Bioware Story Overview

So right about now unless you've been living under a rock for the last month or so you're probably aware that Bioware is facing some degree of controversy over the ending to 'Mass Effect 3', the (hopefully) final entry into their sci-fi trilogy and we'll get to that.  Probably next week.  Before jumping into that snake pit though I thought it might be interesting to look at some of the other recent entries into Biowares game library.  Now normally Biowares games are praised for having good writing (mostly relative to other games) but there are definitely differing degrees in the quality.  And we're off:

1) 'Mass Effect'
So in my opinion this is the top dog for quality writing out of Biowares recent offerings.  The game has good pacing, decent support characters and game mechanics notwithstanding a vast and well developed game world.  It also, unlike every other entry on this list, has a high profile, well written and convincing villain.  In all other recent Bioware fare you too often find yourself fighting some nebulous evil force that threatens all life blahblahblah and that's fine to a degree.  It's fine but it isn't optimal. Unnamed evil is OK in my book as long as said evil force has some sort of avatar for the player to channel their efforts towards defeating.  It further enhances the game because you can actually interact with your nemesis whereas amorphous evil forces tend not to be up for much conversation.  All other things being equal (they're not) this level of interactivity with your opposition would be, to me, what  sets 'Mass Effect' above the rest of this list.

2) 'Mass Effect 2'
A sequel that's not quite as good as the original (again ignoring gameplay improvements) end sentence.  The game is just sort of solid overall with very little standing out as outstanding story choices for better or worse.  It could perhaps have stood to spend a bit less time on the team building aspects and maybe do a better job fleshing out the opposition.  That said it is nice that you really get the opportunity to get to know your various squad members with this aspect coming heavily into play in 'Mass Effect 3'.

3) 'Dragon Age: Origins'
This game is a very solid swords and sorcery fantasy entry into the Bioware library that punts a bit on the “you are the chosen one” aspects of its story and while it has some amusing banter between your party members* the actual conversations with many of them feel kind of hollow and forced.  This is also the game on this list that suffers most from having a more or less undefined evil opposing force.  After fighting through hordes of Darkspawn (even the evil entities name feels generic) the final opposition isn't particularly well explained.

4) 'Mass Effect 3'
Come back next week.  This one's getting an article to itself.

5) 'Dragon Age II'
OK, so this may be the “worst” entry on this list but the game actually has writing that is still on par with any of the other entries.  The issue is that it breaks its story up into three largely unrelated chapters.  The first chapter is especially weak as your character arrives in a new city and your goal is basically to accrue money to fund an expedition (i.e. pay 50 gold enter dungeon).  The second chapter features a wholly predictable city-wide riot as its finale (best description that isn't much of a spoiler) and the third chapter features yet more city wide chaos but this time involving a different group of people.   Now obviously my descriptions are short and spoiler free but hopefully that's enough to give you an idea of how little overlap there is from one chapter to the next.  The main saving grace to me here is that the characters in 'Dragon Age II' are a bit more interesting to me than those found in 'Dragon Age: Origins'.

That's it.  In hindsight I regret, a bit, not having played 'Dragon Age: Awakening' as this list does feel a bit incomplete without it.  I may at some point go back and try it out.  That said unlike the 'Mass Effect' series there isn't much in the way of continuity in the 'Dragon Age' games so I guess it feels like I'm missing out on less.  I suppose it's also a little unfair that I'm giving 'Mass Effect 3' an entire article but oh well.  See you all next week.

*In 'Dragon Age: Origins' and every other game on this list your party members will, depending on who you've brought with you, talk amongst themselves.  Overall this manages to convey the idea that your party members actually do stuff when they aren't following you around killing monsters.  For example in 'Dragon Age II' there was a specific party member who I usually didn't bring along because he was kind of a dick to almost every other character and I got tired of him being such a downer all the time.

Mass Effect Retrospective Part 3

And now we get to the fun stuff. The nuts and bolts of how we and our squad mates shoot stuff (or zap it with various powers). When comparing 'Mass Effect' to 'Mass Effect 2' this area of the game (arguably) saw an even more dramatic overhaul than the environment design did. However unlike the environment changes I think it's fair to say that the changes to how one approaches combat where almost all for the better*. So what's changed?

Well the biggest change is probably the way in which one approaches combat in the first place. In the first game (all of this is based on the 'Normal' difficulty setting) it was very possible to wipe out smaller groups of enemies without having to seek cover often and in general it was possible, within reason and with most character classes, do some amount of damage tanking (i.e. marching towards the enemy while ignoring their gunfire). That sort of plan no longer comes even close to working in 'Mass Effect 2'. The game has gone from taking cover is recommend to taking cover is required. It doesn't matter if you're fighting the crappiest most Stormtrooperiest enemies in the game if there are more of them than you and you try to fight them all with your head poking out you're probably going to bite it. This change overall makes 'ME2' fall a little more in line with other recently released third person shooters. The good news here is that there's a few other changes that still help separate it from the pack**.

That separation comes in the forms of improving how you and your squadmates powers where used. This mostly comes down to power level and frequency of use. In 'Mass Effect' most of the useful abilities fell into the “useful” category by virtue of the fact that they tended to cripple a single enemy while possibly messing up all his adjacent buddies. The tradeoff was that these powers recharged at an incredibly slow rate (recharge times can be upwards of 60 real time seconds). What this frequently meant was that against a tough enemy that was reluctant to advance (usually a large robotic enemy) the strategy became one where you poked your head out, zapped them, then quickly ducked back behind something before they could return fire, repeat until dead. Well I hope you can see that if the power you're using against your victim takes a while to recharge is that combat is going to take a while and have lots of lulls. 'Mass Effect 2' solves this problem by making abilities (generally) less game breaking and able to be used more often. In 'ME1' you could use a power and then use all your other powers while the first on recharged while in 'ME2' you use one power and it puts all of your abilities into a cooldown state for a few seconds (usually less the 5). The latter option leads to more frenetic combat with more options and more stuff going on. Definitely a change for the better.

Now if there's one thing that hasn't really changed, in my opinion, for the better or the worse from one game to the next is the actual usefulness of your squad members. In both games it generally made sense to pick squad mates based on need; i.e. you're playing a flimsier more skill based class then you're better off bringing your more durable characters into battle with you. Or maybe you know (or suspect) that a certain mission is going to contain a lot of a specific type of enemy that is vulnerable to a secondary power that more than one squad member has access to so you'll bring both of them. Or whatever. What doesn't change is that your allies aim is crap. Seriously most of the time it seems like they're shooting at something entirely different than what I'm seeing. Kind of like how cats will sometimes appear to stare at phantoms that aren't actually there your squad mates will be shooting at stuff that just isn't there. Regardless of which game we're talking about they have and make decent use of their powers but as far as shooting stuff goes they might as well be armed with pop guns for all the kills they (fail) to rack up.

The last real change that comes to mind from 'ME1' to 'ME2' was the weapon load outs. In the first game every character (non-player) and every character class (player) had access to every weapon type. Not that every character or character class was anything resembling effective with even weapons that they could specialize in. Sniper rifles in particular where a nightmare to use as unless you had a max or near maximum score in the 'Sniper Rifle' skill, a gun with a near max 'Accuracy' stat, and where standing completely still while crouched your odds of hitting anything where remote. And god forbid any one of those criteria where absent as now you're trying to shoot a moving target with a shaky cam. So already that represents a major change in 'ME2'. Sniper rifles being actually good in that game (probably too good). Also the actual weapon specialization skills are gone. Now each character is restricted to specific weapon classes. This applies to both the player character and the non-player characters though as mentioned in the previous paragraph this would probably matter more for the latter if they could actually hit the enemy. Despite being more restrictive I actually appreciate this change as it helps better differentiate the various classes that the player can run with.

Well that's it. That's all that comes to mind for the evolving flavor of 'Mass Effect' combat. Probably the one aspect of the games that can be said to have been universally improved from the first game to the second. It would have been nice if your squad was a little more helpful but at least that aspect of the game didn't regress. See you all next week.

*In the 'Mass Effect Retrospective Part 2' I opined that while the environments might have been samey and linear but that there was at least enough of them coupled with enough (clumsily implemented) exploration to make space feel really big and that this feeling was generally absent from the second game.

** “separate from the pack” in terms of making the gameplay more distinctive not necessarily better. I think that the 'Gears of War' series is pretty boring and juvenile but I will concede that it was an innovator (I guess that's a good thing) with regards to third person cover based combat and that 'Mass Effect 2' isn't quite perfect in this regard.

Mass Effect Retrospective Part 2

So after last weeks riveting discussion on inventory systems and the fact that 'Mass Effect' is pretty much the poster child on how not to do it we move on to the exciting topic of environment design. OK, so maybe “exciting” was the wrong choice of words to precede “environment design”. I'm also tempted to go with “necessary” as the way that the games approached this was one of the most drastic changes from the first to the second installments. As in almost completely different. So very different.

OK, time for a quick disclaimer. Outside of the vehicle issues none of the stuff I'm going to say about 'Mass Effect's environments and the ways in which you explore said environments applies to those that you encounter during the main story. That stuff is interesting, diverse, colorful, pretty much everything that the side questing environments aren't. This is kind of an issue for me as the side questing actually comprises the bulk of the games volume by playtime with much of it spent hopping between planets, finding strange life and new civilizations, running in terror from aforementioned strange life and murdering the hell out of the new civilizations. The problem is that all of this is done in “dungeons” that are about as generic as they get. It seems like someone thought that the keyword with regards to future living accommodations would be “modular”. Now that may very well turn out to be the case but from planet, to planet, group to group there is almost no variation. In fact as best as I can recall there are exactly two styles of dungeon. Number one is large open-ish room with smaller second floor and 2-4 accessible side rooms. The other option is corridor based environment with medium sized central room that is generally a sort of t-shape in its overall layout. This sort of thing becomes very tiresome and very predictable very quickly.

'Mass Effect 2' on the other hand solves this problem in a similar fashion that it solved the inventory issues. In this case there is a hell of a lot less random exploration. There is still side questing to be done but there isn't much in the way of “Oh, hey I think I just stumbled across something nifty let me see if it's safe”. The exploration in 'ME2' is more like mini side stories as they take place in small contained environments where you're usually simply going to go in, kill all the red dots that show up on your mini-map, hunt around for resources and upgrades and then leave. I'm not really saying that I miss the generic dungeon model found in the first game it's just that it made space feel larger and more open. Speaking of which.

So in 'Mass Effect' you could land on and explore at least one planet in every cluster in the game. I don't remember the exact number but it worked out to a lot of planets. Most of these planets had some resources (converted to money), maybe some crashed debris (upgrades and/or money) and probably some slavers/mercenaries/something that shot first and asked questions later for you to eliminate. Now aside from the generic dungeons this would have been all well and good except for the stupid vehicle that they stuck you with to explore the ~1 square mile of terrain that contained all of this. Yes, I spent many a hour cruising around the surfaces of alien planets in my M35 Mako. Actually maybe “cruising” is the wrong word. You see the Mako is a six wheeled vehicle that promotes itself as a 'infantry fighting vehicle' which would be great and all if it didn't handle like a shopping cart in a moon bounce when you drive over anything other than the smoothest of terrain. And the steering oh god the steering/lack thereof. About the only things I can say in favor of the Mako is that at least it's durable (highly relevant given its inability to avoid enemy fire) and that despite bouncing around a lot it is pretty much as all-terrain as it gets as one of my favorite thing to do with it was to see how close to a vertical cliff face the game engine would allow me to drive up.

So in this case I can't fault Bioware from more or less axing vehicles from 'Mass Effect 2' as the games fans weren't super happy about how the first game handled its vehicle sections. I say 'more or less' because there where a couple of semi-scripted vehicle sections in 'ME2' and there was a vehicle, the M-44 Hammerhead, in one of 'ME2' s DLCs that rivals the Mako for crappiness. But isn't all sunshine and roses in 'ME2' land. See you still need some way to gather resources and some vindictive human being at Bioware decided that probing would be the optimal way to do that. To gather resources you'll guide your ship into a planets orbit then hover your cursor over the planets surface periodically launching probes to retrieve the four different elements that get used in weapon and ship upgrades. I know right. That sounds like an incredibly riveting experience. Or not.

The last thing I want to mention as a major upgrade from the first to the second game was your ship. More specifically your ships elevator. In the first game the game engine (apparently) used the transit time between the different levels of your ship to load your destination. This wasn't particularly well optimized and meant that the length of your elevator ride was basically dependent on how powerful a system you where running the game on with the X-Box 360 version being a ride nearly long enough to count as a snack break. Thankfully this got fixed in 'ME2'

Mass Effect Retrospective Part 1

So I feel kind of dumb that I forgot to do something like this earlier. 'This' being, in case you couldn't guess from the title being a summary of my thoughts on the first two 'Mass Effect' games in anticipation of the third ones release. Well that's gone to hell as this is going to be a multi-part (how many? Good question) retrospective with this one coming out the day after 'Mass Effect 3' . Oh well. That said I think it will still be of interest to people as unlike a few other similar such concepts I've seen on other sites (and quite frankly the things that reminded me that I should do this) I have no desire to rehash 'Mass Effects' storyline. That's what Wikipedia and/or the 'Mass Effect' Wiki is for. No, the goal here is to isolate and analyze specific elements of the games that changed from the first to the second installment. Today we'll be looking at the...inventory system...really?!? A multi-part retrospective comparing two ~40 hour games and we're starting with the inventory system? OK, then let's do it.

Soooo starting off I think that it's fair to say that 'Mass Effect' ('Mass Effect' = the first one) had one of the worst inventory systems I've ever seen in a game. This system managed to be not only cumbersome but also of questionable use. In general if a system is trying to store and itemize over two-hundred different elements I'm expecting that they'll be some way to easily access those elements, perhaps sort them in a way that is intuitive to me but no. No such luck here. What we get is a passable system for managing your squads weapons and armor and an absolute nightmare of a system to try and manage the upgrades to the weapons and armor. See once you get past the most craptastically basic weapons and armor you'll be dealing with equipment that can have between one and three upgrade slots (thankfully three slotted equipment is fairly rare). What this means is going into the sub-menu that houses all your upgrades and picking out the ones you want on your weapon. Do you want +15% damage with -10% firing speed paired with Toxic Rounds or did you want -5% damage with +25% firing speed and Freeze Rounds? Then when you find the upgraded version of the upgrade (most upgrades have 7 tiers) you get to go through all of this again as you wouldn't want to go out to save the galaxy with substandard upgrades in place. Kitting out your armor is pretty much the same song and dance. Ugh.

The above nightmare was further complicated by your inventory capacity. Which is to say you couldn't carry more than a specific amount of junk. Now this shouldn't be an issue. You've got no more than 15 weapons (yes, I know that that's still somewhat excessive) between you and your squad and maybe a few extras. You've got your armor and maybe a backup set or two in case you run into enemies (unlikely) that necessitate a change in strategy. So what does that leave you? Well, in theory it leaves you around 200 empty inventory slots. In practice not so much. See in addition to being difficult to manage the game exacerbates this by spoon feeding the player new weapons, armor and upgrades like its afraid you're going to starve. It is not uncommon to find a locker in a “dungeon” that contains six or more items that are worse than what you're already using (i.e. useless). So upon opening that portal to hell you've got the choice to reduce the item(s) to omni-gel (a substance that you can get almost anywhere and that can be used to fix your vehicle) or you can add that crap to your inventory and sell it later. In my playthroughs of 'Mass Effect' I usually went with the latter option and found it wholly unsurprising that I maxed out the games money system less than halfway through the game.

Let it not be said that Bioware ('Mass Effect's developers) doesn't listen to the fans. Let it also be said that they sometimes overreact a bit. How much they overreacted should be apparent once you see how much shorter the inventory discussion on 'Mass Effect 2' is compared to 'Mass Effect'. See Bioware heard all the complaints about the first games inventory system and scrapped it. I mean gone. There is virtually no inventory management in the second game. Every time you land on a planet, start a mission, etc. you'll be prompted to chose which squad members you'd like to bring with you and after that you'll be asked what weapons you'd like for them to be carrying. That's it. You purchase upgrades at the various stores you encounter and they're applied automatically to all weapons of the applicable type. Sometimes you can mine resources to “craft” upgrades too.

So with the word “Overkill” now likely ringing in your ears we'll be wrapping this up. Was 'Mass Effect's inventory system bad? Yes, it was awful. Was 'Mass Effect 2's system an improvement? Yes, but only if you consider a total absence of customization an improvement. Ideally, and I have yet to see evidence one way or another 'Mass Effect 3' will take something resembling the middle of the road on this issue and allow for some degree of customization without burdening the player with a million little things to micromanage. Hey, a man can dream. See you all next week.

Limbo, limbo, limbo...augh spiders!!!

OK, so your job should you chose to accept it is to finish reading this article and then, if you don't already own it, go buy 'Limbo' a black and white puzzle-platformer on XBLA, PSN and PC. While I am well aware that I am a bit late to the party (game was released in 2010) in heaping critical praise onto this game I feel the need to do so anyway as it has been a long time since I've played a game like this. In short a game that provided an interesting (understatement) experience while also managing to avoid any significant screw-ups on the gameplay end. It manages to be artistically interesting with a very unique visual style without interfering that with gameplay ('El Shaddai'* had issues with this). It also has a reasonably approachable difficulty curve in its puzzles such that you shouldn't find yourself completely lost for a solution and ready to throw your controller of choice against a wall.

In 'Limbo' you play a small boy who, according to the games tagline (and only real direct storytelling), is searching for his sister. Is he dead? Is she dead? Are they both dead? Neither? Something else? These and many others are all questions that the game leaves up to the players interpretation. It further reinforces this ambiguity as you move through the environments with a forest filled with horrible things giving way to industrial environments filled with more subtly horrible things. It does all of this with an incredible attention to detail and a complete absence of hand holding tutorials. A perfectly minimalist experience.

My only complaint about the game was that a couple of its timed puzzles where more than a tad on the obnoxious side. The problem I ran into was that while the solution was (usually) pretty obvious actually sticking the landing was more a matter of trial and error (seemingly) than of knowledge or skill. Oops, you where off by .02 of a second back to the checkpoint. Admittedly isn't much of a setback as the game saves quite often (which given how often it kills you is definitely a good thing) but it still kind of irritating. That's it. That's my only issue with the game. Also it isn't like there's a great abundance of puzzles like this (maybe 2 or 3 in the entire game).

Hopefully you made it through this review even though it's probably not one of my better ones. The issue here is describing something that I want to praise but also something that is better experienced for oneself. Which hopefully anyone reading this who hasn't already played it goes ahead and does. See you all next week.

*What I'm referring to here is that occasionally the game goes all artsy on the player and in doing so makes the actual gameplay more difficult.  This could be something as simple as color choices making it difficult to differentiate enemies from the background (beautiful though the background may be) to going for a more pleasing scenic view at the expense of proper perspective needed to gauge ones jumps.

Limbo in Limbo

So there's no real article today.  I had planned on one of two things but neither came to fruition.  Plan 'A' was to talk about 'Limbo' a creepy, black and white platforming game but I haven't finished it yet so my bad.  Plan 'B' was to, after seeing the discussion get revived in certain arenas, talk about film critic and game neophyte Rogert Ebert's assertion that video games aren't art.  This plan got scrapped because I realized that the article would be too rant-ish and that I'd (and suggest that others follow suit) place about as much value on Mr. Ebert's opinion on video games as I would the opinion of a small kitten on the state of world affairs.  That is to say none.  The man doesn't know what he's talking about and it's pretty clear when he's dismissing games that others have held up as examples of "games as/are art" that he hasn't actually bothered play the game*.  Hopefully there'll be more to talk about next week.

*Or he's played the game and is incredibly stubborn and/or incredibly thick but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here.

Houston, we've got some visibility issues

It's a bird. It's a plane. It's a...you know I'm not quite sure what it is. Yes, boys and girls today we're examining the pressing and mission critical issue of visibility. Except unlike what the opening sentences may have lead you to believe we're not looking at how the speed of an object can affect peoples perception of it, rather we're going to be looking at how fighting game designers seem intent on including at least one stage in their product where it's damn near impossible to accurately see what the hell is going on. The basic reason that this is an issue is that in almost every fighting game the makers allow (to some degree) for players to chose what color outfit their character is wearing and thus some degree of camouflaging is inevitable. That said when we look at the various stages today there are limits to this sort of crap. You've got to balance style with usability. There's a reason that if you watched tournament footage for any of these games you're almost never going to see any of these stages selected* but if you happen to play these games online you'll see these stages quite frequently as players will try to compound the main issue with online play (lag) with added visibility issues.

Because screw the colorblind.

So this stage is red. Really, really, really red. In earlier versions of the game it used to be even redder and darker. Not sure who thought this was a good idea. It's like someone at Capcom has a vendetta against the colorblind. It should be noted that not only do the characters tend to blend into the background here but so do fireballs (mostly). By my count 'Super Street Fighter IV AE 2012' has six characters with red colored fireballs with two or three of those characters being counted among the most commonly played characters in the game. Fantastic. About the only upside to this is that at least the costume color doesn't affect the characters skin tone (in some games it does) so you can at least see the opponents hands, feet and face. Not that that helps much.

You'd think those explosions would illuminate things better and you'd be wrong.

OK, so believe it or not but the stage above used to be a lot worse as the version pictured is from 'Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'. In “vanilla” 'MvC3' the stage was a lot darker to the point where it was like playing “Where's Waldo?” where every time you fail to find him you lose a character. It's not much better than that in 'Ultimate'. By my count twenty-one out of thirty-eight character's in “vanilla” had dark brown or black costumes that would significantly obscure them on the above stage and that thirty-nine out of fifty character's in 'Ultimate' have dark brown or black costumes that would obscure them on that same stage. Bonus points go to the X-23 and Storm character's who each have three different color variations to chose from to achieve that effect (most character's only have one dark colored color). We get it Capcom you think that your fans think that black attire is badass. That's fine but please ensure that the character's are actually visible.**

To be fair this is barely even a stage.

So this was included because I heard mention on a tournament stream that this stage posed a problem with certain character's and looking at it one can certainly see why. While it's going to be generally difficult to get one's character(s) to blend into the stage, without using color edit mode, it does seem like some character's have projectiles that would be hard to see against a bright white background.  Thankfully there aren't too many characters in 'King of Fighters XIII' with light colored projectiles.  I'm not sure I'm demoing the move that the commentators on the stream where talking about but hopefully it's enough to give you an idea of how this could be an issue.

Looking at three stages from three different games it does kind of make me wonder whether the artists and/or designers actually play the game (especially “vanilla” 'MvC3') as I can't imagine a game releasing with stages like those above it they had. I know that stage/level design or lack thereof isn't really a deal breaker with these sorts of games but it would have been nice to see a little more thought go into it or at the very least a little consideration given to those who deal with pricks online who'll take every advantage they can get (i.e. all black team on black stage). See you all next week.

*Most tournaments have rules in place where a player can object to a certain stage being selected.

**'UMvC3' actually has a second problem stage that I forgot to take a picture of in a pleasant looking snow covered stage but that stage only affects one color for one character.