<\/div>The Battlespire <\/em>experience is bafflement and molar-popping frustration, but you already know that. I’ve been mining these experiences for comedy for thirty-three posts now. You already know exactly how I feel about the game. What you don’t know, because I haven’t made room to talk about it, is what I actually think <\/em>about it.<\/p>\n So let’s talk about that. Let me begin by sharing this excerpt from the final pages of the Battlespire <\/em>manual.<\/p>\n “Julian is fond of paraphrasing one of our mutual heroes, Sandy Petersen (designer-developer of <\/em>Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Doom, and other light classics), to the effect that the best computer role-playing game experience is far less fun than the weakest pen-and-paper roleplaying game session. Julian has also stated as his Lofty Aim the creation of a computer role-playing game experience as satisfying as a pen-and-paper roleplaying game session. Julian, of course, is mad as a loon, but it is a fine and admirable madness.<\/em><\/p>\n Is Battlespire as much fun as a pen-and-paper roleplaying session?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Well, we’ve got your basic persistent power-hungry player characters, and your sprawling, exotic campaign setting, and convoluted plots and quests, and handsome, amazing, otherworldly architecture and landscapes, and perky dialog with obnoxious monsters, and cartloads of magic items, and lots of bad creatures and weapons to whack them with, and heroic high fantasy themes, and overconfident, grasping supervillains with sinister deathtraps, and acres and acres of dark, nasty places to poke around in like rats looking for cheese. All this stimulating, immersive activity takes place in gorgeous environments lovingly crafted by obsessive, sensitive artists in startling THREE-DEE!<\/em><\/p>\n Does it get any better than this?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Actually, with the advent of multiplayer gameplay in Battlespire, you also get to accidentally roast those front-line clowns in the tin suits with a fountain of fireballs. Even better, you get to play as competing gangs of Heroic War Wizards who DELIBERATELY roast the meat off their little pals.<\/em><\/p>\n So, maybe we’re getting there. Someday soon, when cheap and universally available technology lets us triumphantly shout at our friends as we roast the meat off them, THEN we’ll be able to smugly turn to Sandy and say, ‘Oh, yeah? Sez who?’<\/em><\/p>\n In the meantime, we’ll see you on the Net. Wear your asbestos skivvies.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n More than all the backstory, instructions, troubleshooting, and tips, this is the part of Battlespire’s <\/em>manual that helps you understand it. You can take or leave the Excelsior-styled banter that didn’t quite outlive the 90s, you can certainly take issue with its assessment of the game’s quality, but you can’t deny this is a passionate and meaningful expression of who the developers are and what they want out of gaming. Your mind’s eye dilates when you read it. You take in the pizza boxes, the stack of crusty Manowar<\/em> CDs, the blobby pewter barbarians rendered by people who didn’t have an internet to teach them how to thin their paints or work with washes. They’re gamers, but there’s not enough of them to call it that. The Golden Age came and went before they came into their own. As 80s and 90s geeks, they’ve set out into the fallout of the Satantic Panic and inherited gaming’s mysterious tools and twilit rituals as eager ash-streaked cavemen. They’ve had to figure a lot of things out themselves, and they’ve learned to play the game their <\/em>way. Everything about their house rules and campaign styles and narratives are native to their group. How could it be otherwise?<\/p>\n This group is<\/em>, as far as any of them are concerned, Dungeons and Dragons. <\/em>And by the same token, their group is Battlespire.<\/em><\/p>\n We take for granted how much we expect today’s designers to work iteratively. The community-building capabilities of the internet and the increasing outflow of new games creates a complex intercourse of demographic expectations, mechanical innovation, marketing, and genre that can’t help but be on a designer’s mind. You know what gamers exists out there, you know what they want, and you know what games have most successfully given it to them. And regardless of how avant-garde they care to be, every developer ends up expressing what they’re making in terms of what it is like–<\/em>whether it draws from the success of Rogue <\/em>or Skyrim <\/em>or Ultima <\/em>or Minecraft<\/em>.<\/p>\n In today’s climate, deciding to make a game based on how your group likes to play a pen-and-paper game would be a bold and conscious decision. It wouldn’t be the default.<\/p>\n So of course Battlespire<\/em>‘s earnestly epic fantasy is punctured by comic relief and colloquial snarking and the occasional dumb reference, because six sweaty teens sitting down to play Dungeons and Dragons <\/em>feel awkward asking each other to take their own narrative too seriously. And of course the women are luridly appointed bosom candy, because that’s what these guys see on all of their paperbacks and movie posters and ninety percent of storytelling, particularly for a journeyman, is recitation. And of course the magic effects are opaque and the story is a buried root network, because that’s how they roll at the table and there’s no stack of market research to tell them people would rather know what they’re doing. Some of it could have been done better, some of it shouldn’t have been done at all, but anyone can see where it came from.<\/p>\n I don’t like Battlespire <\/em>very much. Out of the forty hours I spent playing it, the time I spent sincerely enjoying it can be measured in minutes. But I don’t hate it, either, because I can’t hate the guys who made it. If it’s dumb, it comes by it honestly. If it’s aggravating, it’s doing it to be fun. If it’s buggy and busted and broken–well, that’s not exactly unique. We can’t always ship the game we want to ship. At least they were making the game they wanted to play.<\/p>\n “A fine and admirable madness.” I don’t hate how that sounds.<\/p>\n –FIN<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Battlespire experience is bafflement and molar-popping frustration, but you already know that. I’ve been mining these experiences for comedy for thirty-three posts now. You already know exactly how I feel about the game. What you don’t know, because I haven’t made room to talk about it, is what I actually think about it. 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