Telling Stories: We don’t like your kind here
Some games just don’t want roleplayers around, it seems.
Guild Wars made a point of not letting players stop running no matter what; Warhammer Online made the same mistake. Several console-based games make things like walking and chatting more difficult than they need to be, discouraging people from roleplaying even further, and some games like Defiance barely give you a spare moment to stop and chat about local politics anyway. It makes things a lot more awkward, because it’s one thing negotiating around other players who don’t like roleplaying. How do you deal with it when the game itself doesn’t want you around?
Like always, there are no hard and fast answers, but there are approaches you can use. Very few games are made with the intent to stymie roleplayers, but several make the mistake quite naturally. So let’s look at what you can do when the game’s built in such a way that you certainly don’t feel welcome
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Remakes of the first Final Fantasy have an odd dichotomy going. In the early parts, it’s easier to be curmudgeonly about the more “faithful” remakes while wishing for a game that isn’t brutally crushing you at every turn solely by fiat. As the game goes on, though, the more modernized versions start inspiring more ranting about how things were back in your day.
But that’s a little further along in today’s entry. As you probably remember, we left things off right around the time when the game finally remembers what the stated goal was at the beginning of the game. You know, when you’ve finally finished derping around enough that you could go deal with the Earth Fiend. Which is annoying, but in a way I almost wish the game had continued along that vein, sending you on elaborate, sprawling sidequests just to make a little forward motion. It really creates the sense of two distinct games, where you spend a whole lot of time getting to fight the Fiends at all and then you just sort of kill them in quick succession.
There are only a few places where you can break from the game’s very linear sequence, and taking care of the Earth Fiend first is not one of those places. It’s more obnoxious than all that, really – you have to descend, kill a vampire, open a passage, talk to an NPC who literally does nothing else, then go back down and actually kill Lich. It’s kind of pointless, and it feels like padding the length of the game without even giving you an extra dungeon to go through by forcing you throw the same dungeon twice.
Hard Project: Transformers
This might be as good as it gets. That isn’t entirely buoying.
One of the thing that fascinates me endlessly when it comes to video games is that there are certain IPs forever being tossed about and adapted into bad-to-mediocre games… despite the fact that the IP in question seems suited to games. Sometimes the games languish in development hell over and over, sometimes they get released and never find any sort of critical affection on account of being crap, sometimes they get adapted by several companies in several forms which are all bad.
So let’s talk about these sorts of project, starting with one near and dear to my heart: Transformers. I’d be lying if I said that this was an IP that’s never been made into a game, and it’s in fact been made into several. They’ve more or less all been fairly terrible; the games with the best reception are the ones that more or less just dropped everything else and turned the game into a more conventional console shooter with optional (and largely useless) transformations. War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron received generally acceptable reviews, but the other games have been panned, and Transformers Universe has gone from being an MMO to cashing in on the MOBA flavor of the month. So what makes Transformers so hard to bring in as a game?
Demo Driver 8: Jagged Alliance – Back in Action (#65)
Dead in the water.
The best sort of demos make you intrigued about what the game has to offer. The worst get you bored with the concept.
Last week’s candidate was a demo for something that I wouldn’t call good, but it also wasn’t something I’d call bad. I felt like after taking my time, the demo left me with a good sense of what the game would play like, but also left enough blanks in the picture that I didn’t feel I could entirely satisfy any cravings simply through the demo. It was solid, it teased, it made its central hook known.
Jagged Alliance – Back in Action does not have a particularly good demo. In fact, what it has is a stilted tutorial and a single mission that both manage to remind me of why I long considered PC gaming to be far more tedious than it needs to be. And from research, it’s not really the fault of the franchise, but a combination of a developer doing a poor job of adapting a game and the demo doing an even poorer job of making the game seem enjoyable.
Telling Stories: Roleplaying and character pets
If you know me, you know that I’m a pet person. To be very specific, I’m a cat person most of the time, but I’ve got a deep and abiding affection for animals of all sorts. Having pets is a big deal to me, and I don’t feel nearly as happy without a few of them in my home. Which says something about me right off the bat, just like the fact that I have two cats mewing their way through my home says something different about me than if I had two dogs or two birds or two ferrets.
Pets are one of those character traits that we don’t tend to think about when it comes to roleplaying. It’s kind of understandable why; we dote on our pets in real life, but unless you have a particularly unusual one we don’t really focus on our critters. But a pet says a lot about you as a person, and there’s every reason why your character’s pets or lack thereof can be a major character element. Read More…
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 