TTRPGS – Diamonds and Rough

It’s been over two years since I set out to patch what I saw as the most glaring hole in 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. To briefly re-summarize my complaint, the assumption that most parties will face “six to eight medium to hard encounters in a day” simply does not align with the way most 5E DnD plays out. Constructing six to eight consecutive plot-relevant combats is extremely tough on the DM and resourceful players can wiggle their way out of basically anything else. That’s not to say that players are “avoiding playing the game,” more that the smartest thing to do when you’re low on resources and a gaggle of goblins is heading towards you is to avoid them entirely. This leads to a world in which players expect a long rest after every one to two combats and play accordingly, further disrupting combat prep and heavily tilting the power balance between classes towards whoever can deal the most damage on turn one. This in turns forces DMs to push the difficulty of combats higher and higher, as anything short of a “deadly” encounter (as defined by 5E) is essentially a waste of time and mega-deadly encounters themselves can become a coinflip between unexpectedly easy and a TPK based on initiative rolls alone.

In short, over my years of playing vanilla DnD 5E, I found the balance… lacking. On one hand, I could play mechanically “correctly” and exacerbate all the problems I’ve explained above. On the other, I could deliberately handicap my characters’ abilities in the name of roleplay and try to ignore the fact that the struggle and challenge I so desperately sought out was entirely self-imposed. Neither was particularly satisfying.

In July of 2021, I set out to fix these issues as best I could. To those ends, I developed In Darker Times (IDT), a 5E rules supplement aimed at organically creating challenge and tension. The rules supplement itself is here, and here is the post I wrote at the time explaining my issues and goals in more depth.

Since then I’ve played three campaigns that used IDT, of which I was a player in two and a DM in one. Today I’m going to be breaking down my own work: What worked, what didn’t, and what I learned along the way. Let’s go!

Diamond: Medium Rests

Far and away the best piece of IDT is the concept of medium rests. In case you don’t want to open the supplement to read it yourself, here’s how they work, along with the modifications to long rests to make them relevant:

Rule Change – Long Rests

Long rests can only be taken in an area of relative safety such as an inn in a town. Taking a long rest requires a three day period of relative inactivity including as many uninterrupted nights of peaceful sleep wearing no armor and with comfortable conditions. The day between can include light activity such as visiting a market or a library. Characters capable of casting spells cannot cast spells above a cantrip. Any abilities that recharge on any type of rest cannot be used.

New Rule – Medium Rest

Medium rests require only the unaltered long rest requirements: At least six hours of sleep (or equivalent) across an eight hour period. They can be taken in any location, though they still require relative shelter from the elements. A medium rest grants a character:

• Hit dice – one hit die, but no hit points.
• Any ability that recharges on a short rest
• One additional Medium Rest Benefit from the list below.
  • More Hit Dice
  • Spells
  • Abilities
  • Remove Exhaustion

I can’t emphasize enough how much these changes hit the nail on the head. Honestly, these two rules alone just about fixed the issues I had with vanilla 5E DnD.

First, the change is intuitive, easy to understand, and cleanly integrates with other core systems. Even players new to DnD as a whole have had no trouble understanding how medium rests work. (This doesn’t yet address the issues I’ve outlined, but it’s a sort of “table stakes.” If the proposed rules were too messy or complex, the cost may outweigh the benefit. Remember this for later…)

Second, they effectively extend the adventuring “day” beyond a single calendar day. Players now have to think about when they’ll reasonable get their next long rest and whether their resource expenditure that day can be paid back with a single medium rest. These changes make easy encounters matter, even if the players have no chance of “losing.” Even losing chunks of health or having to commit resources may matter down the line.

Third, they make the DM’s life drastically easier. Restricting long rests to towns and areas of safety gives the whole rest of the world an implicit challenge, one that before the DM was forced to generate themselves. The DM no longer has to convince the players that the dungeon is scary. It’s scary simply because the players know that once they enter, there is absolutely no way to fully recharge their resources until they leave. (In vanilla 5E, a single Tiny Hut per day generally defeats all but the most dangerous dungeons in a single stroke.)

Fourth and finally, they help correct power balance between classes. Bursty classes that are used to spamming powerful spells until the enemies stop moving have to think twice lest they be caught with their pants (spell slots) down. More sustained martial classes get their day in the sun as they consistently deal solid damage and even get to spend medium rests keeping their health topped off. I can truly say that playing a high level fighter is a blast in IDT, in a way that it simply isn’t in vanilla 5E.

I’ve seen the positive benefits of these changes, from both sides of the looking glass. On the player side, I’ve had to make difficult choices when taking a rest, debating whether to heal up or to get greedy and recharge a powerful ability. I’ve felt the tension slowly build as my party has limped through the wilderness, the nearest town still days’ travel away. I’ve felt the overwhelming relief at finally crawling into an inn and shrugging off all my burdens and passing out in a bed for the first time in a week. It’s a complete synthesis of mind between character and player, a roleplaying gold standard. With these rules, I the character and I the player agree that the wilderness is scary, that even a single wound is of concern, that there’s something special you get about the rest you get in a place of safety as compared to a random clearing in unknown woods. It’s incredible and it’s something you have to see and feel to believe.

From the DM side, I’ve seen how even a low-powered encounter gives my players pause. How longer journeys are contemplated carefully. How every coin and every item they receive is treasured as a future failsafe for a dire circumstance. It’s given me incredible flexibility to challenge my players while not shoehorning in forced, unavoidable combat. It makes DMing for experienced players fun in a way that the vanilla rules simply do not.

If you play or DM in 5th edition, I would highly recommend you consider adding the medium rest and modified long rest rules to your games, even if you don’t read any of the rest of this post!

Rough: Traveling Mechanics

I promised some rough to go along with my diamonds and I intend to deliver. First up, the traveling mechanics. I added these rules in an effort to make long distance travel less hand-wavey. After all, with the new spiffy medium rest rules, shouldn’t traveling from Plainsberg to Delport pose some challenge to the players? I wanted to formalize that challenge, to make the players feel how their characters would feel traversing through an unknown landscape.

To these ends, I created various roles the players could take in their traveling party. One character could scout, another could navigate, a third could forage or make a map. Each would make some number of related skill checks, determining the outcomes for the traveling day. The hope was that these mechanics would create the space for challenge and lead to interesting new developments in the story.

In practice, it ends up being a lot of rolling dice and not a lot of interesting outcomes. On one hand, the players could all roll well, in which case nothing bad happens and the traveling day is uneventful. In this case, it’s essentially the same as if you hadn’t used the mechanics at all. On the other, perhaps the players roll poorly, in which case the players suffer setbacks and injury. In practice, I can say this felt more like an inconvenience than a challenge. Because players weren’t trying to accomplish anything in particular other than make progress in traveling from Plainsberg to Delport, suffering a setback along the way simply wasted time. Either way, the players didn’t end up actually caring about the travel nor the travel mechanics.

In reflection, I think the reason these mechanics fell flat was that I was trying to solve the wrong problem. Travel isn’t interesting. However, the reason it is not interesting isn’t because the mechanics make it boring. It is because it is disconnected from the interesting parts of the game. The way to make travel interesting isn’t to stuff it full of mechanics. It’s to make the travel matter. For example, if there’s some plot in Plainsberg and some plot in Delport, but those two pieces of plot are fully disconnected, no amount of mechanics will ever make the players care about the travel from Plainsberg to Delport. If they take three days to get there and skip into Delport’s front gate, or if they limp in on day eight, spitting blood and fragments of teeth… so what? If the plot doesn’t care, neither will the players.

On the other hand, if the plots in Plainsberg and Delport are connected, then suddenly the travel might matter. If the players learn in Plainsberg that there’s a once a century carnival happening in Delport in five days, suddenly the difference between three and eight days of travel matters.

This burden ends up falling on the DM, but I think it’s a valuable point of (self) feedback nonetheless. Broadly speaking, players rarely want to play DnD for the simulation of walking 100 miles. Either connect that travel to something they do care about (plot, treasure, combat, whatever), or hand-wave it away.

(To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with handwaving travel. In fact, even in an “optimal” campaign, I think most travel can be narrated away. However, it’s a good idea to keep strictly mechanical travel in your back pocket for those few situations where the players’ travel schedule really matters.)

Diamond (With Some Rough): Grievous Injuries

As a long time DnD player there is nothing I dislike quite so much as “going through the motions.” It’s a special kind of frustrating to sit through a 90 minute combat, knowing from turn one that not only is the party certain to win, there is straight up no chance that anything could happen that would matter after a long rest later that night. Thus, one of my goals in IDT was to make sure that even the smallest combat could matter. Even beyond the medium rest additions I’ve already explained, I wanted there to always be a chance, however small, of sustaining a greater injury in battle, one that wouldn’t be gone tomorrow.

Another related area of immersion breaking that I never loved is how 5E handles unconsciousness and death saving throws and what it does to “optimal” healing. “Down” is “down,” after all. If you take 40 fire damage from a powerful fireball, it doesn’t matter if you were at 39 health or 2 health, you’re equally down. This does some really weird stuff to incentives around healing and action economy. Generally speaking, this system means you’re better off waiting till your party members fall unconscious before you heal them. For example, a cure wounds on your 2 health teammate before the fireball hits does absolutely nothing, but a cure wounds immediately afterwards gets them up and fighting again with literally no consequence. Even worse, this effect is far more pronounced at lower levels when healers have fairly few healing spells to go around and enemies don’t have legendary actions that could legitimately kill your unconscious teammate before the healer gets to act. Newer players constantly fall into the trap of healing too early, particularly because the “correct” play is horribly unintuitive and breaks immersion. Who would think that waiting until your barbarian hits the dirt is the right time to spend your healing word? What cleric in their right, in-game mind would wait that long?

In a completely separate column of my DnD hopes and dreams, I’ve always wanted the ability to fight with more strategy and tactics than DnD allows. “Health” is a wonderful abstraction that does away with huge amounts of bookkeeping that would certainly arise without it, but it has the tendency to reduce epic flights into monotonous slapping back and fort to see who can make the other’s red number hit zero first. If I’m an archer fighting a cyclops, shouldn’t I be allowed to try to blind it with a regular old arrow? If I’m a wizard fighting a red dragon, shouldn’t I be able to freeze it out of the sky? And if I’m a monk fighting Strahd, wouldn’t it be awesome to punch him so hard he flies across the entire room and through the wall like a DBZ villain? (Trick question: of course it would be cool!) I’d long assumed, though, that there was no way to unlock the cool without compromising the simplicity offered by health. Gain one, and you lose the other.

Turns out, though, that there was a shared solution to all three problems. Enter the Grievous Injury! I won’t copy paste it all here (the full rules are a lot longer than medium rests; you can read them in the supplement), but I can address the above issues with a few highlights:

• When a creature is knocked unconscious or suffers a critical hit, they have a chance of sustaining a grievous injury.
• The injuries can only be restored by some number of long rests (not medium).
• When a creature is knocked unconscious, the saving throw to not receive an injury is equal to the amount of overflow damage the creature took.
• Starting at fourth level and ever four levels after, player characters gain Griveous Strikes, an ability that lets them deliberately try to inflict an injury.
• The save type and consequence of the injury vary by the type of damage inflicted.

This fairly concise system addresses all of the above points in one neat package. Because injuries take time and resources to remove and critical hits can happen at any time, even a rogue skeleton can inflict a meaningful blow on a high level character. Because the saving throw DC increases with overflow damage, hanging around at 2 health in battle is terrifying and preemptively healing to a safer, higher number is a strategically valid choice. Finally, because the save type and consequences vary by damage type and players can force saves through Grievous Strike, unique and immersive battle tactics open up combat (like punching Strahd through a wall).

All in all, it’s added a lot of fun moments to my games. It allows dramatic range in consequence during combat (that vanilla health simply doesn’t) and helps players who prepare to get an extra little edge on their enemies. Overall, I’d call it a clear win.

The system does have its rough edges, ones that can probably be ironed out with a bit more tweaking. First, the level of severity of injury isn’t perfectly balanced across the injury types. This can be fun when the players are picking damage types (different injuries may be more effective against different enemies), but less fun when an enemy happens to highroll the perfect injury to cripple your abilities. There’s an argument that this is “realistic,” but at the end of the day I’m not sure it’s that fun.

Second, Grievous Strike is only a cool mechanic when it actually works. Otherwise, when you line up your best attack and the enemy saves, the “well, then nothing happens” feels like a bit of a letdown. It also violates my general TTRPG invariant that needless dice rolling should, as often as possible, lead to some kind of outcome. Again, there is an argument that this is “balanced,” (I don’t know if I’m allowed to buff Grievous Strike any further), but again, not sure it’s that fun.

While more work is probably needed here, I’m fairly confident that Grievous Injuries and the associated rules are a net positive to my games and will continue to strive to improve them.

Rough (With Some Diamond): Blood Magic & Chronomancy

Honestly, I kinda let the theming run away with me here. With all the added rulesets around making the world grittier, tougher, darker… it felt almost too obvious that I should build a few extra schools of magic to go along with it. To these ends, I created two additions: Blood Magic and Chronomancy. To fit in with the overall theme of power coming at a cost and persistent consequence, I wanted to build both schools of magic around an inherent drawback. My idea was that both schools would feature very powerful spells (more directly, spells more powerful than the vanilla 5E spells at equivalent level), but that they would have a built in cost that would balance them out.

To keep the flavor and play style of the two separate, I designed two separate cost schemes. For blood magic, every single cast has a cost in health, scaling upwards with spell level. This damage is unpreventable and in some cases even increases the power of the spell as more blood is poured into it. Additionally, after you cast a blood magic spell, you have to make a saving throw to resist the pull of the magic. Fail, and the blood doesn’t come back: Your maximum health is reduced by the damage dealt until you can rest it off of heal it with a restoration style spell. This gives the school an incremental cost, a drip-drip-drip of loss as you cast powerful blood magic spells. One’s amount of dependence is directly measured by loss of maximum health. How weak are you willing to become to unlock great strength?

In contrast, I wanted chronomancy to be less material. Rather than a constant cost to be paid with every spell cast, I created a scheme of slowly building risk. When you cast a chronomancy spell you gain fracture stacks based on the spell level. The stacks themselves do nothing, but you then roll a d100 and compare to your stacks. Roll lower than your number of stacks, and a consequence occurs, ranging from fairly bad to positively catastrophic. On the flip side, fracture stacks slowly fade as time passes naturally; restrain from chronomancy and the issue will resolve itself. However, as time mages know, sometimes there simply isn’t enough time. How much will you risk to do what must be done?

While I find some of the individual spells to be absolute gems and create fascinating play patterns, I need to do a lot of work before they’re truly play-ready. My first few sessions with these new spells showed that they had a number of game-breaking balance issues that had to be patched mid-combat. More broadly, they are probably simply too much to explore in a single campaign, let alone a oneshot. Perhaps picking either blood magic or choronomancy would have let them shine. Trying to cram both in at once was a bit too much, too quickly.

All in all, I’d call In Darker Times a success. I certainly accomplished what I set out to, at a very minimum, and I can easily say that I enjoy playing with these rules more than without them.

As I wrap up my writings about this ruleset, I want to reiterate that DnD, and TTRPGs more broadly, are fun for a multitude of reasons. Every player has their own reasons for playing and different set of activities they are looking to get out of the game. Some who tried IDT found it particularly unfun. In listening to their criticism, they mainly found it unfun because IDT successfully accomplished its goals. For example, some wanted the flexibility and freedom to express themselves in roleplay and combat and didn’t like the way the rulest restricted their resources. Others enjoyed the sensation of being powerful and flattening enemies and didn’t like how the rulset made even previously trivial fights meaningfully challenging. (Notably, I haven’t met a DM who hasn’t liked IDT yet, but that could change.)

These players are completely valid in these opinions. It is totally fair to seek out a game with these qualities and I can certainly say that IDT doesn’t help create such a game. If anything, these discussions point more towards having a meta-conversation with your play group before you start the story about what everyone is looking to get out of the game. Making sure everyone is aligned about where the fun is makes sure you all spend a lot more time having a real great time!

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to even more time.. In Darker Times.

TTRPGs – In Darker Times

I’ve been playing a fair amount of Dnd 5th edition recently. I grew up on 3.5E, and compared to that 5th edition is a breath of fresh air. Large amounts of book keeping have been entirely removed, clearing the way for roleplay and making it much easier to sell new players on the game. On the whole, I’d consider the changes a success.

There is one area, though, in which I find 5th edition to be lacking, and unfortunately it is founded upon a mistake in design. Over the past few 5th edition campaigns this flaw has become more and more obvious, to the point where it now inhibits my enjoyment of the game.

What is this flaw? How did it come about and what can be done? Glad you asked; let’s go!

I’ll not beat around the bush: There’s a single sentence in the core 5th edition rules that spawns all sorts of trouble. Here it is:

“Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium to hard encounters in a day…”

Dungeon Master’s Guide, 5th Edition, page 84.

While not explicitly stated, it is fairly clear that many mechanics are built upon this benchmark. Magic classes capable of casting spells have only so many spell slots per day and are thus assumed to have to ration their abilities among these hypothetical six to eight encounters. In contrast, non-magical classes put out more consistent damage and are expected to fill in the damage gaps when their magical party members run out of juice. The tension should steadily increase over the course of the adventuring day as resources diminish and injuries accumulate.

There’s just one issue: No one, not a single campaign I’ve ever run or played in, actually does this. (One tried and it didn’t go well.)

Why is that? Well, outside of a fairly heavy plot impetus, the players really don’t have a good reason to want to deal with more than one encounter a day. After all, if the first encounter of the day left the rogue bleeding and the cleric out of healing spells, the prudent thing to do would be to sprint back to the inn and rest up. Moreover, most plots don’t involve more than one plot-relevant encounter a day, unless they’re operating on crazily-compressed Shakespearean time in which the entire events of a three act play occur over the course of two days. It is theoretically possible to fill the adventuring day with sufficient random encounters to make up the difference, but in my experience these take up time players would rather spend advancing the plot or roleplaying, so these are used sparingly.

In practice, I would say campaigns I have been in average about one encounter per long rest. That’s a far cry from the recommended six to eight. As noted before, that six to eight number isn’t just a random recommendation; many other numbers rely on it to be balanced and fun. With this imbalance come a bunch of particularly un-fun side effects:

First, classes that recharge their abilities on a long rest end up much more powerful than those who recharge their abilities on short rests. Because players expect to be able to recharge after every fight, they have no qualms spamming their most powerful abilities right out of the initiative gate.

This then has a follow-up consequence: Any encounter that’s less than Deadly is fairly trivial. When your Wizard is spending their first turn casting fireball in every fight, throwing the easy encounter of a wandering band of goblins at them amounts to little more than an adventuring speed bump and a goblin-colored smear on the dungeon floor. Because of this, DMs are effectively forced to only give deadly encounters, since these are the only ones that “matter.” This can be difficult to balance, as the line between a deadly encounter that challenges your party and a deadly encounter that TPK’s on round two is a very fine one.

This then, finally, has a way of kneecapping the slowly building tension that we all love. If you’re never in lasting danger, then the consequences of the world don’t feel so real. It removes the part that really gives TTRPG roleplay its soul.

Now I know at least some people are thinking, “It doesn’t have to be like that! You’re doing X/Y/Z wrong, it’s your fault, not the rules!” To which I say… maybe. I would note that multiple people I’ve played with have come to the same conclusion without my input, so it’s at least a common problem, not just one I’ve invented.

Furthermore, consider the alternatives. In particular, a campaign module. (A pre-written and published plot, sold by WoTC and various other vendors.) I’ve only used a module once, but it’s fair to assume that modules are generally built with the “six to eight encounters” number in mind, since they are marketed as “canonical” campaigns. This means that, in this campaign, we were trying our very best to hold to this benchmark.

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I was a player in this campaign, a young wizard who got scammed out of a deal with a devil and devoted her remaining mortal life to getting even.

In the opening fight of this module, the party was thrust into combat when monsters appeared through a portal directly into the tavern we were staying at. (If you already know which module this is, bonus points to you.) Of course, we jumped into action, fending off the monsters and seemingly saving the other patrons. After the fight, a famous and notable person approached us, remarked positively on our performance, and begged us to assist him in investigating the disappearance of his friend.

Now, at the end of this first fight, we were all two-thirds depleted on resources. Our health bars sat at half-mast and most of us were close to out of various expendables like spell slots. So, being still at the inn, we assumed we would take a long rest and then set out to find this guy’s friend in the morning. Not so! Because, you see, the module-based-plot assumes six to eight encounters (or at least more than one), and thus we should be good to keep going. The DM insisted as such, and, over my in-character protestations that walking into a potential ambush while unprepared was an absolutely terrible idea, we went to the abandoned warehouse where his friend was last seen.

From here we admittedly played with very poor tactics. We inadvertently alerted our enemies to our presence by knocking, then burst in to be immediately fired upon by every archer in the whole building. Without spells and low on health, multiple members were knocked unconscious before they could so much as determine who was firing at us. Ultimately the DM was forced to Deux Ex us out of danger by having the town guard show up and save our sorry asses.

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I think it’s worth taking a moment to analyze just how this went so wrong. At the time of the first fight, our characters had no reason to know that there was going to be a follow up fight to be had the same day. Thus, completely in character, we spent our resources accordingly. (Unbeknownst to us, the first fight had a built-in failsafe: The bartender is some crazily high level fighter/monk and is actually able to take the fight completely on his own if the party falters. We, of course, didn’t know this, and didn’t utilize it.) Thus, after this first fight, we had spent resources as if it was the only fight we would have. When someone approached us afterwards and asked for more help, my first in-character response was to say “no.” I was desperately in need of a long rest and knew I was not in a state to rush back into danger. The DM didn’t buy our excuse, and so off we went.

At its core, a multi-encounter adventuring day requires some plot-relevant reason why the party can’t “nope” out of wherever they are and stall until they can take a long rest. In the example above, we didn’t really have one better than “the module/DM says so,” which is particularly unsatisfying. I’ve managed to do this in a campaign I run only once: Set up a series of encounters such that the players knew something about all of them, but also knew they wouldn’t be able to squeeze a long rest between them without dire plot consequences (and thus were able to budget resources accordingly). It was incredibly satisfying but also really difficult to arrange from a world-building and session writing perspective. It’s something I expect to be able to do once or twice a campaign, not every session.

At the end of the day, it is my humble opinion that the “six to eight encounter” day just doesn’t fit actual Dnd 5E play patterns particularly well. Making it work requires either extensive planning, which is difficult for the DM, or telling the players that “despite a complete lack of a motivating in-game reason, I’m not allowing you to rest right now,” which is terribly un-fun for players. Not following the encounter allotment suggestions, though, cause all kinds of balance issues.

So, what can be done?

I’ve been mulling over this set of issues for a while (ever since that disastrous module session, actually) and have finally come up with, I think, a solution. It is a set of rules additions for 5th edition, In Darker Times (Homebrewry Link). While the flavor of the ruleset is for a grittier, darker campaign setting, the true underlying goal is to fix the problems I’ve laid out thus far while working with actual play patterns instead of against them.

The single most important change is:

• Long rests now require a week’s worth of inactivity in an area of safety, such as an Inn. Medium Rests now take the place of former Long Rests.

Why does this matter? Players will know ahead of time that getting a full recharge of their abilities will be rare and only happen in specific scenarios. For example, they know that they will not get a long rest while traveling from one town to another, or while plumbing the depths of a dungeon. From a balance point of view, this stretches the adventuring “day” into the time between two long rests, which could be weeks of in-game time. This now makes fitting in the suggested “six to eight” encounters relatively easy. Even easy encounters will begin to pile up as a party traverses a countryside, making spending every resource a consequential decision. They can always choose to run back to their starting location and take a long rest (and the DM should allow this), but that means giving up on their progress to their destination. To achieve their goal of traveling to a second town, they have to be able to brave the dangers along the way.

There’s a whole lot more in this ruleset, from persistent Grievous Injuries to Blood Magic. The link above goes to a full Homebrewry ruleset; take a look and let me know what you think!

The Pendulum Swings, Part 2 – Gravity

(This post is a continuation of a previous one – start there, then come back.)

First, a quick recap – in brief, an ideal JRPG has both:

• A complex and flexible combat system
• A meaningful plot with surprising twists, usually somehow pertaining to saving the world

In part one I talked about the first point. Now let’s look at the second.

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Most JRPG plots involve, somehow, saving the world. The exact form can vary – perhaps someone plans on freeing a long-sealed evil, or attaining omnipotence through a forbidden ritual. In Chrono Trigger’s example, a parasitic planet-devouring creature happened to crash into the earth millions of years ago and is only now waking from its slumber. Regardless of the exact circumstance, two aspects of the plot are nearly universal:

1. The world-ending event is truly world-ending. There’s no point in making plans for what will happen after the world-ending event if it isn’t prevented as there won’t be a world to live in anymore.
2. Only the protagonists are in a position to prevent the world-ending event. Maybe they are the fated heroes, or perhaps only the protagonists even know that the world-ending event will occur. Regardless, if the protagonists do not act or act but do not succeed, the world will certainly end.

From a narrative standpoint, this can be seen as an unnecessary and frustratingly juvenile framework to have to work within. However, it plays a very important role in the plot as a whole: It explains why the various characters in the game come together to adventure despite their fairly fundamental differences. Without this linchpin, the narrative fabric can begin to fall apart.

(Warning – some plot spoilers for both Chrono Trigger and Octopath Traveler ahead.)

“No.” “…. oh. Ok then.”

The most meaningful example of necessity trumping personal ethics in Chrono Trigger is the interactions between Frog and Magus. (In the above picture, Frog is the broccoli holding a sword in the center and Magus is the orange-gloved purple-pantsed handyman at the top…. 16-bit graphics leave some things to the imagination.) Frog, originally named Glenn, was once a squire to a man named Cyrus. In service to their lord, they ended up fighting against Magus, a rogue sorcerer who was terrorizing Cyrus’ and Glenn’s people. Together, they attack Magus. He defeats them without a second thought, slaying Cyrus and cursing Glenn with his current half-frog half-human form. Needless to say, Frog holds a bit of a grudge against Magus. It’s crazy, then, that they later end up on the same team fighting towards a common goal.

The initial fight with Magus is later revealed to be a misunderstanding – Chrono and friends believed Magus was the cause of the world-ending force Lavos, but Magus was also trying to destroy it. When this is finally understood by all parties involved, Magus offers to join the team and lend his extraordinarily powerful sorcery to the cause. Throughout it all, it’s unclear if Frog ever confronts Magus or if Magus ever apologizes for cursing Frog or slaying Cyrus. Given the lack of reconciliation, it appears that both men approach their predicament with a stoic and grim sort of determination – the deeds of the past won’t matter if they don’t succeed in saving the future.

Plots that have a world-ending event loom on the horizon allow any set of characters to come together and work to save the world. Even blood enemies can get along since they can presumably agree that they’d prefer the world to continue undestroyed. On the flip side, plots that drop this point start having to answer some uncomfortable questions.

Spoiler alert! The mansion is extremely pregnable.

The plot of Octopath Traveler started to fall apart for me when I got to Therion’s first chapter. As noted above, Therion is a thief and his adventure begins when he decides to try to rob a certain mansion. After adding Therion and picking a set of four characters, my party included:

• Tressa, a merchant who spent her entire first chapter yelling at a pair of pirates for stealing from people.
• Ophilia, a cleric who follows the preachings of her church to the letter.
• Olberic, a knight with a nearly iron-clad set of ethics and morality.
• Therion, a thief who somehow got the above three people to help him break and enter into a mansion to rob its residents.

Feels a bit nonsensical, no? If I’m really to believe that Olberic is such an honorable knight, why would he agree to help Therion? After getting through paragraphs of text spoken by Tressa extolling the virtues of trading compared to the vices of thieving, I know for a fact she wouldn’t agree to help Therion unless there was a really, really motivating reason. Frog agrees to allow Magus on the team despite Magus literally ruining Frog’s life because Frog knows that regardless of his personal grudge they will need all the help they can get against Lavos. Tressa agrees to help Therion rob a mansion because…. why exactly? There’s no reason I can find in the plot, which unfortunately means we fall back to the worst answer of all: Tressa teams up with Therion because the plot needs her to do so.

An unfortunate but practical limitation imposed upon JRPG plots is that for the most part, the party can’t split up. That means that for the vast bulk of the time they are adventuring together everyone in the party has to agree on the path they are following. Under the gaze of a world-ending event, this is trivially easy, which I think is one of the reasons why such plot structures are so common in JRPGs. Without one, however, there are no easy outs, and fundamental ethical differences like those between Tressa and Therion can’t just be handwaved away.

Beyond Tressa’s horizon: Shiny rocks, then MORE shiny rocks!

Even more broadly, having a world-ending event on the horizon answers a general and persistent question – why should I care? Why should I care about this character’s trials or that character’s desires? Why does any of this matter? In many game genres, the answer can simply be “you don’t have to.” Even in Breath of the Wild (a fantastic game I reviewed two posts back), the plot isn’t the part of the game that makes it so amazing. The plot isn’t at all bad, but it takes a back seat to exploration, combat, and discovery. Adventure games like Breath of the Wild just don’t rely that heavily on their plot, and Breath of the Wild does a wonderful job recognizing that fact and allowing the player to freely adventure without forcing them to walk a linear line of plot.

JRPGs, for better or worse, are on the opposite of this spectrum. The plot and strategic combat together are the most important two elements, and an argument can be made that plot is the more important of the two. There are many ways to a bad plot, but a fast and fatal one is to construct a plot that the player (or reader or viewer) simply doesn’t care about seeing to completion. I don’t specifically have to love or identify with the protagonist. Within the context of an adventure, though, I do have to believe that the character’s actions are making some sort of impact. Otherwise, I have no reason to fight the next random encounter or turn the next page.

Gravity, in a way, is what is needed in every JRPG plot. The characters’ actions need to matter within the context of the world they inhabit. It has to matter that I defeat this particular boss or journey to this town and start a cutscene. If things are essentially left unchanged by my actions, what was even the point? As above, having a world-ending evil to defeat fixes this problem in a jiffy in somewhat hyperbolic fashion. If you don’t continue on your adventure, the world will literally be destroyed. Ok, yep, got it. Box checked.

Aaaaand in this corner, weighing in at 100000 tons, the source-of-magic, the dinosaur-extinctor, it’s Lavos!

Octopath Traveller ditches this hyperbole, (which is fine), but in doing so swings too far in the other direction. Tressa’s entire story is one of personal discovery. Seriously – if Tressa had not left home, the rest of the events of the story would be essentially unchanged. This type of narrative just doesn’t fit into a JRPG context because it lacks gravity. I just don’t care if Tressa comes to a personal epiphany, at least not in the same way I care about Chrono preventing apocalypse-via-space-parasite.

Some of the lack of gravity is unfortunately caused by the format of Octopath Traveller’s plot. Featuring eight characters, Octopath Traveller opts to serve eight unrelated plots, each with four chapters. This means that Tressa’s whole story is actually only four chapters long, which is not nearly long enough to develop a journey of discovery into something even slightly motivating. Had they opted for a more linear plot structure (by joining the eight characters’ plots into a single branch after the first chapter or two) they could have had more time to work with.

There’s more to why I didn’t find Octopath Traveller’s plots particularly engaging, but the bottom line is that I didn’t particularly care whether the characters succeeded or failed. I continued onwards because the combat is just that fun (as detailed in the last post) and because engaging in the plot is the way to get to harder enemies, but I never felt amazingly drawn in. There’s a pendulum in JRPG development, swinging between combat and plot, micro and macro. Octopath Traveller is a great game (and again I recommend it to any fan of the genre.) This time, though, it may have swung a bit too far.

The Pendulum Swings, Part 1 – Flexibility

Another day, another game. Unlike other recent posts detailing surprise favorites, this is one I’ve been looking forward to for a while and was very excited to play as soon as it was released. Let’s talk about Octopath Traveler.

HP, SP, and four people in a line – looks like a JRPG to me

Octopath Traveler is a quintessential JRPG, but what exactly that means in 2018 merits some discussion. First, though, a simple definition. A JRPG – Japanese role-playing game – is a game that has the two following qualities:

• Adversity in the form of combat that emphasizes strategy over technique or skill. Combat is usually turn-based. Otherwise, it can be real time in that characters get to act every [x] seconds or the like. The player is almost never required to react quickly or in honest real time. Rather, the player is expected to think multiple turns in advance and have their characters act in a way that maximizes their joint effectiveness.
• A detailed and rich plot featuring multiple characters, usually from a diverse set of backgrounds, who (nearly always) must come together to defeat some all-powerful, world-ending evil. While the framework is bland, JRPGs rely more on their plot than any other genre I can think of and as such have left a long history of memorable plots and iconic characters.

The genre has been around for a very long time: Final Fantasy I was released in 1987, meaning JRPGs have been an easily identifiable genre for at least 30 years. This has been long enough to spawn subgenres including tactical JRPGs (grid-based JRPGs that focus on unit placement and map control like Fire Emblem and Advance Wars) and monster capture JRPGs that allow you to capture your enemies and use them in subsequent battles (Pokemon, you’ve probably heard of it).

Like every art form that has been around for a long while, “pure” JRPGs released today have both a high standard to live up to and an increasingly restrictive space in which to live. So long as they adhere to the tenants above, they will be judged against the best and the brightest of their school of gaming.

Which is exactly what I’ll be doing today.

Chrono – a man of very, very few words. Zero words, if I recall correctly.

Chrono Trigger! The 1995 time-traveling world-saving Square Enix classic that effectively defines the genre. Some fans may have other favorites, but everyone who loves JRPGs has played Chrono Trigger. If you’re a JRPG fan who hasn’t, you should rectify that as soon as you can. (Just grab a SNES emulator and ROM, I won’t tell anyone.)

Well, we have two games and two criteria against which to judge them. Let’s get to it!

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In today’s post, combat. A great JRPG gives the player enough choice to allow them to use their characters in a near-infinite set of ways, each with trade-offs and counter-balances. Furthermore, the game is difficult enough to make this strategic thinking a necessary requirement for progressing, just like platformers require timing and FPS’s require reflexes.

On this front, I’d give the point to Octopath Traveler.

That’s not to say that Chrono Trigger’s combat system was bad – in 1995 it was great and even now it holds up as being fine if a bit mundane. Just like how Shakespearean stories now seem cliche and predictable because they were followed by hundreds of copies that made their once original and gripping twists into household standards, Chrono Trigger’s combat system now seems ordinary because its copies (effectively) reused its novel inventions.

Chrono Trigger takes the standard attack/skill/item system from the early JRPG era and adds combos – instead of using a skill with a single character, you can wait (Chrono Trigger had an active battle system) to use a more powerful joint skill. This created interesting decisions both in the micro gameplay of choosing whether to act now or wait for a higher payoff, as well as the macro gameplay of choosing a party from available characters based on what combo skills the chosen party could perform. Again, this is a fun and engaging combat system. I first played Chrono Trigger when it was re-released on DS in 2008 and I loved it, all the while having no idea that it was a barely-changed re-release of a 13-year-old game.

Chrono Trigger’s combat was good. Octopath Traveller’s combat is phenomenal.

Miss?? Give me a Break

Similarly to Chrono Trigger, Octopath Traveler starts at the same Attack/Skill/Item(/Defend/Flee) base set of actions. On top of this, however, it adds two key additions:

• An armor and break system, as illustrated above. Each enemy has an armor number displayed next to a list of symbols that match some subset of the 12 damage types (6 physical weapons + 6 magic types). Each time the enemy is hit with damage of the matching type their armor number decreases by 1. When the number hits 0 the enemy is “broken.” They lose their current and next turns and take double damage while they are broken.
• BP (battle points) which accumulate during the course of a battle and are represented by the dots just below their names in the illustration above. Characters start the battle with 1 BP each and can have a maximum of 5. At the start of each round, each character that did not use any BP during their last turn gains 1 BP. In a single turn up to 3 BP can be used to increase the effectiveness of a skill or (and this is the crucial part), get one additional basic attack per BP spent.

Why is this so innovative? And how does it unlock so many strategic possibilities and tradeoffs? In a sense, BP accumulation is like giving a character free turns. Spending a full 3 BP a character can have 4 basic attacks, which if used correctly can reduce an enemy’s armor by 4 and lead to a crucial break. Thus, should you use your BP for basic attacks to reduce an enemy’s armor fast? Or save it for skills which will result in more damage? All else equal, which character’s BP should you spend to reduce an enemy’s armor? Should you use BP to boost a damage skill and take a large chunk off of a boss’ health, or use it on a stat-boosting effect to make a character more effective or resilient over a long period of time? The combination of armor/break and BP systems leads to an amazingly large set of choices and positively blew my mind when it was first explained in the game’s opening levels. (Another sign of a good system – it’s simple enough to be explained during the beginning of the game. I’m looking at you Xenoblade Chronicles 2 – if you can’t explain something until the 20th hour you should probably cut it.) Breaking enemies becomes essentially mandatory during the game’s later boss fights, requiring the player to have a strong grasp on how to use these systems to the greatest effect.

Every other choice the player can make in Octopath Traveler complements this primary pair of mechanics. As the player picks up characters they can make their party of four from any of the eight (though they are required to keep their first character in their party until completing that character’s plot, which I’ll touch on next time). Any set of four the player selects yields a set of weapons and magic types that the represented characters can attack with. Even if the player specifically wants to cover all twelve types (and this is by no means required) there are a host of “complete coverage” party combinations. Later on, the player unlocks secondary classes that can freely be moved between characters, further freeing the player to craft their ideal party.

This flexibility, I think, is what made Octopath Traveler such a joy to play. The game gives you strategic pieces in the form of characters, classes, skills, and equipment, and expects you to figure out how to put them together into an effective force. I (as the player) felt like I had the freedom to craft a party that was both powerful and fit my playstyle. Yet when I compared my end-game party to what my coworker created we found that we had nearly no overlap. I had made a powerful and interesting combination of strategic pieces, and he had made an entirely different powerful and interesting combination of the same strategic pieces.

Chrono Trigger had strategic flexibility, but Octopath Traveler has raised the bar. In doing so, it does its forebearer proud.

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Next time in The Pendulum Swings, Part 2 I’ll talk about point two – plot, memorability, and saving the world.

Choice

After breezing through Super Mario Odyssey and slogging through Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I found myself without another new Switch title to really grab my interest. Looking at what I have in my collection, I decided to fire up Breath of the Wild again, to see if it still holds up on a second playthrough.

Short answer – yes. Even a year later, after the initial hype has worn off and we’re all getting excited about the next mainstream Pokemon title (…eventually…), Breath of the Wild is not only an amazing game but one that I suspect will come to be seen as a major milestone in game design and history.

It takes my breath away, every time

As with any true masterpiece, Breath of the Wild has a lot to teach us about good game design, specifically what makes a good adventure game. That’s what Zelda games are, at their core – the original in-development nickname for what would become the Zelda series was “adventure Mario.”

What makes a good adventure game? Or, even more concisely, what makes a good adventure? It’s a simple yet extremely difficult question. Each society has been working on it for millennia in the form of stories and legends passed down through the years. Clearly, this is a topic of great study, but a short laundry list of items an adventure should have could be:

• Some number of protagonists, who are working towards some “good” goal.
• Opposing them, adversity in some form. Either an “evil”, consciously working against them, or simply the natural adversity of life.
• A trajectory of growth for the protagonists. Rewards for passing each trial along the way, both in tools needed to oppose their adversity and in skills learned in doing so.

From only these three aspects, we already have a rough outline of an adventure. There exists a goal that needs to be accomplished. An evil defeated, an object found, or perhaps just a world explored. A protagonist is chosen, by fate or chance, to accomplish this goal. However, at the start of the tale, they are not nearly ready to simply accomplish the final goal. They lack the strength, or the knowledge, or the resources. These things they lack become sub-goals that must be accomplished before the original top-level task can be attempted. Thus, the protagonist sets off to attack these subgoals. When they are finally ready, they can attempt to complete the original task, achieving their good end and completing the story. Everything that happens in the middle – the friends they make, the places they travel, the skills and knowledge they acquire – is the adventure. A good adventure game, then, is one that allows the player to do all of these things.

That’s what makes a good adventure game. What makes a great adventure game, however, requires allowing the player to feel like they are the adventurer. That’s a good deal harder.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an adventurer, and you need to slay a dragon that’s been torching the kingdom on the regular. So far, sounds like an adventure, right? Now suppose that in the center of the town square is a large red button labeled “SLAY DRAGON.” Your adventure consists of walking to the button and pushing it.

Doesn’t feel very adventurous, does it?

Unfortunately, plenty of adventure games are more like this than what you were probably imagining before the big red button part. In an attempt to make accomplishing the final goal feel awesome while keeping the game accessible, the adversity is removed. As we’ve noted, though, the adversity was the very source of the adventure: removing the adversity removes the adventure. Cosmetic changes involving the protagonist (“only the fated hero can push the button!”) or the nature of the button (“It’s actually a magical orb from the dragon-slaying dimension”) don’t help, no matter how much lazy game studios wish they did. No adversity, no adventure.

Back to the hypothetical scenario. Let’s remove the button since that’s an obvious dead-end. There’s still a dragon to slay, but no obvious, easily accessible Deux-ex device to utilize. However, this time, after asking you to slay the dragon, the king hands you a long parchment, detailing the exact steps you’ll take to do so. First, you’ll travel to the northern marshes to find the lost breastplate of fire-proofness. Then you’ll head east to the dark forest where the elves craft the strongest bows in the land. Along the way, you’ll meet a new acquaintance who will initially be skeptical of your abilities but will become a true friend in time. From there you will turn south to the great ports, where any good can be had for the right price. You will eavesdrop (completely by chance, of course) on a conversation between two merchants, letting you know the location of the illegal midnight market where the most contraband items are sold. Upon arriving, you will learn it was all a setup. You’ll barely escape with your life and, crucially, the very item you came to buy: the famed cowl of invisibility. (In the process your love interest will die. Just a heads-up.) Your checkbox-style inventory completed, you will track down the dragon in the steppes of the south-west, and after a long confrontation slay it with a cinematic shot through the eye.

If you were this protagonist and the king actually handed you this list, your eyes would probably glaze over halfway through the list. (If you actually read the whole paragraph above, your eyes probably actually glazed over halfway through the list.) If you were playing a game where you then had to actually go and do all of the listed things, the feeling of adventure would be dead on arrival. It would feel more like grocery shopping than adventuring. What’s the problem then? The above story has all of the things we need for an adventure. There’s a protagonist who wants to adventure, an evil that needs defeating, and a well-thought-out trajectory of growth and challenge to get the protagonist from A to B. What’s missing?

Aww, he wants a hug!

Choice. Choice is missing. The single biggest implicit prerequisite for any adventure is the ability to make choices in how to go about it. Without choice, everything else falls flat. Adversity loses its teeth, as you will only ever encounter adversity that you have the tools to beat. Protagonist growth goes out the window, as you have no need to learn and grow. As long as you remain locked on a railroad traveling towards the final goal, everything you’ll need at any point along the way will be effectively spoon-fed to you at just the right moment.

Boring, right?

The presence of real choice is where Breath of the Wild sets itself apart. For years, adventure games have tried to lay out series of events to create ever stronger senses of adventure. Bosses got badder, twists got twistier, and terrain more extreme. In doing so, though, they became more and more scripted, which has a way of killing the very adventure the script was supposed to create.

There are many ways Breath of the Wild breaks this mold. The extremely well disguised “tutorial” section of the game essentially hands you all of the mechanics in the game, restricted to a small part of the map. After completing that, you’re able to travel to literally any part of the map, completely ignoring the plot if you so desire. You can even travel to places you are woefully underprepared for and promptly have the shit kicked out of you. The main part of the plot of the game is broken up into discrete chunks, which can be tackled in any order (or, as noted above, simply ignored). The sub-goals, designed to increase your power and knowledge and prepare you for the final confrontation, can be completely ignored. If you want to, you can run straight to the final confrontation without so much as putting on pants. Not like a real adventurer would, but like a real adventurer could in a real adventure. You have complete freedom of choice in how to progress, in a way unlike any game I’ve ever played before.

Breath of the Wild – a game about climbing cliffs.

If I had to credit the abundant choice found in Breath of the Wild to a single game feature, it would be the ability to climb. Most games use cliffs as walls: If you’re walking down a road between two vertical cliff-faces, you’d have no choice but to take the road one way or the other, as those would be the only options available to you. Not so in Breath of the Wild. Just as in real life, you can decide you’re done with the road and try to climb one of the walls. Many landmarks you want to travel to in the game present no easy path, so climbing becomes a necessity. This creates a subtle but massively important shift in how the player thinks about exploration. Instead of seeing a far-off fortress and thinking “How can I get there”, or even worse, “How can I get there that the game will allow”, or even worse yet, “Will the game allow me to get there”, the player is faced with the choices involved in planning a route. Is there a road that makes sense? If not, what path is the shortest and the least steep? (In a symbiosis of realism and good game design, the stamina system allows the player to climb further when the ascent is less steep, incentivizing planning a route over blind climbing.)  Will taking a less standard path allow you to stumble upon something noteworthy? The presence of climbing alone in the game changes travel from logic and possibility-elimination into, for lack of a better word, adventuring. You feel like you are truly exploring Hyrule, limited only by your strength (health and stamina), the tools you’ve found so far, and your wits. You feel like an adventurer.

I don’t know how long it will take for another game to come along that captures the spirit of adventuring as well as Breath of the Wild does. I can only hope that game developers are paying attention to Breath of the Wild’s massive success and will try to emulate it in all of the right ways. That they will realize that engaging world design goes further than elaborate, scripted cutscenes in making us care about what’s going on. That they will give us a few multi-use tools instead of many single-use ones, as only multi-use tools allow for creativity. That rather than boxing us in, they will allow us to venture wherever we want, even when the plot turns right and we turn left. I hope that when the time comes to create the next great adventure game, these developers trust us, the players. Because they’ll have to trust us, in order to give us the ability to choose how we play.

Because It’s There

Every so often I stumble upon a game that I immediately know will be one of my all-time favorites. More and more, the games that fall into this category are indie games that only take me a single digit number of hours to clear. Despite being short by video game standards, they manage in this short time to demonstrate the very best gameplay qualities and innovate further within their chosen genre, as well as present a compelling and deep narrative, all along with art and music that link the two together. It seems like a tall order, but back when I started this blog I had just started Bastion and knew instantly that it would forever be one of my favorite games. Later on, Axiom Verge and Undertale joined the list. This week, the new inductee is Celeste.

It doesn’t.

A glowing review from a co-worker convinced me to buy Celeste on Switch (though it is available on most consoles and Steam), and within mere minutes I was loving it. Celeste is a puzzle-platformer with a platforming difficulty level somewhere above Super Mario Bros but well below Super Meat Boy, which puts it right in the sweet spot of challenging but not sadistically punishing. That may intimidate some who aren’t huge platformer fans, but about half of the challenge (and in particular the hardest parts) are purely optional. Strawberries are distributed throughout the levels in hard-to-reach spots that will push your platforming skills to the limit. They’re there if you want to get them, but the game even goes out of its way to let you know that they don’t matter other than that.

Strawberries – the hardest way to impress your friends. Seriously.

So then what’s the point of the strawberries? Why do I (the player) feel such a gut-level need to at least try to collect them?

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In Celeste, you play a girl named Madeline who is trying to climb the titular Mount Celeste. Along the way you meet a few other characters, including social-media-obsessed fellow climber Theo and a crazy old lady who seems to be more with it than she lets on. At the start, the lady warns you that strange things happen to climbers who attempt to summit the mountain and urges you to turn back. Of course, Madeline stubbornly pushes ahead, insisting to both the lady and herself that she “needs to do this.” It’s only in a later chapter that you meet the reason why – A physical manifestation of Madeline’s mental illnesses (mainly depression and anxiety) who springs from Madeline’s mind in a nightmare and retains physical form even after the sun has risen.

Rude.

The girl (nicknamed “Badeline”, though this name is never used in the game) haunts Madeline at every turn, insulting her and telling her repeatedly to give up. At every success, she urges Madeline to quit while she’s ahead and at every failure trumpets her foresight and warns of even worse consequences if Madeline doesn’t throw in the towel. But Madeline persists, and persists, and persists.

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There is a very interesting connection between platformers and depression. In any sufficiently difficult platformer, even the best player will “lose” to the game hundreds of times before they eventually succeed by the skin of their teeth. With every successive failure, the game is effectively telling you, “You can’t do this. You’re not good enough. You’ll never be good enough. Quit. Turn the game off. Give up.” I am no expert in anything mental health related, but I wonder if these same feelings of frustration and hopelessness are what people who suffer from depression deal with constantly in their everyday life. If so, the game not only destigmatizes depression but praises those who carry its burden while continuing to push themselves to reach the highest heights. Within the game, continuing to play is telling the game that it is wrong. That after every failure you will try again. That you have the ability to succeed and the fortitude to see it through.

The fact that the mechanics and the narrative are intertwined at the deepest of levels really drives this point home. I yearn to collect strawberries just like Madeline yearns to reach the summit of Mount Celeste. Neither poses any reward of any sort, yet the very existence of the mountain (and the strawberries) issues a challenge to any who would dare lay eyes on it. Simply walking by would be admitting defeat, and neither I (the player) nor Madeline the character are ready to give up just yet.

Towards these ends, the musical score is truly magical. It seamlessly fits into the mechanics and themes, while also subtly re-asserting the plot throughout the game. For an example, here’s “Scattered and Lost”. Each of the songs blends light acoustic sounds (mainly piano and acoustic percussion) with heavy, dark and dissonant electronic sounds. In a way, this combination symbolizes the state of Madeline’s mind, with the acoustic sounds representing her optimistic and confident personality and the electronic ones representing the weight of her depression. Throughout each of the songs in the soundtrack, these two elements do battle, each vying to gain dominance over the other yet both unable to fully declare victory. The plot of the game, which I won’t spoil here, comes to the same conclusion.

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One of my favorite parts of games as an art form is that they are able to unlock emotions in the player that other art forms (for example, books, movies, and paintings) struggle with. Platformers excel at causing the emotions of frustration and (in the non-medical sense) depression when the player fails while bestowing elation, confidence, and pride when the player succeeds. Celeste capitalizes on this unique ability of platformers to weave a narrative of challenge and suffering, of rising only to fall and yet still getting back up onto your feet. It instills a deep empathy for Madeline and respect for all who struggle with depression but despite its burden still continue through life.

In a way, the very frustration and challenges set up by platformers like Celeste make them the most optimistic and encouraging of games. By setting up challenges they make us better players by allowing us to overcome them. We collect the strawberries because they’re there. We climb the mountain because it’s there. We strive to make tomorrow better than today because that’s what it means to be alive. If the mountain could see our faces at the top, if it could feel our elation and our pride at conquering it, I don’t think it would curse us.

I think it would be proud.

My Favorite Sandbox

Suddenly beset by an unusual amount of free time, I had an urge to recapture a little magical chunk of my youth during the remaining months of my pre-career life. Using only $5.99 on Good Old Games.com and a nifty application called Winebottler, I made my past dreams a present reality – I’m able to play Roller Coaster Tycoon again.

Just beat Leaf Lake with this fabulous park, holding a company value of $175,000

Whenever I’m asked to choose my favorite game of all time, I usually end up picking RCT. Whenever I’m asked to pick a single game to play for the rest of my life, I always pick RCT. I could write and talk forever about why RCT is absolutely amazing in essentially every regard. If you haven’t noticed, it’s the banner at the top of my blog, and will always remain there. I could even make an argument for why it’s one of the best games of all time. That discussion, however, is inherently extremely subjective and I would be heavily biased in promoting RCT. I just have too long of a history playing the game. Instead of doing that, I’m going to focus on one particular genre: I believe Roller Coaster Tycoon is the best sandbox game of all time.

That claim is easier to defend than “best overall game”, but there is nonetheless one looming opponent to defeat. Namely, this one:

Less of a sandbox, more of a desert

Hold on, you have no idea what that is. Let’s zoom in a bit.

Lifelike graphics are so yesterday

Minecraft! The gargantuan behemoth of a game that has sold well over 100 million copies worldwide and has over 40 million monthly players. It has education applications that span grade levels and has inspired educators on the national level. It has been under continual revision since its inception in 2009 and reached massive new mobile audiences after Microsoft purchased the game for $2.5B in 2014. It is the epitome of a sandbox game, allowing complete freeform manipulation of the truly unreasonably large map.

And somehow I’m going to argue that Roller Coaster Tycoon is a better sandbox game.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Minecraft. I joined moderately late in the game during my junior year of high school and basically spent the second semester of my senior year constantly playing. I’ve fought zombies and skeletons, built four-story victorian mansions, and farmed wheat and sugarcane from sunup to sundown and back again. Yet whenever I’ve tried to get back into the game after years of not playing, I can’t get hooked again.

During my early days of Minecraft, there was magical wonder-dust sprinkled throughout the whole game. I climbed every mountain and spelunked every cave with the burning desire to know what was around the corner. Would I look down upon gently sloping plains or a massive verdant rainforest? Would the next corner reveal diamonds? A bottomless pit? A zombie right in my face? Everything was new and shiny and surprising and wonderful. On the sandbox side, there is an endless ladder of construction rungs to climb. You want diamonds? First you have to chop down a tree to make a pickaxe to mine some stone to make a better pickaxe to mine some coal to make some torches to go deeper down the caves to find iron to make an even better pickaxe… You get the idea. Just about every block of the world is usable and even necessary for some pursuit.

There comes that moment in playing Minecraft, however, when you suddenly look up bleary-eyed at the clock that now reads 4:31AM and wonder why you just spent eight hours moving virtual blocks around. With all the freedom granted by Minecraft comes a disconcerting openness: challenge and goals and achievement within the game are almost entirely self-determined and self-enforced. Yes, there are achievements granted for picking up new resources. Yes, there is now a “final boss” to defeat to “win the game” that was not present in the early versions of the game. Both of these elements are so secondary to the main mission of the game – do whatever you the heck want – that they feel irrelevant and almost artificially attached.

The “challenge” of Minecraft is not game-like at all. Rather, it is much more similar to gaming’s distant cousins, art and design. The game is effectively a blank canvas. It’s up to you determine what you’re trying to accomplish and to find some meaning in self-defined achievement. Many players have created scale replicas of famous locations and structures both real and fictional, while others create mine track rides or functioning computers out of redstone, the game’s electricity equivalent. The options are, quite literally, endless.

There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s worth noting that it makes Minecraft fairly unorthodox when compared to most games, so much so that it’s actually hard to justify calling Minecraft a game. There’s no score, no adversity beyond a few monsters aimlessly walking around, and no meaningful goal. Sandbox? Sure, so much so that at this point Minecraft is the textbook definition of the gaming category. Sandbox Game? That’s harder to claim.

For comparison, I present Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it – build a bomb-ass amusement park

There’s something very special about the way RCT displays a fresh map. As shown above, you are greeted by a short description of the park and given your objective. That objective is front-and-center, yet easily dismissable and forgettable. If you are the true sandbox sort, just close the goal window and play your own way. The game doesn’t even notify you when you’ve lost; the specified goal time comes and goes without any popup or other announcement. You are 100% free to play at your own pace with personally-defined goals.

If, however, you’re anything like me, it’s hard to turn down a decorated finish line far off in the distance. It’s like running a 5K for charity, but being told that everyone who gets under a certain time wins a prize. If you know you have a shot at winning, why not try your best and see if you can win? To make another comparison, a true sandbox is cooking for yourself. You decide what you want to make and upon completion decide if you did a good job. A sandbox game is cooking for a friend or customer who says “surprise me.” You can still cook anything you want, but now there’s a clear metric of success. You’re welcome to ignore that metric; it’s your right as a chef to disregard the customer’s opinion as uncultured, unrepresentative of diners as a whole, or plain wrong. The very presence of that metric, however, will motivate you to perform to the best of your ability.

Building an amusement park in Roller Coaster Tycoon is a lot like cooking a meal for this metaphorical friend. Essentially every park requires you to build a “good” park according to one of a few metrics, usually attendance or company value. What’s in a good park, though? Probably a few awesome roller coasters, that’s for sure. Gotta have smaller rides throughout as well. And people need to eat, so we need some food and drink shops. Oh and don’t forget staff or every bench will be smashed and every ride will break down. We need more money? Take out a loan or two and buy some advertising to draw in more customers, and raise park entrance fees but lower ride fees to make sure people keep riding. Good, that worked and our coffers are full; let’s build another roller coaster!

In short, building a “good” park takes a little bit of everything. There are many right ways and many, many wrong ways. That decorated finish line is way, way off in the distance. How you choose to get there is entirely up to you. From that standpoint, RCT is undeniably a sandbox game, containing essentially unlimited choice.

Each different map proposes a different twist on the same essential challenge of building and running a park. Some give you a blank slate, while others have some rides already built, while still others have partially built rides that you have to finish in order to win. Underneath it all is a fairly complex AI governing the action of your guests, from what ride they want to head to next to how likely they are to smash the trash cans and storm out of the park. Building a good rollercoaster requires balancing physics constraints like velocity, vertical Gs and lateral Gs, with economics constraints such as available money and building space. Each component of the game, from finances to scenery to ride construction and placement, is an intricate system that can only be understood via repeated use and study. You need to understand all of them to succeed, and consecutive victory is both thrilling and addictive. Finally, the pride of the sandbox achievement is no less strong. It’s really cool to look at a screen full of intertwining roller coasters and buzzing with people, knowing that it used to be a deserted area full of nothing that you molded into a winning park.

Let’s go back over the checklist. Daunting but simple and technically optional goal set way off in the future? Check. Infinitely complex (essentially unsolvable) underlying subsystems that require trial-and-error to overcome? Check. Full control over park progress, leading to infinite possible avenues of moving forward? Check. Huge collection of maps, each with their own unique spin on the core challenge of the game? Check. Written 99% in machine code????? Check. (Aside – HOLY SHIT. The best comparison I can draw is that Chris Sawyer managed to build a functioning, real-person house out of linkin logs, duct tape, and drink coasters.) Massive replay value? Check. Completing the deluxe version of the game, which has 81 scenarios and a couple extra bonus maps, would take hundreds of hours.

All that for a game from 1999 that you can now get for $5.99. It’s truly miraculous.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to playing in my favorite sandbox.

Forging a Path – How to Capture Replayability

As luck would have it, the steam summer sale fell in the middle of my awesome vacation. I, therefore, had no time to play any games. Luckily though I managed enough of an internet connection to buy a few and have them waiting for when I got back to America.

One of the games included in my haul this summer was Valdis Story: Abyssal City. The game is listed under the tags Metroidvania, Action, RPG, Platformer, and Indie, so the chance that I wouldn’t at least semi-like it was already slim.

The art throughout is bright and bold, similar to Dust

In short, I really loved the game. The single best thing I can say is that the game has extreme replayability. As soon as I finished the game the first time (in around 6 hours), I immediately started up another file on a harder difficulty. There are a bunch of reasons for this, all of which symbiotically reinforce the others. First, there are four difficulty levels: normal, hard, veteran, and god slayer. When I first started the game I opted for hard, but found it too challenging and moved to normal. Now I am replaying it on hard and having no difficulty. That leads into the second quality that assists replayability – the game is heavily skill based. Initially I could not even progress through the game on hard, and now on this second try I am flying through it. Third, the RPG element of the game is no pushover. The skill, spell, stat, and alignment systems ensure that you get fairly comprehensive control over your character and reward different play styles. The system, on the whole, is complex enough that you can make mistakes, again ensuring that more experienced players who make smart choices early on have a better chance as the game progresses in difficulty. Finally, if all that wasn’t enough, there are four playable characters, each of which is drastically different – entirely different skills and spells, as well as weapon choices and attack patterns. Just because you’ve mastered one character doesn’t mean you’ve figured out the game.

Each character does have loosely defined attack, defense, and magic skill trees, but even within them the differences start to appear. Because of the system of prerequisites for skills (denoted by connecting lines downwards) it is important to pick skills not only for what they do but for what later skills they help unlock.

Secondly, the game gets a solid B+ for story and an A-/A for visuals and sound. You very quickly begin fighting against both demons and angels, so rest assured that it’s not a standard you’re good/you’re bad go fight the other people kind of thing. The story also manages to create a fairly fleshed out and engaging world to explore, which is always a really nice thing to have in any metroidvania (which by definition require some amount of exploration). I can’t give top marks for the story only because it is a little short, and that the dialogue is a little shallow and cookie cutter.

Visually the game is beautiful. Areas are bright and diverse, colors are bold and the fast paced action is accented by quick flashy animation. The overall feel of the game is helped by the epic soundtrack which wonderfully captures the difference between demonic and angelic settings. I particularly loved the boss battle (of which there are many) music, which contributes to both the epicness and the time sensitivity of the fight.

The first of many, many boss battles. You are graded on your performance on each one, which is yet another reason to replay the game over and over again.

Where the game starts to stumble, ironically, is in being a metroidvania. Some features that should really be considered standard are simply missing. For example, one big one is the ability to access the world map. As it stands you can only access the map for the area you are in, so it’s up to you to remember how that area connects to the other areas you’ve explored and what path to take to a specific one. On a related note, there is no hint feature telling you roughly where to go. It was really nice when the game would at least point you in the right direction after you’d wandered for half an hour or more not sure how to progress, a feature that became fairly standard starting with Metroid Prime. Without such a system, you’re stuck re-checking every reachable room to see if there’s something to do there with a new ability you didn’t have the last time you were present. This isn’t all that bad here, as the whole map in Valdis Story is pretty small, but I did have to look up a guide once just to save myself an hour or more of useless wandering trying to find where to use a newly found key.

Secondly, the game expects you to make certain logical leaps without giving literally any suggestion towards them. This is more of an RPG problem, and is an area of challenge that isn’t fun. Rather than understanding the puzzle and upon completion think, “YES! I am the best”, you are forced to try every possibility, eventually get lucky, and then think, “How was I supposed to know that was the answer??” After getting a new set of spells, it’s fairly standard throughout the game for you to have to use one of them to escape the newly sealed room, but (even after realizing that you now can’t leave) you have to go into the menu and read through all of the descriptions to figure out which new spell can get you out of this mess. It would have been really nice for an unobtrusive line of text to appear a few seconds after gaining the new spells, hinting you towards what new ability to use. Furthermore, the game would vastly benefit from a built-in glossary of game terms. It uses arbitrary fantasy words like affliction and reckoning, which clearly have in-game significance, without ever defining them. Even simple words like stealth don’t have a clear definition listed anywhere. I’m all for not throwing walls of text at the player, breaking immersion and slowing the game down, but that information really should be available somewhere in case I want to look it up.

Do you know what stealth means by default? I don’t.

On the whole, though, the game is incredible. Even as a metroidvania I loved it. It struck the right balance of exploration and fun “ooo I remember an area where I can now use this new ability” backtracking. The combat is intense and extremely skill based (as opposed to button mashing), and even the platforming was challenging and kept stages fresh.

More than anything else, Valdis Story: Abyssal City truly shines in its replayability. Capturing replayability in single player campaign-based games is a challenge that designers are constantly trying to defeat. Unlike sandbox games, multiplayer games, or single-player match-based strategy games, single player campaign games usually struggle to present any value after completion. In this regard, they are closer to books and movies than their other game companions. Once you’ve experienced the story and seen what’s behind each hidden turn, that’s kind of all it has to offer. You might re-read your favorite book or series a few, maybe even ten or more times, but that’s nothing compared the thousands, even tens of thousands of matches enjoyed by the standard LoL or Smash player. Stories are, inherently, finite. So long as it is pre-programmed or pre-written, it has to come to a hopefully satisfying conclusion at some point. Yet, single player campaign games are nonetheless judged by the same expectations of playable hours as other games, and thus are constantly looking for ways to give the player more to do.

One avenue of doing this is to create more and more subquests, small but branching storylines allow (but don’t force) the player to explore the world while simultaneously continuing to experience story content. This isn’t a bad option, but for better or worse it always seems to detract from the main story. One example that comes to mind is Skyrim. Yes, there is a central story in Skyrim, but most people don’t seem to care. All Skyrim discussion that I’ve seen bleed onto the other parts of the Internet (i.e. Imgur, Facebook) usually refers to weird physics quirks and funny NPC interactions, as opposed to interesting plot points and underlying themes. Despite Skyrim’s certainly epic story, it is discussed more like Minecraft than like Harry Potter. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but the last thing you want to do when crafting an epic story is to add content that detracts from it.

I think I can say with confidence that this is the most important thing to come out of Skyrim. This meme.

Valdis Story, for all of its missing help features, does something so right that the story is both important and central, and yet I want to play again. The answer, I believe, is the right combination of challenge and choice. Give me enough challenge that I am basically unable to complete the game on the hardest difficulty on my first playthrough, and am instead forced to use an easier one instead. It is thus clear that I have not bested the game; there remains a further challenge to conquer. Give me enough choice that I am aware that I may be making mistakes on my first play through, ones that I could make better if I knew what I was doing. It is thus clear that the path I took through the game was not the only one, nor likely the best one.

If the game doesn’t have additional levels of challenge, no amount of choice will get me to play again. If I’ve already gotten the gold medal, so to speak, using set of choices A, there’s no point in doing it again with set of choices B. I’ve already won, no need to do it again. If there’s not enough room for choice, on the other hand, additional levels of challenge will feel redundant. I did the best I could with the options available and was able to attain a high enough proficiency at the game to beat it. Allowing me the ability to try again at a harder challenge, but not make significant alterations to my play style, means that the only way I’ll beat the harder level is to, as they say in the biz, “get gud”. I, the player outside of the screen, have gained knowledge by my first play through the game. Let me use that knowledge!

Crucially, none of this detracts from the story. I approached and beat the epic final boss of the game for the first time with the guilty knowledge that my victory would be a bit hollow. I knew that I was playing on the easiest of the available difficulties. In the real story the final boss would be impossibly difficult to defeat. I’m still invested in the story because it was made clear that a full and fulfilling conclusion was still just outside of my grasp, and that I would have to play both smarter and better in order to achieve it.

Overall, I give Valdis Story a 9/10. Would I play it again? I already am.

The Puzzle of Railroading

Ahhhhh… Spring break. Time to pour yourself an orange juice, kick off your shoes, and finally open all of those games you bought during the Steam winter sale but didn’t have time to play. To that affect, I’ve spent the last few days playing through two games on opposite ends of the spectrum – Fez and Shadowrun: Dragonfall. While both are amazing games, contrasting the two sheds some light on what aspects of entertainment video games excel at, and what other qualities they are still lacking. Minor spoilers ahead – minor meaning these are things you would find out within the first half hour of the game or less. If you do want a completely pristine experience, skip this post.

I’d heard about Fez from countless friends, and knew I had to play it after watching Indie Game: The Movie. (Yes Phil Fish isn’t a very nice guy but he made a cool game so whatever.) The core concept of the game is that you belong to a people who spend their whole lives believing that the world is 2D. The game begins when you wake up one day and journey to the top of your village where you meet a magical cube. Think about that for just a second. What would happen to the way you think if you woke up and just saw something in 4D? There it was, right in front of you, existing in all of its four-dimensional goodness. Nothing about you has intrinsically changed, and yet in that moment of perception your entire understanding of spacial geometry is flipped on its head. You can never undo your realization, and therefore can never go back to your old life. In any case, the cube blesses you (Gomez) with the ability to rotate around the different 2D views of the truly 3D world. In doing so, however, the cube is destroyed. It is up to you, therefore, to traverse this new 3D world and put the cube back together, one block at a time.

There’s a piece of the cube right there!

Fez is a puzzle game with no danger mechanic whatsoever. There are no enemies, no attacks, no health to lose. If you fall off a cliff, you simply respawn at the last solid location you touched. In spite of this lack of punishment for making mistakes, Fez is exceedingly difficult because the game is nearly text-free. When you come upon a puzzle, there are no instructions. It’s just you in a room with the puzzle elements. For example, in one room I found a huge bell at the top of a tower. I further found that the bell made different pitched rings when I rung it from each different side. I have no idea what to do with that bell. I assume there’s some order of sides to ring, but given that it could include duplicates it’s simply impossible to “try them all”. Hints in the form of treasure maps are given throughout the game, but even the maps are their own form of puzzle – they’re just pictures with no description or title given, so half of the challenge is figuring out which room the map even corresponds to. With every new puzzle I come to, I wonder if I even have enough information to solve it or if I can’t make more headway until I find a map somewhere else.

This intellectual difficulty is very refreshing at a time where many big games are guilty of over-explaining their gameplay. No one needs to be told to run away from the people shooting at you, or that you are in danger because your health is low (thanks Fi). Fez almost has the opposite problem – there were times I audibly exclaimed “I don’t get it!” while playing the game. Fez poses an unadulterated puzzle challenge. There are no time limits, no enemies, and only very modest platforming requirements. The only thing standing between you and the next room is whether or not you get the puzzle the room poses. It’s something that video games do very well. I don’t think I realized how much I hate reading pages of text in a video game (I’m looking at you Braid) until Fez came along and showed me that you can have both a moving plot and unfathomably complex puzzles without text entirely. The relative lack of text makes the few sentences you do get all the more important.

In contrast to Fez (in the first of many ways), I had never heard of Shadowrun: Dragonfall (or any of the Shadowrun series) before the steam sale. When I did stumble upon it, however, I knew I had found something good. To put all of the steam tags together, it’s an indie-cyberpunk-rpg-TBS. The first element to hit me was the rpg part – the moment you open up the game you are presented with an extremely intimidating character creation screen. Pick a race (human, elf, dwarf, orc, troll), pick a class (Street Samurai, Adept (Unarmed Combat), Decker, Rigger, Shaman, Mage), and start allocating stat points. It’s an electronic RPG dream, from the tabletop tradition. I went with my gut and played a drawf adept with plenty of points in strength and chi-casting. Because I didn’t know what was good and what wasn’t, I went with the “just don’t die” strategy. It’s worked relatively well thus far.

SR:DF Combat – You know you wanna get a piece of this action

The combat – whole party movement with AP as time currency, buffs/debufs, line of sight, AOE attacks, and simultaneous cyber-battles – is intensely complicated and plenty to chew on. I initially had the game set to hard, but quickly had to shift back to normal after getting destroyed a few times in a row on early missions. The upgrade and item system surrounding the stat system is equally complicated, but you get enough money to play around a little with your build. You are given just enough control of how the rest of your party upgrades to be useful, but not the full set of stats which would simply be laborious. All told, there is so much to think about in SR:DF, from the micro of how to emerge from this battle in one piece, to the macro of which team member deserves an upgrade with your limited funds. It’s one of the most tactical games I’ve played in a while.

Where SR:DF lost me, surprisingly, is at the plot. To get you up to speed, here’s the opening scenario, which I imagine may pertain in part to the original Shadowrun: It’s the mid 21st century and everything is topsy turvy. Through some not well explained means, our world went through a fantastical transformation, with dwarves, trolls, and other mythical races simply appearing. What’s interesting is how the game portrays this transformation in realistic and even bleak terms. At one point you confront an evangelical organization bent on the mass murder of all meta-humans (all the other races) for reasons that should seem old hat by this point in human history. A troll, running a soup kitchen for meta-humans on the streets, pays you off to “shut them down”. Needless to say, things aren’t at all rosy.

Most importantly, as you discover in the first hour of the game, the fantasy transition came with one more unsurprising surprise – dragons. As dragons are want to do, they quickly established their dominance over different areas of the globe. The dragon ruling Europe where the game takes place decided to show her power – by burning the continent to the ground. She was eventually stopped, but people who know too much continue to disappear. Clearly SR:DF doesn’t have a simple or by any means traditional plot. It is intense and gut-wrenching at just the right moments. Good level and character design play into the intensity and push the plot forward. So why do I feel like I’m blindly clicking dialogue buttons?

The best part of going grocery shopping, ages 4-6

Remember when you were very young, and a parent let you “steer” the grocery cart/racing car – the ones with the little steering wheels in the kiddy seats? If not you had a deprived childhood, and I’m very sorry. Assuming you weren’t a toddler, you probably knew that the steering wheel wasn’t actually attached to the grocery cart in any meaningful way. So when you felt the cart start to turn, you turned the wheel to pretend that you were the one causing the change. And it felt cool – it was the first step in the path to driving that included bumper cars and Mario Kart. But what happens when the cart doesn’t do something you want it to? For example, you’re passing right by the candy aisle. You bank hard to the left to turn in, but the cart continues straight. Right at that moment, you are suddenly aware of how little control you have over the cart (and start complaining that you want candy, etc etc). You only know and care that you’re railroaded – that your current and future path is already set out for you – when it takes a turn you don’t like and you’re powerless to stop it.

Plot-heavy games are a lot like this grocery kart (shields self from thrown rocks and tomatoes) metaphor. The game already has a plot set out from the beginning, and it’s up to you to follow that track. When the track takes sudden and illogical turns, or has uninteresting scenery, it becomes stale and boring. What’s worse (and what seems to be the case in SR:DF) is when the game asks you to put forth effort in the name of the plot, but has all choices map to the same outcome. If this becomes a pattern, I’ll just default to clicking the first response option in any dialogue chain. It’s not going to matter anyways. I don’t care about the plot when it’s merely a gift-wrapping for the gameplay to make it pretty.

My standards of railroading, however, are fairly high. My RPG experience comes from a DnD Dungeon Master background, where railroading is a cardinal sin. If I create a dungeon and you, a player, decide to simply skip the town, it would be frustrating on both of our parts for me to not allow you to leave (through a variety of means) until you complete my dungeon. In short, if I haven’t made you want to explore my dungeon, I’ve failed my job as a DM. If you can see my railroad tracks and resent the direction they go, I’ve failed my job as a DM. Video games, especially plot heavy ones, do this regularly. It doesn’t matter if I know who the murderer is, I still have to find the clues and walk in on the suspect as he murders the main love interest, because that’s how the plot has to go. That’s how it’s programmed to go.

Pen-and-paper RPGs (a-la DnD) will forever have this advantage over electronic RPGs. One of my favorite DnD experiences was when my party and I decided to rob an armory in the town we had just entered. Just to see what would happen. When electronic RPGs go the sandbox route, the main plot is usually laid by the wayside in favor of doing just this kind of weird stuff. Only in pen-and-paper RPGs, with no pre-programmed response to anything, can a skillful DM seamlessly integrate your latest random exploit with a greater plot and leave you begging for more. The moment-to-moment feedback that occurs between players and DM isn’t something that can be replicated in a preprogramed video game, no matter how sophisticated.

So wrapping it all together, both Fez and Shadowrun:Dragonfall are intensely difficult and strategic games. If you’re looking for a mental workout, I can heartily recommend both games. SR:DF pushes against the boundaries of what video games can do well a little too much for my tastes, and as a result has a strongly railroaded, if very interesting, plot. In contrast, Fez is a game that can only exist within an electronic medium, and fully takes advantage of the relative strengths of video games contrasted with their paper cousins – sound, lighting, and graphics as a game element. The plot simply comes along as an added bonus. And if anyone knows what to do with that freaking bell, let me know.

When Everything Changes…

“Look, whatever you’re thinking, do me a favor; don’t let go.”

It’s taken just under two days, but I’ve finally made it home to the good old VA. Driving is nice, especially given how awful dealing with air travel has gotten these days, but upstate NY to central VA is just a bit too long of a trip for my tastes.

There were many things I wanted to do during the semester, and now I finally have the free time to start checking items off that list. The list (as with all mental things) is in a constant state of flux, but it looks a bit like this:

1. Hug my two miniature poodles.
2. Arrange music for next semester.
3. Continue working on the game I’m designing. Hopefully have a playable prototype by the time school starts up again.
4. Boot up steam and see what’s new.

I checked off number one immediately upon opening the door, not that I had much of a choice. With my desire for poodle hugs briefly sated, I flipped through the other three. In browsing Steam, however, I stumbled upon a game I have been waiting for forever, and everything else would have to wait until I finished it. Usually I wait for sales to make my Steam impulse purchases, but Transistor, released for Mac since I last checked, couldn’t wait.

I loved Bastion. Like, a lot. So let’s get the biggest disclaimer out of the way first: Transistor, the second game produced by Supergiant Games and spiritual successor to Bastion, is not Bastion. This isn’t at all a bad thing, but it means that in evaluating Transistor we can’t ask it to fill Bastion’s shoes. We have to judge it based on its own merits and flaws, and come to an unbiased conclusion.

A gorgeous travel cutscene

Even combat is beautiful

Let’s start with the good. Transistor, like Bastion, is absolutely beautiful. Bastion’s art style was full of vibrant colors drawn in a way to convey mystery and build the world. This strategy is applied once more in Transistor, to even greater effect. Transistor’s world is furnished with unending high rises that are at once indestructible and in a state of disrepair. Just as Bastion’s use of thin terrain and muted backgrounds created a sense of being alone in the middle of nowhere, Transistor’s never-ending urban sprawl creates a different kind of isolation – being alone in the largest city in the world.

Also like Bastion, Transistor makes use of a dynamic soundtrack with narration that follows you through the game. The music, along with the various bits of plot information thrown at you throughout the game, completes the feeling of isolation. Moments of silence drip with dread and desperation, punctuating key plot moments in the game.

The biggest way Transistor moves beyond Bastion is in its combat system. Bastion was a simple hack-n-slash. The weapon selection and upgrade system went a long way to allow all kinds of players to find something they liked, but at the end of the day everyone still selected two weapons and a special ability, and mashed buttons until everything stopped moving. Transistor starts at the same point, but moves far beyond it. Your core weapon is the Transistor but you get to pick four abilities to use at a time from a bank of learned abilities. Thus at the very start the level of customizability is higher – choosing four different abilities leads to a much higher number of combinations than three. Add on to that the fact that the upgrades and the abilities are the same resource – every ability you learn has three functions: an active, an upgrade, and a passive. You can only use each ability for one of its three functions in a given setup, however, so choose wisely. With this system, the number of different setups is nigh infinite and creates an extremely fun framework in which to experiment.

Thus far in the description, Transistor is still a hack-n-slash, though notably a complex and well-explored one. Transistor, however, doesn’t stop there. While you do have the option of playing the entire game in real time, you can instead treat it as a turn based strategy. Whenever you start a “turn”, all movement stops and you have free reign for a given amount of “time” – in turn currency. After you’ve planned out your turn you are able to execute it, seeing your immaculately planned series of strikes become reality.

The turn() interface. Admit it – you want to see how this works.

This turn() system is what allows the complexity of Transistor’s ability selection system to truly shine. Where the distinctions between your four abilities would likely be lost in a truly real-time setting, the ability to plan a combo allows you to use your set of abilities to their fullest and incentivize picking a set that you can really work with. It also creates a strange hybrid between a real-time strategy and a turn-based strategy, as you can seamlessly switch between the two even within the context of a single fight. At a minimum, it’s certainly an idea I would like to see more of.

Now, on to the bad. Transistor suffers from a few issues, but all are rooted in one core problem – the game is ridiculously short. I bought the game last night and had played about five hours when the credits rolled. I may play the “recurse” mode, but by the title I am lead to believe that I won’t see anything new. The combat system is amazing, but I felt that I had barely gotten the hang of it when I beat the game. The plot begins promisingly, but ends in a rush without real resolution because it just didn’t have enough time to develop. There were a few hard fights, but I never felt extremely challenged. It’s possible that the real difficulty of the game comes after the first victory, but I don’t think that’s good planning – the final boss fight should feel hard, on any play through. I came away feeling like I was ripped off. Not because of any monetary reasons, but because I really bought into the concept of the game in all aspects, from combat to plot, when it suddenly ended.

Overall, Transistor was a very good game. It proves that Bastion wasn’t a mistake – Supergiant knows how to use art, music, and gameplay to build a world and shape a plot within it. Moreover, Transistor brings up enough new ideas in its combat system that show that Supergiant isn’t skittish of trying new things that depart from the Bastion formula. At the end of the day though, Transistor’s short playtime is just too much of a handicap to argue for it being on the same level as Bastion. The real test, however, is what Supergiant will do from here. They had one hit game and managed to make a second one that, despite suffering from a key flaw, contained both the things that made the first great and new innovative material. I’m excited to see what they can do for their third game.