Games I've Been Playing: Legend of Grimrock

After careful deliberation, I've decided to try a less formal mode of writing for the next few posts, which will also coincide with a recap of my gaming life in the past year. So, in short:

In these next few blog posts I'll be describing the few games that kept me company during last year's absence (which I've already talked about in a previous post). Starting things off is Legend of Grimrock, a retro-inspired dungeon crawler made by  newcomers Almost Human Games.

It's not hard to see why Legend of Grimrock would appeal so strongly to my demographic (aged 30-ish and above), as we've been practically raised on this kind of game - first person dungeon crawlers where you must fight tooth and claw against not only monsters but the environment itself and the cleverly-built traps the dungeon's makers have devised. Such examples that still evoke a smile and pleasant memories include Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Ultima Underworld and a multitude of similar games that had but one premise: survive the traps, gear up your characters, slay monsters and maybe, just maybe, you will live long enough to escape captivity.

Legend of Grimrock aims to bring all this to the present, wrapping up the core gameplay ideas of the genre in a new engine (which, as of this writing, has just been upgraded with a great, easy-to-use dungeon creation toolkit), bringing it more in line with modern releases. For the most part, it succeeds.

The dungeon creator: More games should come with tools like these.

The game's story is (predictably) simple: your group of four (custom or pre-made) prisoners has been thrown into Mount Grimrock for unspecified crimes. Mount Grimrock is a vast network of underground dungeons and caves, infested with monsters and riddled with traps; thus it has become a standard means of disposing prisoners in the game's world. From there, there is precious little in the way of a plot - aside from some notes left behind by Toorum, a previous prisoner and a series of (mostly) incomprehensible "dreams" your characters have at set intervals, the story never proceeds past the general "escape Grimrock" premise.

I feel that Almost Human missed the opportunity to incorporate a few cosmology-establishing facts, like how Mount Grimrock came to be, where did the builders of the dungeons disappear to and a lot of other questions could have been answered via environmental storytelling (the aforementioned Toorum notes could have been expanded in this regard).

The character generator, in all its glory.

However, what Grimrock lacks in a solid story it more than makes up for in gameplay. At the start of the game, the player is given the choice to create a new party from scratch (there is also a choice for a pre-made party, which I haven't tried); the standard trinity of fighter, mage, rogue are present - as is the usual quartet of strength, dexterity, vitality and wisdom, which in turn affect a series of secondary statistics such as attack power, accuracy and health. There's also a choice of races between humans (all-round characters with no particular benefits), minotaurs (extremely strong but require more food than other races), insectoids (which are frail, but make excellent spellcasters) and lizardmen (the most agile of the bunch). Finally, there are choices for skills (which give benefits at certain thresholds) and two perks, which serve mostly as fine-tuning options for boosting secondary statistics.

Skill points are one of the few ways to strengthen your characters.

My only gripe with the character creator is that, for all the choices available, there are certain builds that are highly favorable and advantageous, while the rest underperform - thus forcing the player into building "what works best" in order to avoid difficulties in the later stages of the game.

Simple mechanics such as weighing down pressure plates...

The level design also merits specific mention, as Almost Human has shown themselves to be masters of the discipline; the game does a great job of introducing the (relatively few) puzzle parts in the early levels, such as pressure plates, teleporters and torch sconces - in lower floors these simple components are combined into ingenious puzzles, often leaving me stumped for a good deal of time before figuring the deceptively simple solutions and walking away with a lovely feeling of accomplishment.

...are later combined in clever ways to hinder the player's progress.

Lastly, combat. I found this part to be a mixed bag, as it keeps an aspect of the old-school dungeon crawling mindset I've never been fond of: circle-strafing. More specifically, the enemies in the game are mainly hard but not impossible; even early enemies such as giant snails and the mushroom-themed myconids can pose a challenge to a careless player but more often than not a fight's difficulty is more dependent on the level design itself - narrow corridors proved to be the bane of my party on more than one occasion as there was no space in which to strafe around my enemies, thus preventing them from attacking altogether if I was sufficiently fast on the movement keys. For this reason, several of the battles (especially in lower floors) felt very mechanical and stiff in nature, as I merely kept side-stepping around enemies before their "turn" animations could finish playing, then chipping away at their health - repeating as necessary until I won.

Combat: An affair of side-stepping more than anything else.

In conclusion, Legend of Grimrock is a very enjoyable game if you can "get" into the mindset of the genre; for older gamers it feels like a highly-polished revival of one of the prime genres of the 80's, while also being a great introduction for younger gamers that might otherwise be put off by the graphics of these oldies.

Resources

========

*Almost Human Games

*Legend of Grimrock Official Site

Ideas - Four RPG Tropes, How to Improve Them, Part 2

Disclaimer: The following article is merely a gathering of ideas, thoughts that I have collected throughout my gaming experiences regarding certain tropes found most commonly in the RPG genre. They should not be taken as fact, but instead as a provocation for thought for the improvement of the medium.

Amnesiac Protagonist

and similar back-story delivery tropes.

In Planescape: Torment, you play as
the aptly-named Nameless One...

What's Wrong: As is common with most RPG cosmologies, new players are often unfamiliar with the various aspects of the game world their characters inhabit. This leads to a very common problem designers need to address during development: How to justify explaining the world to the player in-character (without communicating with the player directly; usually, this means an in-game "tutor" character conveys explanations to the player's avatar instead). Amnesia is sometimes used in this regard; by having the main character suffer from memory loss, the designer can use them as a player surrogate, allowing the game to describe various aspects of itself without breaking immersion (an amnesiac character being treated as a blank slate for the purposes of exposition).

 While this approach certainly has a few advantages - it saves time during development, provides narrative cohesion and enhances immersion (if done properly) - it is often used as a crutch when character design is either lacking or non-existent; many offenders of this trope are bland, one-dimensional characters that use amnesia as an excuse to not have any personality of their own.

...an amnesiac immortal with a
penchant for dialogue.

What's Right: On the flip-side, amnesia used correctly can be a very powerful tool of narrative delivery. The quintessential example is, perhaps, Planescape: Torment, the 1999 RPG by Black Isle Studios - based on the titular Planescape campaign setting of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG - it provides what I consider the best use of amnesia as a plot hook. In the game, the protagonist (The Nameless One) is an immortal being, who (at the game's start) has no memory of his past lives. 

Torment is structured around this concept, with most (if not all) of the game's mechanics being explained via amnesia; gaining levels is mostly remembering past knowledge, most of the party characters are linked to his past incarnations and a good part of the game's plot revolves around acquiring his previous memories. It's therefore apparent that amnesia can work as (and even enhance) the game's story and narrative if it's treated as an integral part of the experience, instead of a fall-back method to shave time off development.

What to Improve: The best remedy in this case (aside from going the Planescape: Torment route) would be to refrain from using amnesia altogether; after all, this is probably one of the most overused tropes in the narrative delivery department. Barring that, however, better integration into the story is probably the best way to go - as an example, gameplay tutorials can be incorporated as "flashbacks" into the protagonist's past - while making sure that said integration remains an interactive part of the player's experience (don't resort to non-interactive sequences such as cutscenes or take over the controls to illustrate such scenes).

Game Mechanics / Story Segregation

In Final Fantasy VII, weapons like
this are hard to get...

What's Wrong: At its' core, the inconsistency between the story and gameplay sections stems from what (at first glance) amounts to bad/no communication between the story and game mechanics aspects of game design or, in some cases, a desire to cut costs by reducing development times. A perennial example found in most RPG's is the inconsistency of gameplay and cut-scene avatars; a character might appear to have equipped any number of items/armour/weaponry during actual gameplay, but in non-interactive scenes they're always depicted in their default, stock models.

Such actions often shatter the in-game world's verisimilitude - the suspension of disbelief that helps immerse the player into the experience - effectively wreck any attempts at atmosphere the designer(s) may have tried to implement.

...though, judging by cutscenes, the
starting blade is Cloud's favourite.

What's Right: Admittedly, such techniques can sometimes reinforce verisimilitude instead of destroying it; with sufficiently plausible justification, the inconsistencies instead become defining traits of the cosmology - thus allowing the audience to suspend their disbelief far more easily.

What to Improve: Facilitate better communication between the story and game mechanics teams during development; often, the challenge of integrating (and explaining) various gameplay aspects into a coherent story line can be difficult, but offers great rewards by means of immersion and consistency. Alternatively, if you absolutely must break the game world's "rules", at least attempt to justify such actions; in the above example, the character could have been inflicted with a status effect that disables resurrection items from being used (which would also work as an actual in-game ability for better cohesion).

===================================================================

Part 1 Link

===================================================================

Ideas - Four RPG Tropes, How to Improve Them, Part 1

Disclaimer: The following article is merely a gathering of ideas, thoughts that I have collected throughout my gaming experiences regarding certain tropes found most commonly in the RPG genre. They should not be taken as fact, but instead as a provocation for thought for the improvement of the medium.

Throughout the history and evolution of electronic entertainment, role playing games have been one of the most prolific genres by far, from the text-only Multi-User Dungeons (M.U.D.s) - one of the early forms of massively multiplayer gaming - to recent graphical powerhouses such as the Witcher 2 and the upcoming Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.

As a result, the genre has always been in the forefront of trend-setting, with many modern tropes and clichés stemming from 20+ year old sources. While these tropes are often ignored (or, in rare cases, done well enough to be welcome additions to the overall experience), for the most part the possibility of improvement exists. Some ideas on the subject:

Convoluted Character Development

Final Fantasy VII status screen,
part 1 of 3.

What's Wrong: Using more than a handful of derivative statistics, often with poorly defined function, which in turn reduce much of the actual gameplay to number crunching. The Final Fantasy franchise has been particularly guilty of this (barring the latest instalments, which I've sadly not played yet) - as an example, Final Fantasy VII boasts a total of thirteen main and derived statistics (such as Strength and it's derivatives, Attack and Attack%), another nine elemental effects in each of the four ways they react with each character, plus a huge list of attack and defend effects as they are dictated by equipment. Additionally, the player is asked to manage said statistics for each of the eight characters that gradually become available during play.

What's Right: This type of system is, however, highly beneficial to players that wish to engage in "min/maxing", the process in which they develop the characters to be as powerful as possible (usually via focus on specific statistics per character and in-game "grinding" techniques that allow them to maximize their gains - these are unique to each game and usually very time-consuming).

An age-old habit for the genre,
by the looks of it.

What to Improve: The principles of emergent gameplay can be used here, specifically the usage of minimal elements, but with well-defined interactions between them. In the Final Fantasy example, the reduction to three individual attributes (e.g. Strength, Magic, Defense), which don't overlap each other in functionality can provide a simple, yet complex system of character development. Said attributes can then be combined to form highly specialized secondary statistics (which the player cannot influence directly, past increasing their "parent" attribute; in this example, Strength and Defense are both factored for Evading attacks) - this in effect provides an easy to understand, yet hard to perfect system of interactions, allowing for a high degree of specialization, allowing the game to shift focus to actual gameplay instead of number crunching.

Overuse of Dialogue

Intro scene from The Witcher.
Not pictured: A heap of exposition...

What's Wrong: During development (specifically writing), one of the most common problems that arise is the need to convey a large amount of information to the player in order for them to better experience the game's world and atmosphere; the result in most cases is huge text dumps and in-universe dialogues in what I like to call "exposition overload" - the writers' attempt to bring the player up to speed with what their in-game persona is "supposed to know". Often this leads to severe pacing problems, which in turn result in the player losing interest in the game. A good example of this is The Witcher: Tasked with conveying the entire collection of short stories and books that preceded it, the game resulted in huge exposition dialogues in the game's first chapters; while the game is otherwise great, I find it easy to believe that more than a few of the early buyers were put off by this and never gave it a chance.

...which the game will gleefully
use on each and every occasion.

What's Right: Dialogue can be a powerful tool, if used in moderation; some games, while featuring significant amounts of written and/or spoken dialogue, have mitigated the problem by carefully rationing it and even used it for added effect, by contrasting brief moments of dialogue against larger action sequences; this is best seen in the Half Life series (not RPG's but they illustrate the point quite nicely), where the dialogue set pieces are set as a 5-10 minute break in between the (much longer) action sequences.

Meanwhile, Half Life manged it right.

What to Improve: Games are an interactive medium and this allows the creators of the experience (a.k.a. the game) to improvise in ways that other media can't - the player can explore the environments in a much more detailed way if they are so inclined (and sufficient leeway has been provided for them). Instead of, say, having a dialogue line reading "This kingdom is rich beyond belief.", design the kingdom levels with that in mind; gold trimmings on any tool available, gem-encrusted public works and well-dressed citizens can clue in the player instantly, while also allowing them to explore and pace their experience to their own tastes.

===================================================================
Part 2 Link
===================================================================

Further Reading
===========
* Emergent Gameplay (Wikipedia Link)
* Dialogue Conventions (FFVII Case Study)
* FFVII Status Screens (FFVII Wiki)
* The Witcher Official Site
* Multi-User Dungeons (Wikipedia Link)