The Crux of the Problem (Part 2)

Role-Playing-Gumption

4. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

I guess I was looking for someone gorgeous and
gormless but I couldn't find a decent photo
of your sister.

Any gamer worth their salt will have at some point been shanghaied by a free-roaming RPG. Whether its Dark Souls with its ball-busting difficulty curve, Baldur’s Gate and its peerless narrative or for the masochistic – Gothic and its stun-locking wolves. As gamers, we gather around the heels of developers, baying for more intuitive gameplay and less linear storylines. We chant for freedom, that ethereal creature with her cheerful skip and her glowing smile. She looks like everything we want in a game unfettered from the patriarchal power regime of media corporations and their insatiable need to sow constraint. Look a little closer though, and you’ll see that her trailing foot drags behind her, not so much a skip as it is a listless stagger, a product of idleness and a mass of undirected free time. A tendril of drool seeps slowly out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes are impassive orbs. All she sees are the distant mountaintops of Skyrim and a double life spent stealing pottery, running from imperial guards, finding a fence to ditch her stolen goods and then using the profit to pay off her bounty. It’s a vicious cycle and she’s not exactly trading in a hot commodity. 

Jesus I need to tone these metaphors down. That was my long-winded way of saying we’ve all been there, free-roaming RPG’s are developed almost exclusively with immense play-times and replay-ability in mind. Huge environments to explore, reams of text and dialogue to sift through, myriads of different skills, classes, races and character types to choose from/agonise over. Morrowind was my biggest poison. It popped my RPG cherry and then it came back to haunt me years later when all I had was my Dad’s laptop to entertain me one summer. I use the term “laptop” rather loosely as that suggests I played on some sort of streamlined device manufactured especially for its portability. That was far from the case. Think of a sandwich press; now make sure you visualize that sandwich press loaded with a serious megashit inducing, Frankenstein of a sandwich. We’re talking three tins of tuna, a can of sweet corn, half a block of cheese and a squirt of Worcestershire sauce all squeezed between two whole begets. You’re gonna have to back your car over the press just to close the dirty thing. Now imagine you repeat that abomination in another sandwich press before duct-taping the two machines on top of each other. There you have it, a reasonably accurate, model representation of my Dad’s old laptop. As an added feature, you can plug the two presses in and over time they’ll also manage a passable re-enactment of how well Morrowind ran on said computer. 

Mathematics

Despite the odd framerate related hitch, Morrowind welded me to the keyboard. I loved the inhospitable and bleak environments, swamps, ash-storms and volcanoes oh my. The architecture and the lore were unlike anything I’d encountered before with familiar hints of traditional fantasy mixed seamlessly with alien races and architecture. It was the unique elements of Elder Scrolls lore and the haunting landscape that made Morrowind such a joy to explore. Combine this inherent desire to waste time with the sort of game design which had no intention of babysitting the player around its world – no map markers, no quick travel and a notoriously unorganised journal – and while I may have wintered in the Riviera, I definitely spent that summer in Morrowind. 

Just in case a combination of my emotive
prose and Megan Fox's tight ass was
making you sentimental, here's a
reality check. 

3. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup    

I’ve always had a hard time describing DCSS to my friends/family/women at bars after a few too many [insert any form of alcohol based drink here], and my initial Vin Diesel related pick-up lines have failed. I’m going to cut out the middleman and pre-empt any long-winded metaphor which may or may not have tried to explain DCSS with the clever inclusion of a joke about your mums milk-silo’s and how I recently spent my Saturday night. Reference ahoy!

“Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free rougelike game of exploration and treasure-hunting in dungeons filled with dangerous and unfriendly monsters in a quest for the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot.”(http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/about)

And for the uninitiated –

“The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by level randomization, permanent death, and turn-based movement”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike)

There’s something refreshingly cleansing about playing an indie game. You know, supporting a small development team and appreciating a low-budget game for its quality design creativity rather than slamming it for a lack of Blockbuster visuals. We’ve all been there – Dwarf Fortress, Legend of Grimlock, Bastion – and if you haven’t, then stop reading my fucking blog right now finish reading my blog and donate to my future projects, after which time I insist that you place the name of every indie game mentioned in this section into a hat or an ice cream container(preferably an empty one you jackass), and then draw out the name of the only computer game that you’ll be playing for the next 3 months. Any follow up questions? Hold on, hold on, let me nip a few of those possible queries in the bud. There’s no multiplayer, no plot and the visuals usually vary between ACIS coding, a graphical system which literally uses numbers, symbols and alphabetical characters in place of graphics or tile based graphics which for all intensive purposes, resemble a straight port from the Sega Master system.

Apparently there's an ogre somewhere in amongst that and he's having a rough time of it.

Alternatively you can use the Tiles set which allows you to behold Saint Roka in all his terrifying
glory and he's not here to fuck spiders. 

This leaves just one serious whooper of a question then – what the shit is left? Well for starters, gameplay. Dungeon Crawl employs a number of deceptively complex game mechanics to help pad-out your RPG adventure. These include but are not limited to, magic systems, different weapon types, religion, mutations and special abilities. Add in the traditional RPG character creation combo of race and class plus a levelling system which allows the gamer to designate experience to over 30 different skills and I’ve just paraphrased the brainstorming process for the next Elder Scrolls game. Unfortunately, DCSS looks more like Alex the Kid than it does Skyrim, so it takes a devil in the details to make DCSS worthy of my number 3 slot. Dungeon Crawl is an exercise in selective simplicity. The core idea is pretty damn straightforward – choose a race and a class, start on the first floor of a dungeon complex and make your way down through 27 other levels to retrieve a magic artefact. Other than the odd shop and extremely odd friendly minion, the game will consist of you fighting an assortment of different creatures on each floor. That’s pretty much it. You’ll fight, and fight and run and run and eventually learn to pick which scraps you shouldn’t even bother starting in the first place. Buts that’s where those details rear their beautiful heads. 

While the overarching concept is simple, the sheer degree of customisability on each character, the variety of loot, the terrifying hotchpotch of different monsters and the many ways in which you can fight each desperate battle is truly staggering. And those fights will be desperate. There’s some something intrinsically nerve-wracking about playing an RPG where every fresh game spawns a completely new dungeon and there’s no way to save your character when they die. And mine did. Time after time, I enthusiastically sunk days into a character, only to end up one heart breaking click away from a turn where poison damage finished off my last few hit-points, or Boris the Lich blasted me into oblivion with a purple ball of energy. I would understandably sulk for a week or two before eventually mustering up the minerals to venture back into the dungeon. Inspiring stuff, I know. It also made for some hilarious stories. The sort of stories that were so mind-blowingly comical that I could only ever tell them to one other nerdy and close friend of mine. We laughed and we cried, we learnt and we lost and if we ever made love then I was always the pitcher.

Boris and I have a score to settle, but if I was a betting man I'd still put all my money on him.