role-playing | Mohammad Moshtaghi

Fable: Anniversary

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When the original Fable was released in 2004, it made waves. As Guildford Games wrote in their eulogy for Lionhead Studios:

The touchstones for Fable were folklore, humour and a desire to offer the player an experience that didn’t demand too much from them, free of complexities… Microsoft’s involvement ensured focused marketing in America, but hardly any in the UK, leading it to gaining a substantial fanbase in America. The US audience were beguiled by the fairy tale nature of the game, they applauded the progressive ‘love is love’ message and welcomed Fable into their hearts.

Ten years and two celebrated sequels later, Fable: Anniversary was released in 2014, updating the Xbox-era graphics with the power of the Xbox 360 and bringing the content of Fable: The Lost Chapters into the fold. Nearly another decade after that (well, seven years later, at Xbox’s 2021 not-E3), Playground Games announced a new Fable, which is forever fated to be disambiguated as Fable (202x) by game writers everywhere. So here I am in 2022, having never touched a Fable game, thinking: “What an exciting time to cherish an old classic!”

Well folks, mistakes were made.

In all fairness, when I decided to play Fable: Anniversary, I was braindead-tired from a long day of research and stuck in a hotel room with very poor Wi-Fi and a modest TV screen that was inexplicably tilted slightly upwards towards the ceiling. This was not the vibe for continuing on in the masterwork that is Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, nor for running duos with my wife in Fortnite only to lag out once every five minutes. No, this slumpy, tired-tech vibe was for an eight year-old remaster of an eighteen year-old classic with a single-player narrative and last-last-generation graphics. And that’s exactly what Fable: Anniversary shaped up to be.

I could go on for too long about what didn’t age well: clumsy combat mechanics, early difficulty spikes followed by an obscenely long difficulty plateau, poor inventory management, romance with NPCs lacking any personality, “powerful” female characters with no agency whatsoever… there’s a lot to suffer through, especially from a modern perspective.

That being said, I think Fable is delightfully nostalgic in two ways: not taking itself too seriously, and applying that same explorative approach to role-playing moral dichotomies. While the occasional joke is Fable is almost too dumb, the vast majority are good-natured and enjoyable. Just as I was getting annoyed with Fable’s excruciatingly long tutorial, the first side quest outside the Hero’s Guild was a triple fetch quest to get a series of haircuts that made me look increasingly stupid—as the mockery of all passerby NPCs confirmed—in order to impress a girl. Turns out the girl didn’t exist, but her “father” greatly enjoyed making me look like an idiot. And that’s exactly what I was in that instance: fresh out of guild training, ready to take on all of Albion, and already spending all the money I had on haircuts to meet a girl. Good joke!

Unlike 2007’s Mass Effect which treats choices between good and evil with the narrative and relational seriousness that earned that series its glowing reputation, Fable takes a much more whimsical route. Flirt with another person in front of your adoring spouse? That’s not even a morally consequential issue. Eat a crunchy chick or sacrifice a human being to Skorm? Those are roughly equally bad. Go on an indiscriminate murdering spree of innocent traders and bloodthirsty bandits? It’ll all balance out. Donate a crappy old axe to charity to outweigh all your sins? Sure, why not! As with everything else in Fable, morality is inconsequential—which is not to say it isn’t meaningful, but rather that it’s a buffet of experiences to be enjoyed.

Hidden in that treatment of morality is a much appreciated bit of gaming wisdom, one that has fallen out of vogue with modern RPGs (thanks, Bethesda) and one that made playing through this aging classic well worth it: Good games can be silly. Good games can be simple. Good games can be fun.

Jedi: Fallen Order

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 22:09:15 -0700

I’m not ashamed to admit that I spent much of my childhood wanting to be a Jedi. My sister and I would duel for hours in the backyard with our plastic lightsabers, having to pause between whacks and parries to negotiate whose limbs were still attached or how far back we were supposed to move when the other pushed with the Force. As a teenager, The Force Unleashed on the Wii was magic: my remote was my lightsaber, my nunchuk was my connection to the Force, and the galaxy was filled with Stormtroopers to send flying. (Too bad it kind of sort of isn’t canon.) Now, as an adult and a whole sequel trilogy and two seasons of The Mandalorian later — not to mention the nine seasons of The Clone Wars that I’m still catching up on — I’m all in on Star Wars growing up with me, learning how to tell new and more mature stories. Jedi: Fallen Order is exactly that, putting the player at the center of a decent Jedi story with slick Jedi combat.

Jedi: Fallen Order takes place during The Purge, which for the uninitiated is a period of Star Wars history just after the majority of Jedi are executed by their clone allies in Revenge of the Sith (Order 66). The fledgling Empire casts the few Jedi who survive as traitors to the Republic, hunting them down to either kill them or turn them to the Dark Side as Inquisitors (ex-Jedi who hunt Jedi). You play as Cal Kestis, a padawan who experienced deep personal loss and trauma during Order 66 and has been concealing his powers to survive The Purge. Other major characters include Cere Junda, an ex-Jedi Master who severed her connection with the Force after an especially traumatic event during The Purge, and a Nightsister whose people were killed in genocide during the Clone Wars. This is a Star Wars story where nobody’s okay and the heroes are the ones who are brave enough to believe in one another as they heal.

The gameplay absolutely does what it needs to do to make you feel like a Jedi, from customizing your lightsaber to dueling against powerful adversaries to bonding with a droid companion. I think all of those things were non-negotiables for a modern Star Wars game, and as such, it suffices to say that Jedi: Fallen Order does them well. What’s really special about this game is how cool it makes you feel despite Cal not being the greatest of Jedi. He’s hidden his abilities for years, presumably. At best, he’s just rusty and has forgotten a lot of his training; at worst, his trauma and guilt pushes his connection with the Force towards fear and unpolished lack of control. In the early stages of the game, Cal can’t even move stuff around with the Force; he can wall-run, however (Respawn just couldn’t resist sprinkling in a little Titanfall, could they?). His best ability, psychometry, makes him a better anthropologist than Stormtrooper-slayer: he can sense an object’s history by touching it, filling out the backstory of the different planets and societies he interacts with.

The five playable planets in this galaxy far, far away are largely linear, keeping you moving towards your next plot point. There’s not a side quest to be seen, and the only exploration Cal can do is to veer off the main path for a slightly less obvious path where he might find a secret or unlockable cosmetic. (As an aside, I love that Cal wears ponchos — as opposed to, I don’t know, Jedi robes? — but I can’t get over how over half of them are badly-fitting, hoodless, plastic raincoats.) 100%-ing Jedi: Fallen Order is a fine and relatively quick experience (except for the very Star Wars and very bad holomaps), revisiting planets when equipped with new Force abilities to get into previously inaccessible nooks and crannies. This feels less like a chore and more like virtual space-tourism, giving players a second chance to appreciate the beautifully crafted set design and try out the very nicely implemented photo mode.

All in all, Jedi: Fallen Order does what it came to do: put players in the shoes of a Jedi powered by the best of what 2019 tech could offer. The experience certainly feels more self-contained and linear than what we may have hoped, but it’s good for what it is. With EA’s Star Wars exclusivity now expired, maybe Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment will give us the beautiful, open-world Star Wars playground of little-Josh’s dreams.

Bugs

I know this isn’t a bug but it’s so bad that I’m calling it one: every sad excuse for a Wookiee in this game (except Tarfull) looks like a stick with clumpy fur. To the developers at Respawn, Chewbacca would be disappointed in you.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 21:58:21 -0700

Ori and the Will of the Wisps was released on March 10, 2020 — one day before many in the United States were put under stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of COVID-19. In the following months, our leaders abdicated their responsibility to coordinate a comprehensive response as the non-essential of us remained at home, wringing our hands and feeling powerless to stop our world from slipping into shambles. So when Ori opened with Naru, Gumo, and Ori working to restore Ku — a young owl with a malformed wing — my emotions were immediately invested. When the first major chapter involved ridding a historic watermill/library of a corrupted monster poisoning the water, my determination was fixed. And when Grom asked Ori “Want to make [the Wellspring Glades] a better place?” I nearly shouted “yes!” at the screen. Beautiful graphics, slick gameplay, and huge improvements over the original game aside, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a game about healing, restoration, and hope — three things that run at a high premium in today’s world.

One more philosophical point before moving on to gameplay: I was pleased to see the thought given to the nature of evil and the role of violence in resisting it. While killing corrupted creatures is commonplace in the Ori series, there is also a consistent gravity around death and loss. This sequel explores these themes more thoroughly than the original. Without giving specifics away, only one enemy boss is actually murdered (and, interestingly, not by Ori). Moreover, the main antagonist is one that deserves the player’s hate and empathy equally, as summed up in this bit of dialogue:

I heard what happened to your friend, and I am sorry. Sorry for your friend, and for the one that hurt her. Nothing’s fouler than when the strong hurt the weak.

— Tokk, Ori and the Will of the Wisps

There’s a “we hurt ourselves when we hurt others” in here that’s revisited later in the game, when a character who once wanted the warmth of the light rejects it and chooses instead to remain isolated in darkness. I was left with the impression that this was an emotionally heavier fate than death.

In terms of gameplay and design, Ori and the Will of the Wisps surpasses its predecessor (Ori and the Blind Forest) in every way, and then some. In short, this is a must-play if you liked the original, and is the place you should start if you’re new to the series. Much has already been written about these improvements, like how Moon Studios created entirely new technologies to fit its beautifully crafted 3D assets in a 2D world. The world is filled with expressive characters, vibrant and responsive foliage, and gorgeous foreground/background effects that express depth. Role-playing elements give players newfound choice over Ori’s evolution. The boss fights blend the newly fluid combat system with the series' emblematic choreographed escape sequences. Gareth Coker returns with a triumph of a soundtrack that is deeply integrated with the rest of the game’s design.

Improved replayability deserves its own treatment. In Ori and the Blind Forest, collectibles were limited to Life and Energy Cells that increase the amount of health and ability energy Ori has, respectively. After finishing the main story, achievements and 100%-ing the game are the only incentives for finding all these secrets. In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, however, side quests and new collectibles give meaning to the secret hunting. With Gorlek Ore that Ori collects, Grom builds new structures in the Wellspring Glades for Moki to live in. Tolek plants Seeds that synergize with Ori’s abilities to make new areas of the Glades accessible. Ability Shards unlock useful augmentations of Ori’s abilities. Hardcore fans can take on the “*-less run,” requiring a complete run in under 4 hours without dying, spending Spirit Light, or equipping shards. These goals enhance the actual play experience, greatly improving the replay value.

Bugs

In what is otherwise an pristine and polished experience, Ori and the Will of the Wisps has several frustrating bugs:

Spirit Charge is a mid-game ability whose primary purpose is to toss projectiles that fall back down, allowing Ori to Bash off of them and reach new heights. The “Spirit Rocket” bug causes all charges to instead fire off like missiles, happily ignoring gravity and stranding Ori without a lift. Thankfully, this bug seems to fix itself after a full game quit-and-restart.
There were occasional rendering issues. After a long play session, the game would freeze and lag (again, quitting and restarting seemed to fix the problem). Later, after unlocking the Launch ability, Ori seemingly could move faster than the game could handle: Ori could Launch off-screen without the camera following, and once the camera caught up the environment occasionally wouldn’t render.
Even after 100%-ing a run (and getting the corresponding achievements), the Energy Cell counter stays at 19/20, capping the progress tracker at 99% complete. This is uniquely maddening for people like me who live for the 100% completion.

The Outer Worlds

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 12:00:00 -0700

The Outer Worlds promised to let you, “the unknown variable,” truly role-play in the wild world of Halycon. Want to be the hero and save the world? Sure, who doesn’t? Want to steer your jaded friends towards self-awareness and hope? Just might work. Want to murder everyone on sight, including major companions and story-critical characters? Have a great time, you monster. Streamers have basically tried it all, and the game does indeed deliver. I particularly enjoyed embodying some kind of scientist/intellectual with an aversion for violence and a deep need to screw some corporate tools over.

What most impressed me was the world building packed into this tight, 40-ish hour experience. Every character looks different, has their own believable personality, and acts based on real fears and hopes. Most remember past encounters with you and have whole conversations scripted for the late-game, even when they’re just “extras” that have nothing to do with the ongoing story. Your companions are the best examples of the developers' care and attention to detail: one companion develops a love interest and wants to grab drinks with you to get your thoughts — this leads to a tipsy bar visit where you get to give dating advice. Other characters are working through past hurts and losses that shape who they are in the current narrative. It all feels very human, and that aspect alone (against the stark contrast of the very inhumane slave-like colony townships) is enough to pull you into the first several hours of gameplay and give gravity to the difficult choices you have to make.

The characters made me savor conversations, walking up to every NPC just to make sure I wasn’t missing personal backstories or historical context. I found myself imagining those who would be unjustly punished for my decisions to stir up trouble, or who I could win over by showing some semblance of kindness. The world felt open and full of possibility, while harboring many situations with hidden consequences.

Unfortunately, some of this delightful, game-outside-the-game enchantment faded when I realized a very simple reality: what felt like a cliff of consequence was really just a short ledge, and every mistake I made could usually be solved by shooting my way through. This wasn’t necessarily the only solution (for example, I appreciated the go-and-kill quests that offered diplomacy as a non-violent alternative), but violence was often the path of least resistance. I slowly deteriorated from a hero who respected life — killing only when just or necessary — to a skilled mercenary with a vague conscience who also happened to enjoy conversation. The magic wasn’t there in the same way after that reality set in.

Perhaps this is what The Outer Worlds had promised all along: that there would be many paths that one could fully explore, even if not all of are equally satisfying. It’s less that you live with your choices and more that your choices happen to the game, forcing it to bend and twist around you. And in that way, it really is a wonderful role-playing experience.

Bugs

I had a syncing issue with save files between different Xbox consoles, but this may have been a fluke.
There was one view on Monarch where the environment didn’t render correctly, and whole stone structures seemed to disappear.
I was awarded one achievement (“Pirate Radio”) out of the blue, unsure what exactly I did to get it.

MARVEL Strike Force

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0700

After reading a particularly deep and persuasive Game Informer opinion piece, I decided to download MARVEL Strike Force as a way to take occasional breaks from the stress of planning our wedding. In a polished experience centering on collecting and upgrading MARVEL characters, I soon found myself assembling five-character teams of heroes, villains, and minions whose compositions rivalled even the wildest Cinematic Universe crossovers to date. My early game mashup team of Spiderman, Elektra, Crossbones, Luke Cage, and an unnamed S.H.E.I.L.D. Medic was soon taking on the likes of Ultron, Hydra, and other players' amalgamations in an effort to — as always — save the world.

The campaign offers a barebones and comic-book-absurd explanation of what’s going on: a new villain named Ultimus (who was invented for this game) has a Conversion Device that he uses to corrupt heroes and villains alike to join his cause. Ultimus conveniently also has the ability to open interdimensional portals, so he makes a habit of converting whole armies of Avengers, Guardians, Hydra, Kree, etc. in his ongoing conquest of the multiverse. Naturally, our dimension — and specifically, our Earth — contains Nexus portals that guard the way to all other dimensions, so Ultimus sees our dimension as his prize. Conveniently, our dimension’s Nick Fury secretly started a S.H.E.I.L.D. division called S.T.R.I.K.E. to monitor and defend against inter-dimensional threats, hence the whole “Strike Force” thing. So, in a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” narrative, our dimension’s heroes and villains team up under the Strike Commander (that’s you) to fight Ultimus and — cue the heroic fanfare — save the multiverse!

I’m just going to get this out of the way now: MARVEL Strike Force’s main story (and many side- and event-stories) are terrible. The writers can’t seem to decide if they’re self-aware of how silly the whole setup is or if they take it very seriously, which leads to almost all the characters delivering similar, melodramatic lines. Even characters who were created to leverage our cracking suspension of disbelief (like Deadpool and Star Lord) fall flat. That being said, MARVEL Strike Force is primarily made up of its many well-executed variations of the same core, turn-based strategy gameplay, and the forgettable story is really just there to tie everything together.

With that negative aside, let’s talk about a bunch of things MARVEL Strike Force does really well. First, as hinted at before, it has a lot of different game modes. And somehow, almost all of them feel enjoyable and distinct despite not being terribly different from one another. For example, the Campaign mode tasks the player with using different subsets of characters (only heroes, only villains, only characters from space, etc.) to play though a sequence of levels. In the Arena, players fight for better ladder rank by pitting their best five-character team against those of higher-ranked players. In Blitz, players use their entire collection of characters to win as many battles as they can in the period of a couple days. In Raids, players work with their alliance to collectively complete a map of difficult battles.

You might be thinking “Okay, we get it, every mode is basically a different framework for battles. Doesn’t that get old? Why play all the different modes?” The best answer I can give is that MARVEL Strike Force’s many modes enable and encourage progression in a way that is exceptionally better than many of its free-to-play peers. In order to explain how it does this, we need to understand how characters are upgraded. First, a character has to be unlocked by collecting some number of that character’s “shards.” Some shards can be obtained through completing/replaying Campaign levels, while others come as rewards from orb drops (MARVEL Strike Force’s equivalent of a loot box). Once a character’s been unlocked, they can be upgraded in five ways:

Stars: Gaining additional shards periodically increases a character’s star level (up to star level 7), which increases the character’s power.
Red Stars: Random drops that dramatically increase character power (and the one and only pay-to-win feature of this game).
Level: Players can spend gold and “training modules” to increase the character’s level, which maxes out at the player’s level (which is increased by gaining XP).
Abilities: Each character has up to three active abilities and one passive to use in battles, and each ability can be upgraded using “ability materials”.
Gear: A character’s stats (health, damage, armor, etc.) can be increased by upgrading their gear, which can be obtained from Campaign levels.

This may all feel overly complicated, but the reality is that these convoluted systems encourage players to engage in everything the game has to offer, all while rewarding that engagement with tangible and meaningful upgrades to their characters. Being a free-to-play game, this approach helps players remain relatively competitive without having to empty their wallets. (There’s one necessary caveat to this point: for those who do want to shell out some cash, the in-app purchases in MARVEL Strike Force are stupidly expensive).

The second free-to-play sin that MARVEL Strike Force neatly avoids is unnecessary grinding (especially for free players to progress). Instead of making you play Campaign level over and over again, for example, beating a level without any of your characters dying unlocks an “auto-win” of that level, where you can simply spend Campaign energy and immediately get the rewards (shards, gold, gear, etc.). With a tap of a button, I can auto-win a level ten times, a task that would usually take at least 10 minutes. Other small details like this one really add up in a way that makes me feel good about playing (instead of worrying that I’m falling prey to time-sucking strategies the developer may be employing).

The meta-game has pretty severe balance issues (at the time of writing, Defenders and S.H.E.I.L.D. teams have been essentially unbeatable at the highest levels of competition for months) and the main UI is unnecessarily cumbersome, but if you’re looking to play with a wide cut of MARVEL’s roster for free in a pretty friendly community, I’d be hard pressed to find a better recommendation than MARVEL Strike Force.

Notes

As of writing this review, I’ve been playing MARVEL Strike Force for 6.5 months, have been in two alliances (other than the default one), have reached the maximum level (70), and am easily completing Ultimus V raids. I have not completed any of The Dark Dimension. Alliance War was added after this was written.

Bugs

Occasionally, after certain updates, battles can hang indefinitely, where either the AI never takes their turn or the player is never presented with their actions. This is usually fixable by force-quitting the game and restarting.

Undertale

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 12:00:00 -0700

Every review for Toby Fox’s Undertale seems to somehow impart a deep seeded conviction that this truly is one of the most emotional, clever, unexpected games of all time. That conviction is so powerful that by the time I metaphorically pulled this title off the shelf and gave it a good dusting (months after I got it as a much wanted gift), the idea that I was going to be blown away by this little indie game was all but a concrete expectation. That hope only grew when, after falling in love with “His Theme” when it was used as a backing track behind some Overwatch voice lines, I found Undertale’s soundtrack to be incredible in its own right.

Perhaps by osmosis, I had come to respect the vague, sacred secrecy the community held around the game’s details. But it wasn’t until I fired it up for the first time that I realized I’d never even seen a screenshot of Undertale before, and it was honestly a jarring experience. Playing on my 3000x2000 Surface Book display, Undertale loaded as a little box of pixel graphics that only occupied a ninth of my screen, and it took me a solid amount of Googling to figure out if it even had a fullscreen mode (it does, press F4). Once it was big enough to actually see, it was a whole other struggle to figure out how to control stuff, as Undertale offers you no real tutorial whatsoever (arrow keys to walk, and Z, X, and Ctrl for pretty much everything else). In fact, the initial feeling I had was one of deflation; this supposedly perfect game was actually a time machine back to the days of pixel art and text-based RPGs with a bad on-ramping experience.

And that brings us to the paradox of Undertale: in order to give it all the praise it deserves, to show off all the things that make it both sharply witty and warmly endearing, and to convince a newcomer to push past the honestly confounding first 10 minutes of play, I’d have to spoil a little of the game. And that is something I should absolutely not do. Because realizing what Undertale is, living out the experience of a truly beautiful game revealing itself to you in the subtlest of character dialogue, and feeling your assumptions about how it should be played slip away — all of this must be yours and only yours.

So have a little hope, press on, and stay determined. You’ll be so happy you did.