PC Game Fun Time

It’s finally here.  Fallout 3, the sequel I (and many others) have been awaiting for nearly a decade.  In fact, it has even been four years since Fallout 3 was officially announced.

While I have only barely scratched the surface of this game, it is telling that I found it quite difficult to tear myself away long enough to write this mini review.  Like every high profile title these days, Fallout 3 has received pretty much nothing but glowing praise from the mainstream gaming press.  Unlike many of those other titles, it is looking like Fallout 3 may deserve it.

Here are a few of the things I have found notable so far:

• Quest design is damn good.  I haven’t really gone anywhere with the main quest yet, but I have done a couple of the larger side quests.  Both have been very well written and engaging.  They have been a mix of exploration, dialog, combat, and a tad of puzzle solving.
• Dialog options are vastly greater than in Oblivion.  This game has a ton of dialog - I have spent a significant fraction of my time so far just talking to people.  You tend to have several interesting responses to choose from in most situations, as well.
• VATS is a lot of fun.  The much vaunted VATS combat system is actually pretty cool.  Not only is it useful for carefully planning out tougher encounters, it is also quite cinematic.  Watching heads get blown off and then roll down hills has never been so much fun.
• Real time combat is fine, but not amazing.  It does feel very fast and somewhat hard to control.  In the end, it just not of the same quality as a good shooter.  I personally don’t have a problem with this.  Fallout 3 is not a shooter, and if you want to experience some fun combat, just make use of VATS.
• Visuals are great.  Graphics quality is very high and everything looks just like it should.  If I had one word to describe the game’s visuals, it would be “immersive”.
• The game does not hold your hand nearly as much as Oblivion.  It is hard to find a good balance between hand holding and being frustratingly non-specific.  So far, I have found Fallout 3 to do this exceptionally well.

While my impressions are pretty much strictly positive so far, your mileage could vary.  Note that I (obviously) loved the original Fallout games, and also had quite a good time with Oblivion.  I ultimately spent an inordinate amount of time working with mods for Oblivion to fix various flaws.  Many of these were not all that apparent until I had spent quite a bit of time with the game.  So, while my first impressions have been good, I am not completely sold on Fallout 3 yet.

I fear that all the buzz over Far Cry 2 in recent days has crowded out other PC games that are no less worthy of mention, so allow me to take a step back and cover some of the PC games that I enjoyed immensely over the past two years or so. If you’re looking for a game to play that’s just as fun as what’s coming out now, but won’t run you the full $50 price tag, look no further than these games.

Team Fortress 2. Yeah, we’re still playing the ol’ Teef regularly in this household. Grokmoo wrote quite extensively about the parts of the game we enjoy, so I’ll just give the bottom line here: the game has been out for a little while yet still enjoys a thriving community. The nine classes seem deceptively simple (only three weapons each, one of which is a melee weapon), but each require completely different strategies, so that mastering even one takes awhile and mastering them all is quite the feat. Add to that the number of different gameplay modes and all the custom maps that are available, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that you can easily get hundreds of hours of playtime out of Team Fortress 2.

Crysis (and its expansion pack Warhead) offers one of the best single player FPS experiences in recent memory. The graphics are simply amazing and will definitely put your high-end video card through its paces. Frustrated by the slowness and general aimlessness of the story missions in Far Cry 2? Then Crysis is the cure. And despite it being over a year older, its engine is definitely better (probably because it wasn’t compromised by having to work on consoles). All it takes to realize the superiority of the engine is to level a copse of trees — full of enemies attempting to hide — with a mounted machine gun. There’s nothing else quite so satisfying as to take out not just all of your enemies, but also all of the trees.

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It’s been awhile since I last played a city-building game (since SimCity 4 came out in 2003, to be exact), and boy do I really need my fix. I’ve been addicted to the series since I filled up an entire box with floppy disks of SimCity 2000 saves on our family’s 386 many years ago. There’s nothing else that quite matches the thrill of being an urban planner — and no, I’m not being facetious.

So imagine my amazement when a friend pointed me to Cities XL, a city-building game in the SimCity tradition that I have absolutely no excuse for finding out about earlier. Cities XL is coming out in 2009 and will be a lot like the next release of SimCity, with an MMORPG twist — every other city on the planet in the game world is built by another player. That sound you just heard was the sound of me necessitating new pants.

In addition to the MMORPG element, and all the possibilities of trade/cooperation with other players that brings, Cities XL is also going to improve on the old grid-based landscape of all the old SimCity games. Roads can now be laid out in any direction, not just along the grid or at a 45 degree diagonal. Roads can even be curved. But it’s the highway construction that really has me excited. The video (you’ll have to navigate to it) shows the player fluidly constructing a major highway intersection, with multiple levels of ramps and curved overpasses. This is your opportunity to kick the clover-leaf intersection to the curb and make something so much cooler.

I’m definitely looking forward to Cities XL, and anyone who calls themselves a fan of the city-building genre should be as well. Will Maxis finally be surpassed in their own genre? Here’s hoping. If you don’t hear from me for several months in a row sometime in 2009, it’ll be because I’m constructing the most bustling metropolis on the face of the virtual planet.

Much has been made about Blizzard’s recent announcement that StarCraft 2 will be released as a trilogy. For those who don’t know, the basic story is that the initial release of the game will include the multi-player portion of the game, and the campaign for the Terran side, one of three sides (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) featured in the game.

This has generated a lot of controversy online, with people unhappy about having to pay for three games. While I understand where they are coming from, I also think this move on Blizzard’s part can make a good deal of sense from both a business and a gaming point of view. I’m going to try to explain this below as best I can.

To start off, we need to consider Blizzard as a company. Here’s how I see Blizzard: as a high-quality creator of commercial games. You can’t argue that World of Warcraft is a polished product (I’m sure there are rough edges, don’t get me wrong. But the average person doesn’t see those the first time through.), you can’t argue that StarCraft, Warcraft III, or Diablo II weren’t polished products. Blizzard is the James Patterson or Robert Ludlum of the gaming industry: they are dedicated to the craft of creating tight, vivid, readable (playable, in Blizzard’s case) titles. You can never tell me that Patterson has a dedication to literary craft. You can never tell me that Blizzard has a dedication to a deep or, well, complicated gaming experience. Blizzard makes games to get the widest following possible so they can make the most money possible. Nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s just the kind of games they choose to make.

As for my favorite game companies over the years, Cavedog, Black Isle, Warren Spector’s ION Storm Austin, Irrational Games, and Stardock, I see them as creators of interesting games. Total Annihilation wasn’t and isn’t the most polished game in existence (although it tightened up considerably from the original 1.0 to 3.1). Neither is Deus Ex, Freedom Force, Galactic Civilizations II, or five or ten of my other favorites that I could name. But here’s the key with all these games: Depth. Total Annihilation is, to me, almost infinitely replayable to me even in unmodded form, because of how many different ways there are to play it. Deus Ex is mind-blowingly deep for its era when you consider how many different ways you can play it. Same for Fallout and Freedom Force. These are not games that will truly appeal to a wide cross section of the gaming and non-gaming populace.

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I have now completed the vast majority of the missions in Far Cry 2, and given that Fallout 3 is out today, I am unlikely to come back to Far Cry 2 for quite a while.  So, now is a good time for a full review!

The bulk of this review is going to be pretty negative, so let me just start out by saying this:  Far Cry 2 is a pretty decent game.  Not fantastically great, as many of the professional reviews would have you believe, but decent.  Indeed, the last time I checked, metacritic had the various review sites giving it an average of 88 out of 100, while the user score was a slightly less impressive 6.5 out of 10.

Ultimately, Far Cry 2 suffers from its own scope.  It is just too large.  The game world is to big, and getting through all the main quests takes too long.  While there are some genuinely fun moments, much of the game is just a drag, and there just isn’t enough interesting stuff to do to merit the 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.  I feel like they could have taken out a lot of the “filler” and been left with maybe 10 hours of actual decently fun gameplay.  Unfortunately, even these parts can be very formulaic.  Virtually all the missions boil down to “go there, kill that guy or blow that thing up”.  The Buddy missions are presumably supposed to add some variety, but they instead feel even more run of the mill (not to mention pointless).  At first, the Buddy missions tend to have something to do with the main mission that they are branching off of.  Later on, however, it feels like the developers just got lazy.  One mission in particular I remember involved going to a village and blowing up some medicine production.  For some bizarre reason, the Buddy “sidebar” to the mission was to go to a completely different village and kill everybody so my Buddy could get some drugs!

While the “kill that guy” part of the missions is usually fun, the “go there” part is almost always boring.  Driving is not very engaging, and you will do a lot of it.  Also, a lot of the time you spend just trying to get somewhere will actually be taken up by traveling through guardposts.  These little annoyances never take more than a minute or two to clear, but you can’t just drive through them, because enemies inevitably come after you and they will take out your vehicle quickly if you ignore them.

So, the fun parts are usually the battles at the various mission locations throughout the world.  However, even these sequences generally only take a few minutes to complete.  The ones that are longer are the most fun, but these are unfortunately very rare.  What this game really needs are some nice “dungeons”: longer, more linear combat sequences, where the developers can lead you through the action.  The open ended combat sequences are just not enough.

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I’ve played Far Cry 2 a bit more since the last time I wrote about it, and naturally, greater familiarity with a subject begets more things to say about it to a blogger. I’m still enjoying the game quite a bit and don’t anticipate stopping playing it soon; it’s just not quite as great as most of the major review outlets seem to think. In particular, the game has some annoying aspects that can really hinder enjoyment of the game. Here are the top ten annoying aspects of Far Cry 2:

10. Everyone’s out to kill you. Any time you are outside of the game’s one main city, the first, last, and only thing you should do upon coming across any other person, regardless of whether they’re driving in a military jeep, civilian coupe, or are simply on foot, is to immediately kill them, because given half a chance that’s exactly what they’ll do to you. Far Cry 2 borrows a lot of its gameplay from the pioneer sandbox game Grand Theft Auto, except that it removes pretty much every non-combat element of interaction with the NPCs that litter the world. Imagine Grand Theft Auto where you’re always stuck on a six star wanted level and the only other characters in the game are police, and you get the general idea.

9. Having to schlep across the whole map repeatedly. The game world in Far Cry 2 is big. Too big, some might say (me included). Destinations are spread pretty far apart, with only jungle/desert trails between them livened up with the occasional guard post encounter/diamond tracking. As a result, you’ll have to schlep across the game world a lot. It gets repetitive pretty quickly, and it’s not a lot of fun because the driving isn’t particularly enjoyable. Thankfully, there are bus depots scattered around the map; there just aren’t nearly enough of them.

8. Lack of jogging. Your character in Far Cry 2 only has two movement speeds: walking and sprinting. Since the game world is so big, you frequently have long distances to travel. The game is (thankfully) laden with vehicles that can be stolen at every destination, but when you overturn your vehicle in the middle of nowhere while trying to read your map (which happens surprisingly often), you have to head out on foot to the nearest beacon of civilization. Unfortunately, traveling on foot is slow and annoying, because your character will sprint for about five seconds, then pant while walking for about five seconds, then repeat ad infinitum. It’d be useful if your character could travel at a sustained speed between walking and sprinting for long distance travel — like, say, jogging. Oh, and you can’t sidestep while sprinting, and good luck if you’re trying to get anywhere on the bottom of your map, because you can’t see it while moving.

7. Guard posts that respawn instantly. Let’s face it, guard posts just aren’t very interesting. They’re only manned by a couple of NPCs, so they’re not much of a challenge. I usually just drive my jeep within forty feet of them, switch to the mounted turret, and mow them all down while they stand there staring blankly and uncomprehendingly, somehow having failed to notice me approaching. It’s more chore than fun, but I have to do it every time I come across an inhabited guard post, because trying to drive around one frequently leads to vehicle damage, vehicular chases, and/or death. And the absolute worst part about it is that every guard post is pretty much always inhabited, even if you just cleared it five minutes earlier. The game simply doesn’t save state very well. Clear out a guard post on the way to talk to a buddy to pick up a mission? It’ll be full again coming back the other way, even though you just passed it minutes prior. On the plus side, guard posts just about guarantee that you’ll never run low on ammunition, grenades, or HP syringes, because the supplies are restocked just as often as the ineffectual guards.

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Many PC hardware review sites like to do the occasional “state of the graphics card market” type review where they make some overall generalizations about which video cards are the good buys at the time.  Typically, these sites will lump cards into 3 categories, by price:

1. “Budget” - about $150
2. “Performance” - about $250
3. “Enthusiast” - about $450

Of course, those categories are complete rubbish, and (hopefully) everyone reading hardware sites realizes this.  The idea that a $100 to $150 video card is “budget” is beyond ludicrious.  The fact is, if you spend much more than this, you are simply not getting a good value for your dollar.  If you spend $150 on a video card every 18 months or so, you will essentially always be able to play all of the latest games at high settings.  If you instead spent $300 on a video card, you will not in general be able to go 36 months on that same card with all the latest games at high settings.  So, assuming your goal is to always be able to play games at high settings, you will end up spending much more if you buy $300 cards than if you buy $150 cards.

The preceding paragraph has some caveats.  The $150 number assumes you have a monitor running 1680 x 1050 or perhaps 1920 x 1200.  These are the standard numbers for the now very cheap 22″ and 24″ widescreen monitors, respectively.  If you are using a smaller monitor, running, for example, 1280 x 1024, you might get by spending less.  Similarly, if you have a monster 30″ monitor that runs 2560 x 1600, you will probably need to spend a bit more.

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The videogame industry is in the midst of a booming trend towards realism in games. In the first few generations of videogames, the graphics were sufficiently bad that they couldn’t come close to mimicking anything real anyway, so designers didn’t even try; hence Italian plumbers jumping on side-stepping anthropomorphic mushrooms. But shortly thereafter, rotoscoping lead to the first generation of videogames that tried to be realistic, and the trend has continued picking up pace to this very day.

This is how we find ourselves confronted with Far Cry 2, a game that tries so hard to be realistic that it only succeeds in highlighting, with neon strobes, the differences between the game world and the real world. If Far Cry 2 actually wanted to be realistic, it could have easily done so. Look at America’s Army as a good example of FPS realism: there’s no respawning, and medics can’t cure wounds; the best they can do is stabilize your condition so you don’t keep getting worse. Far Cry 2 is no America’s Army: it’s a traditional FPS that tries to disguise the non-realistic trappings of the genre, and fails horribly at it.

Far Cry 2 uses the amorphous concept of hit points like pretty much every first person shooter, but doesn’t label it as such. Get dinged up in a fight? Simply inject yourself — the game doesn’t make it clear what it is, but it’s presumably something like epinephrine — and your wounds are magically healed. Unless you’ve been badly wounded, in which case you first need to use pliers to extract the bullet from your gaping wound before giving yourself the shot. Because, and this is a little known fact, when you’re shot with a bullet, all the damage is actually caused by the presence of the bullet in your body (not the huge gaping hole it ripped through it), and so all gunshot wounds can be cured simply by removing the bullet. And, logically, gunshot wounds where the bullet passes entirely through you are self-curing. The injection system fails so badly at conveying realism that the only way to really explain it is by using the trappings of the FPS genre: those syringes must be full of pure, uncut, unadulterated liquid hit points, much like how the injections in Bioshock could best be explained as liquid mana.

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Far Cry 2 has now been out for a few days and I have had a chance to put in a few hours with it.  There is as yet no indication that I have yet made any significant progress with regards to the main storyline (and it seems that this game will be a long one).  However, I believe I have gotten a bit of a feel for some elements of the game.

From a players perspective, Far Cry 2 is related to its predecessor in name only.  The game is set in a war torn country in Sub-Saharan Africa, and features open ended style gameplay reminiscent of Oblivion or Assassin’s Creed.  So far this seems to be working fairly well, but I must confess that even in my few hours I am starting to see something of a repetitive formula emerge.  Hopefully, the developers keep mixing it up as the game continues.

Far Cry 2 was developed by Ubisoft, in contrast to the orginal Far Cry and Crysis, which were developed by Crytek.  Perhaps as a result, the game feels very different than Far Cry or Crysis.  Unfortunately, many of these changes are not for the better, at least from a PC gamer’s perspective.

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Now this will be interesting if it holds up to further scrutiny: A gamer has managed to get his hands on an early copy of Fallout 3, and reports his impressions that it is eerily similar to Oblivion. Fallout 3 was created by Bethesda Software, the same studio responsible for Oblivion, and they heavily reused code from Oblivion in creating Fallout 3 (basically the entire game engine, if reports are to be believed). As a result, Fallout 3 apparently feels a lot like Oblivion, just in a different setting and with (thankfully) different level-up mechanics.

So the real question is — is this a good thing? Now I’m not going to accuse Bethesda of being lazy, because, as a software developer myself, I know how important code reuse is, and if I have a perfectly good engine sitting around, I’m going to adapt it for use with a new task rather than create something new from scratch. And I did play Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls IV a fair amount, and I did like it. So that isn’t automatically a negative on Fallout 3. What’s really at issue here is if you spent a lot of time playing Oblivion to the point that you got bored with it (like Grokmoo did): are the similarities with Fallout 3 going to be a negative? I could see an eerie sense of deja vu developing.

Still, I’m eagerly looking forward to the release of Fallout 3, and I’ll report back here regarding whether I find it disconcertingly similar to Oblivion.