Ever wonder what would happen to a show where Tom Chick didn’t show up to ask annoying questions? This is the answer.
PCGamer’s role playing game authority Desslock sits in with the remaining panelists to talk about how RPGs and strategy games overlap. Where is character advancement more important than story? Does Dominions 3 count as an RPG? It’s a low key and low energy discussion with only a little bit of nagging to Julian to get his turn in.
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I like Majesty 2, but I can’t really recommend it unequivocally to any audience. There is a difference between frustration because you are still mastering a system and frustration because your puny units keep dying stupid deaths. This game is the latter, and that – with the repetitiveness – is what eventually took the shine off the apple for me.
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I’m putting my final touches on my Majesty 2 review now that the review embargo has been lifted. I’ll have more to say on the final evaluation of it once that review goes live.
I am struck by how Majesty 2 paces the campaign. This is a real time strategy game that is all about the campaign. The multiplayer experience is OK, but the single player game away from the campaign is all scripted missions, so they might as well be campaign extensions.
An RTS story based campaign follows a pretty predictable pattern. There will be 10 to 20 missions, the first 5 of 6 of which disable buildings or units or powers. These early missions involve a few small, scripted challenges – fend off a small raid, scout the map, kill the minor boss, etc. – and then eventually you get to longer range planning. Storming a citadel, for example, which will often mean building a second base. Or staying alive through regular, sustained assaults on your main production area.
Majesty 2 has a very short campaign mission wise – about a dozen missions – and every mission has the underlying theme of a city under siege. Your city produces its own enemies, for example. A big city will spawn rats, the first dead hero means a cemetery that spawns undead. Clearing out enemy spawning areas outside your city will not stop roving creatures from eventually showing up in town. So you have to always defend your home city from unscripted raids as well as progressing through the larger, more difficult missions.
The effect of this is to instill a sense of panic and anxiety in every mission. As you get better and stronger within a mission, so do the enemies (though they don’t return home to heal.) Where most RTS campaign missions can only really emphasize haste through a timer, Majesty 2‘s home spawned monsters remind you that if you take too long building a big city with unstoppable heroes, the sewers will fill with giant ratmen and zombies will emerge from your graveyard. Since clearing out lairs does little to really stop the advancing hordes of evil, you are kept focused on the larger goal while still having to deal with small nuisances.
Perhaps because the campaign is so short, Majesty 2 also gives you access to a lot of the higher level content relatively early in the game. Temples are reserved for the halfway point, but mages and beastmasters and alchemy tents and the like can be found much earlier than that.
It’s kind of a circle. If you take too long to do your job, then you will face more enemies. But you have access to some pretty powerful resources. Which means that the missions themselves are quite difficult to match the power you can muster. Which means that it will take you forty to sixty minutes to solve a mission. Which means you are taking too long. So you need more powerful units.
There also isn’t a smooth transition up the difficulty ladder here. It’s not like the missions gradually increase in challenge, which makes sense given you often have two or more missions to choose from. This, in many ways, interferes with whatever flimsy story Majesty 2 is trying to tell you. Since the story isn’t about your hero moving from spot to spot, there’s no need for the missions to be structured in a “This happened and then this happened” sort of way. Rise of Legends did this sort of thing in its campaign game, with a conquer the world map you could move through in pretty much any way you wished with story sensitive missions scattered across the board.
But where Rise of Legends stuck a lame story to a great campaign mechanic, Majesty 2 pretty much throws the whole idea of story and campaign structure overboard in what is little more than a bunch of single player missions strung together haphazardly. In some ways, this is reminiscent of the old Age of Empires campaigns, where you would pretend to be Greece or Persia in a series of missions that had zero relationship to each other.
Now I am an avowed non-fan of the RTS story based campaign. Not that there haven’t been good ones (Age of Mythology is still my favorite). But I wonder how much of my disappointment is rooted not in the poor story telling, but in the repetitiveness of the pacing. Majesty 2 avoids the puzzle-map problem that plagues so many games in this genre, but it does have “tricks” and things you have to do in the proper order.
More on Majesty 2 – what it does right and what it does wrong – once my review goes up at Crispy Gamer.
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Yet another war game I don’t have time for.
Operation Barbarossa: The Struggle For Russia is probably as uncreative a name as you can imagine, but how many options are there? I like the range of campaigns, scenarios and tutorials they promise – including a tutorial specifically on the use of paratroops, something that is never quite intuitive in a lot of wargames. Not sold on the appearance of the game – hexes in 3D never really look right to me.
Anyone who has bought it and played it is welcome to praise or condemn it in the comments. It looks like this is Binary Evolution Studios’ first game.
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This week, a full panel deals with the question of getting started in strategy gaming. Should people approach the genre from first principles (The Murdoch Method) or through a topic they are interested in (The Goodfellow Approach)? How important is the visual immersion compared to the mechanics?
Bonus: Everyone is called an idiot by someone else at least once.
Listen here.
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The Qt3 thread that inspired this chat
Tom’s column on RTSes for newcomers
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Why seven? Who knows. It’s one of those magic things, I guess. But the latest Gamers With Jobs conference call had a discussion about what seven questions gamers consider when they decide whether or not to keep playing a game. You have to skip past the as-usual interminable but part-of-deal talk about what everyone is playing to get to the topic, but it’s worth a listen.
In many ways the topic is a little silly. The things that bring me back to a game are usually idiosyncratic and heavily dependent on what else I’m playing, what books I’m reading, what blogs or forum posts I’ve read that day, etc. Yesterday, I was chatting with a friend who was in the middle of playing Imperialism 2; guess what I’ve had an urge to return to?
The questions they came up with were:
1) What are the goals of the game? Are they compelling and sustainable?
2) Does the game consistently “pay off�
3) Does the game avoid impeding progress with pointless obstacles in the game or the interface?
4) Does the game flow to the point that you lose track of time?
5) Does the game give you sufficient context?
6) Is the presentation engaging?
7) Write in your question! call AT gamerswithjobs.com
So six questions and a punt to users – reply there to help them fill out their list. Question 4 doesn’t work for me since that’s less an issue about the game design than it is an issue about how well the design works – if the game has clear goals, consistently pays off and has an engaging presentation then a flow may develop. It’s more a consequence than a criteria.
If I were to rewrite this as Seven Questions That Help You Decide A Strategy Game is Good, it would probably go something like this:
1) Are there variable paths to victory or is this a puzzle game?
2) Are there clear consequences for taking a particular action?
3) Does the game avoid impeding progress with pointless obstacles in the game or the interface? (stealing GWJ’s because it works.)
4) How long before the game has shown me everything it has to show?
5) If the game represents an historic or future world, is it a convincing representation? (Note: convincing, not accurate. These can be synonyms, but don’t have to be.)
6) Does the game hide important information from the player? If so, is there a good reason for it?
7) Write in your question! call AT flashofsteel.com (That’s what readers are for, right?)
The thing is, whether or not I go back to a role playing game or a shooter or a roguelike means entirely different questions because I have different expectations from the genre. In an RPG, I want the story to give me a reason to care that I am leveling up another hobbit bard, whereas I mostly ignore the story campaign in an RTS. My expectations of shooters have changed a lot, too. And don’t get me started on rhythm or arcade games – where does one even begin to discuss “context” in Peggle?
This discussion is a little different for everyone I suspect. The GWJ chat spun off from something Warren Spector wrote about questions game designers should ask, and I bet that Spector’s list would find wider agreement than the GWJ one or even mine.
So fill the comments here and forum there.
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