It's rare that I spend this much time on a game with as many problems as Dragon Age: Origins. It's even more rare that I'm enthralled enough, despite many issues, to want to keep playing for a great deal longer.
With this fantasy role-playing game BioWare ditches many of the advancements of Mass Effect -- like emotion-based dialogue trees and accompanying animated "performances" -- and goes resolutely old-school. But as a friend once said when the Beastie Boys rediscovered their roots on "Hello Nasty," the old school was never quite like this.
Superficially, Dragon Age looks like a dozen other fantasy RPGs. A young hero is assimilated into warrior subculture, then tasked with undertaking a quest to save his civilization, each step of which leads to additional side quests. There are elves and dwarves, dragons and chainmail, swords and bows. Arrows and spells fly in battle. Young gamers will think it looks a lot like World of Warcraft; those who've been around will instantly recall BioWare's 1998 RPG Baldur's Gate.
BioWare hasn't just recalled the feeling of that earlier effort. The aesthetics are there, too. This is one brown, blocky, ugly game. It would've looked great on the original Xbox. I played on the Xbox 360, but the interface was obviously designed with a PC in mind. Nested submenus accommodate your spells and combat commands; accessing all but your most-used commands takes concentration and renders any combat beyond one-on-one encounters awkward at best.
The world isn't quite a routine Tolkien knockoff. Elves are a societal subclass often relegated to slums. Mages are looked upon with suspicion and policed by magic-resistant Templars. The frontier of civilization is threatened by a definite enemy, the Darkspawn, but civil war still brews. Keeping your head down and going with the flow seems like the best way to stay alive; there is scant glory in heroism. The real danger isn't the encroaching Darkspawn (which really are stripped straight from Tolkien) but the selfish motives of men. Oh, OK, that's Tolkien, too. Dammit!
But there are the characters, written with enough detail for you to earn an emotional connection, and the possible ways to approach the story, which are as plentiful as the loot you'll scavenge. The witch-mage Morrigan is resentful and sneaky, but powerful and an essential battle ally. Alistair is a warrior with confidence issues and a past he's afraid to live up to. I could go on, but I'll limit myself to this: Get a dog when the opportunity arises, and think twice about executing a would-be assassin who can become a valuable party addition.
For every two or three hours of grind, you'll hit a tension point that is more potent than the climax of most games. Just playing through my character's prologue (I've rolled a few heroes, but my primary playthrough was with a City Elf mage), I had to think long and hard about how to resolve two conversations. Should I put my allegiance in a friend, or with my superiors? Who do I trust, and who do I sell out?
Those tension points set the tone for the entire game. While the grind is off-putting, coupled as it is with interface difficulties that had me reloading some battles a dozen times, the best beats in the story are like treats dangling from a stick, leading you on. They're not groundbreaking or original; quite a few places felt like homage to established styles. Here's the "Twilight Zone" moment, here's the Alexandre Dumas point, etc. But they work in context, and they take advantage of each character's weaknesses and idiosyncrasies.
Turning points in the tale, both those obviously major and many seemingly minor, become real moments of existential character assessment. "Moral choice" is a pathetic marketing term that has been applied to many games in which proffered binary "either/or" scenarios really represent no choice at all. Yet in a series of games that includes Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, BioWare has been one of the few developers willing to revel in the grey zone of moral relativity. Dragon Age is a respectable achievement in that arena.
Conflict can spring up within the party as easily as without. Every member of your motley band of adventurers has an opinion of your choices and actions. They're not shy about expressing their approval or lack thereof. There's a meter for each character that gives you a general idea of how they feel about you, but it doesn't have to reach rock bottom before they'll decide to split or take action.
For example, I was in the middle of one quest, arguably an unnecessary detour from the path to the main goal of the game. I didn't see it as a sideline, but Sten, a stoic warrior I'd gone to some small trouble to remove from jail earlier in the game, was vocal about his opinion that we were wasting our time. The impromptu conversation led to an argument, which Sten thought I lost. He proclaimed that he was taking over the party. We fought and I won, barely. At that point I had a couple of dialogue options: commanding, passive-aggressive, whiny, etc. Figuring that Sten would respond best to command, I treated him like a dog that had just stepped out of line. My reward? This message: "Sten approves. +6."
As I delved deeper into the mysteries that bound the lives of my party members, though, irritations generated by the clunky interface never eased. I found that I had to save the game like I was playing a late-'90s PC game; that is, manually and often, as the auto-save was despicably unreliable. And without frequently exploring each character's submenus, it was far too easy to forget unlocked spells and abilities.
Most frustrating: Routine battles could turn into decimations, as no matter how intricately I used the options to program my party's artificial intelligence, characters rarely used abilities to their fullest. Each character has a set of "tactics" slots through which you can specify various battle conditions and how the character should respond. So you might tell a rogue to use his bow when enemies are at middle distance, but to get in close and activate his dual poisoned weapons when they approach to melee range. In theory, this offers the ultimate in AI customization. In practice, it turns into a chore with unreliable results.
The weakness of the party AI was drawn in sharp relief in one encounter where I faced shadow recreations of the characters. The enemies appeared tuned to attack at full power, and immediately devastated my own intricately tuned group of adventurers. The abilities open to each character are interesting and balanced, but applying them properly in battle is a serious and often infuriating undertaking. I often felt as if I was fighting the game, rather than the enemy.
If I had been playing on a PC, I would have been brave enough to turn on one of the upper difficulty levels that enables friendly fire. But on the 360, I figured that was about as advisable as jumping from a plane with no parachute.
Small bugs linger in the code. The most pervasive I saw came when saving near an unopened door. When reloading that save, the game treats the door as open even though it is closed; enemies behind it will see and react to you, but you won't be able to open the door. Area-effect weapons sometimes do the trick. Reloading to an earlier save always does. "+5 to frustration."
But as those penalties mounted, I still wanted to hunt down the next big decision. A well-known breed of RPG player is a loot hound. They'll click on for hours in search of the most elusive little trinkets and weapons hidden in a game world. BioWare's game makes me feel like a variant: the conflict hound. I'm a pig sniffing for conversational truffles, digging through everyday dirt for those small, rare moments where characters and situations come together in potent sequence. Dragon Age has kept me hunting for a few dozen hours already, and the reward is sweet enough that I'm going to keep at it.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Borderlands Review Final
Borderlands is a first-person perspective role playing game featuring guns a lot of guns. Its balance is light on the character development and heavy on the firepower, with really only the most cursory attempt at an over-arching plot. Your character is one of four murderous types with no apparent back story or past who are literally fresh off the bus onto a backwater planet full of psychotic banditos in a quest for a big pie of treasure. Now run along and shoot someone in the face.
The plot, such as it is, will involve you doing various quests collected from notice boards and the rare NPCs, with the emphasis usually on extermination and assassination rather than fetch and carry. The setting is a different planet, but you couldnt slide a rusty razor between it and a good old fashioned post-apocalyptic wasteland, complete with ramshackle huts, mutant beasts and nutters dressed in leather chaps and hockey masks. Nuked as the place may look it is a long way from bleak, with the cell-shaded graphics bringing colourful cartoon jollity to the dustiest of canyon or stickiest of slaughters.
The four characters to choose from are familiar basic classes. There is the Soldier with a penchant for assault rifles and the ability to drop a sentry gun, a Long Ranger who will do better with pistols or sniper rifles and comes with a nasty little winged pet as a special attack. Also there is the Phasewalker who would be recognised (and burned) as a Witch in other RPGs, who can become invisible or effectively slow down time, and the man-mountain Melee Tank who is better with explosive weapons but you wouldnt like him when hes angry. Once chosen, the appearance of your character can only be changed in as much as their three basic costume colours, as there is no system of armour or apparel. The simple skill tree is comprised entirely of passive skills that add percentage point to your special skill, up clip sizes, or reduce cool-down and reload times. There is very little in the way of appreciable customisation, and by the end of a play through you will likely have all of the skills unlocked, or at least all of the ones you are at all interested in.
As you play though, your interaction with the characters will be limited to accepting their quest or not no narrative difference will be made if you take or ignore all the side quests, and there isnt a karma or morality system. Its all just loot and corpses behind you. Your only motivation is ever more cash for bigger guns. And do you know what you do with the bigger guns? Go and splatter the nearest boss bandito and take his bigger, shinier gun and cash. Repeat.
This sounds like a recipe for tedium, but Borderlands remains compelling right the way through by appealing to our most basic and craven instincts. Loot. Loot and slaughter in fact. There is an incalculably vast array of guns on offer in Borderlands, largely due to what looks like a random weapon generation routine as was used to create random weapons in Diablo, as well as a large selection of set epic and legendary weapons. The experience of battling or hoarding your way to obtain a new and beautiful pistol, revolver, shotgun, rifle, sniper, rocket launcher or esoteric alien weapon and then unleashing it on the previously difficult enemy is a tangy, dirty satisfaction that will carry you right the way through the 25 or so hours of gameplay.
The random generation routines will base the weapon's appearance on its properties, which will mean each will look as novel and satisfying as they handle. Any revolver you find may come with a 2, 3, or 6 shot cylinders, any number of damage or accuracy buffs or de-buffs, a variety of scope strengths, reload rates, firing rates, critical hit chances, recoil values and a host of other curious little effects. Even the most casual gamer will be able to appreciate how their new piece handles just by blazing off a few rounds into the sky, rocks or a passing bandit or if youre a more considered shopper you can troll through your inventory and see how it measures up and do some tactical selection.
The stripped-down, immediate gratification version of RPG that Borderlands operates is evident in what is the closest the game comes to individual character development via Weapon Proficiencies. Killing enough villains with a type of weapon will increase your proficiency with it, increasing damage, accuracy and ammo reserves. The higher levels require the player to have preferred one type of weapon for most of the game, but this is unobtrusive as if you have been distributing that much lead with one class of weapon it will be because that was what felt good in the first place, rather than a grind to achieve a desired status of upgrade.
Borderlands is entirely about gratification, with an RPG mechanic working in the background only in order to reward you for your murdering ways and to lend the next instalment of slaughter a sense of freshness and homicidal acquisitiveness. The passive upgrade system will not get in your way, nor will the open and simple inventory. The quests will come with a big fat directional reticule on your compass in case you get lost, the map will be filled in already when you arrive on a new level. You will have the option to walk across the wasteland, bounce across it in free and heavily armed vehicles, or simply warp from frequent save point to save point. Everything is designed to provide the minimum friction between you and your next freakish, amusing target. Even death proves little impediment to the gunplay: if both your fast recharging shield and your health reaches zero, you will be given the chance to catch your Second Wind. This works a lot like the Last Stand perk in COD: Modern Warfare multiplayer - your character will sink to their knees and the screen will fade over the next 20 or so seconds as you bleed out. However, kill any other enemy on screen and you will leap back to your feet with fully recharged shields, free to go back hammering at the heavy individual who actually put you down. Most of the gigantic boss battles will be seasoned with a smattering of otherwise ineffectual peons whose only purpose is to have their heads blown off and put you back into the game versus the big bad, be they dinosaurs, maniacal pygmies, cyborgs, gun runners, mutants, or Mothra. Death itself will only cost you a small percentage of your cash no XP penalty or Resurrection Sickness and a respawn at a close by point.
Borderlands is perfectly satisfying as a singleplayer experience, but some of your best slaughtering will be done in the drop-in co-op mode, where online players can invite you to join their game, or you can drop into theirs. The quest progression will follow that of whoever is hosting, but the experience, weapons and cash will be carried over by the individual player, and taken with them when they leave. Whilst there is no loot sharing system, which can make for some irksome treasure hogging, the simplicity of the co-op system is as smooth and satisfying as the rest of the game's design. More players in a game will automatically up the difficulty and the number of hostiles, but will also commensurately up the quality of the drops. Tooling across the bandlands in a vehicle with a live player driving and a live player manning the turrets, smoking mutant fools for no other reason than the cash and the chuckles is hard to beat, and when you or they get bored and leave then you can just get back to the quest progression you were enjoying before.
The worst features of Borderlands are fortunately the ones you can ignore completely. Scattered through the land are player-vs-player arenas where you can throw down against your erstwhile co-op buddies. They are a waste of space in single player and in multiplayer serve no discernable purpose for loot, stats or enjoyment. Additionally, despite the vast mountains of guns youll come across and loot purely for the purpose of later resale, the extremely keen inventory system will always equip one of your hot-keyed slots with the new firearm if you havent found its like before. This can lead to more inventory resetting than the player would want in this otherwise extremely streamlined system.
The colourful, stylised visuals are backed up by a sense of humour in the dialogue and character design. You can ignore anything anyone says, play the whole thing in mute if you so decide for all the difference it will make for your ability to progress, but listening to the few repeat characters such as the helper robots (GIR from Invader Zim, anyone?) helps to make the whole experience that much lighter, more accessible and plain old fun.
Borderlands will not set any benchmarks or push any envelopes in the RPG genre, or even its niche FPS-RPG setting. It simply does not do anything that we have not seen in some form or other elsewhere, nor does any individual element or mechanic uniquely stand out. What it does do is take the most basely satisfying parts of the whole RPG genre and lay them out in a fast moving buffet of bloodshed and looting. The joy of acquisition and dominance inherent to role-playing games is married to the savage joy of slaughtering entire crowds of victi.. sorry villains, and in conclusion I can heartily recommend it.
I'd also like to say that while the console versions are phenomenal as well, the PC version is the one I tried, and was truly impressed, if you can meet the requirements I would definitely go the PC route when playing or buying this game.
85%
The plot, such as it is, will involve you doing various quests collected from notice boards and the rare NPCs, with the emphasis usually on extermination and assassination rather than fetch and carry. The setting is a different planet, but you couldnt slide a rusty razor between it and a good old fashioned post-apocalyptic wasteland, complete with ramshackle huts, mutant beasts and nutters dressed in leather chaps and hockey masks. Nuked as the place may look it is a long way from bleak, with the cell-shaded graphics bringing colourful cartoon jollity to the dustiest of canyon or stickiest of slaughters.
The four characters to choose from are familiar basic classes. There is the Soldier with a penchant for assault rifles and the ability to drop a sentry gun, a Long Ranger who will do better with pistols or sniper rifles and comes with a nasty little winged pet as a special attack. Also there is the Phasewalker who would be recognised (and burned) as a Witch in other RPGs, who can become invisible or effectively slow down time, and the man-mountain Melee Tank who is better with explosive weapons but you wouldnt like him when hes angry. Once chosen, the appearance of your character can only be changed in as much as their three basic costume colours, as there is no system of armour or apparel. The simple skill tree is comprised entirely of passive skills that add percentage point to your special skill, up clip sizes, or reduce cool-down and reload times. There is very little in the way of appreciable customisation, and by the end of a play through you will likely have all of the skills unlocked, or at least all of the ones you are at all interested in.
As you play though, your interaction with the characters will be limited to accepting their quest or not no narrative difference will be made if you take or ignore all the side quests, and there isnt a karma or morality system. Its all just loot and corpses behind you. Your only motivation is ever more cash for bigger guns. And do you know what you do with the bigger guns? Go and splatter the nearest boss bandito and take his bigger, shinier gun and cash. Repeat.
This sounds like a recipe for tedium, but Borderlands remains compelling right the way through by appealing to our most basic and craven instincts. Loot. Loot and slaughter in fact. There is an incalculably vast array of guns on offer in Borderlands, largely due to what looks like a random weapon generation routine as was used to create random weapons in Diablo, as well as a large selection of set epic and legendary weapons. The experience of battling or hoarding your way to obtain a new and beautiful pistol, revolver, shotgun, rifle, sniper, rocket launcher or esoteric alien weapon and then unleashing it on the previously difficult enemy is a tangy, dirty satisfaction that will carry you right the way through the 25 or so hours of gameplay.
The random generation routines will base the weapon's appearance on its properties, which will mean each will look as novel and satisfying as they handle. Any revolver you find may come with a 2, 3, or 6 shot cylinders, any number of damage or accuracy buffs or de-buffs, a variety of scope strengths, reload rates, firing rates, critical hit chances, recoil values and a host of other curious little effects. Even the most casual gamer will be able to appreciate how their new piece handles just by blazing off a few rounds into the sky, rocks or a passing bandit or if youre a more considered shopper you can troll through your inventory and see how it measures up and do some tactical selection.
The stripped-down, immediate gratification version of RPG that Borderlands operates is evident in what is the closest the game comes to individual character development via Weapon Proficiencies. Killing enough villains with a type of weapon will increase your proficiency with it, increasing damage, accuracy and ammo reserves. The higher levels require the player to have preferred one type of weapon for most of the game, but this is unobtrusive as if you have been distributing that much lead with one class of weapon it will be because that was what felt good in the first place, rather than a grind to achieve a desired status of upgrade.
Borderlands is entirely about gratification, with an RPG mechanic working in the background only in order to reward you for your murdering ways and to lend the next instalment of slaughter a sense of freshness and homicidal acquisitiveness. The passive upgrade system will not get in your way, nor will the open and simple inventory. The quests will come with a big fat directional reticule on your compass in case you get lost, the map will be filled in already when you arrive on a new level. You will have the option to walk across the wasteland, bounce across it in free and heavily armed vehicles, or simply warp from frequent save point to save point. Everything is designed to provide the minimum friction between you and your next freakish, amusing target. Even death proves little impediment to the gunplay: if both your fast recharging shield and your health reaches zero, you will be given the chance to catch your Second Wind. This works a lot like the Last Stand perk in COD: Modern Warfare multiplayer - your character will sink to their knees and the screen will fade over the next 20 or so seconds as you bleed out. However, kill any other enemy on screen and you will leap back to your feet with fully recharged shields, free to go back hammering at the heavy individual who actually put you down. Most of the gigantic boss battles will be seasoned with a smattering of otherwise ineffectual peons whose only purpose is to have their heads blown off and put you back into the game versus the big bad, be they dinosaurs, maniacal pygmies, cyborgs, gun runners, mutants, or Mothra. Death itself will only cost you a small percentage of your cash no XP penalty or Resurrection Sickness and a respawn at a close by point.
Borderlands is perfectly satisfying as a singleplayer experience, but some of your best slaughtering will be done in the drop-in co-op mode, where online players can invite you to join their game, or you can drop into theirs. The quest progression will follow that of whoever is hosting, but the experience, weapons and cash will be carried over by the individual player, and taken with them when they leave. Whilst there is no loot sharing system, which can make for some irksome treasure hogging, the simplicity of the co-op system is as smooth and satisfying as the rest of the game's design. More players in a game will automatically up the difficulty and the number of hostiles, but will also commensurately up the quality of the drops. Tooling across the bandlands in a vehicle with a live player driving and a live player manning the turrets, smoking mutant fools for no other reason than the cash and the chuckles is hard to beat, and when you or they get bored and leave then you can just get back to the quest progression you were enjoying before.
The worst features of Borderlands are fortunately the ones you can ignore completely. Scattered through the land are player-vs-player arenas where you can throw down against your erstwhile co-op buddies. They are a waste of space in single player and in multiplayer serve no discernable purpose for loot, stats or enjoyment. Additionally, despite the vast mountains of guns youll come across and loot purely for the purpose of later resale, the extremely keen inventory system will always equip one of your hot-keyed slots with the new firearm if you havent found its like before. This can lead to more inventory resetting than the player would want in this otherwise extremely streamlined system.
The colourful, stylised visuals are backed up by a sense of humour in the dialogue and character design. You can ignore anything anyone says, play the whole thing in mute if you so decide for all the difference it will make for your ability to progress, but listening to the few repeat characters such as the helper robots (GIR from Invader Zim, anyone?) helps to make the whole experience that much lighter, more accessible and plain old fun.
Borderlands will not set any benchmarks or push any envelopes in the RPG genre, or even its niche FPS-RPG setting. It simply does not do anything that we have not seen in some form or other elsewhere, nor does any individual element or mechanic uniquely stand out. What it does do is take the most basely satisfying parts of the whole RPG genre and lay them out in a fast moving buffet of bloodshed and looting. The joy of acquisition and dominance inherent to role-playing games is married to the savage joy of slaughtering entire crowds of victi.. sorry villains, and in conclusion I can heartily recommend it.
I'd also like to say that while the console versions are phenomenal as well, the PC version is the one I tried, and was truly impressed, if you can meet the requirements I would definitely go the PC route when playing or buying this game.
85%
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Borderlands
It saves anywhere, and it auto saves your character state at every checkpoint and when you quit. What it doesn't do is save every enemy/item in the world. It works just like Diablo, except we have more frequent waypoints. Quit, when you join again, you'll be at the nearest checkpoint and the enemies will be around, which is good because they are all worth XP and have cash and gear. And if you are second guessing a decision about skill points, you can fully respec your character at any save station in the world at any time.
Some people don't the action RPG style save system, and I guess this reviewer is one of those people. I believe it's the best possible way to handle this kind of game, and any other solution would have failed the promise of the game.
As for "not for everyone"?
Damn right, and proud of it.
Some people don't the action RPG style save system, and I guess this reviewer is one of those people. I believe it's the best possible way to handle this kind of game, and any other solution would have failed the promise of the game.
As for "not for everyone"?
Damn right, and proud of it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
