Storm King’s Thunder session 3: The Defense of Triboar

I cannot resist the urge to metagame. Reading the DM directives in the book, I had my PC’s and NPCs focus their attack on Ildmane to force her to abandon her mission and run away.

Combat is the least interesting part of playing solo for me. I searched online for tools to automate combat, ideally so I would just press a few buttons and would find the results - who lived, who died, who’s down on hp and what experience they would get. Regrettably, nothing like that exists online and everything I found was more of the flavor of an “Initiative Tracker” - apps that handled the order of each combatant’s turns and maybe had a dice roller app. I realize this is to facilitate actual face-to-face gameplay - players should be encouraged to use their ingenuity, imagination, and vocal descriptions of combat to create unique outcomes that cannot be translated in a simple stat based way.   On the other hand, I just wanted to roll a bunch of basic attacks and wear down the enemies’ hp.

Still, by using physical dice, pencil and paper I was able to resolve combat, albeit slowly.

My PCs and all the NPCs (I learned my lesson from Bryn Shander and involved every story NPC in the battle) zerged the Fire Giant in the first round and brought her below half health, where she and her mate retreated. They will return in 5 days with much greater numbers, but I plan on my PCs being long gone by then.

After all, I’m glad this chapter is over and I’m ready to sink my teeth into the much meatier chapter 3. I didn’t enjoy this chapter’s combat scenarios where the PCs are meant to be vastly outclassed in power and would have preferred if combat itself involved a lot less dice rolls and turn order tracking.

Storm King's Thunder session 2

A male human, large and brawny, wearing a bear pelt as a cloak and hefting a Greataxe, with two more handaxes thrust into his belt, together with a small sprightly female elf, wearing clothing made from woven plants and carrying a handmade wooden longbow, a quiver of arrows, and two shortswords at her waist, journey into a town on the edges of the Savage Frontier in the north of the continent of Faerun.

Their arrival is pure chance, no one yet knows who they are or why this odd pair travels together. They look wild and barbaric, and their reasons for entering such modest civilization is unknown. Perhaps they are there to trade for food, or rest in between some other long journey, or maybe to start a new life away from the harsh wilderness. Whatever the reason, their arrival was cursed with misfortune, for no sooner had they the opportunity to rest their feet when a surprise force of Giants attacked!

Campaign notes: Starting at level 3, skipping Chapter 1 entirely because it doesn't take place in the Savage Frontier, is inconsequential to the rest of the story, and is a boring railroad only meant to push PCs to level 5 quickly. The authors of the adventure more or less expected players to skip it.

Background information for the North is locked behind Chapter 3, so I must play Ch 2 first, so my character's histories and motivations will remain enigmatic for now.

Bryn Shander is a total bust, the battle with Drufi the Frost Giant, her two Frost Giant bodyguards and her two pet Wolves of Winter resulted in a Total Party Kill two times. There is no way my created party could manage that battle as written. The side quests that result from keeping NPCs alive all suck, and take you down south along the Sword Coast to the large metropolitan cities of Waterdeep and Neverwinter, where you engage in urban and political encounters, when I would rather stay inland the North and engage in barbarian High Adventure. So rather than modify the attack and city to fit my Savage campaign desires, I'm focusing on one of the other two towns.

next session, the party is remade and the story begins from scratch at Triboar.

Why a solo campaign using a published module works

Partly, its because 5e relies way less on the DM than 1e does, and because 5e is way less open ended than 1e.

The published adventure modules, Storm King's Thunder in my case, basically do half the work of the DM.

It feels like I'm reading a novel, only the novel's not shit because I play the role of the protagonists and my chance of success or failure, and the consequences and setting thereof, are decided by the dice, the adventure book, and the Dungeon Master's Guide.

It takes reading 3 books - the PHB, the DMG and SKT - simultaneously to properly play solo, but at my novice level of playing it's still a lot of fun.

Session 1 of Storm King's Thunder solo

Went off great! Turns out I don't have the problems at my table solo that I do with other players :P

The instructions for Storm King's Thunder recommend reading the whole module first before attempting to run it as a DM. I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to spoil the major arc of the story for myself, and my player(s) are guaranteed to go off and do something completely different to the published adventure anyway. So I wanted to enjoy the module on my own terms first, simultaneously as a player and as a DM.

The opening two chapters of Storm King's Thunder are a fairly confining railroad anyway, so it's not like I ran into any issues of cognitive disassociation. Thus the act of playing the game solo was very easy - I might have known a bit more 'metagame' than I would have with a real DM, but it really didn't hamper my enjoyment any. I decided my player characters' choices either by what fit their character, or by a dice roll if no choice seemed obvious. There is very little to no roleplay in the opening 2 chapters so I didn't have to deal with that issue, but the Dungeon Master Guide provides handy tables for roleplay situations so I figure I could resolve those with a bit of nondeterministic problem solving and a bit of dice rolling.

My only complaint is with the module itself, I found the first encounter in Chapter 2 to be way too hard for my characters and would have resulted in a TPK if I didn't fudge some dice rolls. Yes, I couldn't resist the temptation to cheat a little. But apart from that I really enjoyed the journey to Bryn Shander and the plot of the first Giant attack.

I realize that the reason they want you to read the module first is because a lot of backstory and setting information is sprinkled throughout the various chapters. As one review I read put it, Storm King's Thunder is 1/3 campaign setting, 2/3 adventure module. Also, as any experienced DM can tell you, it's much easier to weave a cohesive, interesting story if you know where the story will end up going. By tackling STK solo, I get to experience the module half as a player would - with no foreknowledge except what is given to me at the time, without ruining the journey for myself, and without putting myself in an awkward position as a DM where I would not be able to correctly respond to my player's actions as I would not know what consequences would occur further ahead.

In total, the experiment is a success and I can't wait to continue my solo journey through this adventure module.

Playing D&D solo

Am I a loser with no friends? Yes.

Do I spend many a night down in my mom’s basement, crying over an open copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and a filled out character sheet? Also yes.

Luckily, I have devised a band aid for the gaping wound of my psyche: solo D&D! And amazingly the 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide has tables that can easily be repurposed for solo play!

Originally I think the DMG added in a plethora of tables to allow DM’s to “quick build” their universes. Everything from town populations to NPC attitudes has a relevant table. They also have tables for the results of player actions, and other things you might not immediately think of when designing your campaign, which would help flesh out details for your players.

But that’s why all this can be repurposed to play an entire campaign “blind”!  Randomly rolling on those tables to determine the outcome of your characters’ actions, PCs and NPCs alike, and the settings and events of the world. The DMG also contains and appendix for “random dungeon generation”, which can be repurposed to actually play a dungeon room by room, randomly creating it after every pass of the door.

I plan on starting with an empty grid for my dungeon map, and as I go through the doorways, to roll to see what kind of room I enter, and then filling out the map by placing in the room I enter. Luckily monsters can all be filled out by CR from the Monster Manual lists. Combat will have to be done either by randomly rolling for targeting and actions, or by playing both sides of the table somehow. In the end I hope to have a large filled out map of nonsensical dungeon rooms strung together, and a few characters who made it through it all.

But that’s the easy part, what about playing a whole campaign this way? Randomly rolling for towns, encounters, NPCs met, and NPC interactions?

More play testing is needed. And next time I’m crying in my mom’s basement, clutching my copy of Storm King’s Thunder that never got read, I might do exactly that.  Fortuitously, the campaign book could serve as the adventure guide, and I would only have to roll for success or failure results, or PC decisions.

Dungeons and Dragons: my history

As an avid player of video game RPGs, I was always aware of Dungeons and Dragons, but my direct contact with the system itself was limited. When I was about 10 or 11 years old I convinced my dad to buy me the boxed set of "Red Steel" which was sold by TSR at the time, but I couldn't understand any of it. It came with a lot of campaign materials like a map, description booklet and even a music CD, but the rules were entirely missing and I had no idea how to make a game out of it. So despite the cool box art, it was quickly shelved and forgotten.

In the early 2000's I played a lot of games explicitly based on the D&D system or a derivative. Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Knights of the Old Republic, and even action RPGs such as Diablo 2 and Champions of Norrath used systems very similar to the stat-heavy pen and paper.  I quickly grew tired of this system as I perceived it to be deeply imbalanced. Gamers by nature seek to optimize or exploit whatever game system they're given, due to every software being exploitable by nature and the drive in games to win at all costs. Specifically I found most magic spells to be way more useful than non-magical attacks, even if they were nerfed in damage they always had more utility, and any Dexterity based build was always better than a Strength based build, especially if Dexterity measured chance to hit, which made Strength utterly worthless.

Suffice to say, this didn't endear me to seek out the pen and paper game, which at that time was transitioning from 2nd edition Advanced D&D to 3rd edition, and had gained a reputation as something quite complicated, cumbersome, and requiring a large monetary investment to get the full experience.

During my senior year of high school I was invited by a friend to start a D&D group. We the players bought the 3rd edition Player's Handbook and he bought the Dungeon Master's Guide, and another player bought a Monster Manual. We met at his house and played about 4 sessions. I enjoyed it but I had played enough games by then to know how to optimize my char, so like every highschooler who played 3rd ed I played a Rogue dual wielder assassin with throwing knives.

I only really got into Dungeons and Dragons in 2012, when my youngest sisters were in high school and would spend every day of the summer at home, bored, or on their Nintendo DS.  I figured board games at least would be a healthier form of entertainment, so after a few abortive attempts at playing Monopoly and RISK, I went and bought the "Starter Set" for D&D Essentials.

Little did I know at the time that the Essentials line was slowly dying and a new edition of D&D was on its way, but the opening campaign of the Starter Set was a unique gaming experience to my family and enjoyable to everyone, so I went all in and invested in the core Heroes books, the Rules Compendium, and the two boxed sets of the Dungeon Master's Kit and Monster Vault.  My sisters generally despise being involved with my games but they kept returning for the Dungeons and Dragons sessions, even if our playtimes were sporadic and few and far between.

We played through the Starter Set adventure, and next through Reavers of Harkenwold, the adventure that came with the Dungeon Master's Kit, and Cairn of the Winter King, which came with the Monster Vault. Somewhere around the middle of Cairn of the Winter King we all just drifted off. As a DM I didn't really know what I was doing and making a lot of it up on the fly, and that caused issues when my judgement was wrong, and was only exacerbated by issues inherent in D&D 4E.

 A common complaint was that play simply took too long: It took an hour to get set up - to get out character sheets, tokens, to set out the maps and place monsters. In every case I didn't even read the module before starting so we'd waste time where everyone simply waited for me to read the next step of the adventure and nobody really knew the rules so gameplay was halted at many points where players and the I just read the rule books. And finally combat in 4E just inherently took too long - it was much too based around modifiers and gridded 'tactical' play where a lot of time would be spent just calculating damage, to-hit probabilities, and bonus modifiers and detailing powers.  I personally did not enjoy running combat and I didn't like the expectation that every game session had to revolve around, or at least involve an instance, of combat.  Cairn of the Winter King was a straight dungeon crawling adventure and was almost purely combat based, and I think that focus, along with external life interruptions, caused us to lazily abandon D&D play.

A few years later while perusing the local bookstore mega chain, I noticed that there was a whole new collection of D&D books and one in particular looked very appealing to me: The Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure module, which had a White Dragon breathing ice across the cover. My youngest sister enjoys dragons so I figured she'd be interested, and I thought it would be a good idea to get back into pen-and-paper gaming. Now, at the time I had no idea that there was a 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons and that the adventure module was built for that. There was no edition version listed on the covers and the branding simply said "Dungeons and Dragons", which is exactly what the Essentials books said on them, so I assumed they were the same thing. For comparison, 1e, 2e, and 3e all prominently displayed "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition", or "3" and "3.5" respectively on their covers and in their brand, so it was easy to avoid confusion. It's only after we played the first few games that I noticed something was amiss.

My family's PCs were just WAY TOO powerful for Hoard of the Dragon Queen. There's an encounter in the 2nd chapter where the PCs face off against a powerful villain named Langdedrosa Cyanwrath, a half blue dragon fighter who's supposed to challenge one of them to a duel, humiliate them, and walk off. This was supposed to 'raise the stakes' in story and give the PCs a hook for vengeance. My players beat him to the ground, stripped his clothes and took his lunch money. The next few chapters are fights with bandits and a dungeon crawl meant to be somewhat challenging, and my players rampaged through the whole thing, with my youngest sister threatening all the NPCs with an "intimidating glare" and trying to force them to surrender, and basically walked out danger and consequence free. This caused me to actually research the system to figure out what was wrong, and where I came to the revelation that my players had brought over relative superheroes from the 4th Edition of D&D into the more average power 5th Edition world.

I figured I'd need to do some serious research into making this edition conflict work, and to make the game more enjoyable for my players and for myself as well. For one, I'd have to actually read the Essentials' Rules Compendium and Dungeon Master's Book, which I think I read once before maybe but they had contained so much repeated copy and paste information from each other and the Player's Handbook that I had originally just skimmed over them. And I went out and bought the new (5th edition) Dungeon Master's Guide, which I thought would be the core rulebook of the game as that's what my highschool friend had presented it to me as.

Well, I was initially disappointed as the Dungeon Master's Guide (5th edition) contained many options and descriptions for creating a world, characters, and adventures, all of which I could do on my own without needing a guide, or just take from a prepublished adventure module which would render the DMG obsolete. However that was only on a first pass and after subsequent play sessions and more testing I found the DMG to be very useful, however that didn't solve my immediate problem.

Actual criticisms of DOOM 3

I made an impassioned defense of DOOM 3 here in which I pointed out that the usual criticisms of the game are actually due to players having the wrong expectation rather than a fault in the vision of the game.

But by no means is DOOM 3 a perfect game and it has certain flaws that are most definitely due to poor implementation or erroneous design choices that hold back the enjoyment of the game.

First off, DOOM 3 is most definitely a survival horror game and not a run-and-gun FPS, and it has every right to be so. The DOOM series has always been a mix of horror and action and the latter games in the series like DOOM 64 had been leaning more heavily into the horror aspects for narrative purposes, so turning DOOM 3 into a survival horror shooter in the first few levels seemed like a logical progression for the developers. Too bad they didn't have game designers like John Romero still on the team to make the idea amazing instead of pretty bland.

So the first real flaw of the game is the opening sequence on the Mars base where you just walk around and listen to NPCs direct you to the first mission. This sequence is a straight rip off of the opening of Half-Life, which was a fad in the early 2000's. Every FPS released then, such as Halo, Half-Life 2, and even the Battlefield and Call of Duty games, had a sequence where you just walked around to be 'immersed' in the world. Thankfully the industry has moved past this trend and sequences like this do not hold up with age. Literally the only games that do it correctly are the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2.

The second flaw is due to the number of levels that take place on the Mars facility before you first arrive in Hell. Everything between Alpha Labs and Delta Labs should have been cut from the game - even if the layout of the stages was unique the reused textures, backgrounds, encounters, and limited enemy variety made these levels seem bland and repetitive. Only hyper nerds care about how transportation, communication and waste management are handled on Mars and nothing happens in these levels except new monsters appear occasionally. Delta Labs, on the other hand, has a unique design and plot importance - here is where you learn how the demons were able to arrive on Mars and you begin your journey into Hell to stop them.

The third is a technical issue - the reload and weapon switch systems being bugged so that you cannot switch weapons while reloading, and weapons must cycle in order to be switched. This severely handicaps the player while in game and will lead to many frustrating moments while the character is stuck in a reload or weapon swap animation and the enemies are free to constantly attack. The workaround is to turn "auto reload" and "auto switch" off, but its not a perfect fix, and every other game in the genre allows you to cancel the reload animation if necessary.

The fourth are the hitscan enemies. They automatically target you, and know of and can follow the player character's position anywhere on the stage, and by definition their attacks cannot be avoided. The only way to beat these enemies is to cheese their AI and force them to run in circles for a bit to try and blast them, or just soak up their attacks and try to kill them by outputting more damage than they do.  DOOM 3 has fairly weak enemy AI across the board, but the hitscan soldiers really highlight the issue, and the problem is compounded by the fact that they fire faster than the player character and do not flinch or suffer accuracy penalties when hit as the player does.

The last major flaw that I will touch on here is the enemy AI in general. By 2005 some games were making real leaps in game AI. F.E.A.R. is the usual, most touted example but even the Halo games, the first Half Life, and indie modders were starting to make smarter, more complicated AI that acted intelligently in a manner approaching human behavior. The AI in DOOM 3 has none of this, and actually regresses in intelligence from Quake 3. The enemies all attack you from predetermined positions and will move in a straight line directly toward you, spamming their only attack. (Some demons get two attacks). Due to the ambush and unavoidable nature of some attacks, this makes some encounters feel like bullshit, and it makes ALL encounters feel completely repetitive, as since you've killed one Imp demon, you've killed them all. There is no variation in their attack methods or the strategy, beyond pre-scripted ambushes.

DOOM 3 could have been remembered as a really great game. If all portions of the game not directly related to the Hell invasion had been cut, and the pure action portion of the game was available earlier, if the designers had not followed trends and fads of early 2000's game design, and a couple of AI, monster, and technical issues been fixed I'm sure it would be remembered far more fondly than it is today. As I've said before, the gunplay is solid, the engine performance is great, the physics system is nice and fluid, the graphics and lighting are used to great effect (and is probably the system that has aged the best, despite the low poly count and texture resolution compared to modern standards). After all, the original DOOM was just "Evil Dead" meets "Aliens" in Hell.

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3

This game got savaged by critics and players alike when it was released for being too much like a discount Far Cry game, despite being an indie game from a small company in Eastern Europe. The comparisons to Far Cry are fairly apt - the game features a small open world for the player to walk, drive, or zipline through, there are outposts to clear and sidequests to engage in, and a small variety of collectibles to gather. Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 lacks the more unique and fun features of Far Cry, though, such as animal attacks, hunting, flight, weapon variety, customization, the scale of the world,  and a good story. What sets Sniper apart, however, is the gunplay mechanics.

The conceit of Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 is that it has realistic bullet physics modeled into its weapons, and the missions focus on stealth sniping missions where the player must travel to a vantage point and shoot at his targets from long range. Had the game kept this focus and not forced an open world into its design, it probably could have avoided all the negative comparisons.

In Far Cry, the silenced sniper rifle is one of the harder weapons to obtain because it is almost overpowered, but in Sniper Ghost Warrior it is your primary weapon. Sniper Ghost Warrior tries to balance the effectiveness of this weapon by placing a large number of counter snipers and mortars on the enemy posts, and by balancing the AI around hiding behind cover and spotting you from afar, which in theory should force the player off their sniper perch (but in practice never really works right).

But the mechanic that really makes sniping far more fun in Sniper Ghost Warrior is that the bullet is modeled as an actual projectile which realistically travels through the air, so the player must account for the travel time and lead his targets. Wind resistance, direction, and bullet drop are also taken into account, and the best way to use this mechanic is to turn the "aim indicator" off, since it shows you exactly where the bullet will land, thus negating the whole point of judging those variables for yourself.  If you make a wrong judgement and miss, the report of your bullet will alert your target to your presence, which I still find exciting even if I missed. To me, it is far more satisfying to see the bullet actually fly to my target rather than instantly hitting them, and I'm not talking about the slow motion killcam, which is actually less satisfying to me than just seeing my target drop from a well aimed shot.

In the Far Cry series, all the bullets are hitscan, and I don't think they're even affected by gravity, which means that they're essentially the Railgun from Quake, and they're serviceable in an action context but lack the complexity and thrill of sniping from Sniper Ghost Warrior.

There is another sniper game series that opened to much better reviews and always gets compared more favorably than the Ghost Warrior series, and that is Sniper Elite. Sniper Elite 4 also has large levels that function as pseudo open worlds, a stress on stealth and long range gameplay, and a calculation of wind, distance and bullet drop in its sniping mechanics. One thing it does far and away better are the many different ways you can kill your targets - you can use bullets to blow holes in gas tanks, engines, tires, exposed grenades and more, leading to spectacular explosions, you can drop heavy objects onto your opponents, trick them, bait them, and do so much more.

Despite all this, I consider its actual shooting mechanics to be lesser than Sniper Ghost Warrior's, because the weapons in Sniper Elite are all hitscan. What this means is that even though you account for distance, wind direction and bullet drop, none of it really matters because all it does is make you adjust your aim a little on a 2D plane, as in simply choosing a different (x,y) coordinate on which to place your crosshair, rather than meaningfully visualizing the path of your bullet.  Sniper Elite's method of balancing this is to make your bullet slightly inaccurate unless you hold your breath for the accuracy to gradually increase.  Unfortunately it also has an aim indicator, which I always turn off.

Also, I have a few random complaints against Sniper Elite, such as its 3rd person perspective in which the character blocks your view of the weapon, and the fact that cycling the bolt and reloading the magazine do not cause the player to scope out. Where Sniper Ghost Warrior plays like a discount Far Cry, Sniper Elite plays like a discount Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The latter game actually does a lot of things right that Sniper Elite does wrong. Metal Gear gives you nonlethal options to confront a level and there is way more interaction with guards in terms of interrogations, holdups, and combat. "Aiming down sights" in MGS is required since without it the player character will use his fists to strike or throw an opponent, in Sniper Elite he is always holding his weapon so why does he need to go into a special aim mode to fire? MGS also gives a first person view option which Sniper Elite lacks except technically on rifle scopes.  Metal Gear also pseudo models the necessity to lead your targets by changing the calculations on bullet hit for moving targets, which Sniper Elite doesn't implement. Also there are weirder, more fun weapons in Metal Gear and the standard tranquilizer pistol is an actual projectile weapon.

The only other game series I know of with projectile sniper weapons is the Battlefield series. In fact it was my experience sniping in Battlefield 1 that compelled me to find another game with deep sniping mechanics, as Battlefield is multiplayer only and as such has a shelf life and subjects you to other problems if you just want to enjoy the game, like network lag, finding a server, finding a good team, etc.

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 is an indie game masquerading around as a triple A studio title, and that becomes noticeable once you see all the rough spots just underneath the surface. I actually commend the development team for taking on such ambitions and aiming for the leaders in the industry, rather than being an intentionally budget title like most indie games. The open world is the critical flaw and I feel that if they had focused on making a pure sniper sim the game would have been better received. The development team did talk of their passion for emergent gameplay, and the earlier Sniper Ghost Warrior games were criticized for their restrictive linearity, so I see why they experimented in this direction. While many better games exist and do more than what Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 does, it does one thing that they do not do and does the pure sniping much better than its competitors.

*as an aside, I don't know if the pistols and assault rifles in Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 are hitscan or projectiles so fast that they seem hitscan. The enemies don't move or strafe fast enough for leading them to become a necessity, and with realistic bullet velocities its hard to discern over short ranges anyway. For the sniper rifles it is easy to see the bullet travel with a long range scope, however the same is not apparent on unscoped or iron sight pistols, rifles and shotguns.

*the best difficulty to play Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 on is the second-hardest. Realistic difficulty makes most weapons one shot to kill, which forces players to stay hidden in stealth longer. While that might be more enjoyable to sniping purists, I find that it just drags out the game and throws weapon balance right out the window, thus making little distinction between the damage your primary sniper rifle does and what a pistol does. In fact, in realistic mode I would simply mark my targets then take them out with a silenced pistol instead, which you can't do on on the second-hardest difficulty since the pistol will take 3 bullets to kill and the first hit will alert the enemy to your presence.

Should you buy Star Wars: Battlefront?

Honestly, they're both pretty thin on content, with casual gameplay that's a stripped down version of Battlefield's gunplay. They're both heavily online multiplayer focused, yet the population for both is quite small and about the same for both. In terms of offline play, Battlefront 1 has the better content, since its largest game mode, Walker Assault is included in the skirmish mode, while the Arcade mode of Battlefront 2 only has two game types - a team deathmatch equivalent and a horde mode/survival equivalent. The 'mission' game types of Battlefront 1 also give you different experiences such as driving a speeder bike or flying a snow speeder, which is not available in Battlefront 2's offline modes. While Battlefront 2 has an offline story campaign, its utterly boring and forgettable, short and offers no replay value.

The only reason to get either is if you love the Star Wars universe and can't get enough, in which case Battlefront 1 has more weapons, power ups, better game modes and heroes, while Battlefront 2 has better space and vehicle modes.

Due to fan backlash and overrall poor reception, I predict both games will hit bargain price very quickly, especially after Battlefront 2's support cycle ends.

Star Wars: Battlefront (2015) is better than Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017)

When Battlefront 1 was released it was rightly criticized for its thin content and casual gameplay. However after all the DLC released and a few free content patches were given, it now has more than enough content to warrant a full price purchase. It's an exploitative business practice to rely on DLC to make your game fully featured by charging double, but EA makes the fictitious Galactic Empire look like care bears by comparison. Also all the content can be bought in the Ultimate Edition for a reduced price.

Battlefront II promised to make up for all the errors of the original game by distributing all DLC for free, having more content at launch, and having deeper gameplay, but now almost a year after launch we have learned that all those promises were false, and Battlefront 2 is worse in every way than it's predecessor.

To start with, while Battlefront 2 has more maps than Battlefront 1, several DLC maps of Battlefront  2 are just ports of Battlefront 1 maps. Honestly this isn't as big of a deal for me as I generally find that players online gravitate to one or two maps that they really like, and just play them over and over, such as de_dust and Italy back during the CS beta days.

A major issue however, is that Battlefront II has less weapons to use. Related to that is that the class system from Battlefront II is actually worse than the star card system from Battlefront 1. And the third related issue is that Battlefront II still uses star cards despite also having a class system.

The reason this is a problem is because it gates content away from the player. Nominally, this is to balance the gameplay better, however the weapons and abilities can still be balanced without locking them behind specific classes. Battlefront's implementation of classes also makes the gameplay inconsistent, as now your weapon's effectiveness varies depending on the health and resistance of your opponent.* It also killed the in game customization, since all classes need to remain visually recognizable for players to gauge their opponents in game.

Admittedly, the jump pack broke the balance of Battlefront 1 and became a "must pick" star card for every player, so Battlefront 2 made a rational change in locking it to an elite class, but that's really the only positive change.

The Star Card system was never as good as Battlefield's equipment system or Call of Duty's loadouts, but in Battlefront 1 it still potentially allowed you the freedom to experiment and choose what you wanted to complement a play style. In Battlefront 2 the star cards do not allow you to customize and experiment, and you are locked to a small selection of Star Cards per class and the majority of them are just direct upgrades to your existing abilities. A great deal of depth is lost and eventually you just end up playing the same class the same way.

There are only four weapons per class in Battlefront 2, and the default weapon just changes appearance depending on which faction you are playing. This is a straight downgrade from Battlefront 1 where every weapon was available to the player, and all had their own unique stats.

And as a Star Wars nerd, I fault Battlefront II for including the sequel trilogy and spinoffs, and now the Clone Wars. Battlefront 1 stuck to the universe of the original trilogy, where everything is iconic, and not the other movies, where everything is a pale copycat.  Battlefront 1 does have a map set on Jakku, a planet introduced in the 7th film, and it makes my point for me - there is nothing on this map that makes it distinct from Tattoine, apart from brighter colored sand and a fallen Star Destroyer in the distance. The final DLC adds content from the spinoff movie Rogue One, and the forgettable quality of that also proves my point.

And the most important reason why Battlefront 1 is just better, is that the gunplay in Battlefront 2 is just worse. The first Battlefront was heavily criticized for extremely casual gameplay, such as low spread, little to no recoil, no difference between firing "from the hip" and zoom in aiming. The people complaining about that are idiots. All of those are very good things, and everyone agrees, even the detractors, that accurate led to a faster, more aggressive playstyle. The community was expecting something slower like the Battlefield, which is more about tactical positioning than it is about aiming and tracking your opponents. Battlefront also has more movement options with the addition of the dodge roll and yes, the jumppack, which leads to more dynamic gameplay and discourages camping.

Battlefront 2 brought in the mechanics of military shooters, much to its own detriment. Reloading/"cooling" became a central aspect of the metagame, the weapons were made less accurate in "hip fire" mode but thankfully not to the severe levels in Call of Duty or Battlefield, and the time to kill on weapons was shortened. This coupled with the lack of variety in weapons per class, the balance problems between each class, and the awful star card system lead to gameplay that is much less about player skill than it is about the setup of the player and random luck.

What Battlefront 2 should have done instead is either copy the loadout system wholesale from the Battlefield or Call of Duty series, or stick to the rigid class system of Pandemic's original Battlefront series, where there was no customization in class at all but there were something like 6 classes per faction and extra unlockable classes.

And finally, one idea that Battlefront 2 had that was technically better than Battlefront 1, but failed in execution was the removal of the token pick ups. Battlefront 1 had tokens scattered throughout the map which would give players a random extra ability or let them spawn in as a hero or vehicle, and Battlefront 2 removed this in favor of a point system. The system in Battlefront 1 was random and frustrating, and all the hero and vehicle pickups would be camped by players who wanted to lock them down, so the battle point system of Battlefront 2 sounds better on paper, however it is hobbled by the need to unlock heroes and vehicles outside the match before playing, and the number restriction on vehicles, which means players that are built to farm battle points will lock those down before other players. Also this system means that the fourth ability slot is lost.

Battlefront 2 did only one thing better than Battlefront 1, and that is the starfighter gameplay. However, the vehicles actually handle exactly the same as the first game, there is just the option to manually control your roll. Still, it is technically a straight improvement over Battlefront 1 and the added UI elements like the missile lock notification and aim indicator, and the removal of auto-aim fire, greatly benefit the starfighter gameplay.

In conclusion, Battlefront 2 made a lot of promises to improve Battlefront 1, and came up short. The only ones it did deliver on were a larger number of maps and vehicles, however the gameplay is still bland and unexciting, the star card system actually got worse, and the new class system actually created more problems and removed the few good things from the first game. I hope the fan backlash from two successive failures from EA discourage them from making a Battlefront 3, but it is still sad to see one of my favorite shooter series and fictional universe lose such potential.

Battlefront 1 has more weapons, larger star card variety, better balance (but you still must pick the jetpack on any loadout), better game modes and faster gameplay. It also has a litany of problems, however those are not addressed in Battlefront 2 at all. Battlefront 1 now sells in the Ultimate Edition, which bundles in all the DLC and makes it a much more compelling purchase than Battlefront 2.



*This is also a criticism levied against Quake Champions, but the "champions" of Quake champions do not lock weapons to a specific hero, and while health, armor and speed vary between champions, the added active and passive abilities give players more tools to make their character more effective, even if the weapons take longer to kill your opponent if he has a higher health and armor limit. Admittedly, it's not perfect, Quake 3 was as close to perfect in it's way, but if you want that experience then play with active and passive abilities turned off, and force Ranger as the only playable champion.

Anno Domini and Common Era

When I was growing up in the 90's there was a push among academia to replace the occurrence of AD and BC to keep dates in scholarly works with CE and BCE. The reasoning for the is that "Anno Domini" is Latin for "Year of our Lord" and refers specifically to the era after Christ's birth, and since not everyone accepts the Dominion of the God of Christ, a more religiously neutral term is necessary.

But who are these people that don't accept the Dominion of God, and why do they want to erase God's remembrance from the calendar?

Anno Domini was only used in the first place because all previous reckonings of time used the name of the Roman Emperors to categorize eras, so for example the first year of the reign of the Emperor Diocletian would be 1 Anno Diocletian. A Christian monk didn't like that, especially since Diocletian was a notorious persecutor of Christians, so he erased the name of Diocletian by counting from the year of Christ's birth, not the death of the Roman Emperor, and since the Roman Catholic Church was the guardian of Western knowledge for several hundred years, that is what we've used since.

Why did we suddenly decide to change this in the late 20th century?

"We" didn't decide anything. A growing demographic in academia wanted to change this convention because they had never accepted Christ and had been enjoying unprecedented acceptance and influence in the Western world, and so wanted to change whatever they could to suit themselves.  It wasn't Muslims, because every Islamic scholarly work begins and ends with the name of Allah, and every Muslim can't help but tell you "Insha Allah" for something he never plans to do anyway, and Islam has its own lunar calendar anyway. I doubt Muslims ever wanted to make a term religiously neutral.

It wasn't even atheists, because their voices were always more scattered and atheists tend to create replacement religions, they they just don't call religions.

No, it was the growing influence of the Jewish bloc in Western academia. They are demographically numerous, organized, have their own scholarly traditions, and have a hatred of Christianity that most Muslims do not willfully comprehend. The erasure of Jesus' legacy, and his followers has been an agenda of organized Judaism basically since the crucifixion, or wherever and whenever his teachings became more popular than Talmudic teachings. To the Jewish people, Jewish law supersedes all other law, even that of the state or nation.

And replacing "Anno Domini" with "Common Era" was a targeted campaign in academia that played on the sympathies of Protestants and people who didn't want to be "too religious", and used as its unwitting henchmen atheists, agnostics, and anyone who ascribed to an alternate religion like Wicca, earth worship, Freemasonry, and whatever else.

Sadly, even Muslims were duped, and willingly went along with this plan. They thought it made things more "fair" for their religion of Islam, when in reality it does anything but.  Muslims in the West play the dupe for every new age, anti-religious movement because they are told that it will help represent Islam, when all it actually does is tear down the structures of Christianity, and Muslims are more than willing to be the attack dog for these pernicious causes.

Does CE and BCE really replace the remembrance of Christ? After all the dates are the same, you just replace the post script.

In that case, why bother rewording at all? The birth of Christ, or the first year of Dominion, is an actual point in time. We can calculate any date from that date if we use it as a point of reference, just as if we can use the date of the ascension of a Roman Emperor, or anything else, but "Common Era" is not a definite point of time, you cannot travel to any one point in time and say "this is the beginning of the common era, and a second before this is before the common era". "Common Era", as a means of measuring time, is worthless.

And, as an aside, this is how I know it's a conspiracy, because like all late 20th century left wing a Jewish conspiracies, it replaces something real and quantifiable with something meaningless and nebulous, like Feminism and the Patriarchy, like racism, like antisemitism, like homophobia.

It is the duty of anyone intellectually honest, rigorous and scientific to reject these shallow replacements and hold onto the truth, no matter how ancient it's discovery might be. Yet sadly, those who should be the guardians of truth in academia are doing the complete opposite, and are embracing meaningless new age fads.

Ranking the Assassin's Creed games

AC1 is the template for all the other AC games, but is itself a deeply uneven game with good ideas but mixed execution, and a lot of repetitive gameplay.

AC2 is best AC

AC:Brotherhood is an expansion pack for AC2

AC:Revelations is an expansion pack for AC2, but by this point the formula has gotten stale.

I did not play AC3, but I haven't heard  good things about it.

AC4: Black Flag is an amazing pirate simulator, but the time spent not doing pirate shit but assassin shit instead sucks.

AC:Unity is the most underrated AC game with the most gameplay content in the series, but is marred by many technical issues.

I did not play AC:Syndicate

AC: Origins is no longer an AC game, but is Far Cry set in Egypt during Classical Antiquity.

Assassin's Creed Unity

This game got a bad rap on release, due to numerous bugs and issues at launch. Also, it was the unlucky target for general Ubisoft hate, as in 2014 Ubisoft had been running a very exploitive business model and were pushing out lower quality products yearly that relied on brand name to sell. Basically, they were a nascent EA or Activision.  Also, the "bull-shot", or screenshot faked to look better than what's actually in the game, became an art form pioneered by Ubisoft, and they spent lavishly to hype up the game only to release a disappointing product at the end.

Assassin's Creed: Unity is a victim of all these problems, yet underneath it all is a very decent game.

I've been a fan of the Assassin's Creed series since its inception, I still consider the first game as an open world Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, however Assassin's Creed 2 cemented my love for the series. Unity isn't quite as good as 2 but it is a worthy runner up after the boring rehashes after Brotherhood.

As an aside, Black Flag is the best pirate simulator made to date, but the actual Assassin's Creed part of the game - open world cities, social stealth, and free running assassinations - are straight rehashes of its predecessors and the worst parts of the game. After you get the Jackdaw pirate ship, you'll never want to touch a main story mission again.

Assassin's Creed: Unity is an iterative reinvention of the franchise's gameplay. The climbing and parkour system got reworked, as did the combat, stealth system, and social blending.

The combat is harder than previous games - the enemies are far more aggressive and will attack you with both swords and firearms, you can die easily against large groups and now you have to consider the specific strengths and weaknesses of the enemy type you are fighting. You cannot counter-kill everyone with a press of a button, but parrying your way to victory is still a viable tactic.

The parkour rework just sucks. They added 3 free run options - run straight (hold right trigger), run up (right trigger + x) run down (right trigger + o). There are special input commands for entering windows, avoiding obstacles, leaping off of walls or up them. Unfortunately its way too complicated and controls terribly. Most of the time the character does not do what you want him to do and the ledge and wall detection is as finicky as ever. Free running seems like it has a mind of its own and feels like controlling a runaway train.

The stealth system got reworked with a new cover mechanic, and the crouch walk/duck walk that I detest in all stealth games. Crouching down to waist level magically makes you undetectable to people when they would have seen you standing straight up. This is a rant for another time. The cover system lets you duck behind objects or around corners in order to ambush a target.  As with all of Unity's new systems, the cover system is really finicky in how it magnetizes the character to cover, how you can come out of it, and who can detect you.

The Achilles heel of all of Unity's new systems are the controls - they are clunky, complicated, and have lagged responses.  The team at Ubisoft really harped on all the new tech they created for AC:Unity, and it shows that they did create a lot of new tech, however it all could have benefited from a lot more polish, bug fixes and time in development. These are really good ideas - I hate crouch walking but I think covering behind items and assassinations from cover really enhance the realism  and tactical nature of stealth. The Uncharted series actually perfected the controls for this system and it launched a wave of copycats. I would have loved to see this system in the open world environment of Assassin's Creed but unfortunately the developers rushed to release this product before it was finished.

The crowds, on the other hand, are the highlight of this game. This feature got some of the most criticism on release - areas with large crowds caused massive game slowdown, frame rate drops and ugly object pop in. As a result of having so many actors on screen, the texture resolution on NPC characters had to be dialed way down, and leads to the clothing of 18th century France, some of the most lavish in human history, looking kind of bland and ugly up close.

However, nothing compares to the experience of muscling your way through a crowd, sneaking past the guards, climbing into and sneaking through a Parisian stronghold to assassinate the target inside. I feel like this is the experience that the Assassin's Creed series had been building towards ever since the release of the first game, but had always been held back by technology. Unity may be the closest we ever come to seeing this vision fulfilled, as the critical backlash of this game meant that in all subsequent titles, the large crowds have been removed. Even in Origins, Assassin's Creed's latest and greatest release, there are very few non player characters on screen at a time, no large crowds and the civilians barely do anything more than walking around.

And this is a shame, because the Assassin's Creed series has never had much interactivity with the civilians. It's not an RPG like the Witcher or Oblivion, where every NPC can be interacted with and may draw you into a new quest or mini game. It's not a Thief game where every NPC is a potential target to be robbed. The most you can do in an Assassin's Creed game is use groups of 3 or more NPCs to hide from guards. At least filling the world with large crowds and large numbers of NPCs on the streets made the Paris of AC: Unity seem populated and "realistic", as opposed to the small, nearly abandoned towns in EVERY other game.

The reception of this game prompted Ubisoft to strip everything down for the next, yearly cash grab release, and when that game tanked as well they put their next game on hold for a year, finally giving it the development time it needed to be acceptably polished on release, but every innovation and rework done for Unity was thrown out wholesale and replaced with a new system.

Assassin's Creed: Origins had a completely new combat system inspired by Dark Souls, the cover system was completely gone and the stealth system was stripped down to crouch walking only, the NPC crowds were completely gone, but at least now you could get side quests from special NPCs. The game released to rave reviews and revitalized interest in the franchise, but I feel that makes Unity all the more unique for having its own vision and a gameplay experience you can't get in any other game.

I feel that if you can get past the flaws of Assassin's Creed: Unity, both technically and in some gameplay decisions, there is a lot to enjoy and a very immersive, engrossing game underneath. I find precious few people defending this game other than some dedicated fans, since most just played it briefly on release and then forgot about it in favor of the next yearly release. I bought this game to sate my hunger for an Assassin's Creed 2 like experience, and while Unity will never be as good as that game it is still better than the rehashed copy games that the franchise had become and like all the good Assassin's Creed games, will suck you in and refuse to let you out from its world.

Quake 3 is perfect

/it doesn't matter what mood I'm in: whether I want to take it easy and meander around for some slow kills, or play an objective based game mode like Capture the Flag, or go all out racing at the speed of light with my reflexes running in split seconds going for kill after kill, Quake 3 delivers.

In Quake you cannot shoot at where the enemy is, you must aim to where they will move to. This goes for the hitscan weapons as well, because the character speed is so high that prediction is the only reliable way to hit your target. 

Though its lack of a dedicated single player campaign was unusual in 1999, now its more or less industry standard, and Quake actually has more solo player content than most games due to the inclusion of bots and campaign matches.

Game Informer's 300 best video games of all time

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is #1. Super Mario Bros. 3 is #2. Tetris is #3.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is #7.
DOOM is #13.Quake 3: Arena is #114.
Goddamn Casuals.

Doom 3 is a great DOOM game

DOOM3 cover, image stolen from Wikimedia

DOOM³ was generally panned on its release by players who believed that it did not live up to its hype. They criticized its focus on horror elements, slower paced gameplay, and the perception that it copied trends of more modern, console shooters. The biggest complaint was that it did not "feel like a Doom game."  Eventually a group of fans came to like DOOM³, or maybe they just said they did to hate on Doom 3: BFG Edition when it came out.  Regardless, they are both wrong. DOOM³ is a hardcore game in the tradition of id Software's previous games, and a worthy installment of the DOOM franchise.

DOOM

DOOM, DOOM II and Quake all have the same "feel". Naturally, since they were all made by the same development team.  DOOM was famously inspired by the movie Aliens (1986), the development team decided not to pursue the license as they felt that it would restrict their creativity, and the influence is clearly seen.  In DOOM you play a lone Marine trapped in a literally alien environment, struggling to survive while outnumbered and outgunned by inhuman horrors who malevolently seek your death. DOOM is an action/horror mix just like Aliens, and horror is an intrinsic part of the game franchise.

In DOOM II the power fantasy is expanded a bit. Now the focus is the player as one man against the entire Army of Hell. The enemy count went up, the enemies that could be rendered and active onscreen went up, the enemy variety went up, and the protagonist's armory was expanded. Many levels of DOOM II focus on the mayhem of battle and of using your powerful arsenal to overcome the hordes.

Quake

Quake is the most similar to DOOM. It's also the last game where John Romero and John Carmack collaborated together, and arguably the last game from the original id Software team. Quake returns to the horror focus of DOOM, this time in a dark world inspired by H.P. Lovecraft literature where you play another fish-out-of-water type human trying to survive against the monsters skulking in the shadows.

Mostly, the low enemy counts in DOOM and Quake were a result of the technical limitations of PCs at the time. Quake made the jump to full 3D and most common PCs couldn't handle too much 3D rendering at the time. If you, the customer, bought a pricey graphics card you could enjoy hardware acceleration and better visuals (which were sadly out of reach for my young self). DOOM on its original launch faced much the same problem - id had built the technology from the ground up and didn't know how far they could push systems. DOOM II squeezed as much power as they could from the hardware they had at the time.

Famously, Hideo Kojima was faced with the low power of the MSX system, and resolved it by creating Metal Gear, an action game focused on stealth, due to low onscreen enemy count.

DOOM 3, screenshot stolen from STEAM

Which brings us back to DOOM³. The game has low onscreen enemy count, a focus on horror and exploration of dark, maze like levels. Sounds a lot like the original DOOM and Quake, right?

However, in 2004 games were running on much more powerful hardware. Gamers had become used to seeing hordes of enemies on screen, like in Serious Sam, lots of action and extremely fast movement speeds, like in Quake 3.


I think when players talk about the "feel" of a Doom game, they refer to not the base game, but the mods of DOOM II. Mods like Brutal Doom and Project Brutality, which put hundreds if not thousands of enemies onscreen at a time, tons of blood and gore effects, multiple crazy weapons, and brutal killing moves and finishers. This is the style of gameplay that the reboot DOOM (2016) followed to near universal acclaim.

The last major complaint most players have of DOOM³ are the so-called "jump scares", or enemy ambushes that comprise almost every encounter in the game. Quake did this a lot as well, though no one seems to remember, where you would walk to a certain point and an invisible trigger would spawn monsters behind, above and around you. I didn't like it in Quake and I don't like it in DOOM³. DOOM and DOOM II, by virtue of technological limitations, did not use this technique, though they had plenty of "monster closets", rooms with hidden doors that would open and let out monsters once the players pulled the appropriate switch. I much prefer fixed enemy placements, and sadly DOOM³ had none.

Doom 3: BFG Edition, image stolen from GOG.com

DOOM³ on its own merits is an amazing game. The gunplay is tight and responsive, the weapons are all unique and useful, the enemies while not smart are challenging due to their placement in the level, and with some tactical knowledge and forethought, are able to be overcome flawlessly. The level design of DOOM, DOOM II and Quake are God-tier, and while DOOM³ is not quite as good it is still far better than the standard corridor shooter FPS level design, or the static attack and defense lines of the Call of Duty series.

I have recently been on a marathon of shooter games, and focused on id software games since I never seriously played them while younger - I played maybe the first few levels of all of them, and that was it. It has been a refreshing and eye-opening experience, and judged from this perspective DOOM³ is very much like its predecessors and a very enjoyable game in its own right. It has some very tangible flaws and is not the perfect shooter, but is not a bad game by any means and was unfairly derided upon release.  As FPS games go, you can do quite worse than DOOM 3.

Halo Is Casual Trash

When Halo: Combat Evolved first launched for the Xbox, I was fairly impressed that someone finally managed to translate standard FPS mechanics onto a console. Some people claim that GoldenEye 007 was the first console FPS success story, but GoldenEye had wonky controls due to the N64 controller and it's single analog stick, which made aiming difficult and circle strafing nearly impossible.  The Xbox, with its two analog sticks, neatly avoided this problem. Shortly after Halo's release, every console FPS borrowed its control scheme.

However, by being on a console, compromises had to be made. I do not fault Bungie for making concessions to have Halo run and play well on the Xbox. After all, they managed to basically take the mechanics of Quake and mapped them to underpowered hardware that uses a gamepad. As a result, the game speed had to be slowed down, the players moved slower, the jumps floated in air a bit longer, the weapons were easier to handle. Halo: CE is basically dumbed down Quake.

What I do fault the developers at Bungie for is the intentional game design that made Halo easier, safer, and less technical to play. A core principle of Halo's design is that children, aged 12 and up, should be able to pick up the game and play at a decently competent level, without feeling that the game was 'too hard' or that multiplayer was 'unfair'. By raising the skill floor of Halo, the consequence was that the skill ceiling got lowered at well. If you were amazing at highly competitive shooters like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, then Halo would seem too simple, shallow and slow.

I will now enumerate everything that makes Halo a shallower, more casual experience than its "arena shooter" predecessors. Remember that Halo was intentionally designed to be similar to older shooters, but easier for a new audience of gamers.

Shields over health:  Shields exist only to make it impossible for a victim to die in a single burst of fire. The attacker must first break his target's shields before he can do any real damage. Armor has been a concept in FPS games since DOOM, but in DOOM they only mitigated damage taken to your health, in Halo your shields are effectively a second health bar.

Passive Shield Regeneration: Means that now there is no consequence for taking a large amount of fire, because you can recover your full shield bar by just waiting around for a bit. Instead of incentivizing the player to run into battle, it actually does the exact opposite. On easier difficulties this means you have no real challenge and no need to play with forethought, and on Legendary difficulty this becomes a real problem as the only way to really make it past most waves of enemies is to pop out of cover, take as much damage as you can while killing one or two enemies, then ducking back into cover to regenerate your shield.  This is especially frustrating against higher tier enemies, since on Legendary they will have double or triple your amount of shield, so fighting against them becomes a war of attrition while your struggle to deplete their shields before you can go in for the kill. This is what made the "noob combo" such an overused tactic, more on that later.

Weapon Reloading: You may argue that reloading a weapon is more "realistic", but the Halo game universe is one in which mankind has mastered faster than light travel, has ships that can travel between solar systems, and super soldiers that can live inside a suit of powered armor indefinitely. Star Wars has interplanetary travel, and no one needed to reload their blasters. Star Trek has the same, and no one needed to reload a phaser. You may note that the Covenant weapons, which don't need to reload, still overheat. Reloading and Overheating exist for one primary purpose - to delay an attacker from killing an opponent and to force them into an artificially vulnerable state.  In effect, it slows down combat.

Against shielded opponents, you cannot kill them in a single magazine, and must reload or switch weapons in order to press your attack. Many weapons are designed around this concept and the metagame is designed around you choosing two different weapons to kill an opponent.  Which leads into the next problem

Two Weapon Limit: DOOM allowed you to carry 7 weapons at a time, Quake 3 went up to 13. Halo lets you carry only two, due basically to the limitations of the gamepad, but also to restrict your options in an engagement, and to discourage you from simply switching weapons to keep killing your foes. By forcing you to carry two weapons at a time, you are pigeonholed into a certain strategy for facing your foes.

In single player this is far more frustrating than in multiplayer, since you will be carrying the weapons with the most utility most of the time, and powerful, specialized weapons become a hindrance, especially if you want to conserve their ammo for use on the more powerful enemies. You will be fighting weak, low tier enemies more often that the higher tier Elites or Brutes, but when the high tier Elites or Brutes do show up you find yourself without a good power weapon to counter them. The low tier enemies carry only pistols and other weak weapons, and the power weapons are carried only by the power enemies, so when you kill them and take their weapon, you suddenly find yourself with a power weapon but no one to use it on, but hordes of weak grunts that will waste your ammo until you run out and run into another strong enemy with a power weapon. That's just bad game design.

In multiplayer its just an artificial, cheap way to force you to stop chasing enemies, and to retreat into cover to reload and exchange weapons in order to face the next encounter. This also means that against multiple opponents, your chances of survival are lessened since you will simply run out of bullets before you can kill more than 2 foes.

And now the "noob combo." High shield enemies with powerful weapons are no fun to fight against if you don't have an appropriately powerful weapon. Luckily, the developers at Bungie gave players an easy counter in the form of the humble plasma pistol - the charged up shot can completely disable a target's shields and leave them vulnerable for any secondary weapon to finish this off. Using a moderately high damage weapon like the magnum pistol, or DMR/Battle Rifle in Halo 2 and beyond, made this a ridiculously effective strategy. Its usefulness carried over into multiplayer as well, and is derided by many players. And its easy to see why, it shortcuts the balance of the game and lets you use two simple, common weapons to outdo some of the most powerful ones. And yet if this option was not in the game, then the metagame balance would be constantly skewed towards however holds the more powerful weapon, which is why the "noob combo" persists in every Halo game. It must exist because the entire franchise's game design is fundamentally flawed.

Halo did manage to do a lot of things right. It was a technical marvel on the Xbox, it had a rich, intriguing science fiction world, the music was top-tier, the characters believable, enjoyable and fleshed out. However the moment-to-moment gameplay, the "30 second loop" of combat falls short of its peers, other FPS games that were out on PC at the same time. Unfortunately it spawned a generation of children that believe that Halo was the best shooter ever, and its wild popularity caused every subsequent FPS to ape the Halo mechanics of regenerating health and two weapon combat. Even before Call of Duty 4, Halo: Combat Evolved had such an impact that it managed to casualize the whole First Person Shooter genre.

It's still enjoyable in mild doses, but the same can't be said about its sequels. There's nothing good about Halo 2.

Quake 4 Review

UPDATE: I'm posting from an iPad and Blogger is absolutely horrible for editing. This is like the third time this post has gotten completely wiped.

 And now to the review:

 Quake 4 is a game that I had to force myself to finish. Technically the game has a lot going for it: Quake IV is build off idTech 4 and showcases the fantastic lighting work that engine is capable of, it has good modeling and texture work, the movement and weapon mechanics are solid, and it even has a few outdoor zones with DOOM 3 did not. However it is marred by technical issues as well; the biggest is the severe frame rate drops that happen every time there are multiple enemies or too much geometry on screen, or if you're just moving too fast. To save on rendering resources, the dynamic lighting is lessened in this game from DOOM 3, and some lights and shadows are 'baked' into the environment, but its not something you'll easily notice. Though the game has high quality textures on the player, weapons, and foreground objects, this is offset by low quality, blurry textures on distant land and the skybox, which is really noticeable in the later levels. Also on the 360 some enemiess just look nondescript gray, but I assume this is a console specific problem since I've seen PC screenshots where this is not the case.

 But let's talk about the gunplay. Quake IV has ten weapons that are all carried at the same time and can be switched to on the fly. They are all unique and serve a specific combat niche. This is a major improvement from modern shooters which limit you to only two weapons at a time and as a necessity most of their weapons are fully automatic and very similar to each other with minor differences.  Like most games in this genre, I found myself hoarding ammo for the most powerful weapons and defaulting to the shotgun, machine gun or the pistol for most of my encounters. I could take out even the strongest enemy in the game with just the pistol by dodging correctly, timing and aiming my shots, and using the charged up pistol shot, which is significantly more powerful than the standard fire. For me, this is a hallmark of good game design, as opposed to other games which arbitrarily make your starter pistol totally useless in any real fight.

I have nothing bad to say about the gunplay, but the enemy AI is a different matter. It's so bad it completely drags down the whole game. The AI is not advanced at all, and will either shoot at you while standing out in the open, or run in a straight line toward you to engage you in melee. This has led to many, many encounters where I simply backpedaled while firing and managed to kill my opponent without getting hurt myself. There are three enemy types focused around this attack and all three are "damage sponges" with high hit points but unsophisticated attacks, which make them very dull to play against.

The standard grunt comes in two types - machine gun wielding Strogg and shotgun wielding Strogg. Now, in video games, its much simpler to simply program the AI to "see" the player at all times, even through walls. It's simple to have them aim and rotate onto the player's position with perfect accuracy in instant time, and its far less costly to implement bullets as hit scan calculations, where there is no real bullet but the game simply calculates if the target was in the line of sight of the shooter's aim at the time of firing and then scores the hit instantly.  This makes the enemy AI kind of cheap to fight against so the developers of Quake IV offset this by making them attack in patterns. The shotgun wielding Strogg will try to close the distance and somersault to the player before firing. This makes him laughably easy to predict and kill. The machine gun Strogg will fire in patterns from right to left or in short bursts directly at the player. The direct bursts are unavoidable, but the right-left spray will never hit. They are not complicated and easy to defeat.

Acknowledging how cheap and uninteresting the hit scan and melee enemies are, none of the bosses use hit scan weapons but fire large, slow moving projectiles in patterns you may recognize from a 2D game like Mega Man or Ikaruga. Again, not hard to avoid and the boss battles just turn into a "shoot it until it dies" affair.

Level design is the second totem of First Person Shooter gameplay, and here it is also a mixed bag. The early levels are bland corridor shooters, the later levels open up, are less linear and have wider spaces for you to use your toys of destruction in. It's why most reviewers say that Quake IV "gets better later".

Overall Quake IV is not a bad game, but its a good game that's being severely held back. Also, when it came out in 2005 its competition was Half - Life 2, which didn't have as good shooting mechanics but had large levels and implemented an amazing physics system that was utilized to provide lots of unique fun, F.E.A.R. which implemented bullet time mechanics and had amazing enemy AI, and Halo 3, which was popular for no real reason.  Quake IV sort of got buried under its competition and it can be seen as sort of the last gasp of the old school, corridor shooter from the 90's.  Fittingly it was made by Raven Software, whose other collaborations with id like HeXen and Return to Castle Wolfenstein are some of my favorite games ever, and which somehow avoid the pitfalls that Quake IV fell into.

The 360 version of the game also came bundled with a port of Quake 2, which for me was why I even bought it to begin with.

On Hardcore Shooters

When I was in High School during the early 2000's, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike were all the rage. At our homes my friends and I played Half Life, and on our school computers we installed and played Unreal Tournament on our free time, until everyone found out about it and got out of hand, and we got shut down. From there we gravitated to LAN Cafes, which exploded in popularity and we played Counter Strike beta for hours upon hours every weekend. When console shooters like Halo and Call of Duty started rising in popularity, I thought they were fun but ultimately shallower experiences, and I basically ignored them and focused more on playing games in other genres like RPG, fighting, and 3rd person action. My college anime club had a launch day tournament to celebrate the release of Halo 2, which prompted me to get that game (the Xbox was a birthday gift), but the subsequent multiplayer experiences were so terrible that Halo 2 made me quit online multiplayer for a whole decade. Only recently did I return to online shooters, via Metal Gear Online 3, which I became obsessed with. Since then I have gone back and tried to involve myself in other contemporary shooters such as the Battlefield, Overwatch, DOOM 2016 and Halo, but these games are always compared unfavorably to the games I played in school by the larger gaming community and are generally considered "casual" shooters. I largely agree, and this has caused a hunger to find FPS games with high skill ceilings, deep gameplay mechanics, and which require technical skill in order to reliably defeat the competition. This blog will generally document my journey to find a modern "hardcore" shooter, assess the games I've played along the way, and maybe even recommend a few good ones that got buried with time or were never fully appreciated to begin with.