2459: Double Wang

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Having finished Shadow Warrior yesterday, I was considering picking up its sequel, which released today. Then someone said some magic words that stopped all consideration and caused me to hit the “buy” button immediately.

But let’s rewind a moment to yesterday evening, while I was playing through the rest of the first game.

Shadow Warrior has a skill system whereby double-tapping a direction and using either the left or right mouse button will perform different special moves. There’s a powerful thrust attack, a “sword beam” type affair, a spin attack, a crowd-controlling stun, a healing spell and a protection spell. Because they’re mapped to controls you’re already using for movement and attacking, weaving them in while you’re avoiding and attacking enemies is pretty straightforward.

Hmm, I thought to myself while I was playing, contemplating the fact that Shadow Warrior had a rudimentary levelling system in place, whereby you could upgrade passive and active skills as well as your weapons by expending various currencies that you acquire through play. I wonder if a first-person Diablo would work?

Some of you may, at this point, wish to raise Borderlands as evidence that yes, a first-person Diablo would indeed work, but I was thinking more focused on the melee angle, since that was a key part of Shadow Warrior’s appeal.

Oh well, I thought. I doubt it’ll ever happen, even if it would probably be really good.

This morning, I Googled Shadow Warrior 2 to see what press and public alike thought of it. One of the first things I saw was “Shadow Warrior 2 is first-person Diablo.”

Magic words. Bought. (And with a nice discount for owning some of developer Flying Wild Hog’s other work!)

It’s not an exaggeration to call Shadow Warrior 2 first-person Diablo, either. It has loot, colour-coded by rarity. It has a variety of different weapons. It has clear ways to “build” your character. It has skill trees that you can beef up as you gain levels. It has quests. It has four-player co-op. It even has a small amount of procedural generation, but it wisely limits this to just parts of levels, so there’s still very much a hand-crafted feel to the whole experience.

So far, I actually think I like it better than Borderlands, for one very simple reason: all your level does is provide you with skill points that you can pump into your various active and passive skills. Enemies don’t level up, and your stats don’t scale with your level, either. This helps prevent the ridiculous situation you sometimes find yourself in in Borderlands where you fire a rocket into someone’s face and it does a miniscule amount of damage. It also prevents “overlevelling”, where you find yourself in a situation where enemies are providing you with so little XP that it’s barely worth killing them.

I’m undecided as to whether I like it more than the first new Shadow Warrior as yet. I’m pretty sure I do. I certainly like it very much indeed — to the degree that if I don’t see it on some Game of the Year lists at year’s end I’ll be very disappointed — but it has quite a different structure that takes a little adjusting to coming from the previous game’s tightly designed “explore, monster arena, repeat” loop, and I can see this being a bit jarring to staunch fans of the original. The levels are sprawling, open affairs more akin to something like a Deus Ex zone, with plenty to explore — and plenty of incentive to wander around even once you’ve completed your mission objective. This means that the pacing is a bit more variable and less controlled by design than in the previous game, though with all that said, there’s still a feeling that you’re moving from encounter to encounter with pressure-free time to explore in between, so that’s good.

There’s also a new hub area with a couple of shops and some questgivers around, giving you a feeling of “coming home” back to base after a successful mission. There are also plenty of sidequests as well as the main story missions, so I get the impression there’s a whole lot to do here.

The game promises 70 weapons, which is more than enough, but each can be further customised by inserting up to three upgrades into them. These have many and varied effects ranging from simply increasing damage to providing elemental affinities to your shots. This is fortunate, as in true Diablo tradition, you’ll often come across Superior and Elite versions of enemies throughout the levels, many of whom have specific strengths and weaknesses with regard to elemental affinities. You can equip up to eight weapons at a time, and there’s nothing stopping you having eight different swords for different purposes if you want to play that way.

Besides the weapons, you can “build” your character through attaching upgrades to your armour and powers, too. These might provide specific buffs to particular types of damage, or increased effectiveness of skills. Pleasingly for the co-op enthusiasts, there’s even a multiplayer-specific equipment slot whose occupants generally buff you and your teammates with an “aura” emanating from your position. These auras can be damage increases, healing over time or defensive in nature, meaning if you really want to get into it, you can build yourself a well-balanced team that minimises its weaknesses — or simply pump as much damage as possible into each other to obliterate enemies in a matter of seconds.

Like the first game, the weapons are solid and satisfying to use, and most of them can be used in dual-wield “akimbo” fashion with the use of an upgrade. They make good noises and they rip through enemies in satisfying fashion; of particular note here are the chainsaws and chainswords, clearly inspired by Warhammer 40,000 — they cut into enemies with such precision it feels like you could carve your name into their guts.

Lo Wang’s wit is present and correct, too, and in the same way as the previous game his jokes occasionally fall flat, and the character he has “riding along with him”, much like in the first game, has some good chemistry with him, making for some amusing bickering. Plus all the usual “wang” jokes are present and correct.

Shadow Warrior 2 is very good indeed. If you’ve been considering picking it up, stop. Buy it. Play it. Love it. Who wanta some Wang?

2316: Overwatch is Out, and It’s Awesome

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Well, it’s here: the only multiplayer-only first-person shooter I think I’ve ever actually been genuinely excited to play and be on board with from day one: Blizzard’s Overwatch.

The servers went live at a little after midnight my time, and aside from one incident where I lost connection from a game, everything seems to be running extremely smoothly. I am happy about this.

Here is a list of reasons why I like Overwatch when I typically haven’t got into other competitive first-person shooters:

It has characters. Call of Duty is boring to me because soldiers are boring. Overwatch has a wide variety of characters that includes cute girls. So that’s a win.
There’s no complicated metagame. No challenges to unlock weapons, no perks to worry about, no loadouts, no higher-level people dominating you through use of higher-level unlocks: everyone is on an equal playing field.
The “you must be this skillful to play” barrier is lower than a lot of other shooters. The thing that puts me off a lot of competitive shooters is the fact that it’s extremely difficult to learn how to play them effectively when some 10-year old can snipe you from halfway across the map before you’ve even got anywhere near the objective. Overwatch’s characters cater to a wide variety of skill and confidence levels, and most don’t require pinpoint accuracy to have a good time with.
The objectives are simple to understand but challenging to complete. The game modes may be straight out of Team Fortress, but they work. The Overtime mechanic makes for some genuinely exciting last-second turnarounds, too.
The weapons are satisfying. Each character only has one or two weapons at most, and they’re all great fun to use. They make good noises and feel powerful.
The game gives excellent feedback. Through the use of sound and HUD elements, Overwatch keeps you nicely informed on what’s going on. If you’re getting shot in the back, a nearby character will tell you. If you’re successfully hitting an enemy from a distance but can’t see it very well, a sound effect lets you know that your shots are on target. And most characters’ HUDs are designed so that you don’t have to take your eyes off the action to know important information.
The abilities give characters unique identities. Not only that, but you need to know the best ways to avoid and/or counter these abilities. That keeps things interesting.
The support characters are more than just healbots. Most of them are more than capable of putting out respectable damage, too, and some even have other interesting abilities to support the team.
D.Va. Say no more.

Now I’d better go to bed before I get tempted to stay up all night blasting fools… doubtless there will be a lot more of this over the next little while, though!

If you’re playing Overwatch on PC, feel free to add AngryJedi#2260 as a friend. If you do so, let me know if it’s on the North American or European servers, because Blizzard inexplicably region-locks its friends lists rather than having one global one.

2301: Overwatch

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I decided to give the game everyone seems to be talking about — Blizzard’s new first-person shooter Overwatch — a bit of a go this weekend. They were running an open beta, after all, so there was no risk whatsoever involved in downloading it and giving it a shot.

And what do you know — it’s actually pretty good. I’m not sure if I’m sold enough on it to want to pick up a copy when it comes out later in the month, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with it over the last couple of days.

For those who have perhaps heard of Overwatch but not found out any more information about it, it is, in many ways, similar to Valve’s classic Team Fortress 2 in that two teams made up of various different characters with different capabilities face off against one another in order to complete an objective of some description. In the game as it stands at the moment, the objectives on offer include a “king of the hill” type affair, where over the best of three rounds, each team has to control a particular area on the map for a certain amount of time; an “attack and defend” situation, where one team has to defend a point against assault from the other team; an “assault” variant, where the attacking team has to escort a slow-moving “payload” vehicle from one end of the map to the other while the other team stops them; and a mode that mixes the “attack and defend” and “assault” objectives together.

Like Team Fortress 2, the different characters have different roles on the team. Offensive characters are nimble but fragile, with their weapons and abilities concentrating on inflicting damage efficiently. Defensive characters have the ability to do things like lay down turrets or, in the case of one particular character, turn themselves into a turret. Tank characters have a huge pool of health points so are designed to act as a distraction for the other team. And support characters generally have some sort of useful ability to help the team out — usually some form of healing, buffing or both.

Where Team Fortress 2 only had one character of each archetype, though, Overwatch has several, each of whom has a unique weapon and loadout of special abilities. Weapons have clips of ammo and have to be reloaded when empty, but you have infinite clips, so there’s no hunting around for ammo or any punishment for spray-and-pray gunplay. You can restore your health by returning to your home base, similar to how Blizzard’s MOBA Heroes of the Storm works. And if you find a hero isn’t working out for you, you can switch either when you die or when you’re in your base.

Overwatch strikes an excellent balance between simplicity and tactical depth. The characters are all easy to learn in terms of mechanics, but applying their weapons and skills to situations throughout a match is the real challenge. That and not blowing yourself up in some instances; my favourite character so far, D.Va, has the ability to self-destruct her mech suit, killing anyone nearby, which is an absolutely devastating skill, but also very likely to take you with it if you don’t immediately run away.

There’s also a fun metagame that doesn’t fall into the Call of Duty trap of excessive challenges and skill levels: you simply have an experience level, which gives you a “loot box” every time you level up, and the items in the loot box are randomly selected skins, animations, spray paint logos and voice clips for the various characters in the game. None of these have any effect on the characters’ abilities — they’re just there as cool collectibles as an incentive for players to keep playing. The choice to make Overwatch a full-price game rather than a free-to-play affair also seems quite sensible, too; while some may balk at paying full whack for a multiplayer-only game, there’s a substantial amount of content in here, both heroes and maps, and Blizzard claim that they’re going to support the game post-launch with new, free add-on content rather than paid DLC. A round of applause for them, then; doubly so since their parent company is Activision, who loves milking the annual Call of Duty installments dry.

The other nice side-effect of it being a full-price game is that everyone has access to everything from day one. Everyone can pick a favourite character and get to grips with them without having to wait for them to come around in a free-to-play rotation; everyone is, in other words, on a level playing field to begin with, with no advantage given to someone who has paid up for characters, boosters or whatever.

As I say, I’m not yet sure if I’m convinced enough by the beta to hand over 50 quid for the full game when it releases later in the month, but I will say it’s the most fun I’ve had in a first-person shooter for a very long time indeed, and I generally don’t go in for competitive first-person shooters. The beta seems to have had some positive attention, too, so hopefully it will enjoy a solid community for some time — long enough for it to be worthwhile for Blizzard to keep adding new content.

If you want to give it a go for yourself, I believe you have until Monday morning to try it out. Better hurry!

#oneaday, Day 32: Brown Ops

Earlier today, this animated image from Insomniac Games’ Resistance 3 did the rounds. Impressive. But also rubbish.

Ooh, controversial.

But seriously, look at it again. What is the one thing that sticks in your mind after watching that short clip? You probably answered either “post-apocalyptic”, “monster” or “brown”.

The trouble with things like this is that they completely lose their impact after a time. I’m sure Resistance 3 is technically very proficient, particularly if that clip was rendered using the game engine, which I’m guessing it was. But the fact it looks like Gears of War meets Fallout meets any other post-apocalyptic brown “destroyed beauty” sort of environment completely kills any interest for me—there’s just too much of it around. And not just in the sci-fi genre; I haven’t played Modern Warfare 2 for months (I traded it in after I got bored and decided I had no interest in the rest of the Call of Duty series after it) but my one enduring memory of that game, too, is that there was a lot of brown around.

This is nothing new, of course. I vividly remember getting all excited over the original Quake, the first high-profile “true 3D” first-person shooter. My brother, obviously already sick of it having been exposed to it every day on PC Zone, referred to it as “oh, the brown game”. And yes, Quake was overwhelmingly brown, though there were a few blue bits in it too. This was just the beginning, though.

Yes, post-apocalyptic environments probably are going to be grey, brown and miserable. Although one thing that Halo: Reach shows is that it is possible for armageddon to be happening and it still be a vibrant place filled with colour. In the case of that game, it’s arguable that the impact of the destruction is all the more profound because of the splashes of bright colours that are everywhere.

Or alternatively, developers, how about fewer games involving things that have collapsed or are in the process of collapsing? Fewer games where there’s nothing but rock and stone? More games in organic, natural environments that aren’t dead. More games that aren’t afraid to take a few risks and be a bit more stylised rather than “gritty” and “realistic”. Some of my favourite games of all time are the Timesplitters series, proving once and for all that I don’t hate FPS games, I am just very tired of them all being identikit and boring. Timesplitters was colourful, distinctive and humorous but still managed to be atmospheric. And the news that CryTek are considering resurrecting the series fills me with an enormous amount of joy… and hope that they don’t fuck it up.

Perhaps this is why I like JRPGs at a time when more and more people seem to be getting switched off by them. They may be their own particular kind of generic, but at least they offer some colour as part of their aesthetic.

#oneaday, Day 335: My Synapses Are Cold

I think it’s pretty much a given now that I’m a fan of creative indie games, particularly ones that put unusual twists on established formulae. There’s one I haven’t really talked about here yet, and I feel I should rectify this forthwith.

My brother (John Davison of GameSpot, for those three of you who haven’t realised that yet and are now going “Oh, yeah!”) mentioned on Twitter the other day that asynchronous multiplayer was “multiplayer for grown-ups”. Or specifically, multiplayer for people with little to no free time. Eminently suitable for those with jobs. Or those with families. Or those who simply suck at action/skill-based multiplayer titles.

Mode 7 Games’ Frozen Synapse caters for this crowd, specifically the subset of it who wish that they could pull off a headshot at a hundred paces but no longer have the reflexes of a twelve-year old with too much sugar and caffeine in their system. Frozen Synapse is, at heart, a team-based first-person shooter, albeit one represented from a top-down view played in turns by only two people. So not a lot like a first-person shooter at all, really.

Except that it kind of is. For the uninitiated, Frozen Synapse features a wide selection of different game modes, many of which will be familiar to players of shooty-shooty-bang-bang games. The simplest is Extermination mode, which simply tasks one team with killing the other team before five turns are up.

Each turn represents a five-second period of time, during which your little people can run, walk, duck, crawl, aim, shoot and focus on specific targets. It’s your job to set up a plan of action for them by setting waypoints and actions, then testing your plan to see where they’ll end up after five seconds, then committing your plan. At the same time, your opponent is also doing this, and when both of you have committed your plans, the outcome is shown, and it may not be what you had anticipated.

The cool thing about it, though, is that you don’t both have to be online to play. It’s essentially play-by-email, with the game sending a message to your opponent when you’ve taken your turn and it’s time to check out the carnage. This means that you can have a whole bunch of games on the go at the same time, and be able to rattle through them all in a matter of minutes. It’s a great idea, and it’s awesome to see this kind of idea work in a setting other than a game with With Friends in the title.

Best of all, the game plays well and it’s not even finished yet. The final product promises a single-player campaign mode, puzzle mode and all manner of other goodies. Those who are keen to support the game can pre-order and play the beta version right now, though, and you get a free copy to give to a friend, too. Which is nice.

Even better than that, the game is 30% off until Christmas. So if you’re the slightest bit interested in the unusual concept—and it genuinely does work really rather well—I’d encourage you to support the hard-working three-man team that is Mode 7 and pre-order a copy now.

If you do, be sure to send me a challenge. I cordially invite you to the turn-based bloodbath.

Dear Esther

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I remember first hearing about Dear Esther a while back, during one of those interminable “games as art” discussions. It was held up as an example of using one particular genre of gaming (the first-person shooter, in this case Half-Life 2) as an interesting means of storytelling. Half-Life 2 itself is, of course, well-known for integrating storytelling and gameplay together, but Dear Esther set out to be something altogether different. Designer Dan Pinchbeck describes it as a “multimodal, environmental storytelling experiment” which “presents a sparse environment with no embedded agents, relying purely on the player’s engagement with and interpretation of a narrative delivered through semi-randomised audio fragments”. (source)

That’s a very dry description of what this mod is doing, but it’s an accurate one.

Dear Esther places the unnamed player on a seemingly-deserted island, starting on a jetty facing an abandoned house. The beautifully-delivered narration begins immediately, reading from a letter to the titular Esther and gradually developing as the player passes around the island.

The interesting thing about the story is that there are several threads running at once, and the randomised delivery of the audio cues throughout means that after a while, they all begin to blur together until it’s not clear where one story ends and the other begins. Pinchbeck notes that “two plots develop simultaneously: the avatar’s visit to the island following the historical record of a 17th century cartographer, and repressed memories of a car accident”. The way these plots intertwine and seem to share themes and ideas in common, as well as wildly disparate elements too, mean that, in Pinchbeck’s words, “a closed reading, or understanding, of the events is impossible to ever reach.”

In this sense, Dear Esther is a dream come true for people who enjoy finding their own interpretations of games. The mod reminded me a lot of Flower, if not in execution then certainly in atmosphere. Flower makes very little of its story (if indeed there is one) explicit and is very open to wildly different interpretations. One could take it literally or metaphorically – and it is the same with Dear Esther. The game raises unspoken questions about whether or not the island you are walking around is actually real, who the mysterious characters the narrator refers to really are and, of course, who Esther actually is.

Pinchbeck himself was surprised at the positive response to his deliberately open narrative, noting that “the notion of an unfolding mystery that is never solved actually appeals to [players]” and that “the atmosphere and drive to find out more about the story is enough of a pull to get them all the way through the experience”.

It’s true. Dear Esther presents an intriguing mystery that makes it clear from the outset that there are no specific answers, yet there is a clear “goal” for the player to attain. This was achieved through use of the environment combined with the spoken narrative. Although the environment of the game is very “open-plan”, being based on an island, at no point did it become difficult to determine where to go next, as there was always something that “looked interesting” over the next ridge. As the narrative progresses, a huge aerial in the middle of the island becomes visible with a large flashing red light, and the fact that this is almost constantly visible gives the player some indication of 1) where they are going and 2) how much longer they have to go.

Music is also used very effectively throughout. Haunting piano and string themes drift eerily over the speakers as the narrator slowly speaks his lines. As the story builds to something of a climax towards its “conclusion” (for want of a better word) the music becomes thicker, more intense, and with more mysterious, unidentifiable noises creeping into it. It gives a sense of progression in a game which leaves more questions unanswered than answered at the end.

There’s certainly no denying that Dear Esther, like Flower, is an experience that will make you feel something. That “something” will be different to different people, as Pinchbeck notes that:

“…we have been surprised how many players report being scared. Several others describe the experience as eerie, moving and very sad. These last two are emotions that normally fall beyond the affective range of games, especially first-person games.”

Lewis Denby, writing on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, had plenty to say on this subject, and it’s well worth reading his excellent article. One particularly interesting point he had to mention was:

“I love my Marios and what-have-you as much as the next person, but I still feel games have an incredible untapped potential for negative emotions. Some have tried – Braid stands out for having a bloody good go – but we’re still a little too comfortable with enjoying everything we play. Any stretches of sadness in this medium tend to be restricted to self-indulgence or vapid tearjerker fare, and even they invariably make way for happy endings and bunny fluff.”

Dear Esther, he says, is noteworthy for taking players into uncomfortable emotional territory and refusing to give in throughout. The whole experience is infused with a kind of melancholy throughout, and the final moments of the story as it comes to a close without any real “resolution” are heartbreaking.

All this in a barren, empty landscape with no human interaction, no speech besides that of the anonymous narrator, no guns, no white-haired pretty boys, no anime cutscenes – and yet somehow, deprived of all that exterior fluff, Dear Esther manages to present an intriguing story which has compelled more than a few people to play it through several times and develop their own interpretations further – and all this using an engine which is renowned for its fast-action run-and-gun FPS gameplay. It just goes to show what a little bit of creativity can achieve.

Dear Esther can be downloaded here.

Pinchbeck’s notes on the mod can be read here.