From Ars Technica:

Why we quit: the moments that push us away from gaming

There are also a lot of good examples of issues with frustration in games in the user comments on the article as well.

… if you have a setting that falls below even Very Easy, generally speaking, this means that a brain-damaged sack of rocks could fall over onto the keyboard and still win.  When someone who has at least a bit of skill at Street Fighter II can’t beat the final boss on kindergarten-level difficulty, chances are there’s something seriously wrong with your game.  I’m just sayin’…

More on this when my rage subsides enough to do at least a semi-objective write-up on the game’s problems with wrist-wrecking, controller-smashing frustration.

Ah, the racing game: one of those gaming genres where my enthusiasm for the sport is often inversely proportional to my actual skill level.  While, admittedly, my skill in most racing games is at least somewhat more proficient than my usually abysmal technique in RTS games, this slight advantage is usually undone by the fact that when it comes to most racing games, there is little in the way of difficulty levels, just an AI that starts out bruising and gets worse from there.  And in the few racing games that actually start out relatively easy, another bane of the genre quickly becomes apparent – the often-used gimmick of unlockables as the sole means of progression through the game.

As an example of this, take the supposedly “casual” handheld racing game, Mario Kart DS.  As one of the more accessible-seeming games in the genre, Mario Kart has long been a favorite of mine, pretty much from the SNES on up.  Mario Kart DS picks up on this, and features a collection of “retro” tracks from previous games in addition to an all-new series of tracks.  And generally speaking, it lives up to its name – you can jump right into it, with easy-to-use controls and fairly forgiving game mechanics.  

But here’s the catch:  Out of the box, you can only race on half of the available tracks in the game.  To access the rest of the tracks, first you have to beat a “tournament” race on the first two sets of tracks, which opens up a third set, and you’re required to beat another tournament to unlock the final set of tracks.  And because there are two circuits, one for the old tracks and one for the new, you have to beat a total of 6 actual racing modes simply to be able to freely drive on any track in the game.  And the unlocking doesn’t end there – want to unlock more vehicles?  Want to unlock additional racing modes?  You have to beat more tournament modes, each of which get progressively harder.  

Admittedly, I was eventually able to beat the initial tournament modes, so that I could at least explore all of the tracks that the game had to offer.  However, the harder racing modes still remain out of my grasp, and the only way I have ever been able to access the alternate vehicles and modes is through using Action Replay DS codes, the method of last resort for an otherwise locked-down and uneditable console game.  As I’ve said before, if I have to use unauthorized cheat codes to access all of a game, then something is wrong with how the game was designed – I paid full price for the game, and so I should be able to access the full range of gaming options, regardless of my skill level.

On the PC side, another example of this is the Trackmania series of games.  Again, this is a track-based racing game, but with even more severe lockouts – at the start of the game, you have access to only around 20% of the total tracks, with the rest locked up until you have beaten a certain time for the available track.  Additionally, each track only unlocks one additional track once you beat it, so there’s quite a lot of work to do to fully access all of the tracks in the game.  To this day, I’ve only unlocked perhaps half of them, and while that’s still a lot more tracks than in most other racing games, it’s frustrating to know that I will probably never be able to experience half of the game without resorting to underhanded tactics to unlock everything else.  The only saving grace is that once you get bored with your unlocked tracks, there’s a full-featured editor for making and racing your own, and I’ve honestly spent more time working on that than racing on the in-game tracks.  Without that, though, I would have felt fairly angry at only getting to play half a game.  (At least with trackmania, you don’t have to worry about unlocking extra vehicles – mainly because there aren’t any.)

So, given these decidedly mixed experiences with racing games, I’m always a bit nervous about buying a new one outright, only to find out that due to my mediocre racing skills, I’ve only purchased a small fraction of a game.  Add to this the fact that the games I have cited are among the more easily accessible and playable in the genre – most of the more “realistic” racing games on the market have difficulty curves that are far out of reach to all but the most dedicated racing enthusiasts.  This unfortunately means that, if you’re not the kind of person who has an actual racing wheel as part of their setup (and no, the wii wheel that comes with Mario Kart Wii doesn’t count), you’re going to have a hard time getting much out of these games.  Because of this, I tend to avoid them entirely, looking for the more casual style of racing games, such as the FlatOut series and the ones I’ve already mentioned.  

With all this in mind, I took a look at a relative newcomer to the PC, the moderately casual racing game Burnout: Paradise.  Unlike most racing games, with a fixed series of tracks, Burnout Paradise (henceforth BP, a fairly appropriate acronym given how much virtual gas you must be burning through) takes a page from GTA-style games with a full, open-world city to explore from behind the wheel, racing modes integrated into each intersection in the game.  

On its own, the open-world concept seemed like an interesting idea.  While I have played many games in the GTA series, I always felt that by including so many different modes (driving, shooting, etc), that no one mode was as good as it could be.  For example, the shooting was mediocre, especially when the Max Payne series of games featured a similar third-person style of gunplay that wasn’t hampered by the various limitations in the GTA series.  As a result, I wondered if BP would be able to do the same, except with the driving aspect – a full city to explore, plenty of things to do, without being compromised by the other game modes.  Still, it’s hard to tell anything from a trailer and a handful of reviews, so it became yet another game that I was determined to demo first before buying outright.  

Admittedly, with the demo, the game does do something right – instead of a small, unrepresentative snippet, the demo download turns out to be an actual copy of the entire game – which means that you can explore the entire environment to your heart’s content for a limited period of time.  This, at the very least, allows for a decent trial of the game, and makes the purchase much easier – instead of paying and then waiting for the full game version to download, all you need to do is punch in an unlock code to get unlimited access to the rest of the game.

Of course, when I say unlimited, there are certain caveats to that.  But before I get into that, let me mention one thing that they do right: from the very beginning of the game, the entire environment is open for you to explore.  Unlike most GTA games, where you start out in a small slice of the city and have to complete a large number of missions to access the rest of the map (there are those pesky unlockables again), you can literally go anywhere in the city from the very start, through all five of the game’s districts, everything from driving along winding mountain roads to (if you’re observant enough) spinning donuts around the city’s major-league baseball diamond.  I have to give them quite a bit of credit for this decision, as it is the first truly free-roaming driving game that I have come across, and for that matter, one of the few free-roaming games that doesn’t require unlocks (the only other one that immediately comes to mind is Fallout 3).  As a result, if you’re just looking for a bit of a cathartic diversion, you can fire up the game and just spend some time driving around and exploring the beautifully-rendered city, without having to worry about running into any arbitrarily-closed bridges or other limitations.  

Also, in another gaming departure, crashes are less of a game-ending factor and ore as a matter of course – while a crash will cost you precious seconds in a race, a single crash won’t take you out of the running in any of the game modes, and after a crash, you’ll be right back in the game just about where you left off.  This makes the game feel much more forgiving, and makes completing many of the races (especially early on) much more reasonable.  

However, despite these improvements, BP can’t quite escape the bane of gaming unlockables.  While it’s true that the whole city is open for you to explore, unlike in a GTA game, you can’t just jack whatever car you see that happens to suit your fancy.  Instead, you start out with one single vehicle, and have to earn the other 74 or so through the other various game modes.  Also, as you beat challenges, you upgrade your driver’s license, which basically means that you can get more interesting cars, but all of the challenges also go up in overall difficulty.  Which means that, again, as the challenges outstrip your skill, you end up with only a fraction of the cars that the game provides.

Of course, since this is an EA game, here’s where it gets interesting.  BP is one of the first games to have an integrated downloadable content store, which mainly features additional packs of random cars (famous vehicles, toy cars, etc.) that you can have for an additional cost.  However, intermingled amongst the DLC packs is an interesting option – if you don’t want to go through the trouble of earning all the cars yourself, you can get a pack that unlocks all of the standard in-game vehicles for your driving enjoyment – all for the low, low price of $7.99!

Honestly, I feel mixed about this kind of development in games.  Of course, similar trends have long been present in various types of MMO games, where people will pay X dollars for a character already brought up to maximum level, or many of the free-to-play item-purchase MMOs, where your character can acquire cool and powerful equipment for a micropayment price.  And, overall, the deal isn’t horrible, as BP is already priced a bit lower than most standard games, so you can pay that price and race your way to a full stable of cars, or you can pay about the going price for a regular PC game to get access to everything right off the bat.  While the price isn’t horrible, though, it sets a rather troubling precedent for games, in that companies are deciding it’s okay to charge above and beyond their retail box price for features that are already included on the disk.  In this case, perhaps, it’s not quite as egregious, as everything in the game is technically available through playing (and therefore the payment can be seen as a “convenience” fee for those without a ton of time to earn all the cars, or, in my case, a “you can’t play racing games very well” fee).  In that respect, it’s not quite as bad as the Resident Evil 5 multiplayer fiasco, where a portion of the game was available on the disc, but was locked down until you paid an additional fee.  But all the same, it’s a troubling trend when game companies want to go far beyond the price on the box for what’s already technically in it.  

For that matter, given the sheer amount of advertising present in the game, EA should practically be paying its players for all of the ads thrust in front of their eyes.  Paradise City is somewhat like Los Angeles, in that huge, tacky billboards are plastered everywhere, only instead of featuring fun or interesting things appropriate to the game world, like in GTA, all of them are adverts for real-world products, which feels especially weird given the general lack of actual licensing for any other aspects of the game.  I mean, if you’re going to make it realistic, get some licenses and add in actual cars, locations, and other such things from real life.  Having a fictitious city, but real billboards, makes the advertising seem quite a bit out of place.  While it at least fits in better than, say, in a futuristic or historic type of game, it does feel a bit irksome that the game, with the DLC and the ads, seems like a way to grab as much cash as possible, and doesn’t really speak to a great deal of respect for the people who are actually buying the games.  That being said, it’s mainly a small annoyance.

Admittedly, when it comes to overall gameplay, the game is mostly marred only by small annoyances such as these.  Another annoyance is the ever-present, and singular, radio station available, with a fairly large selection of tracks which are, unfortunately, all in more or less the alt-pop genre, and if you want something else, the only other option is to turn the music off (I’m still looking into way to add custom music in, but so far there isn’t anything obvious).  Additionally, the minimap is occasionally unclear at times, and only shows items outside of the small section of city it covers when it thinks you need them (which doesn’t always correspond to when you actually need them).  And, when you come right down to it, it is a bit weird to be driving around what is essentially a ghost town, populated solely by automated, driverless cars.  But aside from those small quibbles, overall, the game is quite playable, in whatever way you want to play – either through various races and missions, or simply by exploring the expansive city.

So, in summation, Burnout Paradise is a fun and generally accessible game, but get ready for the upsell: unless you’re a racing expert, you’re going to have to shell out some extra cash to get your hands on all the vehicles included with the normal game.  It’s just a shame that only a few rare games manage to go the distance – letting you get the full experience, everything on the disc, regardless of skill level or the amount of time you want to devote to playing the game.

Update: After playing around with Burnout Paradise quite a bit more, and earning my Class A license, I’m still enjoying the game quite a lot, but there is one noticeable aggravation – for an open-world game, it’s really quite closed off.  Admittedly, it’s not something that you’ll notice immediately, as there are plenty of “hidden” areas to explore behind smashable barriers.  However, after a while, you’ll begin to notice that you can’t pull into many places, as they’re blocked off from access.  You can’t roll up the steps to many buildings to perform tricks because they’ve got concrete barriers, and if your idea of fun is speeding in between the wind turbines or speeding through the plaza that houses the observatory, you’re out of luck.  Even the country club is blocked off.  As a result, the game feels a lot more static, and much more limited, as the exploration is limited entirely to the areas specifically designed for it – there’s no going “off-grid.”  This is a fairly major departure from the GTA series of open-world games, where you could find a way to explore pretty much anywhere (mission-based area unlocks aside, of course, which are a different sort of problem).  In that sense, it’s a bit of a disappointment, because it feels like an artificially imposed limit that takes away from the gameplay.  That being said, though, given that most dedicated racing games are a set of much more linear courses, it’s still a vast improvement in the racing genre – it just doesn’t quite measure up in the other genre it tries to compete in, that of open-world exploration.

For those who have yet to complete Fallout 3’s main campaign, there are spoilers below.

Yes, I know, another Fallout 3 update, but a fairly pertinent one.  I’ll keep it brief – while Broken Steel manages to break quite a number of things (including a CTD on saving your game if you have any location-modifying mods installed), it does manage to clear up the significant problem I had with the game’s ending (and which I went into far more detail about here).  Instead of a full-stop game ending, as before, it turns out that the power overload only manages to knock your character into a two-week coma, after which you get to set about putting plasma blots through the skulls of a bunch more enclave baddies, leading through some new levels, and giving you another fun Megaton-esque choice during the campaign.  It’s a fun, if short campaign, with some interesting new weapons and a couple of fiendishly difficult new enemies.  Overall, though, what it does is take away the pointlessly linear finality that the game originally had, and restores it to its true state – a full, open-world game which you can play on your own terms, for as long as you want, all the way up to a ridiculously powerful level 30.  And that, even with the additional campaign and other issues aside, makes this perhaps the only truly necessary DLC to fully realize the story, and potential, of Fallout 3.

One thing about a down economy and less stable employment is that those affected tend to buy less entertainment, including games.  One of the effects that I have personally noticed, in regards to that, is a renewed reticence to buy games on a whim.  In better times, with more discretionary income to throw around, I was somewhat more comfortable making a $50 gamble every so often, relying on reviews and trailers in the hopes that the game would deliver on its money.  No more is this the case – along with eschewing theaters and buying far less music than I used to, I have less money available for games, which leads me to take a more detailed look before I take the plunge and purchase the full version.  With the possible exception of gog.com and other $10 or less gaming options, I only buy games once I’ve had a chance to try them on for size, and make as educated a guess as possible as to whether they will be worth their cost.

When it comes to blockbuster titles, at the premium price range, I’ve probably been the most strict, buying only after extensive time spent with the demo, which has led to very few purchases in the past few months (feeling the need for a racing game Burnout Paradise is the single exception so far beyond DoW II, and I should have a review of that up relatively soon – I hesitate to mention Call of Duty: World at War, which I only picked up during a half-price sale, figuring it was worth it at that price).  That being said, I’ve been looking much more closely at the more budget-priced offerings these days, many from independent developers who I feel better about supporting anyways, and one of the games that I was keenly interested in was Zeno Clash.

For the uninitiated, Zeno Clash is a first-person punch-people-in-the-face game set in a bizarre but highly creative world populated by a truly strange collection of creatures (all of which, of course, you generally get to punch in the head at some point or other).  The trailers looked very interesting, and the reviews were good, so I decided to try my hand at the demo.  After all, one of my favorite games of all time, Oni, was in the beat-’em-up-with-guns genre, and so Zeno Clash looked like it might fit the bill.

Alas, as you can probably already guess, it was not to be.  Admittedly, the demo started off interestingly, with an okay dream-sequence tutorial setup that taught you what you needed to know as the game progressed.  However, upon actually engaging in the battles, I learned a hard truth about the game – even at the easiest setting, the combat is punishingly difficult.  I managed to scrape through the first battle okay, but the second one, with guns, took quite a number of tries to get through (and honestly, for a melee combat game, it’s rather disconcerting that the best way to win any time you have a gun is to run away and shoot people instead – I know, bringing a gun to a fistfight, but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense in a game like this).  And when the first heavy boss battle came around, well…  I’d explain how it went, but honestly, it was pretty much exactly like the dodge-the-behemoth-and-fail battle that I talked about in a previous post about Gears of War.  Not quite instakill, but fighting the same futile battle over and over again is hardly my idea of fun.  

The result?  Despite quite a lot of effort, the demo managed to stymie me less than an hour in, and as a result, I quit in disgust, took the demo off my machine, and despite a promising premise and game ambience, the developers of Zeno Clash won’t be seeing my twenty bucks anytime soon.

I specifically want to emphasize this point, because we’re not talking about some monolithic game corporation here – we’re taking about a small development team, for which every sale counts.  And it’s important to note that when you’re trying to sell a game, amidst a market saturated with options and a sky-high piracy rate, encouraging the maximum amount of paying customers is important.  When your game manages to shut out someone who had initially been a relatively eager customer, someone who would have paid full retail to get a copy of your game, that’s a problem.  And when you make your game sufficiently difficult enough to dissuade everyone but hardcore players, you drastically limit the amount that your game can bring in.  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – having a full range of difficulty options available, to satisfy everyone from the very casual to the very hardcore player, is going to garner a lot more interest than a game which quickly proves difficult to people unwilling to invest countless hours mastering your game.

This, I suppose, brings me to another demo, and one that I haven’t yet removed, but one that hasn’t quite pushed me to buy it, either – the unusual platform puzzler Braid.  Although puzzle games often drive me mad, Braid does bring one important thing to the table – it’s a platformer where you can’t die, and you can’t lose.  On the other hand, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can win, either, and so far, I honestly prefer Portal’s physics-based puzzles to Braid’s time-based ones.  A t the same time, though, I keep Braid’s demo around, and still consider it occasionally, simply because it does what it does well – it’s beautiful, interesting, pressure-free, and eminently accessible.  Even if it does prove fiendish to master overall, it allows anyone, at any level, to jump in and play around with it, and for that reason alone, it’s eminently more playable and less frustrating than a game like Zeno Clash, which is quick to shut you down if your skills don’t measure up to its expectations.

So, my point is this:  If I can’t even make it through your demo, the chances that I’ll buy the full version of your game are slim to none.  What this means is that when you’re designing your game, keep in mind that there are plenty of people who are eager to play, but who probably won’t shell out if they can only play 10% of your game due to its difficulty.  

(In fairness, of course, it is true that one could take the Derek Smart attitude of specifically catering to the niche market of truly hardcore players, and essentially giving the finger to any player who doesn’t live up to your demanding standards.  However, while this may be somewhat profitable, even a casual perusal of Mr. Smart’s general reputation on the web should indicate that there are significant drawbacks to this sort of engagement with the gaming community.  And, as an advocate of allowing everyone to enjoy a wide variety of gaming experiences, I would argue that for all but the most technical and specialized games, which will always require a complex skill set to master, adding in variable difficulty is a small price to pay for a wider player – and purchaser – base.)

A few nights ago, while browsing on gog.com (an excellent site to find and purchase older games, for cheap, drm-free), I remembered that I still had the original retail copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 lying around on a shelf somewhere.  One quick reinstall later (luckily, everything works just fine under Vista), and I quickly started to remember why this game, despite its age, is still one of the most enjoyable shooters out there.  

By itself, UT2k4 has quite a lot to offer: a huge array of gameplay modes, a half-decent selection of weapons, and on top of that, it’s one of the first shooters to incorporate vehicles into gameplay in a way that doesn’t completely suck.  Onslaught mode, a vehicle free-for-all, opened up a whole new type of multiplayer gameplay, and is still quite enjoyable today (arguably even more than its successor’s Warfare mode).  Additionally, UT2k4 brought back the Assault mode, an enjoyable objective-based mode with offense and defense modes (similar to some map types in TF2, for instance), yet another mode sadly missing from its successor, UT3.  Also, notably for a multiplayer game, UT2k4 also features offline play and botmatches, allowing you to get in a quick game any time, without having to deal with the connection and scheduling issues inherent in online play.

However, UT2k4 stands apart from most other games in the sheer amount of mods, extensions, maps, and other user-created content available for it.  A normal game install is about 5GB, and I have at least that in archived user content, featuring countless additional gameplay types (including Invasion mode, where you get to fight scores of baddies from the single-player Unreal games), weapon sets, maps, and mutators.  And, while looking to see if there was anything new available since I last installed it, I found one of the best mods yet: the ballistic weapons pack.

Basically, this weapons pack swaps out the usual science-fiction-deathmatch arsenal, filled with various lame things like the shock rifle (yeah, right) and lightning gun, and swaps in a full complement of modern weaponry – everything from basic pistols (including one very nice on that’s almost reminiscent of the original UT enforcer) all the way up to heavy machineguns, RPGs, and the most crazily “realistic” minigun of just about any game I’ve played.  The weapons are all well-modeled, with realistic animations, and useful alt-fire modes (you can even pin the minigun and machineguns to the ground to make them into in-place turrets, with much greater accuracy).  All in all, it’s a whole lot of great fun, and it brings together something that’s hard to find anywhere else: fun, forgiving casual deathmatch play with forceful modern weapons that are a joy to fire.

Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure why this is.  It does seem, though, that multiplayer shooters end up divided into two types: casual shooters with a rather bizarre set of weapons, and “realistic” shooters which have all the cool toys, but are absolutely no fun to play, because they’re realistic, and you go down after a few shots, and usually then get to wait around until the next match (as respawning simply isn’t realistic enough).  And so, you’re forced to choose – fire a bunch of cool, modern weapons for a few seconds before some teenager with way too much time on their hands puts a round through your character’s skull, or run around blowing stuff up with a bunch of random, crazy, and sadly not all that enjoyable fantasy guns.  

As much as I like the Unreal series, it suffers from this quite a bit – while there’s a good overall array of weapons, most of them aren’t that fun to fire.  Of the actual guns, in the latest iteration, you get the enforcer, which sounds weak, doesn’t do much, and has a three-shot alternate fire that can only be used every few seconds, which makes it feel weaker still.  Beyond that, the sniper rifle does make a comeback, and it’s quite a bit of fun – but it’s just one gun.  Otherwise, you’re left chucking green goop like the contestant on a Nickelodeon game show of decades past, using a bizarre laser-esque rifle that seems to do next to nothing unless you line up a firing combo, a bizarre hybrid between a shotgun and a grenade launcher that’s not ever accurate at close range, a super-generic “fires bolts of energy” gun, and the staple of all deathmatch-style games, the rocket launcher.

I’m not sure why, but playing with those sorts of guns just doesn’t feel all that… satisfying, I guess. There’s just something about modern weapons, the flash and the bang, casings flying everywhere, the undeniable whump of a powerful gunshot that simply can’t be equaled by some electronic raygun squeal.  It’s the kind of heavy-hitting, explosive weaponry that ricochets, blows holes in walls, and really tears shit up.  And as you step up the ladder, it just gets more impressive – miniguns?  RPGs?  Frag mines?  Big bada boom, indeed.  With modern weapons, you really feel like you’re firing something meaningful (and even more so, in my case, since I refuse to play shooters with anything other than the Pistolmouse FPS, a niche controller in the shape of a pistol, with a mouse button set as an actual trigger, making things that much more realistic).  

So, a game with modern weapons can have quite a lot going for it in terms of a shooter.  The Call of Duty series does a god job with this, although it could use a tad more variety, and Call of Duty 4 especially lets you create quite a bit of mayhem with a full suite of modern weaponry.  Other games detour from this, and then things get problematic – F.E.A.R. has an assortment of “modern” weapons, but they feel and sound weak, and while they get the job done, only a couple of weapons really feel substantial and enjoyable to shoot.  An even better example of weak weapons putting a damper on things is Doom 3, where you can discover, quite disappointingly, that most of the “suspense” in the game comes from the fact that all of the weapons fire incredibly slowly, and have al the oomph of a cap gun.  The assault rifle chugs along, the pistol is like molasses, and the game manages to feature a minigun – an freakin’ minigun – with a rate of fire slower that a modern assault rifle.  Pretty pathetic.  (Admittedly, the UT2k4 minigun also suffers a bit from this, and the Ballistic minigun is one of the few I’ve seen in a game approaching the actual rate of fire  – and sheer uncontrollability – of the real deal.)  Simply put, a game with underwhelming weapons just doesn’t translate to the same level of sheer, cathartic joy that can be found while simply shooting everything in sight with a bunch of awesome weapons.  

What can I say?  When it comes to shooting things one a computer, I have fairly simple tastes.  I don’t need realism and realistic combat, I don’t need some overwhelming plot or storyline.  What gets me going are a bunch of well-done, hard-hitting weapons, plenty of things to use them on, and a nice, graphically rich, hopefully deformable environment in which to roam, blasting anything and everything.  The problem is, though, that such a scenario is very hard to find, and almost impossible in most commercially-released games today.  So, until someone hits on the notion, once again, that sometimes it’s just fun to shoot stuff – and that not all games have to be cinematic masterpieces, just fun to play – I guess I’ll stick with my ballistics mods, and keep hoping that, eventually, a game will appear on the scene with the goal of bringing together the best of both gaming worlds.

I’ve already spoken at length about the multiplayer aspects of Dawn of War II – at least those present in the beta test – and if most of the main reviewers had said that the single-player campaign played exactly like the multiplayer portion, I probably wouldn’t have given the game a second look until it turned up, some months down the road, looking a bit forlorn in a game-store discount bin.  However, all of a sudden, everyone was exclaiming how different it was, and how much it was a game-changing experience so far as RTS games go.  So, despite my initial misgivings about the multiplayer, I picked up a copy on Steam, and played nonstop through the first week of campaigns, at which point I realized that I could literally see squad indicators every time I closed my eyes and decided it was time for a break.

I will say that, somewhat thankfully, the single-player game is not the frenetic, CoD-style aggravated mess that reared its head in the multiplayer.  Instead, at first, it felt a bit like some of the earlier campaigns in the original Dawn of War, back before all of the expansion packs, before you get into any of the base-building attributes.  I suppose this is fairly easy to do, as once again, the single-player campaign focuses entirely on the Space Marine faction as they seek, once again, to wrest control of a number of territories from various opposing armies.

Now, admittedly, you will notice a number of similarities to CoD when playing the single-player game, at least in terms of unit movement.  Cover works mostly the same way, although a lot more time seems to be spent on its destruction as well, and once again you can make use of various buildings and fortifications for your troops to shelter in and use as a hardpoint against an enemy assault.  Many of the abilities, especially in the way they function, are very much taken from CoD, especially the use of grenades and satchel charges (although, interestingly enough, your grenades explode on impact, while the enemy ones count down to give your troops time to avoid them).  And, while they have yet to make much of an appearance in the single-player campaign yet, vehicles operate in a similar fashion.

Of course, what you probably notice immediately about the single-player campaign is the scope.  There are no resources to collect, and no bases to build, and instead of vast armies filled with squads and vehicles, you get one hero character, three squads of troops, and that’s all you can have on the field.  As a result, the levels are much more condensed in scope – instead of branching out and controlling an entire map, your troops operate more like commandos, small groups moving in to clear a series of objectives, and fighting in skirmishes against limited numbers of enemy troops.  As a result, the game feels much more tactically different than most RTS games, and even its own multiplayer, in that it focuses so heavily on the micro instead of the macro.  In a way, it’s almost like the opposite of Supreme Commander – instead of zooming out, you’ll almost always find yourself zooming in, because the game is entirely about small-scale, close-in action.

Interestingly enough, in most cases, this doesn’t seem to be a bad thing.  For one, it keeps things moving – no more massive maps, slowly climbing the tech tree, and building up a massive column of troops to send at the enemy.  And, while it is admittedly less explosive than its predecessors, with little in the way of massive, epic confrontations due to the four-squad limit, it seems (at least so far) to be more tactically interesting, as combat is much more fluid and offers a bit more in the way of tactical options.  

Additionally, a number of quibbles that I had about the leftover CoD effects in the multiplayer are, at least to an extent, remedied in single-player.  For one, the agonizing setup time of machinegun squads has changed to be more in line with how it was in the previous games, and instead of having to set up again every time you needed to change the gun’s field of fire, the squads can now turn (albeit slowly) and begin firing on a target as soon as their field of fire overlaps (and perhaps more importantly, they do this automatically, without you having to direct them!).  Also, in most levels, there are various reinforcement points that can automatically reinforce a squad that has lost members, meaning that depleted squads don’t need to flee all the way back to the beginning to reinforce (plus, the commander has tools to drastically heal the squads in the field if they begin to take damage).  Admittedly, I still liked the old reinforcement system, but since the game has no resource management to speak of, I suppose that the current solution is a workable alternative, and fits in with the new style of gameplay.

Also, the suppression/cover system seems to work better in the single-player campaign, and most squads have ways to break out of suppression if need be.  Rarely is your entire contingent pinned down by suppressive fire, and usually if one squad ends up pinned, there is usually away to use your other squads to take out the threat while you move your vulnerable squad back to cover.  And, at least at this point, things are much more balanced than in multiplayer, and you’re not suddenly faced with vehicles that can decimate your infantry squads in a heartbeat.  

So, in many ways, the single-player campaign seems to redeem many of the flaws that are present in the multiplayer section of the game.  And, to this point at least, I’ve had quite a bit of fun with it, at least as much as with the previous games in the series.  There’s much more I could write about, from the loot/RPG-esque leveling system, to the end-level “boss battles,” to the new take on the campaign map… and perhaps I’ll touch on those a bit in a follow-up review.  However, the main takeaway is this: Dawn of War II brings back the notion that a good single-player campaign can still make for a great RTS, and with the stripped-down, up-close-and-personal gameplay, it manages to transcend the beta and become an unexpectedly compelling and enjoyable game.

I have long been a fan of the Warhammer 40k series of RTS games.  While I have never been much a fan of the original Warhammer game (the one with all of the little pewter figurines and rulebooks), the game’s foray into the world of real-time strategy has been, from the start, an enjoyable and and rewarding experience.  And, while the single-player campaigns in the original game and its first expansion were considerably fiendish, leading me to never actually complete them, the third and fourth installments were incredibly fun to play, with a freeform world-domination campaign and manageable difficulty, as well as a persistent, upgradable commander and specialized units to aid your march across the battlefield.  All told, with the expansions, the series has elevated itself to stand along with the other RTS games that I have enjoyed immensely, including Starcraft and Total Annihilation.  

So, when I heard that a new RTS, Company of Heroes, was going to be release by the same company with a similar style of gameplay, I decided to give it a shot.  While WWII games are not my absolute favorites (I kind of had my fill of them after finishing CoD2), the game looked to be fun, and was back by tons of critical acclaim.  Given the usual tone of this weblog, you can probably guess what happened next.

Actually, at one point, I thought of drawing up a little comic strip about the host of glitches that plagued the game, but never quite got around to it.  Long story short, though, the game quickly becomes less of an immersion into WWII combat, so much as it becomes an exercise in absurdity.  

For example:  when you position an antitank gun, you choose its effective arc – and then it stays there.  Unlike in, say, one of the previous Warhammer games, where a turret rationally turns to face an appropriate threat, the gun crews in CoH simply sit there and guard their arc.  Even if a tank is literally coming up the road behind them, the team isn’t smart enough to simply turn the gun around – instead, unless you specifically order them to do so, they will sit there and shoot their rifles at the tank as it massacres them.  The same goes for the machine-gun team – once set up, the team covers an arc, and refuses to deviate (and this from a game claiming squad-based intelligence!).  Plus, to shift around, the gunner has to fold up the tripod, turn around, and unfold it again, instead of just turning around – you know, like you would in actual combat.  Oh, and for good measure, tank gunners are especially proficient at making sure that the last person they shoot in an enemy squad is the one soldier with a weapon that can actually hurt the tank.

So, instead of feeling like you’re commanding teams of capable, intelligent soldiers who can work with their squads to achieve individual objectives, you end up commanding a bunch of clueless automatons, who don’t even have the basic instinct to save themselves unless you specifically tell them to do so.  All in all, any sense of genuine chaotic WWII combat and heroism is quickly lost to these gameplay irregularities (not to mention, how come squads take more damage when they’re pinned, and prone on the ground, than when they’re running away and clearly visible to the enemy?).  

I eventually lost even the slightest sense of immersion when, midway through the game, I came across a mission where the gameplay involved capturing locations that earned you “victory points,” and you won went a bright counter on the screen reached a certain value.  They didn’t even try to disguise it with a plausible objective – not even something like “hold this point until reinforcements arrive,” or “you must control these strategic parts of town in order to gain a tactical advantage.”  Nope, just “capture some arbitrary points and wait until the counter goes up to win.”  Now, maybe I’m not up enough on my WWII history, but I’m pretty sure that the Allies never won a battle by sitting around in a town square while giant glowing numbers in the sky clicked upwards.  

In essence, CoH was the antithesis of the Warhammer series – instead of overall fun and enjoyable gameplay, it instead focused on intense unit micromanagement, an obtuse cover system, and a combination of historical “immersion” and traditional RTS gameplay that utterly failed to mesh in an interesting way.  The result was a game that turned into a slog rather than a good time, and it wasn’t long until I abandoned it and went back to the far more rewarding Warhammer series.

And so, with both of those things in mind, I recently downloaded the multiplayer beta for Warhammer II.  Of course, given my general unhappiness with multiplayer RTS, I quickly figured out how to use it to play some AI skirmish matches. Honestly, due to the not-so-awesome experience of using Games for Windows Live, I was actually unable to successfully connect to their ranked matching system, but luckily there is also an option for “custom” public matches that seemed, for the most part, to work.

Once the matchmaking thing was figured out, I jumped into the game, and played a few skirmish matches against AI opponents – matches against an Easy AI that were challenging but quite winnable, and against a Normal AI that I just barely beat.  What did strike me, though, about the new Warhammer game was this: in many ways, you’re basically playing Company of Heroes, with the main difference being a graphical one.

Admittedly, the interface is much more stripped-down – instead of an expansive base loaded down with turrets and structures in the initial Warhammer 40k series, or the multi-building bases of CoH, you get a base structure, surrounded with a couple of starting turrets – and that’s it.  For the marines, it’s less of a headquarters building, and more of a modified chapel-barracks, but it builds everything – units, vehicles, you name it. The advantage?  The game removes all of the base-building aspects, so there’s no more worrying about construction squads, and so more time can be spent shooting things.  The downside, of course, is that by stripping away an entire part of the gameplay, you end up with other limitations.  With no real options for much of a forward base, getting units into the field can be more of a challenge, as this often means your troops have limited options for reaching a battle beyond slowly trudging their way from a base on the edge of the map.  This becomes all the more problematic due to the fact that, like CoH but unlike any other entries in the series, troops cannot be reinforced in the field – instead, they must retreat back to a reinforcement point (read: that base on the edge of the map) to replenish their squads.  This means that if a squad loses more than one member, its progress is completely halted, and it must flee back to base, instead of being able to reinforce and press on.  While this is perhaps more realistic, it’s also much less fun, and means that a single misstep can much more easily turn into a complete rout.  Additionally, having no forward bases means that there’s no place to run and hunker down to reinforce and delay an enemy onslaught while you bring your own forces to bear.  Losing this strategic ability to balance a set of bases means that the focus becomes much more on “rushing” gameplay, which makes for fast but less satisfying matches.

Also making an appearance from CoH are the cover, suppression and pinning systems, which are just as much of a pain then as they are now.  Cover is spotty, and doesn’t always work all that well, and the suppression mechanic, supposedly a substitute for the morale system of the previous games, makes things much more difficult, and drastically shifts the unit balance of power from previous games.  Beforehand, a hero unit could quite easily put paid to some of the lower-level vehicles and most groups of basic infantry, and then heal up to do something else – the Tau commander, when upgraded sufficiently, was capable of taking out all but the most high-level equipment on a one-to-one basis.  Now, thanks to suppression, a hero unit can get pinned and annihilated by a basic, low-level troop carrier with a mounted machinegun.  And while, theoretically, infantry squads could go up against vehicles, the suppression mechanic makes that all but impossible to do – vehicles now easily eat through most basic infantry squads, meaning that in combat, vehicle must be met for vehicle to have any chance of survival.

And, to complete the gameplay-annoyance trifecta, targeting arcs are back.  Turrets, machinegun squads, and artillery all have that pesky preset arc of fire, beyond which they are useless, or must fold up/fold down to move their equipment.  Again, here, you can see that we’re talking about basic CoH units, with the only difference being a different set of graphics, a wholesale port of an existing game, and a wholesale departure from the unit gameplay of the first series.  Sure, heavy infantry in the first game took some setup time before opening fire, but in the new game, the wait is twice as long, and comes with each setup/move cycle.  Also, unlike in the other games, the heavy weapons can’t turn outside of their arc, making it trivially easy to flank any sort of heavy weapons unit (especially since the unit AI just gives up on trying to set up the weapon if the enemy gets too close).  

Now, admittedly, I’ve mostly played with the Space Marines at this point, and it’s possible that some of the other factions have mechanics that are at least a bit different.  However, with the Marines, it’s hard not to see a direct correlation between the Allied units in CoH and the units present in this beta, with nearly identical gameplay features.  Given the underlying mechanics, I don’t have much hope for the other factions (with the possible exception of the tyrranids – melee attacks work just fine regardless of cover).

Another issue is that the gameplay has been modified significantly in terms of resource allocation.  Again, switching almost entirely to the CoH system at the expense of the traditional game mechanics, each and every resource is based solely on capture points – instead of building power generators, power points are captured along with strategic points.  However, power points can be (somewhat) fortified with additional power plants.  Listening posts do not seem to make a comeback in this game – a strategic point (or requisition point) is held only until an enemy squad happens to walk up to it.  To my knowledge, there is no way to fortify these points at all, which means that unless you spread your forces painfully thin to cover all your resource points, all it takes is one enemy scout squad to quickly turn the point over to the enemy.  This leads to either a spread-out force trying to protect everything, which then becomes vulnerable to a concentrated enemy spearhead, or a constant game of whack-a-mole, with units running back and forth repeatedly capturing and uncapturing various strategic points.  In previous games, such points served as important early-warning structures that could distract an enemy in time for you to redistribute your forces – now, they fall so quickly that maintaining a useful intelligence view of the map becomes a difficult task indeed.  Plus, the cat-and-mouse mechanic results in units chasing each other around, never being able to truly engage, but only meeting midway as they crisscross yet again to uncapture each other’s strategic points.  I literally fought a skirmish in which my hero and the enemy hero walked back and forth, repeatedly uncapturing and recapturing each other’s victory points, because to stay and force a decisive confrontation would have led to the enemy point being in operation long enough to potentially win the game.  And so, instead of fighting, it was a giant game of wandering back and forth, holding the points just long enough to score a not-particularly-enthusiastic victory.

What can I say?  The original Warhammer 40K series was fun to play because of its unique mechanics.  CoH kept some of those mechanics, while drastically changing others to be more “realistic and tactical,” which led to the game being much less fun, and demonstrating that a Warhammer 40K RTS is much different than a CoH RTS.  Because of this, streamlined gameplay or not, simply dumping the CoH mechanics into a new Warhammer game feels like something of a betrayal, and it certainly means that people who are pleased with the usual Warhammer RTS gameplay style will be in for a rude awakening, and even those who prefer the CoH style of battle (although I can’t imagine why you would, unless you derive joy in sneaking up on units that are too dumb to turn around) will find that things are a bit different.  For me, though, the traditional style of play is missing, and painfully so.

However, that being said, the game still manages to be fun – at least, much more fun than CoH ever seemed to be.  The fun, however, is based entirely on fast-paced gameplay, and is less enjoyable for the type of player (like me) that likes to do a bit of turtling, or at least building up a presence, with forward bases and the like.  It’s like asking a contemplative chessmaster to compete in speed chess – they can probably do it, but it’s not as much fun, as it feels like you’re constantly scrambling to put out fires and stay on top of things, rather than building up and calmly planning your next strategic move.  

In a sense, the only reason that Warhammer II is a more enjoyable game than CoH is that, while it keeps a number of annoying mechanics, it strips away most everything else, making the game all about action and on-the-fly strategy.  While that is, perhaps, somewhat innovative in terms of standard RTS play, it ends up feeling too bare-bones, too stripped-away from how Warhammer RTS games ought to be.  So while I can’t bring myself to like it, I can’t quite bring myself to hate it, either.  It’s a mixed bag, to be sure – I couldn’t tear myself away from the matches that I played, but I’m weary as to how the mechanic will play out in an actual single-player campaign, as opposed to a one-shot online skirmish.  

So, based on everything laid out so far, my views on the multiplayer preview of Warhammer II: the graphics are nice, the gameplay is fast, although quite tough, and that, overall, the game borrows far too many less-than-helpful “tactical” conventions from Company of Heroes, advancements which, in my mind, are anything but, and disrupt the usual style of gameplay present in the earlier games in a series.  In short, it’s worth a look, but try the beta carefully and see if the radically different play style leaves the game as something you still want to play.  Overall, with this game, the enjoyment is winning out over the frustration – but only just barely.

One of my guilty pleasures has always been RTS games.  From the advent of M.A.X. many years ago (and happily recently rediscovered via gog.com), I’ve played, if not a comprehensive collection, at least some of the greatest hits of RTS gaming: Starcraft,  Command and Conquer,  Total Annihilation,  and Myth: The Fallen Lords, among others.  Of the recent crop, I’ve played a handful: Act of War, Universe at War, the entire four-volume Warhammer 40k series, and Company of Heroes.  And, somehow, I’ve managed to enjoy most of them immensely.

So, where’s the guilty part of it?  Well, as the (mercifully few) people who have played an RTS with me online are sure to know, I am, by any objective measure, quite abysmal at playing them.  I suppose that stems in part from my preference for individual focus over multitasking – I’ll get tied up in one particular battle group or conflict, while my opponent is busy doing a dozen different things at once, and in so doing, completely dominating the map, and, after a bit, whatever remains of my surviving forces.  I can’t complain, though, as my usual motive for playing RTS games is less about being a brilliant tactician, and more about guiding a bunch of soldiers around and enjoying the mayhem that erupts.  And if there’s an interesting plot to drive things along, so much the better.

In a certain way, it’s a bit ironic – my unbridled enthusiasm for games of this type seems to be in direct proportion to my lack of skill at them.  Which, of course, usually means that I simply eschew online play – and do whatever is necessary to prevail in the single player campaign.

Unfortunately, with many RTS games, this becomes a somewhat difficult exercise.  Back in the days of Starcraft, the AI was clever but not devastating, and there were a whole host of cheat codes at hand to help you out of a bind in the single-player campaign.  As a result, I was able to march through each of the campaigns, enjoying the explosions and the interesting plot, with the occasional help from the archon’s favorite words of power to ease me through the tough spots in later missions.  As a result, I had a blast (in more ways than one, I suppose), and Starcraft remains, to this day, one of the most enjoyable games that I have ever played.

Somewhere along the line, though, a couple of things happened.  AI for strategy games became better, and apparently, game developers felt that having an actually “easy” setting wouldn’t properly be able to show of their AI’s skill set.  So, a lot of games simply dropped the easy setting entirely, opting for normal (read: very, very hard) and hard (read: no, Dave, you can’t possibly win against this opponent).  For those games that did relent and offer an easy mode, it most likely corresponded to the previous normal mode, which usually meant that “easy” was code for a very tough, but still winnable, fight.  And so, I though, I’d suffer through, and look up some codes if I ever got stuck.

That’s where the second part came in.  More and more, games were focusing on the multiplayer, and worries arose about cheating in PvP online matches.  Apparently, there must have been some concern about single-player cheat codes bleeding over into an online environment – but, instead of simply working to segregate the gameplay modes better, many developers seem to have pulled most of the cheat codes entirely, leaving me sadly without my trump card.  

And so, once again, I began my long and weary trek through the valley of gaming frustration, leaving the wreckage of half-played games in my wake.  The original Dawn of War, and its companion, Winter Assault?  Abandoned halfway through the campaigns, amidst impossible levels of difficulty with no recourse.  Universe at War?  Playable only through the judicious use of a third-party “trainer.” Company of Heroes?  Abandoned out of sheer frustration.  Somehow, though, I managed to muddle my way through Act of War, always having just enough to get the job done.  And Dawn of War, with its last two expansions, finally got interesting, with a Risk-style campaign mode and an actual “easy” setting that let me play through to my heart’s content.  

So, how do you fix RTS gaming?  I think it’s actually pretty easy – easy being the operative word.  Bring back that option for each and every RTS game, and actually recruit some novice play-testers to make sure that the easy level is actually appropriate for someone without a lot of skill in RTS games.  For an experienced player, this sort of easy mode probably seems far too easy, and so there is an incentive to ratchet the difficulty back up – but for for an inexperienced or casual player, this setting is absolutely what is needed to make the single-player game enjoyable.  And failing that – let me keep what is mine, let me breathe deep, and let me bring the power overwhelming to bear once again, and I’ll be quite happy to plunk down money to play your game.  Barring that, though, I’m getting tired of being frustrated halfway through – to the point that, without clear evidence of an actual easy mode or a readily available set of codes to tide me over, RTS developers aren’t going to see my money any time soon.

Let me just take a moment to wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2009!  

I do apologize for having nothing new to post here during December, mainly because it was almost all more of the same – me being engrossed in playing (and modding) Fallout 3 to the general exclusion of other games.  However, as a result, I do have a quite comprehensive article on various miscellaneous thoughts about the game after many, many hours of gameplay, which you can find here.

Since I have posted far more than enough about Fallout 3 at this point (after all, this is a general gaming blog, not a Fallout 3 fan blog), my further musings on Fallout 3 will most likely show up on that page, so that I can concentrate on posting more interesting and generally relevant articles to the main page.

Luckily, 2009 looks to have plenty of interesting gaming in store, so I am quite sure that I will have more than enough new things to write about in the months ahead.

Oh, and before I forget, be sure and check out this excellent article on game-ism, talking about the discrepancies in movie and game rating systems, and the reason that we can’t have a truly “adult” mainstream game in the current market.  And yes, it does talk even more about Fallout 3, but fear not, it’s for a good cause :)