MegaTraveller: The Journey Re-Begins

A little red splotch denotes my first successful combat.

I'm happiest in an RPG when I can develop some kind of plan. I don't want to be on a linear track--I love open-world RPGs--but I do prefer when I can at least identify a path through the next X hours of the open world. I want to settle into a system and know that I'm making some progress towards a goal. It's easy for me to abandon a game when I can't identify the game's overall structure and thus don't quite know what I'm going to do next.

Usually, after about 2-3 hours, I get a sense of the game's general layout and can then start anticipating my next move. That's the point at which the game becomes addictive. Whether the next move is obvious (such as progressing to the next level in Captive or mapping the next set of squares in Wizardry) or a matter of player choice (such as deciding from among half a dozen quests or leads in Pool of Radiance or Ultima VI) determines my enjoyment of the game, but it's less important to my compulsion to keep playing a game. Ultimately, I suspect I'll decide that MegaTraveller is a better game than Wizardry III or Dragon Sword, but right now I have to summon the willpower to open a session of MegaTraveller when I had no trouble convincing myself to fire up the other two. Right now, several hours into MegaTraveller, I still have no idea what the game wants from me, and every time I open it, I sit there staring at the screen, wondering what I should do.

Rolling a new guy.

           
For whatever reason, I decided to start completely over, though I don't know that I did much better with party creation than the first time. I did end up getting 4/5 of my characters skilled with laser weapons, and 3/5 actually armed with laser pistols (thanks to their post-enlistment benefits). I think I also did better with their careers. Four retired as officers--the highest a Navy lieutenant commander. In terms of skill selection, I think I wound up about the same, perhaps a little worse since the skills aren't ideally grouped by character. For instance, skills like "carousing," "interview," "streetwise," and "trader" are spread out among four characters instead of centralized in one "Face" character. I don't know if this even matters. As before, no one got Travelers' Aid Society membership. I don't know how you get that.

As before, I fled from the first combat and quickly explored the main area of Efate, purchasing vacuum suits and oxygen tanks this time. I followed a suggestion from Gaguum to rent an ATV and plow over the attackers, which worked satisfyingly well for a few of them. Looting their bodies afterwards, I found a laser rifle and gave it to one of my characters with high laser skill.

Equipping a character with a vacuum suit.

    
The ATV did no damage to a few of the guys in the wilderness. One was a bounty hunter I didn't see (or didn't notice) in my first game; he said that Keefer had placed a price on my head. Also, by running over the enemies, I "damaged" the ATV, so when I returned it, I lost my $4,000 security deposit.

I tried fighting the bounty hunter in regular combat. I at least got my characters to fire at him (not sure what the problem was before), but I couldn't kill him without losing at least two of my own people in the process, so I decided to save him for later. Combat remains another huge complaint I have about the game. I rather prefer games that start you off with a couple of easy combats so you can get used to the interface, not games that offer impossible combats right in the starting area. I suppose I could suck up the loss of the two characters and just go roll new ones.

Plowing into an enemy with my ATV.

          
Next, I rented a "grav vehicle" to explore the "gravitic city" part of the planet. This time, no one attacked me in the bar. The bartender gave me a quest to return a stolen pendant, but I'm not sure where to find it.

Near the bar, I found the weapon shop, where I stocked up on ammo. Further along was an "information shop" that sold rumors for $2,000 each.

The information shop.

I didn't want to splurge on all of them just yet, but I bought the first one, which said that "Efrate's atmosphere is tainted with destructive gases and chemicals that are emitted from a strange, explosive plant life that grows in the planet's swampy regions." This seems to refer to an area in the southeast part of the map in which plants do explode and deal damage when I walk on them. I'm not sure if there's anything to actually do with this information.

Am I supposed to kill these plants or something?

Next up: navigation, jump, and take-off programs for the ship. I loaded up on cargo (someone had suggested water, which sold for $100 a unit) and took off. I landed on nearby Stur and sold the water for $240 a unit, which netted me a $2,800 profit. Subtracting the $1000 in fuel that the trip cost me, if I do this 1,111 times, I should have the $2 million I need for the "Jump 2" drive.

Loading up on cargo. Apparently, I can only carry 20 of anything at a time.

In the bar on Stur, an NPC indicated that she'd be amenable to a bribe. I gave her some money and she told a twisted version of what happened in the bar on Efate, in which my party is a "rogue band of pirates" who nearly gunned down Konrad Kiefer. Assassins and bounty hunters are now looking for me. Stur also had an information store.

Given how ineptly I've been bumbling about, the assassins and bounty hunters must not be very good if they haven't found me.

I next visited Solon, in the same system, where I got to use my new vacuum suits to survive in the atmosphere. Outside, I immediately got into a gun battle with an alien representative of SMIRK, "the most powerful criminal society in the area." After some effort, I was able to kill him, but there were a bunch of other guys wandering around, so I eventually backed off.

By "the area," do you mean just this little corner of the spaceport? Or an entire planetary system? It's a pretty vague term when you have faster-than-light travel.

    
Next up was a visit to the small planet called San, which had virtually no services in the spaceport. I explored the planet and wandered into a facility where one NPC told me that it was a restricted area and another told me that because of something I had done (walked in?) "this whole place is going to blow!" Despite the alarm, nothing happened and it didn't seem like there was anything to do on the planet.

This NPC was apparently just messing with me.

Kra had a cave that I couldn't explore because I didn't have any source of light. On Llun, I encountered another bounty hunter and managed to kill him, but for my troubles I just got his ID and a medkit. I also found a "power pick" lying on the ground. There were some mines that I couldn't enter because I wasn't "company personnel."

Trading shots with the bounty hunter. I'll blog  more about combat when I understand it better.

At this point, in summary, I'm just flying from planet to planet, logging what I find. The problem is that I'm going backwards in development. Fuel, oxygen, and ammo cost money, and I'm just expending all three with no real payoff. (I suppose if I eventually just run out of everything, I can start a new party and outfit it with this party's notes.) At the same time, I'm not getting anywhere with character development, since the MegaTraveller system doesn't have experience points or levels. All I can do is hope that I'll occasionally increase a level in "laser pistols" or my other various skills.

The tone of this review probably conveys how lackluster I feel about the game. Unfortunately, Hard Nova doesn't strike me as any better, so I might reach further down the list to find something more addictive to play in between MegaTraveller sessions.