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Tag: Ultima

Brakketology Gets a Job; Keeps Flying

Todd Brakke 1 Comment

FireflyBoardGame

In this day and age a guy has to do what he can to get by. That means you have to take a lot of jobs to make ends meet, even legal ones. A Firefly class boat needs parts and supplies to keep it in the air, after all. In this week’s Brakketology, if you haven’t guessed, I got a chance to play Firefly: The Game. Along with some first impressions of that, there’s a promising first look at Banner Saga (via RPS) that demands you pay attention, more Enemy Within bits, Project Eternity continues its climb up my list of most anticipated games, Amazon does something that almost made my life better, a real Ultima lands on iOS, and Xbox One gets a release date…

Find a job. Find a crew. Keep flying. I talked a bit (or tried to) about Firefly: The Game on JtS this week. I loved the thing. It’s exactly what a Firefly boardgame should be and if you’re a boardgamer and a fan of the series, you should absolutely give it a look. The theme is exactly as described in bold. You’re the captain of a Firefly and you need work, legal or otherwise. The board is big chunk of space populated by the many moons and planets featured (and not featured) in the show and you travel from place to place seeking work from the likes of Badger, and Patience, and –shudder– Niska. Do not disappoint Niska. You also have to build a crew that complements the skills required to execute on a given job, you have to keep them happy, and you need supplies (not to mention gas) to keep your boat in the air. It’s thematically perfect. The only flaw is that it’s a bit solitaire. There are means by which you can interact with other players while on-planet together, trading items, stealing crew, etc., but it’s not required and in the game I played it never happened. It’s also a game that takes a full play-through to get the hang of. In my game there was a lot of downtime while people figure out their moves, consulted rules, etc. It’s the kind of thing that goes away once at least a couple players know the game cold, but it’s a factor you should consider before breaking it out. Also, it’s a four-player limit, which it really didn’t need to be. I’m betting that, like Spartacus (also from GF9), that the inevitable expansion addresses this. (On the bright side, you can also play it with just one player.)

Banner Saga. It Looks Good. RPS has a hands-on look at Banner Saga. It’s long and detailed and you should read it. This was a game that I had intended to Kickstart back in the day, but missed the deadline because I am, of course, monumentally lazy (and cheap). Now that single-player information is starting to come out, the game sounds (and looks) exactly as good as I thought it did during its proposal stage. Here’s a taste from RPS:

I can’t think of a game I’ve played in recent memory where each and every choice I made felt so heavy. I went from telling tiny squads which squares to move to while fighting drunks (that was a fun tutorial) to managing a powder keg caravan of thousands. And if I didn’t keep it all together? If the whole thing went sky high, if I didn’t placate the spoiled human prince, if I didn’t show my Varl legions that I was just as firm yet wise as their old leader, if I didn’t keep our supplies topped off, if I didn’t get rid of the spoiled supplies some grateful merchant accidentally gave us when we saved his life, if I didn’t, if I didn’t, if I didn’t…

Then the ice would break.

There are comparisons to Oregon’s Trail (in a good way) that follow, not to mention the sorts of hooks and subverting expectations that any gamer will appreciate. Go. Read.

XCOM: Enemy Within Tries to Look Spontaneous. There is now a highly, highly scripted demo, which is so contrary to what XCOM is that it’s hard to draw much of a conclusion from it. It’s worth noting that the more scripted the events in a mission in Enemy Unknown, generally, the less interesting that mission was. It concerns me when they talk about “new environments” they haven’t addressed them in the context of just another mission, because that’s what the game needs from an expansion. More types of random missions. More variety of environments for random missions. A longer game to accommodate it all. More ways to customize your squad is nice too, but I’m not on-board yet with the whole mech and genetic modification angle. I’m strictly wait and see on that. If I can be permitted to concern troll Firaxis, I’m wary their focus is on expanding on the wrong things. I’ll still buy, though, because that’s how much goodwill they earned from me with Enemy Unknown.

For those looking for hope, here’s a blurb from RPS who got some hands-on time with it:

I got to play a little of Enemy Within last week, and the net effect of these new units was that aggressive strategies felt much more effective and satisfying. I usually turtle so hard that people want to turn me into soup, but mechs’ ability to essentially function as mobile cover and a nice helping of active camouflage for weaker units made me feel like I was better able to control the battlefield. However, to balance that out, aliens have mechs too, and I nearly ingested my Adam’s apple every time a sectoid gave one a near-impregnable shield via mind merge. The short version? It wasn’t necessarily better or worse than the way I usually play XCOM, but it was certainly different.

Project Eternity Gets a Stronghold. Obsidian came out with a fresh info-dump on what is one of my top three Most Anticipated Games That Might Come Out Next Year — Eternity. The topic du jour is the player’s stronghold. This is no longer a fresh or novel concept for an RPG, but that does not mean it can’t be cool if done well. This looks cool, mostly because it will have function beyond being a place to dump stuff. Here’s a list of passive things it’ll do. You’ll find much more at the Kickstarter page; the bit about constructing a prison sounds particularly cool so do click over.

  1. Resting bonuses. Some of the upgrades to your stronghold will grant temporary bonuses to your attributes or non-combat skills when you rest there. As examples, you can build Training Grounds to improve your Strength or a Library to improve your Lore skill. Some of these upgrades are expensive, but you’re worth it.
  2. Adventures for idle companions. You will eventually have more companions than will fit in your party, so you will have leave some of them behind. While they are idling away at the stronghold, they can take part in their own adventures, earning additional experience for themselves and extra money, items and reputation bonuses for you!
  3. Ingredients. Many of the stronghold upgrades will generate ingredients used by non-combat skills. For example, Botanical Gardens create Survival ingredients over time, and a Curio Shop produces ingredients for use by both Lore and Mechanics.
  4. Special offers. Sometimes visitors to your stronghold will have rare items for sale, or perhaps they will offer you items in return for something else. Pay attention to these visitors. Some of these items may be nearly impossible to find any other way!
  5. Wealth. Don’t forget that by owning a stronghold, you also own all of the surrounding lands and impose a tax on all of the inhabitants. It will feel nice for a change to have someone recognize your high standing and give you the money that you so richly deserve.

Xbox One Needs a Hug. Has no Takers. Lots of Xbox One stuff going on this week. November 22nd is the first day you can officially not buy the console. Lucky you! What’s amazing is that I’m actually on the fence about it. Despite the fact that I’ve been doing 100% of my gaming via PC the past year, and am perfectly happy with that, I almost want this console just to have it. Maybe it’s because Microsoft keeps bending over backwards to let people know that, “Yes, we know you hate us and everything we stand for, but look at all the ways we’re maybe(?) changing things you don’t like just to make you happy!” Like, teasing the possibility of backwards compatibility… someday. There’s a desperation so thick it makes me want to give them a conciliatory hug by just buying the thing. Also, I think my kids will like the new Kinect and it might keep them off my PC. Also also, I haven’t bought a new gadget in a long time and I’m getting twitchy. It’s a sickness.

On second thought, this ad is so full of awful maybe I’ll reserve my hug for awhile longer…

YouTube video

Because football wasn’t complete until Xbox One. Maybe it’ll even solve that pesky concussion problem.

Ultima IV to iOS. If you want to get the stink of the kinda sorta free-to-play abomination that is Quest of the Avatar, you can now get a retro fix of Ultima IV on iOS as Mythic –let’s just call it an apology even though it isn’t one– ported the Commodore 64 version over to Apple’s mega-mall of a store. And it’s free.

Kindle Readers to Get the Best of Both Worlds? Almost. Amazon, which already gets props for doing this with their music catalog, will now let you purchase their print books and, at the publisher’s discretion, let you tack on the ebook for a small fee (free in some cases). As a Kindle user who laments not being able to share books I enjoy with the people I know, this is a long overdue solution. Now if only I could tack on the print book sale to all my ebook purchases from the last year. Nothing like punishing those of us who bought into your platform already. Ugh.

Tuesday Meditation – We Had Subs Edition

Todd Brakke 15 Comments

We Had Subs It Was Crazy

So, yeah, there’s no JTS post this week because there’s no JTS this week. We’re sorry about that. But you tell Brandon he shouldn’t be exhausted from his move or Bill that he shouldn’t watch OSU’s elite eight game live or me that I shouldn’t enjoy a pre-spring break evening with my kids since they were about to spend the week out of state. The stars aligned against us this week, but we’ll be back and all will be well. In the meantime, it’s Tuesday and things happened. Richard Garriott was kind of a dick. Bioshock Infinite was awesome, but not as awesome as everyone says. Also, Michigan did something even more awesomer… and there were subs… it was crazy. (God, but I love MGoBlog’s style.)

Richard Garriott and the Art of Winning Friends. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I wasn’t all aflutter about Garriott’s Ultima-rebooty thingy, Shroud of the Avatar. The game’s presentation itself wasn’t really enough to grab me, though I’ll always follow anything the guy does. Maybe it’ll work. But regardless of that, I have to say that Garriott going around acting like a dick isn’t helping matters when he says things like this:

“You know, I go back to the day when I was the programmer, I was the artist, I was the text writer, etcetera,” said Garriott. “Every artist we’ve ever hired ever is infinitely better at art than I ever was. I was never a good artist, or audio engineer, or composer. I was a pretty good programmer, but now all of our programmers are better than I am—but if I’d stayed in programming I could probably keep up.

“But other than a few exceptions, like Chris Roberts, I’ve met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a game designer as I am. I’m not saying that because I think I’m so brilliant. What I’m saying is, I think most game designers really just suck, and I think there’s a reason why.”

Yes, he’s trying to make a larger point in proclaiming to PC Gamer that other game designers suck and nobody is really as good as him. And, yes, a lot of sites ran with the “they suck” quote without providing any context to it at all. (That context being that people are trained enough to be designers as opposed to the usual artist, programmer, janitor roles.) And, yes, in context, and wading through all the prideful braggery, there is a reasonable point to be made. But let’s not pretend Garriott A) didn’t know exactly what he was saying and B) wasn’t being a dick about it. He was. A consummate dick, in point of fact.

Then, when the whole thing blew up on him, as was inevitably going to happen, instead of offering even a token apology that hinted maybe he should have used different words, he went and insinuated it was PC Gamer’s sensationalism that caused the stir and, oh, here’s what I really meant now that I am being shamed into acting more reasonably. And PC Gamer’s Logan Decker, instead of starting a ridiculous flame war, took the high road and said, hey we don’t think we’re to blame and we even sort of agree with the man. It’s nicer than I would’ve been about it.

It’s hard to watch a guy you really rather idolized for a very long time behave this way, especially when he really hasn’t done anything noteworthy for gaming in 20 years. Maybe if there were a line up of great 21st century games to his credit I’d be more willing to accept that bravado. There’s not. Given that, just a small dose of humility would be nice. It is one of Ultima’s eight virtues after all.

Infinite Praise. Except Not. Tom Chick is taking heat for his Bioshock: Infinite review from exactly the sorts of people you’d expect. I’ve only got a couple hours spent with the game (I’m barely even into the shootery parts) and even based on just that taste I can tell you that he’s absolutely right about this game. It’s a beautiful, beautiful package. It’s also the same damn shooter we’ve been playing. What’s funny to me is Yahtzee called this one waaaay back in his review of the first Bioshock game (right around the 44-second mark) .

“It isn’t like System Shock 2. It is System Shock 2.”

Infinite is System Shock 2… too. They’re all the same game, mechanically speaking and at this point I don’t think it’s completely out of line to call Irrational a one-trick pony. They’re just really, really, really, exceptionally good at that one trick. Nobody does that trick better. And, you know, that’s okay. It beats the hell out of yet another Call of Duty. That doesn’t mean, however, that regardless of how good the setting is (and Columbia is amazing) that it’s not all getting to be a bit rote to actually play through. Bioshock at least had a decade separating it from System Shock 2. We had warm fuzzy memories, but little in the way of equivalent experiences. Now, we’ve done that. It was practically yesterday and I don’t think it’s asking too much of Irrational to suggest they need to come up with something more than shoot with this hand, use magic with that hand, listen to some audio logs, and scrap for money in trash bins. You don’t have to re-revolutionize everything, but a bit of game mechanics evolution to go with these brilliantly imaginative environments would be swell is all. Also, the save system sucks. Hard.

Final Four!!! It’s been 20 years and a lot of dark times since the maize and blue of Michigan saw Final Four action. Down by double-digits with just a couple minutes to play (and a statistical .6% chance of winning the game), that elite eight victory over Kansas had precisely zero business happening, which makes it all the more glorious. That game-tying three from Trey Burke in the waning seconds to send it to overtime will live in tournament lore forever. Also, there were subs and it was crazy. M fans, you have a T-shirt to buy.

YouTube video

Old School Rules

Matt Thrower 13 Comments

Old School Rules

My second favourite place to read articles about gaming (NoHighScores being the first, obviously) is Edge Online. And it was there that I learned the news that two well known names in video game design history, Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall, were joining forces on a kickstarter campaign to fund an “old school” RPG. The modern incarnations of the genre being apparently, in spite of being “epic” and “wonderful”, in need of some competition from the aged paradigm of stat-crunching. The article from which I learned this asked the pertinent question of what, exactly, the label meant. That pushed my nostalgia buttons sufficiently to make me want to try and answer the question for myself.

I grew up with both computers and with pen and paper role-playing games and I can’t recall a time when the link between the two was not obvious. Gathering other gamers together for role-playing sessions is hard and if you want the full effect of slowly developing a group of characters they suck in immense quantities of time. Computers promised a solution to both issues, allowing you to get your fix any time you wanted and speeding up the campaign arc.

The initial offerings I came across were interactive fiction games, which I found and still find charmless, frustrating things. They have all the book-like limitations of trapping you inside someone else’s imagination without the benefits of character development and absorbing narrative. And the experience of dealing with language parsers drives me to a level of incoherent fury unmatched by anything else in my gaming experience. These were not the things I wanted, where an inventory was a clumsy box of puzzle solving tools rather than a roster of legendary weapons and magical armour.

So the first time I got wind of something that smelled like my beloved Dungeons and Dragons, my delight was incandescent. It was original Bard’s Tale and I was ten. I had no idea how to play the game properly, and I didn’t care. I would carefully roll up a party, lovingly name them and clothe them in skins of iron and steel before setting out into the brutal dawn of Skara Brae where they would stumble into enemies and be torn apart like mewling babes. Whereupon I would go back to the inn and repeat the process over and over, ignoring homework, meals, bedtime, until I was dragged protesting from my dream world, eyes round and red from wonder and exhaustion.

This happened because I was expecting a replica of my childish D&D experience where the heroes went out and slaughtered monsters, collected the loot and went out to slaughter more powerful monsters. I think I solved exactly one of the horrible battery of puzzles the game slammed in front of the player like iron doors, which was how to get into the first dungeon. And once the euphoria of that discovery wore off and I realised that what I’d found was nothing more than a faster way to get my callow band of heroes slaughtered, my interest in the game began to wane.

The Bard's Tale
But unbeknown to me, The Bard’s Tale was just the most popular and visible cap on a mushrooming world of computer role playing games. Ultima had been born five years before and, although I would not play a game in the series until the early 90’s, had set down many genre conventions. After The Bard’s Tale and the home computer revolution they began to sprout in earnest. And why not? On the limited hardware platforms of the time action games looked awful and played in a sticky, halting fashion compared to their arcade counterparts. Role-playing games offered the majestic worlds of wonder and the grand sagas that we craved from both pen and paper RPGs and computer games.

What all the early role-playing games had in common was an obsession with numbers. Character ability scores, experience levels, weapon bonuses, spell counts. That’s where the focus was, or at least the focus of most players. Sure some of those titles were filled with cleverly conceived plots and marvelously inventive settings but what the pen and paper role-playing crowd who lapped these things up really wanted was a computer simulation of their favourite games. And that meant stats and power curves, building up experience points and hoarding loot. It is, as we well know, an incredibly addictive model of game play so titles that stuck to the Dungeons and Dragons formula sold well, got well reviewed, and spawned copies until it became the dominant model in the genre.

Inevitably actual licensed Dungeons and Dragons games eventually began to appear, the first being Pool of Radiance in 1988. But what’s striking about this release is that came after the first video adventure game that struck new ground in the genre, Dungeon Master. With its real time play, peculiar repetition based experienced system and mix of tough puzzles and twitch combat it moved the focus sharply away from number crunching and toward action. The stats were still there of course, buried in the character screens, but for the first time the player didn’t really have a clue what the number represented, what they were for. So obsessively tweaking character builds for maximum power became futile.

Dungeon Master

Dungeon Master laid, arguably, the groundwork for the modern concept of the action RPG. But while people raved about it they kept on lapping up the stats based model. They did so because it was a better mimic for their other hobby and because that reward-response reinforcement is so amazingly powerful. So while technological developments allowed first map-based tactical combat and then real-time combat the numbers stayed totally in the heart of things.

What changed the game finally was Diablo. One hundred percent real time and a character stats system stripped back to its bare essentials, it arrived at a time when computer gaming was becoming increasingly seen as an ordinary everyday activity and not the preserve of Dungeon and Dragons nerds. And it proved that the reinforcement model was just as addictive for mainstream gamers as it had been for the pen and paper role-players before them. From there, slowly, the action RPG model took over as the dominant one and evolved toward pinnacles of near-perfection like Dark Souls and The Witcher, whose difficulty made them once again the playthings of hardcore hobbyists. Video role-playing had come full circle.

Until now, and the kickstarter calls for a new stats based role-playing game to challenge these behemoths of modern technology. It is, as others have observed, a little sad that kickstarter is so often used to stoke the dormant volcanos of nostalgia than to drive innovation. But what I find especially odd about this new project is that as far as I can see, what I consider as old-school role-playing never went away.

If you go trawling around the stony bottom of the internet you will find many, many stats-based role-playing games that will give you many hours of enjoyment without costing you a penny. Just like the arthropods you might find under the real stones of a real stream they’re often ugly and will bite you if you’re not careful, but they’re there. From fan freeware modelled on the console JRPGs of our teenage years to the untold legions of lovingly maintained Roguelikes they will satisfy your desire for stats-based, reinforcement model gameplay to the very brim.

So what does that leave us with from a kickstarter project? A new story, that’ll likely follow any number of tiresome fantasy conventions, perhaps. A graphical update that still won’t be able to match the best looking action RPGs on the market, certainly. But ultimately, and ironically quite unlike the trailblazing adventures its supposed to simulate, this seems doomed to re-tread some very well worn paths indeed. I’ll be sticking with Angband and my action RPGs.

What to Make of Newly Announced Ultima Forever

Todd Brakke 11 Comments

EDIT: I changed the title on this post after posting. Yes, I’m wholly dubious of the likelihood of this game appealing to me, but I’m sure there are some good people working on this project and they deserve to have it judged on what it actually is when it’s done.

Not to date myself, but I remember walking into the B. Dalton’s at the mall near my dad’s and seeing the Ultima IV box sitting on one of the shelves. Yes, B. Dalton’s once stocked video games. Yes, there used to be a chain of bookstores called B. Dalton’s. Yes, this will border on a “get offa my lawn” post. I loved the art on that box, by the way. Way cooler than the crowded image you see above. Sorry artist who drew that, I’m just a simple creature.

So… yeah. There it is. EA and Bioware/Mythic have announced a new, long-rumored Ultima title, Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar. (I see what you did there.) I’d say it’s something of a franchise reboot that begins with retelling Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar, except it’s really probably not so much.

You see, I started playing games with the Sierra Quest stuff and Ultima. Ultima has been the single most influential gaming franchise in my life. I still have every boxed copy of the game from U4 to U9. I have the pewter ankh, the “silver” codex coin, the moonstone, and all the cloth maps. So, you’ll have to excuse me if I approach this one with a skeptical eye.

They’re saying it’s not an MMO, but it sure doesn’t sound single-player. It’s not a remake, but it is sort of telling Ultima 4’s story. It is free to play, but they’re really hoping you’ll spend money in the game. It will be available for PC and iPad. So there’s that. On the other hand, they’re talking about adventuring in parties of four and choosing only between mage and wizard character classes and using “action RPG” on the homepage and something about “Lady British” and then Todd’s head just sort of pops. Not even a pop with authority. More like the sound you can make yourself by putting your index finger against the inside of your cheek and snapping it back out again. It’s the sort of madness that makes me refer to myself in the third-person and not even care.

So here’s the thing, all snark aside, I’m willing to give this a fair shake. Ultima is about more than replicating everything that came before, but doing it with nicer graphics. You do have to build the game for modern audiences. I’m not a slave to the past. The past is still there and nothing takes that way. I’ve just never seen anything in the free to play medium that particularly interested me. I’m old school dammit. Take my money, without possibility of a return policy, and throw me to the wolves. If it’s good I’ll love you forever, or until you make something awful. If it’s awful, I probably won’t play your next game, even if it’s good. It’s all I know and this whole, well you can spend where you want, but we’re really not gonna bug you about it, we swear, model gives me the heebie-jeebies. And then you throw in this sort of cartoony Torchlight art, which is fine in Torchlight and all, but Ultima is for Very Serious People, and I just dunno.

In this interview with Massively, Bioware Creative Director Paul Barnett swears up and down that the game has the virtues, has the core story of the avatar, has Britannia and all its towns and loads of NPCs and the game will play to all Bioware’s strengths in story and character, although how strong Bioware still is in this regard is a bit dubious. They have… flashes, as we’ve recently discussed. But seriously, four player parties and two character classes? One of the great bits about Quest of the Avatar (seriously, making it “for the Avatar” bugs the ever loving shit out of me) is that there were eight cities, founded on eight virtues, defined by eight character classes, and you had to summon with you seven companions (plus yourself to make 8!) to embody the whole. Some of the promo art even shows the famous gypsy, but the whole point of that gypsy in those games was that she asked you questions that determined what your core virtue (philosophy) was and that determined what class you were placed into and which city you started in. The whole pieces of eight thing is pretty central, isn’t it?

Ultimately (bad, pun, BAD!), this game isn’t being sold to Ultima fans. We’re a tiny group anymore. We don’t matter. Seriously. We are irrelevent. But wouldn’t it be cool if this game were actually able to capture the spirit of those games in a way that crusty old players and modern players alike could delight in? Also, I think unicorns are nifty and I think the 113th congress will be a model of bipartisanship that brings us all together in universal harmony.

A guy can dream.