#oneaday Day 970: Shouldn’t This Tell You Something…?

A new game-related Kickstarter is not really news any more, but when one gets halfway to a $1.1 million target just a few hours after launching, that’s a clear signal that the public is very much interested in the proposed project.

The project in question this time around is Obsidian Entertainment’s Project Eternity, a new title that promises to resurrect the isometric-perspective, real-time-with-pause combat, incredibly well-written RPG genre as exemplified by the Infinity Engine games of the late ’90s and early ’00s. Many of the key team members behind the quite astonishingly good Planescape: Torment now work at Obsidian, so the prospect of a new game from these creative minds is a very exciting one.

Very few details on the new game are available right now, but what I feel is interesting is the fact that such a huge amount of support has already been pledged to this project. Obsidian’s justification for starting the Kickstarter in the first place was that it was difficult to get funding from major publishers for what they wanted to do — the Men In Suits believe that late ’90s-style isometric-perspective RPGs won’t sell, so the developers don’t get to make them.

Except… “won’t sell”. Is that really true? As I write this, Project Eternity’s Kickstarter page has pledges of $560,885. A few hours ago when I posted a news story on Games Are Evil on the subject, the figure was $238,296. According to Kicktraq, the project, assuming it continues at the current rate (which it probably won’t), will finish at over 1,500% of its original target. Naturally the initial flurry of people will die down and the final total will probably be a little more modest than the currently-predicted $17.1 million, but it’s certainly going to beat its $1.1 million goal comfortably.

This makes me ponder whether the big publishers, constantly chasing the megabucks, are really going about things the right way. Sure, the blockbuster titles most certainly are selling and making astonishing amounts of money, but they also cost a huge amount of money and time to make. Perhaps more importantly, the increasing “annualisation” trend that publishers are inflicting on popular franchises is starting to make longtime gamers resentful of these series. The regular appearance of Call of Duty has become a running joke, regardless of whether or not the latest entry in the series is any good or not. People still buy it, yes, and the games are unquestionably highly-polished experiences with well thought-out user retention and monetisation strategies but, well, is what you really want from a game something that has a well thought-out user retention and monetisation strategy? Or do you want something that is a memorable experience?

The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. But practically speaking, at some point during the development cycle, an important decision has to be made. What is going to be the priority: business, or creativity? Do you make something that will sell, or do something risky that has never been done before? Do you make a shit-ton of people feel satisfied, or do you make a smaller number of people ecstatically happy?

There’s no easy answer, of course. But whatever you may feel about the sudden rise to prominence that Kickstarter has seen over the last year or so, I’m certainly grateful that it gives developers who want to prioritise the risky, creative side of development the opportunity to make something that they want to make — and that their fans want them to make — rather than what a marketing plan put together by someone who quite possibly has never played a game before says they should make.

So yeah. You should go back Project Eternity. (It’s up to $585,632 now, incidentally.)

#oneaday Day 686: The Times, They Have Changed

Been playing a selection of games recently. Besides the bullet hell joy I mentioned yesterday, I’ve also been playing L.A. Noire on PC and Neverwinter Nights 2 along with a bunch of emulated games that were absolutely totally positively legal to download. Between these games, I’ve been getting a pretty diverse gaming experience, and it’s also allowed me to reflect on how much gaming has changed over the years.

Let’s focus specifically on Neverwinter Nights 2 for a moment. Structurally, it’s relatively similar to the RPGs we see BioWare coming out with today (despite being developed by Obsidian) but the pacing is completely different to what we see in something like Mass Effect or even Dragon Age, its nearest “modern” equivalent.

Remember the fantasy cliche of the lead character starting as a farmhand or something and eventually becoming some sort of godslayer by the end of the game? That’s pretty much what Neverwinter Nights 2 does. You start the game in a small wetlands village in the middle of nowhere, just as their annual Harvest Fair is taking place. And before anything exciting happens at all, you have to go around the fair, complete several mundane tasks and, in collaboration with your party members, complete a number of simple challenges to introduce you to the basics of combat, magic and the like.

It works well mechanically, but in terms of that immediate “BAM!” factor that draws you in to the game, it’s somewhat lacking. Gamers looking for some sort of immediate gratification or heroics will probably find themselves disappointed for at least an hour or two before Plot Starts Happening.

It was the same in the earlier D&D titles like Baldur’s Gate. The first couple of hours of Baldur’s Gate were spent inside the walls of Candlekeep, doing errands for wizards and clearing out basements of rats. RPG cliche stuff — and the sort of thing we don’t tend to find ourselves doing too much these days because people want to get straight to the heroics. And that’s fair enough.

What the snail-like openings for these games do provide, though, is a brilliant sense of unease once you finally get out into the world to embark on your quest. You may have been able to best the local hard men in the Harvest Brawl, but what are you going to do when something that actually wants to kill you comes lurching at you?

The answer, in all likelihood, is die. This particular breed of RPG isn’t afraid to kick your ass right up until about level 5 or so — only then do you start getting to a stage where you can hold your own in a fight. And you level a lot slower than you do in a JRPG.

This is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, early combats become an exercise in managing your very limited capabilities, and simple victories over wild creatures feel like you’ve achieved something. This is realistic. Imagine if a wolf attacked you right now. Would you be able to handle it? If you did manage to survive the encounter without your throat being torn out, you’d feel pretty badass, right? That’s what happens in Neverwinter Nights 2.

The flip-side to this is that the second your curiosity gets the better of you and you wander blindly through a door you perhaps shouldn’t, you’re immediately confronted by a dude who shouts “I AM AN EVIL WIZARD!” and promptly proceeds to obliterate you with spells you won’t be using for a good 40 hours yet. This, too, is realistic (leaving aside the whole “magic isn’t real” thing) but is also immensely frustrating, particularly as the autosave system in Neverwinter Nights 2 and, indeed, the Baldur’s Gate series is best described as “erratic” and “unpredictable”. It’s very easy to lose lots of progress because of one stupid act if you don’t get into the habit of perpetually whacking that F12 (quicksave) key when things start looking a bit hairy.

Is this good or bad? It’s certainly different. In playing Neverwinter Nights 2, I’ve had to adjust my mindset to a somewhat more “hardcore RPG” configuration. Rather than being able to charge in blindly to a situation, safe in the knowledge that if it all goes horribly wrong, I’ll simply resume from a moment before the fight and try again, I have to think. I have to pause. I have to strategise. I usually have to turn off the Party AI function because the other characters are overly fond of running in to the middle of a large group of enemies before getting their appendages hacked off within a matter of seconds.

It’s certainly a different approach. Frustrating AI aside, it makes you a much more cautious player, which is sort of fun. The Souls series is based on this concept, after all, though executed somewhat differently. It also means that when you do reach the high levels of badassdom, you really feel like you earned them, rather than the more gradual trickle-feed approach which JRPGs’ rapid levelling provides.

It’s an approach that won’t be to everyone’s taste — and those who crave the immediacy of modern games will likely switch off the game the first time they’re downed by a pathetic skeleton minion, never to return. But perseverance and patience are key, and once you get your head around that, there’s a rewarding experience to be had.

Neverwinter Nights 2‘s basic campaign is regarded by some as “not great” — particularly in comparison to its expansion packs, which are supposedly excellent — but I’ve been enjoying it so far. Already we have some strong characterisation in the party members — something Obsidian is always good at — and a few hints of what the Big Plot might be, though no sign of whatever the Big Bad might be as yet. I am still only on the game’s first act, however, so there’s plenty of time for epic stupidity to occur along the way, and I’ll be looking forward to it.

In the meantime, there’s bandits to kill, skeletons to shatter into pieces and zombies to get diseased by.

#oneaday, Day 283: The Brown Wasteland

I love the Fallout series a lot more than I think. Any time I’ve spent a protracted amount of time away from them, the only thing I remember about them is the colour brown. Brown brown brown everywhere. Depressing brownness. Wasteland. Dead things. Brown. Dirt. Dust. Oh the dust.

But then I go and play one—in this case, latest entry Fallout: New Vegas—and I remember that life in the wastelands of post-apocalyptic America isn’t just brownness and dead things. Amidst all the death, destruction, doom, depression and other words beginning with D, there’s a lot to discover. There’s life—only some of which is out to kill you—and there’s humour. And there’s an interesting narrative with some deep lore, too.

New Vegas is one of those games that draws you in without realising it and before you know it, several hours have passed. There’s something about the world, the characters in it and the situations you find yourself in that just keep you wanting to explore, just to see what’s around the next corner, over the next ridge.

And the thing I like most about New Vegas, like Fallout 3 and Oblivion before it, is that if you see something off in the distance and think “I wonder what that is?” then you can just walk your way over there and investigate for yourself. And the world is set up in such a way to encourage you to do this.

New Vegas, as it happens, is a huge improvement over Fallout 3. It’s difficult to pin down exactly why this is. Is it the new survival sim “Hardcore Mode”, where you have to keep your character fed, hydrated and rested as well as free of radiation and life-threatening injuries? Is it the interesting plot, which teases you with clues dangling on hooks just out of reach and then proceeds to distract you with OH LOOK ROBOTS AND GHOULS AND WON’T YOU HELP US, STRANGER?

Perhaps it’s the new Companion system, where you can explore the wasteland as a party of up to three—your character, another human and a robot or animal. This certainly makes an enormous difference—for starters, travelling with a trained sniper means that enemies are often taken out long before they get anywhere near me. This is good, because my character sucks at gunplay. Then each companion has a plotline to follow and their own interesting little quirks. The robot I’m travelling with at present, for example, doesn’t speak but blasts out recorded military marches whenever it enters combat. This is inexplicably hilarious.

Or perhaps it’s just the chance to get back into another meaty RPG where you’re not shunted down a linear path to an inevitable conclusion. The Fallout series has always been about exploration and thinking “what would I do if I was in this situation?” Morals sometimes go out of the window in the wasteland, and there’s plenty of interesting choices to make throughout the course of the game’s quests.

The game’s much-publicised bugginess hasn’t reared its head very much since I’ve been playing. I’ve had two freezes, but these weren’t a real problem because 1) I’d been playing so long it was probably time to stop and 2) the auto-save system (at least on the 360) meant that I hadn’t lost any progress. I’m sure there are other bugs out there to be discovered, but frankly, nothing has spoiled my enjoyment of the game so far.

So if you’re the slightest bit interested in seeing how you would take on the perils of survival in the wasteland, Fallout: New Vegas comes highly recommended.