Endgames and Vampires
I was reading Damion's "Zen of Design" blog from last week about the endgames (or the "nearly-endgames" leading up to the endgame).

GUILTY. One of the worst end-bosses ever was the boss in "Outwars", and that was my baby. Shame on me. I think game designers get so terrified of the users slamming their games for being too easy that they deliberately make end-games as horribly nasty as possible. After all, people are less likely to complain about a game being too hard, because, you know, that wouldn't be macho. But the "l337" gamers - a vocal minority who often end up being opinion-leaders - will quickly denounce a game that wasn't enough of a challenge for their mad skillz.

He goes on to call "Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines" as one of the big offenders. Although I think the level he's referring to is actually NOT really part of the end-game at all... it's about two-thirds of the way in. Though he's right --- it's overly long and not very exciting. It's a lot of more-of-the-same three monsters lurking around every corner, with very few ammunition reloads.

My biggest dissapointment with VtM: Bloodlines (besides bugs) was that they only went halfway with the alternatives to combat. The game was so very good at giving you some interesting things to do with non-combat skills. There was content in the game you were only going to be able to handle if you had really high negotiating skills. If you were a combat god, you weren't going to get those opportunities. But then they set these boss-level roadblocks in the way that are designed to challenge the combat-optimized characters. Sure, Mr. Negotiator might have a few extra experience points than his brute counterpart, but he's probably put those experience points in, oh, I don't know... maybe yet more social / negotiation skills? If your "combat PC" can simply bypass (or not even have the option to take) the non-combat situations that he can't handle, shouldn't a non-combat PC have a similar option to bypass the combat-oriented roadblocks?

It wouldn't be too hard. I mean, a negotiator should be able to win friends and influence people - why not win a few extra thugs to help you with a boss encounter? Or maybe negotiate a deal where you can 'borrow' a really neat uber-weapon customized against a particular bad guy so you can even the odds a bit? But instead, you get stuck in the same chamber with no place to run, no place to hide, with a nasty monster that isn't going to be negotiated with. Yeah, those two experience points you "threw away" into being able to shoot your little 9mm pistol ought to come in real handy now... Rossa Ruck! See ya after a few hundred splutch-argh-restore-saved-games.

However, the actual end game cinematic (at least the one I chose the first time - the Anarch choice) of Bloodlines was pretty hella-cool. Nice little twist. I won't ruin it for you.

I liked that he mentioned Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption in a favorable light. I was actually pretty fond of the game. Yes, it was entirely too combat-heavy. But it was created by some friends of mine, so I was predisposed to look upon it favorably, and I loved how they captured the mood of the pen and paper game. Particularly the first half of the game - the medieval era. It seemed like they'd really done their homework, and presented something that was authentic in its feel, unlike most pseudo-medieval-ish RPGs out there that present Hometown USA with gothic architecture and people who say "thee" and "thou" and cast spells. The story was also fairly compelling. Taking the player from being a mortal crusader, to an undead vampire, to a being over a thousand years old with no recollection of the changes to the modern era, was really pretty cool.

The multiplayer was cool, too, though the difficulty of creating new content of having that content automatically transfer and run from the server to the clients really prevented it from accomplishing what Neverwinter Nights did a couple of years later.

The point Damion brings up is something I haven't really thought about in relation to computer RPGs - though I thought about it a lot in our "Pen and Paper" games. I'll make fun of a good friend right now, who I hope will forgive me. We made fun of this as it was happening, too, and he took it all in stride (and improved!) He ran a very fun Fantasy Hero campaign for us at one point that we all noted experienced an incredible escalation in power and expense as we played. When the campaign started, we were informed of how rare and valuable a single gold coin was. And we fought orcs. By the end of the campaign, a night's stay at an inn was several gold coins, and we were fighting REALLY BEEFY orcs. When we finally got to fight "normal" orcs later in the campaign, we were amazed at how trivial the fight had been. The game had kept escalating its power level to match us, and so we never had a chance to go back and benchmark ourseleves to see how much we'd progressed. As a result, we never felt like we were really progressing at all - no matter how good we got, the entire world got a LITTLE BIT tougher.

It's very gratifying. And while a game should challenge you, it's ultimate purpose is to entertain. Giving the player a chance to see just how far they've come - providing some dips in the rate of increasing challenge - is good gameplay, good drama, and good fun. So in my "pen and paper" games, I've been careful to present the players with the occasional opportunities to cause mass destruction to foes that used to terrify them. And it's a good thing to remember in computer games, as well.

And I'm really, really tired of those games that make you run a horrible gauntlet on the way to the final boss, with no save-point to avoid the tedious encounters. That's not fun, people! That's artificially stretching out the gameplay, and turning something that SHOULD be fun into something frustrating and boring!

Labels: Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:03 PM (Permalink)