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| I played the game for a few hours today and here's the result by jeep 02/11/2012, 7:05pm PST | ||||
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| Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning: At least there's lots of bright colors and it's not a giant sewer level.
I got really nervous at the beginning when the EA/38 Studios/Big Huge video thing wasn't skippable, but every other waste of time except running to a new place is skippable, and other aspects of the game are similar: it's always on the edge of being a good game and there's minor annoyances but nothing that made me shut it off in disgust. That said Steam says I put 4 hours in and I'm not sure I'll play it tomorrow at all. I have played a sufficient number of fantasy rpgs and mmos that I don't need to put 100 hours in to know what's up with a game. It's actually a little weird because I've played so many mmos without every really being able to tolerate any one of them for longer than a month or so (except Eve or Star Wars Galaxies, six months or so each) that watching mmo-style design seep into single player games is a little disconcerting, because why copy something that's only designed the way it is to cope with network traffic limitations? Anyway mostly this game isn't a clone of Warcraft so much as a cargo cult of it and you can clearly see in some cases led them to make good choices and some to make bad ones. The WoW influence that led them to do something good is mostly seen in the combat. In-combat control isn't perfect but the fights are kind of like that old PS1 game Bushido Blade: your footing kind of slides around on you, moving during combat isn't perfectly responsive, there's timing issues where you get locked into position if an enemy has started their attack animation, but it is still fun to just kind of whale the fuck out of shit with lots of glitzy effects. I don't know enough about graphics programming to say for certain but I get this strong feeling like the pipeline during combat isn't quite planned correctly so there's a little frustration there. Because they gang up on you a lot of the fights are tactically kind of like Arkham City where the idea is to keep moving at one guy without letting the other ones predict where you'll be for long enough to hit you, it's just a little tougher in this game where the combat controls and animations are all slightly off. (This isn't a reason to take out the complexity that seems to be intended, random internet mining marketards, just saying the execution of the combat flow could have been a lot better, though when I look at the out of combat animation I think there may be a low talent ceiling at this company.) This isn't just my hardware either I know how to build a fucking PC and I just put this one together 8 months ago. The menus are pretty wow-y but they made a couple huge mistakes in the ux for keyboard and mouse. It's nowhere near as bad as Skyrim, but basically they made this path of hitting certain keys to get to a place in the menus and then you always get to a point where you have to reach too far for a key or switch back to the mouse, your choice is either to move your hand over to the enter key or to move the mouse to the far corner of the screen, and it happens over and over. I don't know why Valve are the only ones who get this right consistently, it's not fucking calculus. If you don't know what to do, just copy them and move on, because they are better at lots of stuff than any mmo. They copied mmo-style crafting to ill effect in a single player game, the skill options are kind of like...the first Dragon Age, I guess? Here you can try anything without the necessary skill, which is an improvement, but if you don't have that skill your chances with stuff like Dispelling (sort of magic lock hacking) are vanishingly small. The actual crafting stuff is either kind of cool, there's a sort of materia system like ff7, or just standard potions/blacksmithing shit. They should have combined Persuasion and Mercantile because neither of them come up frequently enough to be worth it, there's some other skills I haven't looked at yet. Basically 'skills' in these games are either recurring minigames like Lockpicking, item bonuses like the Sagecraft system, or noncombat action bonuses like Persuasion. I genuinely wish the people who make mmos, fallouts, rpgs, etc. would split the skill list into 3 lists like 'technical, artifice, social' and then give you one point per sublist per level to spend. The math to rebalance for that isn't harder than making the big list to begin with but it would give people more ways to grow their character in each aspect of the gameplay, and you don't have to put points into "extra conversation options" at the expense of "ever opening a chest in the game." I guess my feeling is if the technical skills are minigames and conversation is now a minigame then it's wrong to conceal those minigames from any player during a playthrough. As long as they're cargo culting mmos, I'll judge the in-game quest system by that standard because it is the same old thing exactly: the quests are obviously written by an A team and a B team and the B team quests are fucking bad, too many times I have to run all over for sub-steps in a side quest with no good reward. Like as long as people are there to play a game that's like an mmo in every way it can at least be a well-designed mmo, and multiple (any) fedex steps are just bad design. At least there's no "go kill me 10 of these." Maybe I should go further here: mmo design is built around a model of visual feedback that's supposed to create a continuous third person experience, even between major adventuring experiences like "fighting through a dungeon to get to the dragon," this usually covers minor experiences like 'running around meeting people." Players project themselves into characters under their control on the screen, and mmos feed that process by aiming to make everything in a game work without interstitial screens (ex. you hit a tunnel to the next area, but you can keep running up the hall as the game loads the next map) things like 'running from point a to new point b' or 'running back to town to clear inventory' are supposed to help with that process. While I can see there's also a benefit in terms of stretching out content with some empty travel time, I think the continuous jogging in earlier mmos like DAOC was like training wheels that just need to come off now, because the other side of that coin is reminding players of the treadmill metaphor. I can see a whole bunch of choices about what to put in these games are affected by the continuous experience goal, but it's fucking killing every mmo that comes out now, and the fact that it's still present in an mmo-style single player game is what makes this the product of cargo-cult game design. Not just advanced players, but any player will tolerate a jump cut if the tradeoff is they get to do something fun after, so it's time to get rid of the 'running for no purpose' part of the experience, even if it seems immersion-breaking give me some short-hop travel options to the next dungeon. The storytelling and dialog have some advantages and disadvantages in relation to WoW in particular. It has good voice acting and a story that is at least not fourth wall breaking by design (fuck you, infinite WoW cultural references) but it's still really fucking generic. I'm still an rpg and tabletop nerd and there's a problem in that field (the one where writer Salvatore comes from) and in this game: everything is a direct metaphor for the same handful of ethnic identities that it was back in Tolkein. I'm not crying racism, here, just boredom: what I want is not for a fantasy author to use another fucking scottish gnome, british town, irish elf, and then go hog wild and throw a trailer park of actual fucking travelers in there, and I don't want them to do years of research on some random tribes in equatorial guinea and then drag them out for some minstrel show, either. I want fantasy to have original shit in it the same as I want out of science fiction, the same as I want from all games and movies and books and tv. From now on if it's a fantasy/sci-fi story then the other species need to be alien rather than remappings of whatever folk culture Europe settled and absorbed 1000 years ago. Make the environment alien, make the magic alien, give me new stories for a new medium or gtfo. Anyway the boss fights and just most of the fights in general are very pretty, the dialog is spacebar-skippable, and it will give people who actually like WoW more of the thing they like, but when it comes right down to it I have higher expectations and I'll keep demanding more out of these games because given DA2's sales I guess I can't rely on anyone else to set any kind of decent bar. I joke that it's curt fuckin schilling but truthfully I posted on the internet and irc'd with that dude even before he was a Red Sox and he's always been real cool to me so I wouldn't mind if his game was great. I know that to some degree this single-player thing is a bridge product while they finish their mmo, but I'd be ok if they just kept refining this gameplay, as long as they spent some time thinking through wtf they were putting in front of people rather than whatever horseshit marketing analysis Bioware's been up to lately, that's gonna ruin them like it ruined Hollywood. |
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