MegaTraveller: Won! (with Final Rating)

 

MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy

United States

Paragon Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS; 1991 for Amiga, Atari ST
Date Started: 22 December 2014

Date Ended: 21 January 2015

Total Hours: 28

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 34
Ranking at Time of Posting: 109/169 (64%)
Ranking at Game #458: 320/458 (70%)

Well, what a weird little game. After spending about 20 hours on gambling, bounty-hunting, and trading to amass my "Jump 2" drive bank, I only had about 3 more game hours before winning. The plot and quests were staggeringly lame, consisting of 3 fetch quests and a final battle. Specifically, I had to:

• Finish exploring the base on Neaera to find Arik. Showing him Lenara's half of the Imperial Seal got me his half and a quest to get his "decoding key" from a friend on Yres.

His reaction if you approach him without the seal in the hands of the first character.

• Travel to Yres and show the full Imperial Seal to a hotel clerk to get the decoding key.

• Travel to Akarates to give the decoding key to Lenara (glad she made it out of the game-opening bar okay) and get the final quest to kill Konrad Kiefer, along with a passkey to the warehouse where he's hiding on Efate.

• Return to Efate, the opening planet, and storm the warehouse.

Getting the final mission.

None of these quests involved anything more interesting than landing on a planet and hunting around for the right nearby building. The backstory, which I described in the first post as "as intriguing as anything I can remember" turned into absolute nonsense--essentially just an easily-replaceable framing story for a game that's mostly about logistics and mechanics. Kiefer was hiding in a warehouse 10 steps from the opening screen, and the only thing stopping me from getting to him was a key? And why don't these agents just travel to each other? If Lenara knows where Kiefer is, why doesn't she just instruct Imperial forces to bomb it off the map? What does this group really need us for? Not to mention that the titular Zhodani don't show up in the game at all.

The final battle was difficult, and I suppose I could have done a better job preparing for it with side-quests to increase my funds, training, and armaments. There were about 8 thugs wandering around a large room, protecting the doorway to Kiefer. I took them out one-by-one, but with quite a bit of reloading and retreating for healing.

Carnage and destruction lie behind me as I blow apart the door with a demolition charge.

Kiefer himself wasn't very hard.

Tough talk from a guy facing 5-on-1 odds.

I beat him?! He is destroyed.

Once he was dead, the game immediately cut to an awards ceremony in which Strephon, the Emperor of the Third Imperium, gave the party an "Imperial Certificate of Achievement." Three screens of text awkwardly recapped the game's plot . . .

Do we really have to hear about the decoding keys again? I just did that 20 minutes ago!

. . . and the game mysteriously gave me a code to write down for no reason that I could discern.

For god's sake, someone tell me what this means.

If nothing else, the endgame gave me the pleasure of imagining my five characters leaving the awards ceremony clutching paper certificates printed on some template from OfficeDepot rather than the riches and titles they expected.

What's particularly staggering about MegaTraveller is how much of the game is simply unused. The main quest only takes you to 3 of the 8 systems. Some of the planets have caves--essentially the game's "dungeons"--none of which are necessary. This includes a long maze on the planet Sino, a planet I never visited in a system I never visited, which contains very deadly creatures guarding a bunch of treasures whose combined value is worth about 4 trade missions.

Wandering around an optional "dungeon."

Even in the systems that are used, most of the planets aren't, and even on the planets that are, most of the territory isn't. My visits to Yres and Akarates involved simply walking from the starport to a nearby building when there were screens and screens of the planet to explore. Some planets had areas only visitable by gravity vehicles or watercraft--just no incentive to actually visit those areas.

Space combat is also entirely unnecessary. It never comes up as a plot point. You only engage in it if you want to earn your money through pirating. I played around with it, but it seemed extraordinarily basic--switch between the two gun turret views, "target," and "fire."

Attacking an innocent ship.

Finally--and this is the most damning aspect of the game--skills seem unnecessary. Of the 82 skills, the manual explicitly says that 25 are unused in MegaTraveller 1, leaving 57 that are supposedly useful. As far as I can tell, I got use out of exactly two of them: "laser weapons" and "gambling." I grant that some of the other skills would have come in handy if I'd made different weapon and armor selections--skills like "assault rifle," "energy weapons," "brawling," and "sword"--and others would have come in handy if combat had been harder and I'd been less willing to reload (e.g., "battle dress," "tactics").

What mystifies me more is the host of skills that seem like they ought to have done something, but for which I couldn't detect anything. For instance, characters without the "pilot" or "navigation" skills are perfectly capable of flying the ship; characters with no "ATV" or "grav vehicle" skills don't seem to have any problem operating those vehicles; and characters with no "medical" or "communications" skills can still operate those stations on the ship. "Trader" doesn't seem to affect buying and selling prices, and none of the interpersonal skills seem to affect interaction with NPCs. If characters with those skills are somehow better at the tasks than the others (perhaps someone with "navigation" makes the ship use less fuel and "computer" makes the programs load faster?), it's extremely subtle and ultimately a non-issue in gameplay.

Skill seems to have no bearing on who can use a medkit or how much it heals.

Having said all of that, you can detect the foundations of a much better game beneath all of this rubble. That 5/8 of the systems are unused in the main quest isn't necessarily a bad thing; after all, most of the locations in Skyrim, Baldur's Gate, or Fallout 3 aren't really "necessary," either. If these planets had been more interesting, with more NPCs to talk to, more lore to discover, and side-quests that involved something more than finding an item in one place and selling it in another, the result would be a reasonably good sandbox game. If the main plot had required a different variety of skills and the combat had been harder and more interesting, and the rewards had been more balanced, the player would have had a reason to do all of the side-quests to pay for better equipment and skill-development. The developers spent a lot of time on mechanics but didn't integrate them into a sensible, cohesive, balanced game.

I expect it to perform in the low 30s in a GIMLET, but let's see:

1. Game World. The background of the universe, drawn from the pen-and-paper Traveller RPG, is complex and interesting. It just doesn't translate well to the CRPG itself. It acts primarily as a framing story for a set of mechanics that could have been transferred to just about any story. The titular Zhodani Conspiracy is pretty pathetic, and the Zhodani themselves never appear.

There are maddening hints at a better game if the developers had simply had more time and technology. Most of the lore in the game comes not from NPC discussions but rather nuggets of information that you buy for $2,000 each at special shops. For instance, one discussed a civil war in progress on Yres, which explained why I kept getting randomly shelled as I wandered around the city. This could have been more interesting if there was anything to do with it. Score: 4.

There is an explanation for these craters and bodies; it's just not very interesting or helpful.

2. Character Creation and Development. A great creation system--one of the best I've ever experienced--undermined by almost no character development after creation and a lack of use of the skills, making all the development a waste of time. The only way to increase skills after the character creation process is to pay around $40,000 per point. Again, it's an issue of balance. If skills were more useful, training cost a bit less, and rewards from miscellaneous side quests were a bit higher, there would be more incentive to spend time on skill development. As it is, you can pretty much win the game with the starting party.

Aside from skills, none of the other aspects of the character's background--in particular, branch of service and rank--seem to affect the game at all. Score: 4.

3. NPC Interaction. For all the random NPCs wandering around, interaction is pretty pathetic. Most of them just say, "Greetings, Traveller!" Others tell you to bring them various items for a reward. Only a couple have anything to say relative to the plot or game world, and none of them offer dialogue options. I found maybe two opportunities to use the "bribe" skill and no place to use all the other interpersonal skills--"leadership," "carousing," "interview"--that the manual insists are important. Score: 3.

I forgot to mention this. On some planets, you get stopped for an "illegal weapons" search. What's "illegal" differs from place to place; sometimes my laser weapons were confiscated; sometimes they weren't. But I never saw any negative consequence to just saying "no" to the search. Imagine if the TSA worked that way.

4. Encounters & Foes. There are really no non-combat encounters, and the selection of enemies is limited and boring, mostly consisting of interchangeable thugs in gray combat suits. None of them seem to have particular strengths and weaknesses. Score: 2.

5. Magic and Combat. Ground combat is mostly boring. You simply order your characters to fire at an enemy and the two groups exchange shots until someone is dead. I guess it was even worse in an earlier version of the game (I'm playing 3.0) when there was no option to pause to issue orders, and essentially you could only control one of your characters at a time.

Ground combat does probably have more tactics than I actually used. For instance, I never did much with grenades, even though they would have been helpful on clusters of enemies. There are some considerations with terrain and character placement that could have made a difference. If the battles had been harder (or, in any event, less random), I might have been inspired to explore these options further.

Giving orders in the penultimate battle. Technically, I could be hiding my characters behind these objects, but it's more trouble than it's worth.

Because it wasn't necessary to the game, I simply didn't explore space combat much. It has some interesting ideas, with a variety of laser and missile weapons to buy and a variety of programs that you can purchase and run to increase ship maneuverability, defenses, and weapon effectiveness. In my few attempts at it, nothing really gripped me about the mechanic, though. Score: 4.

6. Equipment. Like many things in MegaTraveller, equipment is solid in concept, flawed in execution. There is a lot of stuff to buy and use, including weapons and armor, medkits, grenades, demolition charges, vacuum suits and helmets, spare oxygen tanks, electric torches and lanterns, and various quest items. There just isn't much reason to buy them.

Early in the game, I bought everyone the best level of vacuum suit, which also provides decent armor protection, at $9,800 each. The next level of armor, "combat armor," costs $122,500 each, so I never bothered to go there. Again--and I know I keep repeating myself--if combat had been harder, the armor less expensive, and the quest rewards more lucrative, there would have been a much greater incentive to continually upgrade equipment. Score: 4.

Some of the items I can sell.

            
7. Economy. This one category encapsulates the game's entire raison d'etre and almost everything wrong with it. The economy in MegaTraveller plays a huge role. It's key to the main plot--the first step is to acquire $2 million for the "Jump 2" drive--and it's the only real mechanism of character development, both in terms of equipment and purchasing new skills. You constantly need to resupply ammunition, fuel, and healing (if you don't want to waste a lot of time in the ship's sick bay). It's the driving force behind all of the side quests as well.

On the surface, the economy has everything I like in an RPG: lots of ways to make money, lots of ways to spend it, never a time when you can just ignore it. It's just that the balance is horribly off. When a single reload of "Laser 12" ammo costs almost $20,000, it's hard to get excited about a side quest that offers a $15,000 reward. When you can make almost $60,000 flying back and forth between Efate and Louzy in less than 10 minutes, why would you spend 20 minutes flying a "space race" between three planets for $10,000? When the difference between an adequate combat suit and a great one is $113,000, are you really going to spend a lot of time grinding for that extra cash?

With a few tweaks in rewards and costs, the economy could have been much better-balanced, which would have changed the nature of the game entirely, making the side quests more of a necessity than an option. In particular, I would have removed the trading mechanic entirely (or made the prices more variable) and made the "Jump 2" drive cost a lot less. Score: 5.
                    
8. Quests. The game has a multi-stage main quest with no options or alternate outcomes and a pretty pathetic series of events. There are side quests--still oddly rare in the era--but almost all of them are fetch quests with such small rewards that they're hardly worth the time. The exception is bounty-hunting, which is both lucrative and somewhat fun. Score: 3. 
                
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Nothing here is going to win any awards. The graphics are VGA but look EGA and haven't really advanced beyond games like 2400 A.D. from several years prior. The NPC portraits look simply awful. The sound consists primarily of an annoying rat-tat with every footstep and a blasting noise during combat. I played with the sound off. The interface is generally okay. I like that it supports a mouse without (usually) requiring it. Some of the inventory-related activities, like dropping an item or transferring an item to another character, are clunky and non-intuitive, and it's actually quite easy to drop an item without realizing it (if it's the active object when you hit ESC to leave the inventory screen). Score: 2.

Even not considering the hair, this is the ugliest NPC portrait in history.

                  
10. Gameplay. As a quasi-sandbox game, gameplay is mostly non-linear, allowing the player to explore the systems in any order and do whatever he wants to achieve the first step of the main quest. But since there's so little of interest in the universe--basically just retrieving objects for rewards--it's hard to regard the non-linearity as a major advantage or to call the game "replayable" because of it. The difficulty is moderate, which ends up hurting the game, as it makes so many of the mechanics unnecessary. The pacing is way off, with the first 4/5 made up of boring grinding and the last fifth a quick flurry of fetch quests. Score: 3.

That gives us a final score of 34, right about where I expected it.

I'm tempted to give the game some bonus points for a few of its innovative ideas, like being able to refuel a ship from gas giants, or the mechanics of spaceflight, in which Newtonian physics prevent easy turning, gravity wells of planets can capture you and throw you off course, and an inattentive player can easily get sucked into a sun. But I'd just have to take them away again for its bugs (my fifth character never did fire his weapon) and dumb gameplay decisions, like starting the party in the middle of a hopeless combat. Thus, we'll leave things as they are.

                    
Wow, did this game get polarized reviews. The best seems to come from the always-charitable Dragon, which offered its modal score of 5/5 and praised how well it followed the rules of the tabletop Traveller (ahem, Gaguum?) and designated it "one of the best science-fiction role-playing games ever for the computer."
                 
Much as we're used to high praise from Dragon, we're equally accustomed to reviews from Amiga magazines in which the reviewer seems to have never played an RPG before. From the July 1991 Amiga Computing, we learn that MegaTraveller 1 is--I'm not making this up--"undoubtedly the best ever computer RPG" just before the reviewer goes on to describe an experience that sounds more frustrating than fun. In the June 1991 Amiga Power, our old friend Stuart Campbell, who gave Secret of the Silver Blades 8/100, opines that "if you took the Pacific Ocean, stacked another Pacific Ocean on top of it, and then attached two more Pacific Oceans to either end, it wouldn't be quite as deep as MegaTraveller 1" and concludes that "the attention to detail is almost breathtaking, and if there's been a game with more to do in it than this one, I haven't seen it." I'm tempted to suggest that Mr. Campbell therefore hasn't seen the last three Ultima titles, either of the two Starflights, or any of the Gold Box games, but we know he's seen at least one of those.

Sanity comes from the June 1991 ACE (combat "irritatingly difficult to control"; mechanics "serve to slow down the action rather than generate excitement"), pretty much all the German Amiga and Atari ST magazines (ratings in the 50s out of 100), and Computer Gaming World. Back in the 1980s, when CGW was pretty much the only show in town, I thought my own opinions were widely divergent from those of Scorpia and the other reviewers. Now that we're in the 1990s and puerile gaming magazines like Amiga Power are springing up everywhere, CGW's coverage always seems like a refreshing oasis of reason. In the November 1990 issue, L.S. Lichtman offers a fair and sober review of the mechanics, drawing from some previous experience with the tabletop Traveller. He indicates that fans of the RPG will be both pleased and disappointed with what did and didn't make it into the computer version. He praises the game for simplifying the character creation process (while still leaving it interesting) and extensive manual but criticizes the combat system and issues with the economy, ultimately labeling it an "unfinished product" and "seriously flawed" while still praising its "variety of activities and natural feel to the adventuring that it offers." In 1996, the magazine included the game on its list of "50 worst games" of all time.

Paragon never did have a decent track record with RPGs, and I'm curious how they managed to get the rights to Traveller and other RPGs in the first place. (By contrast, SSI and D&D were a natural pairing.) Their only previous offerings were the nonsensical Alien Fires: 2199 AD (1986) and Wizard Wars (1988), neither of which exemplified a good RPG. Now, suddenly in 1990 and 1991, they got this agreement with Games Designers' Workshop, and issued games based on MegaTraveller, Space: 1889, and Twilight: 2000.
     
The project lead for MegaTraveller was Jane Yeager, and this is the only game on which I can find her credited in such a role; all her other credits include art design and direction. We've seen her work before on DarkSpyre (which, artistically, bears a passing resemblance to MegaTraveller) and will again on Dusk of the Gods (1991), The Summoning (1992), Dungeon Hack (1993), Veil of Darkness (1993), Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994), Menzoberranzan (1994), and Anvil of Dawn (1995), before she leaves the field and turns to computer education and web site development.

Most of Yeager's later work was at DreamForge, which was co-founded by her co-designer on MegaTraveller, Christopher Straka. This is the first game on which he's credited for "design," but he went on to become the lead designer on almost all the titles above, plus Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War (1999), his last credited game.
                   
Next year, we'll see MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients, which everyone seems to think is much better, likely because it involved the active participation of Marc Miller, co-founder of GDW and co-developer of the tabletop Traveller. Also, it looks like primary game design was taken over by F. J. Lennon, who wrote the manual for MegaTraveller 1--arguably the best part of the game.

The 143-page manual provides a solid intro to the Traveller tabletop RPG, not just this game's mechanics.

                       
I am sick to death of 1990 games that don't crack the 30s in the GIMLET. When I designed the scale, I really thought that the average game would be in the 50s or 60s by now. In my entire last year of blogging, there have been only a handful of really good games--Ultima VI, Quest for Glory II, Secret of the Silver Blades, maybe Lord of the Rings--and a bunch of mediocre offerings that feel like throwbacks to 1986. The future doesn't look any brighter, and soon we have to deal with Space: 1889, yet another science-fiction RPG from Paragon that's based on a tabletop game. Maker's breath, will I be happy to see 1990 in the rear-view mirror. 
               
Hard Nova, written by the same person who thought "Malcolm Trandle" and "The Key of Thor" were good ideas, is next. Yay.

*****

Further reading: My coverage of the sequel, MegaTraveller 2, begins here. Paragon's other GDW-based games includes Space 1889.