#88: The Banner Saga: Building on an Idea

Every once in a while, I play a game that challenges some basic notions of game design. Usually, these do not turn out to be very good, as these notions exist for a reason. On the other hand, they sometimes open up new possibilities for what game developers can do. The Banner Saga is an example of the latter. A hybrid of the Oregon Trail and classic RPGs, The Banner Saga takes place in a setting heavily inspired by classic Nordic myths. What I want to focus on is a single choice that the developers made regarding the combat. This choice informed the rest of the combat mechanics, and restructured the game in a way that I have certainly never seen before.

In The Banner Saga, the developers made the decision that Health and Damage output would be governed by the same stat. Each fighter has two major stats: Strength and Armor. When attacking another unit, one can either chip away at their Armor, or deliver damage to their Strength. The exact amount of Strength damage is equal to the aggressor's Strength, minus the Armor of the assaulted party. If Strength reaches 0, then the unit will be incapacitated, unable to participate any further in the battle. In other words, whenever somebody is attacked, not only are they that much closer to defeat, but their offensive capability is reduced. This one change to the usual RPG dynamic has a noticeable impact on the rest of combat.

The first of these changes is that players are encouraged to avoid outright killing targets in favor of crippling them and moving on to the next one. While fighting, player and enemy turns are interleaved. Players can determine the order in which their units act, but after every ally action, the enemy moves one of their units, followed by the next ally unit, and so on and so forth. Enemies with low Strength are less likely to be to do any significant damage, especially when friendlies still have Armor. As a result, leaving a weak foe alive means that units with more Strength will take longer to act, since the game still needs to cycle through the weakened enemies first. This extra breathing room makes it much easier to focus on other units, until it is finally time to start cleaning house and removing opposition. I used this very thought process myself on many large enemies, including the game's final boss. By leaving his subordinates low on Strength, I could keep him at bay long enough to finish him before he had the chance to take out too many of my own forces.

The other behavioral shift I noticed during my time with The Banner Saga is that I played a noticeably more defensive game than I typically do. Whenever a party member of mine had taken Strength damage, I always winced because I knew that the fight would be made that much more difficult with their reduced damage output. Because of this, I found myself often grouping my forces together, concentrating all of their attacks on a single unit at a time, keeping them out of range of other units. This allowed my party to maintain their strong offensive capabilities for most of a fight. Though this strategy might be seen as slower and less skillful in other tactical RPGs, The Banner Saga makes it one of the fastest and most effective tactics. Enemies do have AoE attacks, but the risk of spreading units apart too much is always there. Unless some degree of caution is taken, units can crippled just with a few well aimed Strength attacks. Given that the plot is about a group of people trying to stay alive against all odds, this appears to be intentional and a nice way to immerse players into the atmosphere of the game.

\The Banner Saga takes a lot from well known tactical RPGs. However, the choice to take health and damage output, and merge them into the same statistic is one that I have personally never seen before. Of course, there are many other ways in which the game stands out, making its worth known, but this is the one that stood out to me as something that other designers might be able to gain inspiration from. I would definitely recommend taking a look at The Banner Saga is you are looking for something different in your strategy RPGs.

#87: Pillars of Eternity: New Solutions to Old Problems

On numerous occasions, I have cited a dislike of most of the old Infinity Engine RPGs. In particular, Baldur's Gate and its sequel were not very enjoyable. If not for my prior experience with their contemporaries, like Planescape: Torment and the early Fallout games, it would have been extremely tempting to swear myself off of the genre entirely. However, the recent renaissance of cRPGs, from Shadowrun Returns and Wasteland 2 to the upcoming Torment: Tides of Numeria, has brought a new perspective. Recently, Obsidian released Pillars of Eternity, which used those classics as inspiration. In doing so, it highlights many of their problems and proposes some interesting solutions to solving them.

The most obvious improvements Pillars of Eternity made to the systems of its predecessors are in the UI. None of them are major changes, but they all fix some of the more legendary problems that Baldur's Gate and its sequel were notorious for. For example, almost anyone who played those games will recoil in horror if one tells them that “you must gather your party before venturing forth.” Because of how slow characters moved, players could spend upwards to several minutes getting every single member of their group to the exit so that they can transition to the next area. Though that may not seem like a lot of time, when compounded over the sheer number of area changes, it is possible to spend hours in in-game time just waiting for the party to get into position. Should enemies still remain on the map, it will even be necessary to manually guide the party to the exit, else they will accidentally walk straight into battles, further slowing process down. The sheer tediousness of this exercise was, at my most charitable, mind-numbing to the extreme.

Pillars of Eternity fixes this issue in two ways. Although it stills used the memetic phrase, the game will automatically begin the process of bringing every party member to the point of transition the moment the player attempts to move to the next location, saving them from tediously selecting each member and moving them manually. On top of that, there is a “fast-movement” mode players can enable to accelerate the flow of time, minimizing the real-world wait for the party to gather. Though this is far from the only example of such improvements, it serves as a good demonstration of how Pillars of Eternity opted to do more than just reiterate old mechanics without considering how they may be improved.

Another major difference between Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity was in the fighting. Back in the old days, Baldur's Gate utilized a Real Time with Pause combat system. This meant that characters theoretically acted in real time, requiring players to pause the action in order to coordinate tactics, but upon closer inspection reveals this is not entirely true. Though allies and enemies will only act with the passage of time, in truth the game utilizes turn-based mechanics under the hood. During long, protracted fights, I began to notice that my party and the opposition were repeated launching spells and attacks in the same order, no unit acting while another was in the middle of their own move. Baldur's Gate 2 makes this even more obvious by giving players the option to auto-pause the game after each round of combat.

In terms of play, this uncomfortable blend of turn-based play and real time combat offers the worse of both worlds. Turn-based mechanics work because they allow players to take their time and make meaningful, tactical decisions. Without the threat of enemies attacking, it is possible to better consider all possible options before the enemy gets their turn. On the other hand, real time systems focus on the moment-to-moment action. These systems are often built to test quick-thinking and reflex, the goal being to make smart decisions and act on them swiftly. Tactics are important, but they not as strongly emphasized.

With the way Baldur's Gate combined the aspects of these two design philosophies, players have the slow speed of a turn-based game with the need to reflexively, quickly pause after every single action in order to avoid giving away any advantage. Many time in the game, I found that if I did not pause after an enemy attack, my cleric might either launch a low-damage attack, or worst, do nothing at all. When several characters require immediate healing, this often spelled the difference between success and failure.

Pillars of Eternity fixes this in two ways. Instead of a rigid turn/round system, the game relies on cooldowns between attacks. Characters with lighter equipment and/or greater speed will be able to act faster and more frequently than their slower counterparts. Not only does this make party and equipment setups more interesting, but it solves the problem where players are using real time thinking and reflexes on a fundamentally turn-based system. An extremely robust array of auto-pause options also serves to benefit this system. By enabling them, players can force the game to pause on specific events like one character finishing an ability, getting low on health, or even something as simple as the start of a battle. As a result, players can rely on the game handling that aspect on its own, meaning they can focus on the action without having a thumb over the Space Bar at all times.

The balance of short-term versus long-term resource management is also different between the two games. As is the case with most RPGs, Baldur's Gate gives each character a set number of hit points. Once those hit points reach zero, they are killed unless a resurrection spell brings them back to life. In order to recover from damage, players could either use healing magic, or allocate time to resting in a place where no enemies are lurking. Theoretically, this meant that players could spend as much time as they wanted in the wilderness, before heading back into town. So long as they continuously found safe locations, or cleared out areas, any health could simply be recovered by resting. The only potential long-term consequences to doing so are inventory space and party member death. Because of this, battles were either be a total blowout or extreme tough, without any middle ground. Whenever one of those tough battles is finished, resting also became the only logical option so that the party can recover.

Pillars of Eternity uses a different system. Each party member has two pools which get used in battle. Like any other game, each character has health, with represents long-term damage. However, Endurance is another statistic that comes into play. Acting as a shield of sorts, Endurance will soak up most, but not all, of the damage during a fight and is restored at the end of a battle. Should it ever reach zero, the character is knocked out, unable to participate in the fight any longer. Should their health instead drop to zero, they are permanently killed off. This allowed Obsidian to balance each fight so that it will pose a good challenge to a reasonably-leveled party, while also limiting the overall impact of any single engagement on the player's long-term survivability.

Health is completely restored on rest, just like in Baldur's Gate. However, this is balanced by the fact that resting outside of an inn costs a camping set. At any given time, only six camping sets can be in the player's inventory, meaning that their supply will always be limited. The difficulty is in balancing the desire to travel around and complete quests with the necessity to conserve supplies and visit town in order to restock. After fighting a series of battles, finding that the party is tired, health running low, the game always tempts the player to see if they willing to go for one more battle without rest in order to best conserve their inventory. Unlike Baldur's Gate, the decision of when to rest and when not to rest becomes just as much of a tactical choice then anything other combat-related decision.

Pillars of Eternity is not just a loving tribute to Baldur's Gate. Rather, it is a modern take on the game design principles inherent to the old school cRPGs of that era. Given this lens, it is easy to see how Obsidian was able to improve upon those old systems and create something new from them. I am happy this genre is making a comeback. With all that has been learned in the time since the era of Baldur's Gate, there is huge potential for this genre to develop more than it ever could have in its heyday.

Impressions #9: Shadowrun Returns

In the time I have been writing about video games, I have gone back to play many games from the past. A great portion of those game were old RPGs like the first few Fallout games, Baldur's Gate, and Planescape: Torment. As a result, I have become familiar with the tropes, designs, mechanics of CRPGs. This is what inspired me to play a game on my Steam list that has been out for a while, but I had never played: Shadowrun Returns. For the record, I am not referring to the shooter called “Shadowrun”, released in 2007. Rather, I am talking about the Kickstarted CRPG developed Harebrained Schemes. Having just completed the Dead Man's Switch module that came with the game, and the Dragonfall module released later as DLC, my mind is still fresh with thoughts on it.

Given the modular, user-generated content focus of the game, it is great that one of Shadowrun Return's greatest draws is its setting. I would feel incredibly comfortable saying that the Shadowrun RPG setting is one of the most interesting ones out there. Though this is ignoring some of the finer minutia of the lore, the basic gist of Shadowrun's world is that our world ran as it normally did, until an event known as the Awakening happened. Afterwards, magic came to the world, along with many of the typical fantasy races such as elves, trolls, and so on. Furthermore, world governments have weakened in power, leaving private corporations to fill the vacuum. Mercenaries called Shadowrunners (which will typically include player characters) get hired by various people in different positions of authority to complete jobs and acquire their next paycheck. Without a doubt, the mix of science fiction and fantasy, combined with the highly political relationships among corporations, lead to a lot of potential for many diverse and interesting modules/campaigns.

And with such potential, it is crucial for Shadowrun Returns to have a robust character creator. Fortunately, the game has exactly that. Whenever the player starts a new module, they must create a new character for that module. If players wish, they can directly spend their initial karma, which is the equivalent of experience points in Shadowrun, on the various skills available to them. Alternatively, they can select one of six pre-made classes to help guide them. The first is the Street Samurai, which focuses on weapon skills. Next is the Mage, who is an expert in spellcasting. After that is the Decker, who can infiltrate the Matrix, a more advanced version of the internet, in order to acquire files and hack various devices in the world. The Shaman can summon totems. A Rigger can control combat drones. And lastly, a Physical Adept can use their chi energy to augment their physical abilities.

As players complete missions in a module, they gain more karma. That karma can be used to enhance attributes, improve old skills, or unlock new skills. It is crucial to develop a character's stats, because that determines the caps for their skill. For example, Ranged Combat relies on the Quickness stat. If my character has a 4 in Quickness, they can only have a maximum of 4 in Ranged Combat. The fact that both stats and skills are raised with the same resource encourages players to specialize. In general, there are not many “wrong” builds in Shadowrun Returns. Should the player specialize in only a handful of skills, they will generally find themselves able to handle most situations. Even outside of combat, a specialist would usually be able to find a dialog prompt that requires those talents.

On the other hand, what better use is there for your character and their abilities than to fight. Shadowrun Returns utilizes a system extremely similar to the one found in X-Com: Enemy Unknown. In fact, they are so alike that players of the latter will feel quite at home here. Turns have one phase each for the player, the enemy, and any neutral parties. On the player's turn, their character and any allies accompanying them each get 2 Action Points. AP can be spent completing action like firing a weapon, changing position, casting a spell, or going on Overwatch to intercept an enemy on their phase. Each enemy will also get 2 AP on their phase. Phases will alternate until either all player characters or all enemies have been defeated. At the end of combat, the player party's most recent wounds will be healed. Both modules contain many interesting and varied enemy formations. Combined with a very solid system, this allows for highly tactic combat. Finding strong positions, taking cover, and keeping pressure on the enemy are key to keeping the player and their entourage in good enough condition to fight on.

However, there is one element that RPGs thrive on above all others, their stories. Fortunately, both the Dead Man's Switch and Dragonfall modules are extremely strong in this category. To avoid spoilers, I will not speak directly about the plots to either of these games. However, I will say that the writing is top notch. Since the game uses an isometric 2D style, and does not have voice acting, the script has to be strong enough to make up for that. Rather than animate the characters, the dialog box is also filled in with descriptions like “She's hiding it well, but you can tell she's clearly out of her element.” It is very literary in the way scenes play out, letting players use their imaginations to great effect. Both stories also have a very steady build-up and pacing. Lasting only about 12 hours each, both narratives take a decent amount of time to clear without overstaying their welcome.

Dead Man's Switch ends on a bit of a low note with regards to its final dungeon, but it is otherwise very solid, if a bit on the easy side. On the other hand, Dragonfall does a very good job of stepping up the difficulty without being overly frustrating thanks to its smart level layouts and enemy design. It is also much more open than Dead Man's Switch's comparatively linear story. While both stories will eventually funnel players to the same end, Dragonfall feels much more organic and responsive to player action than Dead Man's Switch. There are obvious, yet subtle ways in which the world reacts to what the player does in the game. In any case, both modules have solid stories with intelligent and thoughtful design.

Shadowrun Returns is a truly impressive game in my opinion. I enjoy it so much that I would feel extremely comfortable calling it one of my favorite RPGs of all time, even more than Planescape: Torment. And Dragonfall is an excellent expansion to the game. Given the modular nature of the product, I am excited to see what kinds of creations players have made/will make. The setting and the mechanics are so solid that I rarely found myself in a position where I did not want to keep playing the game. Should you be someone interested in RPGs, I could not recommend Shadowrun Returns enough. You owe it to yourself to check it out if you have not already done so.

#63: CRPGs: Why are They Always so Terrible to Start?

Much of my time this summer has been spent playing games from a bygone era. Because I have only recently started gaming on the PC a few years ago, there is a whole backlog of games, both old and new, that demand my attention. Of those older games on my backlog, I have mostly been playing some of the classic RPGs (cRPGs) from the late 90s and early 2000s. These titles include games such as Baldur's Gate and it's sequel, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights. All of these games used the Dungeons and Dragons license to create what were essentially virtual DnD campaigns, even using the same rules and systems. As a result of all the hours I have poured into them, these types of games have been occupying my mind and most of my thoughts lately. Although each of these games had their own way of utilizing old school RPG concepts, they mostly seem to have glaring flaws in one particular area: the beginning.

In almost every one of these games, the beginning is easily one of the worst aspects of it by far. This runs counter to what one might consider to be the logical way to design a video game. After all, the introduction to the game, including story and mechanics, is the point where the designer has the responsibility to hook the player and keep their attention. If the start of the game does little to generate interest and convince players to stick with it, than it has failed at its job. In my opinion, there are a number of contributing factors that led to this phenomenon. This week, I will discuss why I believe this happens and possible ways to help mitigate the problem, now that the genre is seeing a bit of a resurgence in the realm of Kickstarter.

One of the biggest reasons that the introductions to cRPGs can have problematic introductions is that often many of the most crucial choices a player will make in the game are done at the very beginning, before the player is even introduced to any aspects of gameplay. The Baldur's Gate series is a pretty good example of this. In both games, when the player selects “New Game”, they are immediately bombarded by a list of options. First, the gender of the protagonist character needs to be selected, followed by their race. After that, the player chooses which of the playable classes the protagonist will be (and if they wish to utilize any of the class kits made available). Next, the karmic alignment of the character is chosen among the axis of Law/Chaos and Good/Evil. It is then that the main character's statistics, include Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma need to be allocated from a static, finite pool of points. The same must also be done for weapon proficiencies (and Thief skills if that is the protagonist's chosen profession). Finally, the player is left with cosmetic choices like appearance and name.

As one can easily discern, that is quite the list of choices that need to be made. This alone can prove to be a daunting task for new players, but it is worsened by the fact that there is no real context with which to make those choices in beyond a typical DnD adventure. The player has no idea what kind of obstacles they will be facing along the way, which playstyle will suit them best, nor the amount/variety of situations they will be thrown into. At the very best, they can make an educated guess based on their own personality and possibly the track record of the company who developed the game. The player does not even know anything about the plot when making these decisions. Worst still, once they have been made, there is no going back and no way of correcting any mistakes aside from starting anew. If the player decides about 3-4 hours in that their character is no longer working for them for whatever reason, there is no way to mitigate the damage done and try to change tactics. (There is an exception if they are playing as a human, giving them the option to Dual-Class. However, since both games have a hard experience cap, this too may cause problems if not done early enough.)

However, not all cRPGs have this issue, despite its prevalence. Another, very well-loved game from this genre, Planescape: Torment, had a pretty interesting way of skirting around this issue. The only real significant choice players needed to make at the beginning of Planescape was which statistics to put points. Even that decision was partially made for the player, since no stat could be lower than 9 for the protagonist. Most other characteristics of the player character were either preselected or were emergently generated as a result of play. The player character of the game was a human male that had immortality, but no name and no memory of who he used to be. “The Nameless One”, as he was called by the game's text, starts out as True Neutral-alignment Fighter class. This can change depending on what actions he takes over the course of the game and whether or not he chooses to undertake training as a Mage or a Thief. As long as there is someone willing to train The Nameless One, he can always undergo a class change if his current profession no longer suits the current situation. Even if the player learns that he/she did not allocate his stat points favorably later on, leveling up to high enough levels of any class will grant them more stat points to allocate, so even then there are ways to “fix” any perceived damage done. All these elements combined give players the ability to react to the game and adapt to challenges as they progress as opposed to working around challenges based on what their party is capable of doing at the time.

Another very common problem I noticed in the introductory sequences to classic RPGs is that oftentimes the initial encounters are fairly difficult. Often, I found myself encountering enemies that I could not have been reasonably expected to defeat at the start of the game, even on the easiest difficulty setting. One example of this comes again from the Baldur's Gate franchise, although this time from the first game. I have a very distinct memory of the start of that game. After leaving the first town of Candlekeep and officially beginning the story, I explored the starting area of the game, just the very first zone. As with many games I play, I wanted to do as much as I can in a given area as possible before moving on. While looking around and making sure I did everything and talked to everyone, I encountered a brown bear. Thinking that this was the first zone, and therefore the designers could not possibly think to throw a challenge at me that a starting character could not be expected to overcome, I used my Thief skills to Hide in Shadows and go for the Backstab Critical. Despite landing a successful attack and dealing damage, the bear turned around and hit me, killing me in a single blow.

This was not the only such experience I had playing these types of games. In the first chapter of Neverwinter Nights, shortly after the prelude, players are task with locating four creatures important to the story scattered across the city of Neverwinter. I decided to check out the Prison District because that was my first lead. There, I defeated quite a few random thugs through Sneak Attacks and liberal use of ranged weaponry on my way. While exploring the area looking for clues as to where to go next, I was attacked by a Thug Leader and died when he landed a successful Sneak Attack. When reloading and successfully fending him off, at the cost of quite a few healing potions, I pressed on into the Prison District's sewer system. Shortly upon entry, I was felled by another Gang Leader and three of his henchmen. It took the use of console commands to boost my character's level a few times in order to defeat this foe. Only ten minutes later, I needed to utilize the console again in order to fight a Sorcerer whose spells kept defeating me in a single deadly blow.

This is a pretty simple problem with a pretty simple solution. All it requires is a better balance of enemies encountered throughout the adventure and a more clear communication of where tougher enemies are located. Although there is no way to be absolutely sure where players will go in these kinds of games, designers do have a general sense of what most players will do and in what order it is done. This can be used to better balance the encounters and provide a steady progression of more and more difficult opponents. Furthermore, since game designers know how much experience players can be typically expected to gain over the course of a given segment (through play testing and tuning the number of enemies and their positions), it is possible, though still admittedly difficult, to use that information to better tune the level and types of encounters throughout the game.

Though not exactly a classic RPG, and highly contentious among its audience, this is something that I found that Fallout: New Vegas did very well. At the start of New Vegas, players are explicitly directed to take the South path around to the town of Primm. However, the player is allowed to head north through Sloan if they choose. Should they do so, they will be warned that it is smarter to turn around and go the other way because deathclaws patrol the area. This clearly communicates to the player that the enemies they will encounter are well over their current abilities. With this information in hand, most will make the decision to go back and take the South path, which has weaker enemies that are designed for low-level players to fight. Some will undoubtedly go and fight the deathclaws anyway, but the intent and direction of the design has been made very clear. There is little in terms of ambiguity. As a result, the game has a steady progression such that players will rarely face a challenge that is too tough for their level unless they are deliberately making the choice to give themselves a tough challenge.

I am overall very pleasantly surprised by the coming resurgence of this particular genre of games. Though I have only recently begun to play them for myself, I find that there is a lot designers and players can do with it. However, I hope that the designers of this new wave of cRPGs learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. While many were of very high quality, they were far from perfect. There is clearly lots of room for improvement. The introduction is of particular importance to get right. Without a strong intro, players can find themselves quitting a game before it realizes its full potential. I hope that my advise will not fall on deaf ears.