King of Dragon Pass

Who says you can’t play deep games on iOS? I just tried out “King of Dragon Pass”, and it fits nearly all of my prerequisites for being a great iOS game.

Basically, you play the leader of a clan in the titular Dragon Pass. The entire game plays out as a strange combination Civilization and a choose-your-own-adventure book. Gameplay involves you keeping an eye on your food levels and ensuring your clan is fortified and all sorts of simulation-esque aspects, with random interruptions where you are asked to make some sort of critical decision. This can range from enemy villagers trying to RAID YOUR HARD EARNED CATTLE to one of your farmers having an illicit affair, with you being the judge as to whether or not she should be forced to marry her original groom. Decisions you make can have ramifications both immediate and long-term (the girl becomes pregnant, etc). Those are two of the more pedestrian decisions; I don’t want to spoil the crazy ones!

Of course, in true Civilization style, you have advisors who provide you with advice on every decision, although your advisors are inherently just citizens in your clan; one of my advisors slew all the heirs of another clan just because he can (I chose to compose a poem in their honour, which was deemed an insufficient response, and they declared war on me). They can die or be killed, you can replace them with advisors who fit your worldview, whatever.

Now, while I make all these Civilization comparisons, it’s not a simulation, and you don’t need to micro-manage. There’s no “city” screen, no looking at what tiles are near your clan, etc. You have just one city, and building within it is limited to defensive structures and shrines. At it’s heart, King of Dragon Pass is a diplomacy-and-war centric game, a true role-playing game where you take on the role of this clan leader and must make appropriate decisions. Being the leader of a warlike clan and making peace offerings will not curry you much favour.

If you can’t tell, I’m totally enthralled with this game, even though I still don’t completely understand everything available to me. But that’s OK; it has a manual, but I’m enjoying just figuring it all out. But in addition to being a great game, this is an awesome iOS game, because it scratches a few specific itches I had:

• It has absolutely zero “active gameplay moments”, requiring precise and rapid input. Thus, I can play this game while relaxing, while on the bus, whatever. If the phone rings, or Fringe comes back up on the TV, or if someone jostles me on the bus, I just lock my phone. I don’t have to worry about “being in the middle of a fight!”, or mis-tracing a line and blowing up a plane, or whatever.
• The game is full of amazing little touches, both funny and heartfelt. One of my advisors passed away, with the note “His grandchildren are stricken with grief”, which was surprisingly sad. Then another advisor died, with the last words of “Bless my clan and curse the elves”
• It’s deep. Like, crazy deep. I really have no idea what I’m doing, and it’s pretty awesome.
• It’s also a great iPad game. It’s not Universal, so playing it on the iPad gives you the option to either play with it in it’s original iPhone size or blow it up. It looks great blown up.

It’s ten dollars in the App Store, and if you’re looking for a deep roleplaying game without having to worry about grinding, building a party, or combat (but want to go to war!), I can’t recommend King of Dragon Pass enough. I’m told this game is a classic revived, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a great new game too!

Linked List: Fear of the sub-optimal

Tobold, over at his excellent blog:

But with millions of players having crowdsourced the best solution, these days you simply aren’t allowed to “play” or think for yourself. The devious cult of efficiency is working in a vicious self-enforcing way: Efficiency makes players want to rush through that dungeon as fast as possible, and that forces them to require from all players in the group that they are optimally equipped and prepared. There is no room for experimentation or “learning how to play”, in spite of the sad fact that the single-player game spectacularly fails at teaching you the skills necessary for the multi-player part.

One of the major reasons why I stopped playing World of Warcraft. It was so efficient, there was no time to enjoy it. 

Also, an excellent idea is how single-player games don’t teach you how to play multiplayer. Playing Halo CTF is incredibly different from playing the single-player; sure, aiming and shooting is the same, but the strategy is incredibly different. I might have to explore this more, but for now, definitely check out Tobold’s post.

Dragon Age 2 Review

This guy is approximately infinitely more good looking than my Origins character.

Dragon Age 2 is an epic game, and I had a hell of a ride. That’s the TLDR of this review. Now, let’s get into the TL part, shall we? (And grab a drink, 3000+ words incoming!) If you’re worried about spoilers, don’t be! I do discuss non-spoilery game elements like the classes and various abilities, as well as the overall feel of the plot, but I don’t get into any plot spoilers unless you know absolutely nothing about the game. if you know the main character’s name, you should be OK.

So, as you may already know, Dragon Age 2 is Bioware’s latest fantasy epic RPG, released for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC/Mac. This review will only be discussing the PC/Mac version. If you’ve played a Bioware game before, or any RPG, you pretty much know the gist of basic gameplay and how it works.

Plot

The plot is a mixed bag. It has some standout elements, some great ideas, some underused elements, and some meh moments.

The biggest issue is that the overarching plot isn’t terribly cohesive. The game is divided into three acts, and they’re barely tied together; they could have involved three different groups of characters without much change to the dialogue. Now, I’m not saying that it was uninteresting; far from it! Each act was great, full of classic Bioware moral decisions and plot twists. It’s just that the events of the third act are only tangentially related to the other acts, and Act 2 could have essentially been a long DLC quest. Thus, the finale was fairly awesome, but it didn’t have the dramatic buildup; I kept expecting choices I made in previous acts to come back and bite me in the arse, but they never reared their heads again.

However, if you consider this game to be character-centric (the story of Hawke & his companions) rather than a single event (I.e. The Blight, in Origins) it makes a lot more sense. Each act has it’s own sidequests and plot, and each one tells us who Hawke is: what factions he sympathizes with, who he falls in love with, what type of person he is, and how the city of Kirkwall is important to him. The entire plot builds toward defining his role in the city of Kirkwall. Your party members also have personal quests and motivations that span through the acts, which does help keep the acts tied together.

The narrative structure of the game is one of my favourite elements. While the acts might not be that well tied together, having acts is a nice touch and it’s a nice way to divide up the plot, as it spans several years. Assassin’s Creed 2 & Brotherhood together span over thirty years, which you’d never guess unless you watch the date or catch the occasional joke about Ezio’s age in Brotherhood. Dragon Age 2 makes the passage of time much more explicit, and you really get a sense of how things fit together.

As you may know, Varric orally narrates at key moments in the plot, and it’s quite an enjoyable conceit. My only issue with it is that it’s never used to it’s fullest. I’d love to hear him throw in a few lines during missions, like “We had no idea how this was going to turn out” or even funny ones meant as throwaway jokes. In practice, you essentially forget about his narration, then he’d narrate and you’d enjoy it, then he’d go silent for another ten hours. Still, I enjoyed the idea and hope Bioware is more bold with this idea for their Dragon Age 2 DLC.

The writing and voice acting was fantastic. There were a few odd lines here and there, certainly, but overall I found it compelling. This was made possible by the fact that your character’s personality is actually determined by the choices you make. Thus, my Hawke was generally a good person, but he was extremely sarcastic and joke-cracking, and this came through in his dialogue. In events where I didn’t have a choice to make in the dialogue (non-important lines, throwaway lines as he enters rooms, etc) he would often crack dry jokes or mock other characters, which is exactly the dialogue I picked for him when given the choice. Now, the game does let you pick your dialogue manytimes, everywhere you’d expect it. This isn’t removing choice from the player. But things like battle taunts are now determined by the choices you make with the dialogue wheel, and I loved it. I actually believed who my Hawke was, all the time. Your personality is more complex than “Good or bad”; you can also be witty, a friend of the Mages, whatever. Your interactions with party members are governed by a “Friend/Rival” wheel, which shows your general relationship to that character. Friend means that they feel you’re on their side, rival means that you don’t necessarily agree with them on a lot of matters.

The other element of the dialogue wheel I loved was a little tone icon in the dialogue wheel for each choice, explicitly indicating what sort of tone you’ll take (sarcastic, questioning, a decision, good, bad, etc). I’ve been bitten a few times in the past by accidentally choosing dialogue that ended up being a joke or ended up being romantic, but in Dragon Age 2, no more! It also helps you make your character funny or witty, in addition to being a horrible jerk or a saint, because you can tell which options are neutral, and which will end up being good or bad. 

The writing has come under a lot of fire, for being heterosexual and homosexual unfriendly. Honestly, I think both of these “issues” are idiotic. The writing was excellent, and I think both whiners had an axe that just needed grinding, and this was the game that came along to set them off. Each of the characters in your party is a character, with a history, personality, and reason to exist in the game world. The occasional personal quest from one of your buddies is always worth doing (sort of like Mass Effect 2’s loyalty missions), and they range from funny to poignant. Aveline, in particular, is probably my favourite party member. She has a realistic story arc, breaks a few stereotypes without being the obvious “stereotype surprise” sort of character, and in general is just a great character. Plus, her personal quest is both funny and poignant, so win/win, right?

One big change between Dragon Age 2 (and virtually every other Bioware RPG) is the scope. It’s epic in terms of chronological length (years) & game length (30+ hours) but it’s a much geographically smaller game than you might expect. Dragon Age 2 takes place in Kirkwall, a pretty dingy city far from the more familiar Ferelden. Kirkwall is a city divided, not only by the rich and poor, but also the Mages & the Templar, Humans & Qunari, refugees and natives, and more. It’s ripe for adventuring, and you really get to know and feel the city during your time there. It feels in many ways alive, and it does morph and respond to the events of the plot and Hawke’s actions.

Of course, this can backfire. Since the entire game takes place in and around Kirkwall, there isn’t a huge variety of areas to go to. Kirkwall itself has a good variety considering it’s a non-generic fantasy city, but sustaining a 30 hour game with it alone seems like a bit of a stretch. Still, I liked Kirkwall, and I liked the razor-sharp focus. Fighting for the whole world can be a bit dull, sometimes; it’s good to have that point of reference.

What a gorgeous city. (Click to embiggen)

Battles

The combat is fantastic. Some people say that it’s less “deep” than Origins, but I disagree heartily; on the surface it’s simpler because there are less options for Mages, but all they did is remove a lot of garbage as well as making other classes better. If you’re an Origins fan, or if you’ve played that sort of cRPG style before, you know how it works. Tell your characters to attack, then activate abilities such as Fireballs or Warrior stances by mouseclicks or keyboard shortcuts. Dragon Age 2 simply made fights much faster and much sexier; even the Mages have cool auto-attack animations! Blasts of ice rip up the ground and leave enemies covered in frost, Rogues vanish and appear with ninja-like puffs of smoke (and usually a gush of blood), and Warriors … Well, they’re still a little dull, actually.

Warriors are really useful to have in your party for tanking purposes, and Warrior player characters do look pretty awesome, but the Warrior play style is dull. It’s too stance based, far too cooldown based, and the stat distribution can get really awkward. Warriors need Strength for damage and equipment selection (minimum Strength values are found on armour, shields, and weapons), Constitution for health, and even Cunning to boost your defense. If that’s not enough, Warriors have a meagre pool of Stamina, so you’ll also want to put a fair amount of points into Willpower if you want to use more than one ability each fight. Overall, they’re just a pain to level and distribute stats, and dull to play.

If you haven’t yet started, I heartily recommend picking a Mage for Hawke. You feel like the leader of the party with your access to healing, buffs, and massive damage spells, plus you get to stand back and have a good overview of the fight. This makes it much easier to see when you need to take command of a party member, but for the most part, you can let the AI/tactics system figure out what your allies should do.

Rogue is the next most enjoyable to play, and it’s a contender for best. Combat can vary from stealth to straight up fighting, but you’re very mobile and have many options to keep stuff interesting. Also, Rogues are fantastic at avoiding death, which is always nice. Setting up attack combos, teleporting around to help when things go wrong, stealth, and you look really cool during combat. Plus, if you raise your Cunning enough, you’ll never need to bring around a party member to pick locks, and you’ll miss a lot of treasure if you don’t always have a Rogue with you.

Speaking of the three classes, each of them have a number of talent trees you can specialize in. Each time a character levels up they receive a single point they can drop in the talent of their choice, letting you customize different characters of the same class in different ways or even the same character in different ways across separate playthroughs. Each character also has a class-independent specialization based on that character’s own style, and the player character (that’s you!) has three special “Specialization” trees, two of which you can pick from as you level up. In general, I love the system; it gives you a fair degree of customization but doesn’t have so many choices that it can be overwhelming. It’s pretty easy to build your characters, but you can determine exactly how it happens. My only nitpick comes from the Specialization trees. As a Mage, I had three options: Force Mage, Blood Mage, & Spirit Healer. Now, as a generally good guy I didn’t want to pick Blood Mage, but because another character took care of all the healing, Spirit Healer was even more useless to me. In the end, I picked Blood Mage for a small bonus it granted and never put any points into it.

Weirdly, Dragon Age Origins had the same issue (it’s actually exacerbated in this game, as there are less Specializations); shouldn’t the Specializations either be morality-neutral or provide roughly equal choices? Good guys do not need to be healers. C’mon Bioware, it can’t be that hard!

I did end up picking Blood Mage … (although Walking Bomb has nothing to do with that)

While I keep mentioning that combat is faster, faster, it’s by no means Unreal Tournament; Bioware made health pools have fairly generous, even for Mages. Thus, combat is faster but lacking in Dragon Age Origins or UT style “instagib” moments where you’d open a door and be blasted by three fireballs and suddenly half your party is dead; you won’t see that now. Combat is much less luck centric, and it’s much more based on dynamic positioning, cross-class combos, and tactics.

Bioware did use a dirty trick to facilitate this new focus on positioning and tactics; enemies will simply spawn mid-fight at varying areas around the combat zone, so you’re never truly safe until the fight is over. While this does lead to less realism (“I know I killed them all except the Mage, where the hell did these Archers come from? The ground?”), it does lead to more dynamic fights. No longer can your tank just group all the enemies in the corner and good game, battle is over. Now you have to keep your squishy characters moving, and you need to make interesting tactical decisions about it.

For example, if three enemies spawn behind my Mage, do I just run? I could freeze them in place with a Cone of Cold or knock them down with a force spell, but I might need those area of effect spells for the giant group my tank has rounded up. I could pull a Rogue off of the boss monster to come over and cut them to shreds, but then the boss might stay alive longer. I could pull my tank over, but she might not have enough Stamina to round them up safely and then the big baddie might get loose … you’ll be forced to make these kinds of decisions every fight, and it’s awesome. Spells that inhibit or knock down your enemies are very useful for controlling them, and knocking enemies into a corner then blasting them with balls of fire remains awesome.

I only have two issues with combat. First, while most instagib moments are gone, there’s still the occasional one, particularly the spell I call the “Red Vortex of Doom”, which is an area of effect spell that will kill anyone who stands in the titular Red Vortex for approximately three seconds. The problem is that it’s exceedingly difficult to see unless you’re expecting it, due to the flashiness of the game’s normal spells and bursts of gore. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s a bit of a buzzkill; even if it doesn’t kill you, even a second of exposure can cripple a tank-style character. The lack of a top-down view is a non-issue for every fight except those with the Red Vortex, where it’s near-impossible to actually see. 

My only other issue is that there’s a distinct lack of variety. There really aren’t a lot of different enemies in this game, which can get sort of dreary. Seriously, get used to killing Shades, as about half the fights in the game are Shades. This is doubly compounded by how there aren’t many different environments in the game, so by about the twenty hour mark you’ll start to get a major sense of deja-vu, and the finale is sort of ridiculous due to all the repetition. There are … maybe seven major zones that you adventure in, and about five “dungeons” that are used for generic areas. In other words, there’s a “dock” dungeon that’s used for every city-based bandit hideout, every dock raid, etc. That cave you see in the screenshot above is used for about sixty percent of all the caves in the game. Ironically, the area used in the screenshot below is totally unique and is used only for that fight.

Rogues are also pretty awesome. Note the head flying off.

Technical Stuff

I played Dragon Age 2 on both PC & Mac, specifically, the same computer. Running on a 27” iMac with an Intel i7 processor (2.8 GHz), 4GB of RAM, and an ATI Radeon 4850 mobility video card with 512mb of VRAM. In Boot Camp Windows Vista mode, the game ran flawlessly. Unfortunately, I was unable to test the game in DirectX 11 as my graphics card does not support it, but it looked gorgeous, even on Medium settings. It ran at full 2560x1440 with the high-res texture pack enabled, and while I didn’t test the framerate, it ran rock-solid with no visible slowdown. 

Retail copies of Dragon Age 2 are also Mac-compatible, and in general, it runs good (inexplicably, Steam versions of the game are not Mac compatible). It isn’t a native app like Starcraft or Left 4 Dead. Instead, it runs inside a Cider-wrapper, and it does alright. The game occasionally slows down during intense combat and my mouse would occasionally bug out and start rapidly flickering until clicked. Furthermore, taking screenshots using the in-game screenshot key produced only black images, but the key-command for the Mac OS X screenshot (CMD-Shift-3) worked while in-game. Still, I advise Mac owners who have a Boot Camp partition to use their Windows partition if their graphics card is DX11 compatible, as the Mac installation of the game’s “High” graphics setting is the Windows “Medium”, and the Mac side does not officially support the high-res texture pack. Still, the slowdown was pretty minor, and I ended up completing the game in Mac OS rather than Boot Camp because I was too lazy to keep switching over, so it’s certainly a very usable port.

Regardless of which OS I played it on, Dragon Age 2 is a gorgeous game. Character designs are bright and expressive, spells and effects are explosive, and it’s generally visually impressive. It can occasionally get too chaotic (“Red Vortex of Doom”) but in general, it’s a pleasure to watch. Cutscenes are even more cinematic than in Origins, and it made me not want to skip past conversations once I’ve read the subtitles. The city of Kirkwall has wonderful art design that you’ll really want to explore, and the dungeons and caves and such are also full of nice little vistas and are generally lovely as well.

Told you the caves were nice.

The Elephant In The Room

The big elephant in the room is this: how does Dragon Age 2 stack up to Dragon Age? I’ve already written a blog post on this, so I won’t go into too much detail here.

DLC installation seems like a step back from Origins. From what I remember, when you bought DLC using Bioware points, it would be installed through the DLC pane in the main menu of Origins, automatically. Now, you have to log in to Bioware’s website and stumble around until you reach your registered content, and you can download it from there, then run it’s installer to install it. It’s certainly not bad or broken or unusable, but it feels like something the game should be able to do automatically, considering Origins did it automatically.

Weirdly, issues from Origins remain. The aforementioned Specialization sticks out like a sore thumb, and there are a few weird dialogue moments where you don’t have a whole lot of options, especially with your party members. 

Also, Bioware failed to implement the excellent ending style of Origins, opting for a relatively abrupt “And that’s all, folks!” style ending. I was quite satisfied and I enjoyed the ending, but not quite as much as I did the long and detailed one from Origins. 

The big takeaway is that they’re two different games. It’s very different from Dragon Age, and in scope it’s shorter and focuses on a smaller area. There are less party members. Sounds terrible!

While Dragon Age 2 is smaller, it’s laser focused. None of the characters in your party are Sten or Zevran, who are totally pointless in the greater scope of things. Each of them, with the exception of Sebastian (the DLC character) has important roles to play in the plot and your character’s development. Hawke is a much more interesting character than your blank-slate Grey Warden, and I found myself drawn in by Hawke’s narrative despite it being more disjointed than a traditional save-the-world plot.

So in the end, how is Dragon Age 2? It’s awesome. It’s imperfect, I won’t pretend it isn’t. But it’s an epic game it’s own right, with interesting characters, an excellent battle system, and an enjoyable (if somewhat disjointed) plot. If you like the Bioware style, you’ll like this: the dialogue is better than ever; the choices are excellent, and rarely feel contrived; and the plot & quests are presented in a non-linear-enough fashion, letting you decide how to journey around Kirkwall. Highly recommended.

Global Agenda Impressions - A Tasty Cocktail

So I bought Global Agenda on it’s Steam Sale the other day, mainly because I think it’s an interesting idea. I like shooters, I like RPGs, why not combine them? Well, the obvious reason is that shooters and RPGs have two different philosophies. Shooters are based almost entirely on personal skill, on your ability to shoot. In an RPG, skill matters too, but your character’s stats are also incredibly important. It’s very possible to be too low level for an area, where in a shooter, you can usually make up for extreme difficulty with extreme headshots.

Now, I’m not a fan of unbalanced competition (i.e. Killzone 2’s online rank system), so I’m more interested in Global Agenda’s cooperative PvE gameplay. And frankly, I think it’s a great idea. I’ve spent four hours playing Global Agenda so far, split across two characters, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far.

• Like most shooters, it’s quick to play. Even a situation that you might recognize as a “dungeon” (four characters attack an AI controlled camp, ending with a boss battle) takes a maximum of fifteen minutes - there’s a literal timer.
• Also like other shooters, you can pretty much jump in right in. After the skippable tutorial and a few “quests” designed to teach you the talent tree, you can start queuing for these missions, and be quite effective!
• And did I mention how short the wait time is? You can queue for these missions at any time, so right when I began a quest I queued, expecting a Warcraft-style 45 minute wait … I was thrown into a mission before I even left the quest hub!
• It’s great for the same reason that Halo’s Firefight is popular. It’s fun to play shooters, it’s more fun to play with other people, and these missions take you and some other people, drop you in a mission, and let you rock and roll.
• Unlike MMOs, your personal skill level makes a really notable difference in damage taken and dealt. Managing your power & using your jetpack to dodge while having enough power to shoot is an interesting mechanic, and it makes gameplay a lot more exciting than a Warcraft spell priority system. Fighting a boss really feels like fighting a boss, rather than just standing back and doing your spell rotation while ensuring you aren’t standing in fire. Even in solo play, ducking behind cover can help you last for much longer before having to rest; in something like Warcraft, if an enemy targets you, his spells can go through walls and cover, making that sort of pointless.
• At the same time, the game also takes some of the more negative elements of these genres. For example, the open nature of the MMO style gameplay hampers your ability to learn to play. The tutorial does a great job of introducing the core gameplay elements, but once you’re dropped into the game world, you have a fair amount of other “stuff” that makes no sense. What the hell is a Boost? I found out by accident, but it isn’t very clear at all. same with weapon descriptions; I have “RIfle” and “Rifle [d]”. A simple explanation of what the letter codes mean seems to be important, because I see people in chat selling “Mega Rifle [d][d][r][p][w][n]”.
• It’s also not as polished as a standalone shooter. When exploring my backpack, I have two different jetpacks; the default jetpack (“hands-free) and a second one. It turns out that the second jetpack doesn’t let you shoot while flying, but it has no benefit whatsoever compared to the default (i.e. it isn’t faster, it doesn’t let you fly further). It seems to me that this old jetpack is a remnant of how the game used to be played. Why new players have it in their inventory is beyond me. The game is full of little weirdnesses like that. And the interface is clunky as hell.

I gotta say this: Global Agenda is pretty great. I honestly have no idea why none of the news sites I read really mentioned this game (or maybe I just ignored them). I wouldn’t pay monthly for it, but for eight dollars and change it’s a great deal. For it’s regular price of $30? Well, I can’t totally say after only four hours of gameplay, but it seems solid overall.

Magicka First Impressions

Speaking of new games, any self respecting RPG PC gamer needs to check out Magicka. It's on Steam, it's cheap, and there's even a demo for you to try.

Magicka offers a streamlined, funny, exciting cast & slash game. More importantly, Magicka is actually funny! Especially for us geeks who can immediately identify Gandalf's white staff, the writing is a great extra element in Magicka's mix.

I've only played an hour or so, but it's excellent so far. The magic system is brilliant, allowing for creative, often spontaneous brilliance. Plus, it's co-op, which should make the zaniness even better.

Some elements are unpolished (there's one or two places where there's no clear way to proceed, such as when the objective tells you how to heal yourself, but you have to cut a rope that looks non-interactive using a shift-click command cringed from Diablo), but I highly recommend at least trying the demo. There aren't enough funny games being released these days, and Magicka is a really solid one. It's not being released by some giant publisher so it's not being discussed in the gaming press as much as it should.

I'll write more about Magicka in the next couple of days, once I've played more.