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Feb 19th, 2011 at 19:55:20 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (PC) |
I'd read that Stalker has stunning environments. This is true. I didn't realize it until I'd become totally absorbed in my surroundings in the Zone. The trees are twisted and dead. The time of day changes, from cloudy daytime to starry nighttime. The sunlight filtering through the clouds makes the Zone hazy, as does the radiation. Vegetation is sparse. Old busted up buildings, industrial parks, military compounds, etc. dot the rolling hills. I heard snarling mutated dogs, the shrieking of some cat-thing that I haven't seen yet, the snorting of boars, and the persistent gun fire of bandits, other stalkers, and government soldiers, all belonging to one of a handful of factions in the Zone.
I'm not sure what happened in the Zone, but perhaps something to do with a nuclear meltdown, some alternate version of Chernobyl. My character is an amnesiac and a stalker, someone who scavenges in the Zone for artifacts, and perhaps more than that. The other characters have it rough. The Zone is a very hostile place to live, so the NPCs have a lot of quests to hand me. Most of the optional ones are timed (1 day), and are marked on my map. NPCs will hand out 4+ quests at once, and when I return those, they have more.
Stalker is not a beginner-friendly game. It gives minimal information for how and what exactly to do. A couple quests, I have no idea how to complete because I don't remember what the NPC said. I can't go find a transcript of the conversation, and if I abandon it, I fail it forever. The NPCs do not hold your hand. They send you out into radiation, bandit territory, caves full of packs of wild mutant dogs. Half the NPCs also speak Russian. If I remember, this is a Russian game, translated, which is why some of the dialogue is odd. One questgiver was telling me about his 'homies.'
The guns are fairly realistic. Actually, a lot of the UI is realistic. There are a few guns so far (pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, SMG, silenced pistol), and I must assume there will be a lot more. Each type of gun has its own ammo so far. I have a ton of healing items, and I'd be stupid not to walk around with as many items that reduce my radiation level as I can. The more irradiated I am, the faster I lose health. Weapons fire sort of un-FPS-like. They don't feel real heavy or forceful, and they miss a lot. I need to get a lot more used to the feel of guns in Stalker.
The AI is nice! Enemies take cover, wait for you to pop out, and haven't been typical AI meat targets. I've been killed a lot because the game is kind of realistic in that way. If I get shot at close range with a shotgun, I'm out. I only put the difficulty at 2/4 too. They are kind of annoying so far because my guns are really inaccurate, especially at range. However, enemies can snipe me from half the map away with assault rifles. It's unfair. When I shoot at an enemy, there is no indication that I'm hitting him, so I never know if my pistol is doing any good until/if they drop dead. I assume I'll get better guns that are more accurate and can shoot farther (sniper rifle?!). Mutated dogs attack in packs too, which is cool. It seems the animals all have different behavior.
Another realistic point, and what I've come to see as a strategic point, is that I have limited bag space. I can carry 50kg of stuff, and the more I carry, the less I can sprint, the more tired I get. I thought about this after I played, because while I was playing, as usual, I wanted to take everything and sell it all, and was frustrated that I couldn't. However, there's only one full vendor thus far, and he's way at the beginning of the game, so I can't sell stuff. It's not good to be immobile in Stalker. You will die. So I've rethought having limited weight as being a neat design constraint on the player. Somehow in Stalker, it just makes sense.
Some quests in Stalker show up on the map, like so I can track them on the minimap. Others won't allow me to track them and it's kind of annoying, but I think it was done on purpose. There are all these hidden stashes lying around that are marked or not too, purple circles, that I can go find, and usually pick up some food and ammo.
Oh, and there are these things called anomalies all over the place. They're slightly visible distortions in the air just above the ground and there are different types. One is like wind, and it can appear like a mini tornado. Another is like an electric field and it crackles and pops. Another is like a gravity well. My character's PDA alerts me to these by beeping faster the closer I am. And these are literally all over the place. Walking into one is generally bad, as you will sometimes take some damage, and other times be ripped apart. I watched a mutant dog run into one (the tornado one I think) and it was lifted high into the air, spinning around and around, and then it just exploded into blood and guts. I saw a human NPC walk into another that just picked him up and threw him, killing him. I'm going to see if I can't use them as weapons against enemies because those two times were accidental.
The anomalies form 'artifacts,' which are like radiated masses of stuff I can equip on my belt that boost and hurt various stats. Right now I have equipped 5 that boost health by 200% or 400% (so I think 1400% total), and reduce my resistance to bullets by 10% each (so 50%). SO bullets...hurt. But I have a ton of HP, though I can't find a raw number anywhere.
Those are my first impressions. I don't quite know what to think of the game so far. It's got some cool things and some not so cool things. The atmosphere is definitely fantastic, but I think that works to either overshadow or to make up for other parts of the game that aren't that fun, like the discrepancy in weapon accuracy between me and the computer, or the redundancy (already, ugh) of a hundred little quests, having to run everywhere, or having my stamina bar run out in 5 seconds because I'm carrying a lot. I'm going to go have another session today and see how it goes.
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Feb 14th, 2011 at 11:30:30 - Mass Effect (PC) |
I will start with a resounding "Mass Effect is incredible." I loved everything about this game, every little thing. Seriously, best RPG I've played in a long time. I think "epic" accurately describes it. I've also heard "space opera" and would merge the two descriptors. It's an epic space opera.
Now to backtrack. Any negative things I said in my previous entry do not hold anymore. Of bugs, there were a couple at the beginning, and then none until one quest that I couldn't do because this NPC was inexplicably nonexistent. I reloaded my save, reloaded the entire planet, and still nothing. He is a cult leader, and his followers in the compound also had a strange way of telling me no funny business: "Don't try anything. Robot chicken." Seth Green did the voice acting for Joker. Coincidence? The voice acting in the game is high quality with a few superstars like Seth Green and the guy who voiced Captain Anderson. Good voice quality makes a huge difference, and Joker was particularly excellent. The other negative thing I previously said was that the camera freaks out, and Shepherd won't fire over cover, only around it. The camera quit freaking out, and he started shooting over cover. Either the beginning was buggy or I figured out how to do it. Not sure which, but glad it was okay because cover is important! The AI companions still did some dumb stuff like ignore cover, but they started dying less once they got more abilities.
One nice thing about the game is the pacing. The story moves casually along, as in it is up to the player how fast to advance it. There are only like 5 story missions in the game. Everything else is a side mission. I imagine one could beat the game very very quickly just playing through the story missions. It only took me 26 hours and I did just about everything, visited every single planet in every single system, explored every anomaly and pirate base, mined everything I saw, went through all the character stories, read all the codex entries. So not a long game at all, but one that can be lengthened quite a bit relative to the main story missions. So it's quite casual overall, but the story missions are intense. They're generally a couple magnitudes larger and longer than the size/time of an entire typical star system, and they're just very fun. The standout mission is definitely the final one on Ilos, and I think the last couple hours of Mass Effect are a couple of the best hours of a game I've ever experienced. Simply epic. And if I haven't mentioned already, the world Bioware & Co. created is so thought out, and the story is fantastic. There is a bit of a disconnect though between the beginning of the game and the rest, until the very end. You begin at the Citadel, this giant city, running around and doing fetch quests for hours. Then the whole rest of the game, you explore planets and never come back to this place you spent so many hours at at first. It's kind of strange not to ever need to go back, until the very very end.
Another cool thing in Mass Effect is that your choices and actions have a lasting impact on the game. It uses a good/evil system called Paragon/Renegade. Most of the points are earned through dialogue, either being nice or being a jerk. Other points are earned by actions, helping a credit thief steal credits from slot machines or turning him in, for example. This second type is often like a quest reward. (I got nothing from the slot machine quest because I was caught cheating by the owner and kicked out, mission over!) Other choices are far heavier and determine the fates of party members and major story characters. There is a mission where you have to detonate a nuke on Saren's (the bad guy) research facility, where he is creating a cure for the Krogan genophage (Krogan species was genetically modified to be neutered at birth, so they are all dying out). Wrex, your Krogan teammate, is naturally pissed that you're going to nuke the cure for his species' impotence. You can either kill him, let Ashley kill him (because she hates aliens), or talk him out of his fury. Later in that mission, you have to choose to send either Ashley or Alenko with the Salarians for a frontal assault on the research facility. Whoever you send will die a hero's death, or so you think. Right at the end of the mission, it seems you have a chance to change your mind, but this time the decision is final. (I talked Wrex down and saved Ashley because I liked using her in my party.) And then at the end of the game, you make a doozy of a decision, which I won't give away, but damn. Heavy. I played the ending through three times to see all the different outcomes.
The questionable decision the player must make is that of which romantic interest to pursue. Yes, there is a forced romantic subplot in Mass Effect. It's not bad, but it feels rather forced and fake. As the male Shepherd (you can choose a female Shepherd and get different romantic options), I had both Ashley the human and Talia the Asari pining for me. Ashley I found to be a mildly annoying character for a few reasons, but I used her in my party because she was a pure fighter. Though annoying, she had a more interesting backstory than Talia. Talia had the allure of being an alien who would live for 1000 years, and she's smart, so I chose her to see what the game did with being with an alien and to see how upset Ashley got. She took it pretty well, just a few racist remarks (she hates aliens). Talia was quite excited and even had a 30-second alien sex scene with me. I was not expecting that. I wonder if I see them both in Mass Effect 2. Either way, as much as I enjoy the idea of a romantic subplot, this felt unnatural. I didn't think Shepherd realistically developed any relationship with either of them, but they just loved him to death. When they confronted me about who I liked (yes, they corner you after a mission and demand a choice), I thought it was pretty silly and chose the dialogue options about having a threesome, which oddly enough were pro-Talia choices and anti-Ashley choices. I thought I would piss them both off and neither would get with me, but it didn't happen. Ashley just got offended and told us to have fun with that. I wonder what happens though if I save Alenko and kill Ashley in the nuke mission. Talia is the default lover then?
Most of these decisions weren't heavy for me. The final one was, but the others not so much. The romance was a bit silly, I saved Wrex just because I felt bad for his whole race (though I did load and take the other two options to see what happened), and I saved Ashley over Alenko just because she was more useful in my party. It must be difficult to write in these kinds of choices that players will care about since not all players will care about the same stuff no matter what you do. Good effort though. I'd rather see it attempted than not, so long as it doesn't actually detract from the game. It's bold really.
But there is this continuity with choices. Mass Effect 2 imports save data, and thus choices, from Mass Effect. Similarly, in the beginning of ME, you choose this branching background story for your Commander Shepherd. Mine was referenced a lot throughout the game. Very cool. I can tell you, I was heading a mission on a planet called Akuze. Something went wrong and my whole unit was wiped out except me. I'm a survivor and a hero. NPCs will comment on it, and major characters will actually dialogue about it. I can't imagine how much dialogue was recorded for this game. There are so many branches, and then an entire game full of it for the male and female Shepherds each!
One lore eyebrow-raiser: The Council is made up of three races, and the humans are seeking to be fourth. The Council is a wise decision-making body for the good of the galaxy, for all races. So tell me if this makes sense for 'equal power.' Humans live (in the future) to like 100-150 years. Salarians live for 40 years. Turians live for, I don't remember, say 200 years. Asari live for 1000 years. Which one would have the most power? The Asari! She can be on that Council for-freaking-ever. She can make tons of allies, have tons more experience, etc., etc. Who gets the short end? The Salarian, who, if he is elected at age 30, serves for 10 years only! What good is that even? It seems like the Asari really clean up on age, and thus should be ridiculously advanced and know a lot of stuff and have a lot of connections since they're around for so long.
Anyway, fantastic game, really. The planets are all beautiful and I loved driving my Mako around their surfaces and taking screen shots. The music is also superb, especially the galaxy map music. The ending credit song was really good too. I need to find out who did that. I have ME2 sitting here, but I think I'll take a small ME break and put something else in between. Don't want too much of a great thing.
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Feb 3rd, 2011 at 22:50:43 - Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir (PC) |
Just finished Storm of Zehir. Well, I didn't actually finish because, as usual, the final battle of a NWN game is all but impossible for what I'd consider a normal player like myself. I did finish NWN2 and Mask of the Betrayer, but this one I couldn't pull off after a lot of tries and even reading strategies. My group composition was fine, but all the guides had characters at least a few levels higher than mine, and I've no intention to go grind on the overland map. I watched the battle on Youtube and the good ending that I would have gotten, so it's okay.
SoZ was pretty good. I loved it at first, but less and less as it went on. Some things about SoZ:
Create-a-party! Yes, in SoZ, you can custom build your entire party. Alternatively, you can find cohorts (NPCs) to join you. Or, you do a mixture. I created four, and then got 2 cohorts. This gave a lot of freedom instead of being pigeon-holed into selecting preset characters (which are always very well built, but you never know what you'll get). So I planned for some prestige classes: an arcane archer, stormlord, warpriest, and frenzied berzerker. I've really never successfully made good prestige classes in these games before because I usually go straight one class, or sometimes my cohorts have prestige classes, but they are cool! It's hard to hit all the requirements and to gain the prestige class timely if you don't almost perfectly plan. My 'main' character was what I hoped would become an arcane archer, but he never made it because I failed to give him enough intelligence to cast 1st level arcane spells, a requirement for the arcane archer. Oddly, you can delete and remake and pull in and swap out custom party members, all except the first one you create, which sucked, because I messed up the arcane archer, and so just ended up having a xranger/1wizard who couldn't even use the wizard spells because of low intelligence. My bad my bad! But the stormlord was a badass, the frenzied berserker did a ton of damage, and the warpriest was an awesome healer (although the AI and party settings as usual were really stupid most of the time, like, the warpriest wouldn't heal, my cohort wizard would start using her crossbow even when I had her on overkill casting mode and she had a ton of unused spells). My two cohorts were the wizard for a spell slinger and another druid with an amazing dinosaur pet. Neither one were interesting as characters, but they were good additions. So, create-a-party: thumbs up.
Overland Map! SoZ uses an idea like the World Map in a typical RPG where you travel from town to town, instead of warping around like in other NWN games. I liked it. One unique thing about it was discoveries. Hidden locations abound, and if you walk near them, sometimes you'll 'discover' it, and can go in a temple or some ruins, find some treasure, do a quest, whatever. It made the explorer in me happy. However, I wish I had read the details of it before playing because there are a couple things I failed at for not knowing. Hide, search, survival, spot...those types of skills are so useful for the overland map because you'll encounter random enemies spawning, and if they catch you, or you approach them, you have the option to fight. Hide logically makes it more difficult for enemies to see you. Spot makes it easier for you to see enemies far away. Survival increases movement speed on the map. Having those three or similar skills lets you have more control over the map, over when and what you fight, which is important because the random battles get tedious after a while. None are difficult, and none drop any good loot. It's just a way to grind experience I think. Like, if I want to go finish the last battle, I would go grind a few levels on the overland map. Boring, right? And monsters attack you when you're just trying to go somewhere and it gets annoying. So those skills are good. But, I didn't know that, so I made a bunch of low intelligence characters with about none of those skills. If I'd known, I would have made a rogue or something, or made my ranger smarter, and beefed up those skills, and made that my 'map character' because the map uses whichever character you select's stats for those checks. I still did all right with what I had, but could have been better.
Party Conversation! Like how you can switch between characters on the overland map to use the best one, you can switch between characters in conversation to select unique dialogue options. This was very cool, though as mentioned, most of my characters were too stupid to have many dialogue options. My cohort druid and wizard usually had something different to say, my warpriest had high charisma and diplomacy skills, and my berzerker could intimidate. The conversation thing was also used on the overland map when encountering enemies. Of course you can fight and escape. If the enemy is humanoid, you can parlay, and have some other options if they can't speak, and taking your characters together, may be able to bribe them, tell them you've killed their kind before, intimidate them, use tanglefoot bags to run away faster, ask them questions, and so on. It was pretty neat.
Fiscal Responsibility! SoZ has a weird economy aspect. The story revolves around a trading company and a yuan-ti god (the story is REALLY light, so odd for a NWN game). It's your job to make this trading company flourish. That involves establishing trading posts at all the towns you go to, buying and selling supplies and rare minerals and things from town to town (buy low sell high!), and establishing trade routes with caravans between towns. Another function of the overland map is to see the caravans in motion, and the enemies sometimes waylay them, and you can jump in and save the caravans. It's neat. Anyway, you level up the trade routes (pay lots of gold to make them safer and more profitable) and it just goes on its own for the most part. I thought this would be a large part of the game, but taken with everything else, trading was very minimal, which is too bad, because it was fun to make money and upgrade trade routes. It was also fun to upgrade Crossroad Keep, though unfortunately there were only about 5 things to upgrade. You can also upgrade your standing with some merchant factions, and again unfortunately, there were only about 3 levels to go through, and all this leveling up of things was very easy and very fast and consequently felt way too short and inconsequential. You never really get to experience the fruits of your labors. As soon as I started getting into upgrading trade routes and making some cash, the story moved on past that area of the game and I never needed to go back. But it is such a cool idea with some potential to be changed for the better!
Continuity! I like expansions that make sense to follow the original, or sequels that do the same. Not crazy far-fetched, but nice, plausible, logical extensions, side stories, and so on. NWN2 did real good. Mask of the Betrayer continued with the Shard-Bearer's story, while SoZ continued with Crossroad Keep and the Sword Coast, focusing on rebuilding the economy there after the events of NWN2. So although SoZ didn't have much in the way of a storyline, what little it had was tied nicely to the original campaign, and I appreciate that.
And then, as I said, the game did get a bit tedious by the end and I played the last few hours over days because it was like work to slog through the final areas, all to face the final battle and get slaughtered over and over. No worries though. I enjoyed the game a lot overall and glad I played it.
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Jan 31st, 2011 at 04:01:32 - Mass Effect (PC) |
I've played part (or most?) of Mass Effect about two years ago on Xbox and loved it, but didn't get a chance to finish since it wasn't my Xbox. I'd guess I got perhaps 75% through the main story. Steam had it on sale with Mass Effect 2, so I jumped to play them both through. I probably wouldn't have bought ME1 except that I know ME2 continues the story and choices you made in the first save game impact things in the second game, which is really neat and I didn't want to miss out on. Plus, I remember liking Mass Effect so much and I'd love to replay what I did and finish what I didn't.
It's interesting how much I remember from a couple years ago. I remember a lot of specific quests, locations, characters, etc. It's pretty cool how I haven't thought much about the game in the interim, but so much of it is in my head somewhere and is coming to the fore. I played through the whole 'beginning' today, which was maybe 1-2 hours worth of intro and exposition mission, and then 3-4 hours of exploring the enormous main city, Citadel or something, which is the intergalactic political headquarters and a marvel of technology. I feel like I hardly played the game though since I did so much running around a city and talking and doing little fetch-type quests. Run here, talk to her, run there, talk to him, examine this thing here and then that thing there and this one other thing there, etc. etc. Now my mental map of the city has returned. Even though I say I haven't really 'played,' all the city traversing and dialoging has got my head full of the sci-fi story. I love how dense the world is. Whoever dreamed up the story particulars, the whole intergalactic history thing going on, did an awesome job. I like all the different alien species too. They're very unique, and I like how they all come from different cultures that inform their thoughts and behaviors.
Some things I notice: the PC version looks better. It's got this grainy effect to the picture that is really neat. I don't remember paying attention last time, but the cut scenes are quite cinematic. Whoever directed them lined up shots, did zooming and panning, paid a lot of attention to facial expressions, cutting to one person, then to another, etc. Dialogue cut scenes are extraordinarily done. I'm also digging the music. It sounds like space. A couple of lame things: I had a 'bug scare' when about 30 minutes in, I got stuck on a rock and couldn't move and had to reload. Nothing ever happened again, but it's got me wary. The cover system is really sensitive (buggy?). When hiding behind cover, sometimes the camera just freaks out and starts jiggling. The tutorial says you can shoot over cover, not just from the side, and the controls it gives for shooting over cover just don't work. Nothing happens. Sadly, although the control scheme isn't bad, I remember it being much better on Xbox. Smoother maybe, better responses. The PC controls seem a little jerky. Also, I feel like there are extra dialogue options, maybe a couple extra quests that I don't remember, and that I just am somehow better at the game than I was last time. Maybe the PC version got some perks.
My character is an Adept, basically a user of the Force, Mass Effect style. I can Throw enemies (Force Push), create shield Barriers, encase enemies in Stasis fields, suck enemies into a Singularity, and a couple other things. I've gotten 5/6 characters already and I went with all the specialists since that's what I am, so there's me the Adept, then a Soldier who is the guns person, and the Technician (or mechanic or engineer, don't remember), who can pick locks and hack stuff, and generally tear up machines. It seems like a well-rounded party, and I imagine I'll use those same characters throughout simply to have one of each type.
After the intro section, what I mostly remember is being able to visit various planets and doing little side missions, with the occasional story one to move things alone. I remember driving around on my little moon rover tank thing, blowing up pirate camps, finding rare resources and artifacts, and generally doing a lot of exploring. We'll see if it's the same as I remember!
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