13 Feb 2008
After my first foray into zombie board gaming, of course I was excited to try out Zombies!!!, another entry into the genre. Unfortunately I walked away with a decidedly mixed experience.
In Zombies!!! the objective is to be the first player to make it to the helipad and escape the zombie infested city. The players don’t have any direct conflict, but they are competing over the same resources. The city layout is completely random every play, with the helipad not being placed until late in the game. In the end it boils down to a race, except with mobs of zombies between you and the goal. And due to the randomized layout you don’t actually know where the finish line is going to be. Which unfortunately means that you don’t really have anything to do until the helipad comes into play.
To combat the lack of something to do in the beginning of the game, there is an alternate victory condition for killing 25 zombies. The problem is that killing zombies without dying is hard. Combat is resolved by rolling a die, where you can use ammo counters to increase your roll or a life counter to re-roll. Statistically you’re going to need to cough some of those up every other fight, and you potentially could blow through all of them on one zombie. If you die your zombie kill count is halved, making it very difficult to amass the required 25 zombies (especially because all the other players will gang up on you if you get anywhere close). The only way you can refill your ammo and life counters is to venture inside buildings, which always come infested with a host of zombies. The risk vs. reward is dubious unless you’ve got some sort of edge to tilt the extreme randomness in your favor. But even if luck is on your side, combat fundamentally isn’t very satisfying.
You get a hand of cards to add some strategy. In general the cards seem to lean more towards inhibiting other players than helping you out directly. Almost all of the weapon cards require that they be played in specific buildings, which results in them very rarely being played. So you end up filling your hand with smack-down cards in a hope to win by being the last man standing. There’s a limit to the mayhem you can unleash, as that you are only allowed to play one card per round. So what really seems to happen is that everyone saves up some uber cards until the endgame, where chaos erupts on the mad dash to the helipad.
If there’s one thing this game does well, it’s creating the feeling that there are a crap-ton of zombies swarming the city. The moments after the helipad is placed when everyone is scheming about that last rush are truly great. I like the theme, I like a lot of the ideas, but this game seems broken without some significant gameplay changes (which are hard to make confidently without playing lots of games). Thankfully the issues are well documented and there’s a good set of alternate rules available. But I’m a little shocked that the second edition release of this game hadn’t fixed more issues out of the box.
My first night of Zombies!!! Was disappointing. The second time, with more players and alternate rules, was much more satisfying. I’ll happily play it again, but it’s clear that the game has some fundamental issues that’ll prevent it from being a favorite.
08 Feb 2008
Played on PC
I’ve been struggling to figure out how I feel about the MMO genre. I love the epic worlds and character persistence, but I hate so many of the game mechanics that slow enjoyment to a crawl. I definitely have the capacity to enjoy these kinds of games, but the concentration of good stuff is extremely diluted. I feel like I’m in denial about a failing relationship because once in awhile we connect and I forget about all the arguing and apathy.
I’ve learned to trust Rock Paper Shotgun over the months. The blog is well written, unapologetically subjective, and written by people who get me as a gamer. So when they started talking about Tabula Rasa, a rare combination of MMORPG and FPS, they had my full attention. Richard Garriott may come off as a nut job, but he created one of my favorite games of all time. So I pushed aside my MMO fatigue and plopped down $40 for Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa.
And hot damn, this game is actually good.
Like most games, MMORPGs are basically about killing stuff. Surprisingly, killing stuff in Tabula Rasa is fun. Not fun in the typical MMO sense where after you kill lots of things you get a pat on the back and a minor statistical gain which appeals to your obsessive emotionally crippled self… which confuses it with fun. No, this game is fun for reals. In the same time it would take you to down some boar in another MMORPG you’ve rushed a squad of enemies, taken down their shield drone, shotgunned them onto their backs, and mercilessly clubbed them with the butt of your gun. Similar to how Puzzle Quest replaced the drab turn-based RPG mechanic with something more engaging, Tabula Rasa has replaced the drab real-time RPG mechanic with action packed goodness.
The whole game feels an MMO in fast forward. Many of the time consuming standards have been streamlined. Travel from zone to zone in Tabula Rasa is free and instantaneous. If you want to explore all eight of the game’s classes you won’t have to play the game eight times, thanks to the cloning system. And each run through is going to take less time, because twinking your alts (clones) is actually a supported process with shared storage between characters. Questing is streamlined, with mission goals clearly indicated on your map (sorry Raph, figuring out where you need to go is not the fun part). Hell, you don’t even have to take the time to click to loot, as that looting is accomplished by merely walking near your defeated foe. Pretty much all that filler crap has been thrown out the window.
One of the largest wastes of time in MMOs is looking for a group of people to play with. Extreme level/gear banding splits up the population up so that not everyone can play together. To make things more difficult, you’re going to need a specific number and specialization balance in your party in order to be successful. To find a viable group you have to wait around until the right people all magically materialize at the same time, which can take hours. Your only other option is to join a hardcore guild with a regular play schedule, which of course comes at the expense of your real social schedule flexibility. For a genre that’s supposed to be about multiplayer gaming, it sure is frustrating matching up with other people.
Tabula Rasa somewhat addresses this problem by automatically scaling the difficulty of instances to party size. Even if you can only find one other person to play with, the two of you can happily duo the encounter and still have a good time. In fact, the entire game can be played solo. Grouping is fun, and increases your overall survivability, but it’s not forced upon you. Which works well with my preferred play style, which is essentially “singleplayer with the option to become multiplayer at any time.”
There’s this concept in MMOs of “pulling,” which is the act of choosing an opponent from a field of many to engage in single combat. It’s a miniature puzzle to figure out how to attract the right combatants without adding others. You can pull aggressively, but given that the penalty (death) is high, your success is generally tied to your ability to balance risk. That’s right, MMOs are essentially risk management simulators. Well, Tabula Rasa makes managing risk very difficult, because there generally aren’t fields of baddies milling about. It’s quite common for a drop ship to plop down enemy reinforcements in the middle of your carefully planned assault. Pretty soon you realize it’s better to throw caution to the wind, spin up your chaingun, and have fun. Embrace unpredictability. The game actually rewards recklessness, giving you an experience bonus if you keep up a steady combo of kills.
As I read what I’ve written, this article could also easily be titled “Everything I hate about MMOs and why Tabula Rasa is different.” It’s because of this that I’m so forgiving of Tabula Rasa’s flaws. It replaces the typical fantasy fare with a sci-fi setting, which is refreshing, but the details of this world are forgettable and generic. Everything from the character design to the architecture to the landscape you’ve seen done better elsewhere. And it doesn’t do a good job of easing you into the world. There’s a decent intro tutorial, but after that you have to figure out everything for yourself. In particular the crafting system is a completely mystery until you do some online research, and then you realize that it has potential but is severely crippled by insufficient UI. Outside of the core combat, a lot of things about Tabula Rasa are rough around the edges.
For me, two main things are critical for a game to be enjoyable: gameplay (basic mechanics and incentive) and setting (into which I’m lumping story, characters, and environment). Good games create a synergy between those, which is essentially the connection between intellect and emotion. Tabula Rasa is thoroughly mediocre when it comes to setting, which I suspect will limit its long-term appeal. But it totally reinvigorates the genre’s archaic gameplay. Which is a very exciting thing, because gameplay, unlike setting, is transferable. If the MMO developers out there start taking notes from Tabula Rasa we’ll have a much brighter online gaming future ahead of us.
22 Jan 2008
Let’s face it, I’m a gamer geek. I stand today as a video game playing computer programmer… but that pales in comparison to the path I took to get to be who I am today. In my days I’ve done everything from D&D to CCGs. And the sad part is that I played most of them in my head. Fellow geeks are hard to come by when you’re young, so I spent more time thinking about these games than actually playing them. I think that’s what defines a real gamer: someone who can fuel themselves with the mere idea of a game.
Everyone is familiar with board games. Whether it’s Monopoly or Scrabble or Sorry, chances are you’ve played a board game with your family on a rainy day. In fact, for many people, this is what comes to mind when they hear the word “game.” It’s a socially approved, wholesome activity. But of course as you leave the nest the opportunity for family gaming disappears. So it is that I probably haven’t played anything other than the odd game of Scrabble in a decade.
That is, until now. After all this time I’m playing a new board game and I’m experiencing something fiercely nostalgic. This game isn’t anything like the board games I played in my youth. But with the pieces and the dice it connects me with some of the same sensations - physical things that you don’t get from a video game. For me board games have always been a family thing, and as such I had no idea this whole subculture of adult niche board gaming existed. Hell, there’s even a DOOM board game.
But enough rambling. Let me actually talk about this specific zombie-themed romp (which I [mentioned]/2008/01/16/zombie-board-game.html) called Last Night On Earth.
The board is a small village with a town square and surrounding buildings. The pieces around the square are random for every game, so sometimes there will be a police station, sometimes a high school. There isn’t really a lot of variety in the board arrangement, but it’s enough to keep things fresh.
The players are divided into two teams: zombies and heroes. The heroes are selected from a set of zombie movie stereotypes like the sheriff or the high school flirt. All of them have different attributes and abilities, making them feel more like characters than just board game pieces. Over the course of the game the heroes can accumulate guns, baseball bats, and other equipment to help them defend themselves, but of course the zombies make up for that in numbers.
The gameplay involves a mixture of standard rules for moving, searching, and fighting, a hand of cards to spice things up, and dice rolling. The heroes are tasked with some overall objective. This could be to survive until sunset, or it could be to fight back and destroy the source of the zombie infestation. The zombies have one objective: eat the heroes.
So, is it any fun? Definitely. The thematic element is key here, as that it wouldn’t be the same game if you weren’t living out some zombie movie survival scenario. As you play the cards and roll the dice you find yourself doing storytelling as well. That’s where the real fun is, but the mechanics are just deep enough to keep you thinking about strategies for your next game, even if randomness is a large element.
One of the differentiating aspects of this game is that it’s asymmetric: the zombie team and hero team are not playing the same game. The heroes are concerned with searching buildings and keeping the zombies at range. The zombies play a slow strategic game of swarming and surprise. Depending on the scenario it’s likely that one team has more of an edge than the other. But personally it doesn’t really bother me because the thematic scenarios are engaging enough to keep the minute to minute gameplay interesting, even if the victory condition is sometimes skewed.
I’ve definitely enjoyed the time I’ve spent with Last Night On Earth so far. I look forward to playing with more people, trying out other scenarios, and getting the first expansion when it rolls around. But more than that this game has reminded me of a whole genre of gaming that I’ve neglected for years. I’ve always associated board gaming with “family time,” which is good and all, but I’m excited to see that there’s an industry making board games for quirky people just like me.
16 Jan 2008
I’ve been doing quite a bit of ranting about a potential zombie video game over the last couple months. And after all of that, I randomly came across a zombie board game at a store downtown. I had no idea such a niche existed. There are people out there that are so dedicated to their zombie apocalypse scenarios that they actually carry them out in real space with miniatures and everything. In other words, my kind of people.
Not only did I stumble across a zombie board game, I came across a whole genre. There were no fewer than three games to choose from, so I ran home to go do some research.
Zombies!!! (photo)
In this game the goal is to be the first survivor to make it to the helipad and escape. The twist is that the terrain is completely random. You actually build up the town as you go, with a new piece of it being added every turn. As the oldest of these three zombie games, Zombies!!! has six expansions to it, providing a large set of possible environments spanning everything from a mall to a military base. The most common criticism I’ve read is that the game often runs too long.
ZombieTown (photo)
A newer game by the same creators as Zombies!!!, ZombieTown exchanges the dynamic board for more varied objectives. The goal of this game is to survive for 10 days while barricading properties, finding survivors, amassing weapons, and killing zombies. The catch with this game is that it really requires four people in order to hit critical mass, and without a steady gaming group I can’t really guarantee that. Plus a good deal of the tension in the game comes from the players turning on each other in the fight for territory, and I’m not sure if everyone would be into that. But certainly this one looks to fulfill a lot of the survival objectives that I’ve been talking about.
Last Night On Earth (photo)
Instead of pitting the players against each other as fellow survivors, Last Night On Earth divides players up into a zombie team and a hero team. The board is a fixed shape but is made up of random modular pieces. The scenarios range from killing a specific number of zombies, to escaping in the truck, to smoking out the cult leader. One of the key draws for me is that it is designed to work well with only two players.
In doing my research there were a couple of other names that popped up that I hadn’t seen in the store:
I went back downtown and snatched up Last Night On Earth, because it seemed to be the most favorably reviewed and was recommended for two players. I’ve had the opportunity to play a couple games by now, and it definitely scratches some of that zombie gaming itch. Expect a proper review sometime soon.
15 Jan 2008
Played on PC
When is the appropriate time to evaluate an MMO? I usually post a review of a game after I finish it, but MMOs are designed to have no end to them. I could give a first impression, but many of the finer gameplay elements are not immediately available or apparent. In fact, MMO systems are generally so large and complex that I might not understand the “bigger picture” until the time I’ve invested is approaching triple-digit hours. So it is that I’ve gone so long without saying much about Lord of the Rings Online.
I’ve mentioned before my transition from World of Warcraft (WoW) to Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO). There’s no mistaking the influence the former has had on the latter. Out of the box the familiarity definitely worked in LotRO’s favor; I was immediately about to jump in and concentrate on the content. As time went on I think the similarities accelerated my fatigue, as it was very clear that although I had not “been there” I had indeed “done that.” All of this invites comparison, and there’s no doubt in my mind that WoW is a superior game. But when you’ve exhausted all of WoW’s content, and you haven’t written off the genre as a whole, you can do worse than to slum it out to LotRO.
I’m going to say some not-so-nice things about LotRO, so I really have to preface it all by reminding you (and myself) that I like LotRO. It has some really excellent moments in it. I’ll never forget the time I wandered into the Barrow Downs and encountered my first shrieking screen-shaking undead. Or when I got thoroughly lost in the Old Forest. Or when I turned the bend and saw Weathertop, and refused to do anything else until I had climbed to the top of it. Or when I snuck my way into the valley of Rivendell, far earlier than I really should have. These moments where the game connects you to the fiction are amazing. Unfortunately they’re few and few between.
As powerful as the Lord of the Rings license can be, it is also the source of many of this game’s flaws. You see, the books are primarily about travelling, and as such the world of LotRO is huge. The developers have done an excellent job of honoring the scope of the fiction, such that if you were to walk the footsteps of Bilbo or the Fellowship, it would be an appropriately epic journey. Unfortunately, you can’t really do that. For one, like WoW this world is broken up into level banded regions. Four Hobbits could not make it from the Shire to Rivendell in this world without having their asses handed to them by any number of bears, spiders, and orcs on the way. Instead they would have to stop every mile or so to grind until they were ready for the next leg. I’m beginning to see why Bilbo had to travel with thirteen dwarves and a wizard.
But I can forgive all of that and write it off as a gameplay necessity. I mean, that’s how WoW does it and it works. WoW’s locations are extremely varied, each with their own palette, landmarks, and local fauna. The world of Middle-Earth is certainly full of amazing locations, but unfortunately as LotRO exists today you’re only getting a very small percentage of them. The currently available land mass covers from the Shire to the Misty Mountains. Comparing to the fiction, this basically only allows access to locations where events started to get interesting. There’s no Lonely Mountain, no Moria, no Isengard, and certainly no Mordor. Spending hours of your time grinding through a field that the Fellowship breezed through doesn’t exactly leave a heroic taste in your mouth.
I hit my first real slump somewhere shy of level 25. I had reached Weathertop but wasn’t really high enough level to push much further beyond. I stopped playing for some time until the game got patched to increase the viability of my class (minstrel). Reinvigorated, I powered through the next ten levels relatively quickly. I hit the landmark level 35 and spent all my hard earned cash on a mount. Getting my mount had granted an amazing feeling of freedom in WoW, but now that I had mine in LotRO I quickly realized that I didn’t actually have anywhere to ride to.
I sit now at level 37, not too far from the level cap of 50. And I’m having a hard time mustering up the willpower to get through those next 13 levels because I know that I’ve already hit all the landmarks that are most important to me. I want to see the Misty Mountains, sure, but that’s about it. It’d be different if I weren’t so invested in the fiction. I’d probably be more excited about visiting some random ruin if I couldn’t think of a dozen more intriguing places I’d rather go to. Spending this much time tooling around in Eriador just feels wrong. Long travel times are okay for a one-way trip, but when you’re doing all the back and forth grunt work of your typical MMORPG, travelling around becomes a chore. And this is where I think the license is working against the game: In trying to own up to the epic size of the world the developers have created an epic amount of work for themselves. If it’s taken this long to get us to the Misty Mountains, how long will it be until we’re at the steps of Mount Doom?
I’ll see my character through to 50, but it’s mostly for the potential of what’s to come. The developers of LotRO have done an amazing job with the material they’ve presented so far. The environments are truly gorgeous. I genuinely look forward to seeing how they interpret the rest of Middle Earth, but I hope they establish better pacing so that I can see it in this lifetime.
