Does Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest Think a Slot Machine is Difficult?

Let’s clear up a couple of things now: first, even though I may have been late to the party, I am now totally on board the Fire Emblem train. Final Fantasy Tactics was one of my all-time favorite games, so playing Awakening felt like scratching a long-unattended itch. Second, even though I’m about to have some harsh words about this game, I still love it. In terms of the Strategy Turn-Based RPG, I’d say it’s definitely the cream of the crop. Also, note that as far as I know, these only apply to Conquest. I haven’t had a chance to play Birthright, and we’ve still got a couple of weeks until Revelation launches, so they may do things differently.

All that being said…Conquest, we really need to talk about difficulty. Now, I know you pride yourself on being difficult. And that’s fine! Lots of games are unashamedly punishing: Dark Souls, the recent XCOM games, Super Meat Boy…and they’re super popular! I even like a few of them myself. No, the issue isn’t that you’re difficult. It’s that you’re difficult in one of the worst ways possible; forcing low success rates. What do I mean by that? Well, to answer that question we need to explain some things first. The primary thing to understand about Conquest is that it has two difficulty settings that most players will actually attempt: Normal and Hard. There’s Lunatic, but that’s a story for another day. Normal is actually about what you’d expect for a Fire Emblem game; potentially challenging, but fair. Hard, however, is exponentially more difficult. There are more enemies, they have higher stats, they sometimes have better skills, and to top it all off your experience gain is lowered.

Now, sure, making the game harder is pretty much what hard mode is supposed to do. But it’s important to consider what all of these elements do when put together. If there are suddenly 50% more enemies, I can’t rely on defensive stance because too many enemy units will survive the turn and overwhelm me afterwards. So what about pure offense? The problem here is a compound of the experience reduction, enemy stat buffs, and a new mechanic that allows units to lower the stats of other units which is exacerbated on some maps by environmental effects.

The plain truth of it is that trying to win a map on hard is like playing a slot machine for 30 minutes. Because of the huge gap in stats between your units and those you’re trying to attack, you’re constantly forced to rely on hit percentages as low as 60, where a single miss basically dooms you to instant failure. Because of the sheer number of changes these maps go through in the shift from Normal to Hard, the room for error is basically non-existent. But when the most significant contributor to that error is random chance, it takes a game from being deliciously challenging to frustratingly unfair.

So if I’m so smart (which I’m not), how SHOULD have Conquest handled difficulty? I’m glad you asked, Sir Strawman III, Esq.! In my humble opinion, Conquest already has it partially right. Adding more enemies in or even just modifying their skills is in itself a strong method of creating difficulty. Fire Emblem is already more or less a game of unit placement much like chess, so putting more enemies on the board in thoughtful ways can force a player to reconsider their strategy. Skills are another good option because they force the player to pay more attention. The game becomes just as much about keeping enemy abilities in mind as it is about effectively moving your units around the map. Really, even a slight buff to enemies OR a slight drop in experience earned could be fine, but the two together in combination with the rest of the changes make the higher difficulties a bit of a slog.

And this brings me to my final question; should we even say that Hard mode is “more difficult”? I mean, would you say that betting on a roulette wheel is “difficult”? It’s true that you aren’t very likely to succeed at it, but I don’t think that gets at the core of what we mean by difficulty. The implication in games is that adding difficulty means raising some kind of skill barrier that is required to reach victory. And to a certain extent, you could say that creating the statistical difference is a way to accomplish that. It forces you to seek ways to close that gap as part of your strategy, which is valid. But there comes a point where the gap is so wide that even effective strategy isn’t enough to make things even again and every movement becomes a Hail Mary pass. Is that really a test of skill?

To add to this, Fire Emblem is not a game where you can rapidly iterate on strategy when you fail. Even on a successful run, most maps take between 15 and 30 minutes depending on the objective. Now, let’s say you’ve placed all your troops and you’ve saved just before beginning the map. You play through the map, when about ten minutes in, surprise reinforcements show up. A unit that happened to be standing near the spawn point is killed immediately. Shit. Well, that’s alright, we’ll just reload the map. You play back to the point where the reinforcements appear, but you miss a couple of attacks and your weakened units are picked off one by one. Another reload. This time, 5 minutes in you take a critical that only had 5% chance to hit. Reload. Already you’ve spent about 30 minutes on this map and you haven’t even come close to winning. Worse, the reasons you lost were either design choices that come completely out of left field or the fact that you had to rely on low hit rates to have a chance of winning.

In most difficult games, high iteration is a key factor in making the game feel satisfying. When you lose, you want the player to think, “Well, maybe if I change this…”, not “Shit, I have to get all the way back there?” The YouTube channel Extra Credits (which I firmly believe EVERYONE should be watching) touches on this subject in their video on how to make difficult games fun here. The takeaway is that you want players to be able to get right back to the game after a failure, not feel like they wasted effort. The latter is how you get players ragequitting your game or leaving it for a while to come back at a later date.

But as I said in the beginning, Conquest is still a game that I love. And really, with some of the DLC coming later that will let you do a bit of level grinding, I think players will be able to even the playing field a bit. Just beware that if you’re looking for a game to test your skill, Conquest may not be the right choice, because the primary thing it tested for me was my patience.

XCOM 2: So Sad to Watch Good Tutorials Gone Bad

XCOM 2 is a game I’ve been waiting for with bated breath since its announcement. While purists would probably think of me as unrefined for playing a game that doesn’t have the terrible UI design endemic to all 90s-era computer games, it’s an incredibly solid turn-based strategy game that made a point of being difficult, but fair. In the same vein as a game like Dark Souls, the XCOM reboot made sure that you had and understood all the tools you needed to succeed. Reactions are almost always, “Hm, maybe if I move this unit here instead…” or “Well, if I use this shredder rocket first…”, not “How in the hell was I supposed to keep THAT from happening?”

The reason I’m speaking so much about the previous game in what is ostensibly a review of the new one is that some of this “difficult but fair” element seems to have been lost in the rush to implement new, exciting features. And make no mistake; once you grasp all of the mechanics at play here, the near overabundance of different resources, soldier types, skill options, etc. are one of this game’s strongest points. What I think has happened here is an old fashioned case of a poor tutorial in an incredibly complex game. For the hardest of hardcore players this is likely a non-issue; difficult and obtuse, that’s the way they like it! But for someone like myself who can only spend so much time on each game, it’s something of an issue that a couple of 5-hour play sessions were dedicated to figuring out the mechanics by trial and error in a run that I eventually had to abandon due to mismanagement.

Looking at the tutorial as it exists now, you’d be forgiven for thinking the game handles it well if you only saw up to the end of the first mission. Combat mechanics are very thoroughly explained, and you end the segment feeling like you have a good base to build your understanding of more advanced concepts later. Unfortunately, this doesn’t transfer over to the base-building portion. While the combat tutorial takes time to explain in detail things like flanking, cover, and concealment by guiding you through the motions, the base building portion basically gives you the base and says, “Now figure it out, dipshit.” Take note that, for the purposes of this analysis I’ll be viewing the Avenger and the Geoscape as one segment of the game. Weirdly, things are even harder for people who played the previous XCOM since almost none of the mechanics transfer. Scientists no longer boost research speed on acquisition and have to be staffed in a laboratory, Engineers no longer reduce item cost and instead are required to clear space/build and staff facilities. Adjacent room bonuses are gone, except they’re not if you build a Workshop, which also has a totally different function now.

While it may seem like a minor gripe that this content isn’t made as approachable as the combat since the combat is the portion people need to understand, I’d argue that especially in this game, the base building far outranks the combat in terms of importance. XCOM 2 is much more about resource management than it is about the fighting, which you can see in the sheer amount of gear options and training bonuses provided through various facilities. The genius of XCOM 2 is that because combat strength of enemies ramps up so quickly, you’re forced to invest more time and thought into your base to maintain pace in the arms race. By almost constantly adding health and armor to enemies and routinely adding both more enemies and stronger enemies, XCOM 2 forces the player to achieve a much more brisk pace of equipment upgrades and research.

The addition of intel as a second currency also serves to emphasize the non-combat elements since it can be used for such a wide variety of purchases, the most important of which are not gear-related but rather strategy-related. With so many different approaches to take and events to prioritize, it should be clear that this segment of the game demands the lion’s share of your attention. So why did the developers choose to make these systems so opaque? I…actually couldn’t say. In most other games I would say it’s to avoid over-tutorializing players that are already familiar with the content, but this game and its predecessor both allowed the player to turn off the tutorials when starting a new game. I also don’t think it’s that they lack understanding of how tutorials should work to prepare the player, because they manage this almost perfectly in the combat segment. Perhaps a time constraint? Maybe, but even for the glitches (which, to be fair, might be a quirk of Unreal) this game demonstrates a polish and a fulfillment of vision that I think makes this unlikely.

So, if the game is so unapproachable, why play it? I mean, I’ve definitely criticized other games and even refused to play them on the same principles. Hell, my first review was practically about this same issue in Knights of the Old Republic. I think part of the answer is that the combat introduction is still so thorough. You feel like you do understand the game to some extent, which pushes you to grit your teeth and figure out the rest. Another part of it might just be that the game has some room to coast in on the success of Enemy Unknown/Within. I knew that in the end I was very likely to be satisfied with the experience, so I was willing to go through some growing pains to get there. Whatever the case, the result is that XCOM 2 is a very rewarding experience and definitely worth your time, just be prepare to spend a lot of it wondering what in the hell is going on.

When You Get the Sequel Just Right: A Review of Mass Effect 2

I apologize for the shitpost, but I just couldn’t help myself. In all seriousness, though, Mass Effect 2 does a lot of things right for me that Mass Effect 1 didn’t. I put off playing this game for a long time since I couldn’t make myself finish the first game and didn’t want to lose the advantages of importing my Shepard. I must now admit that I’ve been wrong all these years and that sometimes, just sometimes, a sequel to a subpar game can be something truly worth the cost of admission.

So, why my sudden change of heart on the franchise? Well, let’s start by revisiting my main gripe with the first installment. Mass Effect felt like a game that was built with the intention of merging two genres, but without understanding which made each of them great. This led to poor level design and the game feeling generally like a chore. It wasn’t really fun, though at times there were almost glimpses of it in the middle distance. Mass Effect 2 remedies this almost entirely by trying something different; instead of trying to be all games for all people, it really commits to being a good shooter. It doesn’t abandon the tropes of RPGs altogether, and it does a fairly good job of selecting only those elements that syngergize with the engagement vectors of a shooter. Just for kicks, let’s take a look at the skill point screens of each game as a point of reference, starting with ME1.

It’s alright, Shepard. I’m sure you’ll look more handsome with the graphic fidelity of ME2!

There is so much happening on this screen that it’s kind of insane, especially for a shooter. This menu displays the RPG-overload that’s present in all of ME1, where there are a ton of skills you could potentially boost, but for the most part they have a very minimal effect on play. Nothing here is going to drastically alter your playstyle, making the abundance of options more confusing than exciting. The apparent complexity of the skill system here isn’t meshing well with the simplicity of a shooter; large changes to how combat situations are approached would be a better choice, since this is the functional equivalent of acquiring a new weapon. Incremental damage or power duration boosts don’t really fit into this scheme. With that in mind, let’s take a look at 2’s skill screen;

NOPE, NOPE IT’S WORSE

Even a casual glance reveals that the options here are drastically reduced, but this actually plays to the game’s benefit. Whereas each of the skill options in ME1 offered slight damage buffs or small boosts in other stats, the way the point allocations work in ME2 mean that any time you unlock a skill or put points into it, you are significantly altering the way you’re able to approach combat scenarios. Just one tier of upgrade can determine whether the Pull skill, for instance, is a complete game-changer or laughably useless. This helps with the overall feel of the skill system, because instead of constantly getting a drip of power increases, you fell that you’re working towards a goal of a huge boost. It may not seem like a big deal, but even a somewhat minor tweak to how the player is rewarded like this can change the way the game feels and is played.

Another example to the commitment to the shooter genre is the vast improvement of level design. You still have a couple of designated “roaming” areas in which you initiate quests and what not, but the shooting segments have migrated to very linear sets of setpieces. This isn’t perfect, but it’s a much better match for the mechanics than tight spaces and the vast expanses of nothing that were the planet surfaces. Speaking of tiny rooms and tight corridors, there aren’t many of either in this game, and when they are used it’s usually in a scene that’s intended to be very tense. Combined with the fact that they seem to have realized that more linear designs promote the sort of constant, forward push you want in most shooters, this has me convinced that sometime after the production of the first game the level designers did a fair amount of study in the way other games like Call of Duty or Gears of War structured their levels. Again, this is BioWare taking advantage of the genre they’ve chosen instead of just slapping mechanics together to see what sticks.

I only really have one minor complaint about this game, and no it isn’t the planet scanning. Actually, it’s not even really a complaint so much as it’s an observation. Doing enough side questing, planet scanning, etc. to finish the game at level 26 and not lose anyone during the Suicide Mission, I clocked in between 20-25 hours on this game. I’m really, really glad it wasn’t any longer than that. This game keeps up momentum largely through interactions with your crewmates, and since there’s a point where your crew interactions pretty much stop permanently, a large part of your personal investment in what’s happening goes out the window. I suppose this was done in order to make the somewhat abstract stakes of your mission more personal, but it had the effect of pushing me to finish the last few missions before I got too bored. This in turn made me feel like the last couple of hours were a bit rushed, and if the game had lasted much longer it probably would have devolved into drudgery. Thankfully, BioWare seems to have known where to cut themselves off.

And there you have it; after years of swearing up and down that this game couldn’t be any good based on its predecessor, I have to sit down to a heaping helping of humble pie. But you know what? It’s alright though, because on the other side of this experience, when BioWare gets their sequels just right…mmm, my PC sings.

Genre Blending and You: A Review of Mass Effect

Yep, it’s time again for another entry in the rapidly growing “BioWare games I’m critical of category”, but for good reason. BioWare provides great case studies for games that had huge ambitions but perhaps not enough resources or time. No matter what gripes I have about their games, I can’t deny that they were trying to do awesome work with the medium. And nowhere is that more apparent than the first Mass Effect game, which tries admirably to give us a game in which both the gunplay and RPG elements were strong, but doesn’t really succeed in either way.

As usual, I want to preface the nitty-gritty with a bit of context about why this game may have made some of its design decisions. And really, all you need to know is that almost exactly a year prior to Mass Effect’s release, we saw the release of Gears of War, the game that exploded the “chest-high wall cover shooter” genre. I’m sure this game was in production before Gears of War came out, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the combat was heavily modeled after it. Why? Well, primarily because Mass Effect doesn’t seem to understand how the level design should complement this choice of mechanics.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s take one mission in particular and break it down. One of the quests you can take sends you to Earth’s moon to deactivate a rogue virtual intelligence that has taken control of the automated defenses. Seems easy enough, just roll up to the base in your glorified shopping cart and fight through a few drones. However, like all of these planetside bases, the map is built from a template that uses exclusively tiny rooms and tight corridors. This wouldn’t be a problem, except there are upwards of 20 enemies and only cover that leaves a flank exposed. This means that no matter where you choose to make your stand against the drones, you’re gunned down in seconds. This seems to suggest that the level designers didn’t understand how to make the layout of an area match the purpose they intended to use it for, making it a problem where none of the developer’s intended solutions work.

Spatial problems are much more important in shooters than in RPGs, and I think this is where BioWare’s history as a developer hurts them a little. But speaking of RPGs, this game doesn’t really function well as one of those, either. One of the core mechanics of RPGs is a class system that lets the player choose their own playstyle. But for that choice to be meaningful, the styles have to be substantively different. In Mass Effect, there really is no reason to choose anything other than specializing in weapons use. You can spec in the “biotic powers” like Push and Lift, but these are single-target attacks that do minimal damage and don’t incapacitate an enemy for nearly long enough to be useful. After taking wind-up animations into account, it’s likely that you could have just killed whatever you used your powers on in the time it took to use the power. This makes gun usage a First Order Optimal Strategy, because nothing else the game presents you could possibly be as effective.

So, as a shooter that doesn’t understand level design and an RPG that doesn’t understand how to design classes, why did people love this game so much? Easy, BioWare is quite honestly the king of narrative and companion writing. Even as someone who wasn’t particularly fond of this game, I was kind of bummed out that Tali wasn’t a romance option. The characters are compelling enough that you actually get invested, and they serve as bridges into understanding the larger story going on. Instead of feeling like side content, it boosts the strength of the overall piece. Still, all the great writing in the world won’t make Mass Effect a great game, even if it does offer lessons that the rest of the industry could stand to learn.

And what lesson do we take away as designers? Well, primarily that if you’re going to mix two genres of video game, you have to make sure that you understand what works about at least one of them. A comparison I often make when talking about this game with friends is Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I love those games even though the gunplay is pretty awful. Why? Because the shooting isn’t really the game’s primary engagement vector; the skill system is. If the game were really about the shooting, why would you be given so many ways to avoid combat altogether? In those games, the guns are implemented more as a small switch-up to an established format of games, and they’re better for it. Mass Effect tried something ambitious with mixing the two, but a lack of real understanding of what works about those genres and what elements of each would mesh together well prevents this game from fulfilling its potential.

This review could be much longer, talking about the more obvious design flaws like the Mako or the amazingly terrible inventory management system, but those have been discussed at length already and why they don’t work is fairly obvious. But the issue of slapping RPG elements in places they don’t necessarily belong is ongoing. It seems like every game now needs a leveling system or needs a crafting system, even if it doesn’t match any of the other modes of engagement. Even Fallout 4, a game I rather enjoy, has this issue in spades. Messing with settlement creation feels like swapping over into a totally different game, and while both the main game and the settlement portion are fun I don’t think this break in flow and immersion serves the game overall. We can still learn from the mistakes of older games, and I want that message to be loud and clear.

A Discussion of The Stanley Parable That Isn’t About Choice

 

The Stanley Parable is a game that’s been talked and talked about for a few years now by many different outlets. And even from one playthrough, it’s very apparent why. In fact, it’s a game I quite enjoy and got the demo for pretty early on. However, almost every discussion of the game centers around the idea of player choice and how the game frames the inevitable discussion about it that follows a play session. And it’s not like this is a bad thing; the game does tackle this topic in a fun and incredibly clever way. I think this has left one of the game’s best qualities a little under appreciated, though – the visual direction and how the narration plays against it.

This is where I’m going to throw up the warning that I will be discussing large portions of this game, so if you haven’t managed to play it over the last 4 years and some odd months, you may want to bail out of this review now. Plus, the game is like $10. It’s excellent, and you really have no reason to have not played it yet. Anywho, conversations about Stanley Parable almost always focus around the perceived struggle of player vs. narrator in determining how the sequence of events is going to play out. While this is the meaty part of the experience, we can learn a lot about level design by examining how it accentuates the struggle here. In fact, let’s take a look at the first 30 seconds to a minute of the game and see what we can learn.

Ah, the perfect shade of “dead dreams brown”. Nice touch, Galactic Cafe.

This first room may not seem particularly relevant, but it’s actually very important here that the level design forces the player along a direct path with no branches. The player gets some breathing room and has a moment just to pay attention to the narrator and explore the environment without getting overwhelmed by moving straight into the primary elements of play. This isn’t uncommon in level design (I brought up the area outside Peach’s Castle in Mario 64 in a previous review), but here it’s especially important not because it lets the player feel their way around the game and understand what’s coming up, but rather because it creates a contrast with the content they’re about to encounter. Additionally, the portion of the game immediately before this is a cutscene, and having heavy narration during this period informs the player that the narrator will continue to be an important element through the rest of the game. Now, in a move that will be fairly common throughout this review, I want to present a couple of images side-by-side.

 

Another seemingly small choice, here the level design displays something that will come up fairly frequently; restriction of information through perspective. Before getting this close to the door in the hallway, it appears there is no door directly ahead, which helps prevent the player from considering the decision they’re about to make before the narration kicks in, maintaining its effectiveness. This imparts upon the player that decisions are largely meant to be split-second in this game, with the player operating on instinct. And getting into the nitty-gritty of this particular decision, it’s imperative that the player’s instinct is given a chance to kick in since it’s been shown fairly conclusively that at least in the US, people tend to prefer paths that go to the right. By instructing the player to go left, assuming supermarket pathing decisions translate, the narrator is acting against the player’s natural inclinations. Through thorough understanding of how a player moves through a space and interprets visual cues on a subconscious level, the designers have already created a tension between the driving forces of play. Let’s take a quick look at another segment that uses this technique effectively.

INCREDIBLY OVERT ROOM OF UNSPEAKABLE TERROR

It may be a bit difficult to tell in those screenshots due to the lighting, but the word “Escape!” along with an arrow pointing away from the primary path is only really visible once the player nears the end of this section. By this point, the player is used to being presented with options, so in order to make the decision feel weighty the player needs to be “surprised” in a different way. In this scenario, the designers have made it so that only once the player has probably committed to the linear path before them will another option present itself. At this point, the player is in conflict not only with the narrator’s instruction, but their own forward momentum through the space. Again, it may not seem all that significant, but once a player has committed to an action it can be fairly difficult to change course.

But visual design isn’t used only to reinforce the central conflict, but also to subtly clue the player into secret paths. For instance;

Office decor by Montgomery Burns

The framing of this shot, which occurs just as the player enters the boss’s office, is reminiscent of other instances where the player is forced to make a decision. The placement of the doors directly opposite one another is very deliberate, and it hints to clever players that there may be more options here than are initially present. Additionally, since this is something like a third of the way through a path where the player follows all the narrator’s directions, there’s plenty of context to base this assumption on. And while I joked about the decorations above, it’s actually another conscious decision; because this room is so visually different from the rest of the office, it’s likely that the player will remember this moment for subsequent playthroughs and be more prepared to look for secrets upon return.

One more thing I’d like to point out before I wrap this up is the very last room of the main path, in which the player is presented with a simple choice of button presses;

 

This section is set up to be a near-mirror of the very first choice of doors presented by the narrator. Keen observers will even notice that the directional layout has been preserved; the option dictated by the narrator appears on the left, while the alternate option is placed on the right. A key difference, however, is that the approach to this console offers a full view of what’s to come. Also, the narrator begins speaking about which option the player is “supposed” to take well before the player can reach the console. With this, the designer has built up tension in a way that is completely unique to this moment of the game. There’s more to it than this being the final decision, though. To reach this point, the player must have followed almost all of the narrator’s directions. For a run that ends in this area, this would mark the final opportunity for the player to rebel against the narrator. In a game that is obviously about choice, this last chance for the player to become independent is drawn out so the player has plenty of time to contemplate what their upcoming choice will say about them.

To be sure, The Stanley Parable is a wonderful little game about how much agency we allow players in virtual spaces, and that’s its strongest element. But as I said earlier, it would be a shame to overlook just how well the rest of the game is made in service of that theme. For a game that only costs $10, it’s kind of amazing to dig down and see how much effort and care was poured into this game on every level. As far as recommendations go, I strongly recommend that anyone with even a passing interest in video games either as a form of entertainment or as an artistic medium grab this game (though I suspect you’ve probably already done so; this isn’t exactly news). General gaming audiences will be entertained by the narration and the level of antagonism they’re allowed to engage in, while the artists and designers out there can learn a treasure trove of lessons ranging from the superb level design to the excellent voice casting.

Is This Game? A Review of Knights of…Just…Goddamn It

 

As of the moment I’m starting to type this out, I finished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II about an hour ago. If you can’t tell, it left something of a sour taste in my mouth, brain, and three-sizes-too-small heart. Pinning down exactly why this is can be a bit difficult because this game fails in so many new and exciting ways. And yet, the mechanical core is virtually unchanged. The question arising from that is “How can the first KOTOR be a decent but unapproachable game, yet another game with the same mechanics be seen as a failure?” Well kids, that’s what I’m going to do my best to answer today. Fair warning, this will probably be a long one.

 

In my review of KOTOR 1, I used the first portion to give a bit of context to put the complaints I had into perspective. I felt it was only fair to give the developers a little slack. I’d like to do the same here, but primarily to soften the blows of the savage beating this game is about to get. In October of 2013, mere months after the release of KOTOR, Obsidian was approached by LucasArts to handle a sequel. Apparently the two companies had done work together before and Obsidian had a history of handling the IP to LucasArts’ satisfaction. Even in the beginning, though, there were signs that the development was a rush job. Obsidian only finished the E3 demo of the game days before the conference, at least partially due to the fact that no actual levels had been completed before work on the demo began. A co-founder of Obsidian has said since then that the original release date was slated for 2005, but the team soon found themselves working towards a holiday 2004 release under the direction of LucasArts. Here I have to give Obsidian credit where it’s due; the fact that they were able to crank out something even mechanically competent in this 14-month time frame is noteworthy. Sure the engine was the same and some assets had been used in the first, but the combat does seem to have undergone a fair amount of tweaking and they achieved fairly large worlds compared to the original. Still, even Chris Avellone, lead designer and writer on the project, has said that the tight production schedule led to the release of an unfinished product.

 

All that being said, however, at the same time he hits on one of the reasons this can’t be considered the primary reason the game doesn’t work. Chris admits that the team should have radically “de-scoped” the game, and this is simultaneously true and false. See, the game is basically divided into three “acts” in terms of how progression is structured; there’s the prologue/tutorial segment, the “open galaxy” segment, and finally the “boss rush” segment towards the end. All three of these portions have radically different pacing and structure and largely feel unconnected to each other. The most egregious of these is the tutorial, which is the single most unbelievable 6 hours of gameplay I’ve ever powered through. Yes, that’s right; 6 hours. This is how long it took me to get from the prologue, in which you control a repair droid, to a point where you can actually choose your own destination. This section of the game is so reviled that one of the most popular mods for this game removes 2/3 of it, leaving the last portion only because it’s the first time story-critical information is conveyed that can’t be figured out easily during the rest of the game. I’d like to say that I have no idea why this overbearing hand-holding happened, but I actually have an idea. This is purely speculation, but I have a feeling it may be related to one of the issues I brought up in the first KOTOR review.

 

You see, one of my biggest complaints with that game was that the mechanics were highly unapproachable. Between the fact that they relied too heavily on tabletop terminology that only exists as an abstraction in a video game and the complete disinterest in helping the player acquire play skills, the game can be incredibly intimidating. One of the few good things I can say about this game is that it certainly doesn’t have that problem. But I would posit that it goes too far in the other direction with this approach. It’s not uncommon for games to give players a starting area that has little threat in order to get the player comfortable with the mechanics, but this area doesn’t need to be long. Think the outside of Peach’s Castle in Mario 64; there are no enemies, only empty space for the player to get used to the idea of moving around in 3D space and learning about the physics of the game through trial and error. Then, once the player is comfortable, they move forward. This element of the player setting the pace is crucial, since it makes sure that no player is held back any longer than they have to be. Instead in KOTOR II, we get a long, claustrophobic, uninteresting slog through a mining facility where almost no plot or character development takes place. Also, at the end of the mining facility, you’re given a ship which teases the idea of the game becoming more open; instead you’re simply herded to the next tutorial area for a few “mandatory side quests” before you can actually get to the part of the game you care about.

 

Although, describing the rest of the game as something you care about is a bit of a stretch as well. The main “story” follows you, your band of stock characters, and HK-47 as you go from planet to planet and do odd jobs while some vague threat of the Sith lies in the distance. On the subject of the Sith, everyone you interact with seems utterly confused as to what their objective is, which shows that they’re all imbeciles. Sith have always clashed with the Jedi, so it stands to reason that their purpose in hunting all the Jedi is as simple as “they want the Jedi dead”. It’s not a mystery if it’s literally party of what defines a Sith character. The game flirts with subplots at times, but never really follows through with them. This includes elements like a Sith temple on the moon of Onderon, Infinite Empire flags and markings all over a Mandalorian camp, the mystery of what happened to Revan after the first game, and a couple of other dead ends. All of these are unresolved and unexplained at the end of the game, as if they hoped you would just forget. Even the main plot has a rushed, nonsensical ending in the form of the “boss rush” I mentioned earlier. The last portion of the game is basically you running around small maps sprinkled with bosses that should be epic and memorable but just come off as pathetic. They’re built up the whole game as the pinnacle of evil, then they just kind of keel over.

 

Speaking of this last segment, even outside of it being a boss rush to the finish line, there are some pretty strange design choices here that are worth looking at. Keep in mind that the tension here should be consistently high, as it is intended to be the climax of the entire game. First, before entering the Sith flagship (the Ravager), you’re told to pick a third party member since you have been forced to take one of your companions along by default. Then, you enter the Ravager and are immediately told that your choice was irrelevant since the third member you picked is replaced by another forced companion. A little confusing and detrimental to the flow of play, but not a huge deal. I mean, we’re going to fight a Sith lord! This will be awesome. Well, not so fast. First, you’re required to place four bombs on certain points of the ship because reasons. Alright, not the first time I’ve been asked to run errands right before a boss, although I wish they had bothered to justify it. Then, right as you’re about to finish this little distraction, you’re told you have to backtrack near the front of the ship in order to continue. This KILLS the tension, because it completely disrupts the forward momentum of the game and the excitement of the battle that’s about to take place. Instead of approaching Darth Nihilus with anticipation, I just felt deflated. Less, “Hell yeah!” and more “Let’s get this over with”. And unfortunately, this is only the start of the ending’s problems.

 

After the pitiful boss fight that is Darth Nihilus (where no information is provided about his backstory or motivation, by the way), we quickly jump cut to the player landing on a planet while no explanation is given as to where we are or why we went there. You wander aimlessly among the planet’s surface until you find what appears to be some sort of Sith academy. The game then decides that you have met your quota of interesting shit happening and abruptly switches your control to a near-defenseless droid. I’m not kidding, in the middle of the final world you switch characters just to press some buttons you found as the primary character that they wouldn’t let you interact with yet. Thankfully, this segment doesn’t last long. To contrast this, the Sith academy seems to last fucking forever and has about a million Sith minions. Oh, and did I mention that you’re all alone during this segment? The one where you have to fight more strong enemies at once than almost any other portion of the game? Make your way through the mind-numbingly boring onslaught, and you reach Darth Sion, another battle that’s built up over the course of the game. Like Darth Nihilus, he dies almost immediately. Unlike Darth Nihilus, you’re forced to kill him about five times over. And none of the fights are any different from the first. Same health, same moveset, same everything. At this point it’s just needless padding.

 

Now the player is treated to the real final boss of this game, and what can only be described as the laziest plot dump I’ve ever seen. I get the sense that it was intended to be some kind of “big reveal”, but the rest of the game isn’t set up to achieve this. From fairly early on it’s easy to tell exactly what’s happening, and this is at least partially due to the fact that subtlety is not the writer’s strong suit here. As such, there are a few things you may learn for the first time in this scene, but it’s largely just confirmation of things you’ve known for the past 10 hours of play. This would be forgivable if the last fight were epic enough to counteract this, but like the other Sith lords, this one barely puts up a fight. The last portion of it seems like a rushed, tacked-on addition, too; you fight three floating lightsabers. There’s no context for this, the boss just kind of summons three floating lightsabers and they attack you. It felt like I had briefly switched to Kingdom Hearts in the middle of the fight. After you kill her, you talk briefly of some weapon on the planet you’re on that’s supposed to be super scary, and it just…ends. It’s very abrupt, and it kind of shocked me. I at least expected to see some final scene of your character preparing for the future you picked for them in the last dialogue option, but it just jump cuts to the credits.

 

You may read all of this and think that I hated this game. While that’s certainly true for parts of it, I have to admit that the middle portion where you’re going from planet to planet was actually fairly enjoyable. Some planets were obviously more fun than others, and I suspect that a couple of planets were rushed due to time constraints. For those of you looking to play this game at some point in the future, I recommend this planet order; Onderon, Nar Shaddaa, Dantooine, Korriban. It should be very apparent as you play that the further towards the end of the list you get, the shorter and less finished the planets are. Kind of surprisingly, the shorter planets tend to be more fun and straightforward. Both Nar Shaddaa and Onderon have poor player direction that is only emphasized by the bland visual design that makes the whole world look samey. Still, even Onderon manages to capture a suitable tension during the later stages of its quest to counteract this. And really, when it comes down to it, the combat is still good. Especially with the decision to ditch the non-Jedi class for the player character and the increased (if overdone) focus on approachability. If you enjoyed the first game but wished you had a better grip on the play itself and don’t mind being bored for about 75% of the game, KOTOR 2 might be for you.

 

So what’s the takeaway from all this? Well, in the end I have to say that I think this game is rather bad. Of course, this is the simplistic conclusion. I don’t necessarily think this game is bad because of incompetence. It seems merely to be an unfinished product. In fact, one of the most frustrating parts of the game is that for every complaint I had above, there’s at least one instance of the game getting it right. By the end of the game it becomes clear that the team had the potential to make the “KOTOR 1 but improved” sequel that I wanted this to be, but the resources and the time just weren’t there. Like the first game of this series, I don’t think I can recommend it to impatient gamers without also suggesting that you mod it heavily, but to those looking for a lesson in design this is almost a must-have. It can be a painful, boring journey, but it’s one of the rare instances where you can see an element fail and succeed within one title. You could say this is like the James Joyce novel of video games; it’s tough to get through, and you may not like it, but you definitely learn a lot just through the process of completing it.

Knights of the Old Republic: The Best Jedi Simulator that Desperately Wants You Not to Play it

 

Gadon: In order to rescue your Jedi friend, you’ll have to win her in the swoop race. Now, if we could return to talking about gang politics…

 

Me: No, hold up, what the hell is a swoop race?

 

Gadon: So, what you’ll need to do is break into the enemy base and disable their security…

 

Me: Are you listening? What the fuck is a swoop race? What even is a swoop for that matter? How do I race them?

 

Gadon: Great! Thanks! See you after you get back!

 

For those who have played this game before, you almost certainly know what dialogue sequence I’m referring to. It’s on the first planet of your adventure through space, and immediately you’re informed that your quest to save the lady Jedi you’re looking for will involve…some kind of race? But at no point until you actually get the vehicle near the end of this quest line does anyone bother telling you what a swoop is or how the races work. As it turns out, this one interaction and my reaction to it as displayed above almost perfectly encapsulate the experience of playing this game. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) is a game in which you’re routinely handed a ton of information sans context and expected to just run with it. Spoiler alert, though; if you can manage to make sense of what this game wants from you, it can be an incredibly rewarding effort. However, this leaves the game with the distinct feeling that it doesn’t really want to be played.

 

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s start out with a bit of backstory on this game in the interest of fairness. KOTOR was released for the original Xbox by BioWare in July of 2003. BioWare’s main claim to fame at this point in time was the revered Baldur’s Gate franchise, and I think it’s safe to say that some elements that cemented that franchise’s popularity still come through even now with titles like Mass Effect. Still, despite having been around for 8 years at that point, the team at BioWare simply hadn’t had that many projects to sink their teeth into. Combine this with the fact that the game industry still had many lessons to learn about design in densely populated 3D space and player usability, and it will give you a little context for what’s coming up in this analysis.

 

Let’s rip this band-aid off right now; KOTOR is just a hot mess of a game in a multitude of ways. Without even examining any of the technical problems with the game, it very plainly suffers from a complete lack of player direction. And I don’t mean “The game doesn’t hold your hand and put a glowing marker over every objective”. I mean, “At the beginning of the game you’re told to pick a class without being told what the differences between them are, you’re given a stat sheet with minimal explanation of how each stat works, told to pick skills before you’ve had a chance to try combat, and expected to fine-tune your stats to a degree that some min-maxers would find tedious.” What I just described is the character building segment, which happens as soon as you pick “New Game”. Before we’ve even technically begun, the game is practically challenging us to a chess match to earn the right to start playing. And it only continues throughout the game. Every minute of play it felt like I came across some new, utterly baffling design choice that completely lacked explanation. For instance, it’s typical in RPGs for quest-givers to have unique names that make them stand out. It makes them more memorable and helps them stand out from other NPCs that are little more than the window dressing of video games. KOTOR, however, decided that some quest givers would have generic names like “Taris Citizen” or “Sith Teacher”. To further confound the issue, many characters with unique names do nothing at all.

 

So, why does this matter, right? I mean, the combat is fun. And sure, I get it, if you go back and play it a second time knowing how all the systems work, it becomes brilliant. But the thing is, you don’t want to design a game that is deliberately antagonistic to the player outside of the play. Take Dark Souls, for example. It’s guilty of some of the same issues, but that’s not why people like it. When people say that Dark Souls is delightfully difficult, they’re referring to the punishing but fair play; the combination of level design and combat balancing that produces a game that is difficult to master but by no means impossible. That’s being antagonistic within the context of play. Throwing a bunch of numbers at the player in the first five minutes and not explaining what they are is antagonistic outside of play, and there’s really no reason for it. Think about it this way; you could design the greatest game ever made, but if you don’t build it in a way that teaches people how to play, it’s going to be frustrating to newcomers. This is where I think BioWare’s state as a developer is relevant; I have a completely unverifiable theory that the team fell into a common trap for new developers in which you get so caught up in the fine-tuning of the mechanics, you completely neglect teaching the player how to use them. It’s easy when you see the product from the inside every day to forget that the goal is to have someone else pick it up and play it themselves. If you plan on playing this game soon, I encourage you to go through the game acting as if you’ve never played it before to see what I mean. Take only the direction that’s given to you, and see how long it takes you to ask yourself, “How am I supposed to know what to do here without being a developer of the game?”

 

Before I get into more technical gripes, I will bring up something else that has a negative effect on player behavior; level design and poor management of negative possibility space. To the unfamiliar, negative possibility space is essentially when you don’t account for what a player may try to do in your game, but it’s usually in the context of level design. Imagine a level that has a huge mountain in it, and also that you realize using a combination of skills will let you jump to the top. Neat! So you scale the mountain, waiting to see what the developers have hidden up there for the clever adventurer. You get to the top and see…nothing. The developers themselves didn’t realize you could get here, so they didn’t place any special objects. KOTOR creates a similar effect almost constantly with the poor decision to place an absurd amount of doors that are non-interactive. This in itself wouldn’t be so bad if non-interactive doors were consistently cued visually. Instead, you can almost never tell until you actually attempt to interact with one. Even some that appear to be interactive are actually locked and can never be opened. The downside to this is that it HEAVILY disincentivizes the act of exploring the map. If most of the doors don’t lead anywhere, why spend so much time checking all of them? Of all the poor decisions that went into this game, this and the infuriating environment suit portions are the ones that are least excusable. We knew better than this even in 2003.

 

Now, the mechanical side is really what saves this game in a lot of ways. If you ignore the complete contempt for the player in conveying how these mechanics work and take the time to learn the stat system, you can absolutely have a lot of fun with this game. Still, there are definitely a bunch of unintuitive decisions to be found here as well. To be fair, I think that some of this comes from their Baldur’s Gate lineage; the original BG was basically a slightly modified Dungeons and Dragons, and even in KOTOR a lot of that terminology remains. Even for someone who is vaguely familiar with tabletop games, the appearance of the jargon was somewhat confusing. The upside, of course, is that D&D has a very robust statistic system, and a game that adapts it can’t really go wrong unless you’re just trying to make something bad from the outset. I think the strangest mechanical element would probably have to be the level system. KOTOR uses a very non-standard “20” level cap, and to make things more confusing, the cap is split between two different classes you take on as the game progresses. On top of all this, leveling in your second class is demonstrably better than leveling in your first one, so if you leveled up a few too many times early on (which will almost definitely happen your first time through since they give no indication that this is how leveling works), you’ve essentially sabotaged your character. Again, this feels like something a developer worked on for a long time, perfected, and then just assumed the player would figure out through magic or something.

 

Since this is my first time playing KOTOR, I figure I might as well say whether I liked the game overall. The answer is a pretty solid “maaaaaaaaaaybe”. This game rides a very fine line between incredible and unplayable. It’s mechanically deep once you take the 6-month community college course to become a licensed KOTOR Technician, but the barrier to entry is pretty steep. To be honest, I’m not even sure I could recommend this to someone who doesn’t have a ton of patience. I would love to based on how awesome it feels when you start to get the hang of it, but it just feels like there’s too steep a learning curve. And I mean, there’s a great Star Wars story being told here as well; narrative is one of the few things BioWare consistently gets right, and it really shines here. I’ve never really been a huge Star Wars fan so I never checked out the extended universe, but now I have to admit I’m intrigued. On top of that, there are great supporting characters that are more like people than the pack mules of the OTHER game I’ve been playing recently. For all the complaints I have about this game, it really does get a lot of elements right. I just don’t know if it’s enough to take it from “good game” to “great game”.

 

On the flip side, if you have even a passing interest in how games are made, I would say you absolutely need to own this game. Partly because you’re probably the kind of person that won’t mind the learning curve so much, and partly because all the things I said above and more are best analyzed firsthand. It really is something to behold when you realize a game actively does not want you playing it. But in the end, as I said at the beginning, that swoop race interaction is a great mirror to the experience of the game as a whole; when I first heard about it, I was confused and had no idea what was happening. But despite the initial confusion, both the swoop race and KOTOR ended up being thoroughly entertaining.