Codename: Panzers

War games, or strategy games as marketing calls them, are the elder cousins of role-playing games. The very first RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, from TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), was in fact a rule set for a new kind of table top game, squad based, with wizards and warriors. I don't normally play real time strategy (RTS) strategy games, as I find them a bit too hectic, and there is no intellectual challenge in "Zerg rushing" the enemy in many of them. But right now I'm happily playing the RTS Codename: Panzers. Because for a RTS, it is very RPG-like.

Panzers is one of the many new World War II games this year, a wave probably caused by the 60th anniversary of D-Day. You control a general and his troops in one of three different campaigns (German, Russian, Allied). Each campaign has 8 to 12 missions, for a total of 30 missions, plus some non-campaign scenarios and maps for multi-player. You won't finish this in one weekend, there are some serious hours of game play here. You can control a maximum of 25 units, and there is no unit production during missions, so no Zerg rushing (Starcraft term of overrunning the enemy with a large amount of the cheapest to produce units). Instead it is in your interest to keep your men alive, as they will gain experience, and carry this experience over into the next mission. Every mission has a main goal, possibly optional goals, and possibly even secret goals. For achieving goals you receive prestige points, for which you can buy new units, or even buy equipment. Experience and equipment is what makes the game so similar to a RPG.

Combat is in real time, but as long as you are playing the single-player scenarios, you can pause at any time, and give orders to your troops while paused. Graphics are pretty, but this comes at a price. The "recommended" specs are a 1.8 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and a DirectX 9.0b compatible graphics card. If you have less than that, you'll need to turn down the graphics quality. I haven't tried multi-player yet, so I can't say anything about how the game handles lag and such. Unusually Panzers offers not only the usual multi-player modes like deathmatch, but also a cooperative mode, where players work together against an AI enemy. If you prefer confrontational multi-player modes, you'd better wait for one more patch; there is currently a bug which allows cheating in multi-player. But I mainly bought Panzers as a single-player game.

What makes the scenarios so much fun is that you have a large degree of freedom how to achieve your goals. You can try to march straight towards your mission goal, with brute force. That usually works, but taking a longer way might reveal a softer spot in the enemy defences, and also lead to optional and secret goals. Your army is a mix of tanks and infantry, with the tanks being stronger, but the infantry being a lot more flexible. You can sneak forwards, mine a road, then stand up and run away, hoping to lure the enemy tank over the mine. You can shell the enemy with artillery, or call in air support. In the very first German mission you can even steal a Polish truck, load it with infantry, and the more stupid enemy units will think that truck is friendly; so you drive behind the fortified position of the enemy artillery, rush out of the truck, shoot the artillery men, and take over that artillery unit (I basically won that mission that way). You can even take over enemy tanks, after having barbecued it with a flame thrower or molotov cocktail.

Codename: Panzers is already out in Germany, but release date for the US version is the 31st of August. If you want to give it a try, Fileplanet has two demos of Panzers available, each with a different scenario. They are over 200 MB each, so broadband is much recommended if you want to download the demos. Like some other new games, Codename: Panzers is copy protected with a new copy protection system called StarForce 3, and even the demo will install StarForce as a hidden device driver on your computer. As StarForce 3 is a rather good copy protection, some people that like to pirate "warez" are not very happy about that. So they spread some false rumors that StarForce will ruin your computer and can't be removed. But the producers of Starforce are offering tools to upgrade or remove StarForce. You just can't play StarForce protected games any more once you removed those drivers. Codename: Panzers was the best-selling PC game in Germany for the last couple of weeks, which either proves that it is very good, or that the copy protection is really that good. Or both. :)

- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic

I'm still on holidays, connected to the world only by a 56K dial-up modem, which obviously makes playing most MMORPG impossible. On the positive side, I just bought a new PC: Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB of DDR400 RAM, and a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card. The machine scores 5550 points on the graphics benchmark 3DMark 03, which is about twice as much as my previous PC. A real nice gaming rig. Just the machine to play some pretty 3D games on: Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic (SWKotor or Kotor for short).

SWKotor is an excellent single-player role playing game running on PC or XBox. It plays 4000 years before the Star Wars movies, but the situation is similar: The Republic is fighting against an onslaught of Sith, headed by a dark Jedi lord named Darth Malak. You start the game as a fresh recruit for the republic, having the choice between 3 character classes: soldier, Scoundrel, or Scout. About one third into the game, you become a Jedi, where you again have the choice between 3 different Jedi classes. The game uses the d20 rules system from WotC, which is the same system that 3rd edition D&D (they stopped calling it AD&D) is based on, just with the skills adapted to the Star Wars settings.

The story is fairly linear, with a couple of subquests, but in most situations you have the choice on how to approach it. For example a woman asks you to help her, because the evil crime lord has put a bounty on her head; you can either help her, ignore her, or kill her and cash in the bounty. For good actions you get "Light side" points, and for evil actions "Dark side" points. Those cancel each other out, so you probably want to collect only Light side or only Dark side points, ending you as a Light side or a Dark side Jedi, with different powers.

Combat is pseudo real-time, but is handled in combat rounds in the background. With the help of auto-pause settings you can switch between a combat mode that feels very much like real-time, a combat mode that is totally turn-based, and a default intermediate setting, where the automatic pause only occurs at the start of the combat. That is an excellent way to handle it, as different players prefer different styles of combat, and this one makes everybody happy. Besides normal attacks by sword, blaster, or light saber, you can start special attacks, use Jedi forces, or use items like grenades or med pacs in combat.

Graphics are great. On my new PC I was able to play with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on, which made graphics even better, while still running very smoothly. Kotor is relatively bug free, with the 1.03 patch. I experienced some crashes related to the auto-save when zoning. But as these crashes occur AFTER the auto-save, and only catapult you back to the Windows desk top, recovery is rather painless.

SWKotor is so much fun, I can't help but compare it to the much less fun Star Wars Galaxies. Kotor gives the player what he wants: Playing a Jedi. SWG is built upon the pseudo-argument of "We can't have everybody running around as Jedi". Well, why not? It is not any more illogical than having a fantasy world like EQ in which everybody is a mighty adventurer, or having everybody in CoH being a super hero. Playing a hair dresser in SWG is just not as popular as playing a Jedi.

Single player games like Kotor motivate the player by giving him a sense of purpose with the story line, and by having him advance relatively quickly. Who says that this is incompatible with a MMORPG? Final Fantasy XI showed that a MMORPG can have a story line, by offering special quests every couple of levels. City of Heroes showed that level 1 players could already feel powerful, if you don't force them to kill bunnies. And the general trend from EQ to now is that leveling is getting faster. There is probably a hard core market for a game where reaching the highest level takes 1000+ hours, but the average player would be a lot more attracted by a game where reaching the highest level takes not more than 200 hours. And I don't think that all those people would stop playing after reaching the highest level, as long as they can create new characters of different classes, different races, and hopefully with a different story line. Keep your players by offering them lots of fun, and not by making reaching any goal tediously long, now that would be a new concept for MMORPG.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:06 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
What I'll play for the next 3 weeks

GameSpot wrote an excellent review about what I am going to do for the next 3 weeks: Real Life (tm). They gave it an astounding 9.6 rating, with Editors choice award, compared with 8.4 for City of Heroes, and 7.5 for Star Wars Galaxies, so I really should check it out some more.

I'll be back to more usual playing and blogging in August.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:34 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Profile

In another totally useless cosmetic change to this blog, you can now click on my name below the post (where it says "posted by Tobold"), and reach my Blogger profile. The only useful information there is statistics about this blog. I have written 50,000 words, averaging 800 words per post, which is pretty long for a blog entry. Well, up to now nobody complained, so I'm keeping it that way.

My previous longest "internet writing career" consisted of 2,800 posts on the Magic the Gathering Online message boards, but I don't have a word count for those, and message board post are obviously a lot shorter.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:22 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter

I would never had thought that somebody would manage to design a role-playing game which is too hard for me to play. But BoF5 (European version) for the PS2 manages this easily by adding two little tweaks to the game: There is no healing, and you can't save the game.

BoF5 is the first RPG I know in which there is no healing spell at all, and where you can not rest to regain hitpoints. The only way to regain hitpoints in this game is to use healing kits, but those are few and far between. In fact, instead of spending your money on new armor and weapons, you are well advised to spend it all on healing kits instead. Oh wait, then you don't get better armor and weapons and die anyway.

Console games often have save points, you can't save just in the middle of the dungeon, you need to find a save point. That is okay if there are enough save points, like in the Final Fantasy series. The Baldurs Gate series even has twice as many save points as necessary. In BoF5 the save points are very few, you might need to cross 10 dungeon levels before finding the next one. And then when you reached the save point, you might still not be able to save, as that also requires a save token, and those are rare. The US version has a temporary save option, so you can at least quit the game and restart at the same place, even if that temporary save file was deleted after loading. The European version does not even have that, you are probably supposed to leave the console running.

Other than that, BoF5 is a not very special RPG. You start at the bottom of deep underground world, and the story line tells you that you need to reach the top, leading to an endless dungeon crawl. Graphics are cell-shaded and not bad, but rather dark. Gameplay is real-time in the dungeon, then switches to turn-based in the battle. A neat twist is that whoever gets his hit in first on the real-time map, gets one extra turn in turn-based.

The selling point of the game is that you can transform your main character into a powerful dragon. Unfortunately, if you use that option, your D-counter goes up from 0%. And with every transformation you have a chance equal to your D-counter percentage of losing the game, so you can't use it in anything but the most difficult boss battles.

As you will be losing the game rather often, you will be happy to hear that you can restart after dying. And with restart, I mean restart from the very beginning. You get to keep your current equipment, half of your money, and half of the party xp you didn't spend, so on the next try it gets easier, and you get a bit further before dying and restarting again. And when you restart the game, you get to see some cut scenes that you didn't see the first time around. But I don't know if many people will feel really motivated to restart again and again, until they reach the end of the game. I probably won't play BoF5 until the end, it is simply too frustrating.

Unless you are a power gamer and seriously underchallenged by other games, keep away from Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. Especially the PAL version that does not have the temporary saves.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:08 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Trade

Buy low, make an interesting journey, sell high. Trade, as gameplay element, was very popular in the earlier days of video games, having a big part in the success of games like Pirates! and Elite. But there isn't much of it in the MMORPG genre, which is a pity.

The only MMORPG that feature any trade are space-faring MMORPG like Earth & Beyond or EVE Online. Trade in EnB was unfortunately very badly done, with totally fixed trade routes, leading everybody to trade on the same Somerled - Prasad route. EVE has a brilliant trade system, where you can even give buy orders to be executed while you are offline, but unfortunately the rest of the game is rather boring. All resources originate from mining asteroids, and people can spend hours in large groups doing nothing but shooting asteroids with a mining laser. Added to that, in EVE there is PvP, and if you play a trader, another player can shoot down your ship, steal all your cargo, and set you back several weeks of gameplay, which is not really encouraging a trader career. And both EnB and EVE suffer from the fact that space travel isn't really all that exciting.

Star Wars Galaxies has highly evolved tradeskills, but no trade except retailing manufactured items. Gathering resources from different planets exists, but there are no limitations to transport. You can fit all the materials needed to build a large house in your backpack, and travel between planets is instantaneous using shuttles.

Fantasy MMORPG usually do not have trade, as their economics are too weird for that. There are many games like Everquest in which even the resources for tradeskills are gathered by killing monsters, not imported. Also most games do not have NPCs buying anything for more than a fraction of its value, and selling to players with any sort of profit is very difficult. There is also no wear and tear of items, meaning items come into the economy, but do not get out again, leading to "mudflation", a constant decrease in the value of items. All this is very bad for doing any trade.

So lets look at the 3 components of trade, buy low, make an interesting journey, sell high, and see how they could be implemented in a MMORPG:

Buying low could be achieved either artificially or in a player-based economy. Artificially is the easier approach, you can always have an NPC sell resources at a low price in unlimited amounts. Player-based low prices could be achieved if a resource can be mined in one area of the game, and sold in the same area via a bazaar or auction house. If it was easy to get the mined resource from the mine to the bazaar, but difficult to transport it further, players would be encouraged to sell the mined resource directly, even if they were aware that they were selling it low.

Selling high can also be either to NPC or to players. Both require transport to be difficult. If you have one NPC or player selling low and another buying high, you don't want players to be able to transport large amounts of goods between them in an instant. With NPC that would create a money-making machine without risk or effort. Players simply would transport the goods themselves. Players would only buy goods at higher prices if they wouldn't have easier choices. For resources, you would have to arrange a situation where for example iron could only be mined in one region, but only be forged into items somewhere else. Because if you could perform the tradeskill at the place where the iron was found, there would be no reason whatsoever to transport the iron.

So the critical component in making trade possible in a MMORPG would definitely be the journey part. The journey would have to involve risk and effort, so that it would be interesting, and that it would create added value. This clashes a bit with the other requirement of MMORPG to make traveling easy, so that people can easily gather to play together. One possible solution would be to have the usual range of fast transports, including teleports, but make these transports unable to transport resources.

Imagine a fantasy world with a civilized inner core area, and a big surrounding wilderness. Somewhere in the wilderness there would be an area where e.g. iron could be mined, and transported with rented mules to a mining village, where it can be sold either to NPC selling it on at a slight markup, or directly to other players. A trader would come with a caravan to the mining village, load up on iron, and travel with the caravan to a city in the civilized core area. During this journey, there would be a risk of being attacked by orcs, and each successful attack would steal a part of the iron from the trader, diminishing his profits. So he could either level up as adventurer to fight of the orcs himself, or hire other players as guards, or have guild mates guard him. Once arrived in the city, he would sell the iron either to NPC or to other players. The players buying the iron would transform it into weapons and armor with tradeskills, using the forge that only exists in the city.

Ideally prices and profits would be dynamic, but with a guaranteed spread. The NPC in the city would buy always at a price higher than the NPC in the mining village sells the iron, but would pay even more if iron was currently running low in the city. A player could do the whole chain by himself, mining, transporting, and transforming into items. But with a skill system in which you were learning by doing, specializing in only mining, only transporting, or only creating items would give some advantage.

The iron mining village could be the closest mining village to the city, mining iron could be easiest, and with iron you could create the lowest level items. Then further out there would be a village in which mithril would be mined, needing more mining skill, having a longer journey, and needing more skill for transformation into higher level items. Even higher level metals would be even further out. And that would just be the metals, you can imagine the same chain for wood, with lumbering camps.

All that could be in parallel to the usual activities of a fantasy MMORPG, hunting monsters, gaining xp, looting, leveling. There could be teleportation gates to any city or village you already visited on foot, but you would be unable to teleport any resources, mules or caravans. The beauty of this would be that fighting monsters could be very much a group activity, while mining, transporting resources, and crafting could be the soloing component of the game, thus offering different gameplay elements to different player types.

Alas, it seems that game developers have great problems getting a virtual economy to run smoothly. With the notable exception of SWG, crafting often seems grafted onto a game as an afterthought, involving mainly a lot of repetitive mouse clicks. So maybe it is too much to hope that we could have a game with a trade system that is fun to play. But one can always dream.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Blog layout changes

Permalinks have been added to this blog. So if you unexpectedly found a pearl of wisdom in my ramblings and want to link to it, the permalink is at the bottom of each post, above the comments, behind the "posted by Tobold".

The posts on the main page are now listed by title under the list of archived months, so you can jump faster to them. The same is true for the archive pages.

These changes have been made because I realized that in the month of June I posted a lot of stuff, and the blog really got hard to navigate. I hope these changes help. If you like or dislike the changes, or have ideas for other changes, please leave a comment or send an e-mail to Tobold@GMail.com

The month of July will be a lot quieter, as I will be on holiday for 3 weeks, and only have limited internet access. Time to take a break from online gaming, before the big wave of hyped games crashes on my shores.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:40 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments