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Over the holiday break we managed to re-start our ongoing D&D campaign. We are currently running through Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords adventure path, and if you want, you can read as I gush about it here. We are just wrapping up the first book in the adventure path, and the good news is the enthusiasm is high to keep plowing ahead.

Paizo Publishing has done a great job making Golarion (the Pathfinder setting world) a really compelling place, and we are having a lot of fun playing in it. At this point, thePathfinder line is really starting to fill out nicely, and many of the more interesting locales are getting their own sourcebooks, adding to the depth and richness the world. Plus, it gives you mountains of fluff to sift through and keep you engaged between sessions.

Getting back to our pen and paper game has left me pretty much itching for D&D around the clock, so I picked up the new Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion “Storm of Zehir.” It’s an interesting game, and a worthy effort, but my review is somewhat mixed. On the bright side, it seems like there has been some much-needed performance tuning done, and the game now actually runs fairly smooth. NWN2 has always been a bit of a performance pig considering its middle-of-the-road graphics.

The game also re-introduces the party system, a feature I’ve been missing since the first Neverwinter Nights. In this expansion you get to create and control you entire party, which is half the fun. One of the things I really missed since the old Black Isle Studios days was the ability to roll up your entire party at the start of a game. For me, party creation is almost a satisfying game on its own. The game also does about the best job yet of capturing the entirely of the 3.5 rule set, and reproduces them as faithfully as is probably possible without going to a turn-based game (which I actually wish it was). In addition to all the core classes and pile of prestige classes, you will find a full lineup of spells, feats, items and a crafting system to keep you very busy. Storm of Zehir also does an excellent job translating skills – usually in a videogame you can sink all your points into the combat skills like tumble, parry, etc. without worrying about gimping your character. This time around they managed to make everything count, and you suddenly find yourself valuing those ranks in knowledge, intimidate or diplomacy.

An overland travel map has been added, which is kind of a “macro” travel mode where you cross large stretches of terrain. Random monsters encounters will spawn on the overland map, setting up ad-hoc battles. In fact, your skills even come into play here, allowing you to sneak past monsters, intimidate them before combat begins, or parlay with them to avoid conflict altogether. Unfortunately, these random encounters will pop up with a little too much frequency and tend to get annoying (the same way that random encounters popped up constantly in FFX), and left me wishing there was an option to control both the frequency and the difficulty of the encounters.

The story is weak to nonexistent – this is not the game to look to for an epic storyline or deep character development – it certainly isn’t a Baldur’s Gate (we will have to wait for Dragon Age for that), but it is a great combat-focused romp through the Forgotten Realms, somewhat akin to the old Icewind Dale games.

In all, it’s not a great game as a total package, and even pretty weak as a stand-alone story, but if you are itching for some faithful D&D hack-and-slash goodness, it’s worth a look. It also adds a ton of new game content that NWN2’s very active mod community should be able to do some very cool things with. This is definitely a game for the D&D fan (I actually had my Players Handbook open next to me while I created my characters!) On the other hand, if you aren’t really a D&D player, and you are just looking for some good CRPG fun, you would probably be better off passing on Storm of Zehir and picking up Fable 2 or waiting for Dragon Age.

Labels: Dungeons and Dragons, PC games, RPGs

I picked up Neverwinter Nights 2 this week, with a great amount of anticipation. I couldn’t help feeling some nostalgia for the good ol’ days, when D&D-based games sallied forth in abundant legions. Sneaking out of work at lunchtime on release day to pick up the latest installment brought back fond memories of the glory days. I think there is a tendency to think of the old “Gold Box” era as the heyday of D&D video gaming, but in my mind nothing compares in quality to what we saw out of the Infinity Engine era of games. I put over 100 hours into the original Baldur’s Gate, and another pile of hours into the Icewind Dale series, not to mention the superb Planescape: Torment. Needless to say, it is an impressive tradition for any game to live up to.

I’ll admit up front, I wasn’t a very big fan of the original NWN campaign. In fact, I had this weird relationship with the first game where I ended up liking it much more in concept than I did in execution. If it wasn’t for some of the great content that came along later in the form of Bioware’s premium modules, I probably wouldn’t have had a good opinion at all. Everything about the original campaign just felt boring and contrived, as if the designers had come up with a ten hour campaign and then wrapped it in thirty hours of filler just to meet marketing’s expectations. I only made it through the first two chapters, but they both shared the same mind-numbing structure: start in hub area, explore area to north, south, east and west retrieving an item from each area. Once you’ve found all of the required widgets, you advance to next hub area just to start the entire process over again. It may have gotten much better later in the game, but unfortunately, I will never know.

The good news is, so far it appears that the latest installment is living up to the fine tradition of D&D gaming much better than it’s predecessor did. So far I’ve found the story to be dynamic, engaging and very focused. The dialog is sharp and well written, and I’m impressed with the lengths that the writers have gone to take into account your race and class. I’ve already seen comments like “A cleric like you can certainly understand,” or “What do we have here? Two Dwarves traveling together…” Little touches like that make all the difference to me. My only complaint so far is that it falls back on an all-too-cliché mechanic of the forces of evil searching for an item of mystical power, and (of course) you get the duty of taking said item away from you village and search of a solution. I’m guessing it will take a turn away from this later, but still…

Anyone who plays D&D understands that at the end of the day, it’s all about your character, and the developers at Obsidian have done a fine job of providing a full arsenal of character options, and at a much deeper level than any game before it has attempted. It’s truly a full meal deal: All of the Forgotten Realms races are there, including the sub-races. You don’t just choose to play a elf – you choose between sun elves, moon elves, wild elves or drow. Plane-touched are even available as a race choice. The full Forgotten Realms pantheon is also represented for use as patron deities, each with their related domain powers. All the base classes are there (they even through in the Warlock for good measure) and a huge sampling of prestige classes makes an appearance. I hope the fan module community is as active for NWN2 as it was for the original, because it’s going to take a lot of adventuring to try out all of these character options.

Visually, the game looks pretty sharp, barring some technical issues that I’ll talk about in a minute. One of the biggest changes is the move from tile-based to height-mapped outdoor environments. The end result is much more organic looking outdoor areas, with rolling hills and natural grades. Indoor environments look phenomenal as well, with lots of small details and realistic “clutter.” The level designers really took their time to make sure everything looked nice.

Unfortunately, this improved visual quality seems to have come at a disproportional performance price. The game can run somewhat sluggishly, especially in outdoor areas. Anti-aliasing is appears to be forced off, and no amount of jiggery-pokery in my video drivers can get it back on again. It’s no secret that Obsidian was under the gun to get this game out, and it looks like video and performance optimization may have suffered for it. The good news is that that game is still very playable, and if you are willing to turn down a few of the shinier options it can run great. I’m guessing we’ll see most of these issues cleaned up in a series of patches and new drivers, and we’ll get to the point where we can turn on all the whiz-bang and enjoy the game the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

I’m hoping to get into the toolset soon and give that a spin. I spent countless hours playing in the original toolset – unfortunately this time around I’m enjoying the game too much, so it might be a little while longer before I get in there and try and build something. In a moment of weakness I also picked up Final Fantasy XII, although I haven’t played any more than the intro tutorial. At least I should have no shortage of things to blog about for the next few months!

Until next time, game on.

Labels: Dungeons and Dragons, PC games, RPGs, video games

I can't believe how quickly the weeks are going by! It's almost November at this point, which means the deluge of Christmas titles is about to hit! And what does that mean? It means I'm going to break the bank buying games for the next two months, and half of them won't even get around to being played until sometime in the middle of next summer. Hell, I still haven't broken the shrink-wrap on F.E.A.R., and it's been in my game drawer since spring.

Most importantly, we are weeks away from Neverwinter Nights 2 landing in my hands. D&D in videogame format is drug that I have no natural resistances to. I failed my save long ago. The fact that the old Black Isle guys (now Obsidian) built the game is icing on the cake. To this day, Planescape: Torment remains the best story-in-game-form I have every played. I just can't wait.

In the mean time, I've been playing quite of bit of Guild Wars: Factions. To be honest, the whole Guild Wars thing was kind of lost on me the first time around. I bought the game and tried to play it a couple of times, but it just never made sense. Not that it's a particularly complex game, but it definitely has its own conventions. The Prophecies campaign (at least the pre-searing piece) was gorgeous but just felt completely empty to me. The skill system seemed limiting, and I never could figure out the crafting/item system. To make matters worse, just about the time I started feeling vaguely comfortable with the game's basic mechanics, they threw The Searing at me, completely pulling the rug out from under me again.

Needless to say, factions came and went with little interest on my part. Finally, a few weeks back, I started to jones for some MMO goodness, but with NWN2 and FFXII on the horizon, I wanted MMO without the long-term commitment. So, I decided to pick up Factions, figuring that I could play for a bit, and then put in on hold while I dove into the aforementioned titles. Luckily, I ended up much more impressed with Factions than I ever was with the original. While the core mechanics remain mostly unchanged, the new player experience has improved by leaps and bounds. Things like classes & subclasses, skills, attributes and item crafting are all explained much more directly, and the chain of opening quests are entertaining while doing a great job of leading you through the game's core mechanics. I suddenly got it, and now I'm fascinated with the whole meta-game of skill collection and selection. The game has so many levels of strategy and nuance that I can suddenly see why it has it has such a huge following.

Within just a couple days I had my Ritualist/Mesmer up to level 15. I look forward to finishing this campaign and going back and playing the first campaign now that it all makes sense. Nightfall looks impressive as well, adding an entire third campaign with a decidedly middle-eastern flavor. Compared to the first game, I've also like the addition of more utility-type classes. I was a big fan of the Paladin and Shaman classes in WoW, and it was nice to see the same type of support classes appear in Guild Wars. I can't wait to try out the new Paragon class from Nightfall. Too bad you can use the new classes to start the earlier campaigns. That would have been a really neat feature...

I am a little confused that I'm already level 15 in a game that level caps at 20, and I've just gotten out of the starter area. I'm guessing that most of the missions are ran after you have already capped out? This would mean that the real focus of the game is coming up with strategically useful and synergistic skill combinations, as well as the out-and-out PVP battles - which I'm okay with. I'm already starting to feel my computer-controlled henchmen become less effective, and I'm wondering if the the game is trying to push me out of the nest into real grouping... Either way, I'm having fun with it, and it's nice to see a sequel that not only focuses on adding lots of new content for the hardcore player, but also tunes the game's presentation to bring in new players. The experience give me high hopes that Nightfall will continue this trend, and might just be be the most polished Guild Wars yet.

Labels: Dungeons and Dragons, MMORPGs, PC games, RPGs, video games

I am truly ashamed. It's been almost a month since I've posted last, and a whole lot of shit has gone down in that time. First, I finally got my nasty gall bladder out, which is a big part of why I disappeared for a month. The upside of that turned out to be that I had it removed the week of E3, which gave me an excuse to lay in bed and watch show feeds from Gamespot and IGN all week long.

On E3: Interesting show this year - it had a very different vibe. You could almost feel a perceptible power shift from the normal hierarchy: the powerhouse Playstation, the scrappy underdog XBOX and the retarded cousin Nintendo. The only thing that seemed to be a constant is that Nintendo remains as retarded as ever. In fact, by naming their console the "Wii", they chose to revel in it. They should have just stayed with Revelation, or better, go with something like "tits" - at least something like that would make me want to buy one. And I don't want to hear the usual line that they are the last truly creative company, and all about how bold they are for doing everything different. Lesbians do everything different, but it still doesn't make them useful to me.

Sony's press conference left me cold. Kaz Hirai was his usual arrogant self, espousing the virtues of his mythical console, building to the mighty crescendo where they unveil that the PS3 would be available for a mere five hundred and ninety-nine North American Dollars! Then there is this strange pause where all of the little mental calculators are doing their fuzzy math, followed by a tremendous psychological shockwave which said (at least what I heard in my bed 1,ooo miles away from E3) "Fuck you, Hirai!" Somewhere in the middle of all this, they also showed waaaaay tooooo muuuuuch footage of the next version of some racing game that I quit caring about the first time I played Burnout 3, and some footage of a geriatric Solid Snake which miraculously made my give-a-shit meter for all things Metal Gear Solid actually go negative. Oh, and before I forget - where there hell was Killzone 2?

All of this left Microsoft in the enviable position of being the only major player extolling the virtues of the next-generation gaming who actually has a next generation console on the market. As you can imagine, this was pretty fun for them, and it showed. Microsoft was finally able to drop all of the aformentioned "scrappy underdog" posturing, and stand as a success in their own right. Also, the Vista preview was interesting, and it's good to see that PC gaming isn't officially dead - it just remains terminally ill.

As far as games, there wasn't that much I came away excited about... Of what I did see, BioShock got me the most excited. System Shock 2 is still in my top five favorite games of all times, and BioShock appears to be a fitting spiritual sequel in every way. Gears of War looks amazing, and I like the look of Assassin's Creed. Heavenly Sword is one game that looks every bit as good in action this year as the trailers did last year. It was nice to finally see a lot more about Neverwinter Nights 2, which I am very excited about. I was hoping to finally get some info on Bioware's Dragon Age, but that was a no-show.

Labels: consoles, PC games, video games, XBOX

Well, I've managed to go well over a week without an update. While not my intention, this does put me on par with about 99% of all blogs out there. The truth of the matter is simply this - I blog about gaming, and not a lot of gaming has gone on for me over the past week. My wife is out of town visiting her sister in New York City, and so I'm doing the solo-daddy thing, or at least semi-solo. My mom and dad are in town to help out, which makes taking care of the kids that much easier, but just shifts my job to taking care of the grandma and grandpa.

As I mentioned in my last post, I haven't been feeling too hot lately, which is the other thing that has bit into my gaming time. A couple of nights back this culminated with me in the emergency room getting all kinds of pokes, prods and scans. Turns out that I've got a monster stone in my gall bladder, and I'll probably get to have surgury soon to take that bad boy out. At least a few days laid up in bed means I have a good chance to finally finish Grandia III.

I picked up the Dawn of War "Game of the Year" edition at the start of last week. I've always had some interest in Warhammer 40K, although I've never played the table top game. I've seen the minis at the hobby store for years, and I've always found them incredibly compelling on a visual level - it's cool looking stuff. I'm only a few missions in to the video game version, and so far I'm having a blast. It's a great counterpoint to the slow and deliberate pace of Oblivion. The intro sequence is spectacular - even if you know nothing about the Warhammer 40K universe, I can't imagine not being hooked after that intro. Makes me want to pick up a rule book and check out the table top version.

Labels: consoles, PC games, RPGs, Warhammer 40K

I've been playing Oblivion in almost every free hour I've had since I bought it. It's been years since a game has grabbed me like this. The game itself is an amazing accomplishment - the world seems to live and breath on it's own, even moreso than the "persistant" worlds of MMOs. Days turns to night, storms come and pass, people go about their business. If you spend a couple of days in one of the towns and you will actually start to get to know the residents, their patterns, where the live. The amount of detail is staggering.

Oblivion sports a brand of open-endedness that makes Grand Theft Auto feel like it's on rails. I'm just over 10 hours into the game, and I have yet to complete the first step in the main quest. In the meantime, I've explored half a dozen dungeons, been arrested for petty theft (and unfortunate misunderstanding), liberated a town from its oppressive head-of-the-watch, freed a painter from within one of his paintings (a high point so far), and rescued an entire hamlet that had been accidentally turned invisible. There is definately no lack of things to do in this game.

Instead of picking one of the game's standard classes, I chose to build my own custom class. Basically, it's a variation of the Crusader class, modeled after a D&D-style Paladin. The game uses a simple system of major skills and favored attributes that lets you effectively put together almost any classic high-fantasy architype you can think of. I've dropped in a little screen shot below, so you can see my build. He's an Imperial (for the speechcraft bonuses) and born under the sign of the Ritual (for the big heal spell and the turn dead ability).


There are so many potential ways to put together and advance a character in this game, that I would love to see some of the way other players would put together the same type of character. Drop me a comment if you have a particularly cool build.

Anyway, it's pretty clear that I'm impressed with the game. Hell, I'm more than impressed. This is the type of game that transends "gaming" as a hobby, and becomes a hobby all it's own. If anything is going to lay down a challenge to Warcraft's stranglehold on RPG gamers, this is it. And, I'm apperantly not the only one who thinks so.

Labels: MMORPGs, PC games, RPGs, video games