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Jade Empire: Special Edition Review

Introduction

Currently, if you look on the main page of our website, you'll find a poll asking you to select what RPG developers should be spending the most time on. With a fairly dominating 57%, (story/dialogue) is winning. If you look over at BioWare's website, you'll discover a nearly identical poll. There, with an almost as impressive 47%, (involving storyline, numerous side-quests) is the winner. In both polls, categories for things like graphics, equipment, skills and monsters are getting almost no play at all, which seems strange to me, because those are the areas upon which marketing departments if not the developers themselves seem to focus. You've seen the ads: 5000 monsters! 2000 skills! Over one million unique pieces of equipment! And, oh yeah, an engrossing story... that spans two dozen beautifully rendered continents! Too often when I play a role-playing game, if there's any real story at all, it's just enough to get you from your starting village to the final boss battle, and little thought or ingenuity is put into it.

Which brings me to Jade Empire: Special Edition. This is a game that should be a good test for the people who participated in the polls. It has the best story I've seen in a game since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), but it has very little in the way of equipment, distinct enemies, or character development, and while its graphics are nice, they're not exactly going to wow anybody.

And so, this makes me wonder: which is going to sell better, Jade Empire: Special Edition or the next story-challenged Diablo-style action-adventure that rolls off the press? Given the polls, you'd think that Jade Empire would sell tons more, but I don't know. This is one of those questions where I wish that game sales information were in any way possible to find, because I really have no idea which way the market might lean. Do people really look for a good story when they purchase a game, or is that just what they say they look for, when it's really the pretty pictures that grab their attention? Perhaps those marketing departments have it right, but I hope not.


The Special Edition

Anyway, before I meander too far away from the topic at hand, let me get back to actually reviewing Jade Empire: Special Edition. The Special Edition is not really a new version of the game. It's not an expansion pack, and it's not trying to be like The Lost Chapters were for Fable. It's basically a straight translation of the Xbox version of the game (released in 2005) into a PC version.

Of course, there are a couple of additions. There are two new fighting styles (viper and iron palm) and two new enemies (rhino demon and ghost lord), and there's a new (jade master) difficulty level (which allows you to play the campaign again with a character who has already finished it), but that's about it. All of the other changes have to do with modifying the game so that it looks and works better on the PC, and they include things like higher resolutions, more hotkeys, more autosaves, and mouse support. That is, unless you really loved the game, if you've already played it on the Xbox, there isn't much reason to buy it for the PC.


The Story

Jade Empire takes place in the Jade Empire, a fictional land that bears more than a slight resemblance to ancient China (among other things, it has problems with (horselords) to the north, and a visitor from the far west sounds suspiciously like John Cleese). The empire is run by an ambitious emperor, who recently ended a drought just by commanding it to stop. However, he hasn't been seen in some time, and in his place, his enforcer, called Death's Hand, and his private army, called the Lotus Assassins, have taken center stage. Given their names, it's probably not a surprise that the empire isn't in a golden age, and that the peasants are very careful about what they say in public.

As the game opens up, you take on the role of a student at a small martial arts academy. One day bandits attack the academy, and, after you've helped repulse them, the master takes you aside and informs you that you have a great destiny ahead of you. Soon enough, the Lotus Assassins strike at the academy. They kidnap the master, and you chase after them, first with the goal of rescuing the master, but then with the idea of dealing with Death's Hand and his assassins, and putting the empire back to rights. Along the way you meet up with some companions who offer to help you, you find that the dead aren't staying as dead as they should, and you get into a tremendous number of fights.


Character Development

When BioWare developed Jade Empire, they took sort of a minimalist approach to character development. Each character only has three ability scores -- body, spirit, and mind -- and each score affects a lot of things. For example, the spirit score affects how much (chi) you have, and chi can be used to power spells, add damage to melee attacks, and heal your character. Similarly, the mind score affects how much (focus) you have, and focus powers some weapon attacks, and you can use it to slow down time during combat. That is, all three scores are important to all classes of characters, and you have to be careful about how you spend the ability points you receive each time you gain a level.
Another thing that defines characters is the use of (styles.) There are many types of styles in the game, including magic styles that allow you to cast spells, martial styles that allow you to fight using unarmed combat, and weapon styles that allow you to use weapons. You can only use one style at a time, but you're allowed to hotkey the styles so that you can quickly switch between them. Some enemies are immune to certain styles -- spirits can't be damaged by weapon styles, for example -- and so, as with the ability scores, you have to be careful about how you spend the style points you receive each time you gain a level. If you only put the points into one style, then you'll be really good with that style, but you'll be in trouble if you face an enemy that you can't damage with it.

Finally, you'll also run into a slight amount of equipment. You won't be picking up a variety of rings and boots and helmets, and you won't be wearing body armor at all. Instead, you'll only be able to use gems and (techniques.) Near the start of the game you'll find a special dragon amulet that you'll be able to put gems inside of. Gems can increase ability scores, change how often enemies drop power-ups, and provide other sorts of bonuses, and the nice thing about them is that you can move them into and out of the amulet at any time. The (techniques) are permanent bonuses, but once you've picked one up, you won't be able to get rid of it. Most techniques are positive things, but every so often you'll get stuck with a real stinker, too.


The Engine

Jade Empire uses an engine fairly similar to the ones employed by the Knights of the Old Republic games. Just like in those other games, you control a single character, and while you'll have a companion with you for most of the game, you won't be able to give the companion any orders, except to set whether it helps you attack enemies or simply acts in a supporting role. As an example, Dawn Star, the first companion who joins you, can fight with a long sword (attack), or she can help regenerate your chi during battles (support).

Strangely, the camera in the game is fixed directly behind your character, and it always points horizontally. You can move the camera up and down a little, but you can't zoom the view in or out, and you can't rotate or otherwise change the viewing angle. This is sort of an awkward system (if nothing else, it means that your character is always partially blocking your view), but it's strange because this wasn't the system used in the Xbox version of the game. From my understanding, in the Xbox version you could move the camera around, so I have no idea why they'd make it more restrictive in the PC version.

Otherwise, the controls are about what you'd expect. You move your character with the WASD keys, and you steer with the mouse. When combat starts up, you use the left mouse button to make a normal attack (which depends on the style that you're using), you use the spacebar or middle mouse button to block (which protects against normal attacks), and you use the right mouse button to initiate a power attack (which bypasses blocking). This is a fairly common scheme, and it works about as well as ever. There are also various modes that you can enter (such as chi and focus mode), and you can evade (that is, dive out of the way) by double tapping one of the direction keys.

When I played through the campaign using the default (master) difficulty, I found the combat to be pretty easy. Using my standard (swing wildly until everything is dead) strategy, I got through most of the battles without any problems, and I rarely had to change modes or change styles or even block. However, when I moved up to the (grand master) difficulty, things got much tougher. I had to use more strategy and pay more attention, but even so each battle turned into an iffy proposition, and I had to do so much loading that the campaign slowed to a crawl. I'm usually good but not great with action games, so my guess is that regardless of your ability, you'll find a difficulty setting that will give you an enjoyable experience.


Gameplay

As I mentioned way back in the introduction, Jade Empire is a game that relies on and devotes a lot of time to its story. This can be good news or bad news depending on what you're looking for in a role-playing game. For example, there are a few points in the game where you have to listen to a couple hours' worth of dialogue, with little or no combat in between to break it up. The dialogue is well acted, so it's not a chore to listen to it, but there's just a lot of it, and even I (with my preference for an involving story) got a little antsy.

I think it's safe to say that the dialogue could have been edited down to a more manageable level. Many characters need their dialogue to set up their background story or to connect you to what's going on in the campaign, but there are also a lot of secondary characters who get full dialogue trees, and there just isn't any reason why you should need to ask them about their thoughts on the emperor and the empire (among other things), only to get basically the same response each time.
It took me about 30 hours to play the campaign, and I'd say that at least half of that time went to listening to dialogue, which surprised me given Jade Empire's Xbox origins and my assumption that console games tended to be more hack and slash (which is one of the reasons why I don't play console games). The other half of my playing time went to combat.

Combat in Jade Empire is basically a succession of duels. Whenever your character gets close to an enemy, the game switches to combat mode, and then you stay in combat mode (which is the only time when you can attack anything) until your enemies are dead. The battles are usually small in scale, with you facing between one and four opponents. Jade Empire isn't a game like, say, Dungeon Lords, where you face and endless stream of enemies. Generally, you fight a small battle, talk to some people or solve a quest, heal yourself up, and then repeat.

The battles themselves work fairly well, but they're not spectacular. There isn't a wide variety of enemies, and most of the enemies fight in about the same way, so you're rarely forced to change your tactics. This changes for certain bosses, but the bosses are few and far between. Fortunately, because the emphasis of the game is not on combat, fights are rare enough that they don't wear out their welcome and become boring, and I generally enjoyed trying out new styles and beating the crap out of random bandits and spirits.

Finally, there are also numerous quests to complete in Jade Empire, both of the required and optional variety. The game introduces you to the concept of (Open Palm) versus (Closed Fist,) which is its way of handling alignment (Open Palm is basically good while Closed Fist is basically evil), and so you're given some options for how to deal with people and how to solve certain quests. The quests work well enough, but I felt like I had seen a lot of them before. For example, there's an arena that you can fight in, there are bounties to collect where the criminals being hunted aren't necessarily as evil as they're being portrayed, and you'll find a person being framed for a crime and have to clear his name.

More unique is the mini-game in Jade Empire. The technology level of the empire includes gunpowder, and that allows for lots of odd contraptions, including flying vehicles. At various points in the campaign you have to fly between places (that's how you move between cities), and, of course, if you have a flying vehicle then the bad guys have them, too, and way more of them, and you have to shoot them down. This results in a scrolling shoot-em-up mini-game similar to the old arcade game 1942. I enjoyed this mini-game more than, say, swoop racing, and it has the benefit that most of the flights are optional, and so you can take it or leave it.


Conclusion

Overall, I enjoyed Jade Empire: Special Edition. I didn't love it, but I liked it. I think the game does all of the things you want to see in a role-playing game -- it tells an interesting story, it gives you options in quests, it looks nice, and it rewards exploration -- and it succeeds despite its origins and the developer's choice to leave in the clunky menu-driven interface and to overly restrict the camera. I encountered no bugs of any consequence in the game (which is pretty rare these days for any game, let alone a role-playing game), and the 30-hour campaign has enough options to it that you might want to try playing it twice.

I think Jade Empire: Special Edition has a lot of parallels to Fable: The Lost Chapters. Both were developed for the Xbox and then made their way to the PC. Both have sub-par, console-style interfaces. In both you control a single character and use roughly the same control schemes. And in both the emphasis is on story and quests rather than on character development options. My guess is that anybody who enjoyed Fable would also enjoy Jade Empire, and Jade Empire should also appeal to the less twitchy-fingered players of role-playing games.
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Neverwinter Nights 2 Review

Introduction

BioWare Corp. released Neverwinter Nights in 2002. It was their first role-playing game not to use the Infinity Engine (which had powered titles like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment), and it received mostly rave reviews from the critics. I wasn't a huge fan of Neverwinter Nights. I thought it was a better toolkit than a game, and, despite sporting fancy 3D graphics, I thought it was a significant downgrade visually from the 2D Baldur's Gate II.

Now Obsidian Entertainment has released Neverwinter Nights 2. Obsidian Entertainment is probably best known as the developer behind Knights of the Old Republic 2, but some might recognize them as the re-grouping of bankrupt Black Isle Studios. Either way, Obsidian has a long history with role-playing games (not to mention a long history of working closely with BioWare), and so I don't think I was alone in anticipating good things from Neverwinter Nights 2. But did Obsidian deliver? Keep reading to find out.


The Engine

Neverwinter Nights 2 is the same sort of game as Neverwinter Nights. It's another party-oriented role-playing game based on the Dungeon and Dragons 3.5 edition rules, and once again it's just as much a toolkit as it is a game. So what's the improvement? Well, Neverwinter Nights 2 contains everything that was in Neverwinter Nights, and it adds more. For example, Neverwinter Nights combined with its two expansion packs allowed players to choose between seven races, 11 regular classes, and 11 prestige classes. Neverwinter Nights 2 contains 16 races (including fun sub-races like drow and tiefling), 12 regular classes (including the warlock class, which doesn't have to rest to cast spells), and 15 prestige classes (including the frenzied berserker, which does about what the name implies). There are also more feats, skills and spells -- to the point that I'm not sure where Obsidian can go with the expansion packs that are sure to follow. But as a result, there are a ton of ways to develop characters now, and that's a great thing.

Better yet, Neverwinter Nights 2 looks much better than Neverwinter Nights. Of course, you'd expect a game released in 2006 to have better visuals than a game released in 2002, but the improvements go deeper than that. If you played Neverwinter Nights, then you might remember that the game was overly tile-centric, making the terrain look more like stair steps than anything you'd encounter in the real world, and that the tiles were so large that all of the locations started to look alike. Well, Obsidian completely dumped the tiles in Neverwinter Nights 2, and as a result the locations are much more realistic and distinct. There are now rolling hills and winding paths, and not everything happens in 90-degree angles.

The graphical improvements extend to the characters as well. Characters now have moving eyes and mouths, and Obsidian did a nice job of lip-synching the dialogue and of giving the characters expressions to match their moods. Sometimes the animations don't always fit together perfectly (I'm thinking of Ambassador Torio here; her eyelids always seemed wrong), but overall the characters in Neverwinter Nights 2 look far superior to the characters in Neverwinter Nights, who didn't get any animations at all. In fact, characters look good enough now that most of the time when you enter into a conversation, the game will switch to a zoomed-in cinematic view so that you can watch the animations in detail. You can even place the camera in an over-the-shoulder view and move your character around using the WASD keys, and the game looks good from this angle as well.

There are some other changes as well -- for example, the radial menus are gone, replaced by more typical tops-down menus, and the cursor is now more context sensitive, meaning that you won't have to use any menus to disable traps or unlock doors -- but these changes are relatively minor. I don't think Obsidian wanted to try and (fix) something that wasn't really broken, and they wanted people who played Neverwinter Nights to feel at home playing Neverwinter Nights 2. As a result, the things that worked remain about the same, and the things that didn't work got a lot of improvement, and so the engine is much nicer than it was before.
The Campaign

Neverwinter Nights 2 takes place a few years after the events of Neverwinter Nights, but the campaigns of the two games are completely unrelated. Every so often somebody might mention (that business between Neverwinter and Luskan,) and there are a few references to people and equipment from the earlier campaign (and at least one notable character who spans the campaigns), but otherwise no knowledge of the Neverwinter Nights campaign is required, and you can play and enjoy Neverwinter Nights 2 without having any idea of what happened in the previous game.

As the Neverwinter Nights 2 campaign opens up, you find yourself in the marsh town of West Harbor. One night a group of gray dwarves attacks your village, but the attack is odd, as if the dwarves are looking for something rather than trying to plunder the town's relatively meager riches. Soon you discover the reason for the attack -- a mysterious silver shard that was hidden in a nearby crypt. You agree to take the shard far away from your village in order to draw the attackers away, but the shard seems to have some sort of connection to you, and so you decide to investigate what it is and why so many people (not just the dwarves) seem to want it. Along the way you explore dark caves and haunted tombs, complete quests both minor and major, and eventually arrive in the fabled districts of Neverwinter, which barely look anything like they did before.

The campaign is technically well made. You're given lots of options for role-playing. You can be rude or polite, violent or diplomatic, lawful or chaotic. Many quests give you multiple options for how to solve them, and there is even one fairly significant branch in the campaign where you're forced to choose sides between the Neverwinter city guards and a bandit gang. The dialogue is well-written, and it is mostly well-acted (although none of the actors can agree on how to pronounce words like (Faer?n) and (hosttower)), and there is a nice balance between conversations, scripted events, and combat.

Unlike in Neverwinter Nights, your companions in Neverwinter Nights 2 form an integral part of the campaign. You can have up to four companions with you at any one time, and you can control them as much as you'd like (including turning on (puppet mode) and controlling them completely). The companions in the game are like the companions from the Baldur's Gate or Knights of the Old Republic games. You don't just find them all waiting for you in a tavern. Instead, you meet them during your travels, but they often have their own agendas, and so you're never sure if they're just helping you out or using you or maybe even spying on you. But their quests and goals are related to the plot, and so having them with you adds more depth to your adventures.

Also, like in Knights of the Old Republic 2, you need to gain influence with your companions so that you can complete their side quests and open up new dialogue options with them. Mostly, you gain influence when you say something supportive to a companion, or do something that they would agree with, but you have to be careful, too, because what makes one companion happy might not be agreeable to another one. For example, two of the first companions you meet are a lawful dwarf fighter and a chaotic tiefling rogue, and they have wildly different views on things like whether it's okay to enter locked houses or whether you should perform noble deeds without the promise of a reward, and so it can be difficult to keep them both happy. But Neverwinter Nights 2 comes with about a dozen possible companions, and so you should be able to find a few who agree with the personality of your character.
On the down side, for the majority of the campaign, the combat is very easy, and it doesn't require any sort of thought or planning. You can just rush the bad guys, even if a boss is involved, and be fine. Later, as you start to resolve some of the plot threads, you encounter one tough boss fight after another, and these fights are pretty brutal. Some of these, like a fight against a dragon, I must have loaded my game a couple dozen times before I figured out how to get through them, and I think it would have been nice if Obsidian had balanced out the combat a little, making it more difficult in the early goings and less difficult at the end. (Well, either that or figuring out a way to reduce the loading times for the game. The tough boss fights got more than a little frustrating as I spent more time watching the loading screen than I did participating in the fight itself.)

Also a little disturbing about the campaign is that it barely has any puzzles, or secret doors, or really anything to break up the conversations and combat. This was a surprise to me, because the trend in the Neverwinter Nights expansion packs and premium modules was to add more and more of these sorts of activities, but Neverwinter Nights 2 only has about half a dozen puzzles, and some of them I'm not even sure should count, like when you have to prove your loyalty to Neverwinter. I think the only thing I proved in that quest was that I didn't know a lot about the city, but yet I was able to complete it without loading my game. A couple of the puzzles are clever, like one where you have to guide some ghosts to a tree, and there is even an interesting sequence where you have to run a keep, including handing out quests to newbie adventuring parties, but mostly the campaign seemed dumbed down to me, as if Obsidian had spent too much time playing action role-playing games rather than tactical role-playing games.


Conclusion

If you're not sure what to take away from my review of Neverwinter Nights 2, then take away this: the engine is fantastic. I've heard people complain about bugs and performance issues (you should definitely check your computer against the minimum system requirements and the supported video cards), but the game ran perfectly on my six-month-old computer, and I didn't have any problems with it. Plus, Neverwinter Nights 2 looks great, and with all of the options for character development, I could see re-playing the campaign multiple times just to try out a few. And if the toolkit is as easy to use as it was before, then no doubt we'll see a ton of user created modules eventually, and so Neverwinter Nights 2 should have an extremely long shelf life.

That being said, I wasn't overly enthusiastic about the included campaign. For me it felt a little basic, and I didn't care much about who lived or died, or if I'd be able to defeat the bad guy at the end. I think there are supposed to be some potential romances with your companions, but I didn't detect any in my game, and while the dialogue was well-written, I think the writers only excelled at humor and barbs, and had trouble adding in themes with any sort of emotional weight. This is subjective, but for me, if I'm going to spend 60 hours playing a campaign, I need characters and situations I can care about, rather than just a couple of people I can laugh with.

But overall, I'd easily recommend the game -- for what will come if not for what's there now. Neverwinter Nights received all sorts of support, both from BioWare and its community of fans, and I'd only expect the same for Neverwinter Nights 2. Obsidian has already released one patch for the game, and I'd be surprised if they're not able to stamp out most of the problems people have reported so far. So if you're a fan of classic, party-based role-playing games, then Neverwinter Nights 2 is definitely a game to buy.
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Neverwinter Nights: Wyvern Crown of Cormyr Review

With Atari all set up to release Neverwinter Nights 2 later this month, Wyvern Crown of Cormyr is likely to be the final premium module for Neverwinter Nights. (Originally, Infinite Dungeons was supposed to be the last module, but then BioWare decided to release Wyvern Crown of Cormyr as well, and so I suppose it's possible that another module might sneak in under the gun as well.) That makes six premium modules in total, and, by all accounts, they did exactly what BioWare wanted: they gave players extra reasons to play Neverwinter Nights, extending the shelf life of the game, and they generated enough money so that BioWare could continue to add new tile sets and equipment and more to the Aurora toolkit, giving fans of the game more things to play with. The modules were all well made, and most were relatively fun, and so, as experiments go, you'd have to say that this one was a success, and I can only surmise that BioWare (or other companies) will attempt similar endeavors in the future.

But back to Wyvern Crown of Cormyr. The module follows the basic Robin Hood premise. After spending many years away adventuring, you return to your homeland to find things awry. The king is dead, demons have been attacking, and a blight has started taking over the forests. Your family has moved to a new farm to try and eke out an existence, but no sooner do you return to them than hobgoblins attack, killing everyone but you, your brother, and a childhood friend. Together, you set out to exact some revenge on the hobgoblins -- and to track down whoever ordered them to attack your farm. Along the way you gain favor with the local lord, starting as a squire but then eventually becoming a knight, you participate in jousts and other tournament games, and you discover that an artifact called the Wyvern Crown might be responsible, in one way or another, for all of the troubles in the area.

Wyvern Crown of Cormyr has a lot of things going for it. The story is set up well, and it involves people with motivations rather than caricatures that do whatever is required of them by the plot. The quests are also handled well, almost always giving you options for diplomacy versus combat, and giving you ways to role-play your character. The module also contains several new things, like the ability to ride horses and an expanded rural tile set that includes castles with ramparts and towers. And there are even some fun little details, like how you can gain titles (such as (the wise) or (the cruel)) as a reward for completing certain quests.

But probably the most notable addition in Wyvern Crown of Cormyr is the jousting tournament. Unlike the other games included in the module (like darts or the guess-the-magic-spell game), jousting doesn't have anything to do with your character build. It's more of a rock-paper-scissors game. You select where to aim your lance (there are seven spots), and then you choose how to sit on your horse (such as leaning to the left), and then the jousting bout is run. Depending on what choices your opponent made, you might score a solid hit (worth 1 or 2 points), knock your opponent off his horse (worth 3 points), or miss him entirely (worth nothing). The first person to reach 3 points wins, so sometimes jousts can end quickly, and sometimes they can go on for several bouts. The jousting competition is a fun little mini-game, and it does a nice job of underscoring the medieval setting of the module.

Unfortunately, despite all the pluses, I didn't overly enjoy Wyvern Crown of Cormyr. It has sort of a dreary campaign, where everything is serious and dark and muted, and where just about everybody is a bad guy with some sort of evil agenda. There isn't a lot to root for or to care about. The module also has more than a few bugs. One companion I used wouldn't gain levels, the jousting competition froze up on me a couple times, and at one point when you lead an army, the army decided to target my companions in addition to the enemy troops, and that made the battle much more difficult than it needed to be. The final confrontation also seemed overly difficult. I had to do a lot of running away and returning, not to mention saving and loading, to keep my party alive, and at the end I sort of felt like I had cheated my way through.

And then there are the horses. Riding on horses should have been one of the highlights of the module, but thanks to a clunky interface and atrocious pathfinding, horses weren't a lot of fun to use, and eventually I started avoiding them. Obviously, the module designers couldn't do anything about the pathfinding problems, which have always existed in Neverwinter Nights, but it's completely on them that they decided to include so many narrow and twisty pathways, which only exacerbated the situation. Fortunately, horses weren't required except in a couple of places, and so they were easy to ignore.

But, overall, I'm going to give Wyvern Crown of Cormyr a mixed blessing. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but it includes a 20-hour campaign that gives players a lot of options for replayability, it includes a large and impressive rural tile set, and it includes a fun jousting mini-game. That is, Wyvern Crown of Cormyr gives you about the same amount of new content as either of the two official expansion packs, and all for just $11.99. So if you're looking for something to do this month while waiting for Neverwinter Nights 2 to show up, Wyvern Crown of Cormyr is something you could try, although I'd recommend sister premium modules like Kingmaker or Pirates of the Sword Coast first.
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Neverwinter Nights: Infinite Dungeons Review

BioWare has been releasing premium modules for Neverwinter Nights for over a year now. The first modules were short and fairly basic affairs, modules that any fan of the game could have created. Since then, the trend has been for the modules to get longer and more complicated (and more expensive), relying on new tile sets and patches for the game. But while the modules are getting more sophisticated, are they getting any better? Fans of the modules might say one thing, but from what I can see, the answer is no.

Infinite Dungeons is the fifth premium module. As its name suggests, it is all about replayability. When you enter the module (with any character between levels 5 and 40), random dungeons are created for you. If you want, you can tune the dungeons to your class, so, for example, a rogue character would see more traps and secret doors, and find more light armor and weapons. You can also leave the dungeons balanced, so that your character would see the full assortment of equipment drops and dungeon styles.

There isn't really a campaign to Infinite Dungeons. At the start of the module, you meet a creepy kid named Timmy who introduces you to the dungeons. You learn that there is an evil mage named Halaster who controls the dungeons, and so your goal is to eventually defeat him. To reach Halaster, you have to venture into half a dozen random dungeons. The format of each dungeon is the same. Each level of the dungeons contains a grid of map areas, and somewhere on the bottom level you have to deal with a boss creature so that you can move on to the next dungeon. Along the way you encounter random monsters, meet random shopkeepers, and trigger random quests, and so each time you play, the module is different.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Infinite Dungeons is a pretty boring slog. The first dungeons you enter contain two 3x3 levels, and so they're relatively quick to navigate. But then the dungeons start getting bigger and bigger, and it starts taking longer and longer to move through them. I finally gave up on the module after the fifth dungeon, which contained four 5x5 levels. By the end of that dungeon, the module was keeping track of so many map areas that saves and loads were taking almost five minutes each, and while the map areas are random, they're also fairly similar (each dungeon has a theme), and I got bored fighting the same assortment of creatures over and over (I must have killed over 500 beholders in that fifth dungeon), not to mention frustrated with all the waiting I had to do with the saves and loads.

Another problem the module has is that in trying to make Neverwinter Nights more like an action role-playing game, the designers added a system where players can find random equipment, and where they can use recipes to add extra effects to equipment. That probably sounds good (since it's basically what Diablo and similar games do), but it actually causes all sorts of problems. The basic Neverwinter Nights equipment was carefully designed by BioWare, and so, for example, you'd rarely see damage resistances on anything but belts, meaning that it was difficult to resist more than one type of damage at once. But in Infinite Dungeons you can find resistances on everything, and you can add in more resistances using recipes, and you can even add in things like regeneration and haste. At level 10 I found a +2 soak 30 item, and, coupled with everything else, I was almost immune to damage. Every so often a beholder would beat my saves and instantly kill me, but otherwise the overpowered equipment meant that the module was no challenge at all to play.

I can picture some good uses for the technology developed in the Infinite Dungeons module. If you're given a quest to rescue a damsel from a tower, for example, then you could make the tower random, so that the module is always a little different. But you can't just have the campaign be one big random tower, and expect players to get excited about it. You need the random tower to be part of a larger, partially fixed campaign. Infinite Dungeons doesn't try to do that. It doesn't have any interesting characters (other than Timmy), it has zero storyline, and it could have achieved about the same result by regularly spawning random creatures in a single room. I could see some people enjoying the module, and being happy about finally having a place to play their Hordes of the Underdark veterans, but for me the module was a total bore, and I enjoyed it not at all.
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Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach (Second Look)

Introduction

Massively-multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs) are notoriously difficult to review. That's because the developers intend for you to play their games for months if not years on end, and reviewers typically have a week or two where they can look at a game before moving on to the next. And so you see a lot of reviews where more is known about the beta phase of the game rather than the actual retail release, or where the reviewer only experienced the low- and mid-level content, or where the MMORPG was only played during the initial rush on the game's servers.

And so you might be left wondering what the rest of the game is like, or if the game is worth a long-term commitment. Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach (DDO) has just reached its six-month anniversary, and so our goal here is to answer some of those questions, and to comment on how well developer Turbine Entertainment has been running and modifying their game. If your interest lies more in what DDO is about and how it is played, then you might want to check out our initial review of the game.


A Better Set-Up

When I reviewed DDO back in April, I was on a different computer and had a different Internet connection. My old computer was nice about three years ago, but still, DDO ran pretty well on it. With my new computer I've been able to turn up the graphics options, and I've noticed some differences -- like fancy water effects and mirrors that actually work -- but for the most part the game looks about the same to me. So I suspect that as long as your computer meets the minimum system requirements, it won't have a huge impact on whether you enjoy the game or not.

My new Internet connection, however, makes a world of difference. When I first played DDO, I was on dial-up, and I think it's safe to say that Turbine didn't consider dial-up users when they developed the game. I couldn't play with a full group, I couldn't do certain quests, and even after Turbine made some improvements (such as implementing a setting for your connection speed), I lagged so much that DDO was more frustrating than fun.

But now I have DSL, and as I've continued to play DDO, I've enjoyed it more. The game looks good and it runs smoothly, and since I'm no longer restricted against joining certain groups and doing certain quests, the freedom to the game makes it much more appealing. I'm not going to take back anything I said about DDO before -- I wouldn't recommend anybody with a dial-up connection going anywhere near the game -- but for people with a high-speed connection, DDO can be an enjoyable experience.


What's New

DDO went live in late February, and since then Turbine has released two modules, an update, and a series of minor patches. Combined, they've included about 25 new quests, a new mail system, a new race, several new spells and enhancements, new monsters, and a new favor system.

Let me start with the quests. When DDO shipped, it only had about 110 quests in total, and those quests weren't nearly enough. To make it to level 10, players had to repeat quests numerous times, and then when they created a new character, they had to go through the same sequence of quests, repeating them again numerous times. But now there are something like 135 quests, and the problem isn't as bad. You might take a character to level 10 and not complete a few quests, giving you something to do with your next character. Still, DDO could use some more quests. Heck, it could use a whole new town.

Turbine also created a new mail system for the game. This mail system allows you to send money and items as well as text to other characters, including your own characters. That means, for the most part, the system was designed to allow you to move equipment between your characters, so that you don't have to grab an innocent (but trustworthy) bystander to enact a couple of trades to do the same thing. The postage for the mail system reflects the value of the item being sent, so it's not cheap, but it makes moving equipment around much easier and more convenient.

Another major change is the favor system. There are various Houses in Stormreach, and each House has been assigned some of the quests in the game. When you complete a quest for the first time on a new difficulty setting, you get favor with the quest's associated House. (There are three difficulty settings. Completing a quest eight times on (normal) won't gain you any additional favor, but completing it on (elite) once will net you three times the (normal) favor.) Then if you gain enough favor with a House, you get some sort of bonus. For example, if you get enough favor with the Coin Lords, you get a new bag for your inventory, and if you gain enough favor with House Deneith, you're allowed to buy special equipment from a Deneith shopkeeper.
The favor system works pretty well. DDO has definite (good) quests and (bad) quests in terms of the experience and equipment you receive from them, but the favor system gives you a reason to try all quests, and at higher difficulty settings to boot. Plus, if you accumulate enough total favor, you unlock the drow race and a sixth character slot on the server on which you're playing. The drow race is fun, because it gets better attribute point bonuses than other races, not to mention the potential for a natural Spell Resistance 20, but because it's the new and trendy race, that means half the population seems to be drow right now.

Turbine also added some new spells (like (firewall) and (dimension door)) and enhancements (including ways for spellcasters to get critical hits with their spells), and, in total, the changes have helped the game. They've given players a new reason to play existing characters, and they've given players new reasons to start over with new characters. That's about as much as you can ask from a game's updates.


What's Coming Up

Turbine has already announced an update for September that will introduce a new line of quests involving House Deneith and duergar dwarves. Other things I can only speculate about, but since about half of the races and classes got new spells and enhancements in Module 2, I think it's safe to assume that the other half will get new things in Module 3, whenever that comes out (probably in October or November).

I've also heard some rumbling about new player-versus-player (PVP) content and an increase to the current level cap. These changes have me worried a little. Right now at level 10, some characters can reach attribute values of 30 (in a system where 20 was supposed to be good). What happens if the level cap is increased to 12 or 20, and better equipment and higher level enhancements are added? It would have been nice if Turbine had showed a little more restraint with their equipment (for example, you can get +3 strength gloves at level 5 with no problem), and had planned a little better for future updates, because I don't see how they can do anything but further escalate player power even more than it's escalated now.

As for PVP, that seems like a bad idea altogether. What makes DDO unique right now is that it's a cooperative, group-oriented MMORPG. Turbine has already added some (solo content) for low level characters, and if they add PVP content as well, that will just start the game towards being like every other MMORPG on the market. Worse, once PVP comes in, you just know that Turbine will have to try and re-balance the classes, and, from my experience, that never goes well.


Conclusion

In some ways I'm optimistic about DDO. Turbine has shown a willingness to add new content to their game, and the new content has worked out pretty well so far. But in the process they've shown that they're helpless when it comes to designing an interface (somebody needs to lock them into a room and force them to play Blizzard games for a month), and they've shown that they don't have much regard for the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition rules that the game is purportedly based upon.

Turbine also has a problem in that it takes less than a month to advance a character to level 10 and to see most of the quests in the game. Their character development system is rich in ways to create characters, and so you might want to try out a few variations.. but I just don't see DDO right now as being a fun game to play over a long stretch of time. There just aren't enough things to see and do, and so once you've taken a couple characters to level 10, that's just about it. But if you don't mind that your MMORPG might wear thin after only a couple of months, then DDO can be some solid fun in the meantime.
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Titan Quest Review

Somewhere, Blizzard must be laughing. For all that their Diablo games have generated numerous discussions about whether they should be considered role-playing games at all, Diablo and Diablo II started the action role-playing game genre, and they are still the undisputed kings. Every so often a game looks like it might unseat them, but the Dungeon Siege games couldn't do it, Sacred couldn't do it, and now Titan Quest has failed as well.

What's odd about this is that the Diablo games don't look like they're doing anything complicated. They look beatable. But possibly because Blizzard beta tests their games more than anybody else, the Diablo games have just the right balance of giving you things to do and giving you things to look forward to, that other games just haven't been able to match. Dungeon Siege gave you too little to do; Sacred inundated you with too many monsters to kill.

And then there's Titan Quest, which either does things very well or very badly. There isn't any middle ground. Consider the graphics. Titan Quest takes place in the lands of myth and legend. You start out in Greece (where you learn about the game's main conflict between the Greek gods and the titans), then you move on to Egypt, and finally you reach the Orient. Each of the main areas has a distinct look and feel, gives you different sets of creatures to attack, and allows you to explore fun areas, like Knossos labyrinth in Greece, the Tomb of Ramses in Egypt, and the Hanging Gardens in the Orient.

Moreover, while I suspect that Titan Quest was generated with some sort of world editor, it doesn't suffer from the Neverwinter Nights disease, where all areas start to look alike. Developer Iron Lore Entertainment has a great eye for detail, and so, for example, when you visit the Parthenon in Athens and see a bunch of marble statues, it's not just the same statue plopped down several times. Each statue is unique. Or when you kill a creature, you don't just see one animation where it slumps to the ground and dies. Titan Quest uses some form of ragdoll physics, and enemies can end up flying through the air or rolling down hills, and no death looks the same. Or how about something that most developers wouldn't have bothered with? When you run through the underbrush, the grass parts and sways to match your movements, and it looks downright real. In other words, Titan Quest looks about as good as a game using an isomorphic view can look.

The character development system also has a lot of potential. When you create your character, you only get to choose a gender and a color for your tunic (neither of which makes any difference in the game), but then when you start leveling up, you get to select and develop skill masteries. There are eight skill masteries in the game, such as the Warfare mastery, which involves melee skills, and the Storm mastery, which gives you cold and lightning spells, and you get to choose one mastery at level 2 and a second mastery at level 8.

Each time you level up you receive points to put into the masteries. You can use the points to improve the skills in the masteries or to increase your rank in the masteries themselves (you might need to put points into the mastery to unlock skills in the mastery), and so you need to make a lot of decisions about how to spend your points. Do you put points into a lot of skills, or try to maximize only a couple? Do you spread your points between two masteries, or make one dominant? Do you put points into low level skills, or spend points on the masteries to unlock the high level ones?

What's nice about the system is that Titan Quest doesn't allow you to maximize everything, so you actually have to make choices. Better yet, even after playing for a long time, the points you spend still help your character (unlike, say, in Dungeon Siege II, where the diminishing returns mean that high level points barely do anything useful). I played a Warfare and Defense character, and I never even got a look at skills like Battle Standard and Colossus Form, and so that gives me an incentive to continue playing the character, to keep unlocking new skills. The different combinations of skill masteries also give players a reason to try out new characters, just to see what works and what doesn't.
It's great that Titan Quest gives players a reason to keep playing the campaign, either with a new character starting over, or continuing on in the Epic and Legendary difficulty settings with an existing character. The problem the game has is that it's barely fun enough to play even once, and it's difficult to imagine that people would want to play through it multiple times, with new characters, old characters, or any character. You might find it strange that after praising Titan Quest for four paragraphs, I'm now turning around and saying it's not fun to play, but like I said, developer Iron Lore Entertainment either did things very well or very poorly, and we're now into the (poorly) part of the review.

The problem is very basic. Titan Quest's campaign is terrible. You'd think that Iron Lore would have had some fun with the premise, like Reflexive did with Lionheart and Ensemble did with Age of Mythology, but you never get to interact with any of the gods or heroes. Every so often you meet a storyteller who briefly describes one of the myths or legends, but that's as close as you get. You don't pal around with Hercules, or accept a quest from Isis, or have a drinking competition with Bacchus. The game looks like you're in ancient Greece and Egypt and so forth, but as for what you actually do, you could be anywhere.

Worse, what you actually do isn't all that exciting. Obviously, since Titan Quest is an action role-playing game, most of the game involves clicking on and killing hundreds of enemies. That's a given. Where Iron Lore missteps is that's all you do. The quests aren't all that different from the regular killing of enemies, and the bosses are a joke. There is rarely anything tricky or exciting about them. They just have more hit points and hit harder than regular enemies, and you have to quaff more healing potions than usual when you're fighting them. Ho hum.

Even the storyline lacks imagination. Early on you learn about creatures called Telkines who helped the titans in their war with the Greek gods. Well, in Act One you have to track down and defeat a Telkine, and then in Act Two you have to track down and defeat a Telkine, and then in Act Three you have to -- do you sense the trend yet? -- track down and defeat yet another Telkine. It's difficult to imagine a developer taking an intriguing premise and then doing so little with it, but that's the case with Iron Lore and Titan Quest. There aren't any interesting characters, there isn't any memorable dialogue, and you're not given any choices for what to do. Basically, there isn't any incentive given to continue playing the game (there aren't even any cut scenes after the opening cinematic sequence), other than to see what monsters will come next. If you want more from your role-playing games than just combat, then Titan Quest isn't the game for you.

Finally, I've heard from a lot of people having problems with Titan Quest, to the point where the plethora of bugs has prevented them from playing the game at all. However, Titan Quest worked flawlessly for me. I think it crashed maybe five times in the 75+ hours that I spent with it, and nothing else went wrong. I've also heard from people who played Titan Quest and thought it was a lot of fun, but it just put me to sleep. I hated every forest that was just there to pad the playing time, and every cave that didn't have anything interesting in it (which is almost all of them). If you want to play an action role-playing game with a long but somewhat boring campaign, then I'd recommend Space Hack over Titan Quest, just because its purchase price is less than half as much. Wait for Titan Quest to hit the bargain bin first, or at least wait for another patch or two to come out.
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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Review

I very early got on the Morrowind bandwagon. No, scratch that. I didn't climb aboard, I was one of the extremely early reviewers who helped in some small way to drive it. The immersive quality of the 3D visuals along with the seemingly endless series of quests to do and places ripe for investigation made this title one of my favorites in many years, despite the holes that allowed exploits, and the poor economics. Now along comes Oblivion and I find myself neither helping to move that bandwagon, nor mindlessly jumping onboard. There's a good deal to enjoy in Bethsoft's latest game, but I can't help feeling that they've actually fixed many things that didn't need repair, while leaving longstanding problems from Morrowind alone.

Let's start with the visuals. Once again, the Elder Scrolls developers have chosen a great-looking engine for their efforts. The artwork for the styles of architecture they've created are distinctive, with none of the narrow tunnel style that beset Morrowind forcing you on occasion to climb over guild members to reach a door or the next room. Similarly, magic effects are beautiful, and the dungeons are more varied in content, with realworld physics applied to numerous traps (spiked pits, trip wires holding numerous heavy logs, etc). It's true that most of the numerous merchants never seem to visit any other area in their large, well-stocked shops, and after a few dungeons you'll easily see duplicative cells; but these are relatively minor points in a truly splendid job. Let's not forget to factor in animation, too. Overall the impression is one of moving within a real world. That's quite an achievement.

At the same time, it comes with a cost. The computer that could easily run Morrowind and even add on 200+ mods, is often jerky and unresponsive touring Oblivion's Cyrodil. This even holds true for Xbox users. I've tried the game on both platforms, and although it was marginally superior in performance on the Xbox, there were far fewer options available to correct problems, since the PC allowed direct access to the game's INI file. That said, neither was especially fast, and in both cases the crawl in loading all those beautiful views distracted me substantially from their enjoyment. This is even allowing for the fact that Bethsoft clearly compromised by providing very few NPCs on their streets, giving the impression of deserted cities.

There are also problems with those same game physics that are otherwise so enjoyable. If you move close to a table without touching it, the over-sized, invisible edges of the object meshes are bumped, and everything sitting on it is, too. This can send all the carefully arranged books, food, and other items on top flying. Bad enough as that is, even worse is the near impossibility to manipulate objects in that environment. In Morrowind, you could drop books and armor pieces and make a stack. In Oblivion, dropping any item precisely at a given location is an exercise in futility, as it goes flying away from you. Was it really impossible using the Havok system to build in a command allowing players to position and drop items?

Of Oblivion's combat system, I can only say that the (new moves) you gain when skills reach certain levels leave me unimpressed. I'm not the kind of player who thinks that using a special attack on something nasty directly in front of me should involve shuffling to one side or the other, or taking a step backwards. This is too close to Doing the Timewarp. Assigning a special key would have made more sense, since it would have left you free to move in any direction or combination of directions at the same time. On the other hand, I do like the way monsters now attack and retreat, or block, or run to acquire distance for a magical attack. They also seem quicker to use beneficial spells on themselves than in Morrowind, though I've as yet not seen any enemies buff one another up for the attack, as in Wizardry 8.

Speaking of magic, it's been toned down. This is one of those areas where Bethsoft chose to correct an aspect of Morrowind, where players found plenty of exploits (Drain Health on a weapon, bypassing native resistances; Levitate for hours and shoot arrows at enemies on the ground; etc). Some spells simply aren't enchantable on weapons or armor any longer, while others have been severely limited. Nor can all spells be cast by anybody with enough magicka. Now, most require a certain level of competence in the relevant magic school skill; so a very powerful fireball spell with a long range and area of effect might require a Destruction level of 75. The overall balance is much better, in my opinion. Kudos to Bethsoft on this.

I like the new inventory display system, too, with its flexible sorts. The thing's complexity takes a bit of getting used to, but it works well, except in displaying the tiny, non-resizable map. Inventory labels are easy to read and, by the nature of the beast, very well organized and scrollable. Quest details are also far easier to find and study than in previous ES releases, though once again there's no ability to add journal entries.

The new zoom-in faces during discussion are a nice touch, though the small number of voices used repeatedly for the 1000+ NPCs quickly becomes wearing. The changeover of voices is sometimes annoying, too, as when an elderly, senile mendicant switches to a posh young voice when you ask her about rumors; a friendly NPC suddenly scowls and insults you when giving out quests. It doesn't make sense. On the other hand, Bethsoft has finally gotten around to using a faded gray on discussion topics that only repeat what has been said: about time. NPC writing is more distinctive overall, though the old ES flaw of no real character interaction continues to exist. There are no dialog trees, much less the kind of cleverly designed branching of Baldur's Gate II that made it seem like you could really choose to split the game through a major choice at least, for one chapter. You either accept a quest in Oblivion, or you don't. Nearly everything else is just a matter of listening silently, and that's hardly roleplaying, is it?

Much was made of NPC schedules due to AI advances in advance publicity, all of it preternaturally glowing. However, this was also possible in Morrowind. It simply wasn't used very much by a development team that had other priorities. And truth to tell, it isn't used very much on the NPCs in Oblivion's towns, who generally move to and from work, or engage in brief, standardized activities, or flat conversations that have the disconnected quality of dreams. (I dub thee Stepford NPCs.) No, the AI changes can best be seen, instead, in the improved NPC combat as mentioned above, that affects not only your enemies, but any summoned creatures or friends that have temporarily joined you. The latter are more pro-active than before, wading into battle rather than waiting for you to be attacked. They let you know when you've accidentally hit them in battle, and are more forgiving of this; and they no longer target enemies with lethal spells that have the minor side effect of killing you, as well.

Fixing What Ain't Broke

Unfortunately, Bethsoft has chosen to draw upon the Morrowind experience to correct some aspects of basic gameplay, and these don't work well, at all. For instance: in Morrowind, you didn't have to level your character up at any given time. You could do so, or keep playing at that same level until you had accumulated sufficient increases in different skills to get large attribute multipliers. Then, when you finally leveled your character by sleeping, you would acquire a strength (or intelligence, agility, etc) modifier of 4 or 5, instead of 1 or 2.

Not so, in Oblivion. Whether you like it or not, as soon as your major skills improve sufficiently through use, you're informed that you've made a character level and should sleep. Any further improvements to your skills will not affect attribute multipliers on that level, but the next one. Thus you no longer have the option of deciding how quickly you want your attributes to rise, which is annoying. And as a bonus, you have to pay undo attention to character creation and advancement. Should I choose Athletics as a major skill, or will that go up too quickly because my character runs a lot, forcing me to level up before I've improved enough skills to affect my other attributes? What other skills should I avoid assigning as major ones while creating my character, to slow down its advancement? The whole character leveling part of the game, transparent in Morrowind, has become a strategy game in its own right, and a boring one, unfortunately.

There are additional legitimate reasons for not leveling too quickly. One is that due to game balance issues, a very new character will find it extremely easy to complete a raft of quests, because Bethsoft has made the appearance of nearly every potential enemy in the game dependent upon your level. Regrettably, the skew is such that as you improve, your enemies tend to improve far more, gaining considerably greater strength and endurance. As a result, by level 15 or 20 you're getting the bonemeal beaten out of you by (appropriate) enemies, where at level 3 you were managing to hold your own.

Or consider treasure leveling. In Morrowind, there was baseline treasure you'd find on bodies and in chests, with a slight chance of something showing up that was better. The lure of these better items kept you out hunting for more occupied, hitherto unknown caves and potential loot. But Bethsoft now believes all loot should be tied to character level. Their (improvement) makes certain you never see any treasure, in merchant shops or on the kill, that is inappropriate for your current character. Just finished an epic battle with three opponents that nearly took you and your summoned creature out? You can hardly wait to open that boss treasure chest.then you discover it contains nothing different from every other chest you've seen so far in the game, and all of it exactly what a character your level would already own.

One more example: if you killed the nefarious occupants of a cave in Morrowind, left and returned a week later, the place was still empty. You could go away for three months then show up, secure in the knowledge that it was still open real estate. Perhaps it was to stop players taking over such places and making them into private homes, but in Oblivion you'll find that new, equally nasty inhabitants move into any dungeon you've cleared out within a matter of days. Solving one problem, Bethsoft has created a worse. There's no good reason now for the player to explore new dungeons in the wilderness, since they'll find new monsters in the old dungeon they've investigated ten times before, right outside town. And as monsters and treasure will be leveled to the character why seek elsewhere?

Dumbing. As in, Down.

Let's briefly consider quests. They were fairly open-ended in Morrowind. You got one, and you were expected to find one of (sometimes) potentially several solutions to it, frequently without any hints. In Oblivion, you're not only directed every step of the way, with a map that tells you exactly where to go, but messages show up telling you how you think and feel, and what you should do next, even when it isn't directly part of the quest's main goal. There's far too much from-above direction, and every bit of it leeches the game of its best feature, a sense of immersion. It's difficult to remain truly involved in a world when dialog boxes pop up to tell you what you should do next.
This leads me to think that Bethsoft made a strategic decision with Oblivion to grab a much younger playing audience which needs more hand-holding. It stands to reason: they have a captive market of older players from earlier titles, so they can concentrate on increasing revenues among pre-teens and early teens. I'll be the first to admit this is complete speculation on my part, but there's nothing speculative about the dumbing down of the ES series at this point. It looks beautiful, it has many of the thrills of yore, but it seems to be aiming not for the kid in me, but for the nine-year-old kid down the block who has to be told in advance precisely where the cave he's seeking in Cyrodil is, and what to do and how to do it when you're told to locate an artifact in it. Pardon my lack of enthusiasm.

And talk about freebies! You couldn't grab an object from one of the Morrowind guilds for fear of being attacked on sight. Members were protective of their property, and rightly so. But rare and popular alchemy ingredients, weapons, soulgems, armor, books and scrolls are free and found in abundance at all the Oblivion guilds. It amounts to a Monty Haul giveaway that again would appeal to the child player. Bethsoft, if you're so anxious to close up loopholes that allowed players to have uber-spells and loot the occasional strong weapon in Morrowind, why create new exploits by giving newbie guild members full access to plenty of goodies?

If my theory of targeting a broadened market is correct, that might help to explain why there are far fewer books in Oblivion than in Morrowind, with all the stories and lore that helped add real background and detail to the place. (Kids, the theory goes, don't like to read. They only like their characters to kill and grab ever more powerful goodies.) The developers have, in a not very subtle fashion, chosen to compensate for the lack of books but putting multiple copies many times over on every shelf you can find. Even private houses seem for some strange reason to possess half a dozen copies of a few basic texts, and some of the guilds boast of nearly two dozen copies of a single title despite having only five or six members.

There are many other instances of changes that point to a more (youthful) clientele for Oblivion, but why bother?

The Core Game

There's still much to enjoy that was carried into Oblivion over from previous ES games, including a huge land, tons of quests that sometimes seem to appear spontaneously, lore-based artifacts whose purpose you must determine, and a mix of possible careers in thievery, magery, ranged and melee weaponry that actually work. Alchemy, too, remains a well-balanced and varied game system, and the overall structure of the title itself is of a unified design that claims my admiration. Despite the criticisms I have of Oblivion, it's easy to perceive a fine game under the surface, which accounts for its rating. What remains troubling is that the excellence in this title is arguably aimed now at a younger audience, much as Bioware's KotoR took a huge dive in intelligence from Baldur's Gate II. But would an Oblivion that didn't patronize its audience have done as well? I'm inclined to think so, especially with two platforms and all the advanced publicity Bethsoft used. I suppose, though, that at this point we'll never find out.
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Daemonica Review

If you go to Daemonica's official web site, you'll see that the game is described as a (3D interactive mystery) with (thrilling action fights,) (potion-making,) and (quests.) Well, that clears everything up, right? Sometimes you get descriptions like the above when the people marketing the game don't actually know a lot about computer games, and they don't know what words to use to let players know what the game is going to be like. But with Daemonica, it's more a matter that the game is odd. Daemonica is basically an adventure game written using a role-playing game engine, and, as such, it's probably different than anything you've ever played before.

In Daemonica, you take on the role of a man named Nicholas Farepoynt. You have the ability to talk to the dead, and you use that gift to track down the worst sort of killers. At the start of the game, you're called to the small town of Cavorn, where an elderly couple has gone missing, but their bloody clothing has been found. Was the couple murdered? And if so, by whom? And why? It doesn't take long before more people start turning up dead, and others disappear, and still others go mad. Just like in most role-playing games, no matter what simple problem you start with, eventually you're dealing with an ancient evil that wants to take over the world.

Of course, Daemonica isn't really a role-playing game. It looks like a role-playing game because, despite employing a 3D engine, it uses a fixed isometric view, and so it resembles 2D role-playing games like Divine Divinity and Gorasul. It also features some combat, but the combat is very simple -- you click to attack and hit the spacebar to block -- and there are only about ten fights in the entire game.

No, Daemonica is an adventure, and you spend most of your time talking to the people of Cavorn and clicking on things. As an example, at one point the town doctor tells you that his records have been stolen. That allows you to wander around town asking the inhabitants if they've seen the records, but nothing much will happen in the quest until you notice that the field next to the doctor's house has been trampled. At that point you will automatically deduce that somebody has been watching the doctor's house, and when you relay that information to the doctor, you'll have something new to ask the townspeople about.

Really, if you've played role-playing games like Arcanum or Neverwinter Nights, and you remember the murder mysteries in those games, Daemonica uses the same format. You talk to people, you click on something or pick up an object, you talk to more people, and then you repeat. The difference is that the mystery in Daemonica is much longer. The game takes about a dozen hours to complete, which is about right for adventure games but woefully short if you were hoping for more of a role-playing game influence.

Fortunately, while many parts of the game scream (bargain bin,) the storyline is interesting enough to keep you engaged, and your character Nicholas Farepoynt is more intriguing than your average anonymous hero. But with a rather short campaign and simplistic gameplay -- Pirates of the Sword Coast, the most recent Neverwinter Nights premium module, actually has more interesting puzzles -- Daemonica is not a game I'd recommend you rush out and buy. It has an SRP of $30 right now; if you wait until that price drops in half, then you might find Daemonica to be an entertaining diversion some weekend.
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Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach Review

Introduction

Dungeon & Dragons Online: Stormreach is a massively multiplayer on-line role-playing game (MMORPG) that achieves a lot of (firsts.) It's the first MMORPG to use the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition rule set, it's the first MMORPG to employ the Dungeons & Dragons Eberron setting, and, most importantly, it's the first MMOPRG to try and recreate the feeling of playing Dungeons & Dragons in a room with your friends, where one person acts as the dungeon master and the other people roll dice and role-play their characters. As a result, Dungeons & Dragons Online provides a unique role-playing experience. But is it a fun role-playing experience? Keep reading to find out.


Character Development

Despite its many unique aspects, Dungeons & Dragons Online starts out like most other MMORPGs. You must choose a server (there are 14) and you must create a character. I'm not an expert on Dungeons & Dragons rules, version 3.5 or otherwise, but the races and classes available seem about right. Bards don't get any rogue abilities, and sorcerers and wizards get spells to repair warforged characters, but otherwise the five races and nine classes do about what you'd expect. Halflings are best as rogue characters, elves are best as spellcasters, you should choose the cleric class if you want to heal people, and you should become a wizard if you want to dish out damage.

If you've played other Dungeons & Dragons computer role-playing games (such as just about anything from BioWare), then the skills, spells, and feats in Dungeons & Dragons Online should also feel familiar. Some character abilities, like the (magic missile) spell and the (weapon finesse) feat, work just like they always have. Others, like the (diplomacy) and (intimidate) skills, work a little differently. Dungeons & Dragons Online doesn't use conversation checks of any kind (NPCs basically talk at you rather than with you), and so there's no such thing as a diplomat character. That means the diplomat skills have been turned into combat skills, and you can use (diplomacy) to convince monsters to attack somebody else, and you can use (intimidate) to get monsters to attack you.

Characters are only allowed to reach level 10 in the game. Since this is intended to take a while (after playing for a month, my best character is only level 7), developer Turbine, Inc. added five (ranks) to each level. The first four times you gain a rank, you receive an action point. The fifth time, you advance your level. Action points buy small enhancements for characters, such as extra damage for certain kinds of weapons, skill boosts, and bonuses to ability scores. That means, while in most Dungeons & Dragons games characters are pretty weak at the start, in Dungeons & Dragons Online characters buff up quickly, and it doesn't take long before they can participate in difficult quests.


Playing the Game

It's after you've created your character and started exploring the world that Dungeons & Dragons Online separates itself from other MMORPGs. The game is completely quest oriented. You don't get any experience for killing random creatures. You only get experience for going on quests and completing objectives. Moreover, quests only take place in private instances, and there isn't any combat allowed in public areas. That means, among other things, that there isn't any player-versus-player combat allowed (which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your tastes), and that it isn't possible for other players to (grief) your party by sabotaging your quests or even just by following you around and making a nuisance of themselves (which is definitely a good thing).
There are a few (encounter) areas in the game, where you get a small amount of experience for defeating small groups of enemies (early in the game, a trio of kobolds or a single troll might constitute an encounter), but otherwise the game is a matter of putting together a party of characters, going on a quest, and then repeating. There isn't anything else to do, and there isn't really any solo content. In fact, Dungeons & Dragons Online is sort of odd in that it overwhelmingly encourages you to party with other characters. The amount of experience you get at the end of a quest is adjusted for certain things, like discovering secret doors (good) or being a higher level than intended for the quest (bad), but there isn't any adjustment for the number of players in your party. Since all equipment rewards are created for the individual party members (meaning that you don't have to fight over equipment drops), there isn't any downside to completing every quest with the maximum number of players in your party. And because you're less likely to die and more likely to receive experience bonuses, the more players you party with, the more experience you're likely to get. That's sort of an odd change from other MMORPGs, where just the opposite is usually true, and it takes a while to get used to it.

Sadly, while this sort of system has potential, the quests themselves usually aren't very exciting. Early in the game almost every quest features kobolds, sewers, warehouses, or some combination of the three, and it just gets boring. Later, there is more variety to where you can go and what types of enemies you can kill, but there just aren't enough quests. I think it's possible to reach level 4 by completing the early quests one time each, but after that you have to complete the mid- and high-level quests multiple times just because there isn't anything else to do (there's this one quest on an island called Sorrowdusk that I've completed about ten times now). Chances are that Turbine will release more content over time -- just the other day they released a new module called the Dragon's Vault that is supposed to contain more quests for all levels -- but right now the content is kind of thin.

Here's an example of an early quest. Near a sewer entrance, a guy will tell you that his wife has been kidnapped. If you then enter the sewers, you'll have to chase and kill kobolds until you reach the wife. However, at that point you'll discover that a hobgoblin is really the one behind the kidnapping, and so you'll have to kill him to free the wife. You're only required to kill the hobgoblin and talk to the wife to complete the quest, and so if you can sneak effectively you can skip some combat. There are also some optional parts, like a treasure chest that if you open it, spiders will appear and attack you. But really, the quest is kind of generic, and you don't need to know any of the backstory to complete it. You can just wander around and kill stuff and talk to any NPCs that you come across. That's actually a strategy that works for 90% of the quests in the game. Ho hum.


The Interface

Dungeons and Dragons Online uses a third-person perspective, and it employs a couple of different movement modes. In the standard mode, you press the WASD keys to drive your character, and the camera automatically follows behind. In mouselook mode, you can still use the WASD keys for movement, but you steer your character with the mouse. During combat, right-clicking causes your character to swing its weapon, and you can also block (with or without a shield) by holding down the shift key. If you move while blocking, then you can (tumble,) which is a skill in the game.

The control scheme works well enough, which makes sense since it's a variation on the control schemes that just about all third-person perspective games use. Where the interface has its failing is in providing useful information. Consider the (focus orb.) When you select an object or character, an image of it appears in the focus orb on screen. The focus orb is large, but yet it doesn't provide any information about the object. If you want to see the information, you have to press a button on the focus orb, or you have to press the Z key, and then a new panel with the information will pop up. But why require that extra step? Why not just have the focus orb provide some information by default?

Or consider the quest log. Quests are sorted by the location where you received the quest. That's fine -- except that the game gets very specific in its listings, and instead of showing, say, 15 quests for the harbor distict, it lists four in the Leaky Dinghy tavern, four more in the Wayward Lobster tavern, one in the harbormaster's house, and so forth, so the quests get difficult to keep track of because there are so many locations listed in the quest log, and you have to remember where all the taverns are. Worse, there isn't any way to control which quests are displayed, such as only showing the ones you haven't completed yet, and the only way to see how many times you've completed a quest is to go on the quest.
Or consider the party list. The only thing the game shows you is who is in your party, what class they are, and how healthy they are. It doesn't show their level, where they are, or if they currently have any buffs or penalties being applied. That makes it annoying when you join a party, because you have no way of knowing if it's an appropriate party for your character. If you really wanted, you could search for each character in the social tab, or examine them one by one if they happen to be nearby, but that sort of basic information shouldn't be so difficult to come by.

Other parts of the interface work better. For example, the social tab makes it easy to indicate that you're looking for a group, or, if you're in a group, to specify that you're looking for more. You can also move around and resize the interface panels and open multiple hotkey bars, and the game will remember your preferences (except, oddly, for the (d20) panel, which always resets to its default position), but in general, Turbine didn't spend even close to enough time making the interface friendly or functional. The interface works, and the game is playable with it, but that's about the best that could be said for it.


Odds and Ends

There are two other topics I want to delve into, but which don't fit anywhere else. The first one relates to that ESRB warning that you always see nowadays -- (game experience may change during online play.) That's the one where what they really mean is, (People tend to be schmucks, so be careful.) Well, I don't know if I've just been lucky, or if perhaps the cooperative nature of the game has kept at bay those who enjoy causing problems for others, but the people I've met in Dungeons and Dragons Online have been almost unfailingly nice and polite. It's actually been sort of eerie, because I never expect that sort of thing while online. But if you're a parent who worries about what your child is playing, or if you're just a potential player who gets turned off by the typical online hijinks, then you should feel safe with Dungeons & Dragons Online.

The second topic is less positive. In fact, let's call it a negative. Dungeons & Dragons Online works badly if you have a dial-up connection. When the game was first released, simply running through town caused problems, and actually grouping with other people or killing more than one enemy at a time was all but impossible. Then about three weeks ago, Turbine released a patch that allowed you to set your connection speed, and that made the game reasonably playable. The new Dragon's Vault module also includes a patch, and supposedly that patch will help matters even more -- but the patch is 250 MB, and I'm still downloading it, so who knows? I'm optimistic that Turbine will eventually fix the dial-up problems, but even so, realize this: Dungeons & Dragons Online includes voice chat, and that feature only works if you have a broadband connection. If you're stuck with dial-up, then be prepared to be treated like a second-class citizen.


Conclusion

Overall, Dungeons & Dragons Online is a nice but less-than-stellar MMORPG. I probably would have liked it better if I hadn't been using a dialup connection -- or maybe not. Generally, most of the game seems rather uninspired to me. I'd say that the best part of the game is the character development system, but that came almost verbatim from the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition rule set. The quests don't have enough variety, and there aren't enough of them, and so mid- to high-level characters aren't given enough to do. Possibly, Turbine will provide enough extra content, such as with the Dragon's Vault module they released on April 5, to alleviate these problems, but if so it'll probably be a while down the road, and so you might want to wait and see how things shake out before purchasing a copy of the game.
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Dungeon Lords Collector’s Edition Review

When Heuristic Park and DreamCatcher Interactive teamed up to release Dungeon Lords in May of last year, no doubt they had high expectations. But the game got killed in the press -- and for good reason. Even in an industry where games are frequently rushed out the door to meet some arbitrary deadline, Dungeon Lords hit a new low. The auto-map feature hadn't been implemented yet, a large number of spells and skills were missing, towns were empty of furniture and NPCs, and there were a ton of game-stopping bugs. I don't even want to hazard a guess about how many people who purchased the game were actually able to complete it in its original form.

But that was then, and this is now. After its release, Heuristic Park continued to work on the game, and they've now released three patches. The first patch stamped out some bugs, the second patch added in the auto-map feature (and stamped out some more bugs), and the third patch added in the missing spells and skills (and stamped out yet even more bugs). During this time, Heuristic Park also created some new quests and NPCs to flesh out the empty towns, but rather than make those available in a patch as well, they and DreamCatcher decided to re-release Dungeon Lords in a special edition.

Was this a good idea? In my oh-so-humble opinion, the answer is no. First of all, if you're a publisher and you've generated a tremendous amount of ill-will from people who have purchased your games, it seems like it would be a good idea to try and make those people happy rather than try and convince them to purchase even more games. Secondly, the Dungeon Lords Collector's Edition isn't exactly Fable: The Lost Chapters. It doesn't offer a lot of new content, and most of that content isn't exactly bonus material. I think it would be easy to argue that most of the new content (like the furniture and chests added to the towns) should have been included in the original release, and trying to make people pay extra money for such additions is galling. Does anybody else remember when players weren't exactly thrilled with the Heart of Winter expansion pack for Icewind Dale, and Black Isle Studios released the Trials of the Luremaster extension for free? I'd argue that that's the right way to handle such matters, but Black Isle Studios got shut down, and, for all I know, DreamCatcher is going to make some extra money from the Collector's Edition, and so it's the right decision for them.

And anyway, I don't really want to review how DreamCatcher has handled the release of Dungeon Lords -- although the word (abysmally) suddenly comes to mind for some odd reason -- I want to review the Dungeon Lords Collector's Edition and discuss things like what's new in the game and whether it's any fun to play and if it's worth the money. If you're interested in those things as well, then keep reading.

The story behind the Collector's Edition is identical to the one behind Dungeon Lords. There's an evil wizard who is trying to take over the world, and you have to collect Five Relics of Power in order to stop him. The story sounds like it could have been purchased at RPG Clichés R Us, but there are some subtle nuances to it (such as a missing daughter and her captured lover), and it ends up working better than what you'd usually see in an action role-playing game. Plus, the story gives you an excuse to explore five monster-filled dungeons, and so it works out well enough.
Dungeon Lords uses a third-person perspective. You move your character by pressing the WASD keys, you move the camera by moving the mouse, you attack with your weapon (or spell) by clicking on the left mouse button, and you block with your shield by holding down the right mouse button. It's a control scheme similar to ones used by countless other role-playing games, and it's still in use because it works pretty well.

What makes Dungeon Lords a little different -- and better -- is that you're rarely confronted with a one-on-one duel. You almost always find yourself attacked by groups of up to eight enemies, and that means you can't just stand there and click away to kill things. You have to dodge around and maneuver for good angles and sometimes run away to a better vantage point. That makes the combat very satisfying, because you have to work for your kills.

It also helps that the enemies are interesting, and that they attack you in different ways. For example, new in the Collector's Edition is the (mushman.) It's a mushroom-shaped enemy that attacks in packs when you're in swamps or near a lake. If you get too close to one, then it can spray out a poison gas that will cause you to choke and gasp (and not be able to attack) for a while. So for these guys it's best to stay away from them and hit them with ranged attacks or powerful spells. Meanwhile, if you're attacked by wolves, they just use a standard melee attack, and so you might just want to go toe-to-toe with them. Other enemies zap you with ranged attacks, or they float just out of melee range, or they curse you with debilitating spells. In Dungeon Lords, you have to pay attention to your enemies so that you know what works against them, and so that you can kill them quickly, which is important because the engine spawns enemies all the time, and you don't want to be facing off against a banshee's freezing spells only to be attacked from behind by a quartet of mummies.

Because Dungeon Lords focuses on combat, it doesn't really give you any meaningful role-playing options. People simply talk at you and tell you what to do, and then you have to do it. For most quests (including the quests in the Collector's Edition), the objective is straightforward: go somewhere and kill something and maybe pick up the object that it was guarding. If you're looking for a game where you can be good or evil, or choose how to complete quests, or trade witty banter with your companions, then Dungeon Lords isn't the game for you.

Really, the only place where you get to make decisions in the game is during character development. Dungeon Lords uses sort of an odd system where you're allowed to select five classes for your character. In some games, that would make your character godly, but in Dungeon Lords the classes aren't all that exciting. Other than the subjective benefit to being a (samurai) or a (lord,) classes simply give you a learning bonus to a set of skills, and sometimes they give you a new skill distinct to the class. For example, if you select the lord class, you get a learning bonus to all weapon and armor skills, making it easier to equip high level weapons and armor, and you also get the special (crushing blow) skill, which gives you a chance to stun enemies.
The Dungeon Lords Collector's Edition contains 34 classes (one more than the regular version), and so there are a lot of ways to put together a character, giving the game a lot of replay value. The downside is that most skills are available to most characters, and since the only thing that changes is the learning costs of those skills, if you're patient you can learn most everything. If you want to wield the heaviest weapons and wear the heaviest armors and still be a devastating spellcaster, the game allows you to do it, which is sort of unfortunate.

To compound the problem, the game doesn't really do anything to compensate for how powerful characters can become. At the start of the game, when characters have a single class, the battles are tough and exciting, but by the end of the game, it just gets too easy to mow through the enemies, including the bosses (the end battle in particular is pretty easy, and it even got buffed up in one of the patches).

If you played (or read about) the original Dungeon Lords, then I probably haven't said too much that you didn't know already. So let me now talk about what's new with the Collector's Edition. First and foremost, the Collector's Edition contains five new quests. These quests are analogous to the class quests, where you have to go somewhere on the surface of the world and kill something. For example, in the starting city of Fargrove, a man will tell you that he plundered a tomb only to learn that a vampire was living inside it -- and that the vampire is now hunting him. He'll then of course ask you to kill the vampire, which you'll find in the slums district of the city. Vampires are nasty -- among other things, they can fly and turn invisible -- but if you kill it, the man will reward you with the gold he plundered from the tomb.

The Collector's Edition also contains several new enemies. Besides the mushmen that I mentioned earlier, there are also spiderlings (smaller versions of the spiders that were already in the game), mimics, shades, creeper worms, and renegade demigoths. Of the new enemies, the mimics are easily the coolest, since they turn into great big mouths with legs. There are also some new boss creatures to deal with, such as the vampire and a giant scorpion.

The Collector's Edition also contains some subtle changes. The cities in the game have been fleshed out a little better. Arindale and Skuldoon now have furniture in their buildings (including fireplaces!), and in Skuldoon you'll find demigoths wandering the streets. You'll also find many more treasure chests in the game, including level 10 and level 12 chests (level 9 was the highest before). There's also a new (shadow lord) class for the game, although it seems better suited to multiplayer PvP action, which I don't think Dungeon Lords even supports. And the bosses from the original quests now drop better loot, so you don't have to rely completely on chests for your equipment.

Finally, the Collector's Edition also includes all of the changes from the game's three patches, including the recent 1.4 patch. That means you'll find a bunch of (new) spells and skills in the game, such as the (vision) spell (which exposes the map to you), the (air) spell (which allows you to breathe underwater) and the identify skill (which does about what you'd expect). The 1.4 patch also fixes the heraldry bonuses (permanent bonuses that you receive at the end of quests) so that they actually work, and it checks the requirements for classes, so that classes are now a little more difficult to gain.
For the most part, the changes are very nice. It's just that they're also a little bit sloppy. Consider the scout skill. It shows nearby enemies and usable objects on the mini-map, which is helpful. But after I've used the object (such as opening a treasure chest) it remains on the mini-map even though it can't be used any more. Why? Or consider the identify skill. Every weapon and piece of armor in the game must be identified, right down to the weakest, rustiest dagger. And the game doesn't keep track of what you've identified, so you might have to identify that weak, rusty dagger dozens of times. Or consider the repair skill. Only items that you're wearing can get damaged, but you have to unequip the item in order to attempt to repair it. And for some reason helmets take way more damage than anything else, while weapons can't get damaged at all. Oddly, the spells I used all seemed to work pretty well, but the skills all seemed like they were the first stab from a programmer who didn't care much about the project, and I found that to be a little disturbing. Haven't players of the game already beta-tested it enough?

And so, overall, there are various ways you could look at the Collector's Edition. If you got scared off by the early reviews of Dungeon Lords and decided to skip the game, then the Collector's Edition is a worthwhile purchase. It's sort of like a more serious-minded, grittier version of Fable, and it should provide you with hours of fun. If you bought Dungeon Lords, then I'd just suggest you patch your version of the game and play it instead. I enjoyed playing the Collector's Edition, but I don't think the new changes are worth $40 extra. And, finally, there might be those of you who dislike how DreamCatcher has handled the publishing of the game, and their decision to create a Collector's Edition rather than a free patch. For you, I'd recommend you stay well away from any Dungeon Lords products. If DreamCatcher's mismanagement of the game actually nets them a profit, then there's little reason to expect superior service in the future.

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