Beyond Earth is a doomed-from-the-start attempt to shift the familiar Civilization empire-building action into the future. It’s doomed because no matter how good Firaxis made this game, by setting it around the colonisation of an alien world it draws inevitable comparison with one of Firaxis’ very first products: Alpha Centauri, a game that’s rightfully regarded as one of the genre’s absolute classics. Beyond Earth was never going to live up to Alpha Centauri’s better qualities, both real and imagined, and I’ve tried to take this into account when playing the thing; Beyond Earth should be judged on its own merits, not the nostalgia-fuelled remembrance of a sixteen year-old predecessor. What surprises me, however — and especially so for a Firaxis title — is that even if you take SMAC out of the equation, even when you compare Beyond Earth to the modern Civilization franchise that spawned it, I think it fundamentally still isn’t a very good game.

Given my recent tendency to randomly dislike 4xes for almost entirely subjective reasons, I have dragooned Jim into writing this review with me. Jim liked Endless Legend, so you’re getting both sides of the coin here.

Jim: I am the only man on Earth to hold that title, according to my Steam Friends list. But now I shall be…the only man…BEYOND IT

Hentzau: Jim, why not quickly sum up what Beyond Earth is about. Apart from rerouting trade convoys.

Jim: Well I mean the blurb is you and your fine faction being sent into deepest space to make Earth 2.0. You touch down, have a look around and realise you’ve accidentally landed in a game of Civ 5.

Hentzau: Yes, that’s rather sad, isn’t it. Beyond Earth boasts several features to distinguish it from its parent franchise, but nearly all of them are half-baked or just flat-out inconsequential. It’s six hundred years in the future, but you’re still building farms, sending out explorers to find goody huts and generating culture to buy social policies. Probably 60, 70% of Beyond Earth is you doing the exact same things you did in Civilization V, except with a palette swap.

Jim: It’s very similar to the Civ 4: Colonization experience, really.

Hentzau: Oh, I’d argue that actually went further in distinguishing itself from Civ IV. And I hated that version of Colonization, so I’m not often inclined to be kind to it.

Jim: Yeah I found Colonization boring and I hated Civ 5 because…I’m still not really sure why but it is really deep-seated at this point. So really I should find myself despising this. And yet, I’ve actually enjoyed these first thirty hours, there’s a decent game below the blank, botoxed facade

Hentzau: “First” thirty hours. That implies there’s going to be more, which is interesting because I’ve burned out on it after just twenty. I came to the conclusion after two playthroughs that the game was too limited to allow for really different playstyles, and that the differences between the factions were superficial at best.

Jim: And some of that is true, certainly. We’ve already referred to it off-hand a few times but it’s bizarre how little effort has been put into fleshing out this world.

Hentzau: The factions are just so underwhelmingly generic. You’ve got Space France, Space Russia, Space China, all with indistinguishable minor bonuses to their gameplay like “10% stronger in combat” or “Gets a free tech every 10 social policies” – bonuses so small that their impact on how a game unfolds is minimal, like Firaxis were terrified of letting the player have any fun with their faction.

Jim: I realised at some point that they’d found my notebooks from when I was 12 and pinched the names I wrote on pretend maps. Polystralia is a personal favourite. After a lot of play you do begin to notice some common threads between factions – Space France will always race into a tech lead, Space America will have three massive cities, Space Russia will make godawful decisions, but it’s nothing intrinsic to their bonuses.

Hentzau: That’s part of the AI personality that’s existed since Civ IV, I think – Montezuma is always a warmongering dick, Isabella is your best friend if you’re the same religion as her and a rampaging terror if you’re not etc. etc.

Jim: Fucking Gandhi and his technology. But maybe the point is that they don’t want to shoehorn you into certain playstyles, maybe they want every game to be a choose your own four-X-ture

Hentzau: I’d agree that they don’t want factions to really be limited to playing the game one particular way, especially given the way the affinities work. This comes at the great expense of any sense of personality about them, though.

Jim: I think if they’d had fill-in-the-blanks factions in an interesting world that’ll be fine, but…what’s the planet called. Space Earth is a bit rubbish.

Hentzau: It doesn’t have a name. It’d be nice if you could name it yourself or something, but as far as the game is concerned it’s just a random agglomeration of dust and water with resources sprinkled around every few hexes for you to exploit.

Jim: I particularly like how they palette-swapped horses with buggalo and everyone from Earth is just cool with it. “Better make a beetle paddock”, they say, “that’s what we did in Civ 5”

Hentzau: Exactly what you’re getting out of these paddocks is never really explained. One type gives you chitin, and another gives… beetle drugs? Maybe that’s what the developers were on when they decided it was a good idea to just give everything space names without really changing the way it worked.

Jim: Beetle juice. Remind me not to say that two more times. And then there are the aliens. Now, initially, I liked these. Civ’s barbarians are always so anaemic, and something Beyond Earth does differently is make expanding a right pain in the arse. Huge swarming nests of dinosaurs block your every move and your first instinct is to go kill them all.

 Hentzau: There’s no real downside to doing this, weirdly. I expected slaughtering aliens en masse to really piss off the rest of the alien fraternity, so there’d be a genuine decision you had to make: clear out the aliens now and claim that prime spot of land, but at the cost of all the dead aliens’ friends paying you a visit later on. I thought they’d react to me like the natives in Colonization or the mindworms in Alpha Centauri.

Jim: As far as I understand there is some Alien Fight-o-Meter running in the background, certainly it’s referred to, but you never see it or its impact. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say you can just bat them out of the way though – the massive units like siege worms and kraken stay a threat to your expansion for a hundred turns or more. And taking down a nest complex is a lot of manpower.

Hentzau: That’s the major mechanical impact the aliens have. Where barbarians in Civ V forced you to build a military to fend off their attacks, aliens in Beyond Earth require a large standing army to eradicate so that you can expand your empire. One Wolf Beetle is the match of a basic human Soldier. The Drones and Raptor bugs are a pain to take on without tier 2 military units. And the nests will be spawning a new alien unit every three or four turns, meaning that you can’t just wear them down through gradual attrition. You need to go in and clean out the nests in one fell swoop, and this usually requires at least 4-6 military units per nest. More, if there’s multiple nests clustered together. And believe me, it’s hard to find good city spots that don’t have aliens sitting on top of them.

Jim: But yeah you’re right. It changes your behaviour but there is no coherency to the foreign fauna and flora. There’s green shit all over the place called miasma. It damages you a bit if you step in it, it takes three turns to clear, it means you change what you do but it doesn’t lead to anything greater.

 Hentzau: Hey now, it’s not just green. It’s a combination of green and purple that’s been cunningly chosen so that it effortlessly blends into whatever the underlying terrain type is, making it very difficult to spot and leading to a lot of accidental moves into it. Miasma blocks trade routes and heals aliens, and does precisely sod all else apart from inexplicably making the other factions upset when you clear this annoying blight away from your cities. I don’t get the feeling I’m taming an alien world, instead I feel like I’m playing Planet Janitor and doing tedious make-work to sweep away all of these obstacles in my path that have no real point other than to be obstacles in my path.

Jim: The problem we’re both having is that we’re mentally comparing to SMAC’s xenofungus and tutting. Beyond Earth’s sense of place is non-existent. I have absolutely no clue what I’m building most of the time beyond what bonus it infers. And the wonders are even worse – tiny little changes with nothing to hang them on. This matters to me! Science Fiction games need to go out of their way to give you a place to stand because you’re floating in space.

Hentzau: Plus four food in one of my cities! That’s not something that gets me particularly excited about building a wonder. A friend got it spot on when they said that while old-style Civilization wonders like Da Vinci’s Workshop may have been overpowered, they were far more interesting than the anaemic modern variety because building them feels like a powerful decision.

Jim: Though it does make for a more ‘balanced’ experience.

Hentzau: That’s not what I’m after, though. It’s taken Beyond Earth to make me realise it, but what I want is a game that is intentionally unbalanced in an interesting way. This is the only direct comparison to SMAC I’ll make in this review, but that was a game that spurned balance. Each faction was fundamentally broken if you played it right. Many of the wonders were potentially game-winning. But it was all held in “balance” because each faction was broken in a different way, and each of the wonders did very different things, making it very difficult to say that one was out-and-out better than the rest.

Jim: I can’t disagree with the joy of taking game systems and stretching them to the nth degree, I’ve always loved theorycrafting, minning to the max and so on. Thing is, this is still in Beyond Earth, it’s just hidden below a suspiciously pedestrian disguise. Our Clark Kent is…

Hentzau: Trade routes. Sodding trade routes.

Jim: The most powerful force on Space Earth.

Hentzau: The irony is that the trade system is pretty much a direct rip of the one introduced in Brave New World and there’s nothing really interesting or spacey about it. All they’ve done is whacked jetpacks onto the camels and dialed the yield up to eleven. You build your trade depot, which is unlocked by a really early technology, and then you can send out two trade routes from that city, and oh my god they are so broken. And not in the good way I just described, either.

Jim: Not broken, just…crucial to win. A normal size 1 city can produce maybe four of each of your classic civ resources (foods, hammers, glowing orange balls…). Buy it a couple of convoys and you can increase that by a factor of 10 or more. Done right, maybe half the resources of your empire will come from trade routes. But like all great power, this comes with a cost. You must manually resend these convoys, by hand, every twenty turns. So the game becomes this balancing act between how many resources you need and how arsed you are to select the same city from a dropdown menu multiple times every turn. WHAT WILL SPACE JANITOR DO NOW?

Hentzau: Later on you get a building that can increase number of trade routes per city by 1. That’s three trade routes per city, multiplied by number of cities, divided by twenty to get the number of times you have to deal with that bloody trade route popup every turn. The trade interface is terrible and doesn’t give you an option to auto-resend or even highlight your previous route, meaning you have to check through a list of all potential trade routes from that city – which, again, is going to scale in proportion to the number of cities that you have — to figure out where the hell you sent it last.

Jim: This is the reason that I recommend playing on a small map. I think a lot of these problems are problems of scale. You can just about deal with the busywork, you are cramped enough that aliens can’t just be routed around or ignored, civilizations get right into each others grilles from the get-go and grudges can actually develop. I’ve really enjoyed my small map games, whereas the eight player marathon broke my will to minmax. That’s not something I say lightly

Hentzau: I’d agree with that. But then I’d also say that half the problem with the game’s scale is that they’ve taken most of the brakes off of going wide (i.e. having a large sprawling empire). Happiness has been replaced by “Health”, and the malus for having low health is far less than the malus for having low happiness in Civ V. This is not an inherently bad thing, but when each additional city you build multiplies the number of tedious maintenance chores you have to do, actually taking advantage of the space available on a larger map will quickly burn you out unless you really, really like micromanaging cities.

Jim: Can I just mention that whoever did the UI for cities needs a good hearty slap? Somehow there’s a few steps backward on there from even Civ III. Everything’s hidden in the weirdest ways.

Hentzau: Like build queues. A fundamental feature of the modern 4X is locked away from the player by default in Beyond Earth. To unlock it you have to check a tiny grey box on top of a large grey background, and only then will it trust you with the fearsome ability to queue your build orders. I forget how renaming cities was hidden but it was even more laughable.  Firaxis have always had a problem with their UIs, but Beyond Earth is their worst effort yet.

Jim: I think they did want to do something different. I like a lot of underlying ideas they’re trying to implement to change the Civ formula (we’ve been playing that game for 20 years now, so fair enough) but in a lot of cases they fell short. However there are two new inclusions which I really love and they dovetail nicely with each other. First off, the tech web is the most magnificent sight in strategy gaming. I beheld it and I made the same noise as those aliens in Toy Story.

Hentzau: Hell, even I liked the tech web. It’s plagued by the same UI issues as the rest of the game, but it’s absolutely thematically appropriate for a game about future science. You start in the centre and progress outward via nodes which each have two or three techs on them. The first tech on each node is cheap, and gets you the basic buildings and improvements associated with this research area. The other techs are more expensive and give you more specific bonuses that are very powerful within their niche. The basic tech has to be researched before you can progress to the next node, but once you’ve done that you can just ignore the other techs unless you really really want them. The web is only about four nodes deep from centre to edge but you can go in literally any direction you want, through any route you want. It’s a tremendous amount of freedom to offer to player in their research choices.

Jim: It took me a few games to realise the implications of this, I must admit, and a few more before I actually roughly knew where stuff was on the web, but… you can beeline for anything. Every single tech in the game is unlockable in six or fewer steps. The amount of potential strategies this opens up is huge, and this is part of what’s driving me on at the moment. It makes me want to experiment and gives me the tools to do so.

Hentzau: What I particularly liked about it is how effectively it embodies the potential of future science to go haring off down any one of a hundred different paths. We don’t know precisely how technology is going to evolve over the coming centuries, and Beyond Earth wisely doesn’t attempt to constrain it with a narrow research tree. Instead it’s the one part of the game where it says “It’s your story – you choose what happens” and it actually works.

Jim: It’s also tied into the other new system – affinities. Some techs have a red/orange/blue marker that indicates you are making certain choices about humanity’s future, roughly corresponding to humans, robots and hippies. There’s this Bioware-esque tracker of how far down each path you’re going and the levels decide how your units improve or evolve, and the types of buildings you can construct. It’s hard to max out more than one of these in the time you have, so I think this is another solid way to make you choose the future.

Hentzau: Thematically the affinities are a great idea. They even bleed through into the everyday game narrative through quest decisions that occasionally pop up – I think at one point I ended up launching the uploaded consciousness of the population of one of my colonies into space where they could keep an eye on things. The big problem I had with them, though… well, I had two big problems. First was that they weren’t exclusionary enough; Purity (humans are the best) and Harmony (aliens are the best) should have been mutually exclusive, and yet there’s nothing stopping me from mixing and matching these affinities to get the advantages of both. Sure, I can’t max out both of them, but the fact that I can progress very far down both of these affinities in the same game means that my choice of Purity or Harmony as the “dominant” affinity has that much less meaning. It could just as easily have been the other one as far as the game is concerned, and so it ends up feeling rather superficial.

The second problem is the way you unlock affinity points. As Jim says, you get most of them by researching special techs that come with the affinity points attached, but in almost every case the affinity points were the sole reason to research that tech in the first place. So it’s not like you make the decision of “Let’s splice our DNA with that of an alien for improved combat performance” and pick up some Harmony points as a consequence; instead you just beeline for the points and unlock your hybrid units once you’ve progressed far enough down the tree. It feels less like these are reflections of the individual decisions I’ve made in the development of my society, and more like the affinities themselves are the be-all and end-all of determining how my society develops. And that’s just a matter of amassing enough points. It’s just inherently less interesting.

Jim: There’s certainly room for improvement on this system, but I don’t object to the points influencing you down certain paths – that just reflects the snowball nature of one ideology taking control. And similarly, while there is nothing to stop you mixing and matching purity and harmony, it is at the price of not getting the higher tier purity/harmony units and bonuses. As a balancing act, it’s executed quite well and it again ties into that “tell your own story” thing I keep harking back to. And there’s one more amplification of that idea: Quests

Hentzau: Quests are Beyond Earth’s way of making everything seem a little more organic. Most of them aren’t really quests in the sense that we usually understand them; mostly it’s a case of choosing additional bonuses granted by your buildings (do you want your Thorium Reactor to produce two extra energy or one extra production?), but there’s a few meatier ones unlocked when you’ve advanced far enough down the relevant affinity tree that provide some much-needed flavour to your affinity choice. The launching-colony-consciousness-into-space was a good one for Supremacy, and Harmony and Purity also get appropriately themed quests that reflect their respective evolutions of human society. The most interesting thing Beyond Earth does with the quests, however, is that it uses them to tie its victory conditions into a narrative.

Jim: Obviously you can just kill everyone and that takes no affinity whatsoever, but the others are different. Rather than tie your victory to culture/technology/gold, the victories open to you are dependent on the path you have taken. A harmony civ will attempt to hack into the planet’s conciousness, a supremacy civ will head back to cleanse Earth, and so on. These generally boil down to building the appropriate giant monolith and defending it, admittedly, and there’s a problem with the weak fiction of the game making it seem like these huge changes have come from nowhere. Still, more interesting and less secure than most of the Civ endgames I’ve endured.

Hentzau: I’m not sure I’d agree. Jamming units into the Emancipation portal for twenty turns was soul-destroying, while I resorted to killing everyone on the planet rather than sit through the Promised Land victory. However, the idea is interesting, even if the mechanical execution of it is a failure. I’d like to see another 4X take this idea and run with it, since I think that if you can make the conditions themselves sufficiently varied the narrative will do the rest for you. Even Emancipation wouldn’t have been so bad if the actual mechanic behind it hadn’t been quite so transparently shit; if I’d maybe had some indication that the robot armies I was sending through the gate to “liberate” the population of Earth from their weak, fleshy bodies were doing more than filling up an arbitrary victory counter. With a bit more interactivity they could shine. As it is, they’re just another example of Beyond Earth’s weird tendency to make the player repeat the same pointless task fifty times before they can get anywhere.

Jim: Yeah, weird how we keep coming back to that. There’s a genuine attempt here, despite that fact that it is in so many ways a slightly recoloured Civ 5, to make a different Civ experience with some genuinely nice ideas, but the execution, the surrounding fiction, isn’t strong enough for me to say “This is a game you should buy” – yet. But I am still enjoying the experience.

In Beyond Earth, you don’t make big sweeping decisions, you make hundreds of little choices. In some cases, those choices are needless busywork – trade routes being the prime example, but the compound effects are potentially very powerful, and mean that for the first Civ in forever, the endgame can be drastically different from one game to the next, because you’ve focused on completely different sets of technology and ideas. The problem is they haven’t gone far enough with this process, they haven’t committed to it.

Hentzau: I think maybe it was a question of resources. It may sound harsh, but Beyond Earth strikes me as a product made on a limited budget by the Firaxis B-team. It has a lot of fresh ideas that, if they’d been given the resources and time to be polished and refined, could have really lifted the game above its origins as a total conversion of Civilization V. Time and again, though, it’s held back by an apparently shoestring budget that ensures too much of that Civilization DNA shows on the surface for it to really be anything more than a pale reflection of its parent that lacks any real personality of its own.

The future of mankind is such fertile ground for the imagination, and I’m very disappointed that — tech web aside — Firaxis’s latest take on it is such a timid offering that’s afraid to take any real chances or make any worthwhile statements. The one potential lifeline for Beyond Earth is that the one thing Firaxis are consistently good at is polishing up underwhelming games through patches and expansion packs. Hopefully Beyond Earth will get the same treatment Civilization V did, and if it does it’s very possible that in two or three years it will have evolved into an excellent 4X. The raw material is certainly good enough. For now, though, I’d have to recommend that you steer well clear.

The post Thoughts: Beyond Earth appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

INTERIOR: A well-lit tavern. The sound of quaffing and carousing fills the air, along with the twangs of some unmentionable stringed instrument. The camera focuses in on one table to reveal three men deep in discussion. Observing the noble cut of their clothes, the fine pleating of their beards and the ostentatious jangle of their chains and jewellery, one would suppose these gentlemen to be talking of matters of great import, of the rise of kingdoms or the fall of grain prices. We zoom in further, to reveal they’re…talking about Torchlight 2.

Hentzau: So we’re all sitting here, trying to figure out how to kickstart this review/discussion.

Jim: Okay, easy one to start. Why the hell did you buy Torchlight 2. Sinny?

Sinny: I bought it because ARPGs feel like games that should be cheap, simple and quick to play. Torchlight was all of those things, and Torchlight 2 promised to patch up what was missing. I know Jim was somewhat ambivalent towards the original, why did you get Torchlight 2, Hent?

Hentzau: I have been trying to figure that out for the last five minutes. Trying to peer back through the thick fog of boredom and loathing to see what my thought process was before I bought the game. Largely it was a matter of inertia; Torchlight 2 was going to come out before Diablo 3, it was going to provide an ARPG fix while Blizzard put the finishing touches on their Ecce Homo mural, it wouldn’t matter so much that it was good just so long as it existed. Then it was delayed. Then it was delayed some more. Then Diablo 3 was released, and almost immediately afterwards the Torchlight 2 preorder came up, and at this point I’d been waiting so long I blindly jumped aboard the nearest 4-pack without really paying attention to what Diablo 3 might have meant for the genre in general.

Jim: I think ambivalent is nowhere near strong enough to describe my love-hate relationship with the original. I’ve always shied away from these obsessive-compulsive clicky clicky RPGS, but I played Torchlight until the tendons in my wrist ached and that is pretty rare because you could crack nuts with them or use them for bridge suspension they are just that strong. I got obsessed with it for a week, rushed through it and ended up despising not only the game, but myself. I found my old review of it a few weeks ago, it was very succinct. “The worst game ever made, made perfectly.”

Sinny: So we’ve got me, a guy who picked it up specifically as an antidote to Diablo 3, Hent, who bought it to hold him over until Diablo 3, and then Jim in the middle, who can’t work out whether to punch it in the crotch or marry it. This should be a relatively even-handed review, I should think! I’ll start with the sweeping statements then: Torchlight 2 isn’t worth any awards this year, but it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made.

Jim: Justify yourself!

Sinny: There’s nothing here that moves the industry forward or emerges from a flock of doves to the strains of a string quartet. Nor is there anything that feels so polished, cinematic, or packed with human flourishes that it deserves a place in history as a shining example of videogame development. What Torchlight 2 does is take a genre, find out every idea that is key and core to it, and then removes everything else. And it does it in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost that, yes, Diablo 3 tries to.

Hentzau: Oh, that’s certainly what Torchlight 2 does. The problem is that the genre is the ARPG, and the key ideas — the core concepts that are at the very heart of any ARPG worthy of the name — are hitting things, and loot. Torchlight 2 has plenty of both, but that’s all it has. There’s a lot of colourful invective thrown around about ARPGs about how they are basically games about watching numbers get bigger. The numbers on your items. The numbers on your character. The numbers floating out of the baddies’ heads when you smash them in the face with your giant wrench. This is certainly a part of their appeal; however, it is only a part, like butter in a sandwich. Eating butter on its own is probably not something I’d choose to indulge in all that frequently; it needs something more added to the mix in order to make it interesting and give it that addictive APRG tang. What Torchlight 2 is missing, and what it appears to have consciously removed, is the bacon.

Jim: There’s something that really bugs me about the streamlining process and it’s that complexity is necessary for a game to be a dynamic and interesting experience. Torchlight does pursue this gradual chipping away of everything that could be a hassle or a bore with a particular ruthlessness that I think drains a lot of the potential fun out of the game. You start with this overly complex, kind of sharp statue, fine, you sand it a bit. You don’t remove all the arms and legs to make it easier to deal with.

Sinny: I think there’s something to be said for knocking the arms and legs off to achieve a particular effect. I worry that this review might end up at a rather depressing conclusion, because the thing I appreciate most about Torchlight 2 is that it has that satisfying ebb and flow that Bejewelled has. It’s this “blissful productivity” that game designer Jane McGonigal talks about – this feeling of getting things done, even if the final goal is sort of nebulous or maybe entirely non-existent. It’s why you arrange things in neat piles when you’re bored, or why it’s sometimes strangely satisfying to tidy a room. And it’s also why playing Torchlight 2 is simultaneously frenetic, and almost meditative. I suppose the question is – is this an acceptable goal for an ARPG?

Jim: I can see where you’re coming from but I think that clashes with how they’ve packaged the game. Bejewelled looks like it’s meant to go on forever, you play until you’re too bored to carry on, but T2 is a campaign. It’s got throwaway mechanics poured into this epic RPG mould (save the world, kill the bad guy). I’d argue that in the map design stakes, they’ve taken a step backwards from the original. In the first, your goals were “clear this floor of the dungeon, get to the next level”. It was simple, measurable progress that was clearly compulsive. Now, it’s bigger and prettier but there’s no flow. Main areas are gigantic without focal points, and the various event caves dotted around are more or less identical. I think my problem isn’t with the general idea of mindless questing, it’s how it’s implemented.

Sinny: I agree that level design takes a step back here, though perhaps for different reasons: I have a sneaking suspicion that all random map generation has been removed in the sequel, which is a shame. That said, I like the open-plan hub areas. To me, a lot of the areas conveyed a sense of adventure: the swirling snowscapes punctuated with fiery-red caves to quest into; the gaping chasms cutting through the desert. It’s more organic than the original’s cramped, single-minded design. And the art style supports that too, with big brush strokes and the obligatory abundance of particle effects throwing fireflies at you one second and sandstorms the next.

The art is just one of the ways that Torchlight 2 distinguishes itself from a depressing trend throughout Western RPGs to always include dark medieval nonsense, self-important extended metaphors wrapped up in exposition, and the colour grey. Torchlight 2 is vibrant, colourful, and juicy – that great game terminology for a game that moves and shakes and spurts with every player interaction. It’s a lovely-looking game, I think.

Hentzau: The art style goes for a relatively simple and spartan look, probably to make the most of the limited resources the developer had to begin with. NPCs and baddies are picked out in pastel, painterly shades that are a long way from the grimdark look so beloved of other entrants in the ARPG genre. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this and I actually think it works well for rendering the game’s world. Unfortunately the environment I run around in is background only; it generates atmosphere but it is secondary to the creatures populating it and the items you prise from their cold dead fingers, and here I think the game misses two crucial points. The first is that dress-up is a large part of ARPGs. Make the items you pick up and equip look good on the character; when I find an orange pair of trousers I want them to look just as awesome as the stats imply. I don’t want them to look like a pair of skintight lycra pants. It’s not true of all equipment, but most of it is visually bland and unexciting, making the finding of loot that much less interesting.

Jim: In theory the game looks fine, it’s consistent and colourful and full of little elemental fireworks. It’s just that they went for the archetypes of the RPG world. Forests! Snowy forests! Deserts! Fucking swamps! There was no point where I was impressed or cheered or creeped out by the art, but it is competently made.

Sinny: Sure, but Torchlight 2 is Archetype: The Game…

Hentzau: There’s actually a reason the game is set up like that, Jim, but that’s something we shall discuss later. AS I WAS SAYING, my second point is that killing baddies is also a large part of ARPGs. Make the baddies you kill distinctive and recognisable. Make their attacks easily-identifiable. Remember that the player is going to spend pretty much the entire game in this zoomed out isometric view, and that looking at them from fifty metres up at a 45 degree angle is going to make them look very different from what they look like close-up. I’m not sure if this counts as visual design or animation or whatever, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the name of a single baddie I killed in this game, they were that unmemorable to me. They were just things; swarms of things that ran towards my character to be dispatched without thought or mercy. It’s almost like the game has taken its slavish streamlining of the ARPG to its logical conclusion and rendered the concept of enemies down to its most abstract form possible. They simply exist, and Torchlight 2 deems this sufficient.

Jim: I don’t think that’s just a product of the visual design, though, it’s the mechanics underlying them that render everything a little bit of a soupy mess. Ultimately, you barely actually look at your character and what they’re doing. Your two friends, the things that you keep your eyes fixed upon, are the health globule and the map. The bucket o’ blood because the only thing that is happening in these fights is that health is going down and you need to stop it going TOO far down, and the map because it’s impossible to have a general idea of the space you’re in without it. It’s a fine health sphere, sure, there’s little bubbles in it and everything, but it’s not what I want to spend my weeknights glaring at.

Hentzau:  Ah, but the importance of the health globe is actually rather down to the game’s poor visual design/feedback in communicating damage spikes to the player. You’ll be fighting a bunch of things just like the last ten bunches of things you thought, and everything will go well at first, and then suddenly your health will start dropping dramatically with nothing appearing on screen to indicate you’re experiencing a particularly damaging attack except the rapidly-emptying health globe. So combat largely consists of watching this thing and pressing “1” to gulp down a health potion whenever your health gets too low rather than, you know, fighting the bad guys.

Sinny: I think a lot of this might come down to the game’s insistence on throwing colours and shapes at you from the get-go, so as it tries to ramp up the difficulty it’s hard to make things bigger or badder than they were before. But I’m not sure I agree entirely about the visual signposting or the health dependence. Some classes have their issues, but I had quite fun combat experiences with others. Which classes have you both played as?

Jim: Engineer! I cleverly named her “Enjimeer”. There’s bits and pieces I really liked, the variety of robots you can have sauntering after you is a highlight, but as I played more the game did seem to boil down to the health thing. See, I was trying to play elegantly at first, I had a healing robot and I was determined not to use potions because I hate using potions, so I was running away to my portable dispenser all the time. It was tense! It was sometimes exciting! I died a lot! Then I realised that the game spits more potions at you than you can physically carry and there wasn’t really much point in continuing to cripple myself, so I stashed them all in one of those American ball game hats with the two straws going directly into my face.

Hentzau:  Engineer, with an additional hour spent as a Berserker to see if it was just the class that was the problem. Spoiler: it wasn’t.

Sinny: The classes take a few hours to open up, which is a big problem with the way they’re designed, but the Berserker has a lot of interesting skill combinations that encourage you to dash both towards and away from danger. I found that I was focusing on healing a lot less, and more about acrobatic skill usage when playing as him.

Hentzau: TRAP SPRUNG. This is the point where I start railing against Torchlight 2’s skill system and how much I hate it. Specifically, the almost total lack of respec capability. Torchlight 2 lets you pay to refund the last three skill points you spent, which at least allows you to try new skills, but skills on their own do not make a character. You see, in most modern ARPGs skills combine into what we call builds: multiple skills which work together to form something more effective than the individual skills on their own. Torchlight 2’s limited respec system makes the testing of builds impossible. If you’ve invested in the hit-things-really-hard ability and then ten levels down the line realise it doesn’t synergise particularly well with the robomancer your character has become, there’s no way to get those skill points back. It’s intentionally letting you fall into the trap of crippling yourself if you don’t already know what all of the skills do, which I regard as unforgiveable in a modern game. It discourages experimentation, is what it does; there’s loads of skills but you’ll only ever use a small subset of them because bringing in an additional skill is risky when it might not work with the ones you already have.

Sinny: I feel like we’re butting against the same point more than once here, which is that Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2 embrace very different design philosophies, and Hentzau and I seem to come on opposite sides. With Diablo 3’s abandonment of skill points, the player is protected from cornering themselves with a build, but with that loses the feeling of genuine uniqueness and specialisation that permanence confers. Equally, Torchlight 2 – while it tries to let you see how a skill feels with the limited respec points – ultimately is willing to punish the player for changing tactics halfway through a game.

The problem with allowing arbitrary re-customisation of a character is that you’re left with choices feeling meaningless and entirely temporary. While it might be kinder to players (both the expert experimenters and the novice alike) to allow hacks and changes galore, for me it dilutes part of playing an RPG – which is that I chose this path, not this one, and that seeing a pistol drop is a flash of excitement because pistols are my thing.

Whichever side of the debate you fall on, though – Torchlight 2 has already been cracked open, and infinite respeccing is modded in. That’s the beauty of the way this game has been designed. Friendliness extends beyond design decisions, and right through to the openness of the game itself. No Internet connection required.

Hentzau: They’re not meaningless, though! If a player tries a skill and a build and doesn’t like it they have gained valuable information: that build is not for them. Why do they have to be penalised for finding this out? If I try a build and it doesn’t work, I don’t want to have to start a whole new character to try another one. There’s enough skills that a player can spend literally hours fine-tuning their build and homing in on one that works best for them. This is something Diablo 3 got very, very right; I went through like five or six iterations on my Wizard before I finally settled on something that felt right to me, and the game didn’t make me roll five or six Wizards to do this.

Jim: I think conceptually I agree with Sinny, to be honest. Hard choices should be made and you should be punished for making them wrong. All the information is there, dammit, and if you want to go around making wrong decisions then I’m not helping you. There’s also a lot of give built into the system if you are sub-optimal, because you die and you respawn and that’s it, there’s no cash lost if you don’t want to, there’s no experience penalty. I mean if you’re playing Ironman yes, but I suppose by that point you have to accept that you should know what you’re doing. That’s not to say I think that Torchlight’s skill system is particularly great, because the skills are, with a few exceptions, phenomenally boring, all plus percents and plus damage a bit and okay yes the occasional helpful robot. Also, nothing really seems to stack together.

Hentzau: Arguably any flexibility that exists in the system does so because the combat is based in large part around constantly guzzling health potions. As long as you don’t run out of health potions you will win.

Sinny: I don’t know how the Engineer works later in the game, but I know that a lot of its abilities are geared towards firing-and-forgetting, particularly the robot pet stuff. Other classes definitely have synergistic skills, though, but not as many as an ARPG should have, certainly. One thing I do feel, both from writing this review and reading others, is that spending six hours with each of Torchlight 2’s classes gives a better picture of the game than spending twenty-four hours with one of them.

Jim: Playing it through with one class doesn’t give you a picture? It’s going to take me thirty hours to finish my first playthrough and I don’t think I could take much more.

Sinny: I said it gives you a better picture. Even at thirty hours, if you were truly drained at that point, you paid a third of what Diablo 3 is currently going for on Amazon.

Hentzau: And so we come to the elephant in the room: the Diablo franchise and Torchlight’s love-hate relationship with its older, pricier sibling. Torchlight was a modern update of Diablo, in that you descended through a dungeon underneath a town to slay the boss at the bottom. Torchlight 2 is unarguably a modern update of Diablo 2; the action transitions to an overworld and you travel from town to town chasing the bad guy. The levels are even the same, since you start off in your green foresty level (although it swiftly transitions to snow), and then act two is the desert level, and then act three is the swamp level. If you really love Diablo 2 I guess this isn’t so much of a problem, except…

…well, here’s something it took me a while to realise about Torchlight 2 and why I hated it so much: it missed its window. Diablo 3 was taking such a gosh-darned long time — and there had been so few other ARPG titles in the interregnum — that a modern update of Diablo 2 wouldn’t have seemed anachronistic at all. But then Torchlight 2 was delayed to the point where it released after Diablo 3, and the moment Blizzard’s effort came out Torchlight 2 instantly aged twelve years and started to resemble a misguided Spanish lady’s attempt to restore life to a dated work of art. Diablo 3 isn’t perfect by any means and there is much about it that I didn’t like, but it’s taken Torchlight 2’s deliberately retro approach to make me realise that many of the changes it made to the formula were changes for the better.

Sinny: I think I understand everything you’re saying about missing its window, and Diablo 3 shifting the goalposts somewhat, yet for me I was happy to see the Diablo series sail off in search of new waters. Just as Team Fortress 2 retained the fun and vibrancy of first-person shooting, in the face of gritty, noisy, moody militaryfests like CoD, Torchlight 2 offered a respite from the course Blizzard was charting for the ARPG genre, and allowed me to enjoy the genre in the way I wanted to.

Perhaps this is the sad tale of Torchlight 2 – that it turned up for a big fight with Diablo 3 behind the bike sheds only to find it had graduated and gone off to big school. These two fanbases, these two opposing schools of thought on the genre, they’re really not talking about the same types of game any more? I think that’s okay though. I think it means that the old ways get to continue to live and look beautiful and have Internet co-op, while the huge development machine that is Blizzard pushes the core of the genre in the direction it believes it needs to go in?

Jim: Beautiful as that is, I would point out that I am someone who eschews other ARPGS, who has never played a second of Diablo, and those flaws still stuck out like the massive thumbs of a novelty foam hand. I’m sure that Diablo 3 has hammered a few more nails into its general reception but T2 brought that on itself by being such a predictable and derivative game. We haven’t even mentioned the plot or the cutscenes or any of the attempts to stitch their reasonably-fun monster-smashing into a big ol’ game, but they are so, so awful. I think the problem is that it overreached. Torchlight was successful and deserved to be successful, it was a cheap and cheerful game that tried doing things in a completely new and streamlined way and novelty counts for a lot. Torchlight 2 is, well, bloated beyond fun.

Sinny: To me, it’s the realised full game that Torchlight was the proof of concept for.

Hentzau: And to me it’s obsolete. Redundant. Supernumerary. I appreciate that not everyone has the moolah to splash out on the premium rates Blizzard charges for their games, but Torchlight 2 isn’t really an alternative to Diablo 3. It’s something different, and to my mind inferior Its low price point is certainly a point in its favour, but that’s not going to help if it’s not what you were looking for in the first place.

Sinny: I’m sticking with my composite ship-sailing, schoolyard-sparring metaphor. 2012 has pinned the Diablo and the Torchlight series to the opposite ends of the ARPG genre. I’m genuinely excited to see where both of them go next, and the fact that Torchlight 2 could do this without changing its core philosophy is really wonderful.

Jim: I’m middle class, I look up to him and down to him.

The post Diablog: Torchlight 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After the last diablog was so rapturously received (by which I mean three people said they liked it) Jim and I decided to team up to review another game we’d both been playing recently: Bioshock 2.

Jim: Sometimes you’re watching TV, around about the hour when you’re starting to give up on being a productive citizen, and you’ll catch a glimpse of a half-remembered childhood hero, trying to make it big in America as a singer, or filling in the rubbish cooking quotient of Celebrity Masterchef. “Gosh”, you think, “are they still going?” Similar thoughts crossed my mind when Bioshock 2 flashed up in the Steam sales. I mean, Bioshock had been big when it was released. Big Daddies were an iconic design of 2007, the incredibly meaningful choices were more heavily trumpeted than the walls of Jericho. Then everyone played it, realised a lot of that was blustery bluff that masked a reasonably pleasant, novel-looking shooter, and moved on with their lives. 2K weren’t done, however, and brought out Bioshock 2 a few years later, to a chorus of world-weary shrugs. What the hell, it was £3.75, I reasoned. Let’s see what it’s like.

Hentzau: The road to hell is paved with cheap Steam purchases. I enjoyed Bioshock for what it was; an inoffensive enough shooter that didn’t do anything to justify stealing the “shock” nomenclature from System Shock, and which ended up being an average game attached to a spectacular opening as a result. The sequel, though. The sequel’s hook is that you’re playing as a Big Daddy, one of the lumbering armoured juggernauts of destruction that features so prominently on the publicity material for both games and which is the Bioshock franchise’s signature monster. How could they possibly screw that up?

Jim: You still had these memories, didn’t you, of battling those diving monstrosities in the first game. I loved that I had to work up to those kinds of fights, setting elaborate plans and traps and just generally thinking before I shot.

Hentzau: Oh yes. Dodging red-hot rivets, losing half my health to the drill attack — part of the morbid attraction of that kind of power asymmetry is that after dying for the umpteenth time the player mutters under their breath about what they’d be able to do if they had those weapons and that obscene health pool. Bioshock 2 was supposed to fulfil this wish; the concept as stated is pretty much the dream of anyone who played the original Bioshock.

Jim: And so you wake up as said mini-godzilla, espy a splicer bearing down on you and begin to laugh at his puny gun and his puny armour and…oh, you’re dead. Bioshock 2 did not trust you with that level of power, so it made a compromise – you can keep some of the attributes of the Big Daddies, but not all. So out go the obscene levels of armour and health, the powerful attacks and the inbuilt rocket launcher, but you can keep the incredibly slow movement. And the drill.

Hentzau: Except the drill now does sod-all damage to begin with. And has an ammo supply. Which, when depleted, forces you to clumsily flail at nearby enemies with all the brute strength of an enraged flamingo. A power fantasy this is not.

Jim: Basically, they decided that you should play a human who just happens to be wearing a fancy suit. You were forced to mainly use guns, to go for headshots, to be precise and stealthy and everything one of those massive fuckers definitely is not.

Hentzau: The in-game excuse for this is that the player is supposed to be an earlier model of Big Daddy, one which is, and I quote, “a more streamlined and agile type of Big Daddy, meaning they are not as heavily armored, but are faster and more maneuverable”. They got the not as heavily armoured part right, but strangely they forgot the part where the player was supposed to be faster and more maneuverable. In Bioshock 2 — at least to begin with — you move at the speed of a wounded sloth. Just getting from point A to point B is a chore, and you can forget actually trying to strafe or dodge in any way, which is kind of a pain when every single enemy in the game will take off at least a third of your health bar in one hit. There were times when I wished the game was third-person because it would have been quite comical to see this hulking behemoth being beaten to death by two thugs wielding iron pipes.

Jim: And so the game’s response to that difficulty is to literally slap a band-aid on it. There’s a lot of medpacks around and you guzzle them like there’s no tomorrow. It was rare I could make it through an area without needing one or two, and I know I was playing it on hard difficulty (because this year isn’t onerous enough), but it’s weird that you had that problem even on medium and being the world’s greatest manshooter.

Hentzau: Well I probably wouldn’t go that far, although it’s worth mentioning the aiming reticule is a massive empty circle which actively dissuades precision targeting. But yes, even on medium I was chugging at least one health pack after every fight. At the beginning of the game, before I had a full stock of gene tonics and health upgrades and my Big Daddy was at his most fragile, I even dipped into the difficulty settings to check that I hadn’t accidentally managed to misclick Hard when I’d started it. But no, this was medium. I really didn’t feel like I should be coming out of a fight with a couple of basic enemies nearly half-dead. This absurd level of vulnerability is completely incongruous with what you are supposed to be, and did an awful lot to turn me against Bioshock 2 from the outset.

Jim: Given your size and noise made it impossible to get the drop on them until you get that one tonic that makes you invisible, yeah. The other way they tried to balance it was via the vita-chambers, presumably. If the difficulty was too high, if you ended up dying a lot, well, didn’t matter, you could just jump out of that magical tube, sparkling new. I loathe the very idea of those things, though, it takes away all tension in a fight if you know you can never actually die..

Hentzau: Admittedly it’s just an active gameplay substitute for your average FPS player’s standard operating procedure, which is to quicksave every sixty seconds. However, I feel the vita chambers are more insidious than that because they basically remove the penalty of failure that underpins all FPS games. Die in Bioshock and — oh no! — you have a thirty second walk back to where you were, with everything else being exactly as you left it. Actually it’s often less because the damn things are so ubiquitous.

Jim: I did disable them and quicksave like the spawny git I am, but I still curled my mouth into a dismissive sneer every time I walked past one. And that’s just the fundamentals of fighting, there’s an awful lot that Bioshock staples on in order to try to keep these things exciting. Plasmids, for example, were one of the big selling points of the original game, a sort of organic magic that, once again, Big Daddies didn’t have but you do for no reason this time because you’re special.

Hentzau: Did you ever use any plasmid that wasn’t the electro-stunning attack?

Jim: Occasionally I had to melt ice to get some ammo, and I quite liked the one that summoned security bots, but honestly it was a chore switching between those things in combat. If an enemy chucked a bin at you, I estimate he’d have to do it from around thirty miles away to give you enough time to switch to the telekinesis one to fling it back.

Hentzau: This is especially annoying when a lot of the mini-boss fights are built on using specific plasmids within a split-second window. Electrocute the Big Sister to stop her crawling over the walls! Catch her firebombs and throw them back at her with telekinesis! There were all these special attacks that I was supposed to block with plasmids, but which I had to soak up because I had no chance of switching to the correct plasmid and firing it off correctly in the heat of the moment.

Jim: Most of the fights in the end do devolve into a sort of frantic slow-motion backwards jog, firing off rivets in the general vicinity of the opponents heads and hoping they connected. Occasionally you’d spam out some electricity and see what happened. The key thing missing, I suppose, is control. You never felt master of the fight (until right near the end), you were this breakable, endangered diver boy who was constantly hiding in alcoves.

Hentzau: The thing that gets me about this is that there are a couple of gene tonics — Drill Lurker and Natural Camouflage — that are actively supposed to promote stealthy gameplay. Stealth. Gameplay. In a game about a one-ton armoured bastard carrying around guns roughly the size of a filing cabinet. The approach to the whole thing is just so conventional and completely backwards to what it should be.

Jim: You’re also an investigative Big Daddy, don’t forget. Early on in the game you stumble across a camera and the most ludicrous concept of all is introduced: research.

Hentzau:  This is yet another of many, many things which have been recycled wholesale from Bioshock. It worked in the first game when you were a stranger to Rapture; you’d never seen any of these mutated monstrosities before and the existence of a magical doohickey that let you find out their strengths and weaknesses made thematic — if not exactly logical — sense. Here, though, you are a mutated monstrosity, and instead of laying waste to your foes you’re wandering around taking holiday snaps of them so that you can gather research points to get a small bonus to damage or whatever.

Jim: It was another layer of ballache onto the already horrible mini-boss fights that you were constantly having, too, a couple of times I’d sweat my way through some big daddy fight only to find that I’d forgotten to get the research done at the start, which I knew I was going to need. And let’s not forget that amazing research bonus for the thuggish splicer.

Hentzau: Ah yes, that fantastically complex technology that you had to perfect through hours of painstaking observation and analysis of your opponents’ behaviour in combat: a bigger wallet.

Jim: I was already crying with laughter when I realised there was a wallet cap, and that you could expand it just sent me over the edge. Back to those bossfights, though. Bioshock’s marketing was all about the confrontations with the Big Daddies, as we’ve already mentioned. Bioshock 2, unsurprisingly, is exactly the same. How many times would you say you’d slogged through that exact same fight?

Hentzau: Fifteen, I think. Or at least, that’s roughly the number of Little Sisters you can rescue/murder, which means that’s the number of Big Daddies you have to kill.

Jim: And then every time you kill them you go through two more identical “stand here and get rushed by waves of baddies” fights as your adopted Little Sister gathers Adam from appropriately glowy corpses for you.

Hentzau: That’s if you made the decision to save them, mind. Killing them presumably circumvented the whole tedious process, as did just stuffing them into a vent straight away (the game doesn’t tell you this is an option, though). However, in order to get over the difficulty hump and become less fragile you need gene tonics, which means you need Adam, which means you need to stand over the Little Sister and protect her from hordes of splicers while she gathers Adam. Skipping straight to vent-stuffing is only a viable option after you’ve unlocked most or all of the plasmids/tonics and you don’t need the Adam any more. It’s a remarkably unpleasant, repetitive gameplay mechanic which, yet again, is lifted wholesale from Bioshock 1. Except that game at least had the good sense not to make you do a pair of tower defence missions every time you wanted to save one.

Jim: Splendidly, about halfway through the game they run out of ideas and remove even the pretence of that gathering being optional, when that newspaper man tells you that he’ll only lift the barriers if you rescue three little sisters. Because they…..have….a genetic memory or….just do it alright. Your objective is to do the optional metagame objective.

Hentzau: Here’s what I don’t get, right; Rapture is apparently a functioning society because you’ve got all these characters who have survived there for years with no problems, and this guy sends you after the Little Sisters because he’s concerned with his standing in this society and doesn’t want certain plot-sensitive information to become common knowledge. Yet the Rapture I walked through was a leaky dystopian hellhole full of monsters. I doubt they’d have cared much about his dirty laundry.

Jim: My only theory on that is that the only people alive now are people who managed to lock themselves in a booth. Almost every character you interact with has placed themselves behind the unbreakable plexiglass so presumably they can’t be got at. It’s maybe even more worrying that the only time you’re allowed into a room with a person who isn’t a raving monster, is when the game is leaning on you very heavily to kill them.

Hentzau:  It was like the game was telling me I couldn’t be trusted to be left alone with these people, that I had to be supervised and separated from them at all times lest I do something stupid. Your interactions with the NPCs in this game are basically a series of prison visits, conducted through a glass screen and a two-way intercom system. And that’s why, every time the game wanted me to kill someone, I didn’t. Not out of any moral concerns or because I was trying to get a certain ending, but because it was my way of giving two fingers to the developers and their ridiculously constrictive, on-rails level design.

Jim: The whole game was “follow this compass arrow”. Not because it was interesting to explore, not because the world invited a sense of wonder, not even because you wanted to get to the bottom of this awful plot (and it was so tremendously awful), but just because it was there. I was paying as much attention as I could and, honestly, I still don’t know what the plot was about. I understood the words they were using, yeah, but it followed so little logical sense. Despite the hundred little recorded diaries, the constant intercom announcements, all I picked up was a constant squabbling static.

Hentzau: There’s one part towards the end of the game that’s particularly absurd; you find a message from a man who knows he’s going insane and wants you to kill him. To this end, he has left you detailed instructions on exactly how to do that. Except they’re not all in one place, because that would be far too simple and — dare I say it — logical. Instead he’s decided to scatter them across a pair of levels in easily-digestable bite-size chunks that automatically play whenever you finish the next step of his ridiculously elaborate plan. It’s an approach which certainly avoids taxing the attention span of the player, but which is absolutely nonsensical when placed in the context of the game world. How do the messages know to play only for you? Do they play for every random splicer who walks by? And why did he split the plan up anyway?

Jim: That’s it, though, the game world makes no sense, it has no structure. Bioshock was a game that was actually fun to explore, you had the pleasure palace, the run-down slums, the farms, the orphanage and so on. I remember more standout interesting moments from the original game, and I last played that about four years ago. The only things they’ve changed, they’ve made worse. Hacking, for example…

Hentzau:  In the UK we have something called a driving theory test which you have to pass before they let you behind the wheel of a car for real. Part of this test is hazard perception, where you watch a video of somebody driving and click the mouse button whenever you see a potential hazard. Clicking the mouse button too late will result in failure but — hilariously — so will being particularly observant and clicking the mouse button early as soon as you spot the danger. Instead you have to click the mouse button when the person who made the test thinks you should spot the danger. And this is the best analogy I have for Bioshock 2’s hacking minigame, which sets you the pulse-pounding challenge of clicking the mouse button inside a series of steadily decreasing time-windows three or four times per hack. I know Bioshock’s Pipemania minigame got a lot of stick, but even that was nowhere near as braindead as this is. And of course the worst thing about this is that everything in the game can be hacked. Everything. They even introduce a remote hacking tool so that you can hack places that would normally be inaccessible to hacking!

Jim: Hacking on the go for today’s busy professionals who are trying to juggle their home and work commitments.

Hentzau: It’s utter garbage, it really is, and failure either giving you a damaging shock or summoning security bots to kill you is just the shit icing on a cake made of shit.

Jim: Okay that’s a great big list of complaints there, and they all boil down to the utter lack of innovation or care about this gameworld, relative to the original. What Bioshock 2 mainly is, is a poor-quality copy. So many of these things we’re complaining about have just been transferred straight across, apparently without thought on how they’d fit into this alternate viewpoint. Bioshock was if nothing else, glorious to look at and explore. Bioshock 2 is a mess.

Hentzau: Is there anything you liked about the game, Jim?

Jim: I liked the seaweed. The seaweed was ridiculously pretty, there were these shoals of fish swimming about that looked like real shoals. You?

Hentzau: There was a bit where you’re walking around an animatronic display about the building of Rapture and this rickety dummy scientist raises his arms in celebration after making a discovery, only for a pair of giant hands to descend from the ceiling and take it from him. That was good.

Jim: Yeah there were a couple of really nice moments. You get a brief glimpse of Rapture at its peak, right at the end, a swathe of mahogany, velvet and dinner parties, and after tramping through this rusty tin can for many, many hours, it was a lovely sight. I would also add that, once you threw enough upgrade juice at it, the combat finally became a little bit fun, you finally felt like this halfway-invincible ironclad.

Hentzau: If the difficulty curve had started there I’d have had far fewer complaints about the game. As it is it’s ass-backwards; starts out diamond-hard and steadily becomes easier as you unlock more passive bonuses and expand the amount of ammo you can carry. It wasn’t until the end of the game that I felt I had enough bullets to really go hog wild on the basic splicers instead of saving all the good stuff for the inevitable miniboss fights.

Jim: Ah well, there’s always Bioshock Infinite eh?

Hentzau: I’LL KILL YOU.

Has Jim crossposted this to his own blog this time? Who knows. You should probably go there and find out.

The post Diablog: Bioshock 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Crusader Kings is a game of people, not places. It takes a markedly different tack to the usual Paradox approach of putting command of every facet of a mighty empire at your fingertips; instead you have direct control over one man (or woman, but in the agnatic dynasties of medieval Europe it’s overwhelmingly likely to be a man), and while that man may be able to influence a mighty empire through dint of being the person currently wearing the emperor’s purple, the empire itself will be a mishmash of different territories and fiefdoms occupied by feuding nobles who have minds of their own and who constantly have to be kept in line. Personal relationships are brought front and centre while empire management is heavily abstracted; much of the day-to-day running of your kingdom will be in the hands of these autonomous vassals, with your character only having direct control over the small collection of counties which make up his personal demesne.  You rely on your vassals for political support, for supplying manpower in the event of a war, and for not plotting to bring your reign to a premature end.

This shift from absolute ruler to manipulative puppetmaster might be what sets Crusader Kings apart from its Paradox siblings, but it’s also something which has provoked some vehement disagreement on whether or not that shift is, overall, a definitive improvement on the Paradox formula.

In one corner, we have Hentzau.

Hentzau has dabbled in Paradox games before, but does not claim to have a comprehensive understanding of what makes them tick. While he enjoyed the time he spent with Hearts of Iron 2 the armies of the Wehrmacht ran into a brick wall just past the Volga and he committed suicide in his Berlin bunker four years ahead of schedule. He played Europa Universalis 3 for seventeen hours and ended his four-hundred year reign over Brandenburg no wiser than when he started. He ran screaming from the likes of Victoria and… well, Victoria 2. Crusader Kings will be his fourth attempt to make the Paradox grand strategy style stick. He likes long walks in the countryside, cats, and world domination.

In the other corner is Jim.

Jim has spent the best part of four years playing Paradox games, being a bit obsessed with trying to conquer the world. He spent EU3 sending forth the mighty armies of France, Malacca, Florence, Vijayangar, whoever’s free really. He spent eons wrestling with the underdogs of World War 2 in the Hearts of Iron series, trying to make Italy not be awful just once in their life and almost succeeding. He spent in the region of a hundred hours figuring out how the economic model of Victoria 2 actually works, being none the wiser but now having thirty seven cement factories to show for it. The original Crusader Kings was a bit of a closed book to Jim, he could never really scratch through the surface but he has enough trust in Paradox that the sequel is worth a punt. His power animal is the capybara.

Hentzau: I’m going to nail my colours to the mast from the outset here by saying that the reason I never got on that well with EU 3 — and the reason I never even attempted Victoria despite it being pretty much my ideal game — was the sheer quantity of stuff you had to do to run an efficient empire. Technology, troop recruitment, internal laws and politics, national ideas, colonisation, keeping track of the various cassus belli and fighting wars; the list just goes on and on, swamping the player in detail that not even the various beginner’s guides scattered around the internet can make any sense of.  To me, EU 3 is genuinely overwhelming in its scope, and that’s why I spent four hundred in-game years making the tiny state of Brandenburg into the slightly bigger state of Brandenburg. I just didn’t understand how things worked well enough to do anything more than that.

Crusader Kings changes all that, though. The scope is still there, as is much of the detail, but handing over most of your kingdom to your AI vassals makes it far kinder to a Paradox dilettante like myself since it reduces the apparent workload I have to deal with to a manageable level. I don’t have to build buildings in every vassal duchy and county in my kingdom; my vassal dukes have their own income and will spend it on upgrading the infrastructure of their holdings without any input from me, freeing me up to concentrate on the few territories that constitute my demesne and the not-insignificant business of domestic and international politics and the dynastic succession. I like that I have less to do here, and I like that it makes me far more reliant on the goodwill of these autonomous AI characters. If Crusader Kings concealed the mechanics behind my relationship with my vassals I suspect I’d hate it, but the game is admirably up front about exactly why the Duke of Norfolk hates my guts with a detailed breakdown of every single factor affecting his opinion of me. It’s not random and there are things I can do to placate angry vassals, and that’s key; it may be a largely autonomous system but it is one that can be managed and manipulated. I’m playing the role of a Machiavelli rather than a Caesar, and I love it.

Jim: I think from the start, I don’t want to be saying that CK2 is a bad game. It’s not, it’s an excellent exploration of the themes that it is based on. I’m not going to say that it should be different, plenty of people love it the way it is. However, for me, it just doesn’t have that same magnetic, hypnotic pull that other Paradox games have exerted on me and the main reason for that is this lack of control.

At the end of the game, when points are tallied and the final positions made, I want one of two things to happen. Either I can bask in the glory of a job well done, or I can look back and think “This is what I could have done better”. To an extent Crusader Kings does have this; certainly you can learn how to better nudge and nurdle your vassals into doing your bidding, but the lack of control means you might have been perfectly capable of doing the necessary things. The men were there, the funding was in place, but Duke Robert just wouldn’t let you have them, and plunges you into a protracted civil war instead. I want to concoct plans and execute them, I don’t want some imaginary two-bit son of a goatherd stopping that.

What’s worse is the sheer quantity of characters that you have to keep at least a vaguely interested eye on. Bishops and bastards, knights and nobles, mayors and monarchs. They’re all there, hefting their spanners above your great works with a meaningful expression. “Be an awful shame if someone were to…drop this”, they mutter, not quite under their breath. It’s an overwhelming number of personalities to know.

Hentzau: I think your problem here is that you’re trying to play it like you would EU 3, Jim. Crusader Kings will overwhelm you if you try to do everything, yes, but the level of automation here means you only really need a light hand on the tiller. The Holy Roman Empire may be a hundred-state juggernaut but if it’s all the way over there it’s unlikely to ever impede on my game as an incipient Ireland. I did fine just keeping an eye on the monarchs of neighbouring Scotland and England, as well as the most powerful dukes within my own realm. Everything else ran on autopilot pretty effectively, letting me get on with trying to get a claim by blood on the British mainland somewhere so that I could continue expanding.

Jim: I think that’s the nub of my problem too, though. It’s impossible to track everything, so I ended up treating people with the bare minimum of interaction, the disposable flunkies. I don’t get that personal, visceral relationship with enemy leaders that I got in other Paradox titles because no individual leader has that much heft, and there’s half a dozen around exactly like them. For a game about dynasties, it feels a lot like I’m just dealing with individuals, there’s not that same terror of the Habsburg juggernaut that motivated me in EU 3.

And because so much of your realm is automated, so many processes happen without your input, this means that you are unlocking but a fraction of the potential of your realm. I’ve always been about squeezing every screed of possibility from my realm, having every farmer and spice merchant marching for the glory of the greater Jim.

Hentzau: It’s true that if you’re a builder or a tech-hoarder at all then Crusader Kings definitely isn’t the game for you. Empire management is abstracted to the point of near-superficiality, with about eight or nine building types that roughly translate into “more troops” and one per holding that gives you more money. You upgrade these buildings as much as your technology and funds allow, and that’s about as far as it goes. You simply cannot optimise the empire for the greater good; the best I managed was prioritising one of my counties in Wales for investment so that I could build a mighty citadel there garrisoned by several thousand men, just in case the mainland colonies ever got uppity.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing, mind. Again, part of what I found so overwhelming about EU 3 were the law sliders and the national ideas and the fact I didn’t really understand what I should be building in a given province. In Crusader Kings it perhaps goes too far the other way, but — like the automated vassals — this linear approach to empire management simply gave me more time to concentrate on the dynastic squabbling.

Jim: Abstraction is a wonderful thing, of course, and it does need to happen somewhere along the continuum between reality and the game. CK2 does a good job with some aspects – I liked the way they partitioned the laws so you could favour your cities with tax breaks or change your succession with sufficient support, and I like the way plots surface, gradually pick up support and then succeed or fail. That’s a good and obvious way to show how the support of your burghers is needed to push the country forwards.

My main concern here (and I think at this point I will accept that I haven’t played enough to understand all the mechanics at play) is that the point of an abstraction is to change something overwhelming into an interesting tactical challenge. EU3 boiled combat down to horses, mans cannons and generals, but because you could pick how many of each you had, and they all added obviously different benefits and disadvantages, you could still enjoy a delicious slice of tactical pie. CK2, I am acquiring a vast stack of men and I am ramming it into another vast stack of men.

Hentzau: Likely to be the one point here where Jim and I entirely agree. There’s something going on in CK2’s combat, there’s different troop types and a battle screen that goes through different phases where archers fire and horses charge and so on, but none of it seems to have any effect on the actual outcome of the battle. In every single battle I have fought in my games — and I invaded England, so I fought a lot — the man with the largest army won. And he didn’t just win; having just a couple of thousand more men than your opponent can result in their annihilation while you yourself take only light losses. This is disappointingly shallow since unless you take advantage of adverse political conditions affecting your opponent (like his entire army being off on crusade or something) you’ll be able to see far in advance who will win any potential war: the guy with the most men. While this makes alliances and mercenaries far more valuable than they might be otherwise, with the few thousand extra men they contribute to the fight having an impact far greater than their numbers would imply,  turning combat into a pure numbers game is unequivocally a bad thing.

Jim: I’m sure that there is some weird, cheesy way you can overturn insurmountable odds but they really don’t make it obvious how the makeup of your forces is affecting things. Are archers good? Do I need more heavy infantry to counter his cavalry? Who knows. I think that shallowness does factor through into other aspects of the game, and I’m particularly thinking about the buildings you mentioned. There’s lots of different things you can build and you can upgrade them through many levels, but they’re all different flavours of the same thing. Add more men to your vast stacks of men, or increase your funds, and I have no idea how to compare the pros and cons. It just feels like unnecessary busywork.

Hentzau: Yeah, this goes back to the “more troops” thing I mentioned. There’s a building that gives 100 archers for the same investment as a building that gives 45 cavalry. Are cavalry better than archers? I don’t know, but they don’t seem to be, and so I always build the archer building first. Again, playing the numbers game. It’s rather unsatisfying.

Reducing combat to pure numbers does have one unexpected consequence, though, and that’s to make the levies raised by your vassals in aid of your wars absolutely crucial to success. Since the size of your personal demesne is so small in comparison to the land you have to parcel out to the vassals in order to keep everyone happy, it’s often the case that calling on your vassals to aid you in a war will yield 3-4 times the number of men than if you only used levies from your own territories. The number of men the vassals send is almost entirely dependent on how much they like you. A good relationship with a duke will lead to him contributing half — or even a majority of — his total army to your cause. If the duke hates you, though, he’ll contribute nothing unless forced to by law. And my, my, do dukes hate being forced to by law.

Jim: You mentioned before about how this game unlocked your inner Machievelli. I’m interested to hear what you thought about the ways you could interact with your vassals and courtiers, because again for me it felt that odd abstracted combination of unnecessary busywork and random hope. Arranging the education of every child got a bit wearing by the tenth Princess Jim.

Hentzau: It does get to the point where you have no idea who this kid is and you pass him off to some random courtier just so that you can get the twenty point relationship boost this inevitably grants. Mostly, though, I really enjoyed the interactions with my dukes and extended family. Mainly because my extended family all hated me, and I eventually had them all killed. There was one guy, my ruler’s twin brother, who stood to inherit the kingdom of England because it had a purely agnatic succession law (only males can inherit) as opposed to Ireland’s agnatic-cognatic (male children are first in line, then female children). My heir was a six year old princess, locking me out of the English throne unless I somehow managed to produce a male heir who could legally inherit. My solution to this problem was simple: I systematically killed every single son my brother had, and then assassinated his wife after I discovered her plotting against me, and this riled my brother up enough to rebel so that I could throw him in a dungeon and have him executed without incurring too much tyranny. It didn’t solve the question of succession, but it did remove a potential threat to my power very cheaply.

I found the court operated fairly well with only minimal input from myself. The only times I actually did anything were like the occasion above: when there was a visible threat to my power base that needed removing. This meant my interactions were almost all of the negative how-can-I-fuck-this-guy-over-without-provoking-rebellion kind, and trying to untangle those particular types of knotty puzzle is a lot of fun for me. The duchy of Norfolk is going to pass to the queen of Scotland? Revoke it, smack down the duke when he objects. There are second and third sons who are going to be potential pretenders to the throne once I shuffle off this mortal coil? Send them to join the clergy; that’ll remove them from the line of succession. The trickier problems come when there’s a particularly powerful vassal you discover plotting against you and chucking him in jail isn’t something you can just do without risking the entire north of England rebelling against you, and this is where the assassins come into play. And if they’re too risky? Well, it’s always fun to see that a duke who has been a particular thorn in my side has died as a maimed cripple at the age of 28. Sometimes you just have to wait things out.

Jim: I’m glad to hear that I wasn’t the only one using my offspring like a set of football stickers to curry favour with my dukes. You know what I think my main problem with this side of the game is, though? I’m far too passive. If something absolutely needs dealing with, because the Duke of Ulster has declared independence or because there’s a handy tooltip saying I should marry off my third son, then I’ll do it and I’ll try to micro it, picking the best spouse with the greatest bonus. But then there’s vast tracts of time when nothing really needs dealing with and I find myself at a loose end. There’s enough periods of chaos that I do treasure the times of calm, and just sit there like a giant walrus, waiting for the next crisis to react to.

I don’t think I get that same rush of planning because I’m completely unsure of what I should be planning towards, or how to comb through reams of family trees and pick out the right strand that I could benefit from. I find myself doing the boring stuff over and over, making sure the young prince is a courteous young man, giving people stuff when they ask for it, and waiting for interesting stuff to happen. Which it never does. And so I expand, slowly and safely, with all the thrill and vigor of an international knitting championship.

Hentzau: One thing the game could a better job of is notifying you about potential opportunities to expand. It tells you when you have a legitimate claim on a province occupied by somebody else that you can press in a war, but what it doesn’t do is inform you that the infant king of England has been excommunicated by the Pope, putting the whole of England up for grabs for any ruler with the men and the necessary pull with the papacy to get a papal dispensation to invade. The invasion of England was absolutely the most nail-biting phase of my time with Crusader Kings so far, and it’s had repercussions for my game that have lasted for over a century, but it never would have happened if I hadn’t idly wondered why there was a larger-than-normal rebellion going on over there this decade.

Jim: I suppose that’s something true of all Paradox games, though, they do a very good job of shrouding their mechanics and triggers behind layers of ledgers and windows, and the great joy of something like Hearts of Iron 2 was picking it apart, figuring out the right chain of events that would enable me to invade the United States successfully before they overwhelmed me. I have to accept that at 15 hours, I don’t have enough experience to pass a final judgement. In that respect, it’s the same as every other Paradox game.

That said, I actually have something against when it’s set in terms of providing an interesting narrative. You have a map restricted to Europe plus a bit, and so the big players dominate that world excessively. Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire and France are just three huge blobs, sprawling over Europe like a lazy cat on a warm patio. I’m not saying they should invent some new set of nations but to me, that sort of superpower-driven map is a lot less interesting than a more cutthroat, smaller-scale one.

Hentzau: Again, though, there’s plenty of scope for the small-scale stuff at the edges of the map, away from those uber-states. The British Isles, Norway, Spain, Hungary, all of these offer opportunities to play small-to-mid-size countries that won’t be gobbled up by the Franco-German juggernaut. In a game that lets you play any Catholic/Orthodox noble in existence, it seems a bit churlish to complain that there isn’t enough variety in the gameplay. Sure, France and the Holy Roman Empire seem to be rather static entities up until the 1300s or so (Byzantium is a little more unstable) and it’d be nice to be able to play as one of the many Muslim dynasties dotting the map without having to shell out for the impending DLC, but in comparison to any other game that isn’t a Paradox grand strategy title Crusader Kings is a veritable cornucopia of choice.

Jim: Churlish is my middle name. Yeah I can see that, but when I look at the map I just don’t see that same wealth of possibilities that I do looking over the EU 3 map. There’s no tucked-away backwaters thousands of miles from the action, everybody’s interlinked and intermarried from the off and I always feel like I need to start with a completely clean slate. Outside of the odd segmented provinces of Ireland, that slate doesn’t seem to exist. Thing is, I know that despite me saying all this, despite all those individual aspects that rub me up the wrong way, those features that seem improperly implemented or overly repetitive, I’m going to end up falling for the game. You know the real problem here? Nobody but Paradox tries to do this. They’ve got a stranglehold on my world-conquering heart.

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