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Never provide a dungeon without treasure. The longer they search and find nothing, the more your players will be convinced that the treasure is bountiful and exceptionally well-hidden. If left unchecked, they will eventually dismantle and excavate the entire site in their search for loot.
I finished Dreamfall, and I’m obliged to retract some of the high praise I heaped on the game. The ending was quite unsatisfying. Alan De Smet warned of this in the comments of my original Dreamfall post. Even so, the ending was a real shocker. Not “shocker” as in “I can’t believe that happened” but as in “I can’t believe they ended the game there.”
One review I read likened the game to The Empire Strikes back: A dark second installment in a trillogy. I disagree, because I’m sure I would remember if in ESB the beloved Luke had become self-destructive and nihilistic, eventually alienated his friends, and finally allowed himself to be killed by a stormtrooper. I don’t recall the scene where the rebellion was crushed and it hinted that even their families were killed. Princess Leia didn’t fall into a coma and eventually die, and Han Solo wasn’t rounded up and sent to the imperial prison where he was left to rot. The Empire didn’t introduce their new & improved Death Star at the end, and people left the theater talking about wether or not Darth Vader was Luke’s father, not if they thought Chewbacca could maybe have somehow survived that final raid on the rebel base.
In Empire, the Rebels lost a battle. In Dreamfall, they lose the war, the good guys snuff it, and the bad guys get the last laugh.
I’m sure fans of the game will be quick to point out that this is the second act in a three-act play. Great. The first installment came out in 1999. Adventure games and budgets being what they are, there is no guarantee that the next game will even be made. And even if it is, I don’t really care to wait for it. In another seven years I’ll be 42, my oldest daughter will be getting ready to turn 16, and I will only have a vague memory of what happened in this game. Unlike a book or a movie, I probably won’t be able to go back and play this installment, either. Will I need to surf around, hunting for some Windows XP emulator? I had some trouble getting the game to run right on today’s equipment. I can only imagine the challenge of getting it to run on some machine built in 2013, just so I can go back and familiarize myself with all of the various characters and plotlines.
I care about the story now because I’ve been playing it. I won’t care about it then. Seven years is a long time.
Even when the game comes out – even if it came out tomorrow – I’m not sure I’d want to play. A lot of heroes were dispatched. Everyone I liked died. There were many, many bad guys in this game. Lots of people hurt the good guys, hurt the main character, and were a general pain in the butt. In the end, they all went free. Only one bad guy died, and he was dispatched off-camera by one of his own people after all of the good guys were already defeated. Make a story harsh enough, and the reader will be eager to see it all get put right in the end. Make it too harsh, and the reader is going to put the book down and not come back. This is supposed to be entertainment, after all.
The last several minutes of the game were an extended cutscene where the writer drove home his message of hopelessness and utter defeat. Note to Ragnar Tà¸rnquist: Geeze man, mercy already! I liked your characters. Could you maybe leave like one or two alive*?
Of course, the fact that I reacted this way shows that the game was very successful on a lot of other levels. There are wonderful characters in this thing, and even after that brutal ending I have this urge to run around and re-visit earlier parts of the game. Despite the miserable ending, I still think this is one of the best non-comedy adventure games I’ve ever played. It’s generous with the visuals, dialog, and characters. There is a lot to love here, which is why the ending was so upsetting.
* Okay, I actually doubt all of the good guys are dead. It looks that way, but there were enough loopholes that they could show up again. Still.
My fragile and child-like ego, forever insecure and paranoid, has an insatiable appetite for stuff like this. Although, I’m not sure that feeding it is a particularly wise move. It’s probably a lot like feeding gremlins after midnight. I’m cute and funny now, but just wait until I think I’m better than the rest of you. You have not yet learned the meaning of insufferable.
I’m not sure why so many people are linking to DM of the Rings all of a sudden. Has it gotten funnier recently? The sad truth is that I can’t tell. At the start I’ll have some little gem of an idea that makes me smile, but by the time I upload the final result I’ve re-arranged it a dozen times and worded the thing a hundred different ways. I’m just numb to it.
So I don’t know what the sudden interest in the thing is all about. I’ve gotten more links since Tuesday than I have in the past month. Go figure.
The other thing worth noting is that humorous video I posted the other day had almost 6,000 views this morning. If that number is correct, then it pretty much dwarfs the traffic I get here at Twenty-Sided. Crazy.
UPDATE: The next morning. Thirty thousand views. That’s just strange. It’s not like this video is sitting on the front page. Most of those 30k visits were from people digging around in search results and finding the thing more or less by accident.
Over at Augury I found a bit about the new season of Battlestar: Galactica. There is a lot of controversy over the plot at the launch of the new season. It seems the humans have had to resort to suicide bomber attacks, and some parallels between the story and current events are causing an uproar. It portrays the Cylons as the “occupation” and the humans as “freedom fighters” who are obliged to use “suicide attacks”.
People seem to be divided into two camps:
I have only seen the pilot episode / miniseries / whatever it was, and have not checked out the show itself yet, so I don’t know the specifics of this. I will say that I think the most obvious mistake is having the characters use the language of the current war in Iraq. I think this is what makes it seem so clumsy and heavy-handed. The writers should have come up with different words to use so that it wouldn’t be so jarring. Hearing “suicide bomber” – a term that entered use in just the last couple of years and is now on the news regularly – is a terrible idea. This is like having characters talk about their blogs.
They could have instead used “kamakaze”, or (even better) they could have come up with a new word for this. Then it would have seemed more like an exploration of the idea of suicide attacks as a tool of warfare and less like a fumbling allegory of the Iraq war.
I think its an interesting idea: What if we were in a spot where we were outmatched by a superior foe, but we found we could gain an advantage if we were willing to use suicide attacks as a weapon? There are a lot of hooks here that could yield interesting stories. Despite being from the other side of the galaxy (or whatever) the humans in this story obviously hold very western attitudes and values, so finding a volunteers would not be easy. How would commanders react to giving such an order? What if nobody volunteered? How many lives are worth how much gain? At what point does the idea become so costly that they will no longer consider it? For example: what if we could win the war in a single stroke, but we need 10 people willing to die, and we need to know that none of them will chicken out at the last minute? So, if one person chickens out the plan fails, but the other people still die? What if this potential suicide attack was a window of opportunity that was only available for a limited time, but (if they could do it) would deal a real blow to the Cylons?
This stuff is gold, from a writer’s standpoint. You could write a dozen short stories (and thus: a dozen episodes) on this by just looking at it from various angles and exploring all of the ways people react to this idea. The only danger is that you will yank the audience out of the story by reminding them that it was written today. Your characters should never use the lingo of the nightly news. This is the very reason they have space-jargon in sci-fi.
Sadly, it sounds like the show was going downhill even before this happened. Lurking around various comment threads I can see a lot of people echoing the same complaints. It looks like this is a very American television show: Launch with great fanfare but no clue as to where the long-term plot arc should be headed. Then just wing it until the show gets canceled. If you write yourself into a corner, pull out a Dues Ex Machina or two, toss in some controversy, and then just sort of gloss over it and move on.
On the upside, it looks like Vandread is pretty good. I guess I’ll just stick with the Japanese to fill my hunger for Sci-fi.
(One final note: Let’s see if we can keep from getting into a debate over the war. Really. The ‘net is wall-to-wall with people talking about it. We’re talking about TV shows here. Don’t be that guy.)
After all of the praise I’ve heaped onto Dreamfall recently, I think it’s only fair to mention some of the flaws.
The most tedious and stupid is that whenever you put the disc in it launches the installer, even if the game is already installed. Couple this with the fact that the game won’t run unless the disc is in the drive and you have a nice recipe for annoying the user every time they play the game.
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| QUICK! Find the shape with the curvy top and the line with the pointy… oops! Time ran out! Now you have to start all over! |
Perhaps I just hate this game because I’m terrible at it, but this is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about when I refer to DIAS gameplay.
The game was designed with a console controller in mind. This is a third-person game, and just as mouse & keyboard is ideal for first-person, the Playstation-style “Dual Shock” controller is just perfect for the third-person experience. The game supports the use of mouse & keyboard, but it feels clumsy to me. Once I plugged in my USB controller (which is a near identical copy of the Dual Shock) my enjoyment of the game went way up.
The controller issue wouldn’t be as much of a problem if not for the combat, which is another problem I have with the game. Yes, an adventure game with combat. I’m not a purist, and I enjoy this blending of genres. I like when first-person shooters offer a little adventure game style puzzling. I like when action games spice things up with a little RPG-style stats building. (You know, do X for a while and your attributes will go up, allowing you to do more and better X.) So, combat in an adventure game is not anathema to me. My issue with it is that the combat in this game feels… it feels exactly like a combat system designed by an adventure game designer.
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| You can tell my trainer is a martial arts master because when she attacks she takes a step back, cocks her arm, then marches two steps forward and takes a heavy swing at my shoulder. |
My dueling system might be an interesting alternative to use in a game like this, although it would probably be too expensive in terms of development time.
At first the combat in Dreamfall semmed impossible and arbitrary. Then I locked on to a few tricks that made the whole thing easy enough that I was able to bully my way through the game. The big trick is:
The only time I get hit is whenever the #$@& camera swings around on me and I end up stepping into my foe when I’m trying to step back. In any case, this isn’t exactly a chessmatch.
I have other nitpicks with the plot and such, but I’ll leave that for when I get to the end of the game.
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Nothing adds excitement to a campaign like hours of detailing room dimensions and doorway placements. Remember, if you can’t keep them engaged, you can at least keep them busy. Well, one of them, anyway.
(As an aside, in our campaigns we use a a dry-erase board for this sort of thing.)
There is the old saying, “One in the hand beats two in the bush.” Now, I always understood, based on context, what this saying was, erm, saying. The idea is that a thing you have is superior to a bigger and better thing which you must still work to obtain.
Less pithy:
If you’re out hunting some sort of game with your bare hands, and you’ve managed to capture one, you should not put that creature down to go chasing after two more. You could easily end up with none.
In this day where few of us hunt game, and those of us that do employ tools that allow you to secure that which you have already captured so that you may pursue additional game, little sayings like this have become little nonsense stories which are used as an abbreviation for a familiar but more wordy idea.
The Rampant Coyote has about the best example of this sort of idea that I’ve ever seen. I won’t short-circuit his anecdote by trying to summarize here, but I will note that I am in a perpetual state of amazement over how often people are willing to hand their companies over to an amateur or imbecile because he has good hair and a nice suit.
D&D players understand this: If you meet someone with a charisma of 18, it means he probably made intelligence his dump stat.
Just because someone came from Harvard does not mean they know what to do with, or even care about, your money. It is a shame just how many employees are made to be miserable because people just refuse to wrap their heads around this fact. I saw quite a bit of financial carnage during the dot-com bust, and a great deal of it came from learned men who were clearly winging it.
Think of it this way: Grab some random guy off the street and ask him to debug and expand on the several dozen PHP scripts that drive your website, and he will tell you he has no idea how to do that. But what if you offered him several million to do the same task? He is most likely not going to mention his lack of qualifications for the job. He is going to take the money and have a go at it. He would be a fool not to. The problems will begin slowly, but by the time you realize you’re really in trouble you will have a broken website, a trashed database, angry customers, and miles of code that nobody understands. Your coder will slink away quietly and months later he might feel a little tingle of guilt when he buys himself a sportscar.
This is very much what happens every day. Leaders are brought in who have only a list of goals and an enthusiasm for the money you’re giving them. Problems will begin slowly, but by the time you realize you’re really in trouble you will have hired a lot of useless people, fired some good ones, alienated your employees, wasted heaps of money, and missed a dozen opportunities. Your leader will slink away quietly and months later he will feel not the slightest bit of guilt when he buys a new yacht.
After all, he went to Harvard.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
T w e n t y S i d e d
