First Two Hours of GTA V

Well, the first few hours of a game can be very, very crucial. Especially, for a game as anticipated as GTA V, these initial levels can set the tone for the rest of the game. In contrast with earlier titles in the series, or at least the last one, I almost immediately found myself inside the game with one of the three characters, yielding a gun. 

Things looked familiar, but not everything was exactly like there were in GTA IV. The crosshair was too small for me, and I haven't yet found a way to change it. But then again, I haven't been exposed to much gun play either. 

The scene unfolded inside a bank. My character was part of a heist job, and things seemed to go really smooth. I was slowly being introduced to gameplay basics and controls, and it felt like a good old tutorial level. But suddenly things got chaotic, and after some adrenaline high minutes, I found my character alone; all his buddies have died and apparently he was getting caught by the law enforcers. 

Suddenly, I was taken elsewhere, credits rolled in, and I was now controlling another character. The gorgeous graphics was showcased for a while, and Los Santos never looked better. Yet, flashes of GTA San Andreas came back to my mind. Saw some bicycles, homes designed like CJ would come out of them any moment. 

I wasn't allowed to do much with the first character, which I came to know (not from the game) as Trevor, but this new character was duly introduced. He is an African American person named Franklin, and he works in a automobile sales store. I was introduced to a number of supporting characters over the next one hour, and I was also introduced to Franklin's special skill. In true GTA style, I completed a few driving missions. 

I wouldn't get much in to the mission details, but from the 2 hours I've managed to play, I felt happy and contented. When I come back to play the new episode of a long running franchise, honestly speaking, I don't want a hell lot of innovation. I do want to have some new things, but the core gameplay should stay true to the series's theme. 

I liked the fact that police is still vigilante. It's not really possible to hijack a car in broad day light and get away with the theft without alerting the authorities. Also, GTA is still not carmageddon. Killing off innocent bystanders and ramming on to other vehicles has dire consequences, and they can be adequate to cause the failure of your mission. 

After completing a mission, I was walking in the streets and suddenly I saw a tram. I just hopped inside without thinking much, and nothing really happened. I saw some guys chatting away, and after 30 seconds, a cut scene started playing. After a while, I was dropped in a station closed to my next mission (it was the only available mission at that moment). I was actually impressed. I don't know why. This doesn't seem to be a technological marvel, but I didn't have to select my destination, pay any money or do anything other than hopping in. It just felt good.

Hijacking cars is easy as always, and there are ample ammunation shops for grabbing those ever useful sources of firepower.

The game looks and plays a lot like GTA IV, but the graphics has been vastly improved and there are a number of subtle improvements.

But world interaction still stays limited; considering the vast opportunities that lie around.

More to come...

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Initial Impressions

I've started playing computer games from around 1999. Well, actually that was the year when my dad bought me a top of the line Intel Pentium II 350 Mhz computer with an awesome 16 MB Creative Voodoo Banshee graphics card. I had the best gaming PC among my friends and I'd gladly show off the shiny new graphics on games like Fifa 99, Age of Empires, Need for Speed 2 and 3, etc.

From the very beginning, I had a thing with non playable characters and non-interactive elements within a game's universe. Although EA Sports had the tagline of "If it's in the game, it's in the game", many elements within a game seemed restrictive. As an example, when you are playing a first person shooter game, you would quite often hit invisible walls, i.e. inaccessible areas. Also, you see things lying around the terrain but you can't interact with them, i.e. a soda machine is there but you can't buy soda.

Things got a lot better with the arrival of Half Life, and other modern era shooters like No One Lives Forever, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Max Payne, etc. Back then I didn't care or bother about RPGs at all. I heard about games like Diablo, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Elder Scrolls, etc. but never ended up playing one.

It wasn't until 2009 that I seriously considered playing through an RPG. I think I tried playing Fallout 3 in 2008, but gave up soon after encountering a weird situation. My character started moving like an elephant and I was constantly getting a written prompt which said "you are heavily encumbered". I was such a novice RPG player back then that I didn't even know that heavily encumbered translated to "you don't have enough space in your inventory" and I could easily fix things by dropping some useless gadgets! Earlier, I also encountered a similar problem with Oblivion and quit playing that game, too. 

Inspired by some internet friends in a gaming community I belong to, I took up a personal challenge of completing a basic RPG. I started with a very old, classic role playing game; the original neverwinter nights. At first, I found the game to be a little too much retro for my liking. However, I soon figured out the patterns of the game and

There are many capitals, large cities, small towns, caves and other miscellaneous locations to explore in Skyrim. It really is marvelous in a sense that each location is unique, with different NPCs, landscapes and quests. Resolving all issues of one town can take hours, or even days. While taking care of all the quests in a town named Riften, I felt like completing Dragon Age 2. Yes, it's such a pity for EA that Bethesda's one town can feel like their one whole game.

The game is unique in many ways. The best thing is perhaps that you can approach it in multiple ways. While fighting is an integral part of the overall experience, you can do quite well without fighting at all. Sneaking around in stealth mode is as good as direct confrontations in many cases. Also, there are many dialogue based fetch quests which can take long hours to complete. A day ago I spent a whole evening in Skyrim without doing a single fight. I went to different people, talked information out of them and acted accordingly to complete quests.

When you open your journal where all active and inactive quests are listed, you can easily single out the quests where violence isn't involved--at least initially. Retrieving Olaf's verse for the Bard's college may sound like a mundane task, but it actually involves visiting a ghost infested pit and defeating a powerful undead king. However, apart from a few deceivingly titled quests, there are many where you don't need to apply brute force at all.

When my character was below level 10, I was struggling against the very basic brand of bandits. But, now with a level 18 warrior, I've learned to block attacks better and I invested level ups in health and perks in heavy armor, shields and one handed weapons. Instead of making a jack of all trades character, I have started emphasizing on his core competencies of sword swinging and shield blocking.

The only kind of enemies that gives me a tough time now are mages, who attack from a far with ice and fire based fearsome spells. When battling it out against them, one must drink a fire resistant potion or otherwise you will become a burning corpse in no time.

Looks like I am advancing in the game faster than this blog post is advancing--I am already a level 28 warrior, and I can now challenge the frost trolls (the things that I've mistaken for Yetis) and the mammoth herding mountain giants with ease. I've completed some missions from the main story line and now I now know a lot about the titular character I am playing with.

During the initial phase of playing Skyrim, I was constantly getting challenged by the absurd amount of loot I was collecting from fallen foes and random locations. "Loot", or collectibles are a standard feature of any RPG game, and to many (me too), collecting loot is a very enjoyable part of the gameplay experience. Loot can be almost anything; starting from weapons and armors, health and stamina boosting potions, ornaments, amulets, food items, trophies (head of deceased enemies), wine bottles and what not! Most of these items can be sold off to specific NPCs and these are a very good source of money. One can definitely earn gold by completing quests, but in order to go for major cost involving activities like buying a house, upgrading the house, buying training lessons, etc., selling off loot constantly is a must.

However, just like most other games, the protagonist in Skyrim has limited carrying capacity, and in no time that capacity gets full. You lose some very important skills when you have more items than you can carry. You lose the ability to fast travel and sprint, without which it is almost impossible to play. If you are wearing heavy armor and can't sprint, going from point A to point B (even if it's just a few yards away) feels extremely lagged and tiresome. The only time I was forced to do that was when I pressed the "free movement" button and saw my character turtling towards the Inn where I wanted him to go and sell off some heavy weighing items.

There is no stash in this game (at least not initially) where I can keep the items that I can't carry right now but don't want to part with. The carrying capacity can be increased by increasing stamina, but the option comes once after each level up and levelling up is not a very easy task. So I had to resort to a command line parameter which allowed me to set my character's carrying capacity to the maximum. I gave input of 99999, but the actual value came out as something around 12 thousand.

Now I can loot without bothering about inventory management, and I can concentrate more on the core game.


Updates:

I wrote the above preview when I was in the initial stages of playing Skyrim. My OS crashed at the very end of my journey and I gave up playing Skyrim before beating it. Now that a new DLC is out and I have finally managed to get Windows 7, I am planning to re-install the game and replay it using magical skills. I played with a sword and shield wielding warrior character (with a few magical abilities) in the last game.

A Short Review of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

I've written this short review as a challenge for the Decision Based Gaming Union in Gamespot. 

  

After wading through the near realistic graphics of Skyrim, the cartoonish graphics and heavy emphasis on fast paced battles in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning came to me as a pleasant surprise. Initially, the contrast was a bit shocking, but I quickly got hooked in to the beautifully refreshing fights and intriguing story.

The game started off with an interesting story, which I soon discovered to be a multi-faceted one with many side quests and a long main quest. Just like Skyrim, there are factions and completing their quests gives the player a lot of XP and some unique armor sets that cannot be obtained otherwise. 

I was having a great time jumping from one quest to another, but soon, the number of side quests became overwhelming. I started forgetting why I am doing these quests, and I started skipping all dialogues frantically. The battles also got stale after I unlocked some powerful moves.

It was possible to enlist the service of a "fateweaver" to redistribute skill points and abilities on the fly to alter between a warrior, a rogue and a mage. However, in reality, this is not too interesting as the rogue class is extra powerful, and you really don't need to yield anything other than the faeblade and daggers to win most of the battles. 

The game started with a lot of promise, but ended up being a somewhat bland game with repetitive quests and boring battles. It took me a lot of willpower and effort to go through the final hours of the game, and the ending was even worse. 

Mass Effect has Effected me Massively

I've been spending a lot of time playing Mass Effect in this month. Started from April, now I've done beating all three games which took me more than 90 hours, and what a memorable experience it has been! Some of the greatest RPG moments of my life since playing Dragon Age: Origins. The only low point was the ending in Mass Effect 3; the last 20 minutes of the game, to be precise. That portion was really, really lame and I wish the developers dedicated a little bit more time in thinking out the finale. 

I am glad I started playing RPG games in 2009. Previously, I did not really understand the concept well, which caused a lot of frustration on my part. I remember buying Mass Effect 1 back in 2008, when the game was first released. I tried to play it like a FPS, and I desperately hated all the stuff outside the fights, i.e. walking from point A to B to talk to people and recruit them. I would skip all the dialogues, and did not wait to buy items or level up my companions. Result--premature death of the companions and my inability to progress much farther in the game. I think I stopped playing after I was sent to a distant planet where I was supposed to navigate the terrain using a rover. I didn't even know how to get my squad out of that car, and I got stuck in an area from where I could progress no more. Deeply pissed off, I uninstalled the game and didn't bother to replay it in about four years time.

I also remember getting pissed off at Garrus for inviting himself in to my squad. I thought "What the hell, I already have Ashley and Kaidan, why do I need you?" and so on. I hated every walk down (without throwing bullets) and I hated every conversation. I also made a female Shepard, which decreased the immersion value to a great extent. While I enjoy using female characters in RPG games a lot, but I know believe that at least the first play through should be via a male character, with whom I can immerse myself and do the role playing in a better way.

So the Shepard in Mass Effect was actually me--I was taking all the decisions, and Shepard was just letting others know. I recruited all possible companions and waded through all the missions of the three games, trying not to skip many side missions. I did skip some of them in ME1 due to the tedious navigation system, but I didn't miss any in ME3 and only missed a few DLC missions involving a hovercraft like vehicle in ME2.

Apart from a few design choice flaws, the entire trilogy is an RPG gamer's dream come true, and if you have the remotest interest in planets ans space travelling, you will love to immerse yourself in Mass Effect's world.

The only grievance I have is about the ending. It couldn't have been worse. I won't give any spoilers here, but I surely hope they can fix the damage done with the epilogue video they are currently making. 

Sick About FPS Games...

I used to be a big fan of first person shooters, with slight preference towards arena games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. I've spent hundreds of hours playing Q3A and UT since these games came out more than a decade ago, and recently I played through the Q3A (not team arena, the original game) single player campaign once again to reinvigorate my interest in FPS (first person shooter) games. I enjoyed every minute of playing Q3A; the final confrontation with Xaero was as good as ever, but unfortunately, that's as much as I could get my teeth in to FPSs.

I thought after replaying Q3A, I'd feel more interested to play through some modern FPS games like Battlefield Bad Company 2, Duke Nukem Forever, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, etc., but I couldn't really bring myself to playing any of these games. I did install and play DNF for a while, but even the new age Duke could not interest me much. I have been reading a lot of good stuff about MW3, and I also went to the store to buy it, but as soon as I picked up the DVD box, a silent alarm started ringing in my head which said "Don't waste your money, you'll never end up playing this!".

Instead of buying MW3, I came back home, dug my classics collection and re-installed a couple of old real time strategy games that I really enjoy(ed) playing. These are: Age of Mythology (AOM) and Lord of The Rings: Battle for Middle Earth (LOTR: BFME). I already finished AOM and AOM Titan's campaigns and I started playing the evil campaign in BFME, which I've always wanted to beat but never ended up doing.

I had a blast playing AOM and AOMT as I'm now an experienced gamer. When these games first came out, my primary objective was to beat them as soon as possible so that I could move on to other games. That was when I was still in my 20s. But now, at this point of time in my life, instead of having a rushed lunch, I wanted to try a relaxed meal with starters, 2nd dishes, desserts and even coffee, which resulted in a bigger and better playing experience.

I discovered a lot of optional quests, previously unseen areas, eccentricities and new ways of winning the same battles. The memory of my last gameplay was quite vague, as it's at least 8 years old, but still glimpses came back to me while I was playing, and I found some of the rather tough and irritations missions to be quite intriguing and innovative. Instead of rush based battles, I followed more turtling, and only attacked the enemies when I had a sizeable force, which means upgraded units with all sorts of armors and weapons. Previously I solely concentrated on the mythological units, but this time around, my armies were balanced and often the human units played a better part in the battles.

Both of the above mentioned games are quite old. AOM was released in 2002 and BFME in 2006. I played AOM campaign twice before (I did not finish the 2nd playthrough) and BFME good campaign twice. When I was playing BFME, memories of the movie was fresh in my mind and I just couldn't force myself to be on the evil side and watch the hobbits and the members of the fellowship die helplessly.

However, this time around, I am happily killing the good people and having a blast trying out the different unit combinations of Isengard and Mordor army. BFME was built upon a modified C&C: Generals engine, which has served Electronic Arts (EA) quite well. In fact, versions of this engine was used as recently as in the expansion for Red Alert 3, which is still a relatively new game.

Before getting in to the RTS games again, I've spent a significant time playing only RPG games. I believe I've spent the better part of years 2009 to 2011 Q2 playing Neverwinter Nights, Witcher, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. I am still playing DA2, and even after 5-6 playthroughs, I still enjoy the battles. Albeit the story has become stale and nowadays I skip most dialogues. The new expansions (Mark of The Assassins and Legacy) are quite interesting, though.

Especially, Mark of The Assassins was a welcome change of pace and I look forward to playing it again. However, it is pretty much frustrating in one aspect--you need a high lever player character before attempting the expansion, or else you will keep on dying. Even with a healer character, all my companions died in my very first battle when I tried beating MAO at around level 5 or 6.

Unlike DA:O expansions, MAO can't be played after beating the main game. That is, you can't play it with your previous save games. Thus even if you've beaten the game with a two handed warrior before, you can't use him to play MAO--you need to start a new game with a new incarnation of a two handed warrrior in order to play it, and which also means you have to level up this new character up to at least 10-15 levels (beating Act 2 will take you there) until you get a feel of Talis, the new female companion available in MAO.

I've also bought and installed Stronghold 3, the new version of an old castle building game, and I am finding it quite frustrating. There are two types of campaigns in the game, military and economic. I started off with the economic campaign, and I had to leave the game within 15 minutes--cause a rogue bear massacred my whole city! I thought this was the "economic" campaign where I was supposed to focus on resource gathering and building, but I didn't realise that the poor villagers needed protection, too. I had the poor excuse of a lone soldier; a settler with a weird looking pike (which actually resembled a rake rather than a pike) who was killed by a solitary pawing attack from the rabid bear! Even the apple farmers were tougher, they ran for their lives and took a couple of blows before going down.

I am yet to read a review of Stronghold 3; I just bought the game because I wanted to play a new RTS game. I also bought Cities XL 2011 sometime ago, but that game didn't really interest me much due to the sub-par graphics and complicated gameplay. I found the learning curve for Cities XL to be a bit higher than my current patience level.

As for SH3, I just read the wiki and found out that the game is heavily bugged and there's already a number of patches out. I guess I should apply the patches before attempting it again.

So I guess that's the current gaming update from me. It's been a while since I wrote anything like this, and I am feeling good after getting this done.