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[SWTOR] Emotional Rollercoaster

Supra-edit: BioWare’s Stephen Reid says these two things are unrelated. So as not to waste prime article space, these other two things are also not related.

I just got a free beta key for SWTOR from Rock, Paper, Shotgun! I thought, well I didn’t think Rift was going to be all that fun, and playing in beta changed my mind. Maybe a free romp in SWTOR will do the same. Here I come static lightsaber battles!

Then I remembered I would have to install Origin. That brought my high crashing to the ground. I really don’t want to install something on my computer that seems shady at best. If EA simply wanted a great way to bring updated games the PC, why didn’t they just leave it at that instead of creating EULA-backed spyware. Any corporation that asks me to believe them when they won’t even explain what they deem necessary… well, I have my personal high road on this one.

In the world of quid pro quo, I don’t mind a source gathering information for say an operating system that I need or a game-buying service that I love, but making SWTOR’s rider the installation of Origin brings my high back to “meh.” I am now mulling my beta key. I want to play, but not that much. Put too many hoops in my way, and I have plenty of other games to fall back on. Still the first hoop (getting a free key) was a big one.

–Ravious

EDIT: Winged Nazgul to the rescue! Up we go, rollercoaster.

The Running Narrative: Bastion and Your Brain

Bastion comes highly recommended, although that is more for the atmospherics, visuals, and narration than the gameplay. I think of the gameplay as “Zelda,” and since I have already played Recettear and Spiral Knights this year (Spiral Knights is closer), I don’t feel a lot of drive for the gameplay, so let’s focus on the narration.

Bastion is best known for building the level around you as you go and having running narration. Whatever you do, there is some smooth-voiced dude telling it as part of the story, whether you rush blindly ahead, stand around waiting, or intentionally leap to your doom. It sounds like a story he already knows and is just recounting as you play it out, rather than something you can affect (there is a fair degree of forced linearity, so that’s easier). Interestingly, the human brain does exactly the same thing, constructing a narrative after the fact to impose a consistent story on events beyond its control or understanding. In either case, the narrator will take whatever it is given and piece something together after the fact.

And now I find myself wondering how random you can be within the game and at what point the narrator gives up on explaining things to you. I would hope that it also has something of the Left 4 Dead director to impose something on you when dramatically appropriate.

: Zubon

Psychonauts: Exploration and Leveling

The leveling mechanic of Psychonauts is a marriage of Exploring and Achieving that is a song to my EASK heart. Reaching the level cap is painful, but you only need level 30 (of 101) to have the requisite abilities. Past that, it’s all ability upgrades for convenience and more power. And how do we do this leveling? We find stuff. Every psychic level has a bunch of figments, every physical zone has psi cards and psi challenge marker, and then a few other miscellaneous collections. The late game lets you add an entire hit point bar from a collection quest.

Most of your levels come from normal play, picking up figments effortlessly plus a lot more to gain with just a little effort. In most levels, the figments will guide you through the level, pointing out a good place to head next and serving as an indicator that you have not gone somewhere yet. Then the maps are decorated with hidden spots, platforming, and the occasional mechanics puzzle. Some items are ridiculously hidden, but most are visible from a distance or have something more visible right next to them, like a series of psi cards in the area of a psi challenge marker.

There is a reward for exploring the map. That’s nice. It is also not required to complete the game, since the first couple of upgrades are nice, but then they are mostly convenience or crap until you start getting awesome abilities past level 70 (damaging levitation, damaging shield, regeneration, infinite ammo).

: Zubon

[GW2] Questing for Skills

Lots of neat tidbits in the latest ArenaNet blog post including UI changes, character customization stuff, and skill quests. Okay, so that’s not what they’re called. “Skill challenges” is the official title, but this new system for getting the non-weapon skills unlocked has me squirming a little. Flannum writes:

Skill points can be acquired by undertaking what we call a skill challenge. There are 200 skill challenges in the game, and they range from defeating tough opponents, to answering riddles, to drinking a particularly potent drink.

He goes on to say that this is an evolution of one of their earlier profession specific “challenges” because this new iteration allows for players to group up to do a skill challenge together, regardless of profession makeup. Sounds pretty good, until I looked at the picture. That’s a lot of things to unlock. Continue reading [GW2] Questing for Skills

Psychonauts: Camera Control

I have become convinced that good camera control must be the hardest part of a 3-D game, because you see great games like Psychonauts where the camera is utterly horrible at critical moments. The camera usually follows Razputin, more or less facing where he is facing in a standard third-person view. Then sometimes, particularly for boss fights, the camera becomes relatively fixed and your movement keys are now relative to the camera’s facing rather than Razputin’s. Mix that up with sometimes having a fixed camera but your movement keys are still relative to the way your character is facing.

Handling around edges is always rough. Do you make a rock transparent, squish the camera between the character and the wall, swing it off somewhere…? Psychonauts mostly makes the camera stop at the wall while you keep moving or sometimes swings it off. There is also the problem of having objects interpose themselves between the camera and your character. The camera can be lost in the trees while you jump blindly. There is a mid-game boss fight in which the camera tends to get caught behind rocks while you are dodging around them, as if there were a physical camera on the edge of the map trying to keep you in view. Come to think of it, that would be a really great mechanic for a level in Psychonauts 2, really having a camera rolling or flying about.

The worst part is when the camera moves on its own. This is presumably to be helpful in difficult situations, but the effect is to make them more difficult. When your movement is relative to the camera, if the camera swings around 180 degrees while you are jumping, your button has just reversed your direction and sent you plummeting to your doom. The hardest parts of the game are mostly so because a change in camera angle made you lose where you were or made your keys send you in a different direction, or perhaps you could not see anything at all at that angle.

Contrarily, there are some really great moments in camera work. On a couple of boss fights, half the time is spent looking out the boss’s eyes. This works much better the second time, when the level design is less complex and therefore the camera itself is not an enemy in the fight.

: Zubon

Psychonauts: Smoothed Difficulty Curve

Yahtzee comments that the first half of the game is easy training and the later levels are ridiculously difficult. Either the PC version differs or the new update made the later bit less insane. My only indication of how hard the game used to be is Googling videos of folks playing. Hmm, that last level included a lot more flying, flaming projectiles than my playthrough did. I can see how that would be really frustrating, when you must replay a section of the level for the 58th time because one hit knocked you off a trapeze or tightrope. If you had been staying away because of horror stories about the endgame, I’m here to tell you that it is difficult but reasonable, with the occasional exception of tomorrow’s topic.

Anyone have a notion or list of what all changed in the recent Psychonauts update?

: Zubon

Psychonauts: Achievements

The Psychonauts achievement list is an exciting mix of things you gain through normal play, pointers to little gems, stretch goals for achievers and completionists, and “dude, seriously?” The normal play ones are what you might expect: beat each level, level up, complete the game. The completionist goals are exactly what you’d expect, although actually completing everything turns into “dude, seriously?”

Pointing out little gems is one of the best things about having achievements in games. It gives developers a way to encourage and trivially reward players for seeing the best that they have to offer. “I’m Sure She’s Over It” is a wonderfully compact bit of storytelling, and it explains what might otherwise be a BLAM in a later level. “Self Aware” directs you to some subtle content you might not otherwise try, and it includes some foreshadowing for the aware player. The achievements also include some direction on what to do next if you are stuck and a few things you may not have realized you could do (like “I Think They Were Impressed” and “Stump Speech”).

Some of the achievements are unfortunate, or perhaps just unfortunate in how they interact with the game design. I still cite WoW’s The Green Hills of Stranglethorn as the worst achievement ever. It presumably was meant as a reward for completing some arduous content, but its effect is (was pre-Cataclysm?) to encourage players to slog through some of the worst content in the game. Don’t encourage your players to punch themselves in the face, and don’t be surprised when they complain about your game after they react to the incentives you gave them. For Psychonauts, those achievements are the ones that become unachievable at a later point in the game and 100% completion, which is painful here. Out of 35 achievements, 6 become unavailable unless you did them at the right time (or saved immediately before) and another 6 demand a separate “point of no return” save game; there is no post-victory wandering around the map and re-visiting levels. These stack on each other: the most painful are gathering all the figments (which are 2-D, translucent, sometimes mobile, and can be half-inside objects or entirely inside them while moving) and the resulting max level of 101 that calls for several “gather all”s. This is more of a criticism of the difficulty of 100% completion in this game, but there is an achievement encouraging you to go for it.

: Zubon

The percent who have completed each achievement is driven down by the late addition of achievements, although I am suspicious that even 0.5% of players have legitimately gotten a 100% completion. Contrarily, there is the Torchlight achievement page, which says that 11.8% of people who own Torchlight on Steam have presumably never installed the game.

Psychonauts: Escort Quest

Something fresh in my mind and dear to my MMO-playing heart is that Psychonauts has the worst escort quest I have ever seen. Besides who you are escorting on the last level, the escort NPC:

  • is incarnated as a screaming child
  • walks slowly, as escort NPCs do, but teleports away through several phases once you manage to save him, forcing you to catch up
  • leaves you to figure out how to get to him after he teleports somewhere above you.

The escort chase also introduces a new, invulnerable enemy that you figure out then use while finding the NPC. It is a four-stage escort, which blessedly refills the escort NPC’s hit points as each stage, but requires you to start over if you fail any; you can save mid-escort, but it will still start you back at the start of the zone. There are also lots of things around to collect if you want your 100% completion, and if there is a way to come back for them after the escort is done, I have not found it yet (go back before following the NPC to the next part of the level). You do not lose lives for failing the escort quest, despite what the characters imply, which is necessary considering the combination of “teleport away, find the path, figure out the mechanics, and the child is already screaming about being under attack.” Oh, and there is some sobbing (literal) emotional baggage along the way to provide a counterpoint to the wailing child. So, yeah, not the most pleasant part of the game, even before the imagery that surrounds it.

: Zubon

Psychonauts: Settings

Psychonauts does great things with themed levels. We have grown used to thinking of WoW as varied because there is a zone of green forests and then one of red mountains, but Psychonauts exists on an entirely different level. Much of the action takes places in characters’ minds, so you get wildly varying settings that fit together perfectly well. What comes next remains surprising.

Your base setting is a summer camp for psychic children. Your training grounds consist of an obstacle course soaked in war memories; a shooting range themed around strict geometry and floating, dream-like architecture that uses imagery and a small enemy set to suggest the trauma and repression behind the precise facade; and a ’70s dance party crossed with the inside of a pinball machine. You will go on to play Godzilla and fight Napoleon. I will not list all the levels because they are pleasantly surprising, and even when you recognize the point in the game when you will be meeting Napoleon in battle, the structure of the level should remain unexpected.

The levels represent characters’ psyches, and they do it well. You wander around in someone’s head, maybe help him sort out some problems, and you get a notion of how things work in there. If you explore carefully, you will find more, like the little room where someone’s nightmares are locked away or the really meaningful figments that seem out of place but make perfect sense once you have the whole picture. Not to spoil Edgar’s level, but the nature of your unreliable narrator becomes apparent along the way, piece by piece, until it is explicitly spelled out at the end … and then comes back later to explicitly cash out one of the wrap-up jokes.

It’s just a wonderful thing to have this huge variety in levels and have it all fit together coherently. Each level is tied to a character, so it fits that way, and they collectively explore a lot of the space you would imagine for a game in characters’ minds. We have strict, abstract geometry in one level, and another shows a different sort of impossible landscape with a world that is twisted upon itself. We see varieties of trauma incarnated, paranoia and multiple personalities made concrete, and then stack that with scenes played out from the enemy’s point of view.

And then they are made well, wonderful with details and personalities.

: Zubon