Conan: Exiles for cRPG of the Decade

So yeah, to my utter surprise, I’m finding Conan: Exiles to be the best computer RPG I’ve played since Ultima V. Granted, I should point out that I’ve not yet tried Divinity: Original Sin II, Planescape: Torment, or any of the Witcher games. The problem is, I’m not very likely to, either.

Oh, I may give them a shake, but I suspect I’ll have a similar experience to Dragon Age; the fights will get monotonous, the quests will shatter my suspension of disbelief, and the interactions will feel wooden and limited.

Not that interactions with NPCs are much to write home about in C:E; most just shout a battle cry and charge. But your interactions with the environment more than make up for the lack.

C:E isn’t officially an RPG; technically, it’s billed as a “survival game.” This is a new flavor of computer game where you’re dumped in a wilderness and must use the environment around you to survive. Being a Conan game, this means you start the game buck-naked and crucified. You’re rescued by the eponymous Cimmarian himself, and you start the game ripping apart bushes for plant material you’ll knot and weave into makeshift clothing before binding rocks to sticks to make tools and weapons.

The thing that makes C:E for me is the little details; kill a crocodile or a rabbit or a subhuman “imp” and it doesn’t drop a chest full of gold. Instead, you’ll get hide and bones and meat that you can turn into armour or arrows or a meal. Human foes might carry better stuff (though, alas, they rarely carry the weapons they’re wielding against you), but not always. And yes, you can totally butcher humans for meat as well.

Which is another thing I appreciate about this game. There’s no good-evil slider that moves because you picked the impolite conversation option. You can totally eat human flesh, or build an altar to Set and sacrifice human hearts to it, or club humans over the head and break their wills on the “wheel of pain” to turn them into your slaves. Or not, if you want to be all goody-two-shoes about it. You can instead build an altar to Mitra and craft healing ambrosia (though the manner in which that’s done doesn’t exactly promote being all peaceful and not-killy; Mitra is not a god for pacifists). Or go completely off the deep end and worship Yog to acquire greater strength from eating human flesh.

(Hard mode is, of course, worshipping Crom who gives you nothing but the opportunity to grow strong through adversity. He’s the honeybadger of C:E deities.)

There are stats you can improve, as you’d expect in a cRPG, but they’re not the usual D&D-esque basic physical and mental attributes. Instead they’re vague amalgamations of skill and attributes; the Strength stat encompasses both your muscles and your skill with melee weapons, while Survival is both your hardiness and your bushcraft.

But what really counts is your gear. You’ll start the game naked and alone in the desert, and “advance” largely by crafting better gear, building a hovel that you’ll likely expand into a castle staffed with numerous slaves, and wearing weapons and armour forged with secrets of the ancient races that ruled the world in previous epochs. And this feels incredibly organic to me. Here we have a game that’s not all about the magical ding that grants you more hit points. Instead, you get more powerful by expanding your influence and acquiring followers and crafting infrastructure like castles and forges and altars to the gods. You don't slaughter monsters and acquire insane (and largely useless) amounts of gold coins, but quarry stone and chop trees for lumber and build a smithy capable of forging supernatural elements into axes and breastplates.

Conan: Exiles is a game about exploring wilderness and ruins, uncovering lost ancient secrets, building a base (or multiple bases) of operations. There are fights, but they feel more organic as mostly it’s wilderness critters who are as happy to hunt other critters as they are you. And they’re not the end-all be-all of the game.

And finally, it feels like a Conan story. You’ll climb up a tree to escape a hungry crocodile. You’ll be stalking a rabbit or gathering wood when you’ll stumble across an enchanted monolith or ghostly apparition. You’ll fret over the state of your waterskin when you’re not gorging yourself on roasted meat. And when you do fight, you’ll hurl yourself amidst your foes, laying about you on all sides with your club or axe or sword, scattering blood and limbs all about. It’s a game that’s full of what feel like organic surprises, events that both fit with the game, the setting, and the source material. It feels like being inside a Conan story, and that’s about as high praise as I think I can give a game.

Elite: Not So Dangerous

The Thargoids are here! For definitions of “here” that are limited to certain locations in the game Elite: Dangerous, anyway. And ObisidanAnt, premier journalist of the game, asks, “Does anybody care?”

The short answer is that some do, but most don’t, and I’m pretty sure this is on purpose. One of the sacred cows of these sorts of games is, “Don’t impact the fun of the players.” For the most part, this gets translated into, “Whenever you add some new content to a game, make sure people can ignore it if they want to.”

This makes sense. After all, if you’ve got tens of thousands of players having fun, you don’t want some new, untried, and experimental content harshing their buzz. But it also traps the game in its current state. Nothing momentous can happen because truly momentous things can’t be ignored.

ObsidianAnt observes that, while everyone thinks the Thargoids wrecking space stations and leaving them on fire is cool, not everyone is gung-ho about hauling the massive list of materials needed to repair them. And why should they be? Let’s be honest: a burning station is far cooler to fly past than another perfectly normal and functioning station. Sure, you can’t really get all the normal services at a wrecked station, and they can even be hazardous to dock in, but that’s not a huge deal when there are almost certainly other stations and even planetary bases elsewhere in the system to dock at. And these invariably have not been affected by the Thargoid attack. Because if the Thargoids could disrupt an entire system, then players would have a harder time ignoring them.

This should bring to mind Jeff Rients’ Broodmother Skyfortress. That game is all about blowing things up: favorite taverns, political alignments, even the very mechanics of the game the players have come to rely on. When the Broodmother shows up, you can’t ignore her and her brood. It’s do-or-die time and no matter what you do, your campaign will never be the same.

And it is AWESOME!

Granted, it’s far safer to take these sorts of risks around your table. Your players are probably not paying you to play and you’re not relying on them to keep the lights on. And if some change really does the dead-fish belly-flop at your table, you can always retcon it out of existence. Frontier Developments don’t have that kind of flexibility or security. But if Elite: Dangerous has a problem it is this: nothing really matters. You can wrack up your various scores (ships in your stable, credits in your account, prestige titles, etc.) but there’s little you can do with that stuff that’s meaningful to the game as a whole. For good or ill, it’s difficult to have any sort of visible impact on the world of the game. Which means your fun is unlikely to be interrupted, but it also means once the fun is over, there’s really nothing left to hold your interest.

For something like the Thargoids to matter, they have to have some impact. And for them to truly have an impact, something needs to be at risk. And risk is far easier to pull off around your kitchen table than it is on a triple-A computer game.

Dragon Age: Origins First Impressions

Yeah, I’m really that behind in the world of computer RPGs. >.<



That’s mostly because I was spoiled by Ultimas IV and V in my youth. I got to play a game where the NPCs had lives of their own that didn’t revolve around me and my quest. I played a game that didn’t constantly lie to me about how “urgent” a quest was, and then punish me if I avoided side-quests in order to complete the main quest as quickly as possible. I played a game where you actually had real multiple paths to success and taking everything that wasn’t nailed down was recognized as theft.


Damn kids these days need to stay offa my lawn…


Anyway, I’ve heard tons of good stuff about BioWare’s CRPGs and EA is offering DA: Origins for free, so I figured out check it out. I’ve enjoyed BioWare’s other offerings in the past, most especially Neverwinter Nights. But I’ve cooled on the whole genre over the years.

The big issue, honestly, is that combat-as-puzzle doesn’t really hold my interest, especially when it’s real-time. And most especially when…

Ok, so I choose a mage and I do their Harrowing tutorial, which was a neat way to do a tutorial, even if I did have to ask a lot of questions like I’d slept through every class at the Tower. But after that? My next big quest is pest-control: clearing the storage caves of spiders. Ok, they’re giant spiders, but still…

And just to make it worse, I’m also looting the place. In a real, living world, this would be theft, or possibly even embezzlement. In a computer RPG, stealing everything that’s not nailed down, no matter where it is, is Tuesday.

And then there’s the interface. The things I need to know about my characters are far away from them, way off in the corners. I’m not watching the cool combat animations because my eyes are glued to the spell cool-down timers. Even with one character I’m hitting the space-bar multiple times in combat; once I’ve got a large party I’m really going to be wondering why this thing isn’t turn-based.

There’s supposed to be a “tactics” system that’s supposed to jump in when certain conditions are met, but so far it doesn’t appear to be working. I imagine there’s some sort of box I haven’t checked somewhere to do that. Or it does less than I think it does or only works randomly?

So yeah, so far, not terribly impressed. I’m mildly intrigued by the story. Part of that is because I suspect I’m coming at it from a place that’s very different from where I think most players default. Sure, yes, the magi are being treated poorly and oppressed. But neighbor, I’ve walked the streets of Mordheim and I know what happens when the horrors in the universe next door get their pseudopods on a juicy mage to use as a gateway. No, I’m not helping you abscond with your priestess girlfriend, and the reason you’ve not been tapped to experience the Harrowing is because you’ve already failed!

(If you help that guy and don’t end up fighting him as a demon-possessed horror later in the game, the writers should have their knuckles rapped by a fire giant. Seriously!)

Sexualing the Male: You’re Doing it… Er, Well, They’re Doing It

So I’m sure everyone’s seen the vertical banner ads for El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. It’s pretty much poster-perfect for one method of sexualizing the male: bare midriff, wide-spread thighs, thrusting groin in tight, bulging jeans. Very much the Chippendale’s Guys Do Final Fantasy.

This really highlights the challenge of sexualizing the male figure for hetero female consumption. I imagine there are, indeed some women who will find this attractive, though I’d imagine it might actually discourage them from buying the game for fear of slut-shaming by association. Or maybe not, since Fabio covers don’t seem to have slowed down the purchasing of romance novels even a bit.

Still, it seems to me (not having access to sales figures, scientific polls, or other actual data, but when has that ever stopped me from making vague and wild assumptions?) that this sort of thing appeals more to gay men than hetero women. There’s a bit of bishi in this guy, though, so maybe that’s part of the point? A direct appeal to gay men becomes a sort of back-handed appeal to straight women? I could see that working.

Here in America, I’m pretty sure most will just write the look off to bizarre Japanese-isms. The story behind the game, as reported by Newbreview.com, certainly won’t discourage that view:

Based on the not so well known book of Enoch, the game places you in the role of Enoch, who has been tasked with battling seven fallen angels that aim to destroy humanity with a devastating flood.

Apparently, the anachronistic acid-wash jeans are a gift from a not-yet-fallen Satan, who also enjoys chatting on his cellphone while watching you smack around the minions of the Fallen.

Heartbreak

But not an unexpected one.

I used to really be into computer games. I read the blogs, engaged in the debates, eagerly waited release dates. Back in those heady days of the mid-‘90s, Jeff Vogel was one of my heroes. His championing of both indie game design and turn-based top-down RPGs really appealed to me.

But even then, I never got very far in his games. I don’t mean I didn’t finish them; I mean I never finished the free trial versions. I don’t think I ever actually bought a copy of a Spiderweb Software game.

I was often curious why they never really seemed to light my fire, but I think I’m beginning to understand why. Via Carto Cacography I found this post, written by Mr. Vogel, on balancing combats in RPGs.

Now, it’d be easy for me to jerk the knee and point out that the word “fun” doesn’t appear once in this article, but it’s equally true that this isn’t really an article about fun. It’s about balancing combats. Still, if “there are fights that will almost never ever kill a player” and “the vast majority of the fights in a game will be this sort” I gotta wonder where the fun is. Clearly, it’s not in the challenge these fights present, since by definition, they’re not supposed to provide any. They’re simply the hoops you have to jump through to “collect experience to get strong and get new spells and swords and stuff.” You show up, smack the trash mob around, and collect your reward, so you can go smack around “bigger” trash mobs and collect larger rewards. So far, I’m wondering why we’re not just playing Progress Quest with a fancy story engine slapped on top.

I have to believe some people find collecting the goodies and growing their characters’ stats fun but that makes me wonder if I can build a fancy graphical shell atop a spreadsheet database with a thin veneer of story and call it a day. (Heck, there’s some indication that even that would be working too hard.) I’m even more perplexed when Mr. Vogel brings up challenging fights. It would seem to me that having a long string of fights that the player almost certainly wouldn’t lose, punctuated by brick walls that actually challenge the player rather than the PCs, would be a recipe for frustration. I’d assumed, up until now, that such games were designed to have a gently sloping increase in player challenge, and that apparent spikes were either me not thinking in the patterns the designers assumed most players would adopt, or fumbles in design. Now I see that such things are standard design practice.

Ok, I fully understand the value of combat as an infinitely variable puzzle, but you’re tossing most of the benefit away if you’re designing along these lines. If most of your fights are “trash mobs” that I should be able to power through easily, how is making me go through them any less a waste of my time than a maze? Sure, you may need a few scattered around I can fight in order to learn how the game works, or to practice new powers and new tactics on, but unless your interface is incredibly fun to use in and of itself, yeah, I’m going to get bored. And if you attempt to alleviate that boredom by suddenly tossing in a challenging fight, why would you be surprised if the result is players who are now bored AND frustrated?

(And if the fun of your game is in the story, please write a book. If you try to force me to replay an otherwise uninteresting fight a dozen times just to read the next chapter, it ain’t happening.)

If you’re going to make players wade through some trash mobs, at least respect the players enough to make the encounters interesting. Maybe give them a goal that isn’t about just killing things or put the fight in an interesting place. Or make the mob interesting in some way. Otherwise, it looks like you’re just dragging the game out with something less frustrating (but not much more interesting) than a maze.

If you assume your players are just going to reload from the last save point anyway, why do you bother including avatar death as a possibility in your games? Besides laziness? Seriously, fates more interesting than death are easy to think of. And most of them are a hell of a lot more fun than simply reloading the game from the last save point and grinding through content that’s already been trudged through before. This is the FPS version of not being able to find the key that lets you get to where the monsters are, and going round-and-round the same corridors, over and over again, pixel-bitching in what is supposed to be a game of frenzied action and excitement.

If your game is supposed to be about tactical combat, then make it really good, really interesting tactical combat. But if most of the fights are against trash mobs that I should be able to defeat just by showing up, you’re game isn’t about tactical combat. So please, don’t try to pretend it is by forcing me to occasionally jump through some tactical combat hoops.

WoW Killer

A friend asked me tonight if something will eventually knock World of Warcraft off its perch as top dog and what such a game would look like. I do think eventually something will replace WoW as the 500 pound gorilla in its niche. And here I'm talking about the particular genre this game dominates; in terms of numbers alone, Farmville appears to clean WoW’s clock. But the games are so different in style, content, and business model, that it really doesn't make sense to compare them directly. And I suspect, in terms of raw income, but World of Warcraft still does better than Farmville. I'd love to see some numbers on this.

So what will the WoW killer look like? First, I do think Guild Wars 2 is barking up the right tree with their new classes. Giving everyone the ability to shift between tank, healer, crowd control, etc. is brilliant. It makes it a lot easier to put together a team to tackle any adventure. Once you've abandoned niche protection, you can then focus a lot more on what matters to the players. Play style is almost certainly the way to go. Making one class be about fast, precise clicking, and another about preset macros, and a third about positioning, and other such considerations makes a lot more sense.

Easing the grind is also key. WoW got rid of standing in line for your chance to kill the orc king. That's not fun for anybody. Replacing the grind with more interesting quests is probably the way to go here, and I think BioWare’s Old Republic MMOG will be the model in this regard. I haven't played that game either, but buzz says it has managed to capture a lot of the appeal of their single player games.

That said, don't expect story to be king. It would be extremely simple to give every player their own, unique plot and adventures. Nobody's bothered to do it yet, and that's because the players simply are not interested. Most approach quest text in this manner: "blah blah blah silver hammer. Blah blah blah five wolf pelts. Blah blah Darken Wood blah blah blah." Story is to MMOGs what those scantily clad girls serving drinks in casinos are to Vegas. They are an essential part of the window dressing, but nobody is under any illusions they are why the crowd has come. The folks most interested in story are quite happy with their free-form gaming; those who want to charge them $10 a month have nothing to interest them.

The graphics will continue to avoid rigorous realism, though I doubt the game that replaces WoW will look quite as cartoony. It will probably include neat cross-class combos like Dragon Age did. It will almost certainly be fantasy, and will absolutely be combat focused. It probably won't have much, if any, crafting system. It will be even more amusement park in its geography than even World of Warcraft. I suspect that no character over 10th level or so will ever really die; they will simply enter some form of bloodied or half-dead status in which they can escape to try again later.

Whatever it looks like, I seriously doubt I will be interested in playing it. It's been many years since I've been tempted to play a Diku MUD, graphical or otherwise. Most of the blame can be laid on the topics discussed in the story paragraph above. A game that wants to tackle those topics may attract my attention. I'm not holding my breath.

New Dogs and Old Tricks

That computer RPGs have been heavily modeled on D&D goes without saying. From the earliest iteration of Wizardry all the way to modern MMOGs, we still see much that we recognize as the basic core of D&D: hit points, armor class, spell lists, niche protection through classes, dungeon and wilderness exploration, etc.

Since then, the relationship between D&D and computer RPGs has been one in which D&D mostly went its own way and computer RPGs swiped bits that fit their medium. Attempts to program various iterations of D&D into CRPGs have done a lot to draw the two communities closer together. That said, from the beginning, D&D held at its core aspects that computer RPGs just couldn't touch. Advances in computing power and algorithm design have still not given us anything close to what a live and creative DM can deliver. But there have been some advances that have narrowed the gap somewhat. The sandboxy aspects of the Elder Scrolls games (and the Ultima games before them) were an early example. More recently, BioWare has been pushing a design ethos heavily based on consequences for player choices and a plot structure that looks very much like an adventure path.

ArenaNet is currently building buzz for the launch of Guild Wars 2. As usual, they're crowing about unique design, how their game is going to be different from the competition. Also as usual, you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt; there's usually something of a gap between what the game promises during development and what it delivers in actual play. They’re pushing a "not your father's MMOG" look and feel. Clearly, they want to stand out as not just another WoW clone. Still, and despite their protestations that their game will not include the traditional class triad, we're clearly looking at another fantasy-themed combat-focused game.

There is some interesting stuff in the design manifesto published last April:

Let’s say a village is being terrorized by bandits. You don’t want to find out about that because there’s a villager standing there motionless with an exclamation mark over his head who says when you click on him, “Help, we’re being terrorized by bandits.” You want to find out like you would in GW2: because the bandits are attacking, chasing villagers through the streets, slaying them and setting their houses on fire. You can stand up for the villagers, or you can watch their village burn to the ground and then deal with the consequences.

This is your classic "show, don't tell" writer's advice. And it is very, very good advice. The mysterious cloaked stranger in the tavern is still something of a classic in tabletop RPGs, but you don't see him much in actual published material. I suspect you don't see him much outside of tournament play and other one-shots. Since at least the early 90s, you're far more likely to start an adventure by visiting a local village during market day and then suddenly finding yourself up to your Helm of Brilliance in hill giant marauders intent on stealing the prize-winning largest pumpkin.

There is also new fun to be found some of the oldest tricks:

We think of GW2 as the first MMO that actually has a cooperative PvE experience. When I’m out hunting and suddenly there’s a huge explosion over the next hill – the ground is shaking and smoke is pouring into the sky – I’m going to want to investigate, and most other players in the area will too. Or if the sky darkens on a sunny day, and I look up and see a dragon circling overhead preparing to attack, I know I’d better fight or flee, and everyone around me knows that too.

Yep, it's the good old wondering monster with a bit of a twist. Granted, part of how they make this work is by giving everybody who takes part a full share of the loot, which pokes as many holes in my sense of verisimilitude as does 4e’s insistence that defeated drow cannot be plundered for their equipment.

Still, I'm heartened to see the industry still pushing gameplay envelopes and not relying on graphics alone to draw traffic. I'm still not likely to pick an evening of Guild Wars 2 (sorry, Jesse ;) ) over any of my Labyrinth Lord games, but the computer world is inching closer, bit by bit, to the sort of play I think I would enjoy.

What is WotC Up To?

Lots of happenings recently over in Seattle. Yeah, I don’t play their games, but I do find what they do interesting. They’re still the big fish in this pond, and they still make the big waves.

So let’s take a look:

Bye-bye Minis
That 4e is a vehicle to sell expensive, pre-painted minis is an article of faith among some. They’re going to need to get a new religion, because WotC ain’t gonna be in the miniatures business much anymore:

We have made the decision to depart from prepainted plastic miniatures sets. Lords of Madness stands as the final release under that model. We will continue to release special collector’s sets (such as the Beholder Collector’s Set we released last fall), as well as make use of plastic figures in other product offerings. Check out the Wrath of Ashardalon board game next month for the latest example of this.

From now on, if you want a bunch of critters for your dungeon, WotC will sell you die-cut tokens, but not actual miniatures. Apparently, there wasn’t much gold in them thar hills. I can kinda understand why that didn’t work. It works for Games Workshop, but they are very up-front about being in the miniatures and models business. Everything they do is about selling those plastic and metal bits.

WotC isn’t quite like that. They’re into selling books, primarily.

Um, well, maybe…

And Bye-bye Books?!?

The Heroes of Shadow product, originally scheduled for March and presented in digest-sized, paperback format, is moving to April to accommodate a change to hardcover format. Additionally, three D&D RPG products have been removed from the 2011 release schedule—Class Compendium: Heroes of Sword and Spell, Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium, and Hero Builder’s Handbook. While this means fewer books, we plan to deliver just as much great content for players this year through other formats, including board games, accessories, and digital offerings.

Honestly, I don’t have enough of a finger on the pulse of their publishing schedule or their player base to really understand what this means. Clearly, the paperback format of the new Essentials books isn’t a winner, but that’s fine. It was intended to make the books cheaper and friendlier, and I can only see the shift to hard-back as a promotion for the line.

Cancelling three books is harder to wrap my brain around. Were these also-rans in their publishing schedule this year? If so, we might simply be looking at a cost-cutting move, the results of past or potential layoffs. Or were these core offerings, books that were highly anticipated by players? In either case, it’s obvious the brand is diversifying into “board games, accessories, and digital offerings.”

Stepping back and looking at this as a whole, it really looks like fewer resources are being devoted to D&D as an RPG. More are being disbursed towards managing the wider brand. The best example of this is probably the latest iteration of Neverwinter:

Neverwinter for PC is scheduled to release in Q4 2011 and is part of a multi-platform event, including a book trilogy from New York Times best-selling author R. A. Salvatore and a tabletop roleplaying game from Wizards of the Coast.

I’m assuming the “tabletop roleplaying game” is simply going to be some 4e setting info, adventures, or maybe splat books for the Neverwinter setting. If it’s an actual boxed-set like what they did for Gammaworld, well, that’ll be a whole ‘nother story, won’t it?

Review: Gratuitous Space Battles

It says something about my computer game playing habits lately that I had to look up "tower defense game." It doesn't surprise me that people find these sorts of games fun. Tower defense was basically my primary strategy when playing RTSes, especially of World of Warcraft II. That said, RTS is not my genre of choice these days. Most of my gaming is older turn-based strategy, like Master of Orion II, Bio-Ware RPGs, and neat little things like Positech Games’ Gratuitous Space Battles.

The game is exactly what it says on the tin: really pretty (even though sprite-based) battles in space between slow crawling capital ships and swift little fighters. The backgrounds are full of the Technicolor glowing nebulae that the Hubble space telescope and Babylon 5 have made us come to expect in space. What's a little odd is the focus of the game. It's not a flight sim with RPG elements, like Elite, or 4X game like Master of Orion. It's not even a turn-based RTS combat simulator like Starfleet Command. Instead, it really is more like a tower defense game, except your towers are spaceships which crawl slowly across the screen towards enemy spaceships which are crawling slowly the other way toward your ships. You don't command ships in the battle; instead, you set things up beforehand, unleash the fleets and sit back to watch how it turns out.

So what do you do? The first stage of the game is designing your ships. The game comes with four races, three of which you have to unlock through successful gameplay. Each class has different hulls in three categories of ship: small zippy fighters, not quite so small and not nearly as zippy frigates, and big lumbering cruisers. Each hull has a certain number of hard points and slots for general equipment. In the ship creation screen, you fill the hard points and equipment slots with the gear you want your ship to have. If you need a fighter-killer, you outfit your ship with quick, low-damage canons and missiles, while another ship may be equipped with big but slow beam weapons that pack a lot of punch. Most hulls add extra bonuses towards certain stats on the ship like power generation or speed.

After you've designed your ships, it time to see how they actually perform in combat. The game comes with some preset scenarios. When you load one of these up it first tells you about any special conditions. These can range from the classic Wrath of Khan nebula situation where shields don't work, to logistical limitations on which pieces of equipment or hull types can be used. You are then shown a map of the territory in which the combat will take place. Maps vary in size, so small little skirmishes don't necessarily have to start with your ships crawling diagonally across a vast expanse towards the enemy for hours before the fighting actually starts. You'll see the enemy fleet already in its line of battle. This allows you to arrange your fleet in tactical response. Usually, this will probably mean some variation on the denied flank, but since you can run any scenario as often as you like, you can try out all sorts of different configurations and combinations of ships.



As you're arranging your ships, you can give them commands that they will carry out once the battle starts. These consist of which ships to engage in combat at which distances, formation and escort commands, and whether or not to attempt to withdraw from the front lines when they start taking too much damage. As with most computer-based tactical AI, the actions of your ships can be both predictable and, at times, really wonky. This does allow you to achieve certain effects in a roundabout sort of way. For instance, if you don't want your fighters to speed ahead straight for the enemy, you can assign them to escort a fragile frigate with paper-thin armor. The fighters will then swirl around the frigate as it crawls towards the enemy, and then swarm over the enemy once they've destroyed the frigate.

After you've got your fleet arranged, you click the “fight” button and watch them go. The space battles are gratuitously gorgeous, as you'd expect. Great glowing missiles leave trails in their wake, glittering bolts of plasma glitter across the screen, and laser beams rake their targets, all causing explosions and fires to erupt on the targeted hulls. Unlike other games on similar subjects I've seen, Gratuitous Space Battles actually shows you the damage being done to enemy ships. In spite of the sprite-based graphics, you can zoom in and watch the turrets on the ships turning towards the enemy and firing. You can also see them burst into flames when they are crushed by missiles and laser beams. Hulls become peppered with flaming holes that belch smoke and sparks. Destroyed ships drift as blackened and shattered hulks, bits of twisted metal floating as debris in your battle space. The whole thing is just fun to watch.

After the battle you can review reports on which ships and weapons did (or suffered) the most damage. These reports are not quite as detailed as I would like, and they don't tell you which of your ships hurt any particular ships on the other side. Or at least, I haven't been able to figure that out in the data I've seen. Still, it's pretty easy to figure out which of your weapons are effectively harming the enemy and which are just pinging ineffectively off their shields.

And that's the game. Rinse and repeat as desired. You can set up a situation and fleet and challenge others to take it on, or accept challenges others have created. It's quick, easy to get into, and fun to play. It doesn't require a whole lot of time, and if the space battles are crawling on a little too slowly, you can always speed up the action. The music is appropriately strident, full of drums and horns, but I imagine it's going to get old very quickly. Still, the music and eye-candy are surprisingly good for a game that sells for only US $10. If you do get bored with the fleets provided by the basic game, a few modded fleets (some based on IPs like Star Wars and Starship Yamamoto, a.k.a. Star Blazers) are available, as are official add-ons of new fleets to fight with or against. At the price, it's hard to argue with. But there's no substitute for downloading the free demo and trying it for yourself.

The Phasors! They Burns Us!

This... looks less than promising.



This isn't the whole game; they promise you'll have away missions where you lead a team of up to five NPCs, plus you can join together with friends on joint missions. Still, the emphasis seems to heavily be weighted towards combat and shooting things. When all you have is a hammer...

More Digital Ink on Where the Kids Are

Randall Bills over at Catalyst Game Labs has quite a bit to say on this subject:

I believe the most significant hurdle (a hurdle that’s always been the bane of our industry, simply more so now) is market penetration. With kids not driven out of their houses to get their geek on and discover gaming by accident along the way, getting them to find our games is all the more difficult.

Yet it’s important to recognize that the market still exists. It allows us to see that instead of giving up on RPGs, we need to think outside the box for how to deliver RPGs to a hard-to-find market. Instead of bemoaning the lost days of yore, we can step up to the challenge and declare emphatically that RPGs still rock, are cool and can find a great audience, including the next generation.

As I've mentioned before, I think MMOs and console gaming are a distraction. The real threat is freeform online play based on beloved IPs like Harry Potter and X-Men and Middle Earth.

That said, the fix remains the same, as Mr. Bills points out. People are not going to show up until they're invited.

And we need to start extending that invitation. ICv2 Insider’s Guide reports that the second quarter of 2009 saw improvement in nearly every segment of the hobby games industry except:

The roleplaying game category remains deeply troubled, with most brands down, and the gap between Dungeons and Dragons and the rest growing.

UPDATE: James Edward Raggi IV riffs on this topic as it applies to the Old School Renaissance.

BioWare and Green Ronin: Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together?

Two of my favorite game publishers, BioWare and Green Ronin, announced today that they have joined forces. In conjunction with BioWare's CRPG Dragon Age, Green Ronin will be publishing a pen-and-paper version of the game.

Traditionally, pen-and-paper ports of CRPGs have not been the big crossover hits everyone thinks they ought to be. This is because of a truth that RPG designers on both sides of that fence are finally waking up to: the circle of CRPG fans has only a little overlap with the PnPRPG crowd. They are not the same. CRPGs are best when they have a fairly tight focus and get certain core activities right, and then offer fun variations on that core. PnPRPGs offer impossibly expansive play and are limited in setting, tone, and activity only by the imaginations and tastes of the participants. I have, in the past, had a lot of luck convincing folks to try PnPRPGs by describing them as CRPGs without the annoying limitations.

For those of you who don't know them, BioWare has a reputation in the CRPG market that is very similar to Paizo's in pen-and-paper gaming. BioWare's games tend to enjoy excellent production values, detailed settings and characters, and to at least brush up against more “adult” themes. One of the players from my college game loves their stuff because they not only include romances for your PC, but usually give you choices as to who your character gets into a romantic relationship with. Like Paizo's Pathfinder adventures, BioWare's games tend to be a bit on the railroady side, but do give you lots of options, including “good” and “evil” paths or other meaningful philosophically motivated options and tangents either in or from the main storyline. In the past, BioWare has worked with licensed properties, including D&D (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights) and Star Wars (Knights of the Old Republic). Dragon Age is an original setting BioWare developed in-house.



For their part, Green Ronin appears to be doing a number of interesting things. First, they're releasing the pen-and-paper game as a boxed game. If they mimic the size and shape of the computer game boxes, they could very well end up with something that looks very much like the little white box of old D&D. I think this is a great idea. A full game in a box is something the hobby has been needing for a while now, for various reasons. The other smart idea is to release the PnPRPG ahead of the CRPG. This means Green Ronin is likely to make a number of sales to the CRPG fans who just want a sneak-peak at the computer game. I don't expect many of them to convert over to pen-and-paper gaming, of course, but the sales should be very good for Green Ronin, and getting the boxes out into the public can only be good publicity for pen-and-paper gaming in general. Still, if you want to sell a PnPRPG to the CRPG crowd, at least making it look like a game instead of a text book is a huge step in the right direction.