MegaTraveller 2: Won!

The Duke of Rhylanor is a little excited.

      

Well, I said I'd do it in one more session, and I did. But man, did it take a long time. And I mostly just pursued the main quest after the last entry. I don't think I completed a single side quest.

As we discussed, side quests are only necessary for the money they offer. By the end of my last entry, my financial situation was already pretty good, and pretty soon into this session, any monetary woes disappeared forever.

First, I got sick of my scout ship's limited travel capacity (just one sector at a time), plus I was getting destroyed in every space combat--which can occur randomly every time you arrive at or leave a planet. I sold the ship for $1.5 million, which would have been enough to keep me going until the end on its own.

       

This happens a lot.

      

That amount was supplemented by the facts that a) apparently, I'd been taking photographs of every Ancients ruin I visited; and b) Trow Backett back on Rhylanor would buy them for $150,000 apiece. That was another $750,000 that I pocketed.

       

You really need to learn to lowball. I would have taken $5,000.

      

Then, not so long afterwards, I discovered that some of the Ancients artifacts I'd been collecting were capable of delaying (though not ending) the threat of the slime spreading across Rhylanor. Between a "stasis ray," a "disintegrator," and a "pocket disk," I reduced enough of the threat that the government on Rhylanor paid me $7 million! Apparently, I could have found something called a "force dome" that would have stalled the slime even further and netted me more money.

      

And the math actually works out.

      

When I sold my ship, I had intended to swear off my own space travel and just use commercial and charter travel. But now that I was nearing $10 million, I figured I'd buy a far trader and outfit it with the best weapons that I could. After all, it only took half my money, and it would let me experience a side of the game I'd been ignoring.

I haven't talked much about space travel. The game's 117 planets are dispersed across a map of about 320 hexagons, organized into four "subsectors." The dispersal is not even. Most planets are adjacent to other planets, but some are isolated with several empty hexes between them.

The "scout ship" that I started the game with is only capable of jumping from one hex to an adjacent hex. Upon arrival, I either need to land on the planet to refuel or hope the system has a gas giant, where I can refuel for free. Since the whole process of boarding the ship, assigning crew locations, taking off, jumping, landing, and buying fuel takes about a billion mouse clicks, trying to get anywhere in my scout ship was just frustrating. Fuel prices cost about as much as paying for commercial travel anyway. And if you accidentally jump to a system with no starport or gas giant, you have to pay a ton of money to have the ship towed back to a system with a port. It just wasn't worth it, so I sold the ship.

     

"Jumping" from one planet to another.

      

But a "far trader" has engines that allow jumping two hexes at a time. Every system in the game is reachable that way (though sometimes via a round-about route). I figured that might improve in speed upon commercial or charter travel. Plus, charter travel to some planets is so expensive ($300,000 or more, with my low negotiating skill), that I still had a vague worry about running out of money eventually.

I won my first combat with my new trader. There isn't much to do in combat. Your crew automatically assigns itself to various stations, including guns, based on their skills. You just hit "target" and "attack" and watch as the ships fire at each other. You can't move, even.

        

Watching the battle take place.

      

After battle, you have the option to loot the enemy ship. I got so much in one haul that I can see why some people prioritize piracy in this game.

       

Is it really "pirating" if the ship attacked me first?

       

But I only had the far trader for about an hour of game time. At one point, I visited the planet Ylaven because my notes said there would be an Ancients site there. I didn't find a site, but when I stopped at the system's gas giant to refuel, I did find an abandoned Ancients ship.

      

This was lucky.

      

In a series of text screens, the game described how my party boarded and used some fuel cores we'd discovered at another site to re-activate the ship. It became ours. The Ancients ship is capable of jumping four hexagons at a time and doesn't require fuel. It also has its own special weapons that can't be modified or supplemented. Traveling with this ship meant that I didn't even need to land between systems and thus became much faster than any other form of travel.

Despite my low skill in ship's guns, I never lost a fight with the Ancients ship. I don't even think I took any damage. With no more need for money at all, except paltry amounts to travel between cities on a single planet, the game largely became a race to the end of the plot at this point.

      

I'm not even sure I want t know what's happening with this ship.

      

As I wrote several entries ago, MegaTraveller 2 is basically one huge treasure hunt as you follow clues from one system to another. But being an open-world game, it's also non-linear and occasionally rewards random exploration. If you lose a quest thread somewhere, you may be able to pick it up by visiting a random planet. I made it a practice to explore at least the startown of each new planet I stopped at, and I took pains to route myself through unexplored systems when possible. 

The developers tried hard to make each planet seem unique. The map in the manual has codes for a bunch of systems, and these codes tell you the type of starport you can expect to find there, its size, its atmosphere, its hydrographics, its government type, its law level, its technology level, and its population. Computers that you can access in the naval and scout bases and the Traveler's Aid Society (I eventually bought a membership) tell you even more about the political and social situations there. I found that some of the computer entries even gave hints about quests or the likelihood that the system has Ancients ruins.

       

TAS computers offer back stories and hints about plot points.

       

I appreciate the effort, but it doesn't quite work. If money was harder to come by, you might study the computer entries for hours looking for planets with solid opportunities. You might use the data to plot trade routes. If combat was harder, you might be wary about visiting a high-law level planet with no naval or scout base, as you're almost certain to have your weapons confiscated. But from the outset of the game, there's almost no reason not to move freely from world to world, meaning that all this intelligence is mostly wasted. Plus, the uniformity of each city map ruins any sense of uniqueness.

       

A better game would have made more use of these variables.

      

You'll recall that there are two branches of the main quest: trying to stop the slime released from the Ancients site from taking over Rhylanor, and figuring out which megacorporation was behind the sabotage in the first place.

The Ancients part of the quest involved tracking down each member of the Ancients Collectors Society to get their wisdom and visiting each Ancients site to find artifacts and "coyns." The ACS members helped identify which planets had Ancients ruins, but random use of the "Locater" device on every planet helped identify a few more. Early in the game, I thought that I had to visit every site and collect every device, but I guess that's not the case. All of the artifacts but one are optional, I think--although the others are responsible for that $7 million. You only need 36 "coyns" to win the game, and there are more than that in the galaxy. I ended the game with 41.

      

We explored a huge set of caverns for 20 minutes to find this one coyn.

       

The Ancients sites are interesting. Each one has a slightly different look and feel, and as you explore each one, the game offers verbose cut scene text to describe them. Here's what I found on Gerome, for instance:

        

In the dark, murky cavern, you struggle to negotiate the craggy corridors. One of the passages seems to have a pale light source at its end. You venture down the tunnel, taking tiny steps, and struggle to maintain your balance on the damp rocks beneath you.

At the end of the tunnel, you stumble upon an incredible discovery: a deserted space vessel. Lying half-buried in a dry, crusty bed of mud is the wreckage of a fantastic ship like no other you've ever seen. A transparent, illuminating glow bathes the craft in a soothing array of soft colors. Only one race could have constructed a ship this magnificent: the Ancients. After photographing the Ancient vessel, you gaze at the remains of the shipwreck in wonder and feel a twinge of nervous excitement as you prepare to board the vessel.

      

Another nicely-written and illustrated introduction to an Ancients site that had, I think, a single coyn.

     

These passages are all very well-written but again, mostly wasted. The actual "exploration" of the ruins involves wandering around cavernous areas with no combats and no encounters, only to find a single item or two on the floor.

The plot occasionally got silly, too. On the wreck of the ship described above, I activated a computer and read some logs from the long-dead Ancients captain. The logs mentioned a few planets with ruins that I didn't know about, and they described the war beginning between Grandfather and his children. At first, they're confident: "It is one against 420." Later, they become panicky as they realize "Grandfather has pinched off his own pocket universe" and thus "we can't fight him." I'm not saying it's horrible, but I didn't expect the ancient legend of "Grandfather" and his children to be literally true. Plus, I had to track down an Ancients expert to translate some writing on a shield, but somehow my characters are able to interpret the writing on the computer? To use the computer in the first place? It took me 9 hours to emulate Gates of Delirium in MAME, and that system is only 30 years old, not 300,000. Why are the planets named the same thing now as they were 300 millennia ago?

         

You're the only sentient beings in the galaxy. Who are you sending that "mayday" to?

     

On the corporate side of things, I started to run into a wall. Representatives refused to speak to me, or refused to tell the truth, and my "interrogate" skill wasn't good enough to crack them. Very late in the game, I found some "truth serum" at an abandoned university. It apparently was placed in the game to compensate for weak "interrogation," but I found it too late to do much good. I basically only used it on the secretary of Lie Ioccocco, the president of Tukera Lines, to get her to tell me where I could find him. 

     

Ms. Chan illustrates the value of the initialism "TMI."

     

But when I visited him, he simply said that he couldn't believe anyone in his company would be responsible for internal sabotage, and he offered me $250,000 to prove otherwise.

     

For the record, the real Lee Iacocca was the son of an Italian hot dog vendor who started at Ford as an engineer and worked his way up to president via good ideas and hard work. Sometimes, I don't know what this game thinks it's satirizing.

     

I had expected the Imperiallines thread to lead somewhere. Two representatives had told me that the company was up to no good, and they recommended that I search the offices of a representative named Gryfythh on Junidy. I did that, and I found a disk that outlined Gryfythhs's plan to attack a Naasirka facility on Aramax. I traveled there but couldn't find the facility in question, and otherwise couldn't find anyone to give the disk to. In any event, this sub-plot didn't seem to be related to the "real" conspiracy.

It was blind luck that let me pick up the path again. I had a layover on Pscias between stops and decided to explore the starport. I entered a building and suddenly found myself in combat with 5 guys. In the middle of combat, incidentally, this appears on my screen:

     

Where has this been all game?

      

For the first and only time in the game, one of my characters spontaneously acquired a skill through continual use of an item. It didn't happen with any of the other items that I'd asked the characters to use, and I never got any more training opportunities at the training facilities. Honestly, the game's approach to character development just makes no sense. It's either bugged or horribly broken from the outset. In nearly 40 hours of constantly using various types of weapon, armor, vehicles, and interpersonal skills, I was able to train once in "ATVs" and spontaneously generated a level on "Swords." Unbelievable.

After I killed them, I interrogated their leader, a guy named Grazer, in an adjacent room. He admitted that he was one of the two suspicious characters fleeing the Ancients site on Rhylanor, having activated the slime. He said he had been hired by a Tukera representative named Jayef Nonnel, who my notes said should be on Treece but I was unable to find him in the first visit.

     

I filmed two people fleeing. I don't think we ever found out who the second guy was.

      

Here, things got interesting. Grazer offered to let me join the conspiracy. Just for fun, I said yes, and he gave me a quest to go kill Trow Backett. I made an alternate save at this point, reloaded, and said no. He battled me and I killed him.

      

An intriguing alternate path opens.

      

Grazer had started his speech with "So, Cruxlic spilled his guts?" I didn't know who that was. Later, looking at a walkthrough, I see that I was supposed to have interrogated one of the random thugs attacking me and discovered he was recently released from the Huderu prison world. I would have then gone to Huderu, interrogated the warden, and learned about Grazer.

On to Treece. I found Jayeff Nonnel in the Tukera offices. I didn't even have to use interrogation or the truth serum: he admitted to everything. He had somehow learned how to activate the Ancients site on Rhylanor, and he hired Grazer to do it. He broke into Ashkashur's office and issued the order for the Vemene agents to kill me. And he partnered with Cruxlic to recruit prisoners as hit men.

       

You're destroying a whole planet over inter-office politics?

     

He did all of this because of a rivalry with fellow Tukera representative Roald Bulolo, based on Rhylanor. He wanted to "teach him a lesson about power and control . . . to destroy everything and then reroute all trade to the Lanth subsector."

Okay. I mean, I'm glad I solved the conspiracy, but wow was it anticlimactic. And talk about overkill! That would be like some Microsoft executive from Cambridge collaborating with ISIS to nuke Seattle so that the headquarters would be moved to the east coast and he'd have better promotional opportunities.

     

Looting the body from what turned out to be the game's final battle.

     

In any event, he attacked me and I killed him. On his body were a couple of disks outlining his nefarious plans, plus an Ancient "string of pearls" and a journal that mentioned an "Ancient site where challenges await adventurers." I already knew from the shield translation that such a site existed in the Regina subsector, and I knew from visiting Regina itself that there was a site I couldn't access before.

The site was interesting. It consisted of a series of pearly domes with teleporters at each end of the room. The only "challenge" was a simple number puzzle in which I had to finish a sequence beginning 1-9-2-8. Don't overthink it. It's a count-up followed by a count-down. "3-7-4-6" was the answer.

     

The visuals here were pretty cool.

     

The site offered a "Locater Plug" which fit into my Locater, but I never really figured out what it was for. More importantly, it delivered enough coyns (7) to give me the full set I needed. When I tried to use the "coyns," I was explicitly told that I should use them on Shionthy, so that's where I went. I used them again right out of starport, and they opened a "rip through the fabric of time and space" which led my party to "a magnificent city."

     

I hope the writer had a per-world contract.

      

I'm tempted to transcribe everything that followed, but it would take forever. (The game got very verbose in its final hours.) To summarize, the party entered the portal. We started to marvel at the domed city when we were suddenly paralyzed by some Droyne (Ancients) warrior robots and taken to Grandfather, who was dressed in "an awesome suit of armor," carried a majestic staff, and had "black eyes like an endless abyss, filled with the answers to every question and the solution to every problem that ever existed."

     

"Grandfather, what do women want?"

      

Grandfather was cool. After hearing our story, he explained that he sealed himself in the pocket universe after the destructive war with his offspring. He was amused when he heard about Rhylanor. The slime isn't supposed to destroy the planet, he said; rather, it was a terraforming substance that would restore life and water to the barren landscape. He agreed, of course, that it needed to be stopped before it covered existing cities. He gave us a terraforming activation device and sent us back through the portal, promising that he wouldn't be interfering with the universe again.

We returned to Rhylanor. Before activating the device, we visited Lord Hollis and gave him the disk outlining the Tukera conspiracy. He gave me a pass to see the Duke of Rhylanor, who in turn rewarded me with $1 million credits--not that money was any good at this point.

     

Yes, it was an inside job. Again.

     

And so we rented a gravity vehicle, left the city, and flew to the edge of the slime's spread.

     

Just note that the planet appears to have water and trees already . . .

      

We walked up to it and activated the terraforming gun. The slime "vaporized, leaving fresh soil and lush, green grass and vegetation beneath it." A continued "domino effect" finished transforming the planet into a "lush paradise." I have to admit with some embarrassment that I don't remember Rhylanor being described as dry and barren before. Maybe it was during the opening sequence.

      

If the whole planet gets terraformed anyway, why did the slime ever need to cover the planet?

         

The endgame video commenced. The party met with the Duke again, who had a really long speech, presented for some reason as scrolling text on the bottom of the screen:

        

On behalf of the Royal Family and the citizens of Rhylanor, and on behalf of the Imperium and all of the megacorporations that conduct business on this great world, I, Duke Leonard, grant you Knighthood in the Honorable Order of the Arrow.

Though their reward is monumental, no amount of money can repay the debt we owe them. Our homes, our lives, and our futures are secure thanks to the efforts of these worthy individuals. These courageous and cunning knights have not only saved Rhylanor, they have transformed it into a lush, thriving world. There is now fresh soil where before there were scorching deserts. Rocky, barren wasteland is now dense, deciduous forests and vibrant green grasses. Dry river and lake beds are now filled with clear, life-sustaining water. In the amazing rebirth of our planet, new industries will emerge, agricultural enterprises will flourish, exotic species of animals will appear, and we will all take part in a cultural renaissance that will change our lives forever.

Thanks to these adventurous knights, the secret of the Ancients has been solved. The Ancients never meant to destroy Rhylanor. Instead, they sought to transform our world and make it a better place for all. Sadly, the Ancients never saw the results of their work, but hopefully there's a spark of their brilliance still left in the galaxy, somewhere. Maybe, the Ancients still exist in another time and space, and maybe they're looking upon our newfound abundance with pride.

Here's to Rhylanor! Here's to the Ancients! And here's to the greatest adventurers of all!

       

The party seems to be one member shy as we approach the Duke.

       

You may recall that the supposed reward for solving the crisis was half a billion credits. Well, after the speech, we got a scroll proclaiming that we were awarded $5 million credits, with the remaining $495 million to be paid "as Rhylanor begins to rebuild from the destruction." That's reasonably funny. I wouldn't bet on my party ever seeing the balance of that reward.

     

It's good to know there's still parchment in the future.

     
The sequence ends with Kevin, the tour guide from the opening sequence, starting a new tour at the Rhylanor Ancients site, noting that since the last tour, "an amazing thing happened."

     

The face that bookends the adventure.

       

The game then dumped us back in Rhylanor Startown and let us keep playing. In a slightly better game, I'd be tempted. Of the 117 planets, I only visited 82. What's the story with Bevy on the fringes of the Rhylanor sector? How did I miss Paya right there in the middle? Is there anything else to discover on the prison planet of Huderu? What's happening on Celepina, where the an NPC captain told me that a visit from a Zhodani representative is under protest? What does the TAS computer mean when it says that Vanejen has an "unusual Vilani culture?"

    

You occasionally get hints from NPCs in space.

    

Unfortunately, with no character development, boring combat, and a tendency for side quests to play out either banal or goofy, the game doesn't quite justify further exploration. But it almost does. From this year, from this developer, that's a reasonably important accomplishment.

I may keep playing to see how the "evil" plot resolves, working with Grazer. If they actually programmed an alternate ending in which Rhylanor is destroyed, that would be pretty amazing. I also want to see what happens if we just wait out the clock. Thus, we'll save the summary and rating for a separate posting.

Time so far: 39 hours