Orcs: The other white...err red humanoids

Continuing my playthrough of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic:

Last time, I had just finished Chapter 4 and had left for an island of some kind. I was tasked by the sexy niece of a recently departed wizard (he died in front of me...end of Chapter 2, I think) to enter some kind of temple and find a skull or something. Upon arriving at the island, I discovered that orcs had taken over the temple (along with some goblins). My first task was to clear out the orcs on the temple steps. I quickly realized two things:

1) These guys were VERY similar to the humans I had previously been fighting (with both sword/shield and archer types)
2) They hit harder and had more HP

That's right: the very minute I start to not feel pathetic against the things I'm fighting, the game ratchets up the difficulty while keeping me fighting basically the same sort of enemy.

(Note for all game designers: DON'T MAKE GAMERS FEEL FEEBLE AND PATHETIC!)

Of course, I already had the techniques down: throw rocks and barrels until they fall down. Then stab them. A lot.

After clearing out the courtyard and running away from a dragon-like thing, I finally found myself in the temple. The inside was your basic setup of traps and various goblins and orcs.

After a while, I found myself facing the chief orc. He informed me that we were going to fight honorably, i.e., "no wizard tricks," and that if I won I could go free. The fight started immediately with his four followers watching us. Five or six deaths later I had both learned to avoid using magical healing (a "wizard trick") and that he could two-shot me if I didn't block properly. It was pretty easy to figure out the winning strategy: throw a rock at his face then stab him when he was on the ground.

Let me diverge once here: it seriously irks me when designers artificially create difficulty levels in their games. There are so many good way to make a game harder or easier, but so very often they fall upon the old stand by: simply make mobs hit harder and have more hit points. This game is SO bad at that; it is quite honestly distracting from the immersion. It just shouldn't take such a large number of sword swings to kill an orc with a flaming sword whilst he can kill me in two to three well-placed blows. I can think of only one other game that has ever been this terrible: The Suffering.

(An example from that game: on the hardest difficulty level -- again, it was called Insane, so I should have known better -- it took eight point-blank shots with a shotgun to kill the lowest level melee character in that game. I counted. EIGHT. We aren't talking super shotguns here, that reloaded super fast and had 100 round magazines... no, you'd often end up reloading just to finish off a single mob. And the game would usually send multiple mobs at you simultaneously. In the final section of the game, you run down a road trying to get to some docks with enemies just popping up everywhere... the mobs had such a ridiculous amount of hit points that I literally just sprinted down the road as fast as I could, killing nothing. It was neither possible nor worth my time.)

Anyway, DM of M and M definitely suffers similarly here. I will freely admit that I am not playing on the difficulty it was probably tuned for, but if you can't tune the game for all your difficulty levels, don't put them in. (For an example of good difficulty increases, play Crysis on "Delta" where they remove the crosshair and make the enemies speak Korean instead of English).

With the chief orc bested (with five usually-fatal "stab a guy on the floor" blows), I went back to the sexy wizard niece. She proceeded to open the gate we had been standing in front of and I proceeded to be insta-gibbed by the two ghouls. They possessed no swords, no shields, but they did have the ability to two-shot me (first shot reducing me from 60 hit points down to 9). 10-20 attempts later, the ghouls were dead (more rocks and barrels), the sexy niece opened the gate, was trapped on the wrong side and was promptly killed by the necromancer hot on my tail. I ran down the hall way and found myself in Chapter 6.

Next time: Chapter 6+, rope arrows, magic items, cyclopes and hopefully I'll finally get some screenshots.