The future of RPGs?

Neverwinter Nights, Bioware’s latest take on their Dungeons & Dragons licence, could easily be described as ambitious. Their plan is to take computer roleplaying to the next level by extensive multiplayer support. The whole roleplaying party is transferred to digital age, the adventures just move from pen and paper to mouse and display. Game master still controls the adventure, players act it out.
By delievering the editor & other tools with the game Bioware hopes gamers accept Neverwinter Nights as the new medium for role playing. With dozens of new scenarios and modifications appearing daily, the beginning looks promising.

In addition to the new concept Neverwinter Nights also brought Bioware’s AD&D games into the third dimension. The Infinity Engine, used in Baldur’s Gate & Icewind Dale games is replaced with the new Aurora Engine. The transfer to 3D has its advantages and disadvantages. First of all, the graphics look great. Environments are beautifully rendered and player models look good. One disadvantage the 2D engine had was the fact that all your characters & their equipment looked pretty much the same. This is no longer the case with Neverwinter Nights. You’re now able to actually see what equipment your character is wearing, from weapons to different outfits.

Combat is beautifully detailed. You can see different moves, blocks, equipment changes etc. If you hit an enemy with arrows, you see them sticking out of their body. Magic spells & lighting effects look excellent. Funny thing is that while the 3D graphics look good, so did the 2D ones. In fact the detailed backgrounds of the old Infinity engine and the incredible amount of detail they have still continues to impress. Fortunately the Aurora brings along more than just 3D.

Battles are entertaining to watch

Neverwinter Nights uses the new 3rd edition rules of AD&D (Now just D&D). This brings many changes to the gameplay. First of all, it removes most of the character restrictions AD&D 2nd edition had. Mages can’t use swords, clerics are restricted from using bladed weapons, wearing armor prevents from casting spells etc. , you know the stuff.

With the 3rd edition, none of these exist. There are no restrictions in weapons, eg. mages can use two handed swords if they wish – although they have to be proficient with them if they want to be effective. Wearing armor now doesn’t prevent spellcasting, it just makes it more difficult. Mages with full plate armor have significally greater chance of failing the spell than those with no armor at all. They can reduce the penalties by focusing on armored spellcasting when leveling up. Which leads to the next big change in system.

The amazing singing fighter

Character development has gone through a major overhaul. Every character now needs the same amount of experience points to go up a level. In 2nd edition some classes advenced slower than others, rogues needed less points than wizards for example. In 3rd edition dual & multiclassing is gone. Once you go up a level, you choose a class to advance in. You may choose the same class you began with or advance in another.

E.g. when a 1st level warrior goes up a level he may choose to advance to 2nd level in warrior class or choose another class. This makes customizing your characters much easier. You can gain 3 levels as wizard, one as warrior and two as druid, then gain one more as warrior etc. The only limitation is the experience penalty you recieve if you have two classes more than one level apart (eg. Level 5 warrior/level 5 rogue/ level 1 wizard).

Resting means sitting on a floor until you are healed.
Heroes never sleep.

Close combat is dangerous, use henchmen

Even though Neverwinter Nights is clearly designed with multiplayer in mind, Bioware has not totally forgotten single gaming. In Neverwinter’s single player campaign you play as a newly recruited hero trying to find the cure to a strange plague infecting the city of Neverwinter. The single player scenario is not as complex and long as Baldur’s Gate games were but it offers a decent gaming experience. Although rather linear, it manages to stay interesting. The game’s clearly designed with multiplayer gaming in mind.

Inventory is big enough for spare clothing.
Why just fight when you can fight with style?

This shows up in the gameplay as well. Instead of controlling a group of up to six characters like in other Bioware/Black Isle AD&D games, in Neverwinter you’re stuck with one. The game allows you to hire one henchman to help you, but he/she is computer controlled. The sidekick feature is pretty limited as you can’t access your helper’s inventory, give him items (potions are exception) or anything like that. Basically the henchman is just one extra guy in the battlefield, drawing enemy fire and assisting you in combat.

There are various henchmen to choose from and each one has their own story & quest for you. They have a wide range of abilities. There are warriors, rogues, wizards, etc. Certain henchmen are better in some quest than others. If your henchman has rogue skills, he/she opens doors and chests for you and disarms traps. Brute force works on doors & chests as well, but is slower and tends to break stuff…

Clever employers fight from the range
while the henchman do all the dirty work

The A.I. of the henchmen isn’t something to brag about. They usually hold out on their own in battles but they are too eager to fight. I often saw my henchman running around the map beating enemies senseless. Then he run to an ambush. Results are easily imaginable. Fortunately you can pick up your resurrected henchman from the temple of Tyr where you’ll also get free healing. The handy portal stone you get at the beginning of the game transfers you to the temple at no cost.

Rampage isn’t the only flaw henchmen possess. Once my henchman spotted a trap at the end of a hallway. After seeing it he commented something about disarming the trap for me. whet surprised me was the way he did it. My henchman disarmed the trap by running straight INTO the trap! Well, that’s one way of doing it, I guess and fortunately he survived. It worked, though and the trap was obviously no longer there…a good employee does anything to protect his master, apparently…

Traps are highlighted nicely in red

Victory

I have mixed opinions about Neverwinter Nights. On the other hand, Bioware succeeded in moving their D&D games to 3D. I haven’t tried the multiplayer game, so I can’t say how well they succeeded in changing the RPG genre. On single player front Neverwinter Nights isn’t as good as it could be. The 1 player scenarios available for download on the net may make up for it, but we’ll see. Even if you’re not planning to play online, Neverwinter Nights isn’t a waste of money. There’s a lot to do and explore on the single player scenarios, just don’t expect anything as grand as Baldur’s Gate was.

Righteous heroes glow in dark

The classic

The first game in X-Com series places you in the lead of X-Com, a multi-national force founded by world’s governments to fight the extraterrestrial threat (the aliens). The game was released as X-Com: Enemy Unknown in North-America and went by the name UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe.

As the leader of X-Com (Extraterrestrial Combat), you must organize your troops, manage the funding and command the researchers as well as order units to intercept the UFOs. All this is done in the Geoscape mode, where you’ll find yourself watching the world map.
In the map screen, you see your bases and crafts. As the radar of your base picks up an alien craft, it appears as a red dot in the world map. Then you must order aircrafts to intercept it. As soon as your interceptors have managed to make it crash land (or to blow it to bits, depending on your craft’s weaponry), a new part of the game is about to start.

Yay, a cinematic intro

Once the UFO has been shot down, you must send units to neutralize the survivors and salvage the alien technology. All that takes place in the game’s turn-based combat mode where you control your soldiers in an overhead perspective.

Each soldier has a certain of time units and each action you take (walking, firing a gun, etc.) consumes them. Once you have run out of the time units, you switch to next soldier and repeat the process. When all of your troops have taken their action, it’s time to end the turn. After that the computer does the same for aliens with hidden movement. You can’t see what they’re doing, unless one of your soldiers sees it, but you can hear what the aliens are doing (opening doors, firing shots…).

One of the most important aspects in making UFO a classic was the line-of-sight system. The fact that you only see what your soldiers see, keeps the game interesting. You may hear sound an see bits of movement happening, but you don’t truly know what’s going on until one of your soldiers is at the scene. Once an alien is spotted, you have to neutralize it. This means you’ve got two options: either you kill it or you stun it and take to scientists for researching. (Pay back all that probing they did to us…)

Once you’ve taken care of all hostile units, the mission ends. Then you’re presented with a review of your performance. Obtained alien artifacts and neutralized aliens add to score while own casualties reduce it.
In addition the normal cleanup missions, there are terror missions where aliens have attacked a city and X-Com must come to deal with the threat. (Interestingly the textures the game uses indicate that aliens only seem to attack city outskirts with cabbage fields and occasional gas stations…) There you also need to protect the civilians on the scene. Aliens enjoy firing at them and each casualty shows up negatively in your mission performance reviews.

Bases start small burt eventually grow huge

Happiness is a warm gun

The combat mode is very well done. You can blow up everything you see (Which always is a great feature…), the line of sight is very well done and both the obstacles and lighting affect to your field of vision. The maps can contain multiple floors and sniping from the roof is always fun.
Speaking of weapons, the arsenal is huge! You have just about everything: rifles, hand guns, grenades (standard, smoke and motion detecting), heavy explosives, laser weapons, plasma weapons, stun rods, motion detectors, cannons (with different types of ammo) and even a homing missile launcher! Not to mention the battletanks you can use…

You start with very basic equipment and the aliens weaponry seems far superior to yours, but once your scientists manage to complete some of their their projects, the aliens soon find themselves outgunned. As you get your hand on alien technology, you can create more powerful equipment and armors which are essential to your success.
At the beginning your troops are true one hit wonders, who drop dead from nearly every hit they take while the aliens can survive two or three. Once you get the armors, your soldiers can switch to personal armors and eventually to flying suits (extremely spiffy armor which is not only durable, but allows the soldier to hover in the air).

Interceptor is the first fightercraft you’ll get

One of the best parts in X-Com is that eventually you start caring what happens to your soldiers. They all have names (You can even change the names if you want to) and ranks and it’s fun to observe as John Smith advances from rookie to sergeant. And soon you’ll be genuinely pissed off if poor John gets shot in the back by some alien punk. You want revenge and find yourself using your most powerful weaponry to get that alien bastard…

Even though I’ve talked a lot about the combat system, the Geoscape mode shouldn’t be forgotten. You’re able to control the projects the scientists are researching, build additional structures to your base (or even a new base if you feel like it), buy or sell weaponry, hire or sack people, build new weaponry or view the UFOpedia encyclopedia which contains all information you’ve gathered about your equipment or about your enemies.

After each month in game time, you’ll get a review from your funders. The governments may increase or decrease your funds, based on your performance within their borders. The more alien attacks to their cities you stop, the happier they’ll be.
If you, however, have neglected protecting, for example, Great-Britain, they can reduce your funding or (if you’ve really screwed up) sign a deal with the alien invaders, cutting their support entirely. Which is NOT a good thing… (Although the nations aren’t good at keeping secrets, you immediately get notified of their ‘secret pacts’). Loose enough supporting nations and the game ends.

One thing less to worry for Asia

The game has no actual time limit (at least not that I know of), but as the time goes by, the alien’s attacks become more frequent. You can advance by getting information from the alien leaders you capture. First you find about their bases on earth, than about their plan and finally you’ll be able to locate their home world and end the war with a counterstrike.
When you congratulate yourself on finding an enemy base, it’s good to remember that the aliens may assault your bases as well. Therefore it’s good to invest on base defense systems. If they get inside, you’ll have defend your base with all the men currently stationed there. If all your available troops are still on their way back from a mission, it sucks to be you…

You don’t see games like X-Com very often. Game’s which have nearly no flaws at all. Sure, it lacks some features. Soldiers can’t run or crawl, just to mention the most obvious ones. The lack of those things, however won’t change the fact that the game is near perfect.
If you haven’t played X-Com, now is a good time to give it a try. The game has that kind of an atmosphere that many games nowadays don’t have. They’ve even added all those cattle mutilation references to the game! Don’t let the now outdated graphics frighten you, playability is the most important thing and X-Com really has lot of it. This is a game you find yourself playing again and again.

I knew I should’ve brought weaponry

Even though I talked about the PC version for X-Com, they’ve ported Enemy Unknown and it’s sequel Terror from the Deep for PSX and possibly for other consoles as well (although I’m only aware of the PC & PSX versions).

Even though the PSX version hogs an entire memory card (yeah, 15 blocks…) and isn’t as easy to control as the PC version (PSX pad doesn’t suit to X-Com as well as mouse does), it’s a great game nevertheless. They’ve also added some cut scenes to PSX version, as well as new opening and ending videos, which look great. Also, getting the PSX version may be easier to find because the PC one is really rare (and doesn’t work well on fast computers).

If you like the X-Com series you should also try the Jagged Alliance series, which has an entirely different setting, but the combat system is very similar to X-Com. And Jagged Alliance 2 is much easier to find, as it was released much more recently.

Before…

…and after. Viktor Andianov’s finest hour.