Cav's Place

Despite the generally negative reviews, I rather enjoyed the first game, though that may be in large part thanks to the fact that I only played it fully patched and stayed well away from the broken mess I heard it was on release. Unfortunately, not even the latest patches can hide the fact that its successor not only failed to improve upon the original recipe but actually represents a step back in most aspects.

Finding redeeming qualities is difficult and none of the few that can be found have much to do with gameplay, but I’ll probably start by saying that the writing has some good moments, if you look for them. This applies mainly to the books and messages you find, which can occasionally be funny or witty, make some good points or even provide interesting information that’s not necessarily restricted to the game world. There are also a few twists in some tales and some references in quests that may bring a small smile to some faces, perhaps the most notable such case being Last Crusade. And there’s something to be said about the general idea and feel of chapter three.
Otherwise, it is of course nice that there are still no class restrictions and you can develop your character as you wish, the equipment crafting system is all right, and better than in the first game, the spell crafting is actually very cool, even if the vast majority of the available options will likely be no more than curiosities, and the final battle is a nice change. I’ll also add that the gear comparison comes in very handy and, since I’m really trying to find some more positives, that it’s a nice touch to see different coins according to their value, all the way up to those worth 10000.

And now that I did my best to be nice, let me move on and say that its predecessor’s strongest point, namely exploration, is probably the worst element of Two Worlds II. The areas are significantly less diverse, there are far fewer enemy types, there’s little to no reason to even visit many parts of the game world, especially considering the annoying chapter one respawns, and a significant area is actually inaccessible. Perhaps worse, go through a few dungeons and you’ll see perfectly identical center rooms, or perfectly identical large chambers, with perfectly identical little paths that go nowhere off to the side, and in a fair number of those dungeons there’s nothing to make it worth your while. Sometimes you may find locations clearly meant for quests that don’t exist or apparently secret areas with difficult to reach locations inside them, but not as much as a single chest, item or any other element of interest. And, of course, with the content, and also the locks, of chests always adapting to your level, there’s no reason to pick one particular place over another even if you do find something.
And yet somebody craving to explore a large, open world badly enough might find a way to put up with all of that… If only the world would be open. However, if the first game did a wonderful job of allowing you to go wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted, in fact encouraging exploration before quests, now you’ll find yourself held back every step of the way. Need to “open” locations when the game wants you to, impassable mountains and cliffs block access to large areas, and half the doors and even some chests are barred until you get a quest sending you there. And don’t think that you can still find a way through anyway, like in the first game, because the character can barely jump, will take fall damage even if climbing off corpses or running down slopes or stairs, and is next to impossible to control precisely, largely due to carrying far too much momentum with every action. Plus that riding, which worked so beautifully in the first game, is now only available in chapter one and has been turned into a chore that you’re far better off staying well away from.

If you’re still struggling along, you’ll find yourself plagued by many area loading times, frequently having the game freeze for seconds at a time while you’re running along, or perhaps even in the middle of fights if you happen to move out of the currently loaded little piece of the map. And in between those, you’ll notice terrible animations, including some unnecessarily long ones for common actions, and uncountable graphical and placing anomalies, such as the character’s hair vanishing when putting on even head gear that shouldn’t be able to hide it, NPCs sitting on invisible chairs, plants and even at least one chest inside rocks, a fair number of broken textures, and enemies floating in the air, stuck in the ground or the ceiling.
When you do get to combat, I imagine that the control issues make it a real pain for warrior characters, but I had a mage and what I clearly noticed myself, on top of the bad enemy AI, was inconsistent targeting for spray or ricochet spells, some issues with spell effects, and the fact that my character kept insisting on moving towards the enemy on his own when one was nearby, even though I was trying to go the other way to be able to cast.
As for non-hostile NPCs, you’ll quickly notice that, while everybody seems to hear you even if you’re sneaking and even sleeping NPCs or fellow thieves will notice and stop you if you’re trying to pick a lock in what should be their line of sight, there is an obvious lack of reaction to your character otherwise. This is particularly obvious if you’re a mage and still, for example, get warned that mage opponents are “something else” when fighting them in the Arena, or more notably can wander around without a care in the world, wearing your robe and hat and wielding your staff, even calmly stopping to listen to the town criers announcing that, by order of the emperor, all mages or possible magical activity must be reported and stamped out.

Like I did when I reviewed the first game as well, I must make a special note about the voice acting, which generally ranges between poor and atrocious, not to mention that Cassara’s lines are almost always cut short, so you’ll often have to read the subtitles very quickly if you want to know what she says. But by this point it must be obvious that there are so many other things wrong that this can already fall under miscellaneous annoyances, along with the stupid prologue, the segments of the questing system that’d be more at home in a generic free-to-play MMO, the messy map, some interface issues, and the problems with the archpriests quest, which could have been really nice but seems removed from the rest of the game, plus that the tombs were the only places where I experienced crashes, and many of them at that.

In the end, the save timer said that, not counting reloads, I took some 45 hours to complete the game, still exploring just about as much as I could and completing all but a few quests. That’s not much when you compare to the over 100 hours recorded by the last save for the first game, but they sure felt longer this time around. Two Worlds II feels like a game released well before it was completed, but also one determined to “fix” almost everything that wasn’t broken in its predecessor, while doing little to nothing about what was.

Writing something’s even harder when I seem to be struggling with panic attacks again, but I can at least try to write about these, seeing as they started last night. It probably was just after midnight when I suddenly got very dizzy for a moment, there was the obvious adrenaline rush, which caused a momentary feeling of panic, and then the usual vicious circle of getting scared that something was wrong, feeling worse because I was scared, getting more scared because I was feeling worse and so on. That only subsided shortly before I went to bed, but then the panic came back some hours ago, and I’m not even sure if this time it was preceded by a moment of dizziness or it caused it, because it was far less noticeable and not exactly unusual for how dizzy I normally get during such attacks.
Rather long time since this last happened and at least the intensity is relatively low this time, in the sense that I’m not convinced that I’m just about to have a heart attack or a stroke, but it lasts a long time and trying to keep it somewhat under control is using up even what little energy I still have, so if it was next to impossible to get anything done before…

The thing is that I should be getting stuff done now, seeing as I’m trying not to do much on the computer to avoid putting any more stress than I have to on this old HDD, since I don’t have a backup anymore. I definitely should be writing that review for Two Worlds II now, while I’m waiting for a replacement and not even thinking of playing anything else, and the fact that I have a pretty thorough list of what I want to say in it means that it shouldn’t be that hard once I manage to get started, but getting started is always the worst part.
Meant to finally continue reading Tongues of Serpents too, thinking I’ll get through it in a few days now that I’m not doing much else, but then I gave up again after only a couple more chapters and I really can’t say why. It’s definitely not the book’s fault in any way, and I definitely like to read and want to read, but… I can’t get myself to do anything at all anymore. That’s all there is to it and you can see that in what happened to my MobyGames submissions as well, where I had managed to somehow claw my way back and end up being only a month behind the “schedule” I had set for myself at the end of September, but then hardly submitted anything at all during October, so now I’m a good two months behind with only two months left until the end of the year.

But let’s see if I’ll manage something over the weekend. I mean, I certainly need to post one more thing, so maybe I’ll somehow manage to make it something non-personal… And possibly submit at least a few more things on MobyGames as well, like I somehow managed to do today, though it took me significantly longer than it normally should have.

Even if these news pieces are about a week old now, I just noticed them yesterday, when I checked my e-mail and saw them linked to in the Access newsletter, and they’re definitely worth drawing more attention to. If such things are allowed to slip past, we’re not even talking about trading privacy for security anymore, but about giving both of them away, with the authorities clearly having the potential to become a much greater direct and immediate threat than the criminals they claim to want to stop through these measures.

The first piece has to do with the United Nations calling for an international framework for Internet surveillance, requiring ISPs and also messaging and VoIP providers everywhere to store information in case the authorities want to review it later, but also calling for mandatory registration in order to use any public Wi-Fi networks and more cell phone tracking… Plus, of course, some mention about acts of terrorism depicted in video games, which includes video games that may be created by terrorist organizations for the purposes of attracting or training members, but extends to any depiction of a violent terrorist act in a game, particularly if the player is allowed to play the part of the terrorist as well.
Of course, the European Union already passed, and required all member states to adopt, a data retention law that requires information regarding on-line and phone communications, though not also their actual content, to be kept for a certain amount of time, while in the United States most providers seem quite happy to voluntarily practice such surveillance, whether they claim to do it in order to look for possible terrorism or for copyright infringement, even before the laws making such practices mandatory are properly adopted. Yet even in these parts of the world, which certain individuals in positions of authority still try to convince us are “free” despite all the evidence that says otherwise, the measures are obviously not enough for the United Nations, which wants everybody treated as a criminal almost from the moment they enter this world.

But the worse part is actually in this second piece of news, which is coming from the Netherlands. Apparently a proposed law would give the Dutch police the right to conduct remote searches, install malware and delete “illegal” files on computers, regardless of location. If the target computer is in another country, it is “preferred” to request assistance from that country’s authorities, but if the computer’s location can’t be determined or if the local authorities refuse to comply with a request for assistance, it will be perfectly acceptable to break into it directly.
As that article points out, such a law gives Dutch police the right to enforce their laws on any computer user in the world, and also to attack cloud storage services or infrastructure meant to protect privacy. It’s an absolutely appalling proposal, obviously made worse by the fact that it comes from yet another supposedly “free” country, and it therefore must be struck down by any means necessary. If they’ll be allowed to get away with this, imagine what they or others like them will think of next!

One of my HDDs is quite clearly about to bite the dust, making very worrying sounds and twice freezing my system intermittently while it sounded like it was trying to get unstuck. It’s possible that it’s the old one, which I only put in for backup purposes, meaning that I won’t need to go through any hassle or reinstall anything but will be left with no backup in case this one will bite the dust as well, which is a prospect I’m not keen on, considering how frequently these seem to fail. There also seems to be something with the month of October, because the previous failure, in 2009, was also during this month. And the one before that, in 2007, was in November…
Now, of course, I have learned my lesson and have a script that backs everything up daily, with the important stuff copied manually once per month in a third place as well, so I won’t be losing anything unless they both fail at the same time and be able to get back the vast majority of the important stuff even if they do, but reinstalling everything will be quite a hassle, plus that I’ll be waiting for a while before getting a replacement. Actually, I’m quite sure that they’re both still under warranty, even the old one having some weeks left, but that was bought from a shop that went bankrupt since, so that’s no use and only the “active” one may get replaced like this. However, if I won’t be able to “revive” it long enough to wipe it clean afterwards, I’d rather not send it and just get a new one instead, which will solve the matter faster but be limited by the available funds.

Oh, it’s just freezing up again. All right, I need to get this posted quickly, because I want to run more tests on both of them and see what happens. If it’s the main one and it’ll fail, I’ll leave this as it is. If not, I’ll get back and edit this with some more details and what my original plan for getting a new HDD was.

Edit: Well, it is the main one and booting off it isn’t exactly an option anymore, but the other partitions are still holding just fine and I can access most of the boot one too, as long as I’m not trying to run things from it and don’t touch the portions that make it struggle and eventually hang. So I’ve been spending the past several hours installing things on the backup HDD and seeing how that holds. Will probably send the main one to be replaced next week and then decide what else to do… Sure hope I won’t end up with this failing as well till then, because it is five years old and has some issues of its own.

As the title suggests, this post will deal with multiple recent events that have to do with gaming, even though they may not necessarily be directly related to each other. Most of them are connected through the use of Kickstarter, but I’ll also mention the latest announcements coming from GOG.com, since they were only made yesterday.

If you have any interest in the matter, I’m sure you already know that Project Eternity has become the most funded Kickstarter game, raising $3986929, which is $650558 above the previous record, set by Double Fine Adventure back in March. In addition, in the last Kickstarter update they mentioned that by 8:30 PM GMT the next day, which was Wednesday, they had been sent $176279 via PayPal as well, making for a grand total of $4163208 from a total of 77667 pledgers, and that amount may still increase, since they still accept money through PayPal.
What this means is that all stretch goals have been reached, including the crazy four million dollar one that they had put up mere hours before the deadline, so the game is scheduled to be released in April, 2014, on Windows, Linux and Mac, in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Polish. It will feature a large game world with a longer story and more areas and factions than originally planned, a second big city, six playable races, eleven playable classes, many customizable difficulty options, several companions with their own personalities and stories, the Adventurer’s Hall, where players will be able to recruit mercenaries to customize their party as they see fit, a house and a stronghold that the players will be able to obtain, crafting and enchanting, live instruments for the soundtrack and a dungeon with 15 levels, 16 if they’ll get 40000 fans on their Facebook page… And Chris Avellone will be forced to play Arcanum, since he somehow hasn’t so far.

Largely in Project Eternity’s shadow, a couple of other pretty well known game designers have started a Kickstarter funding drive for another ambitious RPG, called Shaker. Unfortunately, at first the page offered basically no information about the game other than some common RPG features which it was supposed to include, so it was entirely expected for it to have a hard time gathering any funds. At the moment, when we’re about halfway to the deadline, it has obtained about a quarter of the minimum goal of one million, but it may yet reach that target, seeing as Project Eternity’s funding drive has finished and some information has been added to Shaker’s page, starting from the name, since it didn’t even have a working title at first. It’s quite clear that it won’t get anywhere near any records, however, so their announced plans of funding two related games at once, if they’ll obtain at least 1.9 million, will certainly remain only on paper.
Edit: They just announced scrapping the project, saying they’ll come back with something stronger at a later time.

One game that clearly won’t reach the goal, on the other hand, is Nexus 2: The Gods Awaken, seeing as it has only obtained slightly above a fifth of the minimum goal of $650000 despite being three quarters of the way to the deadline. And that’s probably not particularly surprising, because the first game, which is actually still on my list of games that I should get around to playing someday, seems to be a largely forgotten gem from what I could gather, but I do find it rather sad, seeing as this idea of tactical space combat involving massive ships is very interesting and, strangely enough, rarely explored.

At the same time, the attention of gamers who enjoy space combat is probably grabbed these days by Star Citizen / Squadron 42, which is gathering funds both with and without Kickstarter. The Kickstarter page was actually only launched yesterday, so I have to wonder how much did Project Eternity’s success factor into it, because the original plan seemed to be to make a funding drive that works more or less the same way but is managed directly by the developers, who were staying away from Kickstarter on purpose.
Still, the project is extremely ambitious, the minimum goal of two million being by far the most I’ve seen for any such project so far and the top stretch goal of six million being utterly insane, but the scale of the project and the level of detail certainly justify all of it and then some. Unfortunately, the development of Squadron 42, which will be the single-player campaign, seems to be largely left for the stretch goals, the initial plan seeming to focus much more on the multiplayer “living universe” that Star Citizen aims to be, so I fear that the result will be more along the lines of a multiplayer game with something that amounts more or less to a single-player tutorial unless new funding records will be set.

And to finally move away from Kickstarter projects, I must point out that GOG.com seems to have taken a liking to the “pay what you want” model, because after a somewhat failed attempt at something like this for the Divinity series, they now did it more than right for their entire Interplay catalog. I can’t say that I’d personally have any interest in any of those games, but if you do then know that you can get eight of them for as little as one cent, if you pay above the average, which at the moment I’m writing this is $13.60, you get 12 more, and if you pay at least $34.99 you get all 32 of them. Granted that the most notable titles are in this last group of 12, but each of these games is normally sold by them for $5.99, so the total value is $191.68 and you only need to want six of them to say you’re better off purchasing all 32 while this offer lasts.
Of course, even if I was interested, none of this would do me any good as long as they won’t add any payment methods that I’d actually be able to use to buy anything from there, so it’d sure have been nice if something along these lines would have been included among yesterday’s announcements instead of Mac support. Actually, if we’re talking about supporting other operating systems, even if I’d have no use for it myself, I’d sure have liked to see Linux support first, seeing as that would seem to go with what GOG claims to support, while the strict controls and insane prices promoted by Apple, as well as their tendency to sue at the drop of a hat, go completely against those ideals, so I’m really quite bothered by this move.