Exploration and Self-Discovery

One of my greatest joys in gaming is the feeling of discovery one gets from exploring a finely-crafted world. When a world is designed properly, it can really suck you into its setting, and when you have the unrestricted freedom to explore its boundaries, you get a strong sense of place in the environment. It's not merely the sightseeing that makes exploration compelling -- it's the rewards you receive for your discoveries, whether they be little treats left by the developers or just the psychological gratification you get for finding a more efficient path.

Some of the real fun, however, comes from discovering tricks that the developers neither intended nor anticipated, like backflipping into an exploding bomb to reach a high ledge in Ocarina of Time, or planting mines on a wall and climbing up them in Deus Ex. These discoveries are more fascinating to me because they're completely unscripted. As rewarding as it can be to bomb a cracked wall in The Legend of Zelda and find a wealth of hidden goodies inside, it's really just a scripted sequence designed to happen in a precise way. There are obvious clues telling you what to do, which make these discoveries a little less personal and a little less dramatic.

Exploration plays a prominent role in non-linear, open-world, free-roaming sandbox games. Much of the appeal stems from the player's freedom to go off and search for adventure in his own way, but some games promote and reward exploration much better than others. Playing Risen 2, I've noticed that the exploration is at times very creative and satisfying, and other times it's rote and boring, which got me thinking about the broader picture on how games can design worlds that beckon for a deeper, more personal level of exploration and discovery.

Great Games You Never Played: Painkiller

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

In the world of first-person shooters, Painkiller is a throwback to an earlier time in gaming history (back in the days of Doom and Quake), when shooters were all about fast-paced, cathartic action. Developed by People Can Fly in 2004, Painkiller tells the story of Daniel Garner; after dying in a car crash with his wife, he's sent into purgatory to battle Lucifer's army, in order to prevent a war between Heaven and Hell and to earn his passage to join his wife in Heaven. Alone against the armies of Hell, Daniel must fight the demons through different slices of history recreated in purgatory, before facing Lucifer himself in a final showdown.

In Painkiller, the main point of the game is to walk into a room and turn every moving thing into a shower of blood and dismembered body parts. The action is fast, the shooting intense and cathartic, and there are no other objectives besides "kill everything." As much as I enjoy more sophisticated shooters like STALKER and Deus Ex, I also hold a fond appreciation for shooters that can make mindless action fun and engaging. Thanks to the tight shooting mechanics, the wonderfully diverse and evocative level designs, the unique variety of weapons and enemies, and the colossal boss fights, Painkiller does the action very well with fantastic presentation.

Impressions of Risen 2: Dark Waters

This past Friday, Piranha Bytes released Risen 2: Dark Waters, a pirate-themed action adventure role-playing game and sequel to Risen from 2009. Piranha Bytes are best known for their previous work on the Gothic series, with Gothic 2 considered by many to be one of the greatest RPGs of all time. I've been a longtime fan of Piranha Bytes, loyal through the missteps of Gothic 3 and their recovering process with Risen, and was optimistic for a brighter future with Risen 2. Now that I've played about six hours of it, I almost fear that Risen 2 may be a case of "one step forward, two steps back."

From what I can tell, Risen 2 seems to have all of the core elements I've come to expect from a Piranha Bytes game; primarily, a rich and organic world that's interesting to explore, and decisions with concrete consequences and role-playing options. The dialogue this time around is especially enjoyable, and many of the new features (like "dirty tricks" in combat) are welcome additions. But even ignoring some of the more glaring superficial issues, there are still a number of questionable design elements that really seem to detract from the game's potential, leaving me with mixed opinions. Continue reading for the rest of my quick impressions.

Please Get Off the Life Support

I've been seeing Resident Evil 6 advertisements lately, and knowing very little about it besides what's been mentioned in marketing, I can't help but feel like the series is desperately crying out for attention. After the lackluster fan response to Resident Evil 5, it seems like they're carefully backpedaling into Resident Evil 4 territory, as if to catch people's attention with "Look! It's Leon! The guy from the one you guys really liked! Please buy this game!" Other forced elements, like the inclusion of Albert Wesker as the main villain again (wasn't he killed off at the end of RE5?) make me even more skeptical.

It seems to me like a lot of these established, long-running series are going onto life support, with the developers making surgically precise tweaks (sometimes read as "manipulations") to try to draw audiences back with promises of returning to the series' prior glory. More often than not, these attempts prove to be uninspired, derivative rehashes that neither capture the original magic of the series, nor provide anything new or exciting. This bothers me. I'd really prefer for these companies to push their series into bold new directions, or perhaps even try their hand at some new IPs. More commentary after the jump.

Introducing my New PS3

I'd been wanting to get a PS3 for a while now, with certain exclusives taunting me from the other side of the fence. Demon's Souls was always one of the main games I wanted a PS3 for, but I could never justify the cost of a new console when I already had a gaming PC and such a vast backlog of unplayed PC and PS2 games. But with my recent birthday and news of the Demon's Souls servers going offline on May 31st, I finally bit the bullet and bought the console. Six years later, I've finally entered the current generation of console gaming.

The icing on the cake is that GameStop had just started a sale period for the PS3, which got me a $50 discount on a new console and a free copy of Batman: Arkham City. These were some very nice surprises, since I wasn't even expecting them and the timing was absolutely perfect, so the sale helped validate the purchase a bit (or at least alleviate some potential buyer's remorse). Demon's Souls, here I come.

Impressions of Nehrim: At Fate's Edge

If you haven't heard already, Nehrim: At Fate's Edge is a free total conversion mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It's a completely stand-alone game with its own original world, characters, and quests so impressive in ambition that it rivals the scale of the vanilla Oblivion experience. And in most ways, it's actually better than Oblivion, which is either a heaping bit of praise for Nehrim's developers, SureAI, or a scornful derision of Bethesda. I'm going with both. After all, it's kind of sad when a group of volunteer modders can make a better game than a multi-million dollar studio of (supposedly) industry-leading professionals.

I'm somewhere between 20 and 30 hours into Nehrim and I've only just finished the first of (I believe) five chapters. I'll be writing a full review once I've finished the game, but since I'm still only a fraction of the way through it, and I'll almost assuredly be distracted by Risen 2 when it launches, I figured I'd go ahead and publish my early impressions of the game. So far, I've been really enjoying it. It feels far more like Gothic 2 with an Oblivion skin, which makes it a far more compelling experience, even though Nehrim can't quite escape some of the inherent problems of Oblivion. More of my impressions after the jump.

The End of a Lineage 2 Chronicle

Dear Diary: Nostalgic for the good old days, I decided to reinstall the Korean MMO Lineage 2 after a few years of absence, in order to see how the game has changed, especially in light of it recently going free-to-play. I logged in and found all of my characters completely stripped of their gear, items, and money. Anything that could be traded or sold from my characters was gone, leaving with me with nothing but useless junk items. So I submitted a support ticket to customer service, and eventually received a full set of equipment for each of my characters, which averaged out to being about as good as what I had before.

Except I was still left with zero money, which is as much a termination sentence as the previous lack of gear, since I can't afford to teleport or buy any of the supplies one needs for ordinary gameplay, and I have no way to gather an income without already having some money to invest in the first place. I couldn't even farm money the old-fashioned way (by killing enemies for random item drops) because all of my characters are too high of a level to get drops from the low-level enemies surrounding the towns in which I was left stranded.

I've learned, however, that the various changes have made it quicker and easier than ever before to reach the end-game content from a new character. Supposedly you can go from level 1-85 in the span of a month with only casual play, or within one week of hardcore sessions. In contrast, it took me 2-3 years to get from 1-79 on my primary character. So I'm pretty pissed that all the time and effort I put into my characters has now been rendered obsolete. Even if I hadn't lost all my stuff, I still would've been better off rolling a new toon from scratch, thanks to the unique benefits new characters get these days. 

I think that puts the final nail in the coffin of my Lineage 2 chronicle. I just don't have the motivation to get my original characters back into the game, and I'm not very pleased about essentially scrapping all the work I put into them in favor of starting up fresh. If I were to start from scratch, I'd rather just play an entirely new and different game. Hell, I'd probably have more fun with Star Wars: The Old Republic, a game I didn't enjoy very much, than I would lingering on in L2. Here's hoping Guild Wars 2 will be worth the wait.