Welcome to 2024, everyone.
I've been getting a lot of email questions about the future of "The CRPG Addict," with many people apparently seeing my unproductive fall as some kind of omen. I want to assure you all that nothing could be further from the truth. It was a challenging season for several reasons, but I'm still eager to get back into it, and you should see more material on Bloodstone tomorrow.
I confess that I've been doing a lot of off-blog gaming over the last week. Irene can't get enough of Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, and we managed to get through four or five scenarios of the latter over the week. I enjoy it, too, but man are those sessions long. I also bought her the adventure game Stray for Christmas, and we played that for the few hours it took to win, although I didn't like it very much.
Third, I finally decided to check out Starfield. I actually purchased and downloaded it back in October, but I didn't have any serious time to invest in it until the past week. Alas, as much as I usually like what Bethesda offers, I don't like this one. I may offer a longer entry on it when I get caught up on other material for my blog, but these are my observations for now:
- Ground combat is way too easy, but if you increase the difficulty to compensate, space combat becomes way too hard. I want to hear more about others' experiences with both styles of combat, as I find them extremely unexciting and I wonder if I'm missing something. They don't seem very tactical to me. Chemical boosters don't seem to make much difference despite what they promise. Grenades hardly do any damage. Mines are a waste of time because enemies don't come to you. I mostly just charge into battle and heal later.
- Companions have the worst AI since the 1980s.
- Procedural generation ruins the open-world experience. Wondering what you might find over the next hill is fundamentally different from knowing that the game will generate something for you over the next hill.
- I know that a lot of the abandoned outposts and whatnot are supposed to be left over from "The Colony Wars," but it still doesn't begin to make sense that there are that many such facilities on that many planets.
- So much time was invested in the outpost-building mechanics, and yet there's absolutely no reason to build any outposts, mostly because . . .
- There are no survival mechanics at all. Fuel isn't even any sort of consideration. It should have been an option for the player.
- For all the excitement that flying your own ship and fighting other ships is supposed to generate, you fundamentally don't fly anything at all. You just rotate a view window.
- I do like some of the world-building and lore, but it's very . . . bland? You've got a couple of factions and about 200 years of history, but nothing approaching the richness of, say, Mass Effect or even Bethesda's own Fallout games. Other than the immediate problem with the "Starborn," there are no real mysteries, conflicts, or complexity to the universe. You never hear much of anything from the most-interesting sounding faction, House Va'ruun. I assume they're being saved for an expansion.
- In contrast to the sometimes-interesting side quests, I have never been less invested in a game's main storyline. I found its conclusion idiotic--although I allow that there might be some complexities that I haven't had a chance to process.
My plan is to let it sit for a year or so and maybe give it another shot when the expansions come out, particularly if in them they offer some kind of survival mode. But in general, this was not, in my opinion, worth the delay to the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout title.
If you want to talk about the game in the comments, please ROT-13 anything to do with the main quest or conclusions to any of the major faction quests. Anything involving the opening 10-15 hours or overall mechanics can be discussed freely.
See you tomorrow as we get back on track with Bloodstone and Worlds of Legend.
Okay, but what about 'Starflight'?
ReplyDeleteEmbarrassing way to start the year.
DeleteStarflight and Starflight II were fantastic, fight me
DeleteYou're late to the party, Brad, Chet simply misspelled the title, but had corrected it before your post.
DeleteStarflight's great, no question about it...
At the risk of derailing your blog's nascent return...and obviously you already know this given it's on all the cool kids' best-of-2023 lists...but if you're looking for a triple-AAA modern RPG, you should drop Starfield and switch to Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 reverses the verdict of all your bullet points: great tactical combat, great companions, no procedural content, etc., etc.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's from Belgium. Haven't played it and I honestly don't like Divine Divinity at all (which also got a lot of GotY awards -at least in Belgium).
DeleteTo add to the above: Larian is the same publisher as Divine Divinity. Haven't played BG3 but gets a lot of praise.
DeleteI was just assuming he had gone for BG3. It's almost inconceivable to consider delaying it.
DeleteAgreed that Divine Divinity was not the most fantastic thing in the world. Original Sin on the other hand was really worth the play, and doesn't require too much lore knowledge from the previous games.
DeleteBaldur's Gate 3 is probably somewhere near my #5 favorite RPG ever, but even with a couple rabked above it,I have to admit, I don't see anything coming close to it in terms of presentation, unless someone else decides to spend a ton of money and several years in early access. Definitely one to play sooner rather than missing out by waiting for 2023 to roll around for the blog
DeleteBased on what I've heard this massive hype for the game seems ill-placed, but I'm curious if there's a reason against this. It seems like the usual modern overproduced title, with waifu/husbando bait characters, an extremely player-centric world that combined with the slick presentation makes the usual illusion that is the player's in-game choices disappear faster than it would in another game. Is the combat really that good, compared to say, Bastard Bonds, Jagged Alliance 2 or the Exile series?
DeleteI haven't played Baldur's Gate III, but I have played Larian's earlier RPG, Divinity: Original Sin. It's good. It's not perfect--the plot is a bunch of pantomime nonsense and there's a few unfortunate puzzles that devolve into pixel-hunting--but it's good. The combat is superb. The sequel, Original Sin 2, which I have not played as it doesn't have a Linux version, is even more highly regarded. I'm not surprised that Baldur's Gate III was such a hit.
DeletePlaying Starfield right after BG3 definitely didn't do it any favors.
DeleteI had played the first Original Sin and I found the combat absolutely excellent but plot and setting kind of meh. BG3 basically keeps the same combat, adapting it to DnD rules and it is set in a comfy familiar setting with much more interesting plot and characters. I don't want to rank it yet as it's still fresh and I wish to mull over it, but it definitely sits among the best of them for me.
The romance stuff is like 0.1% of the game, one can easily skip it and the game experience would not change a bit.
I also don't get what "overproduced" means, is having good production values a drawback? I do think that the effort spent on graphics and voice improves the experience a great deal.
I cannot say it influences negatively the availability of choices since it is one of the better AAA games I played in that regard.
Hi ! I played 210 hours of BG3 and I'm just before the final fight. For me this is in the top 3 of all cRPGs ever. The combat is great and is stays enjoyable throughout the game. (You might want to increase the challenge rating though). The character development also stays interesting (once you hit the level 12 maximum you can always re-spec your character and the NPC to try out different builds. And the gear upgrades stay interesting for people who like to try out different synergy builds) as well as the economy (I needed potions till the end). I also liked the story and the different set pieces and side quests. Also there is dozens of hours of content tailored to specific races, classes and decisions you take along the road, so it feels like a very reactive world. I did my first playthrough as a Githyanki sorcerer and I will play it a second time (once there is an extended edition) as a female drow cleric of Loth. And try to play as selfish/evil for once. I cannot recommend this game enough!
DeleteD:OS and Midnight Suns showed me that even when mechanics are really good, boring/annoying worldbuilding/stories make it much harder to stick with a game til the end.
DeleteInteresting, I must admit I wrote off earlier Larian games because I was under the impression they were Diablo-clones, a genre I had zero interest in.
Delete@Vince, not quite what I meant on either account. Baldur's Gate 2 had romance in it, but it wasn't waifubaiting. That is, taking advantage of modern fandom's tendencies to obsess over some characters. Though I didn't hear good things about the romance either, since apparently if you try to talk to them they instantly go all "Oh, might charname, your spear is the greatest I have ever see, come, let us do it by the side of the road."
Having a higher graphical fidelity means having higher standards for that fidelity. It might be 12 years since Bioware made the infamous skinwalker that was Miranda Lawson, but the lessons of the uncanny valley still don't seem to have crept in. Except now apparently when they do face models they seem to make an intentional hackjob of it for some reason.
I mean, I would expect it to have more choice than most AAA games of the past 15 years, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything, given that AAA is not a space where choice is valued.
>Though I didn't hear good things about the romance either, since apparently if you try to talk to them they instantly go all "Oh, might charname, your spear is the greatest I have ever see, come, let us do it by the side of the road."
DeleteI could tell you that's false/exaggerated, based on some already-fixed bugs that cause the romance to progress too fast. But what would be the point, seems you've already decided to hate game.
>Having a higher graphical fidelity means having higher standards for that fidelity. It might be 12 years since Bioware made the infamous skinwalker that was Miranda Lawson, but the lessons of the uncanny valley still don't seem to have crept in. Except now apparently when they do face models they seem to make an intentional hackjob of it for some reason.
I have no idea what your problems with the character models /graphics is. Did you actually look at the game, or is this all coming from some anti-Woke youtuber who makes videos about how western developers make women intentionally ugly?
I could tell you that's false/exaggerated, based on some already-fixed bugs that cause the romance to progress too fast.
DeleteWell, what's it like now?
But what would be the point, seems you've already decided to hate game.
You're looking at my statements the wrong way, though to be fair I started this off on the wrong foot. There have been a lot of games as hyped up as Baldur's Gate 3, as the next game candidate for the top 100 lists, and have been so completely forgotten by the next year. I believe some of them are titles Chet has reviewed on this blog. Often games with a high production value but nothing otherwise really special about them. Now if I truly already hated this game, I would take this hype, write it off as people who barely play RPGs getting distracted by shiny graphics and the bare minimum of interactivity, and forget about it until someone brought up that one weird Baldur's Gate sequel that was really popular for a hot minute, then disappeared. Not Dark Alliance, the one that was numbered for some reason. Instead I was curious enough to ask, rather than everyone's usual assumption that games they have no interest in have no merit.
I have no idea what your problems with the character models /graphics is.
I suggest looking up the uncanny valley and Miranda Lawson if you're unfamiliar with those, but I'll restate the issue more clearly. In Mass Effect 2, the character of Miranda used a face model, actress Yvonne Strahovski who also voiced the character. While they were never really that good at doing face models, it was noticeable at how off Miranda looked. How creepy and unearthly her face seemed. When you're doing humans you're always in danger of making that human look off if you're striving for realism, especially 3d models in motion; and you're in danger of it more the higher your standard is, something that this game very much is. It's concerning that more and more people don't seem to recognize such things, to the point they insult others who do.
But much like Mass Effect, it's only a goofy side issue that is only a poison cherry on the side. It's worth talking about but not really worth considering when playing a game except in particularly bad cases.
Did you actually look at the game, or is this all coming from some anti-Woke youtuber who makes videos about how western developers make women intentionally ugly?
I've seen pictures and video. Though frankly I would assume the same about anyone who came to the conclusion from watching a Youtuber. What kind of dumbass Youtuber isn't taking advantage of a visual medium to show his point about visual flaws in a video game? Unless they didn't change some of the models faces, then your point is moot. I'm guessing you like the new faces more, which is your prerogative, most would not. Tying into what I just said about the uncanny valley, there's nothing special about the west compared to the east, they both tend to be deep into it, even when they aren't screwing around with faces.
Morpheus, I don't like Larian, didn't like BG 3 in the 3 years of early access I paid to play with my brother, and even I can admit Baldur's Gate 3 is a masterpiece. The animations work well with the characters, especially for a crpg, and the companions are pretty well nuanced, coming off even better after comparing them to Bioware's last few releases
DeleteLarian have been so hit and miss that I'm wary about BG3. I loved DOS1 but not DOS2 , and if BG3 is "DOS2 with D&D rules" I'll pass
DeleteHope you have a great 2024, Addict.
ReplyDeleteLast year was an embarrassment of riches for RPG fans (granted, more for those into the eastern-style over the western-style) so I think everyone was less forgiving of Bethesda jank than usual. Lord knows Fallout 76 didn't do them any favors.
Looking forward to more Bloodstone talk in the near future, but don't worry if you run out of blogging material before you're through. I can appreciate how hard it must be to squeeze blood from a Bloodstone stone.
I'm loving both BG 3 and what little I've played of Rogue Trader. Would love other recommendations - what else came out in 2023 that's good?
DeleteBesides Diablo IV and the Cyberpunk DLC I can't think of too many more CRPGs that made the headlines last year. Many more like Rogue Trader that slipped in under the radar.
DeleteAs for "J"RPGs (that might not necessarily come from Japan) there were two Like a Dragons (formerly Yakuza), three Falcom "Legend of" RPGs, a mainline Final Fantasy, Sea of Stars (and the Star Ocean 2 remake on a nominally-related note), Octopath 2, and then there's Lies of P and Remnant II for those of a more Soulsian bent.
A game I've had my eye on too is Lunacid. It's built like a late-'90s 3D dungeon-crawler of the sort From used to make before they hit it big with Souls, which isn't an era I've seen too many Indies attempt to replicate. 2022's Dread Delusion is another like that, but more Elder Scrolls-y.
I can recommend Solasta: Crown of the Magister. A turn based D&D 5th. Ed. game with a very interested setting. Not as good as BG3 - very few non-combat encounters for example, but a really good combat system for an indy cRPG. The last DLC was released 2023, even though the main game is from 22. You should get all DLCs by the way to have the full selection of classes and races...
DeleteDread Delusion's still in early access, isn't it? It's interesting, but it's clearly trying to replicate the weirdness of Morrowind without as much thought as that game had. It's also more of a first-person metroidvania than a RPG. It's a respectable good without much special going for it. (combat is even a bit worse than Morrowind) It's not even necessarily the only game going for that late '90s style of RPG, the same company that published that also published Hand of Doom, and there are many more besides.
DeleteWrath of the Righteous got two more dlc expansions as well,with a third coming soon
DeleteI'd skip Wrath of the Righteous altogether and go back to Kingmaker, a more balanced game
Delete“ Procedural generation ruins the open-world experience. Wondering what you might find over the next hill is fundamentally different from knowing that the game will generate something for you over the next hill.”
ReplyDeleteHaven’t played Starfield so I’m not sure but I think you mean something more specific than procedural generation here, since the default implementation of that would still allow you to wonder what’s over the next hill (obviously there are versions of proc gen that would guarantee that whatever is over said hill is going to be boring but that’s not necessarily the case).
So is it that Starfield dynamically and predictably generates encounters for you that make it seem like you can just go in any direction and something will happen?
It's kind of hard to explain, but I know what he's getting at. It's like the difference between opening a present and getting a toy out of a gachapon. There's a certain pleasure in exploring _that specific hill_ and finding what there is to be found. Unless procgen is really well done, it can begin to feel like the actual terrain you're exploring is an abstraction for being fed random items, encounters, etc.
DeleteGachapon/gashapon -- I've learned a new word, and the new year has only just begun...!
DeleteI think procedural generation is so often either implemented poorly or done so in a way that cannot possibly meet the high expectations of the marketing attached to it (No Man's Sky comes to mind) that it has become a kind of stand-in meaning "boring random content." Which is unfortunate, since procedural generation itself is just a tool like any other, and when done well (for example, Dwarf Fortress) the results are impressive.
DeleteProcedural generation only ever seems to work when the game relies on content being random, like roguelikes and roguelites, or if that content is used as a base for something else. Morrowind, for instance, according to what I've heard had a randomized landmass at first before they started making the world. Making it the bulk of your game just makes your level designers seem lazy.
DeleteInterestingly, I don't think it was the first game to do the whole wide proc gen galaxy kind of game, even discounting No Man's Sky. A lot of games kept trying to do a Minecraft in space aesthetic, and there was the awful Starbound which also relied on the same tricks that Starfield does and similarly failed. One game even did the whole exploration thing alone, Noctis. I think it had a much better proc gen for its planets than other games, but it's been so long since I played it I can't quite tell you if that was true. It was fun, at least for a little while. Really captured the whole mood of being an alien explorer exploring a cosmos without life.
@badger2013 You picked exactly the two examples I had in my head.
DeleteElite had a procgen galaxy in 1984 and people love it (it's pretty much the Wizardry of space travel games).
DeleteThere is an old freeware game game called Noctis which had a whole galaxy including planted surfeaces proc gen. When No man's sky was announced it reminded me very to this game (it's very nishe so I couldn't understand the hype). I tried No man's sky this year and liked it quite a lot, maybe because there is now much variant and it rounds very stable and fast. But it's no rpg.
DeleteStarflight was also procedurally generated to create that many planets in that small of a space.
DeleteProcedural generation is a term that refers to creating a large amount of content from a small input source, according to some algorithm. In the case of Roguelikes, this is used to create unique map layouts every game, where the initial input is the seed for the random number generator (most likely the current time). For Starflight, the procedural generation was some set of parameters for each planet, which would be passed into a function that would do the work of creating the orbital view, and then when combined with the player's choice of landing coordinates would create the landed terrain. In this case things aren't different every time you play; the procedural generation meant that they needed to store only a tiny bit of data per-planet and rely on a generic function to turn that into this wide explorable planet.
The Elder Scrolls games have used both methods in their history. Arena goes full random terrain generation if you start walking outside the city, while Daggerfall used the static "generate a fuckton of data once, and always generate it the same" version to create its massive world with the large number of dungeons. As noted earlier, Morrowind was hand-placed, while Oblivion started to reintroduce it with things like the Speedtree technology (a piece of middleware that generates nice looking trees that look different from each other, but all within a given species).
Eventually we'll have AI generated game worlds that will rival handcrafted ones. It will require quite some time and work to train a good model, but the benefits are enormous.
DeleteI imagine there will be specialised providers who sell gameworld AI engines the same way that 3D/physics engines are sold. Perhaps even AI modules, with specialized models for certain styles, cities, landscape, etc.
I'm under the impression that relatively few CRPG developers have really delved into improving procedural generation, except in the roguelike genre. Normal CRPGs need additional content like plots and dialogues, where innovations are still needed.
DeleteFor example, the procedural level generation in Unexplored is pretty great (it generates levels that flow well and are interconnected by a few clues) and was designed by just one developer. ProcGen is easier when the level format consists of tiles on a grid, but realistic 3D worlds can also be built out of modules. I think that given some constraints, such as plot templates, procedural generation for stories and dialogue could reach a similar level.
I agree that AI, even just current-generation LLMs utilized well, probably is one possible method (not a necessary one) to get there. One approach could be for developers to procedurally build and auto-play-test thousands of levels / campaigns with the help of AI during development, ship the game with all these levels contained, and randomly select campaigns for the player. (Because running a huge AI on the player's device is not feasible and calling the AI via an API from the player's device is error-prone.)
This might get us to campaigns of a quality similar to Ultima Underworld or Baldur's Gate. I think that this is still relatively down-to-earth, I'm not talking about things like being able to talk about any topic with any NPC or even generating a game world according to the player's wishes on-the-fly.
Regarding the anticipation for what's over the next hill, a ProcGen game world can be more predictable and boring than a hand-made game world, especially if you come to expect that the next section will simply be a slight variation of a module that you've seen several times already. It's also less of a shared, authored experience.
DeleteBut aside from fostering shared anecdotes about players' specific experiences, ProcGen worlds can, in principle, also be less predictable and more exciting. What I like is the feeling of exploring a space that was not built for me by a designer and where I'm not being held by the designer's hand (or the designer's leash). Level designers usually arrange challenges so that they're nice and fair. You know that every situation you encounter is tailored for you to be able to cope with it. That's a bit boring to me. Procedural generation (and permadeath) can lead you (as long as you're not careful) into situations where you don't know whether it is even possible to survive, which is exciting.
Everything in a video game has to be created, either by a person or an algorithm. Of those two, only one actually understands what it's doing, or even what games and fun are.
DeleteThe push for AI is just to produce saleable material without having to pay people.
I might suggest that, depending on what you're going for, procgen might have the benefit of giving you just straight up MORE. There are some contexts (not all) where what you really want out of a game (or out of a part of a game) is just MORE. Even if your procgen worlds are usually middling or predictable, it could be beneficial to take advantage of the generator's ability to produce a dozen of them for every hand-crafted world. One thing that comes up a lot in open world games is an unfortunate sense of the world being open, but very sparse. When I think back to early RPGs that stuck with me, the ones with a few very well-crafted settings are great, but the ones that really knocked my socks off were the ones that were (or even just faked the illusion of being) just packed to the gills with STUFF. That always impressed me, back in the days when the technology mostly pushed games to be very spartan.
DeleteWether an AI understands what it's doing is more of a philosophical question and not that relevant for the final product if it can produce a result that you can't tell apart from a handcrafted world.
DeleteReplacing people and cutting costs is one area of application for AI, but if you're using it to replace procedurally generated worlds, you're just replacing a few programmers with more AI specialists/promt engineers. I can also see it as an AI assistent tool in editors, taking over the rote/repetitive stuff and leaving the fine tuning to a designer, similar to the way it is already used in programming. That would probably cut down on development time more than it would reduce the need for people.
“ Procedural generation ruins the open-world experience. Wondering what you might find over the next hill is fundamentally different from knowing that the game will generate something for you over the next hill.”
DeleteI love hiking, and I love seeing what's around the next corner. Nature is all procedurally created in a way, there's a set of variables and a set of rules that is constantly being used to mold those variables into the world that we know. We've already gotten to the point where procedural generation in games can be used to generate quite interesting places to explore. But it has to be used properly, and with humans helping things along to make the bits that aren't nature feel, well, natural.
-Joachim
Something I note in this conversation and especially relevant to space games is the examples of Elite and Noctis. Space games haven't necessarily improved upon the template of Elite, they've just made things bigger and refined the controls. You're still travelling the universe, trading goods and hunting bandits, with overarching stories being the only, odd change from this. The planets in space games haven't necessarily improved upon the template of Noctis, you're still travelling the universe going through as many procgenned planets that amuse you until you're done. Just with more stuff on them.
DeleteA player in 2024 isn't really getting an experience that an older player wouldn't have, just slightly different. We even had a game that does the whole shebang in Battle Cruiser 3000AD. It seems to me that filling that space with random content isn't necessarily working, and they need more handcrafted content or something that cuts out the endless nothing. Games like Planet's Edge and Ironseed made all the planets you didn't need to go to noticeably unimportant, just places for resources. Endless resource crawls seem to be a persistent problem with the genre.
Also, I would really be surprised if proc gen could ever make something on the level of Ultima Underworld.
Good point, Joachim. On the other hand, the scenery around the next corner in the real world has more weight because there's only one real world, not an arbitrary number of newly procedurally generated worlds. If you had a holodeck that generates realistic new hiking trails, would it be as interesting? I suppose that's one of the meanings behind Chet's statement that Brent quoted.
Delete@MorpheusKitami: I would also be surprised if it happens next year, but not if it happens in the next 10 years, and "ever" is a long time... Note also that this ProcGen system doesn't even necessarily have to invent e.g. puzzles (one of the harder parts) from scratch; it's ok to have a large collection of hand-made puzzles available and insert some of them sensibly into the dungeon levels (ideally, with some adaptations). I agree that intelligent puzzles like the lizardmen language translation puzzle in Ultima Underworld are hard to generate, but even that will probably become possible.
Consider a game like Civilisation, You *want* the landscape to be procedurally generated because you don't want to be second-guessing what's around the next corner because that is what the designer would have considered beautiful (there are some philosophical implications here, obviously).
DeleteA lot of good points here. I want to reiterate that my original point was not against procedural generation in general (as observed, it works great in roguelikes) but how it affects the experience of an open-world game. I love open-world games, but I love them for the heightened sense of risk and I love them for the joy of discovery. Procedural generation ruins the latter element for me, but why? Bitmap's comment comes closest to answering that question. I've started and deleted several sentences trying to explain my reasoning here, and I think I'll just have to save it for a longer entry.
DeleteHow much procedural generation criticm comes from the player being able to tell it's PG created, and how much of it is them knowing they aren't getting the exact same experience as the every other player?
DeleteIf it's the former, then I think that's really just a case of PG being asked to do too much for that moment. It happens, especially when something is new. But game designers and AI assistance will get better, and I suspect it will be harder and harder to tell the difference.
But even if unable to tell the difference, will some people still be upset that there's not one true experience?
I don't quite get that. Most games have some random content, even if it's just when random encounters happen or when you miss your attacks or land a critical. It's all on the same continuum to me.
The big problem with procedural generation is that, outside of specific use cases, it starts feeling very "samey" over time.
DeleteDaggerfall is a pretty good example of this - after a few dungeons, you'll start feeling "I've been here before" on entering a brand new one.
There's also no room for little hand-crafted touches like the way skeletons are posed in the Fallout games or Bioshock's everything.
I think this is a case of poor execution. All procedural generation involves an interplay of hand-crafted components being assigned rules and probabilities and fed through randomness.
DeleteIf a PG world feels "samey" I think that just means there was insufficient or poorly calibrated content being fed into the randomizer to generate far too much and it came out looking like wallpaper.
It's probably tempting to developers to think they can use PG to stretch a small amount of content really far, but there are limits and you ultimately still need to do the work of making foundational content. But I don't think those overreaches are intrinsic to PG.
I'm exploring the frozen wastes of Skyrim, trying to make my way to Winterhold before I freeze to death. I see a lighthouse rise in the distance, its light beckoning. Seeking shelter, I trudge my way there and shoulder open the stiff front door. Inside, all is silent. An ominous trail of blood mars the floor of a ransacked living room. A note by the fireplace warns about noises in the basement. For the next three hours, I'm lost in a completely unexpected and heartbreaking quest to find out what happened to the residents of the lighthouse, with my growing understanding supplemented by notes, journals, and graphical evidence.
DeleteThis is what I like about open world games. As far as I know, this cannot (yet) be replicated with any sort of procedural generation. It's possible that AI will get there, but I haven't seen it yet.
I'm a big roguelike fan and I can sympathize with Chester's complaint about procgen in open world games. Procgen works in roguelikes because it's about presenting you with new situations that you have to deal with in unexpected ways using the systems of the game. (Which is why the best roguelikes have a few different systems that can interact in complex and unpredictable ways.) Procgen can also work for making nice background scenery and atmosphere, like the speedtrees Mr. Popo is talking about. And with what Gerry Quinn said about Civilization, it can work to make exploration less predictable--for instance in Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime a given level will feel pretty much the same no matter which random version of it you get, but the randomness forces you to explore in the "fog of war" instead of being able to predict where stuff is.
DeleteBut nobody has yet figured out how to make stories out of these systems, aside from the "story of how the game went" kind of things you apparently get from Dwarf Fortress, or "I was down to my last hitpoint and I did an epic blink across half the level and the amulet was there!" If you're in an open world looking for the stories the designer put there for you to discover, you won't get them from procgen alone.
This doesn't mean you couldn't possibly combine the hand-authored discoverable content with the fog of war of procgen. Maybe the ransacked lighthouse doesn't have to be in the same place every time. The "walking sim" Proteus did a great job of this--the island is generated in a way that creates a lot of the beautiful background to explore, but there are also hand-authored bits and secrets scattered around, and not every animal appears in every playthrough so you see them interacting in different ways. But doing that would also mean that the developer paid to make content that not every player might be able to find on every playthrough, which is pretty anathema in AAA development as I understand it.
"This doesn't mean you couldn't possibly combine the hand-authored discoverable content with the fog of war of procgen. Maybe the ransacked lighthouse doesn't have to be in the same place every time."
DeleteYes, this is exactly what I'm getting at. There are lots of ways you can balance the authored with the random. Maybe in a fortress you need to find a key to a chest. The designer could think of three narratively sensible places the key might be: 60% in the study desk drawer, 30% in some discarded trousers, 10% left on a kitchen table.
You don't just make it purely random so it ends up in the icebox and it doesn't make sense. But you can create content with variable parameters that make sense and still tell a intelligible story.
Sometimes the study is the first door on the left, the bedroom is first door on the right, sometimes it's the other way around. Etc.
There's just a huge range of ways randomness can be incorporated into design. I think it's just often been done very poorly, with insufficient underlying content, and it's given PG a bad name. But it doesn't have to be that way, and I don't even think you need advanced AI either.
Well, we've reached an accord, then, because I agree with that kind of randomization. I prefer it, even, as it enhances replayability. But that's not what Starfield offers. It has random locations, often those that make no sense for the planet you're on, seeded with random items and random enemies.
Delete"There's just a huge range of ways randomness can be incorporated into design."
DeleteAgreed. Procedural generation and hand-crafted content could be blended in much more different ways.
I think that to date, most games employing procgen use a uniform algorithm across all levels of a type. If there is any hand-crafted content mixed in, these are isolated elements like a specific room or a quest, distributed throughout the levels according to sensible progression rules.
(Some games have a few hand-crafted levels, noticeably separate from the procgen levels, such as ADOM. Some have levels where all sections are hand-crafted, and they merely get arranged in varying sequences, such as Teleglitch.)
Suppose instead that you have level designers who do design every level, but who have the ability to adjust the proportion of procedural content, and to tailor the procgen algorithm, for each specific level.
Not necessarily by writing code, but with easier methods: event lists, probability parameters, decision trees.
For example, level X has a hand-crafted hub with doors to 8 branching paths, which are procgen-generated with a defined size of about 4-8 rooms/corridors each. One branch must use the procgen algorithm parameterized with a high probability for floor traps. Another branch is parameterized to contain one large monster horde ambush. All branches contain either nothing, a fake key, or a real key at the end, but it is ensured that there 4 real keys in total. One random branch contains one of clues A or B for puzzle P1 or clues C or D for puzzle P2. Another random branch must contain one hand-crafted room with the puzzle P1/P2 where the clue is relevant. One branch must feature the room sequence "ominous blood-smeared hall" followed by "midboss throne room". Out of the 5 available lore texts for this level, 3 are placed in random branches. One branch must contain a specific door that requires 4 keys to unlock, leading to the level exit behind it. All of this has been designed by the level designer and made with a level-specific theme and lore in mind, e.g. "The lair of trickster wizard San D. Son of Peter, containing some of his diary entries about the location of the doomsday machine".
This approach means that A) each level should be recognizable and distinct from others, and B) if you encounter level X again in another playthrough, you will recognize the theme and the concept, but it will play out differently from last time.
I don't remember any game which has individually designed levels where the procedural generation is adapted to each level.
Just wondering if anyone in this particular portion of the comments has played Wildermyth, and if so what their thoughts are about it?
DeleteWelcome back and Happy New Year Chet! I was afraid Worlds of Legend had broken your soul, which would be particularly sad as I loved Legend so much in the day :D
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear you're over the hump for now! I think by now you have a solid track record for coming back from hiatuses :)
ReplyDeleteThe interesting stuff about Fallout mostly came with it when Bethesda bought it. The people responsible for the interesting worldbuilding in TES are mostly gone, I believe. So it's not surprising that Bethesda was unable to make a compelling new setting. For some reason, games set in space seem to be even more prone to generic blandness than high fantasy. Maybe it's because our expectations for realism are higher?
I didn't know this game had procedurally generated areas. Terrible idea, I agree. I'm a big fan of procgen in certain types of game, but exploration is a huge part of the appeal of games like this. (It's possible to make a game that has interesting exploration with procgen, but it takes a lot of work!)
I think procgen content works really well for games built for repeated play: Strategy games, sandbox survival games, roguelikes.
DeleteI dont really want it in my RPGs. I liked Valheim, but I really felt the lack of crafted content after playing Gounded.
Good to see you back, Chet! You had me a bit worried there. Have a great 2024 with lots of rewarding off-blog gaming as well as (hopefully) a productive blogging year!
ReplyDeleteWelcome back, we were waiting patiently. BTW I played through Gloomhaven twice during COVID with two different groups. I can't comment on the Steam release, I played the board game, but the scenarios worked well, I just never cared much about the story.
ReplyDeleteIrene and I have been playing all-board, too. I bought the computer game just to check it out and found it harder for some reason.
DeleteI really enjoyed the Gloomhaven story. I thought it did a good job establishing a unique backstory and lore, and it had some fun plot twists. You really have to pay attention, though, because you get fed a little bit of information at a time and you might be playing over a year. I started taking my own notes to review before each session.
I'm glad you made me aware of Gloomhaven (digital), I have a session running with friends now and we're all hooked
DeleteHappy New Year and welcome back! While I have not played Starfield, your observations seem to coincide with the reviews I've read from Steam users. Aside from the lackluster plot and lore, I find it interesting that there is such an apparent lack of influence from different aspects of space or different planets. Spaceflight, planetary differences, etc., all sound like they are either missing outright or implemented in a very simple and unsatisfying fashion. It's as though they simply reskinned Skyrim to look like it was set in space.
ReplyDeleteCompanions have the worst AI since the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure that's just Bethesda companions. There's that joke about them running the same engine since Morrowind, but as far as I can tell, since I've had 0 interest in Bethesda games since Fallout 3, is that the AI has gone under basically no changes since then. Follow player unless there's an enemy, then charge. Even if they're armed with a silver dagger and the entire Sixth House is barrelling over a hill. Even if they only have a .22 single shot handgun and a huge army of bandits, all armed with minigun nuke launchers. I'm sure they do the same in the new game, only armed with some dingy laser pistol and the elder gods are barrelling over the stack overflow hill or something.
Makes me wonder if the occasional bit of story idiocy isn't just the writers making fun of how dumb your companions can be...
Yo are wrong - they actually made a new AI for Oblivion.
Delete"[...]I usually like what Bethesda offers"
ReplyDeleteBoy, we can't disagree more.
"[...] nothing approaching the richness of, say, Mass Effect or even Bethesda's own Fallout games".
"The interesting stuff about Fallout mostly came with it when Bethesda bought it."
Boy, I know that people have different tastes and all and if you like Bethesda Fallouts then fine, but... really? Fallout 3 plot was totally nonsensical, things happened without rhyme or reason, characters had zero motivation or... character... old lore from Interplay/Black Isle was destroyed (and lot of things in Bethesda Fallouts are just copy and pasted things from Interplay/Black Isle so what are these interesting things they brought to the table?) and the world was full of illogical things like FEV in every town. I'm always in for people liking different things and for freedom of opinions but IMO it's really hard to defend Fallout 3 as a good Fallout game or even good story. It's nice FPS/walking sim, but plot was probably wrote on lunch break (and it's clearly a first draft, because there are some interesting things that could be GREAT if somebody make some revisions).
I hope I don't seem too harsh, I just wanted state my opinion (and I'm just surprised by some things you wrote). Maybe Fallout 4 (or 76) is better, but after 3 I have no desire to play it. If 4 is better than 3 - great, maybe I'll check it in the future.
On the more bright side - I'm not Bethesda fan, but IMO Daggerfall is a work of genius (I've heard Morrowind is great, too). So my problem is not Bethesda per se, but their laziness in making of Fallout 3.
But to each their own.
Happy new year, guys! I hope you'll get tons of great cRPGs!
I'm not sure if you were trying to reply to me or not (you included a quote from my comment mixed in with some of Chet's words), but if you think I was praising Bethesda's contributions to Fallout you should give it a re-read.
DeleteMorrowind is better than Daggerfall in most ways (I kind of hate Morrowind's dialogue system, but otherwise I can't think of any ways in which it's worse). You should check it out.
Ah! Sorry, my friend! You are right - I misunderstood you (so I was replying to you and Addict, because I thought you were saying that Bethesda brought something interesting to table - my bad!).
DeleteThank you very much. Everybody praises Morrowind, so I'll definitely check it out. I also played Arena - I found it nice, sometimes even addicting, but nothing spectacular.
I think Morrowinds dungeons are mostly bland and uninteresting, especially compared to Daggerfall. I certainly had that "seen it before" feeling quicker in Morrowind than in the semi-generated dungeons of Daggerfall. The overworld is one of my favourite parts of Morrowind, but on repeated replays it starts to feel a bit tiny. Daggerfall is also "peak features", although most people probably didn't miss the features that were cut with Morrowind (languages, houses, climbing come to mind).
DeleteI think Morrowind is still my favourite game of the series, though.
Thank you for your opinion! I've also heard that lot of features from Daggerfall were cut in Morrowind (I've found them all interesting, but - as you said - majority of people probably don't miss them). Sometimes I think Bethesda is making one step forward and two steps back (or two forward, one back - depends on the game) - for example, I find Arena controls better than Daggerfall controls. You can also argue that Arena dungeons were better.
DeleteYeah Daggerfall’s dungeons were a complete disaster. Arena had them beat by a mile. And at least you could find your way back out of a Morrowind dungeon.
DeleteVanilla Daggerfall dungeons are awful! There's a reason that the "teleport to quest location" cheat was so popular. They're enormous, samey, and difficult to map. The hand-made dungeons in the game are noticeably way better. Daggerfall Unity has an option to make the (random) dungeons smaller, which is a huge improvement.
DeleteYeah, I don't like Daggerfall dungeons (you can see they are random generated, they break the immersion - they are so chaotic, there's no way anybody could build that)... but I know some people who think they are fantastic because they are so unpredictable. But even fans of Daggerfall dungeones use "teleport to quest location", so...
DeleteThe main quest dungeons in Daggerfall are hand made, and the generated dungeons consist of large hand made blocks that are connected procedually. So most of what you see in the dungeons is actually hand-made and not random.
DeleteI love Daggerfall's dungeons because they are complex, have chutes, elevators, complex branches, multiple ways to get somewhere. It's exciting when you get lost and finally find your way out again. Eventually this gets less of an issue when you get teleport spells. Though I've only used "teleport to quest location" in case of bugs.
But people like different things, which is why I don't give much weight to statements like "game x has good combat, mechanics, etc.", which is unfortunately what most customer reviews consist of on sites like GOG.
OK, you are right - I played Daggerfall years ago and in my mind main quest dungeons were replaced by generated dungeons. I'm not fond of dungeons in general, so I wasn't thrilled about them in Daggerfall (or in Arena)... But now I think I misremembered dungeons in first two Elder Scrolls games - I thought all the best one were in Arena and all mediocre ones in Daggerfall... But chutes and elevators refreshed my memory. Yet I still got a lot of nonsensical looking random generated dungeons during my sessions (maybe I'd had bad luck), so for me dungeons in Daggerfall are hit or miss (but I must replay the game to decide how often game generate dungeons I don't like).
DeleteBut still you can argue that dungeons in Arena are better, because they are more straightforward. Like you said - tastes of individuals can be really different.
Chutes forcefully drop the player to a lower floor, without a direct way back, right?
Delete"It's exciting when you get lost and finally find your way out again."
Indeed. This feature is used so rarely, I wish designers would use it more often. When the path that you came from is blocked and you have to find a path to safety again (a location where you can restore your health / save the game), that's when things get really interesting. Aside from chutes, this can be done by breaking bridges, river torrents, and one-way teleporter traps.
Daggerfall dungeons were insane, do you remember the 3D maps which showed them in all their ridiculous glory?
DeleteI thought Morrowind had good dungeons. Like the egg mine south of Balmora, or that old Dweomer labyrinth. They seemed to be made with care.
The fact that if you ever got lost in Arena, you could just disintegrate the walls and the floor has to be taken into account somewhere
DeleteDisintegrating walls also counted for riddles you couldn't figure out.
DeleteHappy new year, Addict!
ReplyDeleteI am currently playing Starfield.
Every space game basically gets a +1 in my 1-10 rating system, because I love space-based games so much. So I am looking fondly on it, but can't help but still be disappointed.
It falls victim to the same traps of all the space operas, of trying to simulate life, overexpanding, and then being forced to focus the late development on the necessary. Starfield sort of promises you Skyrim + X, but it ends up being more like The Outer Worlds, which was an intentionally tight game.
Some of the opinions on it, I suspect, come from Star Citizen supporters, who want to badmouth Starfield as an alternative. But Star Citizen demonstrates a lot of these "life in space" game weaknesses, in that you HAVE to stop simulating at some point, and focus on making an enjoyable game. Or you'll never get done.
Starfield might not have gotten the crunch right. The overwhelming detail of the settings turns stale eventually, and the pickable items are far less varied than in the Elder Scrolls games, which allow you to pick up everything you see.
Starfield has a super-detailed skill tree, but from what I've experienced so far, the quests don't make use of them.
The planet generation also creates stale environments, they remind of Mass Effect: Andromeda, only worse. Both feature featureless enemies, procedurally generated.
Starfield fails to convince you of the use of all the mechanics, at least from what I've seen so far. I was disappointed to find out yesterday that you can only have one ship active, so you can't build a trade network.
If you could, you could have a whole questline to achieve mogul status or something.
So much would have been added to the game if trading had been a part of it. If Elite II did it 30 years ago, Starfield should have done it, too.
I suspect, one would be able to finish the game on level 5 doing nothing but main quests. I've heard the defense that "the game only really starts after the main quest". But the sandbox part of the game doesn't seem fleshed out enough. So it kind of falls between the two chairs.
Starfield is like a return of Daggerfall. Huge in ambition, impressive in design, ultimately failing in delivering fully.
I think it's a 7/10 game which is less than the sum of its parts. The game wants you to enjoy the magic of space as a very abstract concept.
The appetite for such a game isn't there at the moment. We've seen it before with the initial launch of No Man's Sky.
The Open Space game is really, really difficult to pull off.
To be clear, I didn't HATE Starfield (also because I played it on Gamepass, if I had to shell full price for it, I might have), I played a good 70 hours of it, maybe I would rate it more as 6/10.
DeleteI believe Chet, yours and other comments touch on all the issues. Personally, as some that also loves space games, I was mostly disappointed about how lifeless the space exploration feels.
You go from fast travel to fast travel, the feeling of awe of taking off from a planet to the depths of space (something that Elite pulled off 40 years ago) is completely absent. The feeling is that of the stereotypical old Western movie where the town is just a 2D backdrop, and looking behind there is nothing of substance, like the the fake complex UI in the "flight" sections.
If you set up of making a space game whose very main plot is about the excitement of exploring the unknown, and you cannot make that interesting, well, you really made the wrong compromises from the start, both from gameplay and technical standpoints.
The other main issue is the setting, as Chet says NOTHING really happens at all. Nobody says all setting must be Star Trek/Wars with varied alien races, but there is no conflict, no interesting narratives going on. In Skyrim you get thrown in the middle of a civil war, Mass Effect is full of unresolved tensions on faction and racial lines, Starfield universe is just... boring as hell. I think of Star Control 2 and how the state of the galaxy evolves as a consequence and independently of player's action, that in 1992.
I still was interested enough by to play through the main story and most non-procedural side quests, but it's definitely a missed opportunity.
I think one of the difficulties with making a good space RPG is that (as evinced by your comment) people have much stronger simulationist desires for sci-fi than fantasy. Elite isn't an RPG, and it doesn't really serve an RPG story and systems to be bolted to a knockoff of Elite.
DeleteThere's nothing fundamentally bad about hybridizing a Elite/X style space sandbox with an RPG system. The problem is that doing so meaningfully is a ludicrous amount of work and phoning it in will be quite bad.
DeleteThe issue is also managing expectations. If you make space simulation aspects part of the overall gameplay then yes, players will expect them to be fun and deep, even if they are just a part of the overall RPG experience.
DeleteAlexander mentioned The Outer Worlds, that I think is a good example of space RPG that never had any pretension of adding simulation aspects, and people unsurprisingly never complained about them (the game is not a classic by any means, but at least it has a cohesive design).
Yeah, I'd say that the problem is that the two genres don't have a ton of synergy. You spend your gameplay time in one mode or the other and the degree to which they influence each other is limited (having a vast freighter fleet and ace flying skills doesn't help your fleshy little body survive blaster bolts, etc.)
DeleteI played about 15 hours of Starfield and... don't care.
ReplyDeletePoints 1-3 are about exploration:
1) My hands down _favorite_ part of Skyrim was my first big trek from.... whatever the name of the center town to the mage college in the north east(Winterhold?). I was low level, had to run from a bear to find a guard on patrol to help fight it, had to avoid giants etc.
2) My hands down favorite part of Fallout 4, which I played on "survival" mode(no fast travel, save only at beds) was my first trip into and out of The Glow
3) Outside of those, I love wandering around, finding some interesting cave/ruin and exploring it.
Starfield... doesn't really have _any_ of that stuff for me. You fast travel everywhere. Nothing feels connected.
4) The outposts just feel underdeveloped. I liked them fine in Fallout 4 especially on survival mode where I wanted to create safe places to sleep, and a trek between them was a trek. Or on say.. Subnautica (survival game) where they were meaningful for _my_ survival but here they just don't feel like anything.
You and I are on the same wavelength. You know that you're never going to find epic moments like that in a randomly-generated world. Starfield has enormous physical spaces and no particular reason to explore them.
DeleteStarfield plays a lot more casual - mainly because it don't has the survival mode of course. I guess they will implement it later and maybe then you might enjoy it :-)
DeleteI couldn't enjoy Fallout 4 because of the nasty weapons and weapon upgrade system and the settlements ;-)
Starfield really has the potential for those hands down parts you described! I found some stations that would never end. I you do them at the beginning, where you have a lack of medical items things become pretty adventurous :-)
I enjoyed my time with Starflight, but I can definitely see where you're coming from when it comes to the main plot. Honestly, the main plot feels like an excuse to set up an end-game feature that can provide some replayability without having to reroll a new character each time. And honestly, I like the existence of that feature. There's a lot of games where there were significant plot branches I would like to experience, but the thought of having to start from level 1 again keeps me from doing so. Unfortunately, Starfield doesn't have enough of that sort of meaningful mutually exclusive quest chains to get me to actually use the new feature.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to the combat, I agree that the land-combat is fairly easy, but honestly I can't see them really being able to make it harder in a satisfying way. You can certainly adjust the numbers, but now you're just going to be chugging health packs without any meaningful change in your tactics. They would have to have everything be a bespoke-built area with hand-placed enemies to be able to add mechanics that can allow for more satisfying combat than "shoot mans a lot".
As for the space combat, "you're not flying, you're moving a view window" is how all space combat works across games. Space is big. Really really big. Elite Dangerous does a good job of really getting that scale hammered home. You have to have gone through the landing sequence and are hovering above the ground for your ship to have any sort of meaningful positioning needs (to not hit a mountain), and there's no combat there. The only other place where there's a density of objects that matter is inside the rings of a planet; that's your sort of Hollywood style asteroid field. Otherwise all space combat is against some backdrop (such as in the vicinity of a planet) but your position relative to that backdrop never changes.
"As for the space combat, "you're not flying, you're moving a view window" is how all space combat works across games." Maybe, but I had a lot of fun with Star Wars: Battlefront, for instance, where I actually felt like I was FLYING, and not just rotating.
DeleteAny space game has to stretch science to explain why you can move faster than light. I don't see why it can't stretch it a little more to explain why you can fly from a moon to its planet in a reasonable amount of time.
I played Elite Dangerous for quite a while and had the image it had really realistic flight physics. I personally think Starfield aimed more for that than the arcade style. Or at least something in the middle.
DeleteIt's been said a million times before, but it's telling that Bethesda's success rests on two franchises that were created and thoroughly developed either by third parties or by people who have long since left the company.
ReplyDeleteStarfield is apparently what happens when you want to create a cool open world space RPG but then have no interesting ideas about how to flesh that out. There were some side quests that were ok, but nothing really ties together or has consequences, it's just a bunch of isolated stories.
This. Bethesda’s a lot like Blizzard, Bioware and many others - a hollowed out brand managed by their parent entity’s favorite suits.
DeleteThe only thing I give Starfield credit for is showing a larger audience how utterly boring and dystopian the Musk/Bezos future of colonizing the Moon and Mars with rule by corporations will most likely be. Was that deliberate, though? I honestly don’t know. It’s not a world I want to explore at any rate.
ReplyDeleteWelcome back, hope your holidays were well and you bought as generator. I am curious to know your thoughts on BG3? I have not and don't plan on playing Starfield, the feedback from everyone seems to be that it would not be my cup of tea. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteI haven't tried BG3 yet. I typically don't play PC games these days that aren't for the blog specifically. I have heard mixed reviews of the console version of BG3.
DeleteThey are still releasing patches every few days. I'd suggest you wait for the inevitable release of the extended version to make sure the console version is as polished concerning handling as possible.
DeleteI can't speak to the console versions of BG3, but I've been playing the PC version on my Steam Deck and as far as playing with a controller + lower power issues it's been working great so far.
DeleteI know this isn't the perfect place for this, but it looks like a full 3D remake of Wizardry - Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is coming soon to a GOG near you. Surprised me to see it on the site in Early Access today. Anyone heard anything about this?
ReplyDeleteIt's been out since September or so. Definitely hasn't gotten as much attention as I'd expect. It sounds like a very faithful remake (based on the original source code, so the combat math/encounters/etc. should be unchanged).
DeleteI'm not sure I want to pay $30 for an early access remake of a game that I've already played, though, and that price is supposedly going to increase. It might be an OK value if they included Wiz 2 and 3, maybe. I'm also not sure I want to play a version of Wizardry that doesn't have any way to avoid permadeath (no floppies to copy and/or yank out here).
Now if they tossed in a scenario editor, I'd be on board. (I firmly believe all retro RPGs should come with scenario editors if at all possible.)
Happy New Year Chester,
ReplyDeleteI had zero expectations but personally I am really enjoying the game. Back when I played Freelancer and X3 and totally sank into those but they left me always thinking how cool it would be to exit the ship. Also I always also loved the life of a scavenger in Fallout 3 or adventurer in Oblivion. In Starfield I have it finally all combined! And I can build my own ships. How cool is that. I trotally understand your points, but I enjoy 'playing' a game, so I don't need to much story in them. I get in my ship, do contracts, look for better gear, sit at the bar etc. - I'm roleplaying! Not many games get me into that mood. And there is just so much to discover. Some sidequest I stumbled into made me laugh or really excited how things turn out. But yeah, you are in the majority - many people don't like it I guess.
What I dislike is the Inon Zur soundtrack. I muted it and play some Berlin School albums (mainly Tangerine Dream and Soviet Space Dog Project) :-)
I just wanted to say: welcome back, Chester!
ReplyDeleteI clicked on this in the recent comments section truly expecting to read about Starflight. But now I see that Chet plays also recent games (I remember him writing a bit about his decision to play Skyrim on the couch sofa instead of a desktop solution)... Which brings me to ask (and you'll forgive a lurker if this has been addressed already elsewhere), did Chet play (and/or wrote something about) The Bard's Tale IV?
ReplyDeleteI did not. Almost all the "recent' games I play are console games, and I look for different things in console games than in CRPGs. Sometimes, there's some overlap, but BT4 wasn't one of them.
DeleteI think this one is missing on your master list:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.mobygames.com/game/17106/centauri-alliance/
It's not missing. It's there in 1990. I missed it on my first pass through the year.
Delete