I already have, but very few know who the hell is Scorpia and Ferhergón...
The RPG Scrollbars: Serpent In The Staglands
Richard Cobbett on July 13th, 2015 at 1:00 pm.
My first real act as a god was getting killed. By a wolf. Just outside my own sorta-temple.
If any of my followers are listening, write that down in your scrolls and I’ll drop the moon on you.
Serpent in the Staglands [official site] is a game I’ve been getting a lot of requests to take a look at, and it’s not hard to see why. At a time when everyone seems obsessed with old-school RPGs, here comes one that absolutely embraces the style and yet has slipped under most peoples’ radars. Honestly, that’s not too surprising. It’s not very pretty, and in attitude, reminds me of these Mitchell and Webb sketches. “Where’s my handy journal? Starting equipment? Anything that teaches me how to play?” “They’re gone. They’re all gone. And we’re back. The brutally opaque RPGs that spit in your face for not being one of the designers. Oh, I saw you in character customisation, picking skills because you thought they sounded ‘cool’. Go back to your Dragon Age. You make me sick.”
Luckily, it’s got a few things on its side from the start too, not least a fun premise and setting. You’re the god of the moon who likes to head down to the mortal world on a regular basis, suddenly finding yourself unable to get back home. With no allies save for a lord you’ve blessed over the years, and needless to say, no divine power, your only hope is to masquerade as a travelling spicer and slum it on foot through a Slavic flavoured world armed with nothing more impressive than a kitchen knife and some stolen travel papers. And that was after searching. Fists against wolves? Not recommended.
With a little equipment though, it’s a good start, kicking off with a dark mirror of Ultima’s character-creation-by-gypsy system that lets you determine what kind of god you are, and with a script that doesn’t forget it. Pretty much every conversation gives you the option to throw your weight around in blissful ignorage of the fact that you don’t have any right now. Always entertaining.
It’s this layer of character that carries the game through the needlessly frustrating opening, which largely assumes you’re coming to the game from things like Dungeons and Dragons with clarifications like “Strength gives a natural bonus to hit damage for melee and range fighters. Phys Damage: (above base)Strength/2 + equipped weapon damage + item/skill mods.” There’s a lot to juggle in both the raw rules, from that, to the different skill trees that handle basic stats and skills and Aptitudes, which give additional options in certain situations, to the point that I ended picking up most of it by sheer accident. There’s an early quest for instance where a farmer wants you to get rid of a fox from his field, and it was only in the ‘I defeated the foul beast’ options that I saw the option indicating that had I put a point into the right Aptitude, I could talk to it and persuade it to leave.
Even on a basic level though, annoyance abounds. There are barrels all over the world, but you can’t smash those barrels, only these barrels. You pick up emeralds, but then they don’t appear in your inventory because it turns out that those are cash rather than valuable goods. A character will say something like “There’s something in the well”, and the well is clickable, but clicking on it doesn’t actually do anything. Or at least, doesn’t seem to. And so on. Sometimes you smash a barrel but instead of getting items, everyone just falls on their arse because it was full of oil. Thanks!
This game painfully, desperately needs a Getting Started type guide. There’s a manual, which isnot optional, but even that is a weak introduction. It’s not complex because the systems are rocket science, but because everything is either poorly explained or just plain not explained at all. I’m aware that to some people that is considered hardcore, but I call bullshit. Games like Darklands had brutal introductions not because scourging is simply good for the soul, but because circa 1992 there usually weren’t any alternatives. Some twenty odd years later, game design by the same rules is like dealing with a civil servant who piously demands all of his staff write memos to him in Latin.
(This is not the same for all its pointedly old-school decisions, mind. To name one, Serpent’s preference for giving you a journal to fill in rather than giving you one that automatically fills itself in feels like a reasonable throwback that fits the style. That at least means you’re never just treading waypoints, and the open world will allow you to go more or less anywhere if you can survive the monsters or find ways to kite them into guards who can then handle them for you. There’s already at least one speed-run of the game that’s only 42 minutes long, and much of that is spent on the achingly slow loading screens. I guess at least they add an extra sting to failure?)
The frustrating/good thing is that behind all of this waits a surprisingly good RPG. It’s bursting with carefully designed areas and clever ideas, as well some really fun gimmicks. You can start with just yourself, or use your god powers to create a few extra empty shells to back you up until you find suitable NPCs to fill slots. When they’re recruited, you can either take them warts and all or use your power to just straight up steal their souls, removing their tiresome free will.
“You grip his shoulder as if he was a comrade and feel the vitality of his blood coursing in his veins. Digging deeper you find his soul, vulnerable and ripe, and whispering the incantation known only to the gods, you mark his soul as yours.”
Oooh.
Similar moments are all over the place, from the arrogant conversation options to weird little asides like being able to greet ducks with a cheery “What ho, duck!” that I find far funnier than I probably should, to the inevitable moments of RPG bastardry. There’s a particularly fine bit in the first proper town, down to the South, where a suspicious ship captain will buy a party member’s contract from you for a nice chunk of change, as long as you don’t have any moral objections to quite clearly selling someone into indentured servitude. Or at least, not more than about 200 emeralds worth of them. When ambushed out in the wilds, you get a cute little bit of flavour text to say that you’re not just jumped by goblins, but get waylaid while following a shortcut, or foraging for food. Early on you can find yourself facing “Crap Goblins”, and again, I find that far, far funnier than I probably should.
While this is all obviously window-dressing, it’s the kind that neatly shows the love and care that’s also gone onto the solid and (eventually) enjoyable RPG core. As much of a pain as Serpent in the Staglands is to get started with, it does reward the effort by combining its nostalgia with new ideas and a fun design sensibility that seems to leave it feeling almost embarrassed to be more modern than it wants to be – a throwback to the 90s that does its quests and world design the way that those games secretly always wanted to but were too constrained by the technology of the time to fully realise. This was after all the era where games like Wasteland had no choice but to put most of their plot text into a manual and have the game give page look-up instructions at the right point. As with many nostalgia-fueled RPGs, that leaves Serpent of the Stagland in a good place to emulate the era of games as you remember it, minus some of the more irritating elements that got in the way.
All of this should give you a pretty good idea of whether Serpent in the Staglands is likely to be ‘your’ game or not. In short, there’s a lot of really good stuff here, and the game is mostly excellent, but the path to actually getting into the damn thing is far more frustrating than it is rewarding. Once past it, the amount of freedom it offers in everything from character builds to your path around an open world designed to reward exploration is all great, and knowing the carrot is there does help. Even so, do be sure you have the dedication to keep chasing it while being brutally beaten with the stick.
The review goes into details about bad sides but only mentions good things in one sentence
Can't wait to see how that article turns out
Me too:D!
Me too
!I agree, because thinking that does not mean to be forced approving its content
Me too
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Can you please just copy and paste the article? it pains me to give them clicks. plus that site layout gives me cancer, rather read it here.
The RPG Scrollbars: A Visit To Old Albion
Richard Cobbett on August 3rd, 2015 at 1:00 pm.
Albion really should be better known. It’s one of the more obscure beloved 90s RPGs, rarely brought up in conversation like the Ultimas or the Gold Box games or for the true aficionados, games like Darklands. Since release though it’s had a decent nostalgic following, and its recent re-launch on GOG produced what can only be described as a small yet dignified whoop from many a corner. So what is it about this obscure offering from the publisher of The Settlers that’s managed to stay in players’ minds for so long? Let’s take a look, shall we? Seems a good time.
The intro isn’t much help, unless the game is actually going to be about escaping from a 3D artist’s cheese-induced fever nightmare. When the actual game starts though, things improve quickly. Albion is less a conventional RPG than a melting pot, combining multiple styles and approaches to the genre in one interesting mix. Most of the game for instance has a fantasy setting, a sprawling world of plantlife. You don’t start it there though, but aboard a mining ship called the Toronto. While there you play with control panels and chat to people about sinister goings on that really aren’t any of your business at that point, before boarding a shuttle and discovering that the lifeless desert planet you were planning to go plunder is actually a verdant world full of civilisation and secrets and adventures to be had.
Unfortunately, you discover that by crash-landing on it. Luckily, the local natives at least are friendly enough, as well as endowed with one of science fiction’s most popular pairings – a lack of a nudity taboo, and boobs. Incidentally, if you’re thinking of Avatar at this point then you’re right, but also, sorry for making you remember one of the most boring uses of squillions of cashmonies since Milton Keynes. Feel free to jump mental tracks to a better product of that name.
There’s a lot to enjoy in Albion, even early on. It’s certainly not the best written RPG of its age, with a lot of clunky dialogue – early on especially the characters are firmly from the exposition side of the universe. What it does have though is an interesting warmth and texture. Your character Tom for instance is a pilot for whom space is no big deal, while your partner for the mission is a pen-pushing bureaucrat having the time of his life simply being in space – and one who wastes none of the time that you’re knocked out, getting to know the locals and even learning their language. Aboard ship, he’s got friends, he’s got a girlfriend, he’s got some sense as existing as something other than a vessel to hit people with. None of it’s exactly deep, but the effort is made. Likewise, once on the planet the script takes a lot of time for the characters to just marvel at what they’re looking at – at being around aliens, at being on an adventure, on the strange and wonderful scenery… even if to the locals it is just a toilet and him a bit weird for getting excited.
This stretches to the mechanics as well. A particularly fun little twist is that in the opening area on board the Toronto you soon get paged to come to the shuttlebay and start the game already. You don’t have to though. You can wander around for a good while first to stock up on supplies that you just ‘might’ need, as well as sneak into a prohibited part of the ship via a small dungeon to steal and pocket a pistol. Pretty much unique amongst RPGs, that starter dungeon then has no space-rats, no space-spiders, nothing. Why would it? It’s a series of service tunnels. Even the floating droid is just there to do its job rather than provide a little free XP at the start of the trip.
Oh, and exploring? That’s quite interesting too.
Albion’s biggest twist is that it shifts perspectives depending on what you’re doing. Exploring individual areas is done from a top-down view, like Ultima. Head out or into dungeons though and it shifts to a basic 3D world. It’s pretty much just a raycast level engine, making it more primitive than a stone axe even when the game came out, but still nicely done. The first town in particular has a striking look with the help of some interesting organic texture work. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it the best of both worlds, but it’s a good stab at it – when you’re playing with items and talking to people and Albion wants to show off specific things, it uses the top-down graphics. For wider spaces and atmosphere, down to ground level it goes. It also resists the urge to make the 3D controls complicated, still including a point-and-click system for interacting with objects and characters and otherwise just letting you speed around.
The interface on the top-down sections arguably goes a bit too far in its simplicity. It’s already enough of an adventure that a status bar wouldn’t hurt while looking for things, and a crazy choice to put Main Menu on the interactions list means a lot of accidentally going there and back. A few of the busier areas could also benefit hugely from a map view or better guidance, since it’s often not clear exactly what you’re doing or where to go next and the scenery doesn’t typically offer many clues. Do I go along by the blobby green thing, or the green blob? Albion has an interesting look, but is definitely one of those RPGs where the conversation tree could have done with a “Yes, but how do I do that EXACTLY?” option at all times. In fairness though, that’s hardly unusual.
Part of what I liked about Albion back in the day was that it was a fusion of two great genres – honestly, it’s about as much an adventure as it is an RPG, albeit one with combat and stats and characters who get tired if you just keep running around. That makes for a bit of a trade-off, in that while it’s a very detailed and crafted experience, it’s also quite a short one. The challenge comes primarily from sudden difficulty spikes combined with a general lack of clarity about what the hell you’re supposed to do – not specifically in terms of narrative, but in terms of preparing yourself for fights and finding the next place to go. That gun example from above for instance, while cute, is countered by the fact that not taking the time to go get it and then smuggling it off the ship puts you at a big disadvantage early on, rather than having it being an advantage.
The mixing of so many styles also of course has its downsides. The top-down world is no Ultima, and the 3D bits are no… well, pick more or less any 90s 3D game from Shadowcaster to Strife. There’s a reason that the saying “Jack of all trades” ends with “master of none” and not “really awesome guy to have around.” It’s a game that bites off more than it can chew in that respect, though still does a pretty good job of masticating it all into paste. Its best asset for that is its colour and absolute dedication to both style and subject – the visible effort spent trying to make the best game possible on its budget and scale constantly shines through, even in the weaker or dodgier or less fun bits. See also the likes of Outcast or the Quest For Glory series. All games take terrific effort to make, of course, but not all of them exude passion in the way this one does.
Albion’s certainly not the greatest game of its era or anything, but it’s a game that’s held up surprisingly well and still has no trouble justifying its devoted following. The mid-90s were a great time for this kind of RPG – before the rules were quite as codified as they tend to be these days, but with technology capable of not just creating this kind of world but making them feel like magical places at the same time. Time is rarely kind to the magic, but the games that did something different and haven’t really been copied since tend to hang on to more of it than most.
Albion is very much in that position. It wasn’t the only game to combine top-down and 3D – the earlier Ultima games did, just for starters – but it was one of the last to keep the faith and do something cool. It’s cool to see it back, and hopefully it’ll get a bit better known as a result.
BG2
Filler content isn't the same as easy combat. Nothing stops a developer to have enemies that are handplaced and have interesting content/story relevance/cool quests and being easy to defeat at the same time. If the enemies have a reason to exist in the game AND they are easy for the Player to curbstomp them, they achieve the developer's aim to allow the plaer to relax and break the games pace, without waste too much time and feel as a chore
