Companion Investment

BioWare’s “Dragon Age” is your standard computer RPG in the style of the genre that they helped define with games like Baldur’s Gate 1&2 and Neverwinter Nights. The quality is what one expects from a BioWare game: insanely high, and after logging a couple nights (5 hours) of play since Tuesday’s launch I’m thoroughly hooked both to the game play and the world. I’m not going to talk about the excellently developed game world and lore, or the smooth, action-oriented-yet-still-typically-RPG combat. No, you can go to any number of gushing reviews to hear about that. What I want to talk about briefly is something that I’m seeing for the first time in this game that should have been done a decade ago in this genre and that other developers need to pay attention to.

In full fantasy tradition (re: Lord of the Rings, Dragon Lance, anything by R.A. Salvatore) the lone hero is never alone for very long and sooner or later he is bound to become surrounded by companions, followers, and well-wishers (in that they don’t mean him any specific harm.) In a video game context these are often fully (or partially) controllable characters who may aid the player in his quest. In most cases the player will have full access to these character’s inventories, being able to swap out old items for new and ensure that one’s adventuring companions are at least as well armed as the hero himself. This is all well and good and from a game play standpoint makes perfect sense … until your companion is taken out of the story and beyond your control by often unforeseen circumstances. Maybe you reach a new town and your hero and his companion part ways or perhaps it is something more sinister involving a dragon and the muffled screams of your companion as he is devoured whole. Whatever the case, story often necessitates the removal of companions and in an abrupt manner as to be more visceral. If only you had known it was coming so you could have removed that Ogre Slaying Knife with a +9 against Ogres from your companion character beforehand and put it to better use than residing in the bowels of some flying lizard.

I’ve been in this situation in countless games and it results in one of two types of behavior:

1. You never give your companions anything of value, that way you won’t miss it should they be gone
2. You save your game often and after you experience a companion’s departure, reload and strip them of all your possessions before continuing again.

Dragon Age makes this a thing of the past. I’ll admit, I’ve grown accustomed to losing items off of lost companion characters in RPG’s, so imagine my surprise when after my first cameo companion character left my employ my personal inventory became filled with all of the items he was carrying, including that nice sword I gave him. The same happened later on with two other companions who met their untimely demise in a cut scene during a crucial plot point and I had just equipped them with new stuff too. Now I know this seems like a little thing, but a decade of playing games where this wasn’t the case and then all of a sudden the optimal solution presents itself? Well you think someone would have thought of it by now.

At any rate, it’s a feature I hope to see again in the future in what so far appears to be an excellent game worthy of the BioWare pedigree. I’m just happy I can finally equip my companions with decent weapons and armor and should I decide to feed them to a dragon to allow myself a hasty retreat, it’s nice to know that my investment will return to me, to be sold or given to my next hapless comrade.

Lazy Week

Having turned back the clocks by an hour last night 9:30am this morning was really 10:30am according to most people’s internal clocks and thus the coffee shop was a bit more crowded when I arrived than it usually is. Most of the inside seats had been taken, at least the ones where a single person can sit without looking like some kind of ass for taking a table that can comfortably fit 4. There were seats outside though and the weather this morning was warmer than expected due mostly to the fact that the sun had been out for an hour longer than usual as the result the “fall back” portion of our bi-annual time travel experiment.

At any rate, I got my double mocha with mexican chocolate in a to-go cup and sat out on the patio of Epoch Coffee and began my Sunday morning ritual with the opening of this week’s Austin Chronicle. At fist I thought it had just been me, but after a few pages of the Chronicle I realized that it had been a slow week for everyone as the paper was fairly dry and uninteresting. There really didn’t seem to be anything new or interesting going on this week. For me personally the week as a whole was something of a non-starter with every day constantly feeling like Friday. On Monday I came into work after lunch due to a server integration that was supposed to have taken place earlier in the day, but was still going on, meaning I had no real work to do except for one fairly productive creative meeting. Tuesday was another late start but little work got done as we spent most of our time testing the stability of the latest server build. Wednesday was business as usual, but since the week had failed to start correctly it never really felt right. I suppose by Thursday I started to get into the swing of it and by the end of OT on Saturday I had gotten a decent amount of work done in what was otherwise an unremarkable week.

There haven’t been any new movies recently, at least not any that haven’t been sequestered to limited New York and LA only releases. That coupled with my disappointment at Tim Schaffer’s new game Brutal Legend and the fact that my efforts on the dating sites this month have all fallen flat has sent October out with a whimper and sigh. November looks to be starting off with a bang however. If the calendar doesn’t waiver there are new games and movies every week this month and I’ll be heading up north for Thanksgiving, which will be a nice break. I also decided to renew my Match.com membership so we’ll see how that works out.

Today (aside from the coffee earlier) I’ve been sitting here listening to bands in my “One More Time” playlist. These are new albums this year that I have already listened to at least a couple of times, but haven’t quite judged as good or bad. I just finished listening to “Population” by Most Serene Republic, an auditory cross between Sufjan Stevens, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Polyphonic Spree. It’s not bad, but it fails to really identify itself or grab me in any discernable way. Friday night I listened to “Golden Vessel of Sound” by Yume Bitsu, an album that starts with a strong track and immediately falls apart, never managing to reorganize itself into something worth listening to before it ends. Right now I’ve got the latest release from Kupek “Tries Again” . You’ll likely never see Kupek in stores as it’s a side project of comic book author Brian Lee O’Malley, which he releases for free online. There are a couple standout tracks in this release, but overall it’s not as impressive as his previous albums. Still, it’s pretty damn good for what is essentially a home produced and recorded album.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be heading to Waterloo Records later today and I’ll be back on the dating sites later tonight to see who I contact this week. It’s a lazy end to a lazy week.

Spore

I’m sorry … I have to join the ranks of people complaining about Spore for a moment, not about DRM though,  complaining about the lack of autosave. I guess some part of me figured it was saving on it’s own in the background and therefore I never followed the usual protocol of “save early, save often”. Having finally reached the “space” stage of the game, I quickly found myself in a precarious position, being attacked by two other alien races. This made it very difficult for me since I had nearly no fleet to back me up in these fights. My first two colonies were taken over and my only remaining two are constantly under attack. This is the situation I found myself in when I logged back into the game around 10:30pm. I knew what I was going to do though. I was going to get by as best I could and pay off my allies to attack my enemies whenever possible. After 3 hours of playing I had finally gotten rid of one enemy, established 2 new colonies, raised 3 of my colonies to Tier 3 status, and left my remaning enemy with only one planet that I was poised (with my new fleet of 4 ships) to eradicate.

Then the game crashed.

I logged back in to find that there was no autosave and the past 3 hours that have left me tired and bleary eyed at 1:35 in the morning, have been erased from all memory. Granted, now that I now my course of action in Spore I’m sure I can take care of my enemies much quicker now, but damn … what I wouldn’t give to have saved my damn game. I consider this a lesson learned. Spore’s space stage is like crack to me however and I know I’ll be back.

<3 Scary

I’m not big on scary movies, but I love scary games. I think the difference is that in a game, I can attack whatever just scared me…or at the very least, there’s that element of control. Bioshock scared the crap out of me today. All I’ll say is that there was this room with a dentists chair…an empty dentists chair. The room is cold…filled with mist, or steam or something. When I enter the room, the mist fills the screen and I hear a noise. All of a sudden there is a corpse in the dentists chair. I promptly shoot the corpse, because…you know, zombies. Not that this is a zombie game, but my ever vigilant watch for the coming zombie apocalypse is more of an instinct than anything else. So I shoot the corpse and nothing happens. I figure it’s safe enough to investigate the room, even though I figure that something is going to try and jump out at me. I check all the corners and every shadowed area and then zone in on a desk against a wall with some stuff on it. As soon as I grab something on the desk the screen fills with mist again. Ohsnap! Whatever put that body there must be back, I better turn around and find it before it hits me in the back of the head…HOLY CRAP! Crazy, evil, dentist standing right behind me. I verbally react, alone in my apartment with something akin to a startled “Arrrgh!” and (with reflexes honed in preparation for the aforementioned zombie apocalypse) I dispatch the crazed, gene-hungry dentist with a point blank blast from my shotgun.

I love it.

Bioshock

I just played the Bioshock demo on Xbox 360. I…I have no words.

This is why we make video games.