My Time in the Wasteland 2

There are spoilers in this post.  Go finish the game, then come back.

Another aspect of Fallout 4 that entranced me was the settlement system.  A wasteland is only a wasteland until some knucklehead like myself decides to start cleaning up and organizing it.  The game allowed you to scrap rusty car bodies, tires, and fallen trees.  I spent hours just cleaning up the areas around my settlements.  It took me a few tries, but I found an efficient hub-pattern of supply lines that connected the resources scrapping gave me, making them available to build useful new structures in any settlement.  Clothing and arming my settlers was another fun time sink. that made clothing found in the wasteland meaningful, in much the way that requiring materials for repairing things made scrap more real.

In the beginning of the game I was anticipating big changes involving restoring society, like getting bottling plants back on line or resettling cities like Concord.  With all the defenses you're able to build and the emphasis put on how happy settlements are, I also thought there would be a big struggle for the hearts and minds of these little towns by the factions in the game.

Unfortunately neither happened.  And, as I slowly learned how settlements worked I had less and less interest in messing with them.  For example, no matter how clever or overpowered your defenses, if you don't go to help when a settlement is attacked, it will lose and be conquered.  Which makes a certain design sense because then it makes the player want to drop everything and rush back to help, right?  Well, except a settlement that is completely overrun pops back to it's full population the moment you travel back.  And it takes only a tiny hit in happiness. 

In fact, the only way for settlers to truly die, seemed to be when I did travel back to help them and the battle was a rough one.  And you want to talk about rough battles, the irony of a leveled-world is that the higher in level I get the worse the world gets for everyone around me.  As a 90th leveler you don't want to return to a settlement unless you want to see everyone slaughtered around you.  So the game trained me to leave settlements to their own devices and ignore their cries for help.

What are Settlements for?
I had hours of fun playing Fallout 4, and no game is perfect, but Bethesda made some design decisions that seemed to work against it's own goals.  Maybe these aspects of the game are related to different play styles and I'm blinded by my own preferences, but let me continue talking about settlements to explain what I mean.

So, players can have fun dressing and arming settlers and cleaning up and building in a settlement.  That's enough of a reason to have them.  Well, to have one, or two, or even a few.  But 30?  Having places to set up artillery seems like an good reason to have a well-developed network of settlements, except the times I found artillery useful were very few.  You basically have to have some enemies in a walled-in area they can't run and engage you, for the slow artillery to be helpful against them.  And by the time that you have a well-developed network of settlements, you're probably powerful enough to just go in blasting anyway.

I think the best reason for settlements as little outposts for exploring the world.  You have a safe place to rest and heal.  You can dump all the junk you find in local ruins and with the supply lines feature, you don't have to worry about hauling most of it anywhere else.  As you go up in level you can make shops and sell the items the supply lines won't transfer.  Settlements make for perfect little outposts in a exploration

Except . . the game pushes you to fast travel.  Early on it gives you missions that are randomly spread all over the map.  Some of the settlement missions are time sensitive.  Because of this hopping and rushing around it made sense for me to pick a place to set up a home base.  Once I did that fast traveling back to it became normal procedure and all those many settlements became superfluous in game terms. 

I think to make the settlements more than aesthetic time sinks, Bethesda had to either limit fast travel in some way-- which would make them useful explorations bases-- or make the plot involve the settlements somehow.  The latter seems so obvious, so almost there, I wonder if it was planned and got cut.

My Time in the Wasteland

This post has Fallout 4 spoilers.  Go finish the game before you read on.

My grandparents owned a wrecking yard.  Their "savings account" was six T-birds parked under a shed roof, with tattered convertible tops, and a flock of geese crapping on the seats.  When I squeezed between their fenders I saw the cool potential.  It instilled the idea that you could find and fix up things that might be unavailable any other way.  That, sure, money could get you a nice car, but knowledge and perseverance might get you a rare one.  So the beginning of Fallout 4 had me pretty ecstatic.  You're given an old set of T-45 battle armor early in the questline and you realize that 1) you can work on each of the parts to upgrade them 2) paint them in different ways 3) mix and match different model parts if you find them and 4) find those parts on chassis scattered around the wasteland.

I was thrilled.  I put all my skill points I gained leveling into perks that allowed me to repair and use my armor.  I scoured the wasteland for parts and learned to follow the rail lines and freeways looking for military checkpoints.  I searched exhaustively for the magazines that unlocked new paint jobs.  I gathered junk with a purpose.  I went everywhere in my armor and got pretty unstoppable.

And it made some sense.  How could one person make a difference in a place like the Commonwealth.  Well, what if that person was a veteran that knows how to repair power armor and dogged enough to search for parts to put together a suit that tops anything even the local mercenaries have.

Unfortunately, any non-procedurally generated world will have an end to exploration, and now that I have been everywhere on the map 3 times, have found the best armor available, and all the paint jobs available, I have no reason to explore anymore. 

But what about using my finely-tuned suit of destruction to help society get back on its feet?  I'll write a bit more soon about the new settlement system in the game and some of the ways it was a disappointmant.

In the mean time, I hope you and yours are having a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Ark: Survival Evolved

Where you been Telecanter?  Umm, yeah.  Kinda been addicted to an early access game called Ark:Survival Evolved.  It's a survival game with crafting and building, but the main thing is you can tame and ride dinosaurs.

The game is designed to be played with tribes.  You share experience for doing things when you are close to tribemates, for instance, and some of the dinosaur taming takes so long it really requires multiple people helping. 

It is a PVP server.  Not everyone will kill you on sight, in fact that is a dangerous way to play, but people will try to break into your buildings, steal your things, and kill your dearly won dinos.  I find the challenge of succeeding in spite of this intoxicating.

Of course, I am trying to play it solo.  And so I have mostly been living like a guerrilla, learning the land and trying to hide little outposts deep in the jungle.

There are downsides. Bugs: when you kill a creature the corpse often balloons away, denying you the resources it contains. Constant server upgrades: add cool content but teleport your sleeping character into the wild where it is eaten by dinos (yes, when you log out this game leaves a sleeping body and yes, almost every time I log in I expect to be dead).  Toxic players: you know that stereotype that games are played by young males that are racist, sexist, and immature?  Well, in the hundreds of hours I've spent playing this game online I've found it is absolutely true.  There are often lots of players on a server that are silent and I hope, hope, they are the more mature, kinder, less idiotic humans playing the game but there is no way to know.

The game has pretty frequent upgrades, almost daily.  I'm hoping the balance will shift a bit because right now it seems like it takes much less time to destroy something than to make something.  Chaos is winning.

My character is almost at the level cap, and as a solo player I will probably never be able to tame some of the bigger dinos, so I already feel my interest starting to wane.  If this game sounds interesting, or you already have it and want to tribe up, shoot me an email and I'll tell you which server I'm playing on.

8 Recent Open World Video Games III

It's been a while since I played these, but since my computer died I would have to re-dowload them all to refresh my memory about them and I don't have the energy right now.  So take my comments as what stuck in the mind of a casual player.

The Forest
The forest is a survival horror crafting game, which seems an odd mix of genres to begin with.  I'm not experienced with survival horror at all, but I thought the point was to always feel out of your depth, uneasy, unsafe.  While crafting games tend to be about mastery and slowly gaining control over an area.

The island you are on isn't infinite and the world is not a voxel world.  You can build structures and permanently chop down trees.  Food and water is a concern and tribes of hostiles.

There was a moment when a band of these cannibalistic weirdoids found me, were walking up slowly and checking me out, that I felt some real fear.  That was cool.  But being killed by them, didn't kill me, it put me in some cave of theirs that I had to escape.  So the second time it happened it felt more like an annoyance.

So, you are trapped between what seemed to be several bands of these hostiles and you are meant to build a little settlement with racks to organize your sticks and gardens to grow vegetables?  Didn't feel right.

A small annoyance was that, while there are plenty of alcohol bottles to drink from and craft Molotov cocktails from, you can't store water in them.  Which means you have to walk and immerse yourself in a pool to drink.  And thirst was off in that if I remember you could start taking damage after one day of not drinking water.

This is the game from this list that I played least.  But if you are a fan of survival horror, maybe it will be more interesting to you.

Savage Lands
This is intended to be a metal, hardcore, barbarian vision of survival where you have to worry about starving, freezing, and getting killed by wolves and monsters at every turn.  The monsters aren't quite as thick as the zombies of 7 Days to Die, but you'll have to fight them over and over to get needed crafting resources.

This is not an infinite world, in fact it is actually a set island map which appears to grow in difficulty as you travel inward.  You can build structures, but not change the landscape otherwise.  You use up ores you mine from rocks, I don't know if they eventually respawn.

One of the ways the game makes things difficult is to strictly limit your inventory.  Everything you build needs sticks and rocks and logs and you can barely carry anything. 

Another common way to increase difficulty in a crafting game is to add wear to items.  Which is fine, unless you get the balance off.  I made a pair of leather boots in this game that wore out before I could get the required materials to make another pair.

A third, obvious, way to increase difficulty is to increase the amount of items a crafting recipe requires or the difficulty of acquiring the items.  Probably the moment I lost interest was when I saw the crafting recipe for all the clothing required logs!  So, they want you to feel a sense of accomplishment when you have finally managed to craft enough bags and backpacks that would allow you to even carry the ingredients to make your leather armor, but requiring 25 logs to make a set of clothes seemed so absurd it threw me right out of the game.

I've always been more of an explorer, interested in seeing not only what's in the world but what's possible in that world, so survival games that are more about balancing on a knife edge of luck and anxious, perfect strategy lose my interest pretty quickly.  If you are the kind of player that loves the Dark Souls games you might like Savage Lands.

8 Recent Open World Video Games II

I think I'll talk about two similar games in this post: Salt and Stranded Deep.  Stranded Deep is basically a Castaway simulator with relatively realistic graphics of islands and sea life.  Salt is a more cartoonish island-exploring game where your main enemy is the pirates that pepper various islands.

But both involve gather rocks and sticks, crafting tools, acquiring food, and exploring infinite islands.  These games focus more on the exploration part of a sandbox game than some of the others on my list, and island hopping is a really good way to do that.

Salt
I think the strong point of Salt is that the islands you find can be quite different.  Some have pirate encampments, some ancient ruins.  I found an ancient altar once, and have found merchants that traded with me and gave me a simple quest.  I've hunted black deer at sunset and had a few terrifying nights fighting spiders by torchlight.

While you can build better boats as you get more materials and the books that teach you how to build them, one thing I found myself craving was the ability to make a change in the world-- to build a house or somehow make an island mine.  But the world is not a voxel world, and when I last played the only things you could build on land where a campfire and a flag.

The worst thing about Salt for me was the poor quality of the art work for the pirates and the item icons in the UI.  I realize the game is still in development and that you might want to put some placeholder artwork in a game you are making, but if your main enemy is going to be pirates I think you need to find artist to make you a better representation, even if a cartoony one.  The item icons are small and cartoony and I would often have a hard time distinguishing them.

Stranded Deep
It is really cool to be able to dive into a shipwreck and find random loot in them.  After a while you know all the possible items you can find in this game, but more items could be added- the point is that this setup scratches a fundamental exploration/scavenging itch I have.  It's also neat to be paddling along and see a marlin, a sea turtle, or a great white shark.  There are whales and sea urchins and sting rays too.

One of the things that get's frustrating is dealing with your limited inventory.  I think this is another common way some of these 8 games try to make themselves more difficult and more "realistic" than minecraft by limiting how much you can carry.  But when you have to go from island to island with sharks trying to bump you off your shaky raft carrying your precious bundle of sticks, rocks, and palm fronds, it can get irritating.  I wonder why I can't make a raft of logs and then break it up at another island, or at least tie a bundle of fronds or sticks to my raft.

Another thing that bugged me was the way the game renders distant islands.  Islands in your peripheral vision zoom closer and then zoom back out when you look directly at them.  It makes it quite disorienting when trying to judge which island is closest and which you were trying to reach before the sharks attacked you and you lost your line of sight.

But I'd say the most disappointing thing is the homogeneity of the islands.  Yes, they have interesting assortments of wrecks around them, but once you've seen one of the islands you've seen them all.  The game really needs some islands that are bigger, with hills, waterfalls, and caves.  The latest update to the game introduced Sea Forts and I've heard they might be trying to add caves, so that's cool.

8 Recent Open World Video Games

I've spend a lot of time exploring single-player video game worlds.  I wanted to reflect a bit on what I've experienced in the last few months.  Of course most of these are early access, but from my experience that doesn't mean a game will change significantly once they once they remove that label.

Minecraft
Not one of the 8 and obviously not new, but the benchmark.  If you want a tenuous connection for this series to pen and paper gaming, Minecraft is the D&D of open world games and the rest on this list are fantasy heartbreakers.  Which, actually is a pretty good fit because I think most of these games are trying to fix one of two traits of Minecraft -- making the world less cartoony and making survival more difficult.

7-Days to Die
Set in something like a post-apocalyptic Arizona, you scavenge, gather resources and try to survive.  It's a voxel based world, so you can dig up every block.  It touts its building physics which requires building with adequate support to prevent structural collapses (unlike Minecraft's floating blocks).

It's fun to go through the modern buildings looting, but there are way too many zombies for me.  I think this might be because it's aimed at multiplayer, so they expect you to have help.  Ammo is limited, weapons wear out and do less and less damage as they do, gathering and cooking meat brings more zombies down on you.  But worse, for a game that includes building, it undermines any kind of building you do.  You can't prevent zombie spawns in an area, so walls are useless.  Zombies will dig at anything in front of them, so ditches or moats will just mean they eventually end up digging up through your floor.   Worst of all, the dead flesh hands of zombies can break through anything given enough time, even reinforced concrete.  In my play-throughs the only viable strategy has been to build an underground bunker, which is kind of boring.

I finally got frustrated and turned zombies off completely, which turned out to be a lot of fun.  It felt oddly peaceful being the last person on earth.  I was quite surprised, then, when I came back from a short break to find out I'd been killed.  Apparently the zombie sieges are coded separately from normal spawns and there is no way to turn them off..  Hah, how's that for hardcore, you get monsters even when you specifically turn off monsters.

So anyway, this heartbreaker succeeds in being more realistic than minecraft, but over-does it on the difficulty aspect.  Unless you enjoy killing infinite zombies forever and living in a hole, it will lose it's shine quickly.

The other 7
I'll talk about these in future posts:
Salt

Stranded Deep
The Forest
Savage Lands
the Long Dark
Subnautica
Space/Medieval Engineers

Video Game Chat: Total War: Rome II

I am a big fan of Rome Total War and I would recommend you skipping its sequel.

I could ramble on but I'll stick to a few simple points instead.  You can read my review of the original here.

So, this sequel was 9 years in the making and Creative Assembly has made several games in the series in the mean time.  How did they do?

The Good
The graphics are beautiful and the unit cards are lovely in their stylized designs.  (Although, my top-of-the-line video card can't handle it when it rains on the battle field or when towers tumble in a siege.  I guess they were future proofing by designing for next-gen video cards?)

The ahistoric units are gone.

The Bad
The AI is as stupid as it ever was.  I've had several computer-run generals do suicide runs into me when the rest of their army had not even engaged yet.  (the computer is obviously using them because they are cavalry.  Can CA not flag generals as a special kind of last-use cavalry or something?)  I've had the computer attack a walled city and then sit there without moving until the battle runs out.  Because I had battle time limits set at an hour back then I had to alt-tab out and surf the web while I waited for them to lose the battle they initiated!  I've had an enemy general in a city I was conquering sit at a capture point with a superior force while I won the city at a different capture point. Stooopiiid.

Also, in the original, if you attacked a city without a siege unit (or elephants) that could break down a gate you lost automatically.  Not so in this game where any unit can throw Molotov cocktails and burn down your city gates.  This makes having walls much less useful and means you still have to put big garrisons in walled cities if they are threatened.

Diplomacy seems just as weak.  Everyone hates you and no one wants to engage in money-making, growth-making trade with you because they hate you.  Even though that money and trade now might help them conquer you later.

The Ugly
They took away one of the most fun things of the original -- the families and their hangers-on.  Oh, there are generals but every turn is a year.  It takes 7 years to raise a full army, several years to pacify a newly conquered city.  It takes several years to travel from city to city.  You are not going to have any Hannibals or Alexander the Greats in this game unless you balls out blitzkrieg.  Your generals will more likely die of old age.  And it doesn't really matter in the end, because there is no family tree.  The generals feel like random dudes that share your family name.  You don't see them grow up, you have no way of anticipating when one will be available.  Hell, I've gone a decade with no one from my family available as a general.  So, if I want to raise an army all the successes and glory of that army will accrue to some other rival family.

(There is still a household, but it is usually just one retainer, they take a year to change and they are very similar with many different retainers offering the same benefit, like,for instance, +5% to morale.)

The way cities work has been completely overhauled.  Now cities matter less than regions.  A region is made up of a capital and one or more minor cities.  The capital can't have agriculture but can hold 6 buildings while the minor cities can have agriculture but only hold 4 buildings.  You need food to build certain buildings but most buildings make everyone unhappy because of squalor.  So the game pretty much is about juggling these buildings.

I can understand this in theory being fun.  But I just have not enjoyed it.  Buildings are expensive and take years to build so destroying them and changing buildings is not an efficient strategy, yet you will often find yourself with either plenty of food but no advancements or with advancements but starving to death with a rebelling populace.  You have to realize that the buildings that fight squalor are far down the tech tree, so for decades of game time everything you build pisses people off, even building up your agriculture causes squalor.  I have taken to leaving all buildings at the last level they don't cause squalor.  So I have a lot of semi-developed cities.

It could be that I just haven't figured out how to play this game the way it is intended to be played.  But for someone who has hundreds of hours in the original (and 140 in this one) that right there is proof that the game is a very different game.  And not much of an argument that fans of the first will like it. 

I'm not opposed to a more dynamic and complicated system of city building, I quite liked the way prosperous cities in Empire Total War would lead to the development of small towns.  But somehow this game makes it painful.  I feel penalized for every change I make and those changes take so long.  I keep going back and trying to play.  But in the end it feels tedious.  I don't understand how in 9 years this is all they managed. 

I think I am going to look to Crusader Kings II (I've played the first one) or Europa Universalis 4 for my strategy fix.  Or, heck, just play the original which I find still holds up pretty well.

Video Game Chat - Mount & Blade 1866

I think I have to lower my own standard on what I post just to get something posted these days.  Work is still sapping a lot of my creative energy.  So, today, a more casual ramble.

What have you been up to recently Telecanter?  I've been playing a lot of video games.  I got on a western kick for a bit playing a mod for the original Mount & Blade called 1866.  The mod had some issues, scripts not working, the occasional crash, and yet I found myself just as excited to play it, if not more than the triple A Red Dead Redemption. 

I think the main draw was the variety.  You can play as a Comanche. Apache, U.S. Army, Mexican Army, Outlaw, or lawman.  I'm not sure how many guns are available in the game but there are many.  Pistols, rifles, carbines, shotguns.  They all have different speed of fire, speed of reloading, damage, number of shots and penalty for horse back use.

I'm not super interested in tons of guns in modern settings, but for some reason, seeing the Pattern 1861 Trade rifle with its brass tacks in the stock or the nickle-plated Winchester repeater, these historic guns, brings out the boy in me.

And it all matters in the game.  Because the guns that let you fire multiple times, say a Spencer repeater, do less damage, while the single shot carbines, like the Burnside, do much more.  Do you want to kill a target with one shot or blaze away, close range, at a lot of unmounted targets?

There isn't as much variety in the horses you can choose compared to the other Mount & Blade games, and protective gear is pretty much non-existent to fit the genre.  The skirmishes have less tactics and more high-speed gun play.  For example if you play as Comanche, pretty much all of your troops are mounted and that first version of Mount & Blade won't let you re-designate units.  So everything is cavalry and you can't order some cav to do one thing while other do something else.

The mod did one thing that is pretty interesting with the format, the different big factions own towns, but a town can also have a hotel, which is like a little appendage town.  Some also have banks.  Because these hotels are not owned by the big factions, but by gangs and posses, this allows outlaws or lawmen to get a foothold without having to face the full fury of one of the big factions like the Army.

The mod also allows relations to cool of with different factions, so you can raid a wagon train and slowly, slowly the faction it belonged to will forget about you.  You won't be eternally at war.

Troops cost a lot more than the default game.  You won't have a huge army for a while.  But there are lots of companions around to get to join you cause.  I ended up with my own company of irregulars of about 20 mounted companions.

I played for hours.  But once I secured a hotel, fort and village close to each other, I cooled on the game.  As is typical with me, once I see the path to complete victory in a strategy game it just starts feeling like a grind to me.  I don't enjoy slowly taking over each city.

The mod is a bit immature in some aspects.  You can tell dialogue was written by teenage boy for teenage boy, for example, but I could largely ignore that.

I got a chance to house sit for a friend that has an Xbox/Red Dead Redemption and I wanted to play it again to remember what it was like.  I played it a lot when it first came out, but I mostly remember enjoying the hunting and chafing at the plot forcing me to do things.  Alas, I forgot how slow the game starts, like a movie with quicktime events.  Cut scene, walk over there, cut scene, ride the horse over there.  Uggh, I didn't have the patience.  And I can't think of a better example of designers believing the future of games is to make them more like movies.  I read a comment on the web once that RDR has the greatest video game ending of all time, which SPOILER, is essentially rocks fall everyone dies, you don't have a choice.  If that is the greatest video games have to offer I'm pretty sure movies already provide that in much better form.


A thing that really struck me is how this crappy mod for a crappy old game allows you so much more freedom.  You can, gasp, be female!  You can be Mexican, Indian.  You can pick your own name and decide whether you want to steal horses and kill settlers or hunt down those who do.

Anyway, that's enough of a ramble for today.  If you own the original Mount & Blade and want to get some old time west gun battles in 1866 is pretty fun in my book.

Mount & Blade: Warband

This is not a review, more like a love letter.  "Hey Telecanter, where you been? It's the New Year and you haven't posted in like a week!"  I, dear friend, have been absorbed in this game:

You should see me when I lose.

So, here's the deal.  Mount & Blade is a game that has a strategic overland map and when there are conflicts, it zooms into real time tactical battles.  The same set up I love about Rome: Total War.  It is a military skirmish game, though that is underselling it.  It starts off feeling more like a roleplaying game something like the first Diablo.  You start out with little armor, no troops and are dropped into the world to do whatever you want.  But you quickly learn that to make any headway you need troops and that they need to be paid so the early game requires a lot of scrimping and nail biting battles to try and get loot from bandits.

The Game Changes
And by mentioning the early game, I bring up one of the things I love about this game.  More than any other game I've played it feels like D&D in that the game becomes different games as you become more powerful.  Once you have decent armor and weapons and find some companions that have skills that can help you and your troops out, there is a mid game where you are no longer fighting bands of bandits but other military forces.  And eventually if you make your own kingdom, battles won't be the biggest problem but your lazy, greedy vassals.

My steppe archer all grown up.

The first game I played I made a steppe archer and favored agile horses and archery.  But as the stakes got higher and higher I found I was a liability with my light armor.  I would get knocked out of combats which affected my troop morale and would end up losing me battles I should have won.  So I slowly shifted strategy to have heavy armor, heavy war horse, and a lance.

Why Warband?
Before I go any further I should say Warband is just a revision of the preceding Mount and Blade, but a revision worth getting.  It's okay to skip the first one, you'll get to meet all the same companions and have the same quests and Warband gives at least three big reasons to favor it:

• You can found your own kingdom.  (I didn't really want to be a vassal.)
• They added a whole new desert faction.
• They improved the world map immensely.

So Many Possibilities
There are so many things I like about the game it's hard to point them all out.  But the bottom line is it is simple in mechanics but allows for lots of choices and strategies.  Shields take damage and get broken.  You can block with weapons.  There are tons of weapon options from crossbows to polearms.  I mean, Gary would have loved this: there are Bardiche, and pole axes, and pikes.  There are lots or horse options, depending on if you want speed maneuverability, or an armored charging force.

And that's just talking about you and your companions.  Recruiting troops from different faction regions will change your battles too.  The viking-like Nords have no cavalry, the the steppe faction has no troops that aren't mounted.

It Feels Medieval
I'm no historian, but I like that this game feels feudal.  So, you've got yourself a kingdom.  You feel awesome with your veteran troops.  Your castles are well-defended.  And then the neighboring kingdom declares war and razes all you poor villages.  This cuts off your cash flow and all of a sudden you can't afford your army.  You can try and patrol your villages to keep them safe but as your kingdom gets bigger this becomes impossible.  Thus vassals.  Vassals are a weird trade off because you have to give them your villages as fiefs to keep them happy, thus losing the income from the village anyway, but they will help keep down bandits and protect caravans which help the overall economy of your kingdom.  They can also be called to campaign when the next war starts in order to inflict damage on the foe and win new fiefs that will earn you some gold.

Also, there is no death for you, your companions, or lords, only your troops and poor villagers.  This feels very appropriate to me.  I found myself, after having made a foolish mistake utterly crushed in battle, all my veteran troops killed, stripped of almost everything and all the nearby towns and villages hostile.  So I ran away to a foreign land far away and built up an army there.  I still had tons of income from my various economic interests.  Once I had a new army I marched them all the way back home and won back what was "rightfully" mine.

The Little Things
Again it's hard to point out just why the game feels so right to me.  But there are little things that give me the impression the developers paid attention.  When you finally start your own kingdom you get to choose a banner.  But what was so cool was, that banner then appears on the shields of all your troops.  Your targeting reticule, normally white, changes color to be visible in sand or snow.  Lame horses will eventually be healed if you have the appropriate wound healing skill.  If you rescue Peasant Women from bandits, you can actually keep them as troops and they, super weak at first, will work their way up to Joan of Arc-like cavalry troops.

You can learn different poems to try and woo ladies of different temperament, or not.  You can take part in tournaments, sure.  But what was cool was when I discovered the events in the tournaments varied by the region they take place in.  I own in the lance tournaments, but the viking mass sword battles always get me knocked out. 

You can pick up weapons and shields in battles.  I was so impressed, in my first desperate siege defense, when out of arrows, I picked a new quiverfull off an archer casualty nearby.  I've won tournaments by switching the two-handed sword given to me to the sword and shield combo of my first victim.

You can loot villages, steal cattle, raid caravans, or just be a friendly trader carrying salt and spices from one city to the next.

Picking Nits
Okay, enough gushing.  The only major thing I can think of to complain about is the Fantasy Alphabet names.  A company goes to all the trouble of modelling historically plausible weapons and armor and then the town and village name look like they just rolled some boggle dice and wrote the results down.  Come on!  Names should have a feel for the faction they belong to or the region they exist in.  The names in this game have none of that.  Shameful.

Beware of the difficulty settings, what they call "normal" is what anyone else would call difficult; your fresh recruits will beat you at sparring even though you have better stats, more hit points, and higher weapon skills.  Not recommended unless the default settings become too easy.

Also, a couple caveats.  This is all based on single player play, I don't know what the multiplayer game is like and couldn't care a whit.  I have a pretty good computer and have all the graphics options maxed.  It might look a little dated if you can't do that or are used to fancier new games.

The company is apparently working on a sequel  which I'm quite interested in seeing.

The Accessible Sandbox

My conception of a sandbox has always involved a "starter" village that has a few roads or routes to bigger settlements all set in a wilderness that get increasingly dangerous the further from civilization you get.  The difficulty of the sandbox could be seen as concentric circles emanating from that first village, because even the roads and big urban areas they lead to could have encounters and dangers.

Morrowind has me re-thinking this.

Map edited from here.  The red dots are the Mage guilds which all can be accessed from each other.
You start the game in Seyd Neen in the South West.

From the very beginning, as a weak first leveller, you can access a huge portion of the existing sandbox, and safely.  The world has Silt Striders that look like big fleas which you can ride from some towns to others.  There are also boats that can be taken from most coastal towns which allow for circumnavigating the island sandbox completely.  This is all safe and relatively cheap.  With a tiny bit of effort you can even become a member of the Mage's Guild which allows for teleportation between the five guilds on the island (again, for a small fee).

Magic available in the game helps with the ease of travel too.  There are spells (and magic items) that allow for teleportation to both native and Imperial temples.  Crafty use of these can let you take shortcuts in travel-- popping over to a temple that is near a Silt Strider port, for example.  There is also a Mark/Recall set of spells that allows you to set a specific anchor you want to easily return to later.

The danger is still present between these points of civilization, but there is much more flexibility in travel and exploration than I have experienced in any other video game sandboxes.  If you don't want to mess about in the grimy swamps along the coast you can spend time in the dry ashlands further inland, or head to the grassy grazelands far to the west.

Danger is fairly well signaled; any old ruins are likely to have things you shouldn't mess with and as you near the center of the island more of the creatures are blighted and contagious.  So your choices about where to travel can be informed choices.

The settlements offer pretty much redundant services, for example temples and Imperial garrisons.  This means if you have a particular kind of character you like to play, you can take of advantage of all these travel opportunities without being penalized.  The cities aren't identical, though, and you often need to travel around to find a spell or item you need.

I think one way this is possible is the sandbox is circular and several hops of travel doesn't take you so far away as to be unable to still access other environments.  In a more traditional rectangular map, traveling towards a desert environment most likely leads you farther and farther from your original location.

I suppose a traditional D&D sandbox is also bigger, though, in-game this world feel huge.  I wouldn't want to have to walk across the island real time.

I guess it all comes down to how much prep you can do.  The video game all has to be ready for players from the moment play starts.  So, as long as you can compartmentalize real danger (shove it into ruins and underground) you can let the player amble about all over.  For a DM, having multiple areas that players could choose to start from sounds like lots of work.

But I will certainly think more about safe, clearly marked, ways players can move about so they can have choices where they want to explore.

Confession

I should number these confessions.  I know I have a few other posts with that title.  So, I scraped my money together and bought a new and glorious computer.  I bought Windows for the first time in my life.  I installed steam for the first time ever.  I am now beffuddled with a wonderful glut of games.

I love Ubuntu for my everyday work.  It is very stable and easy to use.  Gimp and Inkscape work without a hitch even on my older computer with it's crappy video card.  But games.  Dear games.  I have gone for decades now without them (mostly getting my fix on consoles).

Sure, people say you can run most games through Wine.  But not in my experience.  Couldn't get even big popular titles like Fallout 3 to work or popular titles that have been around forever with plenty of time for fixes to get worked out like Morrowind.

The first game I downloaded was Rome: Total War.  It was less than $3.

So, on one hand I feel a little dirty for selling out on Free Software so cheaply.  On the other hand I never got to finish exploring Morrowind and now I can (I installed the updated graphics mod last night and it looks wonderful for a game so old).

I want to keep posting here (and really need to get my campaign started back up to try out all my wilderness travel innovations) because I'm coming up on some big milestones, but expect me to be distracted and scatterbrained.  

And if you want to recommend some games in the comments feel free--I just got Legend of Grimrock which looks great and FTL which has been pretty fun.

Praise for an old Flash Game

Caravaneer has been around for years.  I don't remember if I started playing this again recently and then thought to make the simple pack animals posts, or if it was making those posts that reminded me of this game I've played for hours in the past.  I think it is the most sophisticated flash game I've ever seen.  Even though it has simple graphics it offers a play experience that is reminiscent of Fallout 1 with less dialogue but more trading infrastructure.

In a nutshell, you're in a post-apocalyptic world and can take items from one little town to another for a profit if you can make it past the ubiquitous bandits.  In the early game you'll be limited to livestock as transport.  There is a pretty good selection with camels, donkeys, mules, horses or oxen and various carts to be pulled by the non-camels.

All these creatures require different amounts of food and water as well as travel at different speeds.  So you have to decide whether you want to travel more efficiently but slowly and have to fight all the bandits, or less efficiently and fast enough to outrun some of them.

Travel is abstract on a overland map that zooms in to a top-down battlefield.  Each character has a certain number of Action Points to expend each round and different actions, like firing weapons or reloading, take different amount of APs.

I'm a sucker for the dromedarys and their supper low food and water requirements.  So, I'll usually have a long train of them and then have to fight every step of the way to get from one town to another.  One good thing about this is that you can train up the number of APs and the gun accuracy of your people in these low risk fights for when you need them later in the game.

The game, like D&D, changes as you progress.  As you trade with towns it allows them to progress and grow out of the need for the very product you were trading and it becomes necessary to reach farther, to newer towns, to make money.  Eventually you'll need to upgrade your weapons and hire more caravan guards to even survive.  And then you'll probably want to upgrade to vehicles-- atvs, jeeps, hummers-- to outrun the deadliest bandits.

The game gets a little grindy (this is partially because of the slow travel I tend to use) and I think could do with less frequent bandit attacks.  It also feels like it rushes a bit to push you from one stage of the game to the next; you barely make 2 trips on your first trade route and the towns don't need those supplies any more.  A big flaw is that bandit partys drop all their gear.  It's cool to be able to sell some stuff when you defeat robbers, but It undermined the excitement of upgrading when bandits were dropping stacks of guns better than I'd seen in any shop yet.  I think all the detail spent on handguns is wasted because their window of usefulness is so small.

The game, though, is a perfect example of a computer being used by a game to do what it does best.  Water requirements, food usage, trading prices, all the number crunching is taken care of by the old mechanical brain.

Caravaneer was made by Dmitry Zheltobriukhov and is available from Sugar-Free Games as ad-ware.  I hear it is possible to find an ad-free swf file to downland. I could go on, but you should try the game out on your own.  And, Dmitry, if you see this, I'd buy a PC game like this, if you made one, maybe with the addition of setting up your own shops in towns so I could sell all the dang glass bottles robbers drop.