The Death of a Vanquisher

Some time ago a friend of mine thought I might enjoy a game called Torchlight, an action rpg from Runic Games playable on my laptop. He was right.

Now I'll admit my time in the game has been sporadic at best, but that's actually pretty typical of my game-playing style anyway. But the first character I created, named after one of my wife's online personas (from games) Aunika, received the majority of my attention thus far. She was a vanquisher, and I decided early on that I wanted the ranged style of gameplay for her, focusing on twin pistols.

 

She sometimes carried a shield too :)

Things were going great, and I even managed to finally finish the main campaign only to discover there was more to the game than just that, and I had a whole new dungeon complex to explore and kill more masses of enemies. Until this happened:

See that NPC? He's sitting on a quest item that I needed, and he won't move. For the life of me, try as I might, I could not get the item itself to highlight so I could collect it. I even tried to find an answer on the Runic Games forums to no avail. The problem with the quest is that it's part of a chain (as are pretty  much all of the quests in Torchlight) and to continue further in the quest chain I would have to complete it.

So, being the completionist that I am, I went with the next best thing. Using an in-game feature I retired the character of Aunika and bequethed her enchanted rifle to a brand new character, Aurelia, who will carry on her legacy as Torchlight's premier vanquisher (at least in my world).

Honestly, I'm a little sad. Any rpg character I make generally carries my personal imprint on them, which I'm sure is true of most rpg players characters. It's difficult, therefore, to distance my characters actions and motivations from my own. In that regard it has always been difficult for me to play an "evil" character, even when I set out to do so just to get the full enjoyment from a game that offers such options. The characters that I used to actually complete KoTOR 1 and 2 were both "good," for example. 

Torchlight doesn't have the choice/consequence model to make any personal decisions about how a character acts carry any weight. Point in fact you can consider your character to be a soulless mercenary and your actions are pretty much going to mirror mine, you'll go forth and slaughter mass amounts of enemies, collect loot, lather rinse repeat. But I can still lose myself into the game to a certain degree, so the decision to "retire" the Aunika character and then resurrect her via Aurelia wasn't an easy one.

Thus alas, poor Aunika, may your daughter carry on your legacy with pride, and bring me much loot.

Assassin's Creep!

Every once in awhile you come across something in gaming that you really want to love, but can't due to all the shortcomings of the game. Maybe it's the graphics, or maybe the gameplay just doesn't feel "right." Could be a strategic element that doesn't fit or what have you. Whatever the reason, major or minor, it can have a devastating impact on the game for the player and completely ruin the experience.

Take for instance Assassin's Creed on the PC. Yeah, I'm having my issues with the game, but the stealth-action element is something I very much enjoy in other games like Splinter Cell. The problem with AC isn't the gameplay, not really. It's the wonky GUI and inability of the game to adapt to my personal gaming needs. The gameplay has some lofty goals, and again the stealth aspect to reach specific objectives in my own time really appeals to me but, well, the game is barely hanging on with the problems it's presenting me.

For starters, such an open-world feeling game has one of the wonkiest checkpoint save systems I've seen. Some checkpoints seem to be set at specific intervals in the space of the game world, and at other times they seem random (though I'm sure they're set to a timer). And the game saves a checkpoint every time you complete an objective, be it a necessary one for the completion of one of your assignments, or one of the myriad flags dispersed throughout the game world and optional objectives in the cities. What's wrong with that? IT'S A FUCKING OPEN WORLD! I don't like the idea that I can't save where I am in that world at will, instead I have to deal with when the game decides I've completed a milestone, and to top that off I have to deal with the game spawning me in a location that's often far from where I was when I closed the game off. For instance, enter a city and then leave the game and you spawn at your Assassin's Burea when you relog into the game.

Which leads me to problem 2: IS THERE AN EASY FUCKING WAY TO ACTUALLY EXIT THE GAME? If you want to leave the game that you're playing you have to (MILD SPOILER ALERT) exit the Memory you're playing, then exit the Animus machine, then exit the game, the RELOG back into your profile, where you can finally exit all the way out of the game. I've gotten now where I'll alt-tab out and use Task Manager to close the application. Saves me time and I'm not losing anything thanks to the wonky checkpoint system. I absolutely detest this system.

And then there's problem 3: Do anything like alt-tabbing out of the game, or have a windows message come up ( I had the sticky-keys annoyance come up earlier today from using shift too much in the game) and the game goes into windowed mode. Ok, no problem, I'll just go into the game and change the setting to fullscreen. Now where is that setting.... wait, WTF??? Great, no fullscreen mode change, and now the game isn't even centered on the screen... FML and kick random puppy.

Concerning the gameplay, the only real complaints I can level at the game on that end is the guards, even though they're in a stealth game, are all a bit too jumpy toward the main character to pass muster for the suspension of disbelief and there needs to be some way to check up on continuing side-objectives like the Flags in the cities and Kingdom.

All in all, I want to love the game. The story is interesting, the gameplay is pretty much right there and the graphics are spot on. But in the end, it's showing itself as a poor console port rather than an improved game coming over to the PC medium. I'm going to finish this one (compared to Dead Island, which I might finish) but I have to be able to do it in phases. With my life being what it is, not having the ability to just drop the game or at least alt-tab out reasonably is a huge drawback.