How's It For You?

So it's been out for over a day now. Three new reviews hit yesterday -- two were very positive, the third not so much.

RPG Watch awarded the game four out of five stars, and had the following to say:

In terms of writing, you will find something interesting at every turn. The main plot is interesting and full of twists and turns, some of which are fairly predictable and others are surprising. The characters you encounter are fully drawn and provide both insight and color into the world around you. There are sixteen side quests aside from all of the quests associated with completing the main story. Some of these quests are pretty straightforward, but others will stay with you for much of the game, at times making you wonder if they will tie into the main quest. There is a great mix of humor and pathos, of witty party banter and more serious over-arching exposition.

Sorcerer's Place dished out an 8/10 rating, with the comments as follows:

The plot itself is derivative of several well established cinematic genres. This reflects a deliberate effort to steer away from truly high fantasy, and instead achieve a remarkably successful realism in the setting. You won’t find any Mary Sues and Marty Stus in Westgate. Indeed, more than one criminal faction is vying for power, while agents of good-aligned deities have an apparent interest in containing the chaos, or even benefiting from it. Everybody in this town is looking out for number one, even the ones who are ostensibly on the side of law and good. The degrees and specifics by which everyone’s self-interest finds expression is what sets them apart from each other. In a sense, this pervasive sense on literally being on your own against a hard-bitten world made me compare some of the story arcs to classic crime dramas like Heat, the French Connection, and The Corruptor.

Alas, GameBanshee weren't so hot on MoW and awarded the game a score of 6.8. Here's a snippet:

The campaign structure in Mysteries of Westgate is disappointingly similar to the campaign structure of Storm of Zehir. That is, there isn’t much going on with the main storyline (you don’t really learn anything about the cursed mask until the very end of the game); you just need to complete a bunch of side quests on your way to the parade of final boss battles. The side quests are fun enough, and they involve vampires, pirates, spiders, and of course hamsters, but they’re all short, and they only rarely have anything to do with the main storyline or your companions. They just felt like random filler to me, which is sort of sad coming from a developer who likes to mention Baldur’s Gate, which linked together characters, quests and plot as well as any game ever.

You can't please everyone. My impression is that the reviewer, Steven Carter, simply prefers an RPG with more -- perhaps an exclusive -- focus on story, a paradigm more akin to MotB than SoZ. As it happens, I think MoW more or less sits between both games; an observation made by Michael J. Anderson in his review for RPG Watch. Alas, limited companions are a restriction imposed by a budget tiny in comparison to either expansion and infinitesimal compared with a full release. That VO budget only goes so far. As for unconnected sidequests, well, that was pretty much a requisite for the kind of city-based adventure Ossian wanted to create. You can have a city-based game with an overarching plot -- say, war, famine or plague -- providing a unifying thematic resonance, but our goal was for players to explore the story of Westgate as much as the story in Westgate. The comments about the game's gloominess I found strange and haven't seen repeated anywhere else.

There's a few points I agreed with, though, and the rule of any creative work is that someone won't like it. As long as the negative -- or in this case, neutral -- opinion is the exception rather than the rule, all's well.

MoW Released - At Bloody Last

Yes, it's finally out, along with an improved Ossian website.

Initial player feedback has been promising, and I'm looking forward to seeing more in-depth feedback over the next few days. More tomorrow.

Two More Days...

... until Mysteries of Westgate is released. At least, that's the plan. I've heard nothing to suggest otherwise, so I think this time it's for real.

Initial reviews have been promising. The game scored 8.6/10 from the Neverwinter Vault, 5/5 stars from the Thieves' Guild, and 85% in Croatian magazine Gameplay. PC Gamer veteran Desslock also spoke it about it favourably, and Games for Windows said it was as worthy of attention as Mask of the Betrayer. That's not a bad assortment of praise. All factors considered -- budget, delay, status as Ossian's first commercially-released game -- I think we've done well.

Fingers crossed for Wednesday.

Space - The Final Frontier, Except When It's A Franchise

Two games I've played through recently are Dead Space and Mass Effect. I picked up the former based upon its sterling reviews and interesting premise of Resident Evil 4 in space, which is reasonably accurate. The latter I owned on the XBOX 360 for well over a year; I never really got into it and sold it along with my console a while back. As fate would have it, I shortly after found it in Zavvi on PC DVD for the princely sum of £5 (around $7.50). Yes, new. Who could resist?

Dead Space I suffered through almost as much as enjoyed. I failed to read the reviews for the PC version and was therefore unprepared for the slow responsiveness of the mouse controls; it felt like the cursor was being dragged through syrup. Disabling V-sync helped a little at the cost of major screen-tear; an aesthetic drawback I didn't feel was worth the sacrifice. Poor controls aside, I found the game initially entertaining but ultimately repetitive. The endless steel corridors grated after a while, and the constant fed ex quests made BioShock's mission design look revolutionary in comparison. Fortunately, the atmosphere and basic mechanics were fun enough to keep me playing until the end. The story was kind of blah -- it was decent enough but incredibly similar to that of the movie adaptation of Doom, which I saw a scant week previous.

All in all, despite the shoddy controls, the game felt solid. It's most definitely heavily derivative of about a dozen other games, principally Resident Evil 4 but also Half-Life 2 amongst others, but it does a good job of meshing those borrowed ideas into a fun game. I'd give it a high 7 out of 10, with the console versions weighing in at a solid 8 thanks to their superior control schemes.

Mass Effect, as mentioned, was a game I struggled to get into on the 360. I think the bad UI was partly to blame; that and the slow start. Luckily, the UI was one of the areas of the game improved for the PC version. Also, while not as well-optimised as Dead Space (clunky controls aside), it ran well enough on my 1530 XPS.

In many ways, I found Mass Effect to be typically BioWare -- and that's not a bad thing. The structure was very similar to previous BioWare games, with an action-packed prelude funnelling out into a less linear first act with plenty of sidequests. You then have the branching "do any of these in the order of your preference" technique before things funnel back in for the finale. I've read a lot of critics knocking BioWare for not mixing things up, but honestly, there are two very good reasons why they don't: million-plus sales and average scores of around 90% for every major game they put out. Put simply, theirs is the BioWare CRPG, and it's no more trite than any other of the numerous CRPG sub-genres.

So to get back to Mass Effect, I found it to be a good game. It's BioWare's best-written after Jade Empire, and their most fun post-BG2, from a mechanics point-of-view. They're still no Blizzard when it comes to actually designing game systems, but I'm sure the EA merger will help them significantly in that regard. The graphics and sound are excellent, particularly the soundtrack (gosh, Jack Wall is talented). Only the blandness of certain areas lets the visuals down. And on that note...

The planet sidequests. Who didn't dislike these? Some are moderately entertaining; some are okay; the majority are, well, not fun at all. Instead of bemoaning the bland overland maps and copy-pasted interior areas, though, I'm going to instead take a slightly different tack and admit that I'm not sure these weren't a somewhat necessary evil. How else to give the impression of a large galaxy to explore? Perhaps less worlds with more content would have been the key. I'm guessing art assets, in particular areas, for a game of Mass Effect's visual fidelity do not come cheap -- the blatant reuse of areas points to that. It will be interesting to see how ME2 handles space exploration.

One thing production costs can't excuse is the item and inventory systems. I just found these poorly designed. Item collection becomes a chore and lacks any of the excitement usually associated with this important aspect of a CRPG. The weapons and armour in ME represent nothing more than a collection of statistics to be compared and contrasted with other items; the actual names and lore mean nothing and are exceptionally dull. The game economy is also seriously imbalanced -- at some point, roughly around the 60% mark, I had all the worldly and spacely credits I could possibly need.

Luckily, despite the dull planet exploration and poor item and economy design, the core story and, importantly, the lore are extremely good. The characters too are worthy of mention. While I couldn't stand Tali's voice-acting -- the actress seemed to be trying too hard, much like Neeshka's from the NWN2 OC -- Williams was fantastic in her mild subversion of what you normally expect from a female romanceable companion. She's a racist, or more accurately a xenophobe, and a certain scene with Wrex (the typically amoral "heavy" companion) had my jaw briefly hanging open. Liara seemed like a bit of a plot device to explain away some of the story, if I'm honest. Kaiden I liked well enough but dropped in favour of Garrus, whose skills were more immediately useful. Of the non-joinable NPCs, Joker was a brilliant character. I also liked Benezia and Saren. Some, like Anderson, seemed too stereotyped. There were points where the writers seemed to be phoning it in, and a couple that simply went down like a lead balloon -- the encounter where Shepard -- an unknown stranger -- gets to decide the outcome after butting into an abortion debate was just risible. To be fair, I think the writer of this scene has owned up and admitted as much.

As a whole, though, the writing was really good. I was very impressed by the work that went into creating the back story. For such a complex and detailed tale the reliance on McGuffins was kept to a minimum, and the Reapers were more terrifying than expected. Well, okay, not terrifying, but you know what I mean. The end of the story was legitimately epic and left me excited about ME2. Something to note about BioWare -- they rarely make sequels, but when they do... well, Baldur's Gate 2 is still the best PC RPG ever (sorry, Fallout/PST fans). I'm expecting something really special. I just wonder how they'll handle the issues of space exploration, the borked inventory system, and the player's choices in the first game. The first two are probably less of an obstacle than the third. If BioWare does actually implement massive plot branches to take those choices into account, they'll bring a lot of the disillusioned critics back into the fold.

Red Seas Under Red Skies

On a completely different subject from the MoW DRM discussion, I just finished reading "Red Seas Under Red Skies," the second book in the Gentlemen Bastards sequence by Scott Lynch. The first in the series, "The Lies of Locke Lymora," was a terrific yarn and one of the most promising authorial debuts in the fantasy genre for years. Unfortunately, I didn't quite rate "Seas" as highly, despite the writing and dialogue remaining as sharp as ever. It seemed that Lynch had two rather disparate stories he wanted to weave together into the one book, and the result is that it is overly complex -- not in the sense that I had difficulty following it but rather that the whole flow of the book suffers from Lynch's efforts to intertwine the two major plots. In addition, the temporal displacement technique carried over from the first book is less effective here and not half as clever, although it is eventually abandoned.

What may have done the most damage to the book, however, is the terrible burden of writing part of an ongoing franchise. The first book more or less said "screw it" and carried itself well as a standalone novel, but you can tell certain choices Lynch made to give "Lies" the edge posed major issues for him to overcome in "Seas" and subsequent novels; The Bondsmagi, while they are interesting villains, seem overwhelmingly powerful in relation to everyone around them, and I wonder if a part of Lynch kind of regrets trimming the Bastards' numbers down so ruthlessly in the first book.

The weight of having to seed certain plot elements and evaluate every consequence from a franchise perspective must be a tough one for an author to bear.

I only really mention the book here because the apparent (at least in my eyes) difficulties Lynch faced in "Seas" remind me of my own ongoing issues with AL4. I'll speak about that in more depth some other time.

Mysteries of Westgate Release Date - 29th April, 2009

At long last, Mysteries of Westgate has an official release date. Here's the Atari press release:

'NEVERWINTER NIGHTS™ 2: MYSTERIES OF WESTGATE™’ Adventure Pack confirmed for WORLDWIDE RELEASE ON 29 APRIL 2009

- First Neverwinter Nights™ 2 Adventure Pack Available Exclusively via Digital Download -

Atari today announced that the first Neverwinter Nights™ 2 Adventure Pack entitled Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate will be available exclusively via digital download for the Windows platform on 29 April 2009 at a suggested retail price of €9.99 / £9.99 /$9.99. Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate will be available for digital download at the Atari store by visiting www.atari-store.eu in Europe or www.atari.com/us in the US.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate provides over 15 hours of additional entertainment with all-new engrossing storylines, professional voice acting, enchanting musical scores, new in-game content, and much more. Neverwinter Nights 2 is set in the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® Forgotten Realms® universe created by Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. (NYSE: HAS). DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is under license from Hasbro.

More information about Neverwinter Nights 2 can be found at www.nwn2.com, which includes user forums, project news, development updates and more.