Dragon Age Module

I purchased Neverwinter Nights 2 mainly because of its much lauded toolset. I had intended to create the most brilliant module of the century, get drafted into Bioware's cadre of elite RPG designers, and spend my days talking about elves and buying wenches (can you still do that?). Unfortunately for me I found that the toolset strained my feeble attention span, and I played the main campaign instead.

Now that Dragon Age has been released, I have a chance to redeem myself. I finished off the slightly glitched download process about an hour ago, and spent the intervening time learning how to create an area. With any luck I'll have the basic systems worked out by the end of the week and be on my way to wenches and elves.

A Man of Few Words

The silent protagonist established himself as a gaming giant right at the outset. Early silent protagonists existed largely because game stories used to boil down to: Evil things over there, KILL! Nowadays games' stories have become as nuanced as any story based media (well, some of them have) and we have the hardware and the funding to create long, well written scripts. So why do games like Half-Life decide that their main character will never speak?

For some games it's simply a matter of precedent and difficulty. Link and Mario don't speak because they never have, and characters in CoD games don't speak because it's difficult to represent someone talking when you see everything from their eyes (see The Darkness for a prime example).

For other games though, the silent protagonist becomes a symbol. In the classic platformer Jak and Daxter, Jak never once speaks. I used to think that was just a joke because Daxter always talked over what Jak was about to say, but recently I realized that it was more meaningful than that. The player takes control of Jak, and just like him, has no say in what they have to do next. Sure the player can decide what order to get the precursor crap in, but in the end all of the decisions are made by Keira who gets her motivation from the sage Samos.

Jak acts as the body of the group, Daxter the voice, Keira the mind, and Samos the will or the spirit. While it may sound stupid I think the developers may have actually been thinking about that when they made the game. The player has no say in their own goals, they have to meet the requirements set for them by the game, and the side-characters are the ones who exhibit those requirements. That's exactly how Jak is. He cannot argue because he cannot speak, so he performs his duty without question, as does the player.

The Half-Life series uses the silent character to represent a battle of wills. In Jak and Daxter, Jak is controlled by a single will, but in Half-Life, Gordon Freeman finds himself at the center of a power struggle that he cannot control. The G-Man sets him out on his journey in Half-Life 2, and continues to try to gain power over him in the episodes. The vortigaunts try to battle against G-Man, but Gordon is left out of the mix. Without the ability to speak out against this management of his life, he goes from being a character to being a pawn, and the player has no choice but to go along with it.

As we move into the next generation of gaming we can think more about how our games impact the players, and what message they can convey. The silent protagonist, and other old gaming tropes, can become meaningful decisions on the developers part. Gordon Freeman and Jak represent a new breed of character, one that the player becomes and imprints themselves on. When I play Half-Life I make my own Gordon Freeman, I fill his shoes and feel his confusion. The silent protagonist can draw the character in, and make them feel what a person would feel.

Late to the Game

With the recent release of Modern Warfare 2, I finally decided to take a look at Infinity Ward's first Russian killing simulator CoD 4: Modern Warfare. The reason it took me so long to get around to it was that I was afraid that it would play like the earlier installments in the CoD series. Don't get me wrong. I loved CoD 2, but there was always something wrong with the pacing. The game forced you to do everything on your own, plus allies were dumb as posts, grenades could kill you from halfway across the map, and you needed to unload entire clips into enemies before they died, but the game had good action and fun characters, so I stayed playing.

Modern Warfare got immediate points for making enemies die very quickly. This made me feel pretty cool as I mowed down legions of enemies with a single clip, and improved the pacing. Unfortunetely, Modern Warfare didn't address my main issue, which was that the game makes you do everything. And I do mean everything. Not only do you have to plant all the C4, snipe all the bad guys, and take point every time, but in most gunfights enemies infinitely spawn until you decide to push forward.

The last point is the one I would like to discuss. While I'm fine with being to go to guy to complete objectives, I am not okay with making my success a crapshoot. Every time we got pinned down and had to advance it was up to me to do so, and most times I would get gunned down running into enemy fire. To make up for that I decided to stay back a bit, kill some dudes, and then try to rush their weakened defenses. Of course, the defenses were never weakened. Enemies respawned so quickly that, by the time the guy I had just shot fell to the floor, another dude was taking his place. This meant that I had to just run like hell through enemy fire to get my allies to move up and to get the enemies to stop spawning. When I died, instead of feeling like I had made a mistake, I felt like the developer had.

While I can understand enjoying frustrating gameplay, I can't abide by gameplay that relies mainly on luck. If I was lucky I managed to survive the hail of bullets, and enemies stopped spawning. If I wasn't, then I would die and have to try again... and again, and again etc. Game devs need to look at why their players are having trouble with sections to analyze difficulty. I'm fine with dying for making a stupid mistake like stepping on a grenade, or trying to run and gun in a CoD game, but I shouldn't have to make a leap of faith to advance the combat. Dying because I was unlucky pisses me off, whereas dying because I messed up makes me want to try again.

Liquid Addiction

I have come here today to discuss one of the most unfortunate plagues upon gaming society. It has ruined the pacing of many an RPG, caused people to spend hours clicking on flowers to find the right ingredients, and rendered healing magic meaningless. Yes my friends, I come here to discuss: the potion.

The potion has been an RPG staple for many a year and I only just realized how much I hate it by playing Dragon Age: Origins and Morrowind. In both of these games your character is setting out on an epic quest to kick ass and blah blah blah, and in both games you are hindered by your character having to slam a potion down every few moments so that they can survive through the encounter. This does not make me feel like a bad ass. When I have to take a break from fighting every few moments to nurse my wounds over a bottle of red liquid I feel like I must be playing the game wrong.

The unfortunate truth is that, in all likelihood, I'm not. Many RPGs expect the player to die if they deign to never use potions, and while this would be an okay way to play a survival RPG, it doesn't make sense in epic fantasy. Take Dragon Age for instance. In Dragon Age your party will usually consist of a mage along with a smattering of warriors/rogues. Now, this mage will usually have two jobs. One is to nuke the hell out of high powered opponents, and the other is to heal the warriors/rogues. But, the way the game is scaled, a mage will run out of magic pretty early on in the fight, leaving the party high and dry. That's where potions come in. It wouldn't be so bad if it was a rare occasion that I had to use a potion, but I swear I drink potions more often than I swing my sword. This pacing makes the game feel clunky, and makes me feel cheated and annoyed (especially when I run out of potions).

To fix this problem game designers need to redo the pacing of combat such that mages can consistently heal the party. One solution is to designate a specific type of mage to healing duty (eg. Priests, clerics etc.), but another solution (that would fit in Dragon Age's class system) is an unhinged magic system. In this unhinged system damaging, buffing, and debuffing magic will reduce the mage's mana supply normally. Healing magic, however, will be relegated to another system. The mage could use the blood magic/entropy system of Dragon Age and absorb health from dead opponents or from enemies. They could even use other mages' mana supplies for healing by stealing magic, but that only shows one kind of mage.

For other (less evil) mages there could be a divine magic, or healing magic supply that is separate from their regular mana. A studio could do this simply by having two mana bars, or they could have a system where the mage's regular spells deplete the mana supply, while their healing spells only require that the mage have a certain amount of mana. This would mean that, as the fight wore on, mages would still be running out of spells, but they would be able to heal consistently. The designers would have to nerf the healing so that people couldn't get infinite super health up spells, or they could make it so that, as the magic bar went down, healing spells got more potent. Any one of these systems would make the tactics in RPGs far more interesting and keep us away from our red potion addiction.

Frustration

My recent lack of posts it mostly due to my new found obsession with Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins. The game seems to have taken my advice and eliminated good-bad scores (but they still have popularity scores with your allies) and it is filled with fun characters and scenarios. But, for all its solid storytelling I found myself drawn back to the game with its extremely difficult gameplay. Even the most common of random encounters can wipe you out, and leveling your characters requires some serious thought and effort. What makes the game so difficult though is its deep tactical combat. Each encounter requires a lot of thought and a deep understanding of how your party performs. You have to be able to use each character's abilities in conjunction with all of the others so that you can maximize the amount of pain your party can lay down. Even with mostly picture perfect tactics you can get wiped out just for not paying attention for a few seconds.

And that makes it awesome. It's so rewarding when you finally manage to survive and encounter you've been playing for the last half hour, or when you discover a new talent that gives your character a supreme edge. Every time I sign off I want to jump right back on in order to practice my tactics and bring my skills up to speed. Dragon Age frustrates you to be sure, but it does so in a way that makes you want to keep playing it so that you can get better and better. Now if you'll excuse me I've got some darkspawn to slay.... Damn. TPK.

Hack and Trash

The action-RPG genre has been the well respected bastard offspring of the action and RPG genres since the dawn of the computer gaming era, and in that time the genre has consistently failed to take the best of both action and role playing. Action-RPGs often use a traditional role playing leveling system and then give the player nothing more than control of their character's attack frequency and location. The Elder Scrolls series is a perfect example of this. Bethesda employed a system that was designed more for turn based or tactical combat, but decided to give the player the ability to flail their weapon around as they so pleased. Unfortunately, the direct control of attacks is not enough to constitute action gameplay. Other action-RPGs lean the other way and make intense, blood pumping combat systems, but sorely neglect the leveling system that they tacked on to garner mass appeal. To fix these problems with action-RPGs we need to examine what it is that makes both genres great.

First let's dissect RPGs. The first, and most obvious thing is leveling up. Nothing quite sets off a gamer's endorphins like that satisfying ding and the promise of a whole new batch of skill points. It allows each player to customize their character so that they can take advantage of their play style. Do you want to focus on melee combat and heavy armor? We have skills for that. Magic and summoning? Skills for that. RPGs can offer the player a great way to play the game the way that they want to play it. Other high points of RPGs are their epic storytelling and characterization.

Action games are characterized by blood-pumping, explosive combat, relentless gameplay and the ability to have complete control over the character. Games like Half-Life and Prince of Persia offer their players intense gameplay that requires both fast reflexes and skill. While they are two very different games, they both exemplify the qualities that make action games great. Dying is a momentary setback, and the combat is paced so that you are prepared for each encounter and can spend less time trying to heal or stock up on equipment and more time fighting and advancing the story.

Now, the idea of an action RPG should be to combine the best elements of the two genres into one super-genre, so let's see how this should work out. The most basic elements lie in the basic gameplay and story implementation. By giving total control to the player in combat the game allows for action, and then by granting levels to the player as they advance they have implemented the RPG aspects of the game. Simple right? Well the problem that many game designers face is then implementing pacing. RPGs tend to be much slower, ponderous affairs, while action games tend to try and run the player through the story as quickly as possible so they can get right into the action. To counter this a designer could use a system like Half Life 2s where they keep the player in full control during cutscenes. Players would be able to continue fighting and adventuring, or select dialogue options a la Bioware games in order to keep them involved. By keeping the player playing during story sections, action oriented gamers will have their twitchy kill instincts sated, and RPG gamers will get the deep story and characters that they crave.

The bigger problem is pacing in combat. In a traditional turn based, or strategy based RPG players are willing to slog through either lengthy cut scenes, and can accept having to hit a rest button to heal their party. Action games however, require a much more rapid pace. My biggest issue with the Elder Scrolls series was having to stop every encounter in order to sit on my ass, chugging potions, or having to hit a button to make me rest so that I could get back to full health.

To fix this issue designers have to start using a technique that Left 4 Dead has pioneered: The Administrator. Using the Administrator system, game devs can make sure that, as the player advances through the story, the game is constantly feeding them just enough health and equipment to get by. This will prevent the obnoxious Elder Scrolls scenario of having to go to sleep after every fight and can keep the action gamers engaged, while the leveling and story can keep the RPG-ers satisfied. Then we can have a true cross genre videogame.