinner with him in Paris this summer, and the game was “mostly” done then. But not content with just a graphic overhaul, he has spent a good deal of effort expanding and improving the experience. A lot.

And now – you can check it out yourself and see what you think.

You can grab the free demo of Swords & Sorcery Underworld Gold here.

The game is clearly rooted in the tradition of the earlier (1-5) Might & Magic RPGs, particularly with respect to classes and combat style. It is not a particularly complicated game by any stretch -it’s fairly easy and straightforward to get into – yet it retains that interesting positioning concept from many of the old party-based first-person RPGs. Positioning can be changed in mid-combat, with creatures moving in and out of range for some subset of the party. Your party members can do likewise. Most enemies now have special attacks to contend with. And there are lots of items in the game to make equipping your party interesting.

All told, it’s a fun old-school RPG that you can sink some quality time into. If you are looking for a more modern foray into dungeons reminiscent of the old Might & Magic / Wizardry / Bard’s Tale style crawlers, you should definitely check out Swords & Sorcery Underworld Gold. Enjoy!

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

That Sound You Just Heard Was the Other Shoe Dropping on the Heads of the Publishers

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 20, 2012

Congratulations! You have won. “You” meaning gamers and independent (not necessarily indie) game developers.

This has happened, according to Forbes. Publishers have tried to use developers with a reputation (in this case, Obsidian) as false-fronts for Kickstarter campaigns. The interesting part about the article? It’s “Publishers.” Plural. I sincerely doubt these were big, AAA publishers. As amusing as it would be to imagine UbiSoft asking Obsidian with hat-in-hand to help them scam some funding. But still…

Sadly, the ethics (or lack thereof) don’t surprise me too much. Through mainly second-hand knowledge, I’ve come to expect some pretty shady dealings from this particular class of publisher. But that’s not the twisted thing. Here’s the mind blowing part of it:

You’ve basically got publishers begging developers for funding.

Think about it.

Okay, now… again, considering some second-hand stories I’ve heard about the lower echelons of publishers, this isn’t overly surprising either. I’ve heard of some truly bizarro offers in the past to indies that left said indies scratching their heads and asking, “Ummm… we take all the risk, do all the work, and then… you do WHAT, exactly, for your lion’s share of the profits?” They were like the world’s worst vanity-press.

But this really signifies something even bigger. In the past, publishers were able to dominate the coveted middle ground of the game industry landscape – and by extension, gatekeepers and squabbling lords of the industry – because they controlled three critical factors:

1. Funding – the publishers had the money to fund game development.

2. Marketing – the publishers knew how to market and sell games. Developers rarely did.

3. Distribution – Duplicating disks or cartridges was expensive, as was packaging, and publishers could take advantage of economies of scale. Plus, they were the gatekeepers to the distributors, which was the key to getting into the stores.  And that was largely the most practical way of getting your game into the hands of customers (even the shareware phenomenon Doom didn’t sell nearly as many copies as the more traditionally published-and-distributed sequel).

Well, the digital distribution age has really made #3 pretty dang wobbley. It’s not just indie games, anymore. Physical media sales still dominate, but it’s been steadily eroding over the last several years.

Indies have been forced to learn and do marketing themselves, but publishers still (usually) have the solid upper hand there.

But now #1 – funding – is changing. With developers like DoubleFine, InXile, and Obsidian pulling in serious cash – albeit nowhere near AAA cash (yet) – for promises and a reputation, and smaller indies often pulling in reasonable amounts for their projects, there are now even more alternatives to the two historical standbys, publisher funding and “bootstrapping.”

Leg #1 of the traditional game publishing model tripod is beginning to get kicked out from under it.

No, this doesn’t mean the end of publishing as we know it. At least not for a while.  I’m not expecting EA or Activision to file bankruptcy anytime soon on account of this. The new distribution and funding methods we’re seeing now are basically  a market reaction to a combination of enabling technology and processes, and a pretty crappy system that was in place for decades that inadequately served developers and customers. Some lighter traffic is getting re-routed around the (deliberate) bottleneck. But these “smaller games” with lower budgets are exactly the business of the smaller publishers, and they are the first layer to get shed as their traditional way of doing business is becoming obsolete.

I will once again invoke the words of EA’s Vice President of Corporate Communications Jeff Brown in 2005, speaking on the rising entry costs to participate in the games industry on the advent of the (then) new generation of consoles, “It is now impossible to ‘Blair Witch’ this business.”

Awesome prognostication, Jeff. As for my own attempt to do the same: In a few years, will the traditional publishing model actually become a secondary approach to getting your game to market? I have a tough time imagining it, but at this point I can’t rule it out.

Go, indies!

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

March to the Moon!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 19, 2012

Curtis (AKA Califer), a good friend and fellow veteran of Sensory Sweep has released March to the Moon, a funky, goofy, shooter-with-RPG-elements which is really a lot of fun. Version 1.1 was just released for PC and XBLIG, and it’s getting good reviews for the 360. It perhaps lacks a little bit of curb appeal (a problem I’m familiar with, myself), but its well worth checking out (and for only a couple of bones, it’s dirt-cheap). It’s been a consistent favorite at Utah Indie Nights during its development.

Here’s the link to the PC Version of March to the Moon.

It’s weird and goofy, but solid shooter-y fun. Your “character” begins on a noble quest to rid a bar’s basement of rats. Lots of rats. Rats with plasma beams, even. And other stuff. On success, you just keep right on walking, marching through all kinds of hostile battlefields all the way to… the moon. It’s not even that long of a walk. You are shooting formations of enemies with all kinds of bizarre powers as you go – orcs, goblins, aliens…

Use WASD or arrow keys to move, and you can bind your powers to the JKL and ; keys. Space brings up the level-up menu.

As you make progress, you can “level up” and purchase improved skills (or alternate skills).  Soon you are a walking (well, marching) machine of blazing death…. which you need to be, bcause the end levels pretty much require it. Dying is no great setback. And … if you complete your march to the moon, you can begin again Diablo-style as a more powerful character against a more powerful sequence of levels.

NOTE: As of this writing, there’s a little error in the demo version for the PC – it links to “March to the Moon.exe” instead of “March to the Moon – DEMO.exe”. I would mock Curtis (Califer) about this if I hadn’t ever made similar mistakes myself. We will not speak of a particularly disastrous patch I uploaded one night that only existed for a couple of hours…

Anyway, for PC gamers, the demo should be updated in a few hours (or you can make the manual fix). Or you can check it out on XBLIG.  Either way,  it’s an amusing little game. Enjoy!

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Is Old-School is Back In Session?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 18, 2012

Maybe it’s just because it’s the object of my focus, but it feels like “old-school” RPGs are back in favor … at least a little bit… everywhere but at the big publishers. Game journalists are talking about it. Kickstarters for games like Wasteland 2, Dead State, and now the huge response to Obsidian’s Project Eternity have taken off, as experienced dev teams find grassroots support for doing new games in classic, older styles. Inquisitor, Legend of Grimrock, and Avadon are all moderately high-profile releases embracing “old-school” classic western RPG sensibilities, and there have been a slew of lower-profile current indie releases (like Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, Eschalon series), and upcoming releases (Age of Decadence, Swords & Sorcery Underworld – Gold, etc.) that are likewise built solidly on the tradition of classic western RPGs.

Not to mention the avalanche of 16-bit JRPG style games…

Is it because the market is finally responding to pent-up demand? Is it just a quick nostalgia trip? jIs it just a few misguided indies jumping aboard a phantom bandwagon to make games for a much-smaller-than-believed audience?Or am I totally reading too much into all of this?

I don’t really know. I’d love to believe that we’re seeing a resurgence of old-school RPGs, that the old school is back session, and that RPGs are going to kick some serious butt the way they used to kick serious butt and all that.

I’m thrilled to see this surge in classic-style RPGs, particularly in conjunction with more mainstream fare. I like both.

So if this is really a Thing, where would we go from here?

Here are a few of my opinions on the subject of old-school role-playing games:

I believe that there is no unified theory of “old-school goodness.” If anything, RPGs from the 80s and much of the 90s were far more diverse than what we have today. There was an awful lot of experimentation going on that is very rare in the modern, mainstream, risk-averse arena. The indies can recapture that spirit. But we need – as both customers and developers – to be willing to deviate from the conventions of the big hits of the era. In a lot of ways, what contributed to the drop in popularity (and availability) of the genre was a host of “me, too” clones of poor to mediocre quality.

I believe that the “old-school” has a lot of lessons for game designers that have since been at least partly forgotten. And yes, I believe a lot of these lessons are in the “what not to do” category.  Or at least, “what should be improved upon.” But a little bit of retro-gaming… including some of the less successful games of the era that were perhaps flawed gems and quietly forgotten … can reveal a lot of great ideas that could be improved upon today.

I believe that “old-school” is an origin, not a destination. I don’t believe that the classic games of the past were in any way perfect (and, after reading many interviews with their designers, I’m sure they’d agree). I think that modern RPG styles have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in some cases, abandoning aspects of the old classics not out of disrespect, but out of a mandate to broaden their audience and to follow the success of their more immediate predecessors. I feel there are a ton of potential evolutionary branches that could be pursued using, say, a couple of games from 1992 as a starting point instead of 2010. I think we’re going to be as creatively bankrupt if we dogmatically imitate the past classics as imitating the most recent multi-million-selling hits. But I think we have an incredible potential today to build upon a foundation consisting of multiple decades.

I do feel that a lot of modern, mainstream titles have found interesting ways of incorporating some of the flavor and mechanics of their classic predecessors. But I don’t feel that’s the “only way” to do it.

I want to see indies branch out – and I believe they are. I think a lot of indies are now re-learning the lessons of the past, and in many cases must learn these lessons the hard way, just as our predecessors did.  But it’s a good start.  I hope that the indies can share their experiences with each other, to take advantage of combined experiences – what works, what doesn’t. How to do things better. I hope what we’ll really get out of this in the near future is a wonderful variety of indie RPGs built with old-school sensibilities, modern techniques and conveniences, and some unique mechanics and flavors completely of their own.

Filed Under: Biz, Design, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Indie Innovation Spotlight: FTL

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 17, 2012

I haven’t done one of these for a while. And while I’ve done some spotlights on some pretty old games (including one from the early 90’s!), I haven’t put the spotlight on any really new games.  That’s partly because “new” is a relative thing, and quickly loses it’s shine. But mainly it’s because I’m so busy I often don’t get around to games until they’ve been out a month or two.

But I was intrigued by this one, picked it up right off the bat, and spent a little too much time playing it over the weekend.  Based on a little bit that I’ve seen, I’m not the only indie whose productivity was sabotaged by these two guys based out of Shanghai. Let me get over a little bit of envy (their Kickstarter campaign was a huge success), and tell you about it:

Game: FTL (Faster Than Light) by Justin Ma and Matthew Davis

What Is It?

Loosely, it could be considered a real-time (ish) “Space Roguelike.” The Federation has been defeated by the violent Rebellion, and your ship possesses key information that may be the Federation’s last chance to turn the tide, by destroying the Rebel Flagship. But the Rebellion is in hot pursuit, chasing you across the galaxy as you bring this critical information back to the remnants of the Federation fleet. Each “jump node” that you travel to with your FTL drive (hey, the title has to tie in somewhere, right) brings a different challenge…  often a conflict, many times a text-based “choose your own adventure” situation where you have a decision that is not always what it seems. The map is randomly generated each time you play (a full game can be completed in somewhere between 1 and 2 hours, if you live that long). You can upgrade your ship, and change your crew as you progress through the game. Your crew will also improve their skills as they perform their duties — assuming they don’t die.

Like most roguelikes, permadeath is the price of failure, and there’s no easy way of reverting to previous saved games to back out of a bad situation. A disastrous encounter can be hard to recover from.  And sometimes – many times, actually – discretion is truly the better part of valor, and “victory” may mean simply surviving long enough to engage your FTL drive and escaping.

FTL offers multiple skill levels. Like some Solitaire games, sometimes you may get a situation that is (IMO) pretty much unwinnable from the get-go, with simply a bad combination of a lack of available resources.  Maybe I’ll eventually get good enough to pull a Captain Kirk on these Kobiyashi Maru setups, but for now I tend to just let these campaigns come to their inevitable conclusion and low final score.

 

FTL: Faster than Light – Trailer from Justin Ma on Vimeo.

What Makes It Stand Out?

I was originally a little put off by the screens of the game (no demo is currently available) which seemed to focus only on my ship, not the grandeur of interstellar exploration and combat. This is by design, and after playing it a little, I wholeheartedly support this decision. The focus of the game is not on space – it’s on your ship and her crew.  Space combat Star Trek / Firefly style experience,  emphasizing what’s happening on board your ship and to your crew (and to your enemy’s ship and crew). “Space” is abstracted, but every compartment and major system of your ship is represented, as well as every crewman. Oxygen will bleed out of compartments (or open hatches), fires will start, crewmen will take damage when their compartment is hit, or from fighting fires, or from combat with boarders who transport over from the enemy ship or arrive by some other situation.

The player must make tough decisions in the thick of real-time (with pause!) combat. What’s more important – fighting the fire in the med bay, attacking the remaining boarder who is sabotaging your sensors, or manning your post to keep the shields up against the enemy warship?  Sometimes you can find a more clever solution – like putting out the fires by opening the airlocks and depriving the room of oxygen (this can kinda work against invaders, too, if you’ve upgraded your doors). Crewmembers may be of multiple races – with inherent strengths and weaknesses – and develop skills over time. Generally speaking, specializing them by having the same crewmember working the same station is best, but it’s usually a good idea to cross-train and develop additional skills. Whether you like it or not, a skill in combat may be something all your crew will end up developing in time – assuming they survive.

Crew members aren’t your only scarce resources. Power is always at a premium – even with a heavily upgraded ship, you will max out your power output before maxing out the potential power demands of your systems. In easier fights, it’s not too hard – your medlab doesn’t need power when nobody is hurt yet, so you can put that extra power into your weapons or engines (better for dodging incoming missiles). Scrap is the money that may be exchanged with the occasional store or trader (or trading event). Drone parts and missiles are extremely useful in combat. And fuel is always a precious commodity – run out of fuel, and you will be at the mercy of random events until overtaken by the rebel fleet.

Speaking of the rebel fleet – that creates the other scarcity in the game, which is your freedom of movement. Sooner or later, the rebel fleet catches up to you. Once that happens, your encounters will be against heavily armed spacecraft with very little to gain from victory (because you can’t stick around to scavenge supplies from a destroyed enemy, so you usually net no more than a point of fuel). Once you jump into a new sector, you have only a few jumps before the fleet enters and slowly begins “taking over” part of the map, propelling you forward and eventually out of the sector, to the next (and more dangerous) one.

There’s a very satisfying variety of battle tactics available as you make progress – which get used against you as well.  Early in the game, there’s nto much more to do than choosing upgrades carefully, targeting an enemy’s weapon system, and judiciously rationing power and missiles to the combat. Soon, however, both you and your enemies will have far more options at your disposal, and combat can become pretty frantic (thank you, pause button!) as you fight fires, repel boarders, repair and man equipment, activate or disable remote-control drones, fire special attacks, invade ships yourself, and playing your strengths against the enemy weaknesses (while avoiding the same).

It’s not all about the combat, either. Many times situations will come up that give you a choice. Sometimes the outcome may be random – a ship in distress may actually be pirates planning a trap. Upgraded equipment (or crewmembers?) may give you additional options to minimize the risk in these situations. For common situations, you may be able to guess the potential risk to decide whether or not to get involved. Once you become somewhat familiar with the different alien races, this gets easier, although with the galaxy in such turmoil there are no guarantees.

Anyway, the bottom line is that while “Space Roguelikes” are a rare breed unto themselves as it is, FTL takes it a few steps further with a very innovative approach that better captures the experience of some movies or books. I find that as I manage to survive past the halfway point of a campaign, I begin to identify a lot with my ship and her crew. I feel a lot more like a starship captain, giving orders and making the hard decisions against impossible odds than in any other game. And they pulled it off with pretty simple 2D graphics and a bunch of text menus. Go figure!

 

FTL is available at their official website, and is also available via GOG.com and Steam.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Indie Innovation Spotlight - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: The Story So Far

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 14, 2012

It’s a little challenging to talk about the Frayed Knights storyline without getting into spoilerific details, but I’ll try to keep it as light on the spoilers as possible.

Originally, Frayed Knights was intended as a single game, which I expected to clock in at around sixteen hours of gameplay. It grew. It grew a lot. Even after splitting it into three parts, the first chapter – Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon – is about thirty hours of solid gameplay.

The original story had to stretch to fit. It wasn’t too hard to fit things into the first game, with a bit of expansion. The conclusion is largely worked out for the final game, though it, too, requires a bit more fleshing out to fit the larger canvas. The “middle” act – which I now recognize as being a little weak to begin with – was inadequate to the task of supporting a stand-alone game.  I’ve had to re-work a lot of it to make it (I hope!) a really enjoyable and compelling story in its own right.

A critical goal for the second games’ story is it must be a stand-alone tale: A player must be able to play this game “cold” without even realizing it had a predecessor, and not feel like they missed anything. At the same time, there should be some rewards for the Frayed Knights veterans where they get some payoffs for some background elements set up in The Skull of S’makh-Daon. It has to reach a satisfying conclusion at the end of the game, wrapping up the primary storyline and only leaving a few threads hanging for the final title to tie up.

As you know if you’ve played through the original game, I like a bit of seriousness in my comedy. Personally, I cannot enjoy a story where I don’t care about the characters, or where the stakes never seem to get very high. The Skull of S’makh-Daon struck some sober tones in the middle-to-end game, with a murder mystery the unveils something of a conspiracy. Frayed Knights 2: The _________ of ________*  focuses much more on character development and delves a little bit more into some of their pasts.

The game begins where the first one ends – the Frayed Knights have effectively been “put out to pasture” – ostensibly away from the enemies they gained when they unwittingly kicked over a hornet’s nest in game 1. As it turns out, the conspiracy is much bigger and deeper than anyone would have thought, and the Knights may have accelerated the timetable a little bit by exposing – and defeating – an important piece of a larger plan. Bad things are happening, which even reach the remote country village of Roark’s Retreat, where both the Frayed Knights and (most of) the Heroes of Bastionne are once again competing for opportunities. Rumors continue to grow about the rise of an Ancient Evil (TM), a lich named Nepharides who very nearly destroyed civilization completely only a few centuries before. And – as before – the Knights may very well stumble into the clue in an unlikely place that could change everything…

While parts of it take a somewhat darker tone than game 1, there’s still plenty of action, adventure, and goofiness. The Rats of Nom make a climactic return. There Might Be Giants. And here there be dragons. At least two of ’em. And the Knights – well, they are still the wrong people for the job.

 

* Yes, we have a sub-title. We’re just not sayin’.  Yet 🙂

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Swords & Sorcery Underworld: Gold Coming Out Next Week

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 13, 2012

The same time as Torchlight II.

Swords & Sorcery – Underworld Gold Announcement

So the big question: Which game do you get? Both of ’em, of course. 🙂

But now that you have both, which one do you play? In all seriousness, that’d be a tough call. I’ve been playing the beta of Gold for a while, and I like it. It really captures the style and gameplay of some older 80’s / early 90s era party-based RPGs. Wizardry, Might & Magic, Bard’s Tale, those kinds of games.  Probably with a bigger emphasis on Might & Magic  for style. Think Might & Magic III, and you won’t be too far off.

Originally, as I understood it, this “Gold” edition was really not supposed to be much more than a graphical overhaul of the original. But developer Charles Clerc decided to go all-out and give the game far more than a fresh coat of paint. He changed the name of his company to better represent his focus, and really expanded the game. Some of the changes, mentioned in the above announcement:

• – Enhanced combat: Distance and timing management in a set of tactical options. Enemies have and use them as well.
• – 8 new maps (20 total). 5 previously existing maps were redrawn and 3 entirely new areas.
• – Hundreds of new items, including new item types.
• – New item attributes (charged, enchantments, some specifically scripted).
• – Many new NPCs.
• – Puzzles. Some span entire maps and others are of lesser scope.
• – 115 monsters, each illustrated. Some scantily but tastefully clad of the female gender (be forewarned).
• – Monster specials: many have one to better pounce on your characters. Some have two.
• – New environments.
• – New skills (active and passive).

Yes, this is a lot. But it’s made the game a lot more interesting. And I was particularly amused when my party looted a “Frayed Knight Cloak” or something along those lines. I assume that’s one of the new items…

I didn’t get as far in the original release as I am now, but the newer game definitely seems more interesting to play. And, of course, prettier. While it’s technically kind of the same game that was released a couple of years ago, enough has changed that it feels like a new game. Or it feels like the difference between an alpha “tech demo” and the full-fledged release.  I like it. If you have fond memories of some of those turn-based, party-based, pseudo-3d first-person-perspective games, I’d definitely recommend giving this one a shot a week from today.

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Top RPGs of All Time? I Can’t Say…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 12, 2012

IGN is releasing a multi-part article about the Top 100 RPGs of All Time, which caused the inevitable lashback and arguments. Which is exactly what these kinds of lists are supposed to do, I think. If they serve no other purpose, causing discussion (often heated) about classic computer and console RPGs is a wonderful thing. Many people responded by publishing their own personal lists of favorites. IGN isn’t done yet, and I’ve got my own arguments about the relative placement of certain games, I don’t think I’m going to heap criticism on it now, or when it is complete.

Actually, it’s a pretty good opportunity for me to find out about some games that I’m missing from my collection, and see if I can correct that.

One of the “duh” realizations that I’ve made over the last few years of being an RPG developer is that people play CRPGs for different reasons. The tactical decision-making on a personal, per-character level that I love so much is tiresome to many players, and while almost everybody loves a good story, the importance of the story to players relative to other game aspects (like choosing your own path through the game rather than following a fixed storyline) may vary quite a bit.  What this boils down is there’s no optimal design for RPGs – every single element is a compromise, a calculated risk of losing some of your audience in an effort to grow it elsewhere – to delight one subset at the risk of boring another. There’s simply no objective way to rate them.

Case in point: For some reason I really enjoyed the indie title Knights of the Chalice more than the bigger-budget game that inspired it, the Temple of Elemental Evil. Maybe it’s because the latter game crashed on me too often and left a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t know. On paper, ToEE was a far more comprehensive and interesting (not to mention prettier) game.  Maybe Knights‘ simpler graphics made it easier to calculate positions, or it offered a cleaner subset of gameplay, or it simply got rid of some of the more frustrating “make-work” of its predecessor. I’d have to play both of ’em again to analyze it.

Similarly – I don’t know why I could never get past the first eight to ten hours of Final Fantasy XII. But it marked the “final” Final Fantasy for me. It was technically excellent, highly polished, and… boring. It sent me back to re-playing 6, 7, and 8.

And then, as a lone dude who spent more time making games than playing them, I have some pretty major gaps in my experience – which I seek to fill, but with an ever-increasing load of new, indie, and re-available classic games filling my hard drive, I can’t even pretend to keep up. I’ve been much more of a PC gamer than a console gamer, though I have favorites amongst both types of games (and, as I’ve stated before,  western / eastern / console / computer RPGs are really much more of a mish-mash than they were during the 1990s). But a lot of those glaring gaps are where console games should be.  I think the point I got stuck on in Chrono Trigger was a little action sequence that was perhaps impossible to beat on my emulator, I dunno, but as a result I never finished it and it has never made my list of favorites. SHOCK! But as I keep playing old classics now for the first time (like Anachronox) and newer games (Inquisitor is waiting patiently on my hard drive for me to run it for the first time…), my own list keeps changing. And I can’t really say if Ultima VII is for sure my favorite anymore, until I really get around to giving them (2 games + 2 expansions) a full playthrough again. Though I suspect they’d still be in my top 5.

My enjoyment of some games just really depends upon my mood and preferences at the time. I never really fell in love with Morrowind the way I did its predecessors or successors, yet I think if I started playing it again today you might not hear from me again for several weeks. Others – well, while so much of Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption was done just wrong, I’ve played through it twice and greatly enjoyed it… if only for the excellent mood and story. And apparently I have a thing for purple exposition.

And it would depend on my audience. If I was trying to show a new gamer the “best” RPGs to play today, I might omit some of my all-time favorites for the sake of easing them into it with more modern titles. If I wanted to show someone historical high-points throughout the history of the genre, I’d be reaching back to games like Wizardry 1 and Ultima IV. For other would-be RPG designers, I’d have quite a list of games I feel every RPG-creator ought to play (and a few more that I am told I should play).

The bottom line is that we’ve got an amazing legacy in this genre of games, regardless of how you rate or rank them, which continues to grow at a very healthy rate – particularly now that indies have moved in with conviction. I don’t care if you hated one of my favorites (well, okay, I may care a little), but let’s keep talking about them!

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