KotOR Replay 03: SPAAACE BLACKJAAACK

I’m walking around Taris, right? I just got done murdering a Sith officer and a couple of faceless troopers for being unpleasant to a jabbering alien guy (an alien guy whom—it must be noted—seemed to have some experience completely vanishing dead bodies). So, like you do after successfully killing intergalactic authority figures, I’m off to the bar to celebrate.

(Wait, sorry. I meant I’m off to the cantina. Because one scene in Star Wars took place in a cantina, the rest of the goddamn universe is robbed of bars, saloons, lounges, taverns, and dives. It’s like there are only two types of eatery licenses available: cantinas, and that Silver Diner Obi Wan went to when he was too lazy to do his own homework.)

I get to the bar (fuck you, Star Wars style guide), and there’s some dude standing around asking if I want to play cards. Only he calls it Pazaak. Sure, okay, like in the old west, right? Well, see, it turns out it’s not so much. It’s a lot like cards. Hell, it’s a lot like blackjack. But someone’s gone and spaced it all up.

I’m not trying to make 21, I’m trying to make 20.

And I don’t just take whatever the hell I’m dealt. I get to play special cards from my hand, like in hold’em.

But instead of each player being dealt from the same deck, I only get to use cards that you own, like in Magic.

And there are these special cards, see, that allow me to switch up the values of the cards and OH MY GOD I WILL SHOOT YOU IN THE FACE, SPACEMAN.

For the life of me there are two things I will never fully appreciate about modern RPGs:

1) Every RPG developer feels the need to include a gambling mini-game.

2) Every RPG developer feels the need to reinvent gambling games.

KotOR is not the only RPG to do this bullcrappery. Witcher has its dice games. Mass Effect has Quasar. New Vegas. Etc. And each time it ends up annoying me.

My main problem is this: Pazaak is making the familiar strange—needlessly.

Almost every time a relatively straightforward game is muddied up and overcomplicated for no good reason. To go back to Pazaak, the game is goddamn blackjack. But sure, there’s no blackjack in Star Wars. So target number is changed to 20. Whatever. But there’s a hand to play from. Now it’s self-indulgent. On top of that, there are special wild cards that make it wacky. Now we’re in silly-land.

Why was blackjack so bad? Are there that many GDs with frustrated dreams of being tabletop designers, and this is the only way that their designs see the light of day in a world where physical gaming products are a dying market?

Oh, right.

But that still doesn’t mean it’s a good reason. Mini-games should not be a place to work through creative frustrations and insecurities.

That’s what blogs are for.

Here I give some credit to New Vegas, for sticking to traditional gambling games for the most part. I get slot machines, I get roulette, I get blackjack. Didn’t have to wasteland it all up just for its own sake.

I blame Star Trek’s Tri-D chess for this. If you don’t know, in Star Trek everyone plays three-dimensional chess. It’s like normal chess, but instead of one flat board there are three or four smaller boards in a weird sort of tower. And what are the rules? Spock kicks everyone’s ass until Kirk does something unexpected. That’s fucking it because it doesn’t need real rules. It serves the same damn function as normal chess.

Wikipedia tells me that there are three-dimensional chess variants, but Star Trek didn’t give a shit. It’s a visual gag, pure and simple. So long as it stays chess but with a visual gimmick, all’s fine with the world. The instant understanding the special space rules of Tri-D chess become important to following the plot, some writer is going to writer hell. SPACE CHESS, MOTHERFUCKER. SPOCK’S GOOD AT IT. END WORLD BUILD.

It’s the same with mini-games in a larger video game. What’s important is that the space game serves the same narrative role as whatever it’s standing in for. So Pazaak is like poker, right? I’m the goddamn space cowboy, and wandered into the saloon cantina, and I’m gonna win a space ship off of Lando. You remember that part, right? Han won the Millennium Falcon off of Lando in a game of chance. Probably some form a space cards. They don’t tell you what game it was, but you can guess it was probably something cowboyish, given that it was Han. A game of chance that involved skill, but ultimately can go to either player given the right conditions.

You know, like blackjack.

You know what it probably didn’t involve? Han scouring the universe for three hours so he could find the super-ultra-rare Blue Eyed God Fucker for his black deck. But that’s the Pazaak experience. It’s blackjack, but with the random bits of CCG design thrown in to prolong the consequence-less closed-loop experience despite serving no mechanical function and violating the only narrative purposes it had.

Pazaak isn’t about being a space cowboy. It’s about being a space nerd who drops way too much time and money into building my awesome deck, so my deck can be the best in the universe and all the jabbering, cop-killing aliens will stop laughing at me.

Again, going to give props to New Vegas here. Just a classic mix of casino games and cowboy aesthet—OH WHAT THE HELL, CARAVAN.

KotOR Replay 02: Burn Their House Down!

The opening section of Old Republic, the Endar Spire, is a fun little NPE. For those of you at home, an NPE is fancy-speak for New Player Experience, which is itself fancy-speak for the tutorial section of your game. For most MMOs, it’s Noob Island. In Half Life, it was the Hazard Course. Oblivion had the escape from the dungeon. Etc. There’s no set way to do an NPE. Many designers even question the need. Thankfully though, market forces are simply making that breed extinct.

So, Endar Spire. To be frank, this part of the game works pretty damn well. Tutorials pop up where they should. Gameplay elements are introduced piecemeal, so I’m not overwhelmed with five new concepts at once. I’m even provided with a friend, Captain Deadsoon, who will explicitly tell me what I need to do in audio, even occasionally breaking the fourth wall when needed to make sure my monkey brain knows what to do.

I dearly wish more games would break the fourth wall in their tutorials. In everything else, by all means try to contextualize. But when a player is just learning the game, for god’s sake, tell them what the hell button to push. You can have the best world build in the world. If the player can’t figure out what button to push to get to the next bit, they will hate your world, your game, and your bloodline for time immemorial. Give them the poop.

Another thing I will note—which is not a complaint—is that Endar Spire follows the Bioware habit of burning down the player’s starting village. The player starts off in what should be a quiet environment, takes two steps, and BAM! OH GOD ALIEN DEVIL BABIES, KILL TO LEARN! KILL TO LEARN! The player learns the ropes during the battle, but at the end of it the village is destroyed and the player has to go off into the wide world for justice.

It’s a damned convenient device. Bioware gets to create one-use content, which means each bit can be custom-tailored to the NPE’s needs. They establish the bad guys quickly and clearly. Who needs to die? The guys who wrecked up your room and killed your buddies. It throws the player into the fray immediately, getting the hole game and story moving quickly. The last point doesn’t quite hold true in Jade Empire, but it’s not coincidence Jade Empire is the Bioware game I have the hardest time starting.

It’s not always an actual village. Sometimes it’s a institution (NWN), sometimes it’s a quiet homefront planet (Mass Effect), and some times it’s actually your damn village (Dragon Age, Dragon Age 2). But every time, the player gets a quick and guided intro to the game’s mechanics, and they get to scream, “YOU KILLED MY MUDDAR! YOU KILLED MY FADDAR!”

Nothing wrong with that.

KotOR Replay 01: Pre-boarding Rant

Start a new game, and first thing that happens is the game throws six doofuses at me. I get the differences between the men and women pretty quick. I got that far through public education. But the classes aren’t very well defined.

Soldier I get. BLAM BLAM HOORAY! Scoundrel is like a Han Solo then, right? Pretty certain there’s no spaceships. Hopefully he gets some sort of bonus to gambling (Note: he doesn’t. Pazaak is equally useless for all classes. But more on that in a future post.). So Scout would then be like…what? Wicket? Is this the forest yiffer hobo class? And where the hell is Jedi? I was promised lightsabers.

I’m being a little abusive here. I know damn well the classes—and most of the character mechanics—are based loosely on the WoTC Star Wars RPG. From what I recall Soldier and Scoundrel made it through pretty straight, and the Scout is a well-abused Fringer.

But jumping in without previous d20 experience? Befuddleville, home of the Bewilderbeasts. Especially going with the advanced character generation route. Getting a mental hold of ability scores and skills and feats is probably the biggest hurdle for anyone thinking of getting into d20 games. It’s  too many axes of weird shit. And the real summbitch? The machine god will not care if I make an inept one-legged goat-woman as my character. Doesn’t matter if it’s been two minutes or two hours, you don’t get a chance to re-roll. Screw up, and it’s back to Endar’s Perpetually Doomed Spire for you.

Luckily, my original play through in ‘03 went well enough, thanks to the old standby of Soldier/Fighter-plus-everything-passive. POW POW ZAP PUNCH JAB. During that game I learned that if I wanted to have real fun in quest lines, I only had to care one skill: Persuade. Everything else I could pretty well drag one of your NPCs around for. Landmines, computers, locks, wine tasting, whatever. The rabble can handle that.

Talking though? It’s all me. I could have had Frederick Douglas and Cicero three inches away, bored out of their skulls, pleading to get involved, and every damn Persuasion check would be through me. But I know how to manipulate most of the Bioware story machines now. Always max out the conversation skill. Oh, and I need to throw some repair in there, too. HK will need that. All told, that makes Scoundrel the big winner here.
Screw you, Scout.

Give Me That Old Time Republic

You know what’s great? Star Wars.

No, it is.

I’m not saying everything with the Star Wars label is good. There’s a lot of crap. The kind of crap that would kill most properties. That’s probably what’s most impressive about Star Wars: the brand can withstand any number of assaults and ill-conceived additions. When someone hits upon another entry that has that Star Wars feel, everything else melts goddamn away. It’s like the Second Coming, but with lightsabers.

For the X-Box generation, Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic is probably the most memorable rejuvenation of Star Wars. Not that it sold as many Burger King cups as the prequels, or clocked as many hours viewed as the Clone Wars cartoons. But goddammit, it gave you a blaster, pointed you at some stormtroopers, and said, “Save the galaxy.” It let us be either Luke or Vader, and drag the Republic along with us.

Here we are some eight years later. There are people who are old enough to walk, talk, and have opinions on the awesomeness of hitting robots with laser swords who were born after KotOR came out. Is sticking it to Darth Malak with your whiney Jedi and homicidal robot still as awesome?

For the next few weeks I’m going to be revisiting the original KotOR to see how it holds up. There’ll be needless cursing, groundless speculation on design decisions, and more than a few minutes worth of me swinging my pen in the air while I make "vrrrrrmm” noises with my mouth.