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The Many Plot RPG » 0number of comments:

One of my favorite videogames of all time is Oblivion. You start off as a prisoner, but are quickly released by King Patrick Stewart and charged with delivering the Amulet of Kings to a priest who can use it to prevent monsters from another dimension from invading the countryside.

What’s more interesting to me is the fact that Oblivion has a huge open world with lots of people to meet and things to do. You can become an assassin or a thief or gladiator champion or a wizard. You can rescue a kidnapped lizard-girl and buy a haunted house.

There’s just one problem: all of these things are side-quests. To do them you have to basically ignore the main plot; the monsters will politely wait for you to deliver the amulet before opening their dimensional portals all over the land. There’s no real sense of danger; it could take you in-game months before you decide to show up with the MacGuffin of Power and move the main plot forward.

I’d like to see a game like Oblivion (or Fallout 3, or any of these open-world games) with no main plot at all—it’s all side quests. They would be elaborate and interesting side quests, but there’s not a main plot that every single character has to go through.

In fact, you *shouldn’t* be able to go through every single plot in a single game. You could limit it in different ways: if you aren’t good enough at magic, you can’t join the magical university (skills). If you’re a necromancer you can’t join the priesthood (factions). If you’re a lizard person you can’t infiltrate a party of humans (race). If you’re a gladiator champion, you won’t be asked to be a delivery boy (reputation).

And you should only be able to take on one quest at a time—while you’re on a quest, the NPC’s should not even offer you new quests. The game should focus on one plot at a time. Otherwise you get a to-do list of really important, supposedly time-sensitive things—rescue the daughter, deliver the medicine, steal the jewels—that you can ignore in favor of wandering around picking flowers.

Maybe take a page out of Just Cause 2’s book—you have a huge open world to explore, but once you start a mission the game becomes tightly scripted until the mission is over.

What I want is an open-world RPG that has lots of different tightly-focused interesting plots which make sense for the character I’m playing. I think it can be done—Oblivion is really close; maybe the upcoming sequel, Skyrim, will do even better.

Left 4 Dead 2 » 0number of comments:

Just over a month ago, I mentioned that I was getting rid of Left 4 Dead. I hadn’t planned to buy Left 4 Dead 2, but every night I would see that everyone in my friends list was playing it, and I was tired of playing single player games.

Left 4 Dead 2 is so much better than Left 4 Dead was. They seem to have improved some of the code for things that frustrated me in the old game (e.g. unloading a clip of autoshotgun ammo at a Hunter and doing no damage). Plus, they added a whole bunch of new stuff:

There’s a much wider variety of weapons, including new melee weapons which are great for clearing out a horde of regular zombies that’s gotten right in your face.

There’s several new kinds of special zombies, like the Charger (which can grab a survivor, run him far away from his friends, and pound him into the ground repeatedly), the Jockey (which jumps on a survivor and lets you pull him into danger), and my favorite, the Spitter (who spits noxious acid onto the ground, forcing the survivors to run out of the corner they’re hiding in).

The panic events at the climax of each level are much more interesting. Instead of hiding in a corner and waiting for a timer to go off, you have to run a gauntlet to go turn off an alarm to make the zombies stop coming, or you have to run all over a mall to find gas cans to fill up a car, and so on.

If you’re short on time but want to play Versus, there’s a new Scavenge game mode where you and the other team take turns trying to fill up a generator with gas. Which ever team can get more gas in the tank before time runs out or the whole team dies, wins.

And the levels are amazing. The joy of the L4D comes from doing awesome stuff like running to a helicopter from a hospital roof top while being chased by the Tank (think The Incredible Hulk, but brown instead of green). The new game gives you more awesome per level. I was playing a campaign game with some friends, and we were trying to get to the top floor of the mall to turn off the alarm that was attracting zombies. One of my friends was further ahead of me, but he was eventually taken down by a horde of zombies who were stomping on his prone body. I come in behind him, whack the zombies with my baseball bat, turn off the alarm, and bring him back to life with a handy defibrillator. It felt like something you’d actually see in a movie.

I haven’t even mentioned the level where you start a rock concert to attract the attention of a passing helicopter. Or the zombie clowns who attract more zombies with their squeaky shoes. Or the Realism mode that turns off the highlighting on your friends and makes it communication MUCH more important. Or the incendiary bullets and laser sights.

In short, this game is everything that L4D should have been and more. I’m having a blast with it.

Why I’m uninstalling Left 4 Dead » 1number of comments:

Left 4 Dead is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse. You and three other people are immune to the virus that is converting humanity into undead monsters; the rest of the city is not so fortunate. You have to run, using a variety of weapons and fighting a variety of special monsters, from your starting point to an escape vehicle. It can be a lot of fun.

Can be. With the right people it’s fun most of the time. But sometimes, even having the most fun people in the world isn’t enough to save it.

Tonight, I played with pretty much my favorite group of internet gamers. But it was still frustrating. I lay the blame for this almost entirely on the game: I would pounce on people’s backs as Hunter and just bounce off of them. My teammates would vomit on three of our opponents as Boomer, and would only get credit for one of them. A full clip of autoshotgun ammo wouldn’t take out the Hunter I was shooting at as survivor.

To be fair, the other team was really good, and I felt like I was dragging our team down a bit. I got taken down literally three steps outside of the initial spawn. I did almost no damage as the tank. Etc, etc.

The point is that, between the game’s technical deficiencies and my own lack of skill, the game frustrates me at least one game in four, even with my favorite teammates/opponents. So I say: Goodbye and thanks for all the pills! I’ll see my friends in chat and in TF2.

Can I get a 3X game? » 2number of comments:

JD came into the room, blew a great cloud of dust off of the blog’s admin panel, coughed briefly, and began to type a new entry without bothering to apologize for neglecting the blog for four months. “That’s what RSS readers are for, to let people keep in touch with websites that are infrequently updated,” he reasoned. “Besides, no one wants to hear a long-winded apology. Best to get to the actual content.”

I have loved 4X games (games in which you control an entire society, starting from a small village/planet, eXploring the universe, eXpanding your empire, eXploiting the resources, and eXterminating your enemies) since I first played Master of Orion back in the mid 1990′s. I like starting from scratch, gradually increasing in power, building a mighty empire.

What I don’t especially care for is that last X. I like building my empire, but I don’t really care for conquering other empires (or, far more frequently, getting conquered).

Tonight I was playing Civilization 4, happily building the Portuguese empire. I had expanded out to a small island off the coast of the main continent, I had hanging gardens and spices and all the comforts of a great empire. What I didn’t have was a strong enough military to keep it–Celtic invaders broke off our trade agreements and took over everything but my small island in an embarrassingly swift conquest.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by Euro-style board games like Agricola and Puerto Rico, but I like having a field that I know that people can’t mess with directly, where you’re competing on how well you use the resources available to you to build your territory, rather than conquering other people’s territory.

I want there to still be a goal and competition–SimCity bores me to tears–but I want it to be indirect. I want the video game equivalent of a Eurogame. Any ideas where I can find one?

Comeback » 0number of comments:

Sins of a Solar Empire is an awesome, awesome game, especially with their new Entrenchment expansion. Last night I beat my first opponent on Hard mode, and I think it makes for an interesting story:

I was playing as the Vasari, a race of high-tech aliens with expensive but powerful ships, marked in green above. My opponents were the Verlin Descendants, a human faction with cheaper ships, marked in red.

I had pressed as far as Cesaro (one of the terran worlds in the east on the map above) with little resistance, but the humans had gotten going a little faster than me and had taken over Echemmon before I got there. I set up ship factories on Cesaro, built carriers full of bomber squadrons, destroyed their starbase at Echemmon, and took over the planet. I had built my own starbase there, but neglected to upgrade its armor and weapons, thinking that the remainder of my fleet and the starbase could handle anything the humans could throw at me.

This, it turns out, was an error. Before long, the humans sent in a massive fleet, with a lot of Ogrov Torpedo Cruisers, ships designed to take out structures like starbases, and with a lot of Flak frigates, designed to shoot down my bomber squadrons. In seconds my starbase was reduced to dust, and I was forced to pull back. Their fleet chased me out of Cesaro, destroying my factories and my pitiful local defenses and decimating my fleet. I pulled back to Dione.

I had expected the humans to pursue me again, but they did not. Perhaps they wanted to tend to their new conquests. Maybe they thought I held a fleet in reserve. Maybe they were afraid my fleet would jump back to Cesaro and take out their new buildings while they attacked. Or maybe they feared Dione’s more powerful starbase, which had much thicker armor and more powerful weapons.

In any case, I was sure I was going to lose the conflict. They had a larger fleet and access to more resources. I kept waiting for them to press their advantage, but apart from brief, smaller raids on Dione, which my fleet and the starbase easily swatted away, they seemed to be leaving me alone.

I set about rebuilding my fleet, doing research into ever more powerful shields, armor, and hull designs, and pondered how I might salvage the situation. Then it came to me: I would build a Kostura Cannon.

Now, I need to explain something about how the game mechanics here: You see those lines on the map? Those indicate the paths that ships have to travel. So even though my home planet of Weierstrass and their home planet of Minox are right next to each other physically, I’d have to jump to five different planets to get there.

But there is an exception: The Vasari have a technology that lets them build Phase Gates. A friendly ship can go directly from any planet with a phase gate to any other planet with a phase gate, bypassing the long trip from planet to planet to planet.

The Kostura Cannon is a large, expensive orbital weapon that can shoot at any planet, damaging every ship and structure in orbit. More importantly, it also temporarily makes that planet a phase stabilizer node, meaning that any ship at a planet with a phase gate can jump directly to it.

It was a big gamble: I had to build several new research labs, spend a lot of money on building a prototype, and then wait while I accumulated enough resources to build the cannon itself. All the while, I expected the humans to attack–instead, I discovered later, they were building broadcast centers, attempting to take over my planets using a propaganda campaign. It nearly worked too, but I built my own media hubs just barely in time to save Dione from rebellion.

Eventually, the cannon was finished and my fleet was rebuilt. I fired the cannon at their homeworld and sent in dozens of ships. Their fleet was badly out of position, and I was able to bombard their home planet–and their Capital Ship Factory–into oblivion before they could respond.

Meanwhile, I was building more ships and researching more technologies. I readied the cannon again and fired at Akhmatova, and sent even more ships into their back lines. This second fleet included a Migrator, which I used to build a starbase in orbit above their planet. The starbase was quickly outfitted with its own phase stabilizer nodes, allowing my ships a permanent direct path past their defenses at Terradas.

Their fleet eventually arrived, but it was too late. They had spend too much of their resource advantage trying to expand by culture; their fleet was not much larger than the one that had chased me out of Echemmon. I was able to crush their fleet and take over everything from Minox to Artemis before they surrendered.