Tilting at Windmills

Latest Combat Screen

Well, the new year is here… I didn’t quite get to my combat milestone, but I have been working on it today, er, yesterday.

Right now, I’m working on adding the interaction menus and controls for the combat system. This also extends to spell and item selection, which will be used both in travel and combat modes. I’m not writing effects yet, just the controls for the user to indicate what they want to do.

It’s always a lot harder than you think… I wrote up the code to just display the text on the screen for the different menus, then I realized that actually projecting a cursor to move around is going to be even MORE work… wow. And controls always burn up the most code space. At this stage, I’m ready to use a SuperCart to finish the job, because I’m not all that inclined to start cutting yet.

Unfortunately, I’ve been sidetracked by a regression… while I was checking that the combat screen rendered correctly, I noticed going to the stat screens for characters produced gibberish for the items, and my video memory appears to be garbled up, projecting sprites on screen as well as mucking up other screens… Drat. Looks like a runaway video write somewhere is wrecking havoc.

In other news, I received Dragon Age: Origins as a Christmas gift. This has been lauded as an “excellent” CRPG, built and delivered with Bioware’s usual level of quality and value.

Well, my experience so far with it hasn’t been so stellar… it’s a decent game, and it reminds me of Bioware’s past titles such as Jade Empire and Mass Effect. However, I find the following flaws with it:

• The blood. The graphics designers clearly had been reading Conan, but there’s a world of difference between a pulp swords & sorcery story and something you can actually see… I found the gratuitous blood really quite disturbing… not for kids at all. The fact that your characters and others continue to talk to one another SPLATTERED IN BLOOD like nothing is amiss is even worse. You can turn this off in the options, fortunately.
• The graphics. They’re all right, but I can definitely see the textures are artificial. The leather looks rather plastic, and the clothing doesn’t move independently on the models. This is a bit much to ask even for a high-end 3D game, but since you spend a LOT of time looking at the models close-up during dialogue, it really becomes obvious.
• The color palette. These guys are in love with grey and brown shading. Everything in the game has a dull and lifeless look. I suppose this is to make the blood really stand out, but it doesn’t really make me all that interested in learning more about the world when it looks so bleh.
• The combat. Man, where to begin… very inspired by D&D, unfortunately, they made the serious error of making combat real-time. Oh sure, they threw in a pause option, but what they don’t get is that if you have real-time, you have to have combat that is fairly quick and easy to make decisions in. The system they have is far more suitable for turn-based.
• The companion AI. Well, as far as combat goes, the game provides a quasi-scripting engine to determine what they do in combat. They do NOT provide fully scripted settings for each companion. I don’t consider writing these up fun or interesting. It’s like deck design in trading card games… you’re not playing, you’re preparing to play.
• The quests and story. So far, I’ve had my character betrayed twice by supposedly “loyal” people. If I was playing in a tabletop game, I’d start killing every NPC after this point because “they’ll just betray me later”. One of the quests I did just sort of ended with a choice… kill a child, kill his mother, or go do another long quest chain to avoid the first two. The game is having me go around too much and not accomplish much of anything.

I’ll probably keep playing it, but I can already see a lot in a modern CRPG that I would do differently… and perhaps I will some day. I don’t intend to stick with vintage projects forever.