Friends and Fire Hands

I had a very productive game playing weekend; I finished my second play through of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and I completely finished Penumbra. I'll most likely be breaking my Penumbra experiences into the next 2 or 3 posts. But first, I'll recount the last half of Dark Messiah.

When I left off, I was just starting Chapter 7... which was largely uneventful. Lightning made pretty short work of all the goblins and orcs I came across. I even picked up the lightning shield (even though I couldn't wield it) because it made me feel more awesome for some reason.

The rest of the chapters required some new tactics. Starting in Chapter 8, you begin to face large quantities of Vampire Knights (I think that's what they are called). They are pretty much like the regular melee soldiers you've fought previously, except they are MUCH faster and undead. Being undead, they had no weaknesses; neither fire nor lightning do them much damage (I'm pretty sure I threw 5 or 6 fireballs at one once). Due to the difficulties I was having, I dropped some skill points into another new spell: Charm. Once I did, I wondered why it had taken me so long to pick it up.

My new strategy basically involved me running into a room of guys, charming the meanest looking one, then running around until I could cast charm again. Maybe it's just me, but I think there is something absolutely delightful about watching enemies kill each other. It seriously reminded me of playing Bioshock with a decoy.

When I played through Bioshock (both times), my general strategy was to:

1. Drop a decoy in the middle of a group of enemies
2. Watch them kill each other trying to hit the decoy
3. Hit the remaining enemy once with the crowbar (pipe?) Editor's note: It's a wrench.
   
4. Grin
   

My enemy charming strategy worked great all through Chapters 8 and 9.

In the Epilogue, I got a new spell: Inferno. Inferno is basically like having a flamethrower in place of your arm. It burns mana like crazy, but by that point in the game I had buffed my mana regen and had so many mana potions I couldn't pick up new ones. Inferno became my spell of choice. In short, it absolutely decimated everything I came across. My revised strategy:

1. Run into a group of enemies
2. Cast Sanctuary (shield spell)
3. Spin in a circle whilst spewing fire from my hand
4. Watch enemies burn and fall down while I laugh maniacally
   

I quickly finished the game and saw the two extra endings (I had chosen the "evil" path this time) without much fuss.

A short batch of final, Final Thoughts:

• I grossly underrated magic in my first play through. I feel like you'd have to put quite a few points into it to make it worthwhile (buff your mana pool and your mana regen, etc), but it's definitely more impressive than I gave it credit for. Even as a melee character, I think you could just pick up stuff in the defensive tree (Heal and Sanctuary) and receive a big help.
  
• Until you get a really great shield, staves are the way to go. Even though they do less damage, their group attack abilities are amazing. Being able to stun enemies is ridiculously helpful when you are fighting more than one.
• The game is balanced a lot more intelligently at normal. After playing through in Hard and Normal, it's pretty obvious they balanced the game for Normal and then just sort of jiggled the numbers around for the other two difficulties. Do yourself a favor: just play it on Normal.
• None of the decisions you make really have any sort of impact on the game at all. The endings are all remarkably similar and lack any real reason to play the game through again. If you are playing for the first time, just play the "good" way so you can used the blessed weapons.

That concludes my time in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic... I promise. Next up will be the second episode and expansion to Penumbra.

Sweet, Sweet Revendications

Last night I found myself in a bad spot: I had forgotten to start the second episode of Penumbra downloading and I couldn't seem to get S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky to run for more than a couple of minutes without crashing. I quickly kicked off the download process in Steam and decided I would start a new Dark Messiah game.

I decided that this time I would play as a magic user who wielded a staff. Also, to protect my sanity, I would play on Normal rather than Hard. The events that followed were absolutely glorious.

I'm not sure if it was the fact that I was playing on Normal or that I had gotten quite a bit better at combat or that I had seriously underestimated the awesomeness of staves, but I absolutely MASSACRED EVERYONE.

Since it takes a while to get any decent offensive spells, I found myself using my staff almost exclusively. The staff has a delightful ability to stun and knock down opponents and also works quite well on groups of enemies. I had previously discovered that staves could be useful when fighting a pack of ghouls, but I definitely didn't appreciate its mystical powers. I quite literally felt like a one man wrecking crew. I would just charge packs of guys and then start circle-strafing whilst landing blow after blow on them. I would stun them and kick them off a ledge or knock them down and finish them. Some of them thought they could limp away from me after they were wounded, I just gleefully laughed and brought my staff down on the back of their heads.

Within 30 minutes of starting, I found myself at the end of chapter 4 (something that took hours last time) getting ready to defend a ship from oncoming soldiers. I also had just learned the fireball spell. The fireball spell is a delightful little thing in that you can actually guide it after you fire it. I stood on the deck of that ship and rained down fireball after fireball upon the guards that were foolish enough to run at me.

Have you ever been doing something and then suddenly realized that you had a grin on your face? Mine went from ear to ear.

Upon starting into Chapter 5 (where you start facing the orcs), I got the lightning spell (orcs are weak to lightning). I had previously found orcs to be semi-annoying/tough... not anymore! I ran from roof top to roof top of those temple steps throwing balls of lightning at everything that moved. I felt like Zeus punishing the Greeks for their lack of piety. I'm also pretty sure I cast the spell three or four times after everything was dead.

I completely finished Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 in that one sitting. All creatures perished before me. None were safe from my firey, lightningy wrath: ghouls, zombies, spiders, goblins, orcs, a cyclops... none of it mattered. I was halfway through Chapter 6 before I even died for the first time (stupid ghouls aren't weak to lightning OR fire).

I must admit, after struggling through the difficult combat in my first play through, this one has been ridiculously fulfilling. I'll probably sit down and finish the game (I'm guessing only one more sitting). I'm predicting brutal efficiency, maniacal grins, and heaping helping of diabolical laughter.

Dark Messiah - Final Thoughts

Here are my final thoughts for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic:

What I liked:

• Combat. It was generally quite interesting and varied, despite being either easy or difficult most of the time. There were nearly always a lot of ways to kill a group of guys, whether it was hand to hand, bow/magic, kicking them off something, kicking them into something, bringing a trap of some kind down on them, or throwing rocks at their heads. While some things were more effective than others (hay bales FTW!), you always had options.
• Rope arrows. I mentioned these previously, but can't help but bring them up again. They were a great gameplay mechanic and were the cause of some really interesting solutions to puzzles and problems. I only wish they had been used a little bit more... I think they could have done all kinds clever and interesting things with them.
• Overall design. The levels were relatively varied, the enemies were semi-interesting and the locations where logical and fun. There wasn't really anything that stood out as being overly amazing here, but generally speaking ,it was good.
• Secret areas. I don't know that I could tell you why, but it always made me happy when the little "You've found a secret area!" message would pop up on the screen... even if I often found them accidentally thinking I was just going the way I was supposed to.
• Price. $6 on GoGamer.com (including shipping). Can't go wrong there.
  

What I didn't like:

• Inconsistent difficulty. Early on, this game was REALLY hard. I think that is partly due to learning how to fight properly and partly due to the fact that my weapons were so underpowered. In Chapter 7, however, when I found the lightning shield, the game was ridiculously easy... to the point that I didn't even have to try. And finally, in the Epilogue, the game adjusted to the point where I felt like I was neither godlike nor completely feeble. It's much more entertaining to be eased into combat while ramping up difficulty (and weapons/stats) as the game progresses. This game just didn't do it very well at all.
• Skill point system. This game rewards skill points as you complete quest... while there is not necessarily anything wrong with that, it's a system I've just never really liked (although Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines did that and it is still one of my all-time favorite games). My biggest complaint with such a system is that is doesn't reward me for killing everything or exploring everywhere... something an experience with level-up system does. Although I will admit that this system makes a pure stealth, kill-as-little-as-possible approach much more feasible.
• Magic. I didn't go too far down the magic skill tree, but there just didn't appear to be much down there to get excited about. Perhaps I'm underestimating it, but I basically only used my magic heal throughout the entire game.
• Demonic powers. The game forces you to use these for a segment of gameplay lasting about 5 minutes. I found them to be useful during those 5 minutes and then never again.
  
• Loot/Inventory. The game had a fixed inventory size, but it just really didn't need one... it was quite possible to carry one of every type of ring, staff, sword, bow, and dagger in your inventory at once. Furthermore, I've never been a huge fan of RPGs with a super fixed loot table... as in I go to point x and get item y where x and y are constant. It was especially bad here as I would find a second (or third) copy of a specific item and when picking up the second one, it would just disappear in my inventory over the first... making me feel more like I had earned a skill rather than found an item.

Closing thoughts:

While this game certainly had its fair share of faults, it was definitely entertaining. If you enjoy action-RPGs (Oblivion style), you'll enjoy Dark Messiah. Don't expect a deep, exploration filled experience... just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Hard to easy in a single Lightning Shield

Final installment in my Dark Messiah of Might and Magic playthrough:

When I left off last time, I had just finished Chapter 5. Chapter 6 was a jaunt through a tomb trying to obtain the Crystal Skull Skull of Shadows. The most interesting thing in here was a slew of really slow moving zombies. They were relatively easy to deal with, due to their slow moving nature, but they had one very annoying ability: a poison spray. Poison is definitely something I think DM did wrong... basically when you get poisoned, you slowly lose hit points until you get down to 5. While you can use an antidote to remove it, if you are fighting batches of mobs that can all poison you (it wasn't uncommon to have 10+ zombie packs), it quickly becomes pretty pointless. I basically played all of Chapter 6 at 5 health because it was just a waste of time to keep healing myself and keep getting poisoned.

Chapter 6 ended with "the big reveal" where you wake up from what seemed like certain death to find all your gear gone and that you now have some demonic powers. While it was pretty obvious that the developers intended you to use these demonic powers quite extensively, I found them useful for the 5 minutes it took me to get from where I woke up to where I got my gear back. Perhaps I underestimated their usefulness, but I REALLY don't think I did... they are only usable at melee range, you take damage while using them (refillable by killing mobs), and you don't seem to have any good blocking abilities. I dubbed them a waste of my time and moved on.

Chapter 7 was my escape from the temple and island, and was a relatively uneventful run through goblins and orcs. I did, however, happen to find one piece of new gear in a deep pool of water: the Lightning Shield.

Remember how I was complaining about the combat being ridiculously difficult? The Lightning Shield makes the combat easier... game-breakingly easier. Basically, if you have a shield equipped, you can use the right mouse button to pull it up and block. It blocks every attack. The normal shields are balanced by the fact that they have a set durability... they take took much damage and they break. If the Lightning Shield was only unbreakable, it would have been an amazing shield... but no, any enemy that attacks while you are blocking take lightning damage which temporarily stuns them. This shield made fighting so easy it almost stopped being fun. New combat steps:

1) Find enemies

2) Block

3) Kill them or disarm them with a single power swing while laughing at how stupid they are for attacking a shield with a lightning aura

4) Finish them off if necessary

5) Repeat

With my lightning shield in hand, I entered Chapter 8: a trip into the necromancer stronghold. This area introduced what was supposed to be a rather difficult new melee enemy, which turned out to be trivially easy due to my new shield. At the end of the area, I found out that the sexy niece, Leanna, was not actually dead! (I don't think there is a scale in all the world that could measure my level of unsurprise.) I was then given the first "moral" choice in the game... save her or not. I decided to save her as I figured that doing so would probably grant skill points (it did). I then fought a relatively easy spider boss, found the journal I was looking for (the VERY large book on a pedestal label "Arantir's Journal") and escaped.

Chapter 9 was my trip through town to get to the necropolis where Arantir (the evil necromancer) was apparently wreaking some sort of havoc or something. At this point, the designers seemed to have realized that combat was probably getting easy so they started throwing ridiculously large numbers of everything at me. Right off the bat I found myself fighting numerous ghouls simultaneously. This continued throughout this rest relatively short chapter. The only thing of particular note was the other "moral" choice I could make here... I could either cleanse myself of the demon taint that I had (those worthless demon powers I mentioned) or not. Cleansing myself also granted me access to all the most powerful weapons in the game. Even though those powers were VERY amazing, I chose the cleansing route. The new weapons were quite awesome. Coupled with my game breaking shield, I made short work of the rest of the chapter.

The final chapter was the Epilogue... even though it was a full chapter in and of itself. This had me fighting through the necropolis (more undead made trivial by my lightning shield and blessed sword) to get to Arantir. I did pull out my new blessed bow and use it a fair amount in here (I had raised my bow skill when I ran out of things to spend skill points on) and it was actually quite devastating... almost enough to make me want to try to play the game through entirely as a ranged character.

Anyway, the final battle with Arantir was pretty easy. I fought him for a bit, then he summoned a bone dragon (hooray for my blessed bow!), then I fought him, then he resummoned the dragon, and so forth. Afterward, the final "moral" choice to either free the bad guy or stop him (both of which you can do regardless of your previous decisions). I dropped a save point and tried both... they were equally disappointing.

My next post will be a full set of what I liked/didn't liked items, but I'll give you a small taste now: was this a great game? No... it wasn't. Was it entertaining and worth playing? Definitely.

All arrows should be rope arrows

And now, part 3 of my Dark Messiah of Might and Magic playthrough:

I want to take a break from my playthrough to talk about some of the things DM does well.

First off: rope arrows. The game has rope arrows. The game doesn't really need rope arrows. In all honesty, rope arrows add very little to the actual game play. That being said, there is something really fun about them. The basic idea is that you are shooting an arrow with a rope attached to it. If it sticks in something wood, it will drop a rope straight down from where it hit. You can then climb the rope to get to new and more interesting places. Most of the time it's pretty obvious; you get to the end of a corridor, look up and see a beam you can shoot a rope arrow into. Other times, it's merely a way to get above your enemies and easily go around them.

There are some great things you can do with them though. For example: back in Chapter 5, there's a section where you're out along some cliffs where the researchers there have built these house hanging out over the water. In one place, you drop down through the roof of one, and as you do, it starts to crumble and then the bottom breaks and you fall with it. I could clearly see that there was something in the room that I wanted... I was pretty sure it was some kind of armor. I made half a dozen attempts to run out there and then grab the armor, then jump onto a rope, but the floor just fell way too fast. I then proceeded to spend the next 10 minutes or so across another half dozen attempts setting up this system of ropes that lead all around the outside of the building and finally got me right outside the window where the armor was (the ropes don't swing; they function more like a pole). It was ridiculously clever and I couldn't help but pat myself on the back as I made my way back to the ledge.

As soon as I got back, I walked back into the building and instantly realized I could have just used my telekinesis spell to grab the armor. Yup. Clever to idiot in less than 10 seconds.

The other thing I've been quite impressed with in the game is the actual variety of combat. While I found it practically a necessity to throw things at any and all enemies early on in the game, that stopped being quite as important as I progressed in the game (mostly thanks to the Lightning Shield... but that's a topic for my next post). The game tends to give you lots of ways to kill things: melee combat, arrows (these get better later in the game), magic, and all kinds of environmental obstacles. One of the best ways to kill enemies is to lure them close to a ledge or close to some wall spikes (which seem to be everywhere) and send them flying with a well placed kick. It definitely breaks the tedium of regular combat and is quite fulfilling.

Another example: at some point in Chapter 6, I found myself setup to fight 5 or 6 (I can't remember which) ghouls. If you recall from my last post, 2 of them had previously done an exceptionally fine job of handing me my ass. Despite some ledges to kick them off and some spikes to lure them into, I couldn't seem to manage to kill them all. I then remembered seeing in hints in one of the loading screens (remember I was dying a lot) that staves were good against groups of enemies. I decided to pull out my fire staff and then very quickly made short work of them as the staff stunned them and let me stab, impale or otherwise send them flying into oblivion. While I can't say I used the staff much afterwards, it was quite nice to actually see some variety.

Well, that's all for this time. I know I promised some info about the cyclops (it was a long and relatively boring fight) and some screenshots (next time I promise!) but that's all you are getting. I did just finish the game, so expect two more posts: my experiences playing through the last part of the game, and my overall impressions.

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.

The hay bale is mightier than the sword

Yesterday, I began in earnest my play through of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Yes, I know this game is like three years old, but I just bought from one of GoGamer.com's 48 madness sales for about $6. For those of you not familiar with the game, it's built using Valve's source engine of Half Life 2 fame.

After reading around and asking a friend, I decided that I wanted to play through as a mostly melee class with a little bit of support magic. After some cutscenes and an intro chapter or two in which you don't really fight anything, I finally got to some real action in chapter 2.

My first impression: this game is hard.

Now, let's be clear: I'm no slouch when it comes to video games, and I'm quite good at shooters, but this game is rough. It had three difficulty levels, Normal, Hard, and Insane/Difficulty/Don't play here... I'm pretty sure I picked the middle one (which in all fairness is called Hard, so maybe it makes sense).

You start the second chapter being awoken by a servant who informs you of an attack. A lone guard comes up the stairs; he is wearing full armor and has a shield and sword. This first fight didn't seem to cause me too much grief, although I did take quite a bit of damage. From there, you go down the stairs and out the door... that's where the craziness began.

Here, it threw me against a archer and three more of those melee soldiers. I literally replayed this section over a dozen times. The enemies constantly block your attacks and manage to get in plenty of their own (each of which deal at least a 1/4 to a 1/3 of your total life). If you do manage to land blows, it can take 4-5 full power swings to kill something.

As I continued to play through this section and the next, it READILY became apparent that I failed at fighting. I even pulled out my bow (which was RIDICULOUSLY underpowered) and my one spell (fire arrow) which was similarly pathetic. In the tutorial, the game taught me how to kick enemies to knock them off guard, kick them into fires, etc. Also, that I could pick up stuff and throw it at them as well. As it turns out, these are not helper abilities, but REQUIRED abilities.

Example: in chapter 3 (4?) I "infiltrated" a warehouse and found myself fighting an archer and a swordsman I'd already maimed. Upon killing the swordsman, two more swordsmen would spawn and join the fight. At some point, an archer ran in from the roof on the other side of the square and started shooting. Cue another 10-20 attempts. I FINALLY passed this section by figuring out the spawn order of the guys (kill the archer THEN the limping swordsman) and decided to enter the warehouse.

At this point, I'm sort of fed up with the ridiculousness, so after running into the warehouse, I pickup a bale of hay and throw it at the first guy I see. I then proceed, for the next minute or so, to repeatedly throw this same bale of hay at EVERYONE that appeared. When the dust settled I was surrounded by 5+ swordsman/archers and was standing next to my apparently lead-filled hay bale. I had now learned to let the rocks/barrels/hay bales do the fighting for me.

As I proceeded through the rest of this section, up until I left on the ship for an island (and quite honestly there as well), I would repeat the same basic process:

1) Find guys
2) Run around with my shield up until I found something to throw at them
3) Throw it at them and knock them down
4) Stab them while they were down
5) Find more things and throw them
6) Repeat

At the end of this section (Chapter 4, I think), I had gotten a new sword, I had leveled up my abilities a bit, and I actually got to a point where I felt like I was doing real damage to these guards. Of course shortly after that I started fighting orcs... but I'll save that one for my next post.