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Sunday, June 23, 2002

802.11b News has good analysis on the EtherLinx story:

Unfortunately, all the pieces the founders are discussing just don't add up, and we don't have enough additional detail to make determinations about their innovation.

12:47:04 PM (comments [])

I went back and revisited Dungeon Siege because I was curious to see how the visuals compared. I think that Neverwinter Nights comes off clearly ahead -- the textures seem cleaner and the world feels more detailed.

I was struck by how much Dungeon Siege feels like a dungeon crawl productivity app. There are a lot of design choices that are meant to get you into the action, and keep you in the action. Examples include:

The hotkey for picking up loot automatically.
The ease with which you can change your entire party from an offensive to a defensive stance, or to whatever hybrid stance you desire.
The quality of the party AI
The lack of any loading screen anywhere

In general, the game seems to be about eliminating micromanagement. Which is the two gaping holes are so suprising. First, inventory management is a complete pain in the ass (no pun intended). If you have the whole party's inventory selected, it becomes so small as to be indistinct. And there's no easy quick way to find the best armor/weapon/etc for your character. I'm surprised they didn't implement some kind of dropdown in the equippage slots so that you could compare quickly the best item for a given character (and have it show all other items in everyone's inventory, included other equipped items). Second, the "megamap" doesn't scale out to any useful degree. This makes it very hard to actually see where you've been and what you may have missed.

It turns out that I had played for longer than I had thought (19 hours... now 20). It also turns out that I had quit just before an area (the swamp) that addressed some of my "the whole game is one damn long tunnel" concerns, although the swamp "addresses" it by being vast and difficult to navigate -- again making me wish the map would zoom out more.

Lest you think I'm overly harsh on DS, lemme say that I think it's a brilliant achievement. Bear in mind that I played it for nineteen hours before putting it aside for something else; longer than many of the first person shooters I buy. The forward moving action and the detail in the world count for a lot. However, I think it needs to address the two issues above. Also, I think it needs some added gameplay friction -- I want to be able to make some hard decisions from time to time, since it's at least putatively an RPG. Diablo II's skill tree is a good example of what I'm talking about here.

(I'd also like to feel more connection to my main character, but I'm willing to accept this is really a game about small party combat, not character development or even really storytelling.) 12:33:14 PM (comments [])

Boy, Neverwinter Nights is totally my obsession, and I'm just still in the single-player shit. I'm starting to sketch out the notes for a module, though.

On the plot

I'm up to Chapter 2 in the single player game. I liked the length of Chapter 1; is it was clearly long, but wasn't indefinitely long. There was a lot of stuff to do, but once you reached the end of the chapter, that was it -- there weren't any really big loose ends hanging out there. This helps reduce the storytelling chaos. I confess this was part of what often stalls me in playing CRPGs is that I accumulate a lot of plot threads and I become overwhelmed.

This isn't to say that the plot simply proceeds down the linear corridor of perceived twistiness. (By this I mean the experience that you have in Half-Life, where you run through what appears to be a very complicated research facility, but in reality you're just running down a single very long corridor that is so complexly twisty that it provides the illusion of being a real structure.) So far, there have always been multiple major directions to proceed forward in, as well as a continuing passle of side quests. There are even quests associated with your henchmen, which you may not have noticed if you never take time to discuss things other than tactics with them.

Playing the game is like eating popcorn -- intellect devourer popcorn. I keep wanting to do "one more thing," where one more thing usually involves an hour or two of clearing monsters out of their nice cozy home (kind of like a Trading Spaces where you're armed with a Hildy +2). Part of the reason for this is that every location in the game seems to have at least one quest or subquest associated with it. Last night, for example, I was on my way to hunt werewolves, and I stopped off at the inn. I expected to spent ten minutes in there talking to people, and then be on my way. Then I discovered the contest going on downstairs, and two hours later I emerged, bloody but victorious. The proliferation of quests goes a long way to make the constrainted environments feel a lot more alive and epic (chapter 1 consisted of "only" five major city tiles, with a lot of subtiles attached for dungeons & houses & etc; BG2, by comparison, probably had on the order a hundred major tiles, but a lot more of them were just empty "filler" wilderness).

On the graphics & environment

A lot of people of the Neverwinter Nights forums have dinged the game for having crummy graphics (usually comparing it unfavorably to Dungeon Siege). I think this people are... what's the word... oh yes -- insane. I take some of the points: the characters don't have high polygon counts, most of the textures get a little pixelly at the highest zoom, and it'd be nice to see more detailed faces. But the artwork in general maintains a consistent high tone, and there are some visual effects (the way the shadows fall on complex surfaces; the way the grass ripples in the wind or as you move through it; and the rippling water; the way everything you can search has an animation for opening) that add to the ambience considerably. I think the visuals are an acquired taste -- your first impression will be to find them adequate, but as you continue to watch them, you'll find that there are a lot of little details that are gotten right.

However, while the shadows are beautiful, I do wish the lighting was a bit more sophisticated. I didn't realize the game actually had a day/night cycle, because the city in the day still seemed kind of dark and murky. (It's more clear in the rural area I'm in now, and it also helps to adjust your gamma.) One of the things Morrowind (and Daggerfall before it) does very well is modelling the sun's visual impact. Shadows are thrown based on the angle of the sun, and that more orangey quality of sunrise and sunset also makes an appearance. It helps quite a bit in providing subtle cues about the diurnal cycle, especially (as in NWN) if you can't see the sky. It would have been a nice addition.

Also, some reviewers have dinged the game for having a "sterile" environment. By this, they mean that when you hold down the "tab" key to see what you can search/interact with, there are often a lot of crates that aren't highlighted. Calumny! Horror! The Wringing of Hands! I confess I was bugged by this at first, too, but then I realized that even only being able to search 25% of the crates I could see was a lot of crates, and that I already have more gold than I need. So consider this a trade-off -- the world has a lot of stuff in it, and if you're going to show a visual representation of it, you need to show all that stuff. But no one actually searches every item in a room when they enter it. Most of it is going to be uninteresting -- this way, you can focus on those things actually worth searching.

Finally, I miss the weather. I can see from looking in the editor that you can set weather for an area, but as far as I can tell, the weather doesn't change over time. Dynamic weather was a nice feature of Baldur's Gate; you'd be walking along and all the sudden things would go dark and then there'd be a thunderstorm. I'd love to see that make a reappearance.

On the Dungeons & Dragons rules

I like the emphasis on skills that you can put points into. It means my badass Monk with average intelligence can put a lot of points in Persuade and still be good talker. I also like that you can apparently either put Intelligence or Wisdom to use in conversations -- again, my Monk can use wisdom for "insight" based conversation options. I like that the "listen" skill apparently allows my Monk to detect the location of invisible creatures -- woot!

I think that the "feats" (extra ability bonuses you can get every few levels) are also pretty nice. They're a very practical and concrete reward for levelling up, giving you more toys to put in your toolbox besides more hit points and a higher attack bonus.

I think that Monks rock the lawful world. My monk totally flips out and cuts off heads, and shouldn't even care except that she's turned into a lawful good goody twoshoes (feh). Among other cool abilities you acquire as you level up: immunity to disease & poision; and the ability to make your very hands into a magic attack to strike fear into the mojo of your enemies. Were Monks always this cool? I kept trying to play spellcasters before, but I actually turn out to hate the "memorize & cast" wizard trip in D&D.

It turns out that D&D3E no longer uses exponential experience tables. The rule now is that you'll hit level N at N*(N-1)*500 experience points. Before you scurry off to make a chart, here's how that works out: level 11 (for example) is 10,000 more points than level 10. Level 12 is 11,000 more points than level 11. See that pattern? Each level only requires 1,000 more points to achieve than the previous level did.

This bugs me. It means that screwing around fighting easier monsters still can contribute substantially to your levelling. I've always like the fact that exponential XP meant that if you were twinking around in an easier area, all you'd really have to show for it would be your time. Exponential means that rewards of lower orders of magnitude just get lost in the noise.

I can't tell if I'm just overreacting, though. After all, I am having fun acquiring levels and toys. Here's my main worry -- I'm "only" a little of a quarter of the way through the game. I'm already at level 11. The game caps at level 20. If I keep hitting levels at this rate, won't I max out in Chapter 3? (On the other hand, I've "only" got 1/4 of the experience necessary for level 20, so I guess if the monster XP doesn't start to ramp up significantly, it might be OK. Ugh.)

I also worry about my character's longevity for multiplay campaigns. I don't want to have to keep creating new characters all the time because my old ones keep maxing out. I think that if we become serious about doing some NWN campaigning, we may want to ramp down the XP reward even more than that 10% Bioware has it set at, or else turn off XP for monsters and have it granted by the DM. I guess we'll have to see how it goes.

Boy that was a long "rant". Enjoy!
10:26:09 AM (comments [])