Carots on Cantebury!
So, when you are at home and your lady is away at dinner with the family, what to do? Well, dust off the LJ for a start.
Recently I've been getting increasingly agitated at the state of the game industry. This was brought to light mainly by the bizarre design decisions placed into Spellforce 2, but really it's been building up progressively for ages now.
So, since it was the catalyst, lets start off with Spellforce. Spellforce is an RTS/RPG hybrid. Telling you how it accomplishes this is not important, but recently Spellforce 2 was released. Now Spellforce 1 (hereafter SF1) had two add-ons, both of which were very enjoyable and both of which kept the story going which was also rather good and interesting. I know, unheard of right? What more did it do? Well for those that enjoyed multiplayer mayhem, it offered not only competitive game modes, but cooperative! No that really is unheard of. I can count the number of coop friendly games on one hand for the PC. Anyhow, in SF1 you can create a hero as is typical in every RPG and go about slaying things, finding items, levelling up, learning spells etc etc. It's a very standard type of gameplay and quite successful in that it is very addictive.
Of course, when Spellforce 2 (hereafter SF2) came out, I was naturally interested. After some issues with the demo and some bad vibes, I didn't buy it, but a friend of Bec's gave her a copy of it. Copy as in fully legal boxed version that he bought, but didn't want. So we got to try it out, without risk of being burnt. What had Phenomic done since SF1? What new goodies have they included? New hero skills? Spells? Classes?
At this point, lets make a list of things you should do when making a sequel for something that basically, isn't broken and in no way needs fixing. Something that really just needs to deliver the same again, but brought bang up to date. Made shinier. This is a list of things from my point of view, that, if I had a successful product, I would try to do for it's successor:
1) Keep the RTS/RPG gameplay much the same in terms of pace and style. It should be familiar, yet new as it's the bulk of the gameplay. The 'fun' part.
2) Keep the player focussed on their hero units, make them interesting in new ways and make them feel heroic and powerful. This is the player's game world avatar after all, the thing in game they associate with.
3) Expand on the previous story and world, flesh it out. Make it more interesting and expand on things that were only hinted at before.
Ok, that will do.
So first up, we have the gameplay. The RTS/RPG style was very unique and pretty cool. You could have massive battles and also send your hero out to slay things on the side, or react to a breach in the defences giving you both macro and micro styles of play at once. Zing! That's a winner there. In addition some maps in both multiplayer coop and single player were RPG only (i.e. hero only). So that was really fun and SF2 has this too. No worries there. Something else that was cool is that the map felt alive. All the enemies on the map (most anyhow) had what you could consider a camp, it had a swirly particle effect in the middle and spawned enemies at timed intervals. Each camp as it were had buildings, and the only way to get rid of the spawning thing was to destroy all the buildings. So, destroying the camp, destroyed the spawner and stopped enemies from spawning. That's great and SF2 has this as well. The thing that I found to tie this all together was that all the camps on the map began sending out scout units. These guys wandered around with no real aim, until they spotted you. When this happened you got a little warning sound effect, and a ping on the minimap. Flying over to that location you would normally see an enemy unit standing there watching your units. Sort of, 'You watching him watching you.' scenario. If you didn't dispose of him, he legged it back to the camp. He actually did run, faster than you could catch him.
If he made it back, everyone at the camp came to attack you and that camp started sending out enemies really often. Sometimes this would be a swift end to your base and your hero, as you were quickly overwhelmed. If you managed to defend yourself you were in for a hard battle as more and more camps came on-line and started spewing out mobs to attack you. However, this totally rocked. Because what happened is that you began setting up your base, gathering resources and getting ready to build units. All the while the enemy not-knowing your whereabouts began scouting and you were picking them off one by one. Eventually he sent out groups of twos. Then threes, and then he realised that after thirty-odd scouts don't return, there is probably something happening to them, so he attacked. It was a race, and it was fun. It put you under pressure as you had finite resources (which regenerated very very slowly) and the enemy didn't.
Lets stick a big strike through number 1 at this point, because all this is gone in SF2. There are no scouts, in fact, the first time Bec and I played the very first multiplayer coop level, we got killed. Outright. I mean, 4 minutes into it and our bases were crawling with enemies. No warning, nothing. Just BAM, have 20 enemies in the middle of your base. Enjoy. In fact, it took us about eight attempts to pass that level. Now I am not sure if this was because we were expecting SF1 style play, or because we were unfamiliar with the gameplay of SF2 or because we had jumped right into the coop campaign. But either way, it created a massive cavern between our experiences with the previous title. It further took away a whole dynamic that we liked. The 'I'm building a base and hiding from the enemies until I am strong enough to come out in the open and kill them all.' dynamic. I'm not sure what the concise version is called, maybe we can call it the 'Stealth Setup Phase'. Where you tried to build your base and pick off enemy scouts so you weren't detected. That's all gone. It's just battle-time now. Apart from missing that gameplay element, the game world feels a little lifeless now because you won't have even seen an enemy, until they are crawling all over your base. So it doesn't feel like they are alive and actively pursuing you. They just know where you are, it feels fake and forced and it isn't very enjoyable.
Now we are still talking about the RTS/RPG gameplay here, but I need to touch on heroes quickly. These are the other side of the game, where the player takes their attention away from massive battles to have some good one on several action. I say this because your hero is normally one tough bastard. Indeed, in SF1 he can take out entire enemy bases single handedly. This is great, as it makes the player feel powerful, and it's fun. Lets face it, it being fun is the core component here. Just like having to avoid scouts was fun so is controlling a single unit and battling hordes of enemy's. I've seen some horrendous things removed from games because people thought they were not fun, and on the surface they didn't look like it, but when you stick it in with the complete game, and all the rule systems and mechanics it shines. I will go off topic later, but for now lets stick to SF1. Your heroes gained experience for killing enemies. Even if you lost the level and died, you got XP for everything that lay dead on the ground because of you and your allies. This was important, because in the midst of a game, if you felt like you were maybe not going to pull through and were getting beaten back you still wanted to give it your all. Every enemy dead, is a step closer to your next all-important level for your hero. So you stick at it, whereas in other games you would probably quit and restart and give it another shot. It's fun to lose a level in SF1 and see where you went wrong, give it another go and so on, and let me tell you some of those levels are damn tough. SF2 has XP rewards for specific things on the map. For killing an enemy base for example, or doing a quest, or killing an enemy hero mob. But nothing for individual kills. This wholeheartedly discourages the player to stick with a game that may be going downhill, or go out and risk their heroes for some early kills at minimally populated enemy camps because you don't get experience for killing anything, the mobs are only there to make getting the XP reward challenging.
Now you could argue that it is largely irrelevant if the player gets a little XP for each kill or a whole whack for each base destroyed as at the end of the road, it's the same. But I will deny you that, because of the following: The monsters are a product of the bases, you get experience for killing them but will eventually die if you leave them unchecked and don't wipe out their bases that are spawning them. There is already enough incentive there to eliminate the bases. Survival. Winning. Success, whatever you want to call it. It's the goal of every game. By removing the reward, that little hook that keeps the player killing mobs, and making it only accessible by eliminating the bases you break this relationship between the two and the battles became dull. To simplify it, you had to kill the bases to survive but you enjoyed killing the waves of mobs, because each time you won a battle your eye darted to the XP bar and noted the slight increase. SF2 has removed this which makes the monsters, the mob killing, somewhat of a chore. Now this fits into both the gameplay and the heroes section, but I decided to cover it here because of the impact it has on the overall flow. Levels no revolve around cowering in your base, waiting for the waves of enemy's to come charging in, building loads of towers to help defend you and hording units until you have a large enough amount to split them, one for defence and one for attack. Then it's a matter of wandering around, killing the enemy bases and that's it. Also, lets not forget that the respawning mechanic of the enemy camps is gone, now they harvest resources. I think they cheat, but only marginally. I mean, I think the AI can build worker units for free, but military units/mobs cost the usual.
What this means is, that you turtle-up in your base, and normally defend wave after wave until the enemy has run out of resources, and then you emerge from your shell and wipe them all out. Compared to the hide-your-base, kill-the-scouts, attack-when-discovered style of play from SF1, this is very very poor.
HEROES! You gotta love them, they can take on whole armies, destroy buildings in a few blows, have more armour than an anvil and are capable of mighty feats! Right? Well, sort of. In SF1 yes, your heroes are pretty awesome, and can often take on several enemies of equal or higher level than you. The further into the game you get, the tougher they get and eventually you are calling down fiery rain, bringing entire armies back to life and killing units in a single hit. Awesome stuff, and a great way to shift the players focus from multitasking on several things in the RTS area, and zooming him down onto one specific unit, which essentially represents the player on the field of battle. You have a real attachment to your hero in SF1. You could make almost any kind of hero you wanted. I have had a dual wielding warrior, who specialised in some healing magic, enough to get aura of healing (which heals automatically, even when fighting) and my daggers had manatap so I whilst dealing damage to the enemies, I stole mana which was then used to heal me. See how your hero can become very powerful now? What about a warrior wielding a powerful but slow weapon, with aura of fast-fighting on him? A magic user that can wear plate mail and summon elementals to fight alongside him. You could really make a hero with exactly what you wanted. You got a few points to allocate in your stats each level and two skill points to put into skills, which dictated your allowed equipment use. In SF2 this has been removed. I shall now use a Christmas tree to demonstrate how the new system operates.
Imagine, if you will, a Christmas tree, in fact imagine two. That star at the top of each one, is a tab in game. Each tab is attached to a different tree, when you flick to that tab you have a set of skills that branch downwards from the top-most skill. One is combat related, the other magic. Now, this sounds pretty normal. When your hero levels up, he gets an automatic increase in health and mana, you no longer can choose where to allocate attribute points, in fact these don't even exist anymore. Then you get one skill point. This you can place seemingly anywhere into the skills in either tab. Starting at the top and working your way down, specialising as you go to the skills you want. The problem enters when you do want to specialise. Like I said before? Want a dual-wielding warrior that can use healing magic? You will probably end up with a warrior that can use dual weapons and shields and two handed weapons and bows and cast death magic and cast elemental magic and... *breathes* etc. The reason for this is that before you can advance into a deeper area on the skill tree, you have to have allocated a certain number of points. This is just plain bad design. There is no in-game reason for it, nothing hidden away or anything it's just plainly stated on the skill you want "Requirements: Death Magic level 2 and have allocated 17 points." So instead of getting the skill you want, you have to take that hard earned point (remember experience only from killing bases/completing quests) and invest it in a skill you definitely don't want. As you progress you will end up unlocking probably 85% of the entire skill tree, before you get the skill you want. Essentially it means that in SF1 you got a little buzz from each level your hero got because even if it meant you couldn't allocate skill points you could increase your attributes but in SF2 levelling was more a reminder of what you couldn't do for another 2 levels. Put basically in SF1 you had 7 things per level that you could place somewhere, that you wanted. In SF2 you have 1 and you can place it somewhere you want every 4 levels.
You may have noticed I said even if you can't allocate skill points above. I say this because sometimes in SF1 you will have specialised so much that eventually your skills catchup to their parent skill which you can only increase every 3-5 levels. But you can horde your skill points until that time comes, and then spend them, unlike in SF2 where you can horde them all you like but you can still only spend them on the skill you want when you have allocated X number of points globally. Now what does this mean? Well, that basically all heroes begin to look the same. 10 warriors at level 10 will have maybe 1 unique skill, and 9 common ones. This is a really big deal as the max level is 30 and the requirements are present all the way through. To compound this further, your heroes are weak in SF2. They can easily get mobbed by enemies and take damage so fast that it's often hard to react in time to save them. SF1 had a great deal of skills and spells that you could activate and then wade in to battle, some lasted only a short time and others were as long as you had mana. In SF2 these are present, but only in very low numbers. I can recall maybe 3 skills that last for a duration, the rest are one-shots. Now, in chaotic combat, what this means is one of three things:
1) Your hero dies before you can react.
2) Combat is so chaotic you are hard pressed to click on anything or use any skills other than the 'area affect'/'target not needed' ones.
3) Combat is somewhat more controlled but this is usually because the enemy are dying rapidly. The converse of point two is that you can successfully click on an enemy target (or select a random one with 'TAB') just in time to see it die. Again, before you can do anything cool skill-wise.
The result of this is that your heroes often end up either dead, cowering in the background or lost in the confusion. There are some RPG maps, but like I mentioned since most heroes end up being only a few skills different from each other, you as a player never feel any real affinity for your hero at all.
Ok, lastly, the story and universe that SF1 was set in and how it's been fleshed out in SF2. Well, this section will most likely be short because it basically hasn't. During a few maps and one of the add-ons the player is hinted at a possible other world inhabited by the Shadows. SF2 is called The Shadow Wars and picks up where the shadows begin invading. However, everything from the previous game is gone. At the start of the single player campaign you are seen standing in front of a monument (used to summon heroes in SF1) and a short dialogue informs you that all that happened in SF1 and the add-ons, occurred in a time long past. After which you are plunged into the new world of SF2. I am all for new areas, characters, stories and so on, but the original SF had a very unique and interesting setting. You were a rune warrior, immortal. Summoned at a monument you could create armies out of thin air, by taking control of other racial monuments (Dwarves, Humans, Orcs, Darkelves, Trolls and Elves). You had other heroes you could summon, again from runes which you found throughout your travels and it really felt like you were a very powerful weapon capable of dominating an entire map.
I could go on, but my fingers are getting sore. Basically to wrap this up I will talk about three other things. I've always said I would have loved to be in such-and-such a meeting when decision X was made. But really, when whoever decided to remove the way the player sold items in SF1 (selecting them all then clicking 'sell' to sell them all at once to the merchant) and change it to the method in SF2 (individually selling each item via click-dragging it onto the merchant window) I would have really liked to hear why.
Secondly, why do the workers cost resources? You know what this means right? In SF1 workers were free as they were made from a rune as was your entire army, except military units cost resources. Workers could do little-no damage, they are the grunts. In SF2 they cost silver, which is used for nearly every unit in the game. In addition, workers die in about 2 seconds flat, so what can happen is that the enemy can waltz in, hit all your workers before you can respond and if you are unlucky you can be caught in a situation where you haven't got enough money to rebuild them. That's great, because the AI gets free workers. *shakes head* Another decision I wish I had witnessed.
Thirdly, I mentioned earlier that sometimes I have read things that have been removed because it wasn't fun. An example: In Deus Ex 2 they removed ammo types and replaced them with unified ammo. You have an amount and no matter what gun you selected the ammo came from a common pool. Whereas in Deus Ex 1 you had rockets, sniper rifle rounds, shotgun shells, AP bullets etc etc. The reason I read in an interview was, 'managing ammo was not fun.' and yes, they are correct. If I sat down and simply handed out ammo to loads of people walking by my desk, this would not be fun. However, in game this management of ammo became a gameplay style choice. If you were a sneaking-thief type, you conserved and savoured every delicious sniper round, as it meant one less baddie you had to engage. If you were a tank, that rushed up into the enemy's face and shoved a shotgun under his chin, you loved making sure you were well-stocked with shells and AP bullets for your machinegun. How much ammo you had in this game, determined your approach to the level. It was not just about making sure you had 10 of these and 20 of those. It was giving the player gameplay choices, and by removing that you removed a lot of choices.
All in all, I see more and more games come out that are what I term 'safe' games. You can play it any which way, and it will be very very hard for you to screw up. These are not exciting games, they are dull, boring and do not challenge or inspire. Dear Games Industry, please wake up and put out some good titles. As much as I hate JoWood, right now I am loving them even if they are getting things wrong, as they are the only publisher to put out titles that actually have some new ideas in them.
I hope this finds you all well. :)
Cheers,
Digit
====
"Good AI is annoying because when you fire at it, it ducks and takes cover."
P.S. It actually said Carols on Cantebury, I just misread it...
Recently I've been getting increasingly agitated at the state of the game industry. This was brought to light mainly by the bizarre design decisions placed into Spellforce 2, but really it's been building up progressively for ages now.
So, since it was the catalyst, lets start off with Spellforce. Spellforce is an RTS/RPG hybrid. Telling you how it accomplishes this is not important, but recently Spellforce 2 was released. Now Spellforce 1 (hereafter SF1) had two add-ons, both of which were very enjoyable and both of which kept the story going which was also rather good and interesting. I know, unheard of right? What more did it do? Well for those that enjoyed multiplayer mayhem, it offered not only competitive game modes, but cooperative! No that really is unheard of. I can count the number of coop friendly games on one hand for the PC. Anyhow, in SF1 you can create a hero as is typical in every RPG and go about slaying things, finding items, levelling up, learning spells etc etc. It's a very standard type of gameplay and quite successful in that it is very addictive.
Of course, when Spellforce 2 (hereafter SF2) came out, I was naturally interested. After some issues with the demo and some bad vibes, I didn't buy it, but a friend of Bec's gave her a copy of it. Copy as in fully legal boxed version that he bought, but didn't want. So we got to try it out, without risk of being burnt. What had Phenomic done since SF1? What new goodies have they included? New hero skills? Spells? Classes?
At this point, lets make a list of things you should do when making a sequel for something that basically, isn't broken and in no way needs fixing. Something that really just needs to deliver the same again, but brought bang up to date. Made shinier. This is a list of things from my point of view, that, if I had a successful product, I would try to do for it's successor:
1) Keep the RTS/RPG gameplay much the same in terms of pace and style. It should be familiar, yet new as it's the bulk of the gameplay. The 'fun' part.
2) Keep the player focussed on their hero units, make them interesting in new ways and make them feel heroic and powerful. This is the player's game world avatar after all, the thing in game they associate with.
3) Expand on the previous story and world, flesh it out. Make it more interesting and expand on things that were only hinted at before.
Ok, that will do.
So first up, we have the gameplay. The RTS/RPG style was very unique and pretty cool. You could have massive battles and also send your hero out to slay things on the side, or react to a breach in the defences giving you both macro and micro styles of play at once. Zing! That's a winner there. In addition some maps in both multiplayer coop and single player were RPG only (i.e. hero only). So that was really fun and SF2 has this too. No worries there. Something else that was cool is that the map felt alive. All the enemies on the map (most anyhow) had what you could consider a camp, it had a swirly particle effect in the middle and spawned enemies at timed intervals. Each camp as it were had buildings, and the only way to get rid of the spawning thing was to destroy all the buildings. So, destroying the camp, destroyed the spawner and stopped enemies from spawning. That's great and SF2 has this as well. The thing that I found to tie this all together was that all the camps on the map began sending out scout units. These guys wandered around with no real aim, until they spotted you. When this happened you got a little warning sound effect, and a ping on the minimap. Flying over to that location you would normally see an enemy unit standing there watching your units. Sort of, 'You watching him watching you.' scenario. If you didn't dispose of him, he legged it back to the camp. He actually did run, faster than you could catch him.
If he made it back, everyone at the camp came to attack you and that camp started sending out enemies really often. Sometimes this would be a swift end to your base and your hero, as you were quickly overwhelmed. If you managed to defend yourself you were in for a hard battle as more and more camps came on-line and started spewing out mobs to attack you. However, this totally rocked. Because what happened is that you began setting up your base, gathering resources and getting ready to build units. All the while the enemy not-knowing your whereabouts began scouting and you were picking them off one by one. Eventually he sent out groups of twos. Then threes, and then he realised that after thirty-odd scouts don't return, there is probably something happening to them, so he attacked. It was a race, and it was fun. It put you under pressure as you had finite resources (which regenerated very very slowly) and the enemy didn't.
Lets stick a big strike through number 1 at this point, because all this is gone in SF2. There are no scouts, in fact, the first time Bec and I played the very first multiplayer coop level, we got killed. Outright. I mean, 4 minutes into it and our bases were crawling with enemies. No warning, nothing. Just BAM, have 20 enemies in the middle of your base. Enjoy. In fact, it took us about eight attempts to pass that level. Now I am not sure if this was because we were expecting SF1 style play, or because we were unfamiliar with the gameplay of SF2 or because we had jumped right into the coop campaign. But either way, it created a massive cavern between our experiences with the previous title. It further took away a whole dynamic that we liked. The 'I'm building a base and hiding from the enemies until I am strong enough to come out in the open and kill them all.' dynamic. I'm not sure what the concise version is called, maybe we can call it the 'Stealth Setup Phase'. Where you tried to build your base and pick off enemy scouts so you weren't detected. That's all gone. It's just battle-time now. Apart from missing that gameplay element, the game world feels a little lifeless now because you won't have even seen an enemy, until they are crawling all over your base. So it doesn't feel like they are alive and actively pursuing you. They just know where you are, it feels fake and forced and it isn't very enjoyable.
Now we are still talking about the RTS/RPG gameplay here, but I need to touch on heroes quickly. These are the other side of the game, where the player takes their attention away from massive battles to have some good one on several action. I say this because your hero is normally one tough bastard. Indeed, in SF1 he can take out entire enemy bases single handedly. This is great, as it makes the player feel powerful, and it's fun. Lets face it, it being fun is the core component here. Just like having to avoid scouts was fun so is controlling a single unit and battling hordes of enemy's. I've seen some horrendous things removed from games because people thought they were not fun, and on the surface they didn't look like it, but when you stick it in with the complete game, and all the rule systems and mechanics it shines. I will go off topic later, but for now lets stick to SF1. Your heroes gained experience for killing enemies. Even if you lost the level and died, you got XP for everything that lay dead on the ground because of you and your allies. This was important, because in the midst of a game, if you felt like you were maybe not going to pull through and were getting beaten back you still wanted to give it your all. Every enemy dead, is a step closer to your next all-important level for your hero. So you stick at it, whereas in other games you would probably quit and restart and give it another shot. It's fun to lose a level in SF1 and see where you went wrong, give it another go and so on, and let me tell you some of those levels are damn tough. SF2 has XP rewards for specific things on the map. For killing an enemy base for example, or doing a quest, or killing an enemy hero mob. But nothing for individual kills. This wholeheartedly discourages the player to stick with a game that may be going downhill, or go out and risk their heroes for some early kills at minimally populated enemy camps because you don't get experience for killing anything, the mobs are only there to make getting the XP reward challenging.
Now you could argue that it is largely irrelevant if the player gets a little XP for each kill or a whole whack for each base destroyed as at the end of the road, it's the same. But I will deny you that, because of the following: The monsters are a product of the bases, you get experience for killing them but will eventually die if you leave them unchecked and don't wipe out their bases that are spawning them. There is already enough incentive there to eliminate the bases. Survival. Winning. Success, whatever you want to call it. It's the goal of every game. By removing the reward, that little hook that keeps the player killing mobs, and making it only accessible by eliminating the bases you break this relationship between the two and the battles became dull. To simplify it, you had to kill the bases to survive but you enjoyed killing the waves of mobs, because each time you won a battle your eye darted to the XP bar and noted the slight increase. SF2 has removed this which makes the monsters, the mob killing, somewhat of a chore. Now this fits into both the gameplay and the heroes section, but I decided to cover it here because of the impact it has on the overall flow. Levels no revolve around cowering in your base, waiting for the waves of enemy's to come charging in, building loads of towers to help defend you and hording units until you have a large enough amount to split them, one for defence and one for attack. Then it's a matter of wandering around, killing the enemy bases and that's it. Also, lets not forget that the respawning mechanic of the enemy camps is gone, now they harvest resources. I think they cheat, but only marginally. I mean, I think the AI can build worker units for free, but military units/mobs cost the usual.
What this means is, that you turtle-up in your base, and normally defend wave after wave until the enemy has run out of resources, and then you emerge from your shell and wipe them all out. Compared to the hide-your-base, kill-the-scouts, attack-when-discovered style of play from SF1, this is very very poor.
HEROES! You gotta love them, they can take on whole armies, destroy buildings in a few blows, have more armour than an anvil and are capable of mighty feats! Right? Well, sort of. In SF1 yes, your heroes are pretty awesome, and can often take on several enemies of equal or higher level than you. The further into the game you get, the tougher they get and eventually you are calling down fiery rain, bringing entire armies back to life and killing units in a single hit. Awesome stuff, and a great way to shift the players focus from multitasking on several things in the RTS area, and zooming him down onto one specific unit, which essentially represents the player on the field of battle. You have a real attachment to your hero in SF1. You could make almost any kind of hero you wanted. I have had a dual wielding warrior, who specialised in some healing magic, enough to get aura of healing (which heals automatically, even when fighting) and my daggers had manatap so I whilst dealing damage to the enemies, I stole mana which was then used to heal me. See how your hero can become very powerful now? What about a warrior wielding a powerful but slow weapon, with aura of fast-fighting on him? A magic user that can wear plate mail and summon elementals to fight alongside him. You could really make a hero with exactly what you wanted. You got a few points to allocate in your stats each level and two skill points to put into skills, which dictated your allowed equipment use. In SF2 this has been removed. I shall now use a Christmas tree to demonstrate how the new system operates.
Imagine, if you will, a Christmas tree, in fact imagine two. That star at the top of each one, is a tab in game. Each tab is attached to a different tree, when you flick to that tab you have a set of skills that branch downwards from the top-most skill. One is combat related, the other magic. Now, this sounds pretty normal. When your hero levels up, he gets an automatic increase in health and mana, you no longer can choose where to allocate attribute points, in fact these don't even exist anymore. Then you get one skill point. This you can place seemingly anywhere into the skills in either tab. Starting at the top and working your way down, specialising as you go to the skills you want. The problem enters when you do want to specialise. Like I said before? Want a dual-wielding warrior that can use healing magic? You will probably end up with a warrior that can use dual weapons and shields and two handed weapons and bows and cast death magic and cast elemental magic and... *breathes* etc. The reason for this is that before you can advance into a deeper area on the skill tree, you have to have allocated a certain number of points. This is just plain bad design. There is no in-game reason for it, nothing hidden away or anything it's just plainly stated on the skill you want "Requirements: Death Magic level 2 and have allocated 17 points." So instead of getting the skill you want, you have to take that hard earned point (remember experience only from killing bases/completing quests) and invest it in a skill you definitely don't want. As you progress you will end up unlocking probably 85% of the entire skill tree, before you get the skill you want. Essentially it means that in SF1 you got a little buzz from each level your hero got because even if it meant you couldn't allocate skill points you could increase your attributes but in SF2 levelling was more a reminder of what you couldn't do for another 2 levels. Put basically in SF1 you had 7 things per level that you could place somewhere, that you wanted. In SF2 you have 1 and you can place it somewhere you want every 4 levels.
You may have noticed I said even if you can't allocate skill points above. I say this because sometimes in SF1 you will have specialised so much that eventually your skills catchup to their parent skill which you can only increase every 3-5 levels. But you can horde your skill points until that time comes, and then spend them, unlike in SF2 where you can horde them all you like but you can still only spend them on the skill you want when you have allocated X number of points globally. Now what does this mean? Well, that basically all heroes begin to look the same. 10 warriors at level 10 will have maybe 1 unique skill, and 9 common ones. This is a really big deal as the max level is 30 and the requirements are present all the way through. To compound this further, your heroes are weak in SF2. They can easily get mobbed by enemies and take damage so fast that it's often hard to react in time to save them. SF1 had a great deal of skills and spells that you could activate and then wade in to battle, some lasted only a short time and others were as long as you had mana. In SF2 these are present, but only in very low numbers. I can recall maybe 3 skills that last for a duration, the rest are one-shots. Now, in chaotic combat, what this means is one of three things:
1) Your hero dies before you can react.
2) Combat is so chaotic you are hard pressed to click on anything or use any skills other than the 'area affect'/'target not needed' ones.
3) Combat is somewhat more controlled but this is usually because the enemy are dying rapidly. The converse of point two is that you can successfully click on an enemy target (or select a random one with 'TAB') just in time to see it die. Again, before you can do anything cool skill-wise.
The result of this is that your heroes often end up either dead, cowering in the background or lost in the confusion. There are some RPG maps, but like I mentioned since most heroes end up being only a few skills different from each other, you as a player never feel any real affinity for your hero at all.
Ok, lastly, the story and universe that SF1 was set in and how it's been fleshed out in SF2. Well, this section will most likely be short because it basically hasn't. During a few maps and one of the add-ons the player is hinted at a possible other world inhabited by the Shadows. SF2 is called The Shadow Wars and picks up where the shadows begin invading. However, everything from the previous game is gone. At the start of the single player campaign you are seen standing in front of a monument (used to summon heroes in SF1) and a short dialogue informs you that all that happened in SF1 and the add-ons, occurred in a time long past. After which you are plunged into the new world of SF2. I am all for new areas, characters, stories and so on, but the original SF had a very unique and interesting setting. You were a rune warrior, immortal. Summoned at a monument you could create armies out of thin air, by taking control of other racial monuments (Dwarves, Humans, Orcs, Darkelves, Trolls and Elves). You had other heroes you could summon, again from runes which you found throughout your travels and it really felt like you were a very powerful weapon capable of dominating an entire map.
I could go on, but my fingers are getting sore. Basically to wrap this up I will talk about three other things. I've always said I would have loved to be in such-and-such a meeting when decision X was made. But really, when whoever decided to remove the way the player sold items in SF1 (selecting them all then clicking 'sell' to sell them all at once to the merchant) and change it to the method in SF2 (individually selling each item via click-dragging it onto the merchant window) I would have really liked to hear why.
Secondly, why do the workers cost resources? You know what this means right? In SF1 workers were free as they were made from a rune as was your entire army, except military units cost resources. Workers could do little-no damage, they are the grunts. In SF2 they cost silver, which is used for nearly every unit in the game. In addition, workers die in about 2 seconds flat, so what can happen is that the enemy can waltz in, hit all your workers before you can respond and if you are unlucky you can be caught in a situation where you haven't got enough money to rebuild them. That's great, because the AI gets free workers. *shakes head* Another decision I wish I had witnessed.
Thirdly, I mentioned earlier that sometimes I have read things that have been removed because it wasn't fun. An example: In Deus Ex 2 they removed ammo types and replaced them with unified ammo. You have an amount and no matter what gun you selected the ammo came from a common pool. Whereas in Deus Ex 1 you had rockets, sniper rifle rounds, shotgun shells, AP bullets etc etc. The reason I read in an interview was, 'managing ammo was not fun.' and yes, they are correct. If I sat down and simply handed out ammo to loads of people walking by my desk, this would not be fun. However, in game this management of ammo became a gameplay style choice. If you were a sneaking-thief type, you conserved and savoured every delicious sniper round, as it meant one less baddie you had to engage. If you were a tank, that rushed up into the enemy's face and shoved a shotgun under his chin, you loved making sure you were well-stocked with shells and AP bullets for your machinegun. How much ammo you had in this game, determined your approach to the level. It was not just about making sure you had 10 of these and 20 of those. It was giving the player gameplay choices, and by removing that you removed a lot of choices.
All in all, I see more and more games come out that are what I term 'safe' games. You can play it any which way, and it will be very very hard for you to screw up. These are not exciting games, they are dull, boring and do not challenge or inspire. Dear Games Industry, please wake up and put out some good titles. As much as I hate JoWood, right now I am loving them even if they are getting things wrong, as they are the only publisher to put out titles that actually have some new ideas in them.
I hope this finds you all well. :)
Cheers,
Digit
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"Good AI is annoying because when you fire at it, it ducks and takes cover."
P.S. It actually said Carols on Cantebury, I just misread it...