So I finished Mass Effect 3 last week and I immediately went back to playing Skyrim again. I think it is telling that I am done with Mass Effect after what Raptr tells me is around 35 hours (for now anyway) while I am still engrossed by Skyrim even though I am closing in on 200. I think the difference is that Mass Effect told me a story while Skyrim invited me to come live in its world. There was a moment in my first playthrough of Skyrim when I was scrolling through my quest log trying to decide what to do next when I noticed a quest called “Diplomatic Immunity”. I read the description and had to struggle to remember who gave it to me and what it was about before finally remembering “Oh yeah, that’s the main quest!” Skyrim gives you so many things to do and so many opportunities to do them that it seems as if the various storylines have minimal importance. Don’t follow-up on a murder in the streets in Markarth and you will never find out about the secret of Cibala Mine and the history of the Forsworn. Don’t bother investigating a rumor you hear about a child performing the Dark Sacrament and you will never even get involved with the Dark Brotherhood. The world is out there for you to explore and it is up to you to do so. Want to spend all your time clearing out tombs and hunting for Nirnroot
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Stories and Worlds
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Steam Sale – Winter 2011
As regular as the changing of the seasons the Steam winter sale has started. As usual, there are a lot of games from independent producers marked down to ridiculously low prices as well as a handful of AAA titles to keep things interesting. The gimmick this time seems to be coupons. There are Steam Achievements associated with many of the games and completing them gives you either a coupon or a lump of “coal”. You can trade in coal for… more coupons. The coupons really aren’t that big of a draw. I have a couple so far but the “deals” on the coupons are worse than the sale prices on the same games right now, so they are kind of useless. Still, some of the deals are really good. I’ve cut way back on my video game spending (I only bought two full-price games this year (Dragon Age and Skyrim) so being able to pick up enough games to keep me occupied for the next few months is worth it. I’ll probably look at some of these in more detail later, but here’s the haul so far. Portal 2 – Yes, I’m probably the only one who hasn’t played it yet, but at $7.50 it finally fell into impulse buy range. Orcs Must Die! – Been lots of good buzz about this one. It seems to be a combination of tower defense and FPS. Psychonauts and Costume Quest – A pair of games from Double Fine. I started playing Psychonauts
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Skyrim – First Thoughts
Skyrim, the latest game in the Elder Scrolls series, came out last Friday and I’ve spent most of the last few days playing it (to the detriment of my NaNoWriMo output). I feel like I’ve barely put a dent in the game world but already I can tell this game is going to solidly in my top games of all time and may even knock Morrowind off the top of the pile. In best Elder Scrolls tradition, you start Skyrim as a prisoner. It is 200 years after the Oblivion crisis (the plot of the previous game) and the Cryrodillic Empire is falling apart. The northern province of Skyrim has entered open rebellion against the Empire and the Imperial Legion has just captured the leader of the rebellion, one Ulfric Stormcloak. Unfortunately you were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were captured by the Legion. One Legionnaire realizes your innocence and protests but his commander orders that you be sent to the headsman along with the rest of the prisoners. Fortunately (for you anyway), just as you find yourself on the chopping block a dragon appears and attacks the town. You and the other prisoners escape as chaos breaks out. As you make your way through the burning village you can join up with either a fellow prisoner (one of the rebels known as the Stormcloaks) or the one Imperial Legionnaire who defended you. (Quick, who wants to tag along with the people who just tried to
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On the Level
So Skyrim, the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series, is coming out next week. I’m looking forward to it, mainly because Morrowind, the third game in the series, is one of my favorite games of all time, as are Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, both also done by Bethesda. You may notice that I didn’t mention Oblivion, the fourth Elder Scrolls game. That’s because I think Oblivion made a mistake, one that wasn’t in the Fallout and thus I am hoping that won’t show up in Skyrim. That mistake was having the world level along with the player. Everyone wants to feel as if they get better and more powerful as they go through a game. Whether this is an improvement in our skills as a player as we learn the game or the improvements in our character’s skills and equipment, we like our character at the end of the game to be better than they were at the beginning. This is especially true in fantasy games. This goes all the way back to Dungeons and Dragons, the first of the modern role-playing games. We want to see our weak, nearly helpless first-level characters developing into nearly-unstoppable demigods at level 20. This is something expected in fantasy. No one blinks when Aragorn single-handedly slays his way through an orcish army in The Lord of the Rings and it is just expected that Luke, Leia and Han can blast their way through dozens of Stormtroopers in Star Wars, but
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Review – Train Simulator 2012
Over the past week or so Steam has been running a sale on Halloween/horror themed games. One game, oddly, was Train Simulator 2012 with its Trains vs. Zombies DLC. (No, really.) I had seen Train Simulator before but had mostly been aware of it as that game that had about 150 pieces of DLC on Steam. (It appears that every single train car and locomotive ever made is available separately as DLC.) But for some reason the concept of “Trains vs Zombies” was weird enough that (along with the 50% discount) it convinced me to pick it up and actually look at it. So marketing successful, I suppose. Having played with the game a bit, I have to say that I am disappointed with it. I’m not sure what I was expecting actually but the game has for me failed to deliver, though I’m not sure if that is the fault of the game or not. As the title states the game is a train simulator. A train simulator has to be different from just about any other simulator out there in that you don’t have full freedom in where you go. A plane, boat or even farming simulator should let you wander around more or less freely within the simulation area but trains by their nature are confined to their rails. You don’t steer a train, you just manage the speed to keep it from falling off the rails on a curve and to make sure you stop at
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Ain’t Got Time to Grind
So it’s been awhile since I posted anything; I have the real world to blame. In my non-gaming life I’m a senior developer for an international airline and am currently working with a database used for revenue decision support. We completed a major upgrade to the system recently and installed it into production about a week and a half ago. Things actually went somewhat smoothly, or as smoothly as anything can with a 50 billion row, 4.5 terabyte database used by around 150 people. So, I’ve been a bit busy. It looks like I may clock in at under 60 hours this week, which is an improvement over the 70-80 I’ve been logging for the past two weeks. At any rate, the other night I had a bit of a break and decided to burn off some stress by logging into World of Warcraft and killing a few innocent snapjaws to collect their scales for my master leatherworking quest. So I wound up on a beach in Tanaris, killing snapjaws and half-watching the latest Torchwood off the TiVo while waiting for the next set to spawn. Then, when the show was over, I not only turned off the TV, I logged off of WoW as well. I just wasn’t having that much fun. And that started me thinking about MMOs, grinding and what makes a game fun. No one likes grinding; I think everyone agrees with that. Unfortunately, that makes up the vast majority of most MMOs. Most of your
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Boldly Going Where No (Digital) Explorer Has Gone Before
So I’m still making my way through the various bits of the Half-Life 2 saga and, somewhere in the middle of Episode 1, it suddenly struck that despite having what seemed at first glance to be a huge, complex world, the game really consisted of a single long corridor with lots of bends in it for things to hide behind and shoot at you. Think about it. All through the game you really only have one way to go at any given moment. Sure, you can sometimes go into a side room that has a second door that opens a bit further down the corridor but that really doesn’t make that much of a difference. It’s well hidden because your path is constantly turning left, right, back, forth, up, down, over, under and around itself but the fact remains that the game could consist of a single long corridor and not really be that different. This bothers me because the environments in the game look interesting and I want to go out, explore and see what I can find but you really can’t get to most of it. Sure, you may be able to eventually get to the other side of that fence but to do so you will have to climb an elevator shaft, jump across the roof, shoot your way through five levels of offices and finally crawl out of a ventilator shaft to get there. There’s no other way to do it. Which leads me to the concept of
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Echo Bazaar – Wandering the Paths of Wilmot’s End
So I’m wandering the paths of Wimot’s End. I know them well by now. I stop by the man with the bowler and tell him why I am here. I then spy on the faithful functionary to see what is in his paperwork. I then go back to the man with the bowler to promise not to kill anyone then swap a duffel bag for a different duffel bag five times before checking in with the woman feeding the fish. After I complete this sequence three times, she gives me a set of Collated Research. Yes, I am still playing Echo Bazaar. Sadly, I have reached the current limit on the story, my stats are all currently maxed out at 120 and I am just grinding out the storylets necessary to get the next item out of the Bazaar Side Streets. Right now I am working on collecting Collated Research in order to join God’s Editors. I need 12. It takes 11 actions in Wilmot’s End to raise my “Dramatic Tension” by 1 point. I need to raise it to 2 (three points) to get one set of research. So 33 actions plus one more to collect the research means I can get (almost) 3 per day if I do nothing else. That’s 4 days to get the 12 I need. Sadly, that’s all I really have to do right now. Before this I ground out War of Assassins missions in the Forgotten Quarter in order to get enough “Use
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What’s the Difficulty, Kenneth?
Last night I was looking to kill a few hours and so went into my Steam games list looking for something light to pass the time. I really didn’t want to get into anything serious so I pulled up Majesty 2. Majesty 2 calls itself a “fantasy kingdom sim” but it really is more of an RTS. You build guild halls (and other buildings) to encourage adventurers to move to your kingdom then set quests for them to perform. It’s kind of the reverse of your normal fantasy game in that you’re the one assigning the quests instead of the one doing them. Yeah, that isn’t looking so good At any rate, I drifted through a couple of missions then suddenly the difficulty spiked. The enemy wizard was dropping fire spells on my village which burned down my market. Then a werewolf wandered into the town and killed almost all of the adventurers who had come there. Without a market I had no income with which to entice more adventurers to come to town and with no adventurers there was no one to protect they peasants so they couldn’t rebuild anything. I was getting more and more frustrated, more-so when I remembered that I had started playing a “light” game to relax in the first place. So I decided to just crank the difficulty down to minimum (since I was just playing as a distraction anyway) only to find that the game
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Review – Kerbal Space Program
Ground control to Major Tom. Ground control to Major Tom. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. Lately I’ve been playing a bit of an independent game called Kerbal Space Program. The game is a spaceflight simulator in which you design a rocket, put it out on the pad, launch it and attempt to get it into space and successfully return it to Kearth. The game starts in the vertical assembly building where you build your rocket from a series of predefined components. You can choose from a variety of solid and liquid fueled rockets, fuel tanks and motors as well as structural components like stage connectors and stabilizers. You put together one or more stages of the rocket then put the capsule containing your Kerbals, the inhabitants of the planet, on top. Then it’s off to the launch pad. There you can fire off the first stage of the rocket and see if it lifts off or if it simply falls over and explodes. Once off the ground you are responsible for controlling the rocket, jettisoning stages as they burn out and adjusting its pitch, roll and yaw and the thrust of the liquid fueled engines in an attempt to successfully gain altitude and get into orbit. Once there (assuming you managed to make it) you can burn your engines again to cause the capsule to re-enter the atmosphere and descend by parachute to a safe landing. The game is harder than it looks. It is easily
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