Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

The RPG Scrollbars: Richard Cobbett's weekly RPG column

ERYFKRAD

Barbarian
Patron
Joined
Sep 25, 2012
Messages
28,231
Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
the hardcore RPG heads
And what would you know of hardcore, you RPGWatch-visiting, tabletrpg-playing filthy peasant who plays Gothic with a mouse?
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
And what would you know of hardcore, you RPGWatch-visiting, tabletrpg-playing filthy peasant who plays Gothic with a mouse?

25+ years of heavily RPG-focused gaming experience, bruh. Put some respeck on my name. :)
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,225
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
felipepepe https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/06/explore-create-richard-garriott-autobiography-review/

The RPG Scrollbars: Richard Garriott’s autobiography
Richard Cobbett on February 6th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

expcreate.jpg


Explore/Create isn’t your average autobiography. Certainly, not your average developer one. There aren’t many that jump from 1980s corporate wranglings to literally being in space, nor which start not with the subject in the middle of a D&D game, but about to be crushed by the actual, literal Titanic. But that’s Richard Garriott for you – a man who has always stood for what I personally believe is the finest goal in life. To earn vast amounts of money doing what you love… and then use it to buy a castle.

ult7.jpg


The sheer scope of this book makes for a great, though often bizarre read. Having spoken to Garriott a couple of times for things, I’m personally aware that you don’t really interview him so much as start him talking and pretty much sit back with the tape recorder, occasionally awkwardly interjecting “That’s a fascinating story, but my editor told me to ask about Kickstarter.” The man owns vampire hunting kits. Plural.

Somewhat inevitably, the result is a bit like randomly jumping through a whole season of QI. Barely has an anecdote started than we’re off somewhere else. Chapter 12 for instance is the creation of Ultima Online. Chapter 11 is Garriott and pals raiding a sunken probable slaver ship. If you don’t already roughly know Garriott’s story, expect a lot of “Wait, what?!” moments, like a discussion of the creation of the pictographic language used in Tabula Rasa just casually throwing in “By the way, I took it into space with me for marketing purposes.” Or later, “I nearly drowned the mayor of Austin.”

voices2.jpg


Every chapter, in short, feels less like a coherent flow of history, though it does more or less tend to follow chronological order from the early days to now, oddly minus any reference of Shroud Of The Avatar. Every chapter is self-contained, but the jumps between them – most of them split between Create/Explore – feel less like the natural continuation and more like a sudden “Wait, I’ve got to tell you about-” that launches head-long into something completely unrelated but just as interesting.

Mostly it works really well, especially as the enthusiasm coming off the page from both him and co-writer David Fisher (Random note, kudos for properly crediting the ghostwriter!) is very dependent on the topic. The creation of Ultima for instance isn’t exactly glossed over, but does have a certain perfunctory sense of ‘right, that’s done’ that smacks more of an obligation than a great tale demanding to be told. As if selling 80s games in ziploc bags isn’t as cool as almost dying in the Titanic. Right?

eloh.jpg


Conversely, when he starts fixating on smaller, specific details, the passion starts to bleed out through the page. This book won’t tell you a damn thing about Tabula Rasa as an MMO, beyond the one line or two needed to fill in the completely uninformed, but there’s some great stories both in the creation of its aforementioned pictographic language and how it both practically and philosophically expands on the classic Ultima runes. The same chapter also digs into why this is more than just a mere intellectual exercise, connecting to Tolkein and the emotional resonance of a world that feels real enough to touch… as well as more personal anecdotes of cheating in tests by using seemingly just decorational runes on exercise books and the like to sneak information into the classroom under the teacher’s very nose.

(I had to smile at this bit. I never did that, but I did used to use Ultima runes to label my VHS tapes so that nobody would know what was on them. Unless they, I suppose, put them into the machine and pressed play… but I’m not sure it would be worth it for last week’s Mysterious Cities Of Gold or whatever godawful Saturday morning show would be impossible to explain to kids now. Seriously, I defy anyone of the 80s/90s to convince the youth of today that we had a Saturday morning magazine show set on an alien penal colony where intergalactic fugitives led by an elderly prince with amazing eyebrows would kidnap Earth celebrities, review SNES and Megadrive games, and watch a kid-friendly version of The Toxic Avenger. I digress, but I spent years pre-YouTube trying to convince people it existed and still occasionally have to check…)


shroud.jpg


This keeps the book interesting and surprising. It does lead to a certain rambling and lack of detail though, especially if you’re interested in the games side rather than the adventure side. If you don’t know what Ultima is, you’ll be no wiser after reading the book, and if you do, you won’t find much about the creation of the Eight Virtues or whatever that you don’t already know. Though if you don’t, you might be a little confused, thanks to there barely being any screenshots of the actual games, or descriptions of them beyond the most basic things, with random interludes out of nowhere. For instance, mentions of the Ultima child-killing thing that Garriott’s always seemingly wanted to be controversial despite nobody ever actually caring about it. (Also, in a minor goof, it’s credited as being in Ultima IV rather than Ultima V – a nitpick, but “And I wanted the player to have to decide whether to murder children” does kinda stand out in a chapter about morality and virtue and how clever the game was.)

That silly scene is also brought up at least once elsewhere out of pretty much nowhere, while stuff like Ultima VI’s focus on racism or V’s subversion of Garriott’s own Virtues doesn’t get a look in. There isn’t anything much about the latter parts of the series at all really, save Ultima Online and complaining that VIII could have been cool if the pesky money men hadn’t interfered. Those darn money-men! With their… money…


gypsy.jpg


Now, I’m not really surprised by this. If I had a choice to talk about going into space or rehash the origin of the Eight Virtues for the nth time, I’d pretty much talk about space too. Still, that side is inevitably a recurring element in the tale, what I imagine a lot of people reading this will be hoping for, and it is sadly an often half-arsed and rambling one. Whether this is Garriott’s interest or Fisher not being as comfortable with the gaming side in what I’m assuming were interviews with Garriott, I have no idea. I just know that a lot of these bits felt weird. There’s much of a chapter for instance devoted to a completely pointless scuffle with Mark Jacobs over who deserves to be credited as the creator of MMOs, which has to be the most pointless grudge since the Montagues and Capulets agreed to disagree. Especially when it finally does what I’m guessing most people reading were about to do: bring up Meridian 59.

Also, if you know Garriott’s games, there’s definitely a few small details, omissions and mistakes that will make you wince, like repeated references to an Ultima town called “Moon Glow” (no, “Moonglow”), talking about the Avatar’s good friend “Dupree” (Dupre), and a joking shout-out to Lord British’s assassin in Ultima Online, Rainz, with a cheery “I’ll have my revenge one day!” (You did, Lord British, he was banned…) Then, despite skipping over most of the games, only the Ultima Online section goes into any depth that the gaming side of the room is likely to be interested in or not already know, including tales of naked vomit protests in his virtual castle, the rise of gold traders, and surprisingly not either the Hungry Dragon That Will Come Down From The Mountain Story or the Tale of the Unrepentant Thief. I didn’t actually make a bet on them appearing in the book or anything, yet somehow I still feel I owe someone £5.


Addendum: I am not giving anybody £5.

uo.jpg


Really, as much as the book is split between Explore/Create, it also feels like the story of two Richard Garriotts. The first, the developer, is a guy with passion and creativity, but who deep-down seems to resent big chunks of his career. Chapters on things like that Tabula Rasa pictograms are fun, but undeniably about the toppings on games rather than the core, and almost start feeling like an attempt to hide from the day-job of running companies while the mostly unmentioned magic elves behind the scenes actually make the games. There’s little passion behind that side, but a lot of swings to negativity. Barely has EA bought Origin than he’s talking about how hard it is for he, Richard Garriott, to have to fire people, with both that and most of the business with next publisher NCSoft sharing a chapter that may as well be called “Well, That Sucked”, and followed by “Fuck It, Let’s Talk About Space, I Like Space.”

In these sections, it’s hard not to be drawn to an anecdote early on in the book, shortly after finding success, where Garriott’s friends sit him down and tell him that he’s gone from being their pal Richard to just kind of a dick. And while the purpose of that story is inevitably “I acknowledge this and I tried to move on from it,” I couldn’t help but keep thinking of that Garriott in a lot of the development chapters – the leader dominating with power, all too often surrounded by meddlers who just Don’t Get It, whose interest and investment in Origin especially ends with his own passions while inside, and completely evaporates into a fart cloud the second he steps out of the door.

In particular, I couldn’t help notice that while all the ‘adventure’ chapters pay great homage to the explorers and facilitators who make them possible, the only other real player on the development side is brother Robert, the more business savvy of the two siblings. Most others who show up are people who let Garriott down in some way or who are part of things that went wrong – like firing Garriott, or the aforementioned Mark Jacobs incident. Wing Commander for instance is mentioned as a success, but only to highlight the more important point that it made Ultima look bad in front of EA when Garriott was trying to pitch Ultima Online. Only occasionally does anyone else even get a look-in, and even then, aside from the very founding of Origin, it’s rarely more than a glorified “And Starr Long was there too.” Now, I have absolutely no idea whether this is fair, having obviously never worked with Garriott, but I found it quite awkward by the end – where everyone who has shares the most perfunctory group shout-out.

tabula.jpg


Luckily, the Garriott that we see in the other chapters is a far more engaging, open, and much nicer sounding guy. There’s chapters here that could be fleshed out into entire books – one that I was looking forward to from the moment I opened it being about his infamous haunted houses, complete with Crystal Maze style physical challenges, pyrotechnic effects, Faraday cages and Tesla effects, and scaling up to events like a dinner party recreation of the Titanic that not only forced visitors to choose between steerage or first class for their food, but sank in the middle of the evening. The write-up of this in the book is great, but I really wanted more. More photos, more descriptions – the paths and events, the management. Admittedly, I own two different books on the making of The Haunted Mansion, so I might not be the average consumer here, but I love this kind of stuff. More! More! In as much detail as you’ve got!

The same is true for so much of it. Unsurprisingly, Garriott’s trip into space gets a bigger chunk than most, but there’s a whole book in that, or in the man’s collections, or visiting Antarctica… it’s genuinely fascinating stuff, even zipping along at a pace that suggests the stories were told in one sitting or so rather than really sinking into things. I also wouldn’t have minded more of the pictures that take up the colour section in the middle, featuring shots like a collection of orreries (noun, a) Astronomical models b) O’Reilly’s Men) and amusingly not a picture made by Garriott in space, featuring the confident question “What do you think? You’re holding it in your hands!” followed an audible shriek from the editor who realised they forgot to put it in. (Instead it’s shoehorned into the text, barely viewable, and of course, monochrome. No matter.)

u6.jpg


In short, this is a fascinating, if scatty book, and I don’t just mean because there’s a whole section about how to go to the toilet on the ISS. (The answer: very, very carefully!) It’s not as interested in the game side as it might sound, or at least, doesn’t do half as well at presenting that side as you might hope, especially if you know the basic ‘Making Of’ type stuff anyway. But, the adventure side more than makes up for that – and as the title establishes, Garriott’s life is a split between exploration and creation like few others have the opportunity to enjoy, but more importantly, few openly seize. There’s a difference between someone who has the money to go into space and someone who basically spends all their money to go into space, and on the way to getting there, gets to chat about working in the corner during a world championship boxing match and almost shooting a guy who believed he was in Garriott’s house to get a reward for completing a quest. (The Ultima games did traditionally end with “Be sure to tell Richard Garriott about thy achievement!”, but definitely meant ‘By mail’.)

Definitely an interesting guy, and an incredible life.

Worth checking out? I’d say so. Even if it doesn’t come with a nice new cloth map.
 
Last edited:

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
Patron
Joined
Jan 27, 2010
Messages
15,048
Location
In quarantine
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Barely has EA bought Origin than he’s talking about how hard it is for he, Richard Garriott, to have to fire people, with both that and most of the business with next publisher NCSoft sharing a chapter that may as well be called “Well, That Sucked”, and followed by “Fuck It, Let’s Talk About Space, I Like Space.”

:lol:

Good review. Sounds pretty much exactly like what I'd imagine a Richard Garriott book to be.
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
Patron
Joined
Feb 2, 2007
Messages
17,274
Location
Terra da Garoa
Well, he must be frustrated that he did all those crazy things yet all he gets is game journos at his door "tell me about Ultima IV again!"

And not even interesting questions... just say exactly the same thing again for people who can't be assed to do their research or quote older interviews.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,225
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
More on Cobbett's game: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/13/how-to-write-an-rpg/

The RPG Scrollbars: Notes On Writing A Universe
Richard Cobbett on February 13th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

tljh1.jpg


Hello, God talking. At least, within a certain small sphere. Like a few of Team RPS, I’ve been writing for games as well as writing about them recently, most prominently as the writer of Daedalic Studio West’s The Long Journey Home [official site] – a space exploration RPG with roguelike elements (but not the crap ones). You know. A SERPGWRENCO. We’re now at the stage where my job is basically done, the universe is designed, the dialogue is all written, and I’m asking tramps on the street if I can borrow their whisky just so I can breathe heavily into the bag. There’s not much more fun than working on a game inspired by some of your favourites, notably Star Control 2. At the same time, well… oh dear, here comes that pesky hyperventilation again…

But I’m not here to market, but to talk tools. I know I’m always interested in seeing behind the scenes, so this week, I thought I’d pull back the curtain a little to talk not so much about what I’ve been working on, but what I’ve been working in.


ambassa.jpg


Just as a quick intro though. The Long Journey Home is the story of a ragtag crew (four out of ten characters – your choice) shot to the other side of the galaxy as part of humanity’s first jump drive test. Your job is to get them home, through a procedurally generated universe full of hostile worlds and amusing aliens. There are stories and mysteries to uncover, but mostly the focus is on freedom, and giving you the kind of power that you’d have if you were actually in that situation. For instance, if you take on a FedEx quest, there’s nothing stopping you opening the box and stealing what was in it. Or agreeing to escort someone home, only to turn around and sell them to slavers instead. Each time you play, we want you to find different things and learn more about the races and how the universe ticks. On the flip-side though, much of what works in other RPGs had to be rethought and reworked around our specific ‘get home’ goal. Interesting quests? Yes, but respecting that forward momentum has to be key.

This actually proved pretty challenging, as every quest had to feel like something that a) was worth the crew’s time, despite their desperation to get back to Earth above all else and so not necessarily giving a shit if some planet comes down with Shivering Rot or whatever, b) something that the aliens would actually entrust these random visitors with, and c) something that was worth the player’s time to do. And of course, d) something that fit one of our core goals of bringing a bit more personality to space than players are used to. We really wanted this to feel like a living universe where you were experiencing an at once terrible and breathtaking situation along with your crew, and one you can believe is ticking along around you. For example, most of the time when you finish or fail an important quest, the original quest-giver will show up again in person to handle everything, rather than using some kind of galaxy-wide internet or just flashing up a FISSION MAILED message and moving on.

Spoiler alert. This means a lot of writing.

aboard.jpg


As Alec covered last week in his Supporter post, games are basically spreadsheets with controller support. If you want to write games, you have to be prepared to Excel. If it’s not Excel or Google Docs, then you’re probably going to be working with some proprietary tool that… well, imagine a car, only without luxuries like doors, a roof or seats. Luckily, this isn’t quite a universal rule, but… yeah. There’s a reason why most teams don’t release their internal tools to the public, and those that do wrap them in more warnings than a thin cardboard box containing fresh plutonium rods.

googledoc.jpg


While bits of The Long Journey Home have meant spending a lot of time with Unreal tables (the worst of all things) and Google Docs, most of the hardcore writing has been in a surprisingly good, though initially slightly difficult to parse proprietary tool called LINCOS – a dialogue editor that we also use for locations and and encounters. The core file is a CSV spreadsheet, but LINCOS parses it and puts that information into a much more readable, easy to edit style, complete with built in flag-testing and other niceties. The result is that conversations look a little something like this:

lincos.jpg


This is just a tiny snippet of one of our races – the ‘charming’ Ilitza. Our conversation system is built on a few different key interactions, with the main one being assembling questions in bits based on objects and information that you’ve found. In this case, you’ll fly up to an Ilitza ship, they’ll probably insult you for having a terrible ship, and then you take over the conversation. ASK GOSSIP. PRAISE ILITZA. SHOW VALCORGRUE. That kind of thing. LINCOS was built around these non-linear conversations. If you know your programming, think of it as a glorified ‘switch’ command. With every line and interaction, it begins at the top and keeps going until it reaches the first appropriate response. And here’s where things get cool. With pre and post-conditions, we have a lot of power over what it finds and produces and how aliens react to, say, being asked about something they’ve already told you not to.

Pre-conditions are the instructions above each block. To use the top one as an example, it means “If we haven’t encountered this Race, and this member isn’t Fighting or Fleeing and the player isn’t Hostile, give this Greeting.” This triggers the Ilitza ship to introduce itself by name, making sure the player knows it. Underneath is the shorter Greeting you get if you’ve met, and are neutral (Wary). Later, there are other versions for Friend and Enemy. Obviously, there can be more than one thing in each pre-condition block, effectively hijacking a conversation. The bottom one is an example of this. It says “If the player has never heard of Jassikan’s Teeth (an extremely easy to understand gambling game), then when they ask for GOSSIP, tell them about it, and add it to their knowledge.” Once you’ve done that, ASK GOSSIP will then fall through to the next possibility, which might be another opportunity, like suggesting getting into Bounty Hunting, some galactic information, or just another rude comment.

lincos2.jpg


Each NPC you meet is built with several of these files, chained together – typically PERSONALITY > CLASS > ROLE > RACE. As awesome as it would be for everyone to respond differently to literally everything, that’s how you get murdered in your sleep by translators and accountants. The compromise is that most members of a Race share a basic dictionary that handles the standard questions, like what they think of, say, the Glukkt – our trader race. However, each distinct Personality and Class get their own set of basics, with hopefully enough bolted on that it doesn’t feel like the universe is just five guys without so much as an over-rated burger to call their own.

More importantly, LINCOS is where we script enemy AI as well as raw dialogue – what happens if, for instance, you raise weapons on a character. Most races therefore have their Civil and Military script, which handles the basics of how fights play out, but with scope to bolt extra stuff on. For example, if you’re losing a fight with an Ilitza Slaver, they’ll often call to say that they’ll let you go… in exchange for one of your crew.

cult.jpg


The really cool part of having a proprietary tool though is how it can be upgraded, and how every upgrade opens up new possibilities. At the start of development for instance, there were only pre- and post- conditions for controlling dialogue. Aliens would have to give you a mission by asking, and then it would be added to your Mission Log without any real say. Since that didn’t work, we added basic transactions. Now the alien can say something and you can reply YES or NO. Cool. But… couldn’t we have a bit more fun? Yep. And so once again the system was updated with ‘Transaction Labels’, which effectively reskin those Yes and No options for specifics. A few of my favourites, for which I’m not going to give any context, include FLUSH KING?, REMOVE MY SKIN? and RIDE THE WORM? In general, ‘yes’ is a good idea. Promise.

Of course, the LINCOS side of things is only part of it – albeit the part that I know best. The quest implementers on the team spend as much time in the Unreal editor, working on ferociously complicated Blueprints that handle the game logic of things. Here’s a quick snapshot of just part of a relatively simple treasure hunting quest…

blueprints.jpg


Now, of course on top of all this there are plenty of other tools. Crew dialogue for instance is all in a monster Google Docs spreadsheet, with Notifications and Mission Briefings, the Artifacts you can find and crew comments on them held somewhere else entirely, all in one great big swirling maelstrom of words and lore. Personality in particular requires not just a lot of words, but lots of vectors and care and consideration.

One of the small touches I doubt anyone will notice, but which I’m proud of at least, is that you will never get a mission briefing that tells you to do something. Instead, it’s always phrased in some form like “We’ve been asked to-” or “We’ve heard about-” to reinforce that you’re in command and not just following orders. You’re not failing anything by not doing something. You’re just choosing not to do it. Big difference, even if the alien you’ve promised to help to might not see it that way.

Of course, whether it all works, I guess we’ll see in a couple of months. Until then… pass the brown paper bag. Much hyperventilating left to do before release.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,225
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/20/habitat-retrospective/

The RPG Scrollbars: Old Habitats Die Hard
Richard Cobbett on February 20th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

habitat_1.jpg


There’s no better way to cause trouble than to talk about ‘firsts’. Say for instance that King’s Quest IV featured the first female adventure character, and you’re probably going to be drowned out by some pedant waving a copy of Infocom’s Plundered Hearts in your face. That pedant may even be me. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the folly of calling, say, Everquest the first MMO and leaving it without some very quick clarification. The extent of the first M in MMORPG, the importance of success over existence, the jump between mainframe and computer and all manner of other stuff makes it tricky to plant a flag everyone can actually agree deserves to be there.

But there aren’t many games with a better claim than Lucasarts’ Habitat, the latest classic game to get a fancy modern revival project. It definitely deserves it.



Habitat is arguably Lucasarts’ most impressive bit of coding – a multi-participant virtual online environment originally built for the Commodore 64, in the space-year 1986. Not a typo. 1986. On the surface it was much like later, more famous chatrooms, and indeed it was bought by and used and upgraded by the company that made one of the most famous during the 90s, WorldsAway. However, even at this early stage, it was a complex beast, complete with avatars, weapons, in-game housing and a persistent world full of items and goodies to play with instead of simply empty locations. And player events, with the most famous being a devs vs player maze game where the devs got magic instakill guns. Unfortunately, one forgot their invulnerability flag, had their corpse looted, and so the fancy tool got into the wild. Even then, you can see the innocence of the era by the fact that the developers negotiated with the player for its return in virtual monies instead of just dropping the mighty banhammer.



Habitat is also interesting purely for its central concept – being an object orientated system that almost smacks of a human version of Creatures, where the focus was more on providing potential objects to play with rather than stock quests as such. The funniest of those items had to be the players’ own heads, which apparently led to the stock way of griefing players. Persuade them to remove their head. Persuade them to hand over their head. So began the legend of the literal head-hunters.

This was so early that even post MOO and MUSH on mainframes, every lesson was being learned for the first time. Initially, any player could be killed and looted. Later, Habitat developed dedicated PvP zones, and would have had player operated justice if the developers had solved the issues in time. In another case, again from the ‘innocent nascence of the genre file’, players supposedly – and I’m going from Engadget’s fantastic series written back in 2012 here – found a way of breaking the game economy, but were allowed to keep the money as long as they spent it on making the world a better place. And if the piece is anything to go by, they accepted, running treasure hunts and the like to spread the wealth.

Now, obviously you’ll note that the second-hand nature of many of these stories. Habitat’s not a game I ever played in its original format, due to three basic reasons – I live in the UK, I never owned a C64, and I was six when it came out. Still, I have a real fondness for these proto-MMOs simply because I remember the dreams and fantasies of that era when the concept of the internet was actual, literal magic rather than an essential service we all simply take for granted. I remember, many years before having my first modem and coming to live in fear of the phone-bill’s arrival every three months, just poring over the magazines of the time and trying to imagine what it would be like to step into those worlds, like Meridian 59 and Everquest and Asheron’s Call and Ultima Online. Having the modem didn’t really help much though. Games were charged like other internet services, which is to say by the minute/hour, rather than the subscription fees we got used to, and in the UK, local calls weren’t free. For the first few years I was online, the best you could hope for was a penny a minute connections in weekends.

There was exactly no chance I was playing these games at launch.

habitat_2.jpg


But I could certainly live vicariously through them. One of the biggest examples of that came courtesy of Sierra’s InterAction magazine, which was frequently bundled with UK mags, and for a while at least delighted under the title ‘A blatantly biased look at games from the Sierra family’. Sierra’s offering was called The ImagiNation Network, and almost the exact opposite approach to Habitat. Habitat invited players to build their own world, Sierra just wanted them to play nice in theirs. Lucasarts encouraged players to find their own fun, Sierra populated its world with lots of pre-made games, from classic casino offerings to early RPGs like Shadow of Yserbius – Yserbius being Elvish for ‘better RPGs’. Everquest these early games were not.

Still, just look at it. Look at how beautiful it was, especially for the time, and especially factoring in things like different palettes for the changing seasons. And think! If you played it, you too could meet people like this! For surprisingly little money!



Like Habitat, ImagiNation spawned a revival project, which you’ll find here. If you’re interested, I wrote it up in detail for a Crap Shoot column in Another Place some… Christ, more than six years ago. How time flies, turning even retro columns retro. Sierra would also launch a game that initially looked a lot like Habitat, although which ultimately would draw more inspiration from other MMOs – The Realm, a game which I confess I have few memories of save for an early beta that consisted entirely of walking around a forest built in an extended version of the SCI engine where you’d occasionally encounter a monster, but more usually a female character stripped to her bra and pants. I was about to say ‘Of course, I’m sure that it became something very different’, but then I looked for a screen and… well… got this. So. Yeah.

habitat_3.jpg


But back to Habitat. The revival project is one of the few that’s actually in a good place, legally and technically. Lucasarts sold Habitat and it ended up with Fujitsu, whose people happily handed over permission to play, and the team has big chunks of the source-code. The full story can be read here, in a Paste article from 2016. As of this year however, the NeoHabitat Project is swinging into full action, with a call for Java engineers and other programmers, and progress including being able to connect to NeoHabitat with an actual C64. Unlike ImagiNation, there’s still a long way to go before anyone steps back into the world, but at least it’s progress. The team’s homepage is here, with the plan being to re-build the whole system as an open source project. I know I’d love to see that. A slice of history not in fact gone when the servers were unplugged, but simply sleeping in conceptual stasis for a second chance.

It’s just a shame how much does get lost forever, from the community to the sense of wonder that could only happen back in the early 80s and 90s when Clarke’s Law was very much in effect, and sufficiently advanced technology really was indistinguishable from magic. And not just the kind with fireballs, awesome as that will always be.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,225
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/27/the-rpg-scrollbars-great-ideas-more-rpgs-should-steal/

The RPG Scrollbars: Great ideas more RPGs should steal
Richard Cobbett on February 27th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

steal_1.jpg


They say that they who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. When it comes to game design though, good ideas fall through the cracks and get forgotten all the time. This week then, I’m going to list a few of my favourite small features from classic or obscure games alike that I think would be cool to see more often, and quite probably ask you for a few of yours. Sounds like a plan? Excellent! Remember, we’re looking for small, specific stuff rather than, say, ‘good combat engine’. The kind of spark that perhaps only one or two games have ever tried, or which have faded for whatever reason over the years, but new games really should steal. Let’s start obscure, with…


Clothes Matter – Hard To Be A God
steal_hard.jpg


Clothes are important in most games, though it’s been a while since games routinely let you run your characters around in their underwear just to see what the NPCs had to say about it. For the most part though, that’s all they’ve typically cared about. In something like Fallout for instance, nobody cares whether you’re dressed as a dapper chap or a blood-soaked bandit, unless you count a minor Charisma penalty. Hard To Be A God is one of the few to really understand that in a dangerous world, people are going to make snap judgements. You dress as a bandit, and people will treat you like one, be it refusing to serve you, or allowing you into their camp. Finding the right outfit made for an excellent mechanic, minus the slight problem that like most… it forgot to factor in ‘just underpants’. Very awkward when talking to old ladies.

Criminal Trials – Chrono Trigger/Conquests Of The Longbow
steal_chrono.jpg


Two scenes I’ve always loved in games – correction for pedants, ‘always’ meaning ‘after playing them, obviously’ – are the courtroom sections of both Chrono Trigger and Conquests. They serve very different purposes. Chrono Trigger’s is largely a gotcha, in which your actions at the very start of the game are used against you in a rigged court – whether you walked on the grass, helped a little girl, that kind of thing. Conquests of the Longbow meanwhile asks whether you actually played the role of Robin Hood as an honourable outlaw or simply a thug with delusions of grandeur. For instance, did you kill your enemies instead of merely humiliating them?

I’ve long wanted to see this kind of scene in an RPG done properly, where the game actually keeps track of people you’ve killed, houses you’ve broken into, all the stuff you’ve stolen, and throws it back at you. At the very least, you’re not going to be able to complain when you find yourself on the 666 Express bound for the Bad Ending.

Uh. That said, maybe do it a little better than this…

Enemies That Don’t Engage – Dark Age of Camelot
steal_daoc.jpg


You know the guys I’m talking about. You’re wandering through the capital city of some world when some bandits clad in rags glance over at your party of platemail covered fighters, mages buzzing with power, clerics humming with divine power and… bards there too. Anyway, they look at this team of hardened heroes who have slain gods and they decide, we can totally take these assholes. And it’s so tiring! Even if you only have to swat them away, that’s swatting time that could be so much better used getting on with business.

Single-player RPGs need a fairly common feature from MMOs, which is that at a certain point the trash mobs will just ignore you, or better yet, run screaming. However, to be more specific, I thought I’d expand this to a feature I really liked in Dark Age Of Camelot, where fighting certain monster types would win you brownie points… or pixie points or whatever… with their enemies, allowing your character safe passage through their space where another might get attacked. Obviously, there’s factional version of this in MMOs, where the Horde will befriend one side of a conflict and the Alliance the other, but what I liked about the DAOC version was the sense that the faeries were looking down on you and going, nah, that one’s alright. Let them get on with it. At least until you killed them for XP too.

Fight To The Defeat – Risen
steal_risen.jpg


Earlier games did this too, but Risen is the first where I really appreciated that the human characters weren’t your usual RPG psychopaths with exactly two settings – “Hello, Friend!” and “WE MUST FIGHT TO THE DEATH!” For the most part, they don’t want to kill you, and if you get into a fight, they’ll deem honour satisfied by knocking you on your arse and stealing your wallet. It’s a small thing, but it goes a long way to making the world more believable. Of course, if you actually do push them, all bets are off. And fair enough. But I’ll still take falling down over every world being just one accidental shove away from turning into Falling Down.

Short Epics – Way Of The Samurai
steal_sam.jpg


Now, I don’t actually like Way of the Samurai very much, but it’s a good example of something that Japanese games do better than most Western ones – consider replay value. I know it’s a question of taste, but I don’t like that something like The Elder Scrolls will let a single character do literally everything if they want, up to and including being the head of the Thieves’ Guild AND the Fighter’s Guild. In general, I want to see more games exploring shorter-form stories but with far more scope for variance and surprise. A fifty hour game where you can do anything is a fifty hour game where not a whole lot of interesting stuff can happen. I’m not saying they shouldn’t exist, but that it’s past damn time we saw more five hour games that warranted repeat play and fit better into most of our modern gaming schedules.

Spellcrafting – Morrowind/Daggerfall
steal_spellcraft.jpg


Now, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve often complained that – say it with me – HEROES. DON’T. CRAFT. But that’s the kind of crafting that should best be left to blacksmiths and the like. I make an exception for creating awesome magic spells out of parts – combining interesting effects and unleashing them on my foes. Especially with cheat codes to cut out any pesky safeguards or economic restrictions.

Transmogrification – World of Warcraft
steal_transmog.jpg


Honestly, for ‘transmogrification’, read more or less anything that separates the stats of armour from their look. MMOs have long realised that most players want to have their own look in games rather than simply wearing the same stuff as everyone else on their tier, but it’s been quite slow to make it across to single-player games. Isn’t it boring when you reach the end of the game and everyone’s basically wearing the same gear, maybe with a few mismatched parts and colours due to bad loot or just the designers not being fashion designers? Isn’t it far more fun to just have a big wardrobe of awesome clothes to choose from, and give your character a look that you feel best represents them? Absolutely, it is! And if you disagree, you can always just wear stock armour like a dull person.

The Mule / Auto Sell Trash – Dungeon Siege
steal_mule.jpg


There is little more tedious than inventory management. Just allow a quick way of selling all the worthless crap and moving on. At this point, I am sure someone will ask “But what about the economy?” In response, I would like to gesture to the entire genre and very loudly go “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

Inconvenient Magic – Ultima / Original World of Warcraft
steal_warlock.jpg


Okay, I’m definitely losing some of you here – but bear with me. I love magic users in games. They’re my default, go-to class. However, while part of the appeal is the surface level hurling of fireballs and whatever, a deeper one is the sense of a character being connected to something important, something awesome, something primal. The more it comes down to just ‘click an option from a list’ or ‘click the left mouse button’, the more that’s lost. Annoying as it sometimes was, I miss hunting for reagants in Ultima VII (take a shot) or the need for soul crystals in World of Warcraft. The latter especially, yes, I understand why they went bye-bye. But I still miss that sense of needing to prepare, along with other elements that make it a little riskier, like Wild Magic in D&D. I still think it’s a shame that even The Witcher 3, a game I otherwise love dearly, didn’t really have the guts to enforce the need for alchemy on anything but its highest difficult levels, and generally treated going up against something like a Vampire with the right equipment as cause for a damage bonus rather than an essential thing.

History – Darklands
steal_darklands.jpg


Do I have to explain it? Our history is full of awesome periods for RPG goodness. Yet any time the concept comes up, it’s still 1992’s Darklands that everyone goes back to – and even that has dragons, witches, the Wild Hunt, kobalds and the like.

Creative Challenges – A Tale In The Desert
steal_tale.jpg


I add this one somewhat reluctantly, because I admit it’s here more for the concept than its success over the years. However. A Tale in the Desert – launched way back in 2003 and still running – is a social MMO at least initially based on ‘tests’, like producing awesome fireworks displays, or proving yourself a good judge of character by burying cash in the desert, telling trusted people where to find it, and then hoping it’s still there by the end of a timer expiring. While many of these offer fairly easy potential for rigging, it’d be cool to see more online games at least glance over what’s been going on when working on community focused challenges.

Ongoing Single Player Adventures – Final Fantasy XV
steal_chocobo.jpg


Sorry for bringing consoles into this, but Square is finally doing something I’ve kinda wanted to see for a long time – continuing to add content to a single-player game after release. I don’t just mean patching in more features, but adding time-limited content like a Chocobo Carnival that only ran for a few weeks. More is planned for later on. Like Hitman, it’s a cool way of keeping players coming back, and a method with a lot of cool potential for events, special quests, holding celebrations outside of MMO spaces, and more.

Desperation – Pathologic
steal_path.jpg


A big problem with most RPGs is that their difficulty is basically the opposite of what it should be. You start out weak, broke and clueless. By the mid-game, you’ve broken the economy over your knee, you know exactly how all your skills work, and usually the most the enemies can do about it is pack on the hit-points and lay down more fire not to walk in. I’m not saying I’d like all games to be along the Pathologic style, where every day brings fresh disaster and deprivation… but it’s definitely a concept worth exploring in something other than its own remake. Or my pitiful attempts to play Dark Souls.

There’s a few of mine. How about a few of yours?
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
There is little more tedious than inventory management. Just allow a quick way of selling all the worthless crap and moving on. At this point, I am sure someone will ask “But what about the economy?” In response, I would like to gesture to the entire genre and very loudly go “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

Maybe no trash items (or no need to pick them up) is the answer and not quickly selling the worthless crap.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
Oct 3, 2015
Messages
11,756
Spellcrafting – Morrowind/Daggerfall
steal_spellcraft.jpg


Now, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve often complained that – say it with me – HEROES. DON’T. CRAFT. But that’s the kind of crafting that should best be left to blacksmiths and the like. I make an exception for creating awesome magic spells out of parts – combining interesting effects and unleashing them on my foes. Especially with cheat codes to cut out any pesky safeguards or economic restrictions.
This image is from Oblivion, not Morrowind or Daggerfall. :M Granted, Oblivion did still retain spell-making from the previous Elder Scrolls games, though it neglected to include a way of deleting spells from your spellbook.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,225
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/27/planescape-enhanced-edition-changelog/

The RPG Scrollbars: Predicting Planescape
Richard Cobbett on March 27th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

plane1.jpg


If you go down to planescape.com today, you’re sure of a big surprise. Unless you’re expecting a countdown, in which case, it’s that. What could it mean? Well, if you open the page source, you’ll see a secret message hidden in there – 0x50 0x53 0x54 0x45 0x45. Convert that from ASCII numbers to letters and you get PSTEE. The two most likely translations of that are either Planescape Torment: Enhanced Edition as Beamdog’s latest updated release, or someone is really looking forward to going down to Gregg’s for a pastie sometime on Tuesday. It’s not confirmed. It could be something else. Maybe there’s a ‘Planescape Kids’ TV series coming out. Nobody’s told me.

Though it would explain this changelog I found lying around the other week…

PLANESCAPE TORMENT: ENHANCED EDITION
BUILD NOTES 0.99B. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE ON PAIN OF TORTURE. ALSO SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY, FOR A GAME FROM 1999.



* Update: Native support for high-resolution and widescreen displays, up to 3840×2160.

* Integrated add-ons: Easter Egg Morte, Leprechaun Annah, PS:T Unfinished Business (by agreement with fan creators)

* Update: New font-rescaling options for high-resolution screens.

* Update: Memory leak issues resolved.

* Streamlining: New faster path through Mortuary. Player can skip tutorial by hiding in refuse sack due to be thrown out by the Dustmen (on clicking pop-up). Deionnara now appears in dream sequence if initially missed, promising “I will wait for you in the alley next to the pizza shop by Death’s halls, my love.”

* Character Creation: The Nameless One is now nameable.

* Giant flashing neon arrow added above Pharod’s head.

* New Game Mode: Action. All major conversations carefully abridged to enable full focus on tactical combat. For example, “You are wrong. If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the Planes, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear – whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can.” now shortened to “Cram it, Skullface.”

* New Companion: Giggles the Clown. Giggles now follows the party from the mortuary, making hilarious fourth-wall breaking japes and jokes about the action, including “You’ve lost your memory? That’s Adahn shame!” and “I hear the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts gives good head!” and “How many lives did it take you to get this grumpy, Mr. Grumpy?” It is not possible to kill or dismiss Giggles.

* New Romance: The Lady of Pain

* New Difficulty Level: “Take That, Iron Man”. No loads, no resurrections, no refunds!

* New Area: The Elongatorium Of Hollow Pursuits. Experience thirty hours of new gameplay in this new Maze; a long, empty, featureless grey corridor it takes thirty hours to walk down.

* Conversation: New standard response to all stories of pain and torment around the Planes: “[TRUTH] Haha!”

* Feature: Fell, Lothar and other Planescape source characters now killable because it’s not like Wizards of the Coast has given two shits about this setting since 1999. In fact, hell with it. In Chapter 2, The Nameless One meets Drizzt and Elminster sitting in a bar and drinking a toast to how much Eberron both sucks and can go suck it.

* Feature: Ignus now acts as a light source.

* Tweak: Everyone is now Ravel Puzzlewell. Everyone.

* Restored Content: Basically everything from that trailer that should never, ever have been released to the public, never mind as an unskippable (except via Alt-F4) trailer, which pretty much only existed in the final game in the form of a few diary and glossary pictures, but which did more to make one of the greatest RPGs ever released look unappetising than even releasing a dismal original pitch with a grotty picture of Annah in her finest stripperwear and a comment about The Nameless One being a corpse with incredible sexual charisma, and yes, that really happened.

* Restored Content: Stories from the novelisation now added, including Annah becoming a were-rat, and the reason for The Nameless One’s immortality being that he sold it to a tertiary devil character to help save his village. Disabled by default. Activate by choosing ‘Still Not Quite As Bad As The Baldur’s Gate 2 Novel Mode’ in Gameplay Options.

* User interface tweak: Portals now colour-coded blue and orange for your convenience.

* Multiplayer: Use the new character creator to build your own former team-mate of The Nameless One, then endure hours of soul-sucking, back-breaking labour in the Dustmen’s Mortuary in the hope that he ever comes over to say hi.

* Fast Travel Option: Ride Dabus.

* Updated AI routines: Generic thugs in the Hive no longer look at the scarred hulking demigod with his own and occasionally other folks’ weaponised intestines wrapped around his body and reckon “Yeah, I can take him.”

* New Dialogue: “Chief, just hypothetically, you know how belief here shapes reality? Well, just wondering, what if some kind of flying, skull like fellow of, y’know, some sort of prankish disposition had joked to one of your more, ah, credulous incarnations ‘I bet you must have done something really, really bad in your first life?’ We’d laugh, right? Uh. Chief? Why are we heading back to the Pillar of-”

* New Dialogue: “Morte, before we start exploring, any idea if there’s a portal to somewhere relevant to my quest nearby that might really save us a lot of pain and arsing about?”

* Update: Curst redesigned to feel like stepping into a new world instead of enduring yet more dusty beige and greys.

* Feature: Nordom can be turned into a battlesuit for Morte.

* Bonus Chapter: Planescape: Blood War. In which The Nameless One finally pauses, asks “Wait, if I’ve not been transformed into a Petitioner or something, can’t I just take this big axe, walk out of here and be back drinking at the Smouldering Corpse Bar by dinner time?” And does!

Plus, I hear the planned collector’s edition comes with a special rubber Chris Avellone so that you too can assign him stretch goals from the comfort of your own home! Ten inches? Twenty? Just don’t let him snap before he finishes the new System Shock!

stretchav.jpg


Supplies may be limited. Or indeed, non-existent.

Either way, personally, I can’t wait.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,225
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/10/the-rpg-scrollbars-saving-world-quests/

The RPG Scrollbars: Saving World Quests
Richard Cobbett on April 10th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

wq_1.jpg


Previously in this column, somehow not taken up by the industry as of yet, I suggested that the word ‘quest’ was being somewhat damaged of late by the fact that it can be anything from ‘Kill the Great Red Dragon’ to ‘bring me some orange juice.’ I advocated a system where instead, tasks were split between two basic categories – what used to justifiably be called ‘quests’, and the more prosaic ‘shit to do’. I realise now though that I missed an important third category, World Quests, named because scattering mostly pointless crap everywhere is much easier than actually filling an open world.


wq_2.jpg


World quests come in many different forms, but typically ‘icons on a map’. Kill this. Collect that. Blow up this. Keep doing it and typically your reward is something that would have been really useful about ten hours ago, but now only serves as bragging rights for the literally nobody interested in hearing anyone brag about their success in RPGs. The irony is that they’re usually pretty easy to ignore, in terms of raw game, but always prominent as a way to level up a little more or get some extra cash that may or may not be useful later on, or simply obscure what you’re actually supposed to be doing next. The biggest recent failing is of course Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Hinterlands map, which many players found themselves playing to the point of screaming instead of playing as Bioware intended – to do some stuff, and come back later. “The Hinterlands” is now effectively industry short-hand for offering too much up-front, from regular quests to solving ‘Astrariums’, and closing wibbly green Rifts.

There’s often a fairly wibbly line between world quests and simply optional side-quests. The easiest differentiation is that they’re repeated content in some way, whether it’s getting one of many things, or performing the same rite to shut a magical doorway, or defeating X waves of monsters to mark a location as ‘safe’, or exploring a ruin in search of a treasure that nobody in the game will ever send you after. Conversely, a FedEx quest to deliver something rarely counts, nor would tracking down a bounty hunter target or something like that. Usually they’re shown on a map either up front or when you get close. Also, usually they inspire a sound not a million miles away from ‘urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh’ after the first seventy times, usually with the general feel that being The Chosen One has become something of a janitorial position.

wq_3.jpg


I don’t really want to talk about the bad examples though, because they’re both legion and speak for themselves. I think perhaps the nadir came in Assassin’s Creed 2, not an RPG, I know, which somehow kept a straight-face while asking players put aside the quest for revenge and power in favour of collecting… feathers. Feathers. Fucking feathers. The Witcher 2’s free DLC would subsequently parody this with its own tedious feather-hunting quest, and incredibly awkward finale.

What’s interesting about the good examples of world quests is how easily they can be identified and built on by others. World of Warcraft for instance introduced them in the Legion expansion as end-game content, with each one a bite-sized chunk of regularly rotating content to try and cut down on the dullness of just running dailies, and a wide variety not only available, but available to choose from. Never want to do the ‘find the lady’ game played with barrels of beer? Just ignore it. Conversely, if you need the basic endgame equipment of Order Resources, Gold, key crafting supplies or equipment up to the current level cap, you can head over and get a pretty big payout. Mechanically, it serves to not only give players something to do, if only idly, but as a way of quickly catching up slower players and providing plenty of upgrade potential.

wq_4.jpg


Nothing however does world quests as well as The Witcher 3, for the simple reason that like most of the game, CD Projekt Red based the systems around not just Geralt as a character, but Geralt’s job as a monster hunter. You don’t have to. In terms of cash, it doesn’t pay well. However, it makes sense that you would, either while passing or at the bequest of some peasant, take a moment out of your day to stomp a monster nest or go after some creature not directly relevant to the narrative courtesy of a Witcher contract. It doesn’t feel right to leave the situation undealt with, especially if you can do it on a ride through somewhere else. Likewise, retrieving the fancy Witcher gear from maps found in Scavenger Hunts offers funky new looks as well as the sense of completeness. Even if you never use them, at least by the end of Blood and Wine there’s somewhere to stash the things instead of just treating them as more merchant-fodder. They’re also wrapped in at least some story, of the fallen Witchers who once used them, albeit nothing crucial even if you’re primarily playing for plot.

As with so much in RPGs, there’s a lot more that could be done with world quests. Assisting different sides of a civil war affecting the overall result, for instance. However, not for the first time in the last month or so, it’s Zelda: Breath of the Wild that really shows the rest of the industry how to design open worlds. It’s hard to convey how well many of its systems work if you’ve yet to play it, but a good starting point is that though it does have Assassin’s Creed style towers, they’re purely used as observation points rather than a reason to cover the map in collectibles. Instead, the game itself gently guides you through the world and simply presents opportunities – an impossible climb for instance, which turns out to have a reward at the end of it. Bits of scenery that encourage you to throw things into stone rings and trigger characters to pop up without even thinking about it – feeling clever instead of just anally-retentive.

It even manages to make – and I can’t believe it either – it manages to make collecting seeds interesting, just because the little critters hiding them are under every other rock or tree. Likewise, the game uses its raw mechanics to drive a lot of the game. It doesn’t need to insist, for instance, on endless tutorials about cooking things up in the fire when it knows full well that you’re looking for interesting recipes. The result is that exploring much of the landscape doesn’t feel like a chore, because it’s your own choice to do it, and there’s still scope to be pleasantly surprised by what you find, instead of just working out how to get, to take a purely hypothetical example, a feather.

wq_5.jpg


So, what makes for a good world quest?

The first part is that you can’t just throw Something down and expect it to work, or for that matter just something that can be handwaved as ‘a thing the hero would do’, since that tends to be a very general platter of murderous and thieving activities. It has to feel like a diversion that’s actually worth their time, even if the player knows that ultimately it’s of tertiary importance. That can be, for instance, taking the time to build an interesting location, or having the player fight a tough enemy, or taking advantage of the fact that it being off the critical path means that the difficulty can be cranked up to present something familiar in a real gloves-off, come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough, kind of way, with a suitable reward to match.

The second part is that the job should be, in itself, fun. Now, that sounds obvious, but I’d argue its a jump from the open-world games where this kind of thing started. Red Dead Redemption for instance had its treasure hunting challenges, where maps had to be found, deciphered and then solved. Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag also had its treasure hunting, along with contracts. That mental element is the obvious thing to take. However, those games also put a lot of stock into making simple traversal into part of the game experience – riding through the desert or sailing a ship to a beautiful island, and then clambering all over the final destination and so on and having exciting encounters. Zelda too falls into this category. But even The Witcher treats travel primarily as a way of getting from A to B rather than something to do for fun, which radically cuts down on the excitement of wandering. Its world too is beautifully rendered – the game looks gorgeous – but it doesn’t typically go in for points of particular scenic beauty to find and enjoy. (There are exceptions of course, like the palace in Blood and Wine, with its amazing vistas, or the painter quest, but they remain exceptions to the rule.) A monster’s nest for instance is just going to be another bit of forest, not an incredible ancient temple to clamber over.

Third. The reward has to be real and imminent. That doesn’t mean immediate. But part of the problem with most games is that they don’t necessarily have much to give out for their side-quests that actually ‘feels’ notable – equipment can’t be too good, or it unbalances the game, and it can’t be crap, or it’s not worth it. Gold is usually functionally worthless by the middle of every game. And if it takes too long to get some form of attaboy, then it’s a pain. This is a challenge for every game to solve individually. Zelda for instance exchanges seeds for larger inventory space. The Witcher, as mentioned, offers unique looks and stories. Black Flag offers sea-shanties.

Incidentally, speaking of pirates, does this sound familiar to anyone else?



Just asking, because I’m suddenly sad we never got a piratical Ultima game…



Anyhoo, where was I?

Ah, yes. Fourth. If at all possible, the side-quests should have at least some bearing on the world as a whole. There’s no reason for example that something like Fallout couldn’t have you plant trees and have life return to the wasteland, or factor in the overall prosperity of a settlement into its end-game stats instead of just basing everything on big decisions. This one, I don’t think is essential, but it’s a good way of making all decisions feel at least a little meaningful.

wq_5.jpg


Fifth. These quests really, really shouldn’t slow anyone down. I am so looking at you here, Dragon Age: Inquisition, with plot quests attached to levels of Power well past the point that most players just want to find the villain, insert a boot into him, and catch the titles. The player that wants to scour the map and do everything is the player that will scour the map and do everything. Most just want to advance the story on at least a decent schedule, and know full well when everything’s being blocked because someone in Marketing promised a 50 hour experience rather than 20.

And sixth, all these quests really need to start from the starting point that they’re really not as necessary as many developers think. It’s already hard enough for many players to find time to finish long games, be it because they have other draws on their time, or simply that owning a Steam account is to drown in enticing offers from a million different new experiences every five minutes. If the developers are excited by the side-objectives, as with the treasure hunts mentioned above, then awesome. If it comes down to simply filling the map with icons in some Ubisoftian push for perceived value then really, don’t waste our time. None of that stuff ever, ever compensates if the main game isn’t going to be good enough, and as the Hinterlands prove, more really can end up being less. There’s always bits of the real game that better warrant the time.
 

Aaron Burr

Educated
Joined
Nov 28, 2015
Messages
15
Cobbett wrote about the CRPG Book Project today: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/17/the-rpg-scrollbars-the-crpg-book-project/

The RPG Scrollbars: The CRPG Book Project
Richard Cobbett on April 17th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

cr1.jpg


Since the invention of the RPG, there have been many, many RPGs. Maybe too many to count. At least six! Let’s see. Ultima VII. Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse. The Magic Candle III. Faery Tale Adventure II: Halls of the Dead. Two or three more, probably, and that’s if you don’t count Quest For Glory. But who has time to play them all?

Oh, if only there was a ridiculously large tome devoted to trying to catalogue them all in a decent amount of depth, currently at 450 pages and rising. If only. If only


cr2.jpg


Even at that imposing size, The CRPG Book Project, managed by Felipe Pepe, can only really scratch the surface of the genre. It’s more a primer history than a deep-dive into any individual title, with most games only given a page or two on what they were, why they’re interesting, and what their place in the genre is. Articles aren’t intended as comprehensive reviews, and sequels, in particular, are on a real ‘need to cover’ basis.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. There are eight Wizardry games, ten Might and Magic games, nine Ultima games, and that’s only talking the main games in their series. Ultima also has the two Underworlds, the Worlds of Ultima games (Savage Empire and Martian Dreams), Ultima Online, and if you really want to be completionist, also two Runes of Virtue games on consoles, a couple of ports of the later games, and Ultima: Escape From Mount Drash, which has sod-all to do with Ultima, but still probably has to go in there somewhere. As much as fans of some of these long-running franchises will argue, there’s a definite split between landmark instalments that shook things up, and parts that may as well have been subtitled ‘Second Verse, Same As The First.’

The result though is a lovely book. It’s obviously possible to get much of the raw information in other places, like Wikipedia, but this is a lovingly written and laid out tribute to the genre designed to be enjoyed as much as informed by. Every game is presented in full-colour article form, with a wide range of writers – many from the Codex, but also a few familiar names like Chris Avellone, Scorpia and Tim Cain. I also threw in a couple the other year – Quest For Glory and Martian Dreams – though it’s a different RC who did most of the longer-form stuff bearing those shared initials.

cr3.jpg


Most of the pages are devoted to the games themselves, broken up into eras – 1980-1984 through to (currently) 2014, factoring in the first big wave of Kickstarter projects. If it’s been on a shelf in the West, it’s probably represented here. Bard’s Tale. Castle of the Winds. The Immortal, aka the most ironic name possible for a game full of deaths. Flops like Descent to Undermountain. Visitors to computer screens like Breath of Fire IV and Grandia 2. The occasional questionable entry like X-COM: UFO Defense/UFO: Enemy Unknown and Tron 2.0. Deus Ex. Fallout 2. Silver. Veil of Darkness. Autoduel. Even Super Columbine Massacre RPG. Each gets its own nicely laid out introduction with mostly original pics and occasional links out to other sources.

After that, things wrap up tightly with a very quick look at early JRPGs – understandably kept very separate due to the CRPG focus specifically, though it’s always a shame to see games like Chrono Trigger and Pokemon not get their historical or cultural due – some fan-translations, some RPG Maker stuff in brief, and some quick looks at old hardware platforms. Well. Uh. Two, anyway.

That last one is easily the weakest section of the book, as it stands, covering just the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, neither of which were exactly RPG powerhouses. This section really needs to be bolstered with the likes of the Apple II, early PC systems and Amiga, and thinking of that, the PC bias does make itself more obvious in the absence/irrelevance of stuff like Obitus or Knightmare and Captive II: Liberation. (Technically, yes, Liberation is in, but only as a paragraph and single image in Captive 1’s write-up, despite Captive being a relatively basic Dungeon Master in space game and Liberation at least trying to kick down the genre boundaries.) Most of the really important stuff did come to PC of course, but in Europe at least, it took a while for the C in CRPG to become completely synonymous with the greatest platform in the world. Filthy Amigas and STs, hogging the spotlight. Still. Where are they now, eh?

cr4.jpg


For the most part, the games listed are the ones that you’d want to see, though personally one of my favourite things about this kind of book is running into the stuff I’d never heard of before. The book, for instance, features Wasteland, but not Escape From Hell or the sorta-kinda-not-really sequel Fountain of Dreams, in which you have to try and find a cure for radioactive mutations that ends up literally ten or so steps from your starting position and guarded by an army of murderous clowns. Yes. Really. Likewise, foreign-language stuff is out, as is most shareware. There are exceptions like Dink Smallwood and Castle of the Winds and some Spiderweb stuff, but don’t expect much on formative historic memories like how boring, say, Moraff’s World was. It also skips almost entirely over MMOs and most other online-focused stuff.

No book can hope to cover literally everything though, and what’s more important is that the CRPG Book Project does a great job of covering the history of the genre. It doesn’t go deep enough that the hardcore super-fan who asks their doctor for health potions instead of regular medicine is going to find too much that they don’t already know, but as a primer on the scale, the scope and the variety of the genre, you really can’t do much better than either give your scrollwheel a good work out, or personally clear a good chunk of the rainforest in the name of a print-out.

cr5.jpg


As said though, it’s not completely finished yet. The current version is down as the ‘alpha preview’, but with scope to add a few reviews and so on should you find anything offensively or notably missing, like believing The Kristal to be the paragon of all gaming, regardless of how many cc’s of thorazine the nurse keeps prescribing. The current ‘want’ list is available here, in Google Docs form. As an aside, Felipe Pepe has also made his image collection available to all, so should you ever be in need of a picture of Arx Fatalis or a reminder of how disappointing Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader was, you can snag those here. (Reminder: Sigh. Blasted game.)

The book itself though? That’s here in all of its and the genre’s glory.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,225
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Thumbs up for the Eternam reference: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/08/the-rpg-scrollbars-cool-setting-bro/

The RPG Scrollbars: Cool Setting, Bro!
Richard Cobbett on May 8th, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

csb_0.jpg


The problem with fantasy is that it’s often not very… well… fantastical. Far too often, even brand new worlds feel like Tolkein or Warcraft or Star Wars with a few twists, and the serial numbers scraped off. The good thing about this is that when a game does take us somewhere new, it feels all the more special for it. This week then, a quick look back at some which have caught my attention for their sense of place. That doesn’t necessarily mean super-original in the great scheme of things, or even not based on a licensed work, or even necessarily that the world contained a great game. These are just a few settings that have stood out from the crowd as cool ideas that surprised, inspired, and deserve borrowing or dusting off.


Escape From Hell
csb_escapefromhell.jpg


Okay, I understand this might seem like an odd starting point after the likes of Doom and Painkiller and Dante’s Inferno, and especially given that ‘set in the afterlife’ is a cliche that makes many an agent shudder. In RPG terms though, Escape From Hell was playing Old Harry’s Game long before Andy Hamilton’s sinus-challenged Satan, and taking advantage of the setting to bring in just about any historical character or reference that it wanted. It’s a game where you team up with Stalin and Genghis Khan and Hamlet to beat up Satan, using dustbin lids as shields. Sadly, the game coming on floppy disks meant very little actual characterization, and what was there was rippled with a deeply unpleasant sense of misogyny. Of the army of NPCs for instance, only two are female, and one is simply a topless blonde called “Blonde” with no skills at all. The humour is also pretty… let’s say ‘awkward’ at times, with settings including a walk through Dachau. But as said, we’re looking at originality here rather than necessarily specifics, and the vast quantities of fiction exploring similar possibilities show that there’s plenty more that could be done here.

Eternam
csb_eternam.jpg


Okay, so Eternam is primarily an adventure game, but it has just enough combat and exploration that I’m promoting it to RPG status just to say: Theme Parks. Eternam, the world, is basically Westworld – a series of biomes devoted to different periods of Earth’s history. The main character is a visitor role-playing as a barbarian within the game, tracking down his arch-enemy who has taken over the park. The advantage of all this should be obvious. An inherently fake world allows for both playing fast and loose with mechanical rules, and allowing world-design to focus purely on the awesome. (I still say that if the Dead Rising series never has an installment set in Not-Disneyworld then everyone involved has failed). It doesn’t need to be historical, though of course there’s a lot of fun to be had with the time-travel possibilities there – of bringing a plasma gun to a sword-fight etc. Any question about ‘why this’ and ‘why that’ can be thrown out of the window to give the designer completely free reign. Though ideally without completely running out of steam, as Eternam did long before the lend.

Fallen London
csb_fallen.jpg


A game close to my heart, and not just because I’ve had the privilege of having the keys to its kingdoms now and again (translation: I’ve written for it, and its nautical spin-off Sunless Sea). While it gets a lot of praise for its sense of mystery and the deep lore, and that’s all obviously great, the raw setting would be one of my favourites even without that. It’s one of the best cases I’ve ever seen of taking the familiar and twisting it approximately 32 degrees. In particular, the gap between the big incident of London being stolen by bats and the period in which the game takes place allows for a wonderful melting pot of old and new, but presented as completely normal. My favourite bits are actually the relatively early stuff, where your character isn’t involved in the machinations of the Masters or launching epic zee-journies, but simply tipping their hat to eldritch horrors while trying to write love poetry, or concerning themselves with whatever delightful fancy lay happens to be taking place between the paragraphs. No other universe is so comfortable playing in that margin where the mundane meets the magical. How I’d love to see a big budget TV version of it someday.

Bloodnet
csb_bloodnet.jpg


Do not take this as a game recommendation. I think Bloodnet really, really sucks. I hate almost everything about it, from its combat system to its visuals to its UI. However, that said, I do love its core concept – a cyberpunk city where vampires rule, you’re trying not to become one of them, and every minute that passes is another drop of humanity draining away. The upcoming Vampyr looks to have a similar historical concept and conceit, in that you get to choose who to kill to satiate your thirst for blood. I always did like that idea, and since Vampyr’s not out yet, Bloodnet’s the game I’m throwing the shout-out to. Likewise, while I see no reason to suspect CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk will be anything other than awesome, it’s weird how little it’s been used as a setting. We’ve got Shadowrun now, but lest we forget, its first PC appearance was a team-shooter. That’s ridiculous considering that both SNES and Megadrive/Genesis consoles had an actual, proper RPG version back in the 90s. Bah.

Entomorph
csb_entomorph.jpg


Much to my chagrin, RPGs love nothing more than big bugs and creepy-crawlies. Oddly few though have tried an organic world. Tides of Numenara recently tackled this with its Bloom location – a huge monstrous world of revolting flesh-deals and putrefaction – and we’ve seen individual worlds give it a shot, like Ultima Underworld 2’s Tanaris or Sanitarium’s Hive. They’re still pretty rare though, despite the obvious scope for horror and creative biology. That seems an odd omission, though it’s not as though a few games haven’t tried. Tabula Rasa for instance was initially going to be far more organic, before turning into a fairly stock SF world whose second planet began with a character complaining how boring the world was. Nothing though has really fused body horror and bugs with a sense of an actual world. It’s a wide open field, even if they’re only there as invaders.

Savage Empire
csb_savageempire.jpg


Here’s one that’s always surprised me – the vast quantities of pulp adventure fiction ripe for the picking, yet left to wither on the vine. Obviously, bits of them show up all the time, but the crazy melting pots of things like the old Doc Savage stories are largely left to simmer over. Savage Empire presented a cool world of larger-than-life monsters, less-dressed-than-sensible characters, and crazy jungle adventures without… at least that I remember… the more unfortunate elements of the original stories. Certainly, there’s got to be potential in a Flame And The Flood style adventure down a fantasy version of the Amazon or similar, right? Right.

Darklands
csb_darklands.jpg


There are of course three kinds of people in this world. The ones who praise Darklands for being a scrupulously historical RPG with no fantasy elements, the ones who go “Wait, it has witches and thing…”, and those who’ve never heard of it at all. Either way, the idea of a historical RPG with a few tweaks still has much potential. (A good start being to find a copy of Lionheart and then not do anything that it does.) We’ve occasionally seen dips into this territory, often tied to Robin Hood or King Arthur, but nothing that really fuses the potential of RPGs with a sense of historical veracity. That said, to a generation brought up on Assassin’s Creed, I suppose much of the tutorial would have to be taken up by explaining why everyone isn’t currently doing parkour.

Al-Qadim
csb_alq.jpg


Remember when the Aladdin TV show intro invited us to “Grab your shield, grab your sword, you won’t ever get bored!”? I’m not going to go that far, but the Thousand And One Nights style of world-building does offer plenty of potential. Just ask players of the Tales Of The Arabian Nights card game. Yet it’s pretty much unheard of in games. Even Al-Qadim is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting. So much more stuff to be done, surely?

Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura
csb_arcanum.jpg


Steampunk. Love it or hate it, it’s underused and rarely done properly when it is. That is all. The fusion of magic and technology is also always a fun experience.

Vampire: Bloodlines
csb_vampire.jpg


Okay. I would love a Vampire: Bloodlines 2. I make no bones about it. However, this one is here primarily so that I can ask – where the hell is all the urban fantasy? It’s the perfect genre for RPGs, and you don’t need to put it in the cyberpunk future just because it’s easier to justify people wearing stripper clothes and wielding Uzis. It’s ridiculous that we haven’t seen more adventures on dark nights where monsters tread and occasionally stop for a chat. Yes, as with other examples here, there are non-RPGs that offer the vibe and the aesthetic. However, there’s a big difference between shooting the hell out of secret societies that control the Earth in secret and actually being part of them and living that life. It’s such a strange open goal, with even the likes of The Secret World largely side-stepping it in order to focus on locations with open mysteries and no sense of masquerade.

And I could go on! But as ever, I’m interested in hearing the games that would go on your list. As said, it’s not necessarily about the games themselves, but the chance to experience a different world. There are many fantastic fantasy games that simply don’t stick in the mind, and just as many awesome ideas that cry out to be in a better game. The joy of RPGs is that they can explore all of them, with sword, gun, or just a well-chosen word. And without the need for a single orc or elf within a hundred miles.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,225
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Hmmm: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/22/tyranny-sales-being-evil/

The RPG Scrollbars: The Fall Of Tyranny
Richard Cobbett on May 22nd, 2017 at 1:00 pm.

ty1.jpg


Kickstarter’s been pretty good for RPGs. We may not have seen the next big leap yet – Divinity: Original Sin 2 is looking pretty damn special, mind – but it’s certainly breathed new life into the classics. Wasteland and Pillars of Eternity are both returning. Numenera went down well, despite a little over-promising. Divinity was superb.

Have I left anyone out? (Oh yeah, don’t forget Taz.)

Oh. Yes. Tyranny. If you thought that game kinda landed and faded quickly, you’re not alone. Despite being a very solid half of a game, even Obsidian/Paradox have admitted that when it came to it, “everyone was hoping that it would do better.” I think it deserved to. The thing is, I’m not sure this should have been a huge surprise.


ty2.jpg


There’s obviously market reasons that it might have underperformed, and political ones that I’m not going into here. Players were a touch cool on it at release and have only got frostier since. Not least after realising just how long a decade is in Infinity Engine years. However, I don’t think most of that really explains it. Certainly, in terms of feel, Pillars was by far the clunkiest of the revival projects, and folks were still warm enough on that to almost immediately fund Pillars of Eternity 2: This Time With Pirates.

What separates Tyranny from the crowd – indeed, what was intended to separate Tyranny from the crowd – was its premise of being the bad guy. It doesn’t really matter that in practice it was more open than that. That was its hook and its central draw in all the marketing; marketing which went out of its way to promise a cruel, bleak land in which heroism is dead and the only music left in the worlds are everyone’s favourite lamentations from Now That’s What I Call The Crunch Of Jackboots Stamping On A Human Face Forever Vol 2 – the one with Gilbert Gottfried’s ‘Trapped In The Closet’.

And the problem is… being the bad guy just isn’t that much fun.

ty3.jpg


I know that sounds weird when you look at the success of Grand Theft Auto and the like, and I suspect all of us have done some spectacularly fun, individual evil acts in games to either see what happens or just for the fun of it. Nevertheless, in most cases, there’s a bit more to the story than that. Not for nothing do we have the phrase ‘every villain is the hero of their own story’, just as the kind of card-carrying villain that punts puppies into the sun tends to be the player who gets the most glares in a group.

The basic mistake people make is that when we talk about ‘evil’, what we’re generally talking about is, well, ‘naughtiness’. The fun of transgressing a bit. The power of being outside the rules. That most often shows itself in two ways – in playing around with a game once the artifice of reality has worn off and even the best-realised character is just a glorified Barbie doll to stick in the microwave, or the allure of what I call ‘fun crime’. This is mostly evident in something like GTA – whether it’s something orderly like a bank heist, or just sowing chaos for funsies, versus crimes like torture, scamming pensioners out of their life savings, or recommissioning 2 Broke Girls.

ty4.jpg


The catch is that the further you get from this detachment, the less fun it becomes to most people. Destroying a city? Cool. Kicking over a child’s sandcastle to make them cry? Unpleasant, because while that act might seem completely trivial in comparison, most of us are wired to feel extra shitty about that kind of thing. Even when it’s an accident. Destroying Dubai in Spec Ops: The Line is just more property damage, but destroying the city’s water and condemning everyone to slow death-by-thirst is something both more evocative and harder to cheer at.

An example I like to bring up here is the City of Villains (RIP) arc about a guy called Weston Phipps, a fairly regular guy compared to all the costumed freaks and literal demons splashing around in the Rogue Isles – yet one of the most despised characters even next to the self-proclaimed supervillains, because his story arc was about crushing the hopes of a nearby teacher, seducing the poor and sick into his lair, and generally crushing the hopes of the Isle’s most downtrodden. He was specifically written to counter players’ complaints that they were only ever really fighting other villains, and quickly became an object lesson in ‘be careful what you wish for’.

In practice, there’s a reason that most games that focus on being evil pretty quickly shift focus to be Evil vs. Evil. Dungeon Keeper was mostly spent fighting other Dungeon Keepers, just as Overlord was about fighting corrupted heroes with the help of wacky comedy sidekicks. Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines might seem an example of relishing the power of the night, but in practice, you’re surrounded by dicks and again, most of the ‘bad’ stuff is designed to make you feel shitty.

The whole ghoul sequence with Heather Poe, for instance, plays out as an abusive Joker/Harley Quinn style relationship where you’re the Joker, is designed to make you start by smirking at the situation but quickly realise the horrible thing you’ve done in saving her life. Or a side-quest involving destroying a would-be scriptwriter’s vampire movie screenplay, which is necessary to maintain the Masquerade, but deemed bad enough that even the vampire requesting your services feels sorry for him. Throughout most of the game you’re instead encouraged to play nicely, to not kill, to not make a fuss. True, the official reason is that nobody wants tomorrow’s headline to be “SANTA MONICA RAMPAGE, P.S. HOLY SHIT VAMPIRES EXIST AND ARE REAL”, but potato, po-tahto. You also spend the game firmly on the side of more or less ‘good’ vampires (and before anyone says it, I don’t mean ‘the Camarilla’) going up against or reluctantly following orders from the darker ones and the douchebags respectively.

ty5.jpg


Evil vs. Evil works because regardless of what the Rolling Stones told us, there’s rarely much sympathy for the devil. We can relish in the same acts and the same satisfaction of crushing, humiliating and dominating an enemy, without that pesky moral aftertaste. The catch is that for it to be more than just swatting flies, a la Carmageddon peds or random civilians in Syndicate, those characters need to be built up to some degree, and the more that happens, the greater the odds of developing a degree of sympathy.

As soon as that line is crossed, the maniacal fun usually draws to a halt. Likewise, if the player character does anything to lose the psychopathic link, it’s effectively game over. I can think of plenty of cases where this has happened for me, including GTA: San Andreas, Saints Row 2, and the entirety of Watch_Dogs, which never seems to realise that its vigilante main character is worse than any of the villains. It shouldn’t logically make any difference that brutally torturing one set of pixels has more of an emotive punch than running over other pixels… but it does, and doing it to groups of pixels that your brain has spent the last few hours learning to recognise as a friend can be a sickening experience. Putting Morte into the Pillar of Skulls in Planescape Torment, for instance. Dealing with Harold in Fallout 3. Or The Iron Bull in some situations during the Dragon Age: Trespasser DLC. And these are cases where you’re doing it for good reason, not that you’ve actively decided to spread a little misery.

Away from games, it’s also worth noting the general agreement that media with villain protagonists really requires some degree of punishment. Walter White. Scarface. Tony Soprano. Frank Underwood. Even when we love seeing them get away with things, there’s always that deep-down level that the show or book or whatever else won’t be complete until it all comes crashing down. Until the taxes arrive on those wages of sin. Until all those trampled in their wake get a degree of justice, in at least some form. Villainy and tragedy are intrinsically interlinked in every form of media, with those that escape almost always having done at least something redemptive to earn their second chance, or paid some price greater than failure or incarceration. There’s exceptions to the rule, sure, but not that many, and fewer still great ones.

ty6.jpg


None of this means there’s no scope for evil in games. Far from it. For starters, just having the option is a power trip, whether you actually use it or not, and done right those options can be very satisfying. The Sith Academy in KOTOR. The Dark Brotherhood of Skyrim. The many awful things you can do in Planescape Torment, and the aforementioned Bloodlines. What all these and the other games that stand out as making wicknedness work have in common though is that they understand that evil is a spice with many uses. KOTOR, for instance, lures you to the Dark Side with ‘fun crime’ options, like hurling force lightning and making would-be Sith Apprentices shit themselves, only to have team moral compass Mission finally protest and be given no option but to either kill her or make her best friend do it. A more active choice would be Undertale, where a ‘Genocide’ run involves killing everyone in the game. Players who don’t balk at offing lovable best-friend Papyrus typically do when the adorable, naive Monster Kid shows up on cue. Though in practice, the game immediately backs down, with local heroine Undyne taking the hit in its place, and the Kid escaping unscathed.

(Undertale also of course does something interesting with its central stats of EXP and LOVE – treating them not just as a demonstration of power, but a basic willingness to hurt begetting hurting being an easier and easier path towards sociopathic murder for the sake of convenience, and then doubling down on that by accepting that the most likely reason to be doing a genocide run is that you’re simply bored, and using that as a glimpse into the game’s official villain and their completely broken psyche.)

ty8.jpg


Even then, it’s not enough just to offer the option to do something bad. Fallout 3’s opening choice of whether to destroy the city of Megaton or not is seemingly a good one, but in practice it’s so ridiculously Saturday morning cartoon level evil that the only reason to do it are to see what happens and then reload a savegame where you didn’t. This too is one of the big problems that evil faces in games – that without purpose, it’s just pulling the wings off flies and making enemies. Even Quest For Infamy, a game designed to be Quest For Glory’s dark mirror, has a main character smart enough to know that you get more results with honey than vinegar, to the point of being a polite, mostly respectful guy with a slightly filthy internal narration and occasional tendency to be a little snarky to people without actually offending them. The actual villains, almost inevitably, turn out to be local authority figures, and our Infamy-loving main character finishes his quest being declared a proper hero after all. To nobody’s surprise.

ty7.jpg


The sad thing about Tyranny is that it actually did a good job of making evil into something more than that – to allow for the options, yes, but also to push towards your own goals and conquest plans or treat the evil rule of law as at least a stabilising force in an uncertain world. Ordinarily, making evil decisions actually work out is the province of grand strategy titles, like rampant heir murder sprees with a potentially even holy purpose in something like Crusader Kings, where the effects spread far enough for there to be more than just minute by minute decisions and where your motivations for evil acts are your own. In most games that simply offer branching narrative though, you’re usually just sabotaging yourself by making unnecessary enemies, being a little bit rude to people, or being finger-wagged for demanding payment for deeds. At best, it’s cosplaying as a villain without actually doing anything. At worst, it’s the puppy-kicking option. Stupid. Self-destructive. What players often refer to as ‘Chaotic Stupid’ – being a complete dick for the sheer hell of it, and revelling in Being A Baddie.

Tyranny is better than that. There’s always that bigger picture in mind. There’s always a plan and purpose beyond minute by minute decisions. There’s always a justification for things and an argument against, even if it does end up railroading you into the ending that it wants for the second half of the game. Sorry, I mean of course, ‘the sequel’. I’m not going to say it’s one of my favourite RPGs or anything because honestly, it left me quite cold in many ways, but I’m glad I got to both play it, and play around a bit inside it.

Could it have landed better? Perhaps. Another time. Another revival. Different screenshots and colours that don’t immediately scream ‘All hope is gone!’ when it actually isn’t. There’s so much still do be done with most RPGs, and evil is no exception. When it’s the primary draw though, beyond naughtiness and fun crime to a level where it might mean anything, I like to think that we’re mostly a little bit reticent to jump in, simply because most of us know that doing bad just doesn’t feel good.
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,104
All this bunk about evil not being much fun makes me wonder if even played Legacy of Kain.

It's just years of getting gypped on rewards unless you played perfectly lawful good or its equivalent. Conditioning is complete.
 

set

Cipher
Joined
Oct 21, 2013
Messages
940
It's usually just that it's not set up well. I'm pretty sure you could make an evil playthrough great if you provided the right motivation to be evil. It's usually just too shallow.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom