The Banner Saga, according to the developers, is Oregon Trail meets Fire Emblem. The game has you walking around with your caravan. You are the leader and you travel from one place to another. Although the main storyline doesn't change much, almost all the events are randomized. You don't know what is going to happen and you are often biting your nails thinking what you should do in this situation. This is a time of war, the naive will end up being stabbed over and over in the back until they learn. I did. At the start I was helpful and shared my supplies with suffering people. After I get to the later parts of the game where food becomes scarce, people stab me in the back, rob my caravan, kill my people, and people starving everyday. I learned quickly to start accepting bribes, to take what I want, to look out for my own caravan first, and ignore people begging for help. I don't have food to spare anymore.
People dying can be the most brutal. Heroes you train up and level up and even gear with items, they could fall off a cliff, they could get stabbed in the back, or they could just leave if they don't agree with your decisions. You will never get them back, you might lose your most leveled hero, and you don't get the items you lost. They disappear from the storyline too so it starts becoming more and more empty. However, some people might join you depending on your choices. Its pretty hard to tell which decision is the best and you will always end up regretting your decision. However, people in your caravan will often die and/or leave. If you run out of food, a portion of your caravan starts dying every day and the rest sort of cannibalize them so you can keep living (that is what I assume at least. How else do they survive another day.) The number of people in your caravan decides the outcome of a war. If you have higher numbers the enemies are easier, if they're lower the enemies are stronger. You can charge in to fight stronger enemies to save more lives from your caravan, or you can stay back and fight weaker enemies at the cost of sacrificing more lives.
The art and the animation is gorgeous. Its part of the reason I wanted to try this game in the first place. The story and the random event elements are also entertaining. However there are a few problems with the game and most of them is in the combat system. Its a tactical TBS combat but every turn you alternate between you and your enemy. This is a very big problem because, if there is a big threat on the battlefield and it has a really high armour and strength pool, you can't kill it fast enough you'll decide to kill off the small guys around it first. WRONG. If you do that you will die because the big guy is moving more often now and will one shot your heroes one by one. In this game the stats are armour which will reduce damage taken, and strength which is equal to your health and your damage. If you are low on strength you will deal less damage. If their armour is too high you won't be able to hit through to their strength and you have to choose to break their armour first. So the strategy here is to leave everything on low health, then kill the big guy, then go back and kill the small guys. This is very tedious and stupid. You are penalized for killing enemies.
After winning battles you will get renown points for everything you kill. Heroes who score the last hit will get exp. You use that exp along with renown to promote them. Each promotion gets you more stat points, allows higher level items to be worn and may level up your skills depending on the level. You can customize where you want to put your stats. However another big problem occurs. You have to purchase food with renown points. Why? I don't have a clue but you do. Eventually your caravan will be starving if you spend all your renown on promotions. That or you feed your caravan and your heroes suffer from lack of levels. Its a lose lose situation here.
Another thing I have to point out is the lack of representation of women in the game. Its all about men, talking with other men, fighting with men against other men. The only women I've seen so far is your daughter and Oddleif, the wife of the chieftain, whose husband gets killed about 5 minutes of meeting him so you take over the spot of leader for the caravan. She won't lead the caravan because, "She's a woman. People won't follow a woman chieftain and other groups would attack them because their chieftain is a woman." Well that sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation! No it isn't. Later on she asks if its ok to train some of the women who want to in archery. If you agree then the men in the caravan starts getting uppity saying they won't want to fight alongside their wives, sisters, daughters. I did get a response from the developer about this.
There will be more women in the next game. It was actually more a
limitation of money more than anything- each new class was fairly
expensive to create, but I feel like we did as much as we could to
represent them well.
I was thinking more about how women could be included into the storyline. Instead of just men flexing at each other proving to each other who has the bigger penis. But that brings me to another point. All the classes in the game except one are male. The only class women can be are archers.
If you like a beautifully animated Tactical RPG with random elements that screw you over at every point possible. This is the game for you. There are some flaws, but the game itself is enjoyable despite those flaws. The flaws are pretty big but its all contained in the combat itself. If you really hate it you could turn down the difficulty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIH0vS9AG4
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Choose your own (inevitable) adventure.
Haven't been as prolific as I should be around here for quite some time. Thanks to Kittydog for holding down the fort. On to business...
Reading Kittydog's post on The Walking Dead spurred a long time discomfort with modern games with a prominent element of 'choice'. That is to say, you have none at all. And nobody seems to notice, or mind, whichever is more appalling to you. Games like Mass Effect, Walking Dead, Deus Ex: HR or dare I say, even Bethesda's Fallouts and Elder Scrolls are praised for their storytelling and emphasis on player decisions having meaningful impact on the progression of the game, but they are all overstated.
What does it mean to have CHOICE in a game? That the next three lines of witty, snarky dialogue will be different? That you'll be graced with a slightly different ending slide? Maybe that a few NPCs later on may regard you with disdain. I can sum up my feelings easily: apathy. These choices barely incentivize me to reload a save to satisfy my curiousity, let alone replay the game for a new experience. Everything is so predictable, and it's still the same game, with some minor flavorful tweaks. Inevitably, you will still finish the game, you will still get more or less the same main-story ending, and you will still be YOU. Even juvenile Choose Your Own Adventure books had less predictability and wider variance in outcomes. Even 'choice' games a decade ago had more branching, where your specific dialogue choice mattered less compared to how you carried about in the game world.Instead of leaving the outcome a result of wordplay, the manner in which you appeased them in terms of timeliness, worth and effort was more important.
1. People don't like variance and unpredictability. A consistent and stable universe is more immersive, and less abrupt and jarring when unexpected things happen. Also, modern audiences don't tolerate sudden deaths and unforeseen consequences very well, which is typical of a spoonfed era.
2. People don't want to be punished, and feel like they've wasted their time, even if they've committed to poor choices. Choices can be made casually and on a whim, and should decisions have too much weight in them, the players may feel regret. Instead of stopping the players to heavily deliberate their decisions, developers have reduced their impacts and supplemented them in quantity.
3. People want the story to not end. Even after a terrible decision, the developers want to retain a steady pace and flow of the plot and action. So the story cannot come screeching to a halt even if the player consistently demonstrates he's a mouthbreathing fool who is incapable of making reasonable decisions on behalf of his role-played character. The best way to curb this, is again, to limit the extremities of decisions and their impacts.
4. Devs want all their content to be seen. Nowadays, games are judged immediately and quickly. Too much so, and it pressures devs to make a player's first playthrough, or even first impression, to be as best as it possibly can be, regardless of how the experience of repeated playthroughs suffer. This has created a diorama effect, where the player is shuffled from theatre to theatre, experiencing each set piece and respective characters, but is mostly a linear experience. Adding a few dialogue branches suddenly seems like freedom for what has become an on-rails theme park game. Mass Effect has side missions that you can do before your linear main-story missions to distract you into thinking it's not a linear game. But replays quickly disappoint and show you didn't miss much that a 30 second Youtube video would not have demonstrated. Developers have masked their games so that the first playthrough is as deceptive as possible.
5. Extra content costs money. Publishers may be largely to blame, but regardless, time, money and effort are restrictive constraints. Creating content that players may not see, or discover for years is no longer the norm for games. Anything that is missed by the player scores no points, so developers have been forcibly making sure unperceptive gamers see everything that happens, even to the detriment of immersion. Explosions are huge and flashy, flashing icons popup to tell you something is happening, and camera control is forced to look directly at events. Players have no incentive to try to be perceptive or on guard, since they can just lazily wait until the game tells them something will happen. It's no surprise then, when developers don't want to create player choice branches that branch out too far. It will be content that will potentially be missed, and the further branches go, the more exponentially different the rest of the game becomes, requiring more potentially unseen work.
Walking Dead is entirely linear with dialogue choices that ultimately land you in the same place, with different characters that are all substitutes for each other. Eventually, when the devs feel like it's time to wrap up loose ends, these characters are quickly cut off so they can still produce a similar ending for all branches.
These traits, partially the result of the complacent and spoiled characteristics of the modern gamer, have led the appeal of these games to ruin. There's no challenge of making the right choice. One either gets an ending with all the characters satisfied and a short slideshow of congratulations, or gets something slightly more bleak. How about a completely different ending where the player fails and is tormented in oblivion instead? Or maybe someone he jeered way earlier comes back and cripples him in vengeance and robs him without resistance? These games should be about making one of the dozen right choices, amongst hundreds of bad choices. Start by slamming the player in the face and reminding him that he needs to WORK for the good endings, and that nothing will be happily given to one without deep contemplation for his choices. As it stands, such games are dead, and though adventure games from the past are returning, sadly, their traditional brutal choice mechanics are not.
Reading Kittydog's post on The Walking Dead spurred a long time discomfort with modern games with a prominent element of 'choice'. That is to say, you have none at all. And nobody seems to notice, or mind, whichever is more appalling to you. Games like Mass Effect, Walking Dead, Deus Ex: HR or dare I say, even Bethesda's Fallouts and Elder Scrolls are praised for their storytelling and emphasis on player decisions having meaningful impact on the progression of the game, but they are all overstated.
What does it mean to have CHOICE in a game? That the next three lines of witty, snarky dialogue will be different? That you'll be graced with a slightly different ending slide? Maybe that a few NPCs later on may regard you with disdain. I can sum up my feelings easily: apathy. These choices barely incentivize me to reload a save to satisfy my curiousity, let alone replay the game for a new experience. Everything is so predictable, and it's still the same game, with some minor flavorful tweaks. Inevitably, you will still finish the game, you will still get more or less the same main-story ending, and you will still be YOU. Even juvenile Choose Your Own Adventure books had less predictability and wider variance in outcomes. Even 'choice' games a decade ago had more branching, where your specific dialogue choice mattered less compared to how you carried about in the game world.Instead of leaving the outcome a result of wordplay, the manner in which you appeased them in terms of timeliness, worth and effort was more important.
1. People don't like variance and unpredictability. A consistent and stable universe is more immersive, and less abrupt and jarring when unexpected things happen. Also, modern audiences don't tolerate sudden deaths and unforeseen consequences very well, which is typical of a spoonfed era.
2. People don't want to be punished, and feel like they've wasted their time, even if they've committed to poor choices. Choices can be made casually and on a whim, and should decisions have too much weight in them, the players may feel regret. Instead of stopping the players to heavily deliberate their decisions, developers have reduced their impacts and supplemented them in quantity.
3. People want the story to not end. Even after a terrible decision, the developers want to retain a steady pace and flow of the plot and action. So the story cannot come screeching to a halt even if the player consistently demonstrates he's a mouthbreathing fool who is incapable of making reasonable decisions on behalf of his role-played character. The best way to curb this, is again, to limit the extremities of decisions and their impacts.
4. Devs want all their content to be seen. Nowadays, games are judged immediately and quickly. Too much so, and it pressures devs to make a player's first playthrough, or even first impression, to be as best as it possibly can be, regardless of how the experience of repeated playthroughs suffer. This has created a diorama effect, where the player is shuffled from theatre to theatre, experiencing each set piece and respective characters, but is mostly a linear experience. Adding a few dialogue branches suddenly seems like freedom for what has become an on-rails theme park game. Mass Effect has side missions that you can do before your linear main-story missions to distract you into thinking it's not a linear game. But replays quickly disappoint and show you didn't miss much that a 30 second Youtube video would not have demonstrated. Developers have masked their games so that the first playthrough is as deceptive as possible.
5. Extra content costs money. Publishers may be largely to blame, but regardless, time, money and effort are restrictive constraints. Creating content that players may not see, or discover for years is no longer the norm for games. Anything that is missed by the player scores no points, so developers have been forcibly making sure unperceptive gamers see everything that happens, even to the detriment of immersion. Explosions are huge and flashy, flashing icons popup to tell you something is happening, and camera control is forced to look directly at events. Players have no incentive to try to be perceptive or on guard, since they can just lazily wait until the game tells them something will happen. It's no surprise then, when developers don't want to create player choice branches that branch out too far. It will be content that will potentially be missed, and the further branches go, the more exponentially different the rest of the game becomes, requiring more potentially unseen work.
Walking Dead is entirely linear with dialogue choices that ultimately land you in the same place, with different characters that are all substitutes for each other. Eventually, when the devs feel like it's time to wrap up loose ends, these characters are quickly cut off so they can still produce a similar ending for all branches.
These traits, partially the result of the complacent and spoiled characteristics of the modern gamer, have led the appeal of these games to ruin. There's no challenge of making the right choice. One either gets an ending with all the characters satisfied and a short slideshow of congratulations, or gets something slightly more bleak. How about a completely different ending where the player fails and is tormented in oblivion instead? Or maybe someone he jeered way earlier comes back and cripples him in vengeance and robs him without resistance? These games should be about making one of the dozen right choices, amongst hundreds of bad choices. Start by slamming the player in the face and reminding him that he needs to WORK for the good endings, and that nothing will be happily given to one without deep contemplation for his choices. As it stands, such games are dead, and though adventure games from the past are returning, sadly, their traditional brutal choice mechanics are not.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Freedom Fall - Psychopathic Princess Simulator
To start things off. I like how this game you're not going around trying to rescue a helpless princess. No, its quite the opposite. The princess is out to kill you. Freedom fall is a platformer where you have to avoid all sort of obstacles like traps, fires, pitfalls, electricity, etc. You are a prisoner trapped in a prison tower where if you can escape, you are granted freedom. You might as well give it a shot since you're on death row right? This entire tower was created by a haughty psychopathic princess who constantly write messages on the wall mocking you and the other dead prisoners. Its kinda cute actually. All she wants is to watch you die because shes bored and has no friends.
Difficulty wise, the game isn't very hard. The game isn't very long either but its still an enjoyable game while it lasted. The art is pretty good. Its similar to Bastion, and every time you die it goes splat then covers the spikes with blood. There isn't much of a story though. Then again this is a platformer and there really isn't any text/dialogue in the game outside of the writings on the walls. The princess is mute. Shes also quirky as all hell and it shows in her writing. Really not much else to say about this game. You should get it if you like platformers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o4ma4ki8sE
Difficulty wise, the game isn't very hard. The game isn't very long either but its still an enjoyable game while it lasted. The art is pretty good. Its similar to Bastion, and every time you die it goes splat then covers the spikes with blood. There isn't much of a story though. Then again this is a platformer and there really isn't any text/dialogue in the game outside of the writings on the walls. The princess is mute. Shes also quirky as all hell and it shows in her writing. Really not much else to say about this game. You should get it if you like platformers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o4ma4ki8sE
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
