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Odds and Ends
By Cameron Sorden | July 5, 2007
I’ve tried a number of games lately while in my gaming slump, both new and old. Mostly I’ve just been searching for something that feels like a new twist on a familiar premise. Lets face it, after all. I’m a fantasy gamer geek. I cut my teeth on SNES RPGs and Dungeons and Dragons. I like crunching numbers, tweaking stats, and wading through lengthy dialogue trees. As much as I appreciate Asimov and Roddenberry, space ships and aliens don’t do it for me. I want to sink my sword into a magician’s neck and steal (er, I mean recover!) his shiny pendant, and I want to do it in new and exciting ways.
I tried Saga of Ryzom earlier today. Brent goes on and on about what a great game it is (especially in the latest podcast), so I thought I should check it out. I didn’t really like it, though. It’s not that it doesn’t seem like a neat game. I think skill-based systems are cooler than level-based usually and the game totally has a unique flavor. The graphics and the interface threw me off, though. The way you interact with everything feels exceedingly dated and clunky to me, and after playing LoTRO, WoW, and EQ2, the world and models just felt kind of outdated as well. Granted, this is from 30 minutes of playing and running around, so I’m probably being a little rash… but still. I just didn’t feel like I could see myself getting into it enough that I wanted to go to the trouble of learning a whole new (rather complex looking) MMO.
That’s another reason why I prefer fantasy to sci-fi though. When I play a fantasy game, sure, it’s the same old. But it feels familiar. “Hey, that’s a short sword! And that’s a rapier! Hmm… I can use them to kill this kobold, and take his pouch of silver. Maybe I’ll sell his ears for a few more silver.” All too often when I encounter a game with Sci-fi elements, it’s data overload. I panic. “Wait… so my weapon choices are ion blaster or phaser-knife? Er, and that thing is called a Mukkalo… it looks like a rat of some kind… okay, so I aim, shoot… it’s dead. Hrrm. Well, I found these Grue bits on him. Where do I take these? The space exchange? For credits? Er… okay.” See what I mean? Fantasy genres tend to pull from established conventions and you know what to expect, but get small twists. I feel like Sci-fi makes me relearn from the ground up.
The other game and the one I’ve been spending a lot of time with (as I mentioned in my last post) is DDO. I’m still in my trial period, but I do intend to buy it. Aaron mentioned that it just made him want to play Neverwinter Nights again, and I can see his point, but I feel like these are two different animals. Neverwinter Nights 2 is more about the story and the setting: lots of dialogue, lots of NPC intrigue, lots of quests. It annoyed me that it felt kind of kiddie, but what can you do? It was a good game while I played it, and I really need to go dust off my wizard and finish it sometime. DDO, on the other hand, is all about the dungeon crawl with friends. It can be summed up as follows: kill monsters, disarm traps, break stuff, and loot chests. There’s story, but you just kind of stop caring after a while. I find the combat in DDO much more satisfying than in NWN2. It also captures the “adventure with your friends” aspects of D&D much more convincingly than NWN does, in my opinion. It mimics the tabletop version much better in this respect.
My biggest complaint about DDO so far is that the fun is directly proportional to how many people you can get playing in your group. Solo play is alright, but gets old fast (and only certain classes can do it well). Duoing is lots of fun, but you’re still pretty limited depending on the classes. Either monsters will be tough or traps will be tough. Once you get up to 3-4 people it starts getting really fun because you have such a wide variety of skills to draw on and can tackle the hard mission setting. With a full group of six you can rip through elite missions, get awesome loot, and have a blast. Unfortunately, it suffers the same problem as tabletop– it’s hard to get six of your friends interested, playing, and on at the same time (unless you have LOTS of nerdy friends). As always, and especially in DDO, grouping with your friends is far more fun than grouping with strangers. I still intend to do a full write-up of my impressions on it eventually and detail what I like and don’t, but I want to play out the trial first, at least.
Finally, this is a very amusing (and surprisingly, legal) way to kill time for any fans of the days of 8-bit console games.
July 5th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I never played NWN2. The original NWN is one of my favorite games of all time. I was anxious for the sequel, but decided not to buy it after reading a lot of reviews and previews. The sequel wasn’t even made by the same developer (the original was by Bioware).
I strongly recommend getting your hands on a copy of the first NWN (the Diamond edition). In fact, if you get it, let me know and I’ll play through the campaign with you.
If I remember correctly from what I’ve read of NWN2, it’s much more linear than the original game and more party-based. The original has a fixed storyline, but you can do things in the order you choose. If you go to a particular area first, then the content will be lower-level (including different creatures, sometimes) than if you go to it last.
Anyway, NWN seems to have implemented D&D rules in a more fun way than DDO.
For example, there’s more freedom in how you assign stats. I can choose to take away my barbarian’s intelligence points to increase his strength. Not only does this have effects on die rolls (like saving throws), it also affects NPC conversations. The NPCs will actually make fun of you if you’re dumb or ugly (low charisma). This means a lot to me, because I like to play heavily lop-sided, specialized characters.
Another example is domain choices for clerics. In NWN, clerics choose 2 domains, which determines access to particular spells and possibly skills. I’m not refering to spell specialties (conjuration, necromancy, etc.). I mean like choosing the Water domain and being able to use your “Turn Undead” spell against elementals, or choosing the Death domain and having a shadow of yourself that fights alongside you and levels up as you do.
I could probably come up with a dozen other things that make the game great. Anyway, you should definitely try it out. The camera control takes getting used to, but it’s a blast aside from that.
July 6th, 2007 at 8:37 am
I did play the original NWN, and I still think the combat was so-so. My problem is that I either prefer true turn-based D&D (a la Warriors of the Eternal Sun on Genesis) or an action style game… I don’t like pseudo-turn based RTS gameplay like Torment or NWN, usually.
I’ll grant you that NWN gives you many more options than DDO, especially if you have the expanded character pack installed with all the crazy prestige classes and alternate races. Turbine sadly has to deal with balance issues and can’t just release a pack like that… wish they would though. Or allow something similar to Ryzom ring.
I’d love to play through a player-made dungeon using DDO’s system.
July 9th, 2007 at 11:23 am
[…] week Cameron got to talking about Dungeons and Dragons Online, and it made me a little misty-eyed. DDO … is all about the dungeon crawl with friends. It […]
July 12th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
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