Video Games

Kingdom Come: Deliverance – Playing at History (an early review).

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I backed Kingdom Come (KC:D) a long time ago–maybe more than two years. An open-world historical medieval RPG? Yes, please! Just the sort of thing that pulls at the desires of a person whose favorite video game is the Witcher 3 and who, for a time, was a professional student of the medieval.

There was, of course, a long roller-coaster of development that followed–teasers, delays, the realization that my computer wouldn’t be able to run the game, the revelation that it would be released on console and so my computer didn’t matter, etc., etc.

Finally, it arrived this week, and I’ve spent some significant time becoming immersed in the Bohemia of 1403. With the caveat that I’m nowhere near finished with this game, this is what I have to report to the present:

If you are the type of person who plays Fallout and Skyrim on survival mode, this game will appeal to you. You must sleep and eat. Your food rots over time, and spoilt food will make you sick. Eat too much and you’ll be sluggish. Take an injury (whether in combat or not!) and you might begin to bleed. Fix it with a bandage quickly or prepare to die. Keep your weapons and armor in good repair or they’ll become ineffective. Get your clothes bloody or dirty and people will notice–and they don’t take you as seriously when they do. Carry weights are (relatively) realistic, and you improve your skills by using them–not easy to do when it comes to using a sword.

The game is relatively “on rails” for the first few hours of play–while you can do your own thing for long whiles at a time, only advancing the main quest will get you to the point where you can seriously begin to play the game. It’s a slow start that left me, at first, with an unfavorable impression of how gameplay with develop that is still being dispelled as I move through the game.

So far, the game doesn’t feel as “open world” as I had hoped. It is true that there are sidequests (and perhaps I just haven’t discovered many of them yet) and you can easily spend hours just “living” in the medieval world–practicing a trade, acting as a merchant, traveling and fighting bandits, etc. In a certain way, I think you could ignore the quests altogether and simply view the game as a “medieval emulator.”

Further, there seems to be an intimation that the world will be expanded and even more opportunities for self-directed tasks will become available as the game progresses. Despite my several hours of play, I’m sure that I just have no gotten that far into the story yet.

And that main story is, at least, an interesting one. Set within a discrete historical event–King Sigismund of Hungary’s invasion of Bohemia on “behalf” of his half-brother King Wenceslaus IV (“the Idle”), who Sigismund had kidnapped, you are thrust into the world as the son of a blacksmith and the vassal of a lord loyal to Wenceslaus and targeted by Sigimunds’ invading army.

The attitudes and motivations of the characters seem deep. You get the expected behavior of some nobility toward the peasantry (particularly in Sir Hans), but this is never flat or without nuance:you earn the friendship and respect of Sir Hans as the story progresses and he is–in private at least–willing to admit his own faults and the shortcomings of his behavior. The struggle between adherence to duty and ideals when faced with the grim necessities of the day plays out on multiple levels, both personal and political. No assumption of medieval life is treated as straightforward, with a range of different lifestyles and living situations that more accurately portrays the era in a way we often miss in movies, dry history books and, especially, fantasy roleplaying, where the “medieval” is more often a pastiche or a facade than an actual description of setting.

Despite this, at least as far as I’ve played, the real joy of the game is in the way it immerses you into the historical world with a sense of realism and reasonableness. For instance, fighting several poorly armed bandits by yourself is difficult; attacking multiple well-armed or well-trained enemies (to say nothing of those who are both) is near suicidal. Unless you use tricks, like stealth, surprise and ambush, weakening the enemy with ranged weapons, hit and run tactics and any other approach that generally makes the fight less fair. This was the reality of the middle ages, just as it is today–no matter how good you are, fights are brutal and deadly, and fighting honorably will likely just get you killed.

Each fight is, however, very interesting. As a student of historical medieval martial arts myself, as both scholar (my Master’s Thesis was entitled “Shakespeare, the Sword and Self-fashioning”) and a martial artist (mostly with the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts or ARMA), I’m especially keen on in-game fighting that captures something of the speed, grace and precision of actual swordplay–something very difficult to do in a video-game because of the infinite array of techniques, maneuvers and responses in combat with a blade. KC:D does the best I’ve seen yet, with the combat not only accounting for the directionality of attacks, but incorporating parries, feints, grappling, counter-attacks and animations that perfectly capture some of the techniques used. This is no clumsy hack-and-slash; the only video game that has even come close to this kind of swordplay was Mount & Blade (whose new edition should be out later this year). While satisfying, this also means that combat is difficult and partially based upon your own twitchy-skill. It should be noted that there is only one difficulty mode for the game (so far as I’ve discovered): realistic.

As a side note, I am note a fan of the Dark Souls games. I just feel that should be said when I communicate how much I’ve enjoyed the difficulty of the game.

For the first few hours of the game, I was very frustrated by the save system. The game automatically saves when you sleep, complete an important quest step, or drink Saviour Schnapps. Saviour Schnapps is expensive, takes up inventory space, and can get you drink. At the beginning, when your skills are low and the game is at its most difficult, you will die a lot and have to replay moderate sections of the game (at least I did). As I progressed into the game and got into the mindset, I actually began to enjoy the save system. In a game that strives for immersion and realism, this save system reinforces these without becoming full-on rogue-like. You cannot get lucky for a minimal gain, save, and replay until you get the next minimal gain and save again. Three men in armor down that path? Best just to go a different way. This goes a long way into breaking the hero mentality we usually carry with us into video games; I particularly respect that.

This is not to say that playing heroic (or superheroic) characters in games is not appropriate, good design, or fulfilling–it certainly can be. But the occasional game that makes us live in an alternate world as a regular person–even one who may be an exceptional fighter (though still clearly mortal) provides a truly rewarding exception as well. In some sense, I do wish the game had some aspect of the fantastic to it, but that’s really only because I’m such a fan of fantasy. Realistically (and more sensibly), it’s great to see such an enjoyable game and interesting world and narrative created without any need to resort to the “unrealistic.”

As is probably indicated by the amount of words I’ve dedicated to this preemptive review, I’m really enjoying this game. If you’re willing to devote the time to acclimate to this game’s approach to play–and you’re willing to accept the design principles on which the game was built–I think you’ll find a lot to enjoy here.

In some ways, at its heart, this game is a history lesson you play–one about everyday living in the medieval world.

Destiny 2: A Horror Story in Reverse

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I’d fought my way through waves of countless enemies, scaled strange landscapes and tracked down my quarry, a Fallen Captain supported by underlings, powerful Servitors and other baddies all determined to end me.

Getting to the point where I’d finally cornered my prey and he could no longer flee had cost me dearly–I had no ammunition for my Power weapon, only a handful of rounds left on my Energy weapon, and my Super would not be charged for what seemed like an eternity.

Desperate, I charged in, Kinetic weapon blazing. Return fire shredded me to pieces in milliseconds, my body ripped apart. I died.

Seconds later, I was back, resurrected by my Ghost companion. Seconds after that, I was dead again, but so was one of the Captain’s minions. This process repeated in multiple iterations–I respawned, I took out one more enemy, I died.

But respawning in Destiny is not merely a handwaved mechanic–it is a conceit of the gameworld. As a Guardian of the Light, your Ghost has the ability to reconstitute your body infinitely. There is no death for a Guardian.

As I whittled down the my enemy through sheer will, pure attrition and an unending supply of lives to throw at the problem, I began to think how that Fallen Captain must feel, watching as he repeatedly defeats an enemy who simply returns a few seconds later to destroy more of his brothers-in-arms. Movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween immediately came to mind–the unstoppable, unkillable force who relentless pursues his vengeance.

The terror and helplessness the Captain must have felt surely became too much to bear. I shortly relieved him of his worldly worries, but I can’t say that I felt good about it. Certainly not heroic (no matter what the difficulty level told me).

That’s when I realized it: Destiny 2 is not sci-fi; it’s a horror game where you play the role usually referred to as “the bad guy.” While the world does set things up as a struggle between Light and Darkness, and you are told that you’re on the side of peace, truth and justice, and your enemies do some despicable things, I’m not sure that the gameplay bears that out.

Destiny 2 was not a game I expected to give me some sort of existential crisis; I was only looking for some fun co-op with friends or a mindless activity for my hands while I listened to an audiobook. But what I got was a great uneasiness about the setting, one I can’t seem to shake.

 

What Tom Clancy’s The Division Teaches Us About Humanity

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I’m a big fan of Tom Clancy games in general, but The Division really hit a chord with me. I don’t usually devote much time to MMO games, but I’ve remained steadily involved with the game since its release back in March. This is partially because I have good friends to play it with; friends make everything better.

But this is not a review. Instead, I want to talk about some of my observations in the game.

If you’re not familiar, the game has a place called the “Dark Zone”, a smallpox-contaminated part of Manhattan quarantined from the rest of New York City. The Dark Zone is the game’s PvP (Player versus Player) area. Some of the toughest computer-controlled bad guys are in the Dark Zone, as are some of the best rewards. To eliminate these bad guys and reap the rewards, one typically needs to form a group with other players. Once you’ve grabbed the loot, you have to go to a special area and call in a helicopter to extract the items before you “own” them. They are contaminated, after all.

Before you’ve extracted items, any other player can kill you and steal those items. Lone wanderer players make easy targets to teams of other players and—especially when you get the drop on them—are often easier to kill than the non-player character bad guys.

This is supposed to be part of the draw of the game—the cat and mouse of stalking and evading other players, the team-on-team direct combat against player opponents and, most of all, the tension the system creates. There are few people you can actually trust, and I’ve had more than a few encounters where, randomly encountering another player, we both have to scope each other out, not wanting to fight, but unsure of the other’s intentions. That nervousness is in some way satisfying because it is so immersive; it brings you into post-disaster New York in a personal and experiential way. I like that.

On the other hand, particularly because I’m introverted and often avoid linking up with random players (only joining teams of people I actually know in real life), I often find myself navigating the Dark Zone by myself. Consequently, I often find myself getting killed and my stuff ganked because I’m outnumbered, outgunned, or simply stabbed in the back by an opportunist while I’m trying to defeat the Zone’s tough computer-controlled hostiles.

My time playing has taught me that there are three groups of people when it comes to the Dark Zone. The first is where I find myself, reluctant to “go rogue” to kill and steal from other players even when I’m in a group and confident I can get away with it. I’ve encountered only a few other players with this view. The second group is probably largest. They understand that this is a game—there are winners and losers, and those who play have agreed to the rules that govern the game. This group probably enjoys the game the most because they fully play out the game’s possibilities—sometimes going rogue and killing other players in ambushes or pitched battles. But they don’t strike me as the type who would probably act that way were the game real life. They know the difference in the stakes and consequences of a game versus the real thing.

The last group is the one that I find so simultaneously fascinating and infuriating. These are the bullies, those whose primary joy in the game is picking on players less powerful than themselves. These are the ones who, having killed you in an unfair fight (usually extremely so—four to one odds and they strike when you’re otherwise occupied) come up and stand next to your body to laugh and mock you until you’re able to respawn. These are players with malice aforethought.

At the end of the day, it’s still a game, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to make a presumption about a stranger’s moral capacity in the real world based on behavior in a digitally-manufactured world. On the other hand, I’m a believer that the anonymity of the internet (including multiplayer games) allows people a release from the social conventions that normally restrain their baser selves.

When playing the game (admittedly, perhaps more to relieve my own frustration than any objective reality) I am constantly reminded that maybe there really is a fine line between social order and the chaos of those with more power and less restraint.