No Game New Year: Re-Thinking Role Playing Games

One thing that No Game New Year has taught me: I don’t like Role-playing games as much as I think I do.

To put this into perspective, I have several: Fables 2 and 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon’s Dogma, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And that’s only the ones that definitely count as RPGs. Out of those twelve games, I’ve seen two of them through to the end – Fallout 3 and Fable 2. Of those two, Fallout 3 I completed in the summer of 2013 when I played nothing else for a month, and Fable 2 was a result of many re-starts and ‘coming back to it.’ After a while since I last played it, I did the final third of the game earlier in NGNY.

As for the rest of them, they’re great games,[1] but whenever I attempted a play-through I’d find myself playing for a while, sometimes 10-12 hours into it, and then wanting to play something else. I’d save my game, intending to come back to it later, but I never did. And if I do, I always start the game again, thinking I’ll do it better with a different character.

So, it’s quite rare that I see these games through to the end, and I think their length has a lot to do with it. With some of them requiring 50-100 hours worth of investment just to see the end credits, never mind all the content, it can be a struggle to feel like you’re making progress in the game. Dark Souls is very hard and makes no apology for that, but with the other games, it’s not often I feel like I’ve made a difference or advanced the plot in one session (2-3 hours, for me.) Nothing wrong with that; that’s the way those games are designed, but it feels like I’m trying to paint a wall with an artist’s brush; the sense of achievement from having done a little bit isn’t there.

Contrast this with BattleBlock Theatre. The levels are over in moments, you don’t have to spend ages travelling between each one, and you’ve got an excellent way of keeping track of your progress built in to the game. The same applies to Lego Star Wars, though the levels are longer. Fighting games like Street fighter can be over in 20 minutes if you’re good enough. Even the XCOM games have the gameplay divided up into missions that take 20-30 minutes each, and because of the way those games work, the game itself always progresses whether you win or lose. By the time I turn my Xbox 360 off having played those games, I always feel like I’ve managed something, even if it’s just a little. Consequently I’ve been having a lot more fun with those games than I have with the RPGs, no matter how many different ones I buy.

Maybe that makes me a ‘casual gamer.’ I don’t necessarily like the labelling, but I think this is part of the reason that out of all the so-called ‘next-gen’ consoles, it’s the Wii U that’s piqued my interest so far. Is that console full of ‘casual’ games? Maybe, but it looks like a lot of fun nonetheless, and with the Xbox One and the PS4 apparently forgetting that they are games consoles, I think it might be time to exit the Triple-A market for a while, get a Wii U and have some fun playing games. That’s certainly the plan for next year!

On the other hand, perhaps I should re-assess how I’m playing RPGs. Perhaps not look for ways to advance the plot, and actually have some fun with it. Set some short term goals. Do one or two quests. Clear one level of a dungeon. Try and make it so that by the time I’ve finished, I’ve achieved what I want, even if the game doesn’t necessarily agree. After all, I’ve learned from pen-and-paper RPGs that the games are as fun as you make them.

And perhaps run them alongside a couple of shorter games as well, for when I need a break…

We’ll see.

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[1] Apart from Mass Effect 2, which I’ve never played so I don’t know one way or the other.

No Game New Year - Grinding Dark Souls

I mentioned last week that Dark Souls is a very difficult game, but so far, that difficulty is not insurmountable. It is a plausible tactic to allow yourself to die a few times while learning the attack patterns of the monsters, and retreat from boss battles that aren’t going your way.

I had this very thing happen to me when I’d finally got far enough away from the Undead Burg to find another bonfire. I proceeded with the game from that point and found myself, after throwing myself at the Dark Garden for an hour, face to face with the Moonlight Butterfly. Incapable of inflicting much in the way of damage, I decided to backtrack for a while and grind some enemies to level up. In doing so, I discovered that I’d missed what I was supposed to be doing, which was ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish. I went through that particular level, which still took me a couple of hours, and actually made a lot more progress with the game than I would have done had I thrown myself into the path of the Moonlight Butterfly and her Golems many more times.

Contrast this with something like Dragon Age Origins – a good game, but as I’m absolutely useless at character builds, I’ve come very close to derailing the whole game on more than one occasion because I haven’t picked the right combination of feats etc to level up, finding myself in fights that I CANNOT avoid because of the ‘random battle’ system – and you see why I’m enjoying Dark Souls a little more. I’m not saying the same hasn’t got the potential to happen with Dark Souls, but so far I’m finding there’s more scope for dealing with it. If I’m finding one part too hard, I can look behind and do another part. Sometimes the enemies are too hard for me to kill, other times they need some concentration, and while it is a little hard to make the distinction sometimes, it does add to the challenge of the game.

 

Here’s an experience I think will become familiar quite soon: After ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish and being rewarded with a weapon that there is no way I can use because I’m the sorcerer, I decided to have another crack at the ‘underground’ section. I tried it a number of times before deciding that I still wasn’t good enough to take on the Skeletons (horribly difficult) at the level I was, and went around the rest of the game to grind for some experience. I finished back in the Dark Garden, and though I had no intention of fighting the Moonlight Butterfly again, I did at least get to the clearing before – killing a Golem in the process, which I was pleased with. On my way back to the Firelink Shrine, somebody invaded my world close to the exit of the Dark Garden. Not quite realising what this feature is for, I did not make a move to attack the guy who was clearly a higher level than me. They then proceeded to take me out with one Pyromancy spell, and I lost the 4000 or something souls I’d been saving – I needed around 4500 for the next level up.

“You bastard,” I thought, and hurried back to the area to recover the souls, praying that this Player vs Player mechanic didn’t extend to pinching each other’s souls. It apparently doesn’t and I got them all back. THEN I noticed for the first time that there was a different way you could go out of the garden, and found myself in what the game was calling the Dark Basin. “Oh wow, a new place to explore,” said I. I went down into the basin, got ambushed by a Knight, rolled off a cliff and lost all my souls – and when I came back to collect them, I couldn’t reach them, rolled off the cliff AGAIN and made the last hour and a half of play count for nothing except a new area.

But I guess it’s one of those things I’m going to have to get used to!

No Game New Year: A Brief Summary of the Last Month or so...

First of all, I must apologise profusely for not posting for the last few weeks. There’s a whole host of long and not very interesting reasons for it. A lot of it is to do with the fact that I’m a guitar teacher, and what I really ought to be writing is the 130 reports for the children that I’m teaching in the area. While I struggle to motivate myself to do it, I also find it very hard to justify doing anything else when I’m not doing it. So I haven’t been writing blogs because I know I ought to be writing reports – even though I can’t motivate myself to do it.

Anywho…

I’ve been playing a lot of games over the last few weeks, some I got further into than others but none have I managed to finish yet. In the spirit of the challenge I really ought to be getting rid of the ones that I’ve not kept at, but I can never really bring myself to do it; there’s a chance I might come back to it later. The main games are:

 

XCOM: Enemy Within

This is an updated version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I love this game, I really do, but it is so hard to do on classic difficulty that to be honest I rarely get further into the third month of the game before I derail the whole thing by getting my entire squad killed and not having anything remotely resembling competent understudies.

 

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

I’ve tried this game a number of times and I’ve struggled to get in to it, but this time I decided that rather than play to a theme, play the character I want to play – in this case a sneaky Dark Elf thief – and I find that I’m enjoying it a lot more. But in an open world game where there is so much to do, I often find myself wishing I was playing something else after a few sessions several hours long where I don’t appear to have done anything to progress the game at all.

 

Far Cry 2

If there is ever a game I should have given up on it’s this. It is a good game, I’m not denying that, and I’m fairly sure has more to offer in its single player campaign than many of its contemporary modern-military shooters, but somehow I can’t motivate myself to keep going with it for more than a few sessions. I think once I’ve finished the game I’m doing now, I might give it another go, or later in the year… I kind of owe it a chance to finish!

 

Speaking of which…

 

Dragon Age: Origins

This is the game I am currently playing. I’ve had a few false starts with this but I’m enjoying it now. I’m playing a Dwarf Fighter character with a specialisation in two-handed weapons because I wanted to maximise damage output as a tactic, and so far…

Well, the fantasy setting is nothing if not generic, Elves and Dwarves, that sort of thing. Darkspawn – the games thematic bad guys – are from what I have seen so far a different version of the usual Orcs. And the idea of a specialist force of soldiers, in this game called the Grey Wardens, created for the purpose of keeping these Darkspawn at bay is certainly nothing new. Is it even an interesting spin on the idea? Well, no, not that I’ve seen so far. We’ve all done Warhammer, Dungeons and Dragons, Elder Scrolls, early Final Fantasy games before. There’s nothing new here that I’ve seen so far after a good 20 hours of play.

That being said, it is done VERY well, which is something we can always rely on Bioware to do. I’ve played bits of the first Mass Effect game, but honestly I find myself reminded more of Knights of the Old Republic – with better interactions between the characters. The difficulty, which I rather foolishly set to Hard, is deceptively gentle at the start of the game, but becomes very hard later on – particularly with boss battles, which I rarely feel equipped to deal with. And the idea of recruiting an army to fight the Darkspawn is something I’m looking forward to finishing off, if only for a refreshing change from fetching… maguffins, I think, is the word, or quest items. The game play itself is fun, as are the quests and the feeling that, while there are things going on in the world that are bigger than you, they might all be relying on you to save them…

This is a little bit general but I’m going to be on this one for a long time so I might as well leave it there for this week. I’ll go in to specifics hopefully at the end of the week, where I can discuss things in more detail as I hopefully find out more about the game.