2399: No Man's Sky and The Game as a Pure Relaxation Aid

0399_001

I've been playing a bit more of No Man's Sky this evening and I still like it a lot. It's a wonderfully dreamy, ethereal experience to play — helped partly by the wonderful electronic soundtrack that accompanies everything you do — but also because it seems to have been designed to be an experience that is pure relaxation rather than the more typical goal-driven affair that most games tend to be.

There is no goal in No Man's Sky. Well, all right, there's one: get to the centre of the galaxy, but that's so vague as to be almost meaningless, and the important thing about playing No Man's Sky is not a desperate attempt to achieve that goal as quickly or efficiently as possible, but rather to enjoy the journey exactly as you see fit.

Any other goals in the game are entirely of your own making and will depend entirely on how you like to play. One person's goal might be to fully scan all the planets in a system to receive the hefty payouts you get for "completing" a planetary analysis. Another's might be to produce as many warp cells as possible as quickly as possible so they can make a large number of jumps rapidly. Another's still might be to upgrade their ship, or their suit, or their multitool… it really is up to you what you want to do, and No Man's Sky offers just enough in the way of structure and mechanics to allow you to make these goals for yourself without it ever feeling like you're following a linear, prescribed path.

It struck me while I was playing tonight that this is what the game is all about. You don't play No Man's Sky if you're a powergamer, seeking the "best" or "most efficient" way to "clear" something. You play No Man's Sky during a period of downtime, in which you want to just sit back, relax and take part in something that doesn't demand anything of you, but which has enough in the way of interactivity and structure to distinguish itself from more passive art forms.

In many ways, it can perhaps be regarded as the natural evolution of the "walking simulator", the subgenre of first-person adventure games that focus not on puzzle solving or other aspects of "gameplay", but on storytelling and experiencing a world as if you were there. No Man's Sky differs in some substantial ways, however, the lack of a linear main narrative being the main one, but the "immersive sim" aspect of the "walking simulator" is present and correct. If you are the sort of person who enjoyed Gone Home not for the '90s teenage lesbian angst but instead for the interesting experience that was just poking around that little world the developers had created, then you might get something out of No Man's Sky, because the whole game is poking around worlds of various descriptions.

That lack of concrete story might be an issue for some, admittedly, but for those who still have a working imagination, No Man's Sky puts it to good use by allowing you to interpret what you're seeing as you see fit. Is that abandoned outpost that's full of weird slimy gooey tentacly things a sign that something awful happened there, or is it simply a natural product of the passage of time? Are the Gek a race of entreprenurial merchants, or do they hide a darker secret, hoping to enslave the universe to their bidding? How did that planet get those curiously man-made looking pillars of rock everywhere?

One of the most interesting questions No Man's Sky asks the player is who are you? You never see yourself in the game, and the fact that the game doesn't have multiplayer (boy, you wouldn't believe the whining that's been going on by people who apparently expected this to be an MMO) means that you don't see others like you, either. Even if you could see other players, though, there's no guarantee that they'd be exactly the same as you. Are you human? Are you Gek? Are you a construct of the mysterious Atlas? Are you something else altogether? The game doesn't answer this — at least, it hasn't in the 10 hours I've spent with it so far — and so leaves this rather important question up to the player's interpretation.

In other words, No Man's Sky is what you make of it. If you go in expecting some sort of grand space opera with a clearly constructed story, villains to defeat and great evils to stand against, you may well be disappointed. If, however, you go in expecting a game that allows you to pretend to be a spaceman for a few hours at a time, and can extract a certain degree of joy from that simple experience, then you'll have a wonderful time.

It's a game to relax and unwind with, not a game to "git gud" at. And I appreciate it a great deal for that. That doesn't mean that I want to play it all day every day, but it does mean that I can open it up at any time, fly around and explore a bit, and feel like I've had my money's worth. And with the tantalising possibility of future updates adding more and more interesting mechanics to the game as a whole, I can see it being a game I'll dip in and out of for a very long time indeed.

2398: The Many Faces of the Roguelike

0398_001

The phrase "roguelike" has been overused to such a degree in recent memory that it's become all but meaningless as a descriptor of what a game is actually like to play, but if nothing else it acts as a suitable starting point for a discussion about how a game is constructed, what the player is expected to do in it and where its longevity comes from.

The reason why "roguelike" itself as a term isn't particularly meaningful any more is that it's diverged into a number of discrete but related bloodlines over the years, with each offering their own particular take on being inspired by the dungeon-crawling classic. And, just as with most things, not getting on with one particular roguelike absolutely doesn't preclude you from enjoying others. In fact, this is one of the main reasons "roguelike" as a descriptor isn't useful any more, because it doesn't reflect the sheer diversity that is part of this subgenre in 2016.

Let's take a look at the different branches.

The traditional roguelike

A traditional roguelike builds on the foundations of the original Rogue in a number of ways. It presents the player with a seemingly simple task to complete (usually "find the x of y" or "kill the z") and a means through which to accomplish this task, usually a multi-level dungeon that is randomly generated with each playthrough, but which has the final objective down on the bottom floor.

Traditional roguelikes don't have to be presented as ASCII text characters, but many deliberately choose to, as a key part of these games is the fact they occupy a curious middle ground between tabletop roleplaying and standard computer-based hack and slash role-playing games, and as such a key part of enjoying them is having an active imagination with which to conjure up images of what your character is up to, the strange and terrifying dangers they're having to deal with and the horrible effects that potion you probably shouldn't have drunk is having on you.

A key aspect of traditional roguelikes is permadeath: in other words, your character dies, your save file is wiped and you have to start again. This mechanic can sometimes be circumnavigated by doing unspeakable things to your save game files, but doing so is generally — and quite rightly — regarded as cheating. In other words, if you're going to play a traditional roguelike properly, you can't just charge in with little regard for the consequences like modern hack-and-slash games, where the consequence for dying is usually little more than a portion of your gold and having to run back to where your corpse was.

Some traditional roguelikes try and tell an unfolding story by complementing the procedurally generated content with pre-composed quests, conversations, characters and lore items. More often than not, though, a more old-school, back-of-the-tape-box approach is taken, with narrative very much taking a back seat to exploration and character development in the mechanical sense.

One aspect where traditional roguelikes are heavily inspired by tabletop roleplaying is in the amount of freedom you're given right from character creation. You can generally pick from different races, genders and classes as well as tinker with your base stats to construct the perfect (or entertainingly flawed) character of your dreams. But that freedom often carries over into the game itself, too; many traditional roguelikes, for example, allow you to dig into the walls of the dungeon to change its layout or construct shortcuts, and the mechanics often afford the opportunity to be a little creative with your solutions to problems. A good example is the time I played Angband and ran out of torches several levels down in the dungeon, necessitating me "feeling" my way along the walls of the dungeon (by bumping into them, which reveals them on the map) until I could get back to the stairway up. This mechanic wasn't hard-coded into the game, but I was able to do it successfully thanks to the systems that are in place.

Good examples of traditional roguelikes in my experience include the original Rogue, which is rather simple by today's standards; Nethack, which is a good entry point if you can learn to decipher the ASCII interface; Angband, which initially seems extremely complicated but gradually becomes more and more understandable once you learn a few useful keyboard commands; Tales of Maj'Eyal (formerly Tales of Middle Earth), which is a highly polished, very flexible roguelike that strikes a good balance between storytelling and dungeon crawling; and Caves of Qud, which is unusual for the genre in that it has a sci-fi theme rather than Tolkien-inspired fantasy.

The modern Western roguelike

Modern Western roguelikes tend to take the basic structure of the traditional roguelike and present it in a manner that has more immediacy and accessibility. Perhaps the very best example of this is the wonderful Dungeons of Dredmor, which is as brutal as any traditional roguelike but has charming 16-bit era pixel art-style graphics, a quirky soundtrack and an entertaining sense of humour. Dungeons of Dredmor does the whole permadeath thing and allows you the freedom to build custom characters with a variety of skills — some of which are very bizarre indeed — but doesn't quite offer the full freedom of a completely traditional roguelike thanks to the constraints placed on it by being presented graphically rather than abstractly.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit is another title worth checking out. While its visuals are shockingly bad, it's an atmospheric game that, like Caves of Qud in the traditional corner, eschews the standard fantasy setting in favour of sci-fi. There's an interesting selection of character classes and skills to play with, and some enjoyable mechanics to explore and discover as you play.

The modern Eastern roguelike

Japan latched on to the roguelike structure at some point in the last few console generations, and Eastern developers have produced some great games that have a distinctly Japanese flavour to them while still retaining a number of the key aspects of traditional roguelikes.

One important difference with Japanese roguelikes, however, is that they usually contain some form of persistence rather than permadeath. Death is still an inconvenience, but it rarely, if ever, necessitates going all the way back to the beginning of the game to start all over again.

Exactly how death is handled varies from game to game. In Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon for Wii, for example, dying causes you to lose all your non-banked gold and every item you were carrying except key items for the story and the equipment you had equipped at the time. You keep your experience levels and Job levels, so you can gradually "creep" forward in terms of progress, getting a bit more experience and power each time, until you can eventually just steamroller your way through by outlevelling the challenges — although a number of the bonus dungeons feature a "level sync" mechanic whereby if you're over a particular level, you're pushed back down to the maximum for that dungeon and sometimes given additional non-standard "rules" to folow.

In ZHP for PSP, meanwhile, your character resets to level 1 each time you enter a new dungeon, regardless of whether or not you cleared the last one successfully. The twist is, any time you exit a dungeon, be it through death or successfully clearing it, your character's base level and stats increase, meaning that a "level 1" late in the game will be considerably more powerful than a "level 1" at the start of the game, particularly when you throw equipment into the mix. You still lose all the stuff you were carrying if you die, though, and to add further insult to injury your character develops a phobia of whatever killed him, causing various penalties when encountering them again until they "get over it" by successfully overcoming said challenge several times.

One Way Heroics for PC takes another approach again. Here, there's a traditional permadeath system in effect, though you can retry the same game map by entering a specific seed on starting the game each time. There's an element of player persistence, though, depending on how well you performed, and this was subsequently expanded with the Plus version of the game. You can unlock new classes, carry items over to a subsequent playthrough and upgrade the castle where every game starts (and by extension unlock a number of different quests besides the standard one). There are also a number of named characters you'll encounter in your quests if you get far enough; once you've met them once, they'll be revealed and give you tips on the post-game score screen rather than appearing as shadowy figures. There's also a substantial meta-game in place where there's a "true" ending that can only be unlocked through some extremely convoluted processes. It's a Japanese game, for sure.

Roguelites

This term was, I believe, coined for Rogue Legacy, and is used to describe games that draw inspiration from traditional roguelikes but which tend to fall into markedly different genres and playstyles to the traditional turn-based top-down RPG that roguelikes usually are.

The aforementioned Rogue Legacy was an interesting affair, with Metroidvania-style platform action RPG action coupled with persistent progression between sessions by upgrading your castle and unlocking new abilities as a result. Each character was also regarded as a descendant of the previous one, too, meaning that there was the possibility certain genetic markers could be passed on. These could affect the gameplay — the hereditary ability to jump high or do more damage is very useful, for example — while others were largely there for humour and characterisation. A colour-blind character, for example, had to do their playthrough in black and white.

The Binding of Isaac is another well-known modern roguelite, this time combining the presentation of the original Legend of Zelda's dungeons with some dark, disgusting visual humour and Gauntlet-style shoot 'em up mechanics. While Isaac didn't have persistent progression in quite the same way as Rogue Legacy, you did unlock new items as you progressed through the game, which subsequently gave them a chance of appearing in future playthroughs rather than guaranteeing you'd have them. Collecting all these items provided a substantial metagame for Isaac, let alone the sheer challenge of actually getting to the end of the game.

Finally for now, one of the most recent roguelites can be found in the form of Enter the Gungeon. This is a straight-up action game with randomly generated levels, but its main appeal comes from the many varied and bizarre weapons you'll pick up on each playthrough. There's also an element of persistent progression as you unlock new features using currency you earn in each playthrough; like Isaac, there's a substantial metagame in unlocking everything, though in this case, your unlocks will likely make subsequent playthroughs a bit easier to make it through.

It's pretty fascinating how a simple title from the dawn of gaming has spawned such a diverse range of titles inspired by it to one degree or another. How many other games from those days can boast such a feat? Not that many.

2395: Adventures in Space

0395_001

After feeling somewhat lukewarm to the idea of it for a while — the relentless hype train hasn't helped — I've come around to the idea of No Man's Sky, so much so that I'm now actually looking forward to it releasing on PC on Friday so I can get started on some grand space adventures.

I'm very interested to see how it's turned out, though I am tempering my expectations accordingly as well as intending on paying attention to the evolution of the game over its lifespan; this is a game that, several months down the line, may be very different to what it is on launch day, and that prospect is both exciting and a bit of a reflection on the modern games biz.

The reason why I'm interested to see how No Man's Sky ends up is that the concept reminds me of some of my favourite underrated games of yesteryear, and a genre which we don't really "do" any more, and that is the Star Trek-style space sim. Star Wars-style (i.e. combat-heavy) space sims have been enjoying a bit of a resurgence in the indie space in recent years, but the more sedate pace of Star Trek-style (i.e. exploration-heavy) sims is something still largely consigned to the past, with the exception of a few 2D affairs like Starbound and Interstellaria, neither of which, I feel, particularly capture the real feeling of space travel and exploration.

The specific games I'm thinking of when I ponder Star Trek-style space sims are the two Starflight games by Electronic Arts back in the 16-bit era. These were games where you were given a starship and pretty much told to just get on with it at the outset; there was an overarching plot to follow, but the main attraction of Starflight was the ability to just pootle around known (and unknown) space exploring solar systems and planets, then bringing goodies of various types back to home base for analysis and filthy lucre.

No Man's Sky isn't quite the same thing as Starflight in that you appear to be piloting a single-seater ship rather than a big-ass starship, but the philosophy behind the game seems to be similar in that the emphasis is on discovery, and the main means through which you profit, progress and flourish is through exploring and finding exciting things rather than blasting anything that dares to pass through your crosshairs into a smooth pâté.

To continue the comparison, both Starflight and No Man's Sky had/have significant planetside components in which you explore, find useful things and perhaps uncover a few mysteries along the way. I can't speak for No Man's Sky yet, but I have some fond memories of landing on planets in Starflight, then sending my all-terrain vehicle out into the wasteland to track down valuable minerals, artifacts and, if I was lucky, some specimens of life, too. Starflight's primitive graphics were enriched by some enjoyable descriptive text whenever your ground crew ran into trouble, and naturally it would be up to the crewmember you'd assigned as your medical officer to patch people up when they got back onto your ship.

Starflight was interesting, exciting and compelling even when you weren't in mortal peril, though, and indeed a lot of the time you weren't. There was a simple joy in entering a new system for the first time only to discover that it had an abundance of planets and moons, each of which could be landed on, explored and stripped of as many valuable minerals as you could fit in your ship's cargo holds. It sounds as if this is the sort of experience No Man's Sky offers, too, and if that's the case then I'm pretty excited for it.

Like Starflight, No Man's Sky appears to have an overarching narrative pushing you towards a "conclusion" of some sort at the centre of the galaxy, but also like its distant predecessor, you're free to just do your own thing as you see fit for the most part.

I'll be particularly interested to see how things like encounters with alien NPCs and suchlike go in No Man's Sky, as some of these interactions were a real highlight of Starflight. Judging by this screenshot, though, it looks like I don't have much to worry about.

Anyway. Just a couple of days to go until I can find out for sure whether No Man's Sky is actually the space sim I've been wanting to play since I didn't have a spare floppy disk to hand to save my game in Starflight on the Atari ST, so had to start again each and every time I played. No such woes await with No Man's Sky — hopefully, anyway, though doubtless day-one server issues will be A Thing — and so I'm looking forward to jumping into my Roger Dean/Asimov-inspired space odyssey and, frankly, seeing if Hello Games have managed to make an interesting game out of 18 quintillion planets or however many are supposed to be in the damn thing.

2392: Blood and Wine

0392_001

Finished The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine this evening. Spoilers follow!

While I think, on the whole, Hearts of Stone was my favourite part of the complete opus that is The Witcher 3, Blood and Wine's main story comes a close second.

Blood and Wine's effectiveness comes from its exceptional use of juxtaposition. The bright and vibrant colours of the France-inspired region of Toussaint contrast strongly with the rather dark main storyline, and likewise does the duchy's self-professed love of "virtuousness", pomp and circumstance clash rather a lot with how things really are.

On a more macro scale, Blood and Wine is effective because it is so different to the rest of The Witcher 3. The lands that you're exploring aren't dirty, poverty-stricken regions in which everyone except the very richest is fighting for survival. The narrative you're following isn't something of earth-shattering importance. And the overall tone outside of the main narrative is filled with plenty of levity and even a few in-jokes here and there, though none so obtrusive as to spoil the overall atmosphere that CD Projekt Red has spent three games crafting so masterfully in the series.

I particularly liked Blood and Wine's narrative for being a vampire-centric plot, since I'm a sucker for that sort of storyline, particularly those that humanise vampires and make them complex characters. Villain Dettlaff in Blood and Wine is most certainly a complicated character and, to be sure, he commits some truly reprehensible acts, but at the end of it all there are some very difficult decisions to make as to who is really to blame for everything that transpired, and whether things could have been done any differently.

Blood and Wine's take on vampiric mythology reminded me quite a bit of White Wolf's classic series of role-playing games Vampire: The Masquerade (or, perhaps more accurately in The Witcher's case, Vampire: The Dark Age). We have "higher vampires" treated almost as the aristocracy of the monster world thanks to their intelligence and ability to make rational — albeit often rather emotional — decisions. Said vampires are split into clans that scattered around the world. Said vampires tend to show a more monstrous side when driven into a frenzy or provoked, and at this point display numerous supernatural abilities. And, of course, it's nowhere near as easy to get rid of a vampire as having some garlic hanging around your neck then sticking a stake through their heart.

So effective was Blood and Wine's take on vampire mythology that I'd love to see CD Projekt Red take on the Vampire: The Masquerade franchise at some point. I have no idea whether or not that will ever happen, given that the last Vampire game that was supposed to show up — based on the World of Darkness at large, not just Vampire — became vaporware at some point a few years back, and thus the status of the license is perhaps questionable. Even without the license, though, I'd love to see CD Projekt Red tackle at the very least a Vampire-esque title.

What might that look like? Well, I envisage something along the lines of the wonderful Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, only with a more well-realised setting thanks to the improved technology since that classic came out in 2004. I have great faith in their vision for a futuristic dystopia city in Cyberpunk 2077, but I'd love to see their take on the undead underbelly of a modern city, too. It doesn't necessarily need to be fully open-world a la Grand Theft Auto — in fact, the past few entries on this site have probably made clear I'd rather it wasn't — but there should be plenty of opportunities for The Witcher-style plot branches and decision-making, since the tabletop version of Vampire was always about shades of grey in morality and trying to balance your own dwindling Humanity against the influence the Beast had over you — as, indeed, was Bloodlines.

Seeing Regis and Dettlaff in action in one of the climactic scenes of Blood and Wine made me very much want to play a game with their superhuman abilities — and, let's face it, even though I wasn't a big fan of The Witcher 3's combat, anything is better than the wild flailing of the original Bloodlines.

More importantly, though, good games of Vampire are often about avoiding conflict rather than seeking out trouble; indeed, a number of the clans you are able to represent in the game have rather poor martial skills, their abilities instead lying in the ability to persuade, sweet-talk, seduce, bribe, intimidate, sneak, hack and all manner of other alternatives to baring fang and claw. And with the whole The Witcher series, CD Projekt Red has proven beyond all doubt that it is excellent at developing interesting, compelling, well-written stories in which often simply talking your way out of a perilous situation is an option on the table. That strength of the developer as a whole would lend itself well to a Vampire (or Vampire-inspired) game; perhaps one day, in my dreams, it will happen.

For now, I think my time with The Witcher 3 has come to a close; just shy of 100 hours for the main story and both expansions, I feel I've very much got my money's worth, plus there's a whole host of things I can go back and do if I ever feel like playing it again. I'm very much glad I played it through to completion, but right now, I think it's time for a palate cleanser. C'mon down, Gal*Gun…

2388: Two Things The Witcher 3 Didn't Need to Be

0388_001

I've been playing a fair bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt recently, and while it is certainly a very good game indeed, there are two issues with it where I feel the experience as a whole would have been better served if they… well, if they weren't there.

As it happens, they're two rather major aspects of the game's design as a whole, but thankfully the things that the game gets right more than outweigh the annoyances that these two particular aspects present me with. (Your mileage may, as ever, vary.)

All right, let's jump right in then.

1. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be an open-world game

Here's how I play open-world games:

Spend first hour or so looking around, wowed in all the usual ways (wow, much draw distance, very mountain in the distance can go there, so pretty) and deliberately taking "the long way" to get to my specified destination.
After first hour or so, start using faster means of transportation. (Geralt's magical teleporting horse Roach, in the case of The Witcher 3)
After another few hours, start using fast travel points.
50+ hours in, start very much resenting the fact that there are approximately 300 miles of identical-looking forest/hills/mountains between me and where I actually want to be, and naturally I haven't yet unlocked a fast travel point where I want to be yet.
See destination is on other side of mountain. Attempt to climb mountain. Fail. Swear. Get annoyed. Go around mountain. Discover that there was passageway not marked on map that would have saved me about half an hour of virtual travel time. Swear again.

The fact that The Witcher 3 is an open-world game does have a few benefits, primarily that it gives you a good sense of both the geography of the various regions in which you find yourself and the scale of said regions. However, the fact remains that as with most other open-world games, there are far too many vast tracts of nothingness, and the few interesting things that are there out in the open world are throwaway distractions that become mind-numbing chores after a while.

The Witcher 3 could have been a much tighter game with a better focus had it taken a similar approach to its two predecessors: set the action in large and interesting but self-contained and more carefully designed zones that don't have any unnecessary fluff in them. As it stands, there's a whole lot of game world in The Witcher 3 that just isn't very interesting and really doesn't need to be there.

2. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be a role-playing game

I'm serious! Despite the game revolving around a man with swords chopping monsters' heads off, I really don't think The Witcher 3 benefits from its RPG mechanics at all. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they are, by far, its weakest aspect. Combat is boring and formulaic (slash, slash, slash, dodge, Igni/Aard for fire elementals, repeat has gotten me through the whole game so far), the perks you acquire when levelling up don't seem to have particularly noticeable effects, and you spend most of the game fighting the same monsters anyway, only with gradually increasing numbers next to their names, and occasionally with a few extra spikes on their backs.

Then there's the whole dissonance thing in that protagonist Geralt is supposed to be some sort of monster-slaying badass, having survived the considerable trials of two previous games, but here he starts at level 1 again, barely able to hold his own against a drowner until he starts wearing some proper armour.

Chuck out all the RPG elements (including equipment, since once you get one of the sets of Witcher gear you pretty much make everything else in the game completely irrelevant), I say, keep the combat if you absolutely must (for, indeed, the world of The Witcher is a violent place, and fights are inevitable at times) but make it an action game rather than an RPG.

What The Witcher 3 gets right

I mentioned at the start that despite these two pretty major issues I have with the game, it still manages to be an enjoyable, compelling experience. And that's because the more adventure game-type aspects of it — the dialogue, the puzzle-solving, the detective work — are outstanding. I would have been more than happy to have nothing but the main plot of Wild Hunt and maybe a couple of the Witcher Contracts, presented more as a sort of adventure game with combat. Keep the player on a tighter leash when traversing the world, remove the extraneous and unnecessary fluff, and I think it would have been a much better game.

Ultimately all this is moot because The Witcher 3 is still an astoundingly good game that is well worth your time if you have a computer or console capable of running it, but I can't help feeling that some of that time and effort CD Projekt Red expended in making sure that there were just the right amount of trees in the south-west corner of Velen could have been better used for other purposes.

Let's hope they learn some lessons from this game with their upcoming Cyberpunk title, which I'm very excited for, particularly as, believe it or not, there's a throwaway teaser for it in The Witcher 3's main plot.

I've now beaten Wild Hunt's main storyline and I'm feeling like I'm probably just going to make a beeline for the two expansion main storylines without distractions along the way. I'm already at the recommended level to start the second expansion and I've only just started the first, so I feel this may end up actually being the optimal way to experience the game anyway, leaving all the side content available if I feel like just jumping back into the world at a later date to hunt some monsters.

2378: People Ruin Everything: FFXIV Edition

0378_001

I quit Final Fantasy XIV today.

I am sad about this. Really, genuinely sad. The game has been an important part of my life for quite some time now, and will always be special to me — hell, it's where I proposed to my wife.

But I think I'm gone for good this time. I've just had enough.

Not of the game, mind you; the game itself remains one of my favourites, with an enjoyably rhythmic combat system, plenty of distinction between classes and some truly memorable encounters — not to mention an incredible soundtrack and a great story.

No, I've had enough of the people who infest it.

The community's slide into unpleasantness has been a gradual but noticeable process. Whereas I described FFXIV's player base in my USgamer review (circa 2.0-era A Realm Reborn) as one of the most helpful, supportive and friendly communities in gaming, these days I regrettably can't say the same — though I find myself pondering whether or not it's because at the time I wrote that review, I'd only been playing endgame content for a short period.

Let me talk a bit about the incident that drove me over the edge today, then I'll talk a bit in more general terms about what I feel has gone wrong.

A short while back — like, earlier this week — FFXIV introduced a new type of content called Deep Dungeon. This was a completely new way to play the game, and involved descending into a 50-floor dungeon with up to three companions and clearing it out, one randomly generated floor at a time. The rewards on offer include tokens called "potsherds", which can be exchanged for various valuable items, and if you fully upgrade the weapon and armour you use in the Deep Dungeon — these are separate from those which you use in the main game — you get a high-level weapon for a level 60 character that is not quite the very best in the game, but certainly very respectable and suitable for all levels of content.

Upgrading the weapon and armour requires that you find silver treasure chests in the Deep Dungeon. Opening one of these will do one of three things: upgrade your weapon, upgrade your armour or explode, dealing damage to you and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more likely it seems you are to come across trapped chests, and your weapon's upgrade level is also capped by your character's level within the deep dungeon — also measured independently of progress in the main game. To put it another way: your weapon and armour can go up to level +30, and in order to upgrade them to this level your character must reach level 60 in the Deep Dungeon, though thankfully levelling up is considerably quicker than in the main game.

After completing all 50 floors once, it's likely that your weapon and armour will be around the +10 to +15 mark, depending on how lucky you've been. This means you then have to challenge the dungeon again from floor 1 but with your upgraded gear, hoping you'll get luckier on the deeper floors this time. As incentive to run it again, however, every 10 floors gives you a generous shot of gil as well as Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, Esoterics and Lore, all of which are used to purchase the best level 50 or 60 gear available, so it's not as if running the upper floors again is a useless waste of time. Alternatively, if you enter the Deep Dungeon on a class you don't yet have to level 60 in the main game, completing 10 floors awards you with a large chunk of XP for your character's level in the main game, so it's also a good means of levelling alternative classes.

You may have surmised from that description that this structure puts a lot of pressure on Floors 41-50 to get players up to the magical +30/+30 needed to take away a shiny new weapon into the main game. And indeed, this is where the problems arise, with players doing everything from skipping fights with monsters that they don't feel the party "needs" to fight (despite some players not having reached level 60 at this point, and some enemies dropping treasure chests) to outright Vote Abandon-ing the whole dungeon if they don't feel they got "enough" silver chests in the first couple of floors.

I ran into one of these people today: a white mage, which is to say, a healer, and so an important, useful part of any group. Deep Dungeon, unlike everything else in the game, doesn't matchmake you into a party made up of one tank, one healer and two DPS, so it's entirely possible you'll find yourself running in a group with no healer at times, and as such having a healer in your group is something to be celebrated.

Unless it was this guy. Right from the very start of Floor 41, he ran off in completely the opposite direction to the rest of the party, leaving the remaining three of us to fight off monsters and get afflicted with various status effects that could have easily been cleansed if he had been there. But no; he had places to be, apparently, and finding those silver chests was more important than actually helping the other three people in there.

"Will you PLEASE stop running off?" piped up one of my companions halfway through Floor 42, obviously getting as impatient as I was with this git's shenanigans.

"I'm skipping mobs," replied our friend.

I then pointed out that not everyone in our party was level 60 yet — one was 56, one was 58 — and thus it would be in everyone's interest to kill as many monsters as possible, particularly as it's also necessary to kill a certain number to open the exit to the next floor anyway. He then complained about us being "slow" and "inefficient", and took great umbrage at several of us accusing him of "speedrunning".

Speedrunning is a bit of an issue in Final Fantasy XIV as a whole, particularly in dungeons, most of which are tuned more to the "casual" end of the difficulty spectrum, but nonetheless remain a good source of income for those valuable Tomestones. With a well-geared, confident party that knows what it is doing, most dungeons can be cleared in about 10 minutes or so, but this relies on everyone being both well-geared and confident in the speedrunning process, which usually involves the tank pulling as many enemies as possible at the same time, the healer working overtime to keep their HP topped up and the DPS doing area-effect attacks as much as possible.

It's quick, sure. It's also boring, because more often than not fighting like this means that you use maybe two or three of your complete suite of abilities, and fighting the monsters just becomes a case of standing in place hitting the same buttons over and over for ten minutes. Not interesting, and certainly not doing justice to the impressive encounters the Final Fantasy XIV team have created throughout the game. But no, at some point between 2.0 and 3.35, where we are now, someone somewhere decided that the de facto way to run dungeons was as quickly — sorry, "efficiently" — as possible, and woe betide anyone who slows it down for any reason, even if, say, the tank or healer say they don't feel confident or geared enough to do it.

Now, the thing with Deep Dungeon is that speedrunning is largely pointless, because monsters respawn, everyone needs to level up, you need to kill a certain number of monsters to open the exit to the next floor and, as with any good role-playing game, if you split the party you're probably asking for a bad time. With the levels being randomly generated, too, there's no set route through each floor, either, so you can't even work out a route that lets you avoid certain encounters as in certain fixed dungeons in the game, so it's really more trouble than it's worth.

That didn't stop this obnoxious White Mage from arguing his case increasingly aggressively though, eventually descending to insults about his perception of the rest of the party's skill levels. Hilariously, he even had a go at me on the grounds that I "wouldn't last five minutes in Expert Roulette" (the current two highest difficulty level 60 dungeons, neither of which are very tough) — I chose not to engage with him by explaining that actually, I had been playing the game since its open beta and as such knew it pretty fucking well by this point. Instead, I just voted to dismiss him from the party; my companions silently agreed, and thankfully he was booted shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a much friendlier person who unfortunately wasn't a healer.

This White Mage's attitude is representative of a considerable proportion of Final Fantasy XIV's player base as it stands today: the game, for these people, is about the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" so that they can acquire all the best gear, get all the achievements — achieve whatever they want to achieve, in other words — as quickly as possible then, in all likelihood, go on the official forums and Reddit to complain that three months is too long between content patches and that there's "nothing to do", despite smaller patches with additional features (such as Deep Dungeon, which was a significant addition) being added on a monthly basis.

I also saw this among a number of active Final Fantasy XIV players I used to follow on Twitter. There was a marked shift in their attitude over time; one person in particular that I started following as a result of attending an in-game "funeral" for a player who had sadly passed away in real life began as a very pleasant person to talk about the game with. But gradually over time he started caring more and more about parser figures — a parser being an external program you can run to see how much damage per second (DPS) everyone in the party is doing, a common means of harassing other players for "not pulling their weight" and technically against the game's Terms of Service, though I don't know of anyone who has been punished for it. He'd complain about parties he'd come across in Duty Finder; he'd post images of the parser figures; he'd shame people for not playing "well enough" or being "lazy". That relentless pursuit of "efficiency"; your DPS must be this high to ride.

I just can't stand it any more. It's ruined the game for me. Dungeons that I used to love running, like A Realm Reborn's final storyline dungeons Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, lose all their drama by people skipping all cutscenes — and yelling at people who don't — and speedrunning their way through as quickly as possible, even if someone in the group hasn't seen this part of the story before. (Not coincidentally, those two dungeons were also the last to have lengthy cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon run.) If I decide I want a leisurely run through a dungeon rather than a stressful but boring speedrun, I get yelled at. If someone in the party makes a mistake and there's a single death, everyone gets yelled at. And apparently not going fast enough in Deep Dungeon is now a cardinal sin, too.

Fuck all that. Fuck everyone who has ruined one of my favourite games of the last few years. And fuck this shitty behaviour being considered "normal" in all games, not just Final Fantasy XIV — indeed, I'm under no illusions, and am well aware that this sort of thing is a problem in all MMOs.

I just thought Final Fantasy XIV's community was better than that. It certainly was once — at least, I think it was. But no longer. The buildup of this crappy behaviour and how not-fun this makes the game for me has led me to both cancel my subscription and uninstall the game completely for the first time ever since open beta. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

2374: In Praise of the RPG Maker Community

0374_001

I touched on this the other day, but it bears mentioning again, I think: the community surrounding the RPG Maker series of software packages is one of the most interesting, diverse and helpful communities I've had the pleasure of coming across in all of gaming.

Gaming communities can be a variable bunch. Communities that surround online multiplayer games tend to err somewhat on the side of aggressively arguing that their opinions are the "right" ones and that everyone else is wrong — sometimes even putting players at loggerheads with the developers. Retro-gaming communities are keen to celebrate old games but have an often unspoken code of honour about not sharing pirated versions of software — even though this is sadly the only means of getting to play some older or rarer titles these days. And the Steam forums are just… well, no. Nothing good comes of sticking your head in there.

The RPG Maker community, though, they're some of the most cooperative people I've seen ever. Sure, there's an element of the usual supercilious "Search is your friend!" obnoxiousness on the forums when someone asks a question that might have been answered before six years ago, but this is true for pretty much any Internet community out there, and the help and support the community generally offers for the program is second to none.

It helps that RPG Maker has always been extensible — initially just through graphics and sound in the earlier incarnations, but with more recent installments through Ruby scripts and JavaScript plugins to extend and customise the functionality of the basic engine far beyond what it was originally intended for. Many creators provide these additional bits and pieces either under a completely royalty-free license, or under some variation of Creative Commons, which allows people to use them freely so long as they credit the original creator and, in some cases, don't fiddle around with it and pass it off as their own.

This is extraordinarily generous, and it has always amazed me quite how far people are willing to go to help out the community as a whole — though I'm pleased to see with the rise of Patreon that some of these creators are now able to make a bit of money off their creations through pledges from grateful users, something which was very hit-and-miss when going through PayPal as in the pre-Patreon days.

I know that I'm massively grateful to the RPG Maker community as a whole for providing me with all manner of excellent content to extend the functionality of the program — and helping me feel like I can make the best possible game with the resources I have, rather than having to settle for doing something within limitations. While my silly little game that I'm working on at the moment will doubtless never be anything big or exciting — as I've mentioned before, the very reason for its existence is mostly an in-joke that perhaps only four or five people in the world will understand — I am very happy with how it's looking so far, and how unlike the generic, out-of-the-box RPG Maker engine it looks, just with a few simple changes to the basic mechanics and functionality.

I'm thinking I may well spend next month on MoeGamer covering RPG Maker MV, since it's still relatively new, so watch out for that. In the meantime, I've got games to make!

2363: EmVee

0363_001

I love RPG Maker. I've loved it long before I first used it and was extremely jealous of the American PS1 owners who got to use it on console, and I was thrilled when I first discovered the legendary unofficial localisation of RPG Maker 2000 by Don Miguel. The game I made with moral support from my friends at university, The Adventures of Dave Thunder, was shaping up to be a lot of silly fun — albeit probably far too full of in-jokes to be appreciated by anyone outside my circle of friends — but it was unfortunately lost when my computer at the time suffered a catastrophic system failure. I've never quite forgiven myself for not backing it up.

But I've maintained an interest in RPG Maker ever since, and have fiddled around with numerous incarnations over the years. Most recently, I snagged a copy of RPG Maker MV, the latest version, in the recent Steam sale, and I've been having a play with it. It seems like a lot of fun so far, and a good evolution even from VX Ace, the previous edition.

The basic toolset is almost identical. There's a simple tile-based map editor for you to draw your various locations using tilesets — either those included or those you create yourself in an external art program. On top of that is the Event system, which allows you to place objects and triggers on your map and, constructing pseudo-code through a menu-driven interface, make them do all manner of different things, ranging from being a random NPC wandering around spouting bollocks to a lengthy cutscene event that changes depending on your previous actions in the game.

The basic Event system is very powerful and flexible, but for the last few versions of RPG Maker it's also been supported by the ability to use scripting — actual coding — alongside the pseudo-code created in the Event editor. Previously, RPG Maker used a variation on Ruby for its scripting language; in MV, it's made the change to straight JavaScript, arguably a much more widespread (and easier to learn?) language.

What's particularly nice about MV's scripting support is that it's organised in a completely different way to previous incarnations. Instead of having a huge, daunting Script Editor window where it's possible to completely break your whole game with just one little typo, RPG Maker MV works by using JavaScript plugins. Drop these in the appropriate subfolder of your project, activate them within RPG Maker, configure them as appropriate, then off you go.

It's a simple change, but a very effective one. The fact that each plugin is treated as its own module with its own settings means that plugin creators can create a simple list of parameters that less code-savvy RPG makers can tweak and change without having to even look at any JavaScript whatsoever. Many plugins also have "friendly", easily readable Plugin Commands to trigger various functionality, too — no more "this.enemyType(math.random(floor.bollocks));" or whatever, although you still can perform direct script calls if you so desire.

Best of all, the localisers Degica have embraced the most active members of the RPG Maker community over the years and brought them on board to help out with making RPG Maker MV an excellent package. Legendary RPG Maker scripter Yanfly, for example, has produced a huge number of plugins for MV already, and other well-known contributors to the community such as Archeia have played an important and active role in making RPG Maker MV what looks like the definitive version of RPG Maker… until the next one comes out, of course.

I'm just farting around with it at the moment with no real grand plan in mind; I'm putting together a relatively straightforward game using mostly standard assets as a means of getting my "eye" back in as well as learning MV's new features. It's not going to be anything amazing or revolutionary — going by previous experience, it probably won't be finished, either — but it's providing something fun to do when I want to keep my mind occupied.

2362: Geralt's Private Dicking

0362_001

I've been enjoying The Witcher 3 so far. It's a lovely looking game with an interesting plot, some great characters and a shitload of things to do.

To a certain extent, I almost wish it was an adventure game rather than an RPG.

The reason I say this is that The Witcher 3, much like its predecessors, is at its absolute finest when presenting protagonist Geralt with quests that are much more complex than "go to x and kill y". Which, to be fair, is most of them, since The Witcher has never really done the whole "bring me 15 squirrel ears" thing, thankfully. However, the real highlights of the game are the quests that involve a lengthy investigation of something strange that has been happening.

These quests, of which there are numerous, play out in a similar manner to something like the enormously underrated Murdered: Soul Suspect, requiring you to comb crime scenes for information (perhaps using Geralt's heightened Witcher Senses) and come to some conclusions of your own as to what happened. Many of these quests have branching paths and different consequences for how you choose to proceed in them, too, making for an interesting experience where you never feel like you've made the "wrong" choice.

Since the world of The Witcher is one of dark fantasy, a lot of the things Geralt ends up investigating are pretty gruesome and horrifying. But, as with most people who deal with the unpleasant on a daily basis, Geralt has both a strong stomach and a wry sense of very black humour.

Herein lies one of the biggest strengths of the whole Witcher series when compared to the interminable tedium of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series: personality. Despite the fact you can build Geralt's abilities how you see fit as he levels up, he is a strongly written character in his own right. Sure, there's a certain degree of leeway in how much of an asshole you can be to people throughout, mostly in order to allow for various different conclusions to narrative threads, but even with these options available, Geralt is still a well-defined character who maintains a consistent personality throughout the whole game. Whole series, in fact; he's grown and changed over the course of the three games he's been in to date, but he's still recognisably Geralt.

I'm intrigued to see how well-paced the whole game is. It's entirely possible to avoid the story-based quests altogether and just go hooning around the countryside on horseback looking for "points of interest" to clear, which usually involve killing monsters or bandits, but this gets a bit tiresome after a while. Instead, the best way to play, it seems, is to focus on a quest and where it takes you, pick up any other quests you might find on your way between key locations, and perhaps drop in on any points of interest that come up on your journey if they're not too far out of your way. Attempting to "grind" your way through each of the game's maps by methodically clearing out all the points of interest is clearly a way to drive yourself to insanity, and indeed it's precisely because I did this in Oblivion that I grew to hate the Elder Scrolls games. (Well, that coupled with their complete lack of personality and atrocious storytelling, anyway.) Thankfully, it's not necessary; it takes only a thousand experience points to gain each and every level, and completing quests is by far the most efficient means of getting said experience points, so in many ways the game is actively pushing you towards its most interesting things to do, which is absolutely fine by me.

Been playing for 18 hours so far and Geralt hasn't shagged anyone yet, though; wonder if I'm doing something wrong…

2359: Purupurupurino

0359_001

I took a chance on a peculiar-looking game on Steam the other day. It wasn't a completely blind purchase, since the developer Front Wing were the creators of The Fruit of Grisaia, my favourite visual novel to date, but this looked like an altogether different sort of affair.

Purino Party is a puzzle game with a lightweight visual novel plot, loosely based on Front Wing's Japan-only straightforward visual novels Pure Girl and Innocent Girl. (Indeed, Purino Party reuses a number of event images from both Pure Girl and Innocent Girl, much to the chagrin of those who have read said works, but as someone unfamiliar with them but very much in love with the work of artist Nanaka Mai — who also designed Grisaia's characters — I didn't mind at all.)

The plot is lightweight, stupid fluff straight out of a nukige, which is unsurprising given the source material. You come to a town for a vacation, but are quickly accosted by mysterious local landlord Kei, who decides that your clearly godlike puzzle game skills make you an ideal person to help the girls in her charge realise their potential. (And shag them.) Thus begins a series of eight short stories, each focusing on one of the girls — first the four Pure Girl heroines, then the four Innocent Girl cast members — punctuated with increasingly difficult puzzle game challenges, with your reward being the advancement of the story and a picture to add to your gallery, most of which are lewd. (Most of which are very lewd if you install the optional X-rated patch, which Front Wing have been ballsy enough to link to on their Steam Store page.)

The puzzle gameplay may initially seem to be straightforward Bejeweled-style match three, but it's actually more akin to popular mobile game Puzzle and Dragons in that you can grab a piece and then slide it around the grid as much as you like, displacing other pieces along the way to shift them into advantageous positions, until a 10-second timer expires, at which point you're forced to drop it if you haven't already. Each level gives you a point target that increases with each episode of each girl's story, and a limited number of moves in which to accomplish this score. Later episodes also present you with a time limit, though this isn't normally too much of an issue.

The puzzles are really fun. The way in which you can move pieces around allows you to set up enormous chain-reactions of pieces, and indeed to meet most of the point targets in the game and progress, you'll need to do so. The fact you have ten seconds to move the piece around and displace the rest of the board as you see fit allows you to be strategic and methodical about arranging the pieces to your advantage rather than it simply being a challenge of spotting matches as quickly as possible. There's a touch of randomness that can sometimes screw you over a bit — if you start a round with a bad board layout, there's not a lot you can do — but you can usually mitigate this to a certain extent by taking advantage of the few special mechanics. Firstly, each girl has a "favourite" type of piece that loosely corresponds to their personality or interests, and you get more points for matching or chaining these pieces. Secondly, matching three or more "heart" symbols puts you into Fever mode, accompanied by some thumping cheesy J-pop. During this time, the points you gain are considerably increased; combined with the favourite piece bonus, this is generally the best way to score a lot of points quickly.

Meanwhile, the story is also entertaining. Don't go in expecting an emotional rollercoaster on the level of Grisaia, but each of the characters are endearing and appealing in their own way, and they all have their own personalities and stories to tell. A lot of it tends to descend into sex humour, particularly given that a number of the girls are total perverts, but amid the smuttiness (which, it has to be said, is amusing and curiously charming rather than weird) there are some genuinely funny jokes and some really likeable characters; it's just a shame we don't get to spend much time with them. Though I guess there's always Pure Girl and Innocent Girl to see more of them after the fact — assuming you speak Japanese or can find a suitable translation patch.

Purino Party isn't an amazing game or an amazing visual novel, but it does what it does well. It's lightweight, enjoyable fluff, not meant to be taken seriously in the slightest, and its bright colours, cheery music and immensely endearing characters make it just the sort of thing you can relax with for half an hour when you don't want to do anything too strenuous.

Kanae best girl. And not (just) because she looks a bit like Amane from Grisaia.