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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What’s the Difficulty, Kenneth?
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Who’s the Boss?
OK, so last time I was talking about Hydrophobia Prophecy and how much it annoyed me when it suddenly broke my suspension of disbelief by suddenly throwing in elements of what was essentially “magic” into what had been a science fiction thriller. Well, I’m not through beating the dead horse of Hydrophobia yet. Because shortly after gaining magical powers from nanotechnology, our intrepid heroine Kate comes face-to-face with another one of my pet peeves in game design; a boss battle. All along Kate has been facing two things. Environmental hazards (in the form of the ship she is own being on fire and sinking) and the agents of the Malthusians attacking her. These hazards and opponents have been slowly increasing in difficulty as Kate’s resources (and the player’s skill) increase. Then suddenly Kate has magical abilities and, two rooms later, is suddenly locked in a battle with a rocket-firing turret that she has to short out with her water-based abilities then shoot in one of its flashing weak points. There is no room for error; hit the turret and weak point exactly right or die. As I have said many times I play games primarily for the story, I want to experience the story or the world as an active participant, not as a passive observer. Boss fights take me completely out of the story. They are sudden reminders that I am playing a game. At one point boss battles made sense. In the arcade days you needed a way
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