This last years, computer RPGs are becoming more and more “soft”, probably because of the mainstreaming of the genre, but probably too because of the desire to sell as much as possible. And as we know, geeks have a market share, but is not as big as normal videogame players one.

Let’s analyze some videogames…

Mass Effect was much like Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic: arcade combats, semi-lineal main quest plus secondary optional quests, and dialog choices to affect your alignment.

But the second part has become a Mass-Effect themed Gears of War clone, with conversations between battles. Is not that the story is bad (although it destroys the first part story) but is much much more an action-rpg than a RPG with action.

Or let’s take Fable II, a game that promised almost a virtual life, and delivered an action game with a beautiful setting but less roleplaying than the Diablo series. It was also so easy you could finish it without a single death.

Dragon Age Origins too was recent, and is maybe the only case of not so much softening. In some ways it is less RPG than old titles, but in other aspects (multiple starting places, different outcomes based on your choices, alignments, hidden quests and places…) even improves from the past.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, The Witcher or The Last Remnant are other titles that appeared more or less recently. And that in general, have RPG elements and are considered as such, but none has for example tried to create a multiplayer experience so close to pen&paper games like Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption did, empowering the figure of the dungeon master.

And with MMORPGs the state is similar. Ultima Online had isometric 2D graphics, but allowed to farm food, forge weapons, have your own house and even build it wall by wall. In World of Warcraft you have to pay to change your hairlook and the concept of housing is just a dream. Crafting exists and is much more user-friendly, but even counting thousands of quests most of them are repetitive and so similar that Ultima Online’s “pure freedom” mode gave you much more "roleplaying power”.

One thing is true: The graphics are improving a lot in general. Fable II has incredible daytime changes, bloom effects and in general playing it is like watching a faery tale. Mass Effect 2 is one of the best looking videogames out right now (in PC at 2560x1600 is gorgeous). Even Dragon Age with it’s not so impressive close-up graphics, has improved way far since Neverwinter Nights 2 (specially the faces of the humanoid creatures).

But graphics are not all, at least for me. You can deceive the eye but not the brain. Let’s see how the RPG trend progresses this year…

This time I must give my thanks to my friend Jorge for letting me this comic.

The story goes about an initially simple case for Batman, which turns out to dark magic powers, zombies, and the inner fears of the caped crusader. As usual no spoilers so short description, but it’s an unusual theme, specially for Batman.

This Batman is almost normal: His foes hit him (quite a lot actually), he almost uses no bat-gadgets, he doesn’t knows what to do in some situations… he even has a primal feeling that is unusual on him… Also, this is a really dark and spooky theme. Really violent crimes, a retired Jim Gordon, and a dark succession of events that I won’t spoil.

The comic is painted pretty well, giving an evil decadent look. Sharp edges, long and edged figures, dominance of dark colors… As I said, a different setting.

The fight of science versus magic, of humans versus “others”, of martial arts versus something that doesn’t feels pain, puts Batman in interesting dead-ends.

This comic is like watching Fight Club. Once you’ve seen it once gets less appealing, but the uncommon theme is very welcome for this superhero.

This week Mass Effect 2 launched worldwide, and I’ve had to leave on hold my Dragon Age gaming until I finish it (I’m around 16 hours of ME2 playtime).

While I will leave my judgement of the game, it’s RPG softening for the masses, it’s incredible narrative (being simple doesn’t means it can’t have deep transcripts) and a small screenshots gallery I’m taking as I play for a later post, today I wanted to comment something that happened to me and I’ve finally fixed (thanks to the ME2 community, but I can’t find the exact post).

If you have a Dual-Core or Quad-Core CPU, there seems to be an Unreal Engine 3 bug that causes some incredibly long loading times in Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age (I suffered it only on ME2, but I will try in Dragon Age to see if speed improves too). A 5 seconds loading screen in an affected computer takes easily 20 to 30 seconds!

The solution is easy but a bit boring because each time you launch the game you have to repeat it:

1. When the game is running, ALT+TAB from it or minimize and open the Windows Task Manager
2. Go to the Processes tab, right click on masseffect2.exe and select Set Affinity.
3. Uncheck all CPUs and check only the first one (CPU 0).
4. Close Task Manager and get back to the game again.

Loading times should be much much faster!

Thanks to Vicente, last sunday we had a 4 hours roleplaying session of Alternity, a sci-fi RPG from the late 90s.

At first it looked to me as a crossover between Cyberpunk 2020 and the Star Wars movies, but I was very wrong: The game uses a more or less simple d20 throwing system based on modifiers (which usually means additional dice, from d4 to d20 always, but sometimes a pure +/- modifier).
Combine that with 3 ranges of ok roll results (normal, good amazing) and an interesting combat system (with three levels of damage, and stun hits always present no matter how good the armor is), and you get a nice mix to enjoy futuristic adventures and alien combats.

The play itself was like a mini-adventure (that we managed to finish, albeit some catastrophic rolls :) and was quite funny (being 7 people allows for variety of decisions, opinions and ideas).

The only “negative” point was that the adventure had some similarities to a past Warcraft RPG adventure we played.

The setting and some of the races brought to me the sensation of being playing Mass Effect: the weren are so similar to the krogan, the psyonic magic...

Really fun and nice playsession, now the idea is to keep at least one session per month (one each 3 weeks would be great if we all can make it).

Oh, and as an extra, here is the image of the 8th misterious player… She didn’t say anything but was willing to play:

Taking advantage of my christmas holidays, I’m building the dozens of miniatures I had pending (plus more that I bought as an auto-gift :)

It is curious how now all the miniatures have so many optional components that in the case of orks, I’ve even had to discard some excess arms to make space for other pieces.

Apart from the last ork troops, I’ve got a bunch of Space Marine reinforcements (both troops and a few vehicles), but the “star project” is a homemade “ork stompa asembling facility”: the box contents of a pressure cooker (similar to a crater) among with all excess and unused ork trukk and ork tank pieces and some additional materials (like chinese food sticks xD).

I’ve finished building it (and took some photos) but I prefer to wait until I’ve painted it before posting it (unpainted looks even more terrible than it is).

I bought this comic and read it as a friend recommendation, because I’m a fan of Batman, but not to the extent of buying any of his comics. But as my friend said that “this must be the comic used as inspiration for Batman: The Dark Knight movie for how the Joker is depicted” (and that is my favourite Batman movie by far), I couldn’t resist reading it…

And yes, this must have been the inspiration. Not only the Joker is visually almost the same as the movie one (with the smile-scar in the face), but for his true madman psychology. Here the joker is pure chaos, pure dementia. He is bad, he has clever plans and ideas at some points, but above all he is really crazy.

We have a dark and decayed Gotham, with some classic enemies ruling part of the city’s underground activities and no clue of how is Batman going (but not as successful as he would like, that’s for sure). The drawings and specially the painting give the comic a creepy look, and both language and images are not for children. Kills, tortures and sexual related acts appear.

Also, the title is very appropiate: Here Batman is a secondary character. The narrator isn’t the Joker ether, but it’s better to read the comic ;)

Much better than the original, “more appropiate” joker, this one really scares. If you enjoyed the latest movie, or just like Batman, go grab the comic!

Finally, I’ve finished assembling all the pieces to be able to play Space Hulk.

Between a lot of Real World™ tasks and the arrival on pc of some nice games (specially Dragon Age), I’ve been a bit off from non-computer related gaming.

The assembled miniatures look just amazing, my only complaint is that they are clearly Blood Angels and I want Deathwing terminators, so even if it’s not an easy task I’m going to try to reconvert them. Up to the moment I’ve only removed a few Blood Angel drop icons, but there is still a lot of work (and the incredible detail the miniatures have doesn’t help to ease the task ;)

I’m halfway through the rulebook and unless my memory fails is almost the same rules of the first edition, but including Deathwing expansion weapons and Psykers/Librarians.

Time to find a free weekend morning to play it!

Many Real Life™ tasks lately, so I haven’t had time to paint miniatures, play Space Hulk or enjoy videogames, until last weekend. A lot of awaited games are out, so it’s RPGing time!

I still have to finish the two last DLCs for Fallout 3, but I became a bit tired of it so I’m focused on other title, but first, two small deceptions:

Torchlight

A game that while didn’t aimed to be something better than Diablo 2, ends up being so similar to Diablo. It improves over a lot of small details, the graphics are beautiful, but the story is very dumb and the game can become easily repetitive.
It features random dungeons, though, and multiple difficulty levels which  can help avoid that, but its a pure hack’n slash action RPG.

Borderlands

Another deception… Announced as a first person action-RPG, the result is not much more than a cartoonish, Fallout-themed Quake FPS with experience levels and a stupid, terrible save and enemy respawn system that punishes casual players that don’t pump hours into the game without quitting.
If you quit the game, you will restart at the beggining of the area, having to kill again all the foes (like in Diablo); this is fun the first minutes, but after a while you end up tired of killing “the same guys around the corner” for the 5th time.

Main plot like seems to be quite fast to complete, but I grew up tired on the fourth zone. Maybe with the 4-player coop mode is better, I haven’t tried.

Dragon Age Origins

At least this one is really nice :)

A real and nice Bioware “creature” and a proud descendant of Neverwinter Nights. Fresh setting (no longer settled in Forgotten Realms), vastly improved graphics (not as impressive as Fable 2, but still really good ones), and the promise of tons of play hours…

The interface is very similar to Neverwinter Nights 2/The Witcher, with some improvements, and Mass Effect’s dialog selection system. Recommended on PC for the better mouse handling, but available also in consoles.

Three races, three classes, six backgrounds and hundreds of quests, the game looks like the best RPG out there at the moment along with The Witcher.

I’ve played only a few hours and I’m hooked, as are all of my friends and colleages. Go grab it!

Last week, I spen’t one sitting of 5 hours playing Risen, a new RPG that looked very cool from the screenshots and that was just released. And because of the results, I’m starting a new tag that I will use sometimes in the future, not convinced.

Risen looks very beautiful, yes, and in fact the game world is pretty: weather effects, day-night cycle (you will get used to carrying torches), well chosen color palettes, good overall world design and lots of vegetation visible (a-la Oblivion).

But playing it feels a bit clumsy. Jumping is… strange, trees at close aren’t that beautiful, combat is very basic (and there are bugs, sometimes just attacking will keep enemies from doing anything until they die)… After playing Fable II Risen looks unpolished in comparison.

I haven’t gone too far in the game (I didn’t finish the first chapter), but simply I didn’t want to spend more time playing this.

The quests are too similar to World of Warcraft ones (kill X enemies, collect Y items), you have freedom to go to two or three places at once but this is not Oblivion, you have ranged and close combat weapons but you will have to rely on close combat ones for any non trivial enemy…

Sometimes those quests are not too clearly stated, and as the NPCs will just stop talking with you until you finish them, looks too unreal.

Heck, even the “professions” look like World of Warcraft ones (prospecting minerals, lockpicking, skinning dead animals), except here that means “see but don’t use yet” along your path, not “stop killing monsters and act like a real miner searching the world for minerals”.

Leveling is very basic too: Each level you get 10 "learning points, then you search for trainers to spend them on stats (strength, agility, etc.) or skills (swords, lockpicking,…). Apart from some extra life and mana points, nothing else.

Risen looks like an unfinished ambitious project. It has tons of elements but so rough, so simply implemented and displaced away by the more important lacks or problems, that you forget them and notice more the terrible combat system, or the almost useless world map.

Too bad because it has potential, it might get better later but at least with me its too late, it failed to engage me in the first hours.

In Spain I’ve found a one issue compilation, but I’m going to talk about the first 6 comics of Gears of War (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6).

They serve as a nexus between the two videogames, or sort of, because the truth is that they don’t add too much.

We’re given small hints of the four characters, both of their motivations and their past, but nothing ‘revealing’, just small details.

The scenarios are mostly new, but as in the game, with a similar theme and the same post-apocalyptic aura.

There are no new enemies, but almost all from the videogames appear. My disagree with this is that some of them are too forced inside the comic, just appear for a few pages and do almost nothing apart from “hey, I’m another foe from the videogame, just in case you forgot this is GoW!”.

That said, the comic is not bad. It has fantastic drawings, the locust are frightening and Marcus looks even more badass than in the game.

It’s just the feeling of “really I’m not being told anything, I’l just watching a collection of references to a game with pretty drawings”… But maybe it’s only my perception.