Title: Experiences of Graphic Role Playing Games

I have been playing (when time allows, which is not as often as I would like) adventure games and role playing games since the early days of personal computers. In those days graphics was not really an option. The nearest we came to graphics was the map style play of games like Nethack and its derivatives. Text was very much the thing and when graphics started to become available they were largely used by way of illustration.

A little later we began to have graphic games. The true adventurer or role player tended not like these because too much attention was given to the graphics and not enough to the game play. There were a few exceptions. There was an excellent pure graphic adventure on the Sinclair Spectrum. I Think it was called Tir na Nog and it was set in a Celtic style fantasy world.

The first graphic role play/adventure game that managed to use graphics as a positive assist that I know of was 'Betrayal at Krondor' written for a DOS environment. Based in Feist's Riftwar universe it relied entirely on a GUI for play. The plot was written by Feist and the game-play was excellent. Most of the nine chapters allowed alternative solutions and included many optional missions. Unlike many graphic games this one left you a sense of having been to the place in which it was set. I do not believe that a similar game could have been presented textually with anything like the same success.

A couple of years after that I came across the second of the 'Elder Scrolls Adventures', Daggerfall. This uses graphics for interaction, and though they are not as central to the game-play as those of BaK they are well done. One interesting aspect of this game is that sound effects are definitely important and carry extra clues and warnings. The wide range of choice for your character coupled with a vast range of choices for character development make this the kind of game that you can play for many months without feeling the need to complete the primary tasks. Even when you have completed it you can replay it with a different type of character and try such difficult things as playing a character that has aspects on both the light and dark side.

I think the key feature of each of these games is that they have been well designed as games and the graphics (and sound) have then been used for interaction. In other words the game was the primary element with the graphics used to present and enhance it.

Now, after too many years we have the follow up to BaK. This game has taken several companies far too long to develop. When I got my hands on it I realised why. I cannot believe that Feist is happy with the end product. I suspect that there have been many acrimonious arguments between him and the special effects people. The main plot is about as thin as that of the new Star Wars (Yes, I have seen it) film. Worse still in comparison with BaK there are hardly any side plots and absolutely no options in the way in which you solve the game. We have such ridiculous elements as major weapons only becoming available when no member of your party can use them (I carried around three such weapons for the last two thirds of the game in the hope that I would eventually be able to pass them on to the character in an alternate thread. If you stuck to two simple rules (always carry plenty of potions that restore health and magic capacity; always take every opportunity to fight) there was hardly anything to challenge the mind and certainly no subtle combinations of magic to handle powerful opponents (actually, I did not find any powerful opponents).

What has gone wrong is that the special effects people have been allowed to dominate this game. Even that has not been well done. Photo-realistic country scenes with very limited viewing options do little to compensate for very poor algorithms to handle body movement. Indeed many of the arm gestures became downright irritating before I had finished.

The second game I have loaded (but far from completed) is the third 'Elder Scrolls Adventure': Redguard. This looks to have quite a bit of potential. Again we have a game dominated by the implementors' pre-occupation with graphics and sound. Large amounts of information are provided as dialogue which, by default, is read to you. I had to reconfigure my SoundBlaster Live sound card as a legacy SB card before the speech was intelligible. Even more irritating, the text is written in one of those fancy scripts that is not easy to skim through.

The real irritant is the long time it takes to load new scenes. Even from a 36X CD drive a new scene takes up to half a minute to load. As this applies every time you enter or leave any kind of building it destroys smooth game-play. (If you suspect that it might be some other aspect of my hardware that is slowing things up, my games machine runs an overclocked Celeron at 450MHz, with 128Mbytes of RAM, a Matrox G200 graphics card and about 10Gbytes of empty hard-disk)

Again I think that the implementors have lost the plot. They have been seduced by the possibilities of modern hardware and forgotten that the purpose is to produce a game that is a pleasure to play. I guess I will go on playing Redguard but I feel no great urgency to do so.

I finished Return to Krondor in three days and basically I went on playing because I hoped to get out of the preliminaries into the real game. The game ended before that happened. I am not currently playing Redguard because the defects in its implementation are just too irritating and prevent me from getting into the game itself.

However the game that is causing me to loose sleep and to resent time taken producing this issue of C Vu is Baldur's Gate. Here we again have the ability to choose our main character (though I do wish that character development depended more on the skills you get them to use. In Daggerfall it pays to make your character run round towns and jump up and down when not under threat because that makes her - I always play female roles if given the choice - faster and a better jumper.)

While all scenes are from a single perspective (so even less selective than Return to Krondor) the game is designed so that that is rarely an impediment. The small size of the images and good choice of movement algorithms results in good animation. In other words the designers/ implementors have used the graphic and sound resources effectively instead of being seduced by them.

However there is one very nasty feature that I discovered when I bought the 'Tales of the Sword Coast' supplementary CD during a recent visit to the USA. This disk adds some extra features, fixes some unwanted features (bugs) and generally is well worth adding. However having gone through the installation and authorised the rewriting of my saved game files to a new format (not reversible) I tried to return to one of those saved games. At that stage the screen announced that this version was only playable in the USA and Canada. Yes, it waited until I had completely installed the extras, reconfigured files etc. before telling me I could not play. I went back to the box and examined it carefully, nowhere does it say anything about this being a North American only version. This is a disgrace (even more so when you realise that the game is actually designed for play over networks as well as for single player play).

It is also completely silly. I wondered how it knew that I was not in the USA. I went back and changed my Windows 98 details to specify that it was in the USA. Everything is now fine - except that I have to make my machine believe it is in the USA in order to play a game. In other words there is no real zoning (something that should be outlawed anyway, and I gather that Australia has made illegal for products sold there) just a message that will cause apoplexy to those that do not guess how to fix it.

Developers, no matter what product they are developing, should focus on the needs and expectations of the end user. Avoid the superficial gloss and concentrate on utility. Text should be in a comfortably readable font (or at least the user should be able to select such a font), sound should work without the user having to tweak their system, graphics should work smoothly and extra features or changed scenarios should load quickly (or be cached if there is enough RAM available).

If something will not work in a particular context the context should be checked before irreversible changes are made. In the modern World think very carefully about zoning your product and if you elect to do so make sure that this information is clearly displayed at the point of sale. Actually zoning as being applied to DVD and to games' consoles (such as Sony's Playstation) is a very bad idea. The increased amount of traffic across the Atlantic means that zoning just irritates the hell out of your customers. It also encourages them to find ways round the problem. Once you have encouraged a fundamentally honest citizen to cross the line you have lowered their respect for copyright. Only fools and those practising for sainthood would by a zoned DVD drive when a little checking will provide a source of a chipped (universal) version.