Tag: video-games

The strange, fully functioning phasing of Ratchet and Clank 1

~ SamRandom ~ Leave a comment

Ratchet and Clank 1 shares a lot of the same quirks as the first Crash Bandicoot game, created by the teams contemporaries, that of being the first. There is a sense of being on uncertain grounds and throwing everything at the wall. The player is thrown between rail grinding, shooting and puzzles within the first hour. A lot of the early game quests feels like after thoughts, you often travel to a planet solely to get a tool to solve a puzzle on another map. On several places the way to advance is to ignore the obvious path and go exploring. What makes the game so fascinating, is that it all works.

The game throws you from planet to planet, from play-style to play-style at a truly breakneck phase, yet never feel rushed. No one mechanic never truly comes to overstay its welcome. Like with the companies other start title Spyro, are these segments not nearly as jarring as one would expect.

The narrative of the game is primarily moved forward by the acquisition of data-bots. Small floating robots with screens for mouths, that sometimes, but not always runs away from you. These robots gives the player a cut scene tangentially related to the next plot beat, as well as the coordinates needed for the player to reach the next planet. More then once is the acquisition of these robots not tied at all to the main objective of the game.

A striking example of this narrative stricture is at the x research star base, where Ratchet suggest they should got to find a scientists to interrogate, in order to find the big bad, the owner of said space ship.

The player does indeed find a scientists on the station, and talk to him, but instead of getting any form of information out of him, the player is forced to buy a pair of grind boots to progress. These frequent hurdles exits throughout the game, and often requires the player to find more bolts, the games currency, or save up the bolts they find naturally. The problem being that these same bolts are also used to buy weapons, and ammunition, some being prohibitively expense. Teaching the player to early on be fiscally conservative with their bolts.

The data bot needed to progress is placed in a seeming side path, a quest to find rare tech. Thankfully the map design is made in such a way that the players vision first lands on the shuttle used to travel to the seemingly optional side quest. The game early on presents the player with these side paths, but only some are in fact optional.

The game is understood drastically differently if its either seen as a single game, or as the first game in a series. The first game in isolation has a strange sensation of trial and error, and unfinished ideas, but also of novelty and strangeness. When put in the context of the sequels does the vision become more clear, and the strange choices become more apparent and put in a larger context, just as with Crash Bandicoot and Spyro.

This era is full of games that never got the chance to leave this stage of novelty and strange experimentation. Glover and Rosco McQueen likewise falls in this genre of experimental third person platforms, all tying their creation to lesser or greater extent to the innovation that was the dual-shock controller. A revolution halfway trough the lifespan of the PlayStation one, it drastically changed how the players could navigate and look around a virtual space. No longer limited to workarounds like Z targeting that plagued so many Nintendo 64 games.

Many of these experimental games never got the squeal they needed to fulfill its promise, Ratchet and Clank was one of the exceptions, it got not only a sequel, but an entire series. It is trough this lens that I will return to Ratchet and Clank next.

Gwylim notes on Morrowind: Seyda Neen, the anatomy of a tutorial area

~ SamRandom ~ 1 Comment

Introduction

All players of Morrowind start their adventure by leaving their prison ship, and entering through Vaardenfell costumes office. They enter the game as a prisoner, brought to Vadeenfell under unclear circumstances, with only a cryptic dream of Azura to guide you. The Sedya Neen port is a customs office, giving the game a perfect excuse to ask the players questions about their race, name and profession. The office effectively presents the player with the workings of the Empire and your role within it.

This is a goal that Skyrim also achieved by having you give your information to the executioner. Morrowind shows the bureaucratic rigour of the Empire, while Skyrim shows the cold and careless part of the same bureaucracy. Both approaches are useful, and have their positives as well as negatives. While Morrowind’s approach is more diegetic, is Skyrim’s approach doubtlessly more action oriented..

The ship and the dock

The game slowly introduces you to the controls of the game, moving, talking and interacting, as you travel through the

ship and interact with your jailor. As you leave the ship you are asked to tell the first clerk where you are from. This being the game’s way of making the player choose their race diegetically.

The landing area is small, verdant with life, and completely closed off from the rest of the gameworld. The player is situated directly in front of the entrance to the survey office as they leave the ship. This gives the player a clear goal, while also giving them small glimpses of the world beyond the introduction area.

Getting registered

Entering the customs office you are met by an elder Imperial man, asking you to fill in your paperworks. He dryly explains that there are a number of ways that this can be achieved, and that the choice is up to the player. Here the player can make their own class, pick one from the list of premade classes, or answer a few questions to let the game pick a class for you.

While these questions are rather strange and surreal in the context of the registration for entry, the game has done enough groundwork for it not to be too immersion breaking. As you fill in your race, class and birth sign, is your character menu likewise filled in with the relevant information, making the UI feel like a natural extension of your characters paperwork. You get one last chanse to correct anything you are not happy with before leaving the character creation process. At this you are ordered to grab your papers of registration and show them to the guard at the end of the room.

Exploring the halls

Leaving the costumes office you are briefly left to your own devices in a series of small rooms. Here you can find a few interesting objects that I will explain later in more detail, as well as plenty of trinkets books. Right ahead of the player is a small set of stairs, leading to a number of barrels and boxes, containing clutter items as well as alchemical ingredients,as weöö as gemeral nicknacks.

Directly to the right is a room that is far more inviting in its decor and overall layout. Here the player will find a book case, a locked chest, a dagger and a lockpick. Picking up the dagger or the lockpick gives the player a small tutorial window relating to combat and lock picking, the game suggests that the player tries to pick the lock of the small coin chest in the same room. The drinks and the bread can be picked up, leading to the same short tutorial on alchemy described earlier. Leaving the dining room leads the player to a small outdoors area.

The ring, the knife and the lockpick

It is in this walled off outdoors area that the player finds their last tutorial item in a barrel, a magic ring. The barrel is located in such a way that it is almost impossible for the player not to have it directly in their line of sight as they enter the area. The knife and the lockpick is similarly located in the player’s direct line of sight, with the dagger being called out in a corresponding note.

Picking up any of these items gives the player a small explanation on how they work, and how they are equipped, slowly introducing the players to the game mechanics as and when they become relevant. While not the most interactive tutorial mechanics available, are they effective at the goals that they aim to achieve. At the end of the tutorial area, most players will be informed about the game systems of magic fighting and lick picking. Leaving the open area leads you to the last room of the tutorial area.

Release, getting your orders

The player enters the last small office, populated by a single guard that instructs the player to take a packet of contact in Balmora. The player is given a package as well as some instructions on how to carry out this task. This being the only guidance the player gets besides their cryptic dream from the introduction cutscene for quite some time. This approach teaches the player that Morrowind’s secrets are many, and that they need to find them out for themselves.

The player can ask the guard a series of questions regarding a number of topics, as well as trying their hands on the persuasion system. The player learns through the dialogue tree that asking certain things can lead to new topics being discovered. When the player is ready to leave there is a door at the opposite end of the room.

Epilogue, choices and consequences

Leaving the costumes office, the player is faced with the last mechanic that the game will teach them for a while. A Bosmer man wanders outside of the costumes office, apparently he has had his prized magic ring confiscated recently. The same ring the player just picked up. Here the player learns about unavoidable text options in the form of red text snippets.

Here the player is forced to make a choice, to give the ring up, or to keep it. Keeping the ring allows the player to cast a spell they would otherwise not be able to for some time, while handing the ring over raises the disposition of the Bosmer man. The man also hints that mentioning this to the local shop keeper will give you better prices. If the player were to help the man, and mention it to the shopkeep, they will indeed be rewarded with better prices at the store.

From here the player is free to explore at their leisure, with a stern but gentle suggestion that they should travel to Balmora first, to get that entire prisoner business dealt with. So begins all games of Morrowind, heading out from the confined tutorial area of the Seada Neen customs office.

Do you like my writing and want to help me write more? Please take a look at my patreon, it has several essays, and would help me create a lot more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/SamRandom13

Gwylim notes on Morrowind: Guild quests, the value of mundanity

~ SamRandom ~ Leave a comment

Mundanity is a powerful tool of storytelling, it helps anchor and expand the narrative, it gives the reader a chanse to recover from a particularly intense chapter. This last part is especially important for games where the players take a more active role than in for example film watching or reading. Morrowind has several organically formed downtimes, primarily traversal from one area and another, while this is a fascinating form of mundanity, and one that I will undoubtedly come back to, is there another mundanity I wish to discuss in this essay, the mundanity of faction questions.

Specifically the mundanity of the quests found in the joinable guilds. Unlike the later games in the series, these factions do not have a big Crisis to solve, no real villain, and no truly complete unbroken narrative. What you get from the quests is that of which you puzzle together on the way, vague hints and implications of grander plots. What makes these quests so engaging is that they often intersect with plots and narratives of both the main quest and other grander narratives of the game.

Source; https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Fighters_Guild

While you may only go to Vivec city to acquire a rare book for a colleagues research paper, you will inevitably find many more quests on the way, many more areas to explore, as well as some interesting hints and implication of the mystery of the Neravarine. The quests writing and design works rather effectively for giving you a reason not only to explore, but to place the player characters in regions and situations they may have otherwise missed.

The mundanity of the guild quests also helps with how Morrowind is designed to be interacted with. For the longest time, the player is not The hero of the tale, but a simple agent of the imperial crown, pardoned from an unspecific crime in return for providing a vague service to the crown. You are a person in the world, rather than a hero that happens to it. The game pretty early on heavily suggests that the player should join a guild or another organization, with the logic that the player will need some form of cover. Again enforcing that you are not necessarily the big hero, yet. So far you are a mere civilian and agent of the imperium’s spy network.

The mundane and pedestrian tasks of the guilds helps to drive this point home without making the process tedious and boring. The quests are often streamlined and located either near to the starting location or near one or several fast travel locations. The quests are often very simple from a purely mechanical standpoint, entailing going to a place, talking to or killing a person, or getting a thing. What sells the fantasy of the guilds is the consistent theming and narrative, giving everything you do a flavor unique to that faction.

Source; https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Mages_Guild

The guilds have their own internal struggles and politics, and you get glimpses of, and partake in some of the politics as a player. There is bad blood between the thieves guild and the fighters guild, power struggles within the fighters guild, as well as discontent with the current mage guild leadership. As you carry out your orders, train your skills to raise in rank will the player inevitably find other quests and stories. The lack of a central narrative of a crisis makes it a lot easier for the writers to weave these quest tales in the wider tapestry of the world’s narratives.

Lastly, does this approach to quest design allow the player to more effectively play out the narrative of their character. Your role as a Mage guild member does not end when you leave the Balmora Mage guild in the same way that your role within the Mage guild in Oblivion disappears as soon as you leave the arcane collage. While the strategy of creating walled gardens for your faction quests may be more practical and easy to manage (I will return to this topic later), I would argue that the depth and life the Morrowind approach to faction quests entails, is well worth the extra work.

Do you like my writing and want to help me write more? Please take a look at my patreon, it has several essays, and would help me create a lot more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/SamRandom13

Writing update

~ SamRandom ~ Leave a comment

So, funny story. I have several papers cooking, but none of them are finished for today! One, almost was. But would make no sense without the other. So here’s a little rundown of upcoming topics!

Gwylim notes on Skyrim: health potions and visual shorthand

This is the next part of my Skyrim series, it needs some more research done, and I need to take some reference photos before it’s ready but the base is there.

The potion bottle is a staple of the fantasy game genre, and can be found in most every game of the genre, from Dark souls to legend of Zelda. In Skyrim are the potions easily labeled and color coded to the stat that they refill, green for stamina, blue for mana and red for health. What I wish to discuss in this text is their prominence in the game world.

Health potions can be bought by vendors for sure, but can also be found in caverns, dungeons and most interestingly, inside people’s homes. While this makes sense from a gameplay sense, it does lead to some interesting narrative consequences. At some points are you able to hand these magical potions to an npc, that indeed does get better. Others you are forced to leave to their death. It is worth noting that Elder Scrolls Online is much more guilty of this crime than Skyrim.

Gwylim notes on Skyrim: Books and magical excavations

This will be a continuation of my exploration of books and their use in narrative building in Skyrim and Oblivion. I want to lay a fair bit of groundwork before I post this one. There is a fair bit of research to do for this, and the other essays in the series.

Books are a fundamental part of the narrative building of the Elder scrolls series, they can often bring context to the greater narratives as well as specific quests. In this essay I will discuss four different quests, two from Oblivion and two From Skyrim.  The unifying themes for these quests is that, except for one, they get a lot of context from the lore books surrounding, or being part of the quest.

In this way I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of relying on a player to read a book, and when in the narrative the book becomes available to the player.

Warhammer essay: Wild creativity and measured preservation

I have slowly been working on more Warhammer essays, but currently are the Skyrim essays taking precedence. I need to get my hands on a few lore books first if I want to be able to discuss Warhammer properly again, as a lot of the texts I have are either too old, or too new for what I want to write about.

Warhammer fantasy as well as warhammer 40k has an interesting relationship to the concept of creativity, knowledge and the art of creation. There are two opposing forces that are present in much of the texts. These are of innovation and of tradition, as well as carelessness and caution.

Each faction lands somewhere between these parameters, and a lot of the faction’s philosophy, morals and history can be gleaned from these traditions. There are some ideas that returns again and again. Tradition often comes with stagnation and loss of generational knowledge. On the other side is carefree innovation leading to explosive results. I will present a few examples of these themes in this essay, but they are by my way exhaustive.

Umvelon: City of magic

I have been writing a lot on a lore supplement for my homebrew setting Landhurst. I have posted a bit of this project on my patreon, so if this sounds like something that is interesting to you, you can find more information there. I want to present the introductory text here, to give my readers an idea of what I have been working on.

Introduction

Umvelon is Landhurst’s third largest city, and the second largest centre for education in the entire nation.  It is most importantly the undisputed centre for arcane education, research and regulation. The seemingly ancient city is in fact one of the younger cities in the nation’s history.

After the Elven defeat did the nascent mage guilds take the arcana rich site to be their centre of learning and research. From the humble campus on top of a ruined Elven metropolis did the mighty city of today take shape. Spreading ever downwards towards the muddy waters of the surrounding swamplands that keeps the city isolated from the mainland.

Magic education and bureaucracy.

Umvelon is the seat for higher arcane learning, and the only place where one can learn the many trades that require a full time commitment, such as battle mage, alchemist or healer. While the rest of the nation have rudimentary research and safety training for proper arcane use is it only in Umvelon that one can become a full fledged member of the mage guilds.

Furthermore the city is the centre for the governing body of the mage guilds. It is from here that arcane disasts, corruption and other dangers are investigated and rooted out. The dreaded Mage hunters, the personal juridical wing of the mage guilds also have their headquarters in the city, brazenly displaying their clandestine operations in broad daylight.

Patrons of art and education

Besides the arcane colleges there are several smaller academic institutions present in the city, not least of them the Librarians and archival collage, as well as the academies for History and the liberal arts. These campuses can be found all across the city, but everyone boasts at least one lecture hall on the coveted Campus hill in the fourth ring of the city.

Beyond the official institutions is the city sprawling with museums, bookstores and coffee shops that hold unplanned lectures and readings for anyone interested. Most of these institutions are free for citizens and are paid for by the many rich trade families that have made the city their home. A grand payment to one or more of the educational institutions of the city not only garners good will with the citizens, but also gives them rather generous tax cuts from the city’s mayor and mayoral staff.

Arcane trade

Umvelon is the centre of all arcane trade in Landhurst, and all arcane items are either made here, or made by someone who has been educated here. The guilds keep a close eye on all wares of an arcane nature that moves through the nation’s many waterways. Close, but not so close that smuggling and bribery is not permitted, solely to make sure that research and production runs smoothly ofcourse.

Arcane artifact

While many of the bulk products such as magically enchanted ammunition, scrolls, crystals and potions are made in large warehouses elsewhere, the city is still full of production. It is unsurprisingly full with the kind of production that will not disturb a college professor’s mid day nap with its noise, or the kind of smell that makes a high society lady reach for her perfumed handkerchief.

Gwylim notes on Skyrim: The joys and frustrations of in game book hunting

~ SamRandom ~ 2 Comments

I am sure that many of my readers have had the joy of finding a specific book in an obscure bookshop or lurking in a digital archive somewhere. The frustration when you are missing but one text in your collection, the unwillingness to start a project before you know that you are all the texts you need to start. I admit that this is not a problem that many people have, but I am sure that at least some of my readers can empathise with my plight!

A book from Skyrim in the reading view of the game.

I have had a similar experience in skyrim recently. I have discussed the wealth of reading that can be found in the elder scrolls series many times. There are novels, poems, essays and unhinged ramblings to be found in all of the main games. In many of these games there also exist book sellers in where to easily and effectively acquire this reading materials, as well as libraries aplenty.

Skyrim is different in this regard, as it is the general store sellers that sells but a paltry few books. The only libraries available to the players are also located at either the seats of power, or at Skyrims two seats of learning, the bards college and the College of Winterhold, the primary location to learn the arcane arts.

The second of the two colleges have an especially stringent and suspicious librarian. Due to his dour nature, or due to a lack in coding, can you in fact Not borrow books from this library, though he does sell some of the texts he stores there. Due to a quirk in the book shelves in the Winterhold library can you only read the majority of the books if you steal them from the shelves, as they are not located in the regulair open style bookcases.

There are on the other hand other ways to acquire reading material in Skyrim. First and foremost does the otherwise uninterested populus of Skyrim own a fair few books themselves, as at least two or three can be found in each household. Likewise does it seem that everyone from blood crazed necromancers to cut throat bandits have a bend for reading. As a result the dungeons are populated by sentient races often surprisingly full of books, journals, scrolls and other reading material.

Many of these seemingly brutal and bullheaded robbers seem to have an interest in obscure history and advanced magical theories. As it is more common to find a thesis on Mysticism next to a bandit bed, then it is to find something salacious like The Lusty Argonian Maid.

This means that the best way to expand your library is to either delve into a dungeon, or go thieving in the neighborhood. I want to make the argument Skyrim has moved away from the cities being as much of a hub as they were in Oblivion and Morrowind. The wilderness and the quests and adventures that take place in the wilderness between the cities, has taken over much of the time spent in the cities, especially Oblivion. In the earlier games most quest givers lived in the cities, as well as large part of the quests themselves taking place in, or near cities.

An in game view of the city of Solitude from the game Elder Scrills: Skyrim

As a result would it make sense that much of the amenities that the player needed, weapons, potions, books and other gear would be available to them in the cities. Likewise does the specialized stores help create a sense of urban life in both Morrowind and Oblivion that I believe is deliberately absent from Skyrim.

It makes sense for the seat of the mage guild to have a dedicated staff shop for example. Likewise would it make sense for Vvardenfell capital with its many educational and administrative centres to have a well stocked bookstore available. These shape the narrative of the world itself.

Skyrim is a much more rugged place, but also a different game. Many quest givers meet the player on the road, or in small villages, and when they are located in the cities do they more often than not direct the player to a cave in the wilderness. The courier is another mechanic that delivers quests to the players with the constant letters and requests. Specialized stores that only accepts certain kinds of loot would slow down the game loop of:

Visit town, get quest.
Visit wildernets, finish quest and get loot.
Visit town, sell loot, repeat.

A book from Skyrim in the reading view of the game.

All of this gives the gameplay a much more mobile feeling to its gameplay. I would argue that the lack of specialist stores have also had an effect on this. You are less likely to spend time in a town when every single town offers the same, smithy, general store and alchemist as the next.

All these design choices make Skyrim feel differently from their predecessors. You explore and interact with it in different time scales and relate to space in different ways. The way you interact with the hour to hour gameplay is subtly different in many small ways. For example how the player interacts and considers the loot from dungeons and quests.

As a result is it only natural that you would need to interact with the lore book in different ways. While I do miss The First Edition from Oblivion very much, I must admit that a bookstore in Skyrim would not fit into the differently phased and organized gameplay that the game works around.