So as I’ve mentioned before I often read “The CRPG Addict” while waiting for compiles and installs, because I need something to occupy my time and reading things works better because it’s basically random access: I can stop and start reading and go back incredibly easily when things finish or I get interrupted. Something that he’s been recommending a few times is the book “Dungeons & Desktops”, and so when I decided to pick up some things from Amazon I decided to order it. There are two notable things about it from my perspective. The first is that the version I got is the second edition, which supposedly adds in some modern games which weren’t in the first edition. The second is that it cost about twice as much as I would usually be willing to spend on such a book, so the pressure was on for it to be an entertaining read and so a book that I might want to reread to make the extra cost worth it.
Fortunately, the book turned out pretty well. It’s an interesting summary of the history of video games, starting from their inspiration from tabletop games up to the modern era, and covers how they evolved, how they succeeded, and how they failed. It even takes the time to note that some of the big series — Ultima and Might & Magic — pretty much ended up failing in the exact same way, although it didn’t cover that much of the Mass Effect debacle (although it mentions it). The authors also fill in things a bit with their own personal experiences with some of the games which is a nice touch and stops the book from being a dry and technical history which makes it more fun to read. And the book is fairly comprehensive, going through a ton of games and talking about some of them in detail. So, overall, the book was an entertaining read which help me get through it quickly while watching curling and not getting overly distracted by the curling while reading it.
I needed to start with the praise because the rest of this post is going to consist of some nitpicks about the book and then a longer discussion about RPGs and about games in general spawned from it. So I needed to make it clear that I did enjoy the book before I start complaining about it.
The first nitpick is that at times, the two authors engage in short conversations with each other. These conversations are … less than successful. The problems I had with them is that they rarely followed directly from the text and so seemed to be there just to be there, tried to be funny but came at times where we didn’t need comic relief, weren’t all that funny besides, and also were often a bit mean-spirited, where Shane Stacks would say something and Matt Barton would basically insult him or at least express what I felt was an undue frustration with what was said. There are a lot of these early on but fortunately they fade away as we get into the book proper and only return a couple more times right at the end.
The second nitpick is that despite the fact that I bought the book because The CRPG Addict mentioned it, they don’t mention him very much. All they do is use one of his screenshots and have two comments where he says the game they are talking about is terrible. They do recommend him at the end of the book, but when they were trying to define what it means to be a CRPG for example it wouldn’t have killed them to have referenced the detailed definition that he used and has refined over the years. There were a number of times where referencing him would have made sense and it was a bit disappointing that they didn’t.
The final nitpick is that while there is a significant amount of research in the book, it has a tendency to focus on the games that they know and played and often leaves some of the others out. For example, when talking about modern JRPGs they basically mention the Persona games as, to paraphrase Kor’s comment to Worf in DS9, “and they were there, too”, despite the fact that that series is probably the most influential of the modern JRPGs and might well be the epitome of of the modern JRPG. Since it builds in the romances from CRPGs to a level unseen outside of them, it certainly had an interesting link there and was innovative, and so it probably deserved more attention than it got … especially since they tried to comment on which one was the best and seemed to pick Persona 5 by default. And while I can forgive them for not mentioning Shadow Hearts when talking about older JRPGs that they didn’t even mention the Suikoden series in their list of games at the end is a bit harder to forgive, given its long lineage and unique character interactions and stories. They also lament the lack of superhero CRPGs, but don’t even mention the X-Men Legends/Marvel Ultimate Alliance games — again, even in the list of games at the end — despite the fact that the games appeared on PC — at least from X-Men Legends 2 — and are clearly ARPGs, which they talk about. Finally, they talk about Dark Age of Camelot but focus on Realm vs Realm, which is fair, but imply that the different realms heavily focused on different aspects, like the Norse realm focusing on melee, which is misleading since one of the wonderful things about the game is that each realm contains interesting and lore-specific implementations of all of the major class distinctions, and so the Norse realm has strong mages and ranged classes as well, and the others have strong melee classes, like the Paladin class that I tend to play in the Arthurian realm. While the book itself is interesting and covers a lot, there are a number of things that a reader can complain about wrt how they treat games that the reader knows and likes better than they do. This might be one of the fun things about such a book, but if the complaints are serious enough it hurts it as a history.
And the final thing I want to talk about is the one thing that separates them — and the CRPG Addict — from me is that they really do like the combat in RPGs, and consider good combat a key to a good CRPG … which is something that I don’t really agree with, seeing combat as, in general, the thing that I need to get through in order to get to the fun parts of a CRPG. In fact, one of my biggest fears with CRPGs is that the combat is going to be too hard for me and will prevent me from finishing the game, which is one reason why I haven’t finished VTM: Bloodlines. Given their research, though, this has been one of the things that CRPG game makers have always considered important as well, which again is why I end up being afraid to play those games knowing that if the combat is too difficult I will get very frustrated and might get myself into a situation where I’m not powerful or skilled enough to beat a key combat and so will have to quit without finishing the game … which has happened to me in the past.
But this struck me as creating an issue that is relatively unique for CRPGs, because they are games that from the start and from their tabletop origins always combined a number of different elements into it. Yes, we’ve had cross-genre games, but CRPGs are pretty much cross-genre by definition. The elements of a CRPG have always included a great story, great characters, great combat, interesting magic and leveling systems and interesting and varied equipment. So in its very genre it has these different elements that are crucially a part of it, although different games may focus on some elements and not others. However, what this means is that different gamers may be attracted to different aspects of a game. Some players may come for the combat, some for the story, some for the characters, and so on. But what this means is that they may not, in fact, actually like the other aspects of the game, which means that they have to try to put up with them to get to what they actually want to do in the game. As noted, I’m the sort of player who is there primarily for the story and characters. If the combat is too difficult or too prevalent, I may bail on or have to bail on the game and not get to experience that story, which will be disappointing and will sour me on the series as a whole. On the other hand, players who are there primarily for the combat might get frustrated at all the times the game stops to relate the story and keeps them from moving on to what they really want to do.
So CRPGs need to balance these aspects, and from the book it looks like what most of them did was either to try to maximize everything or else focused a lot on the combat and made the story basically work. The game that I think has balanced these things the best is indeed the aforementioned Persona games, as on Easy the combat is easily manageable and yet the combat system has the depth that even a story gamer benefits from paying attention to it and, in fact, generally has to pay attention to it to make it work, but with careful planning can usually minimize their grinding — especially in 4 and 5 — to focus on the story and character aspects, while someone who prefers the combat has a lot of ways to minimize the story to make the combat dominate their gaming experience more often. And yet my worry about Persona 5 is that each of these elements are becoming so complicated and prominent that if you don’t like one of them you have to spend too much time and effort doing them, which will make them more frustrating. And so I think attempts to define a CRPG as having to have all of these elements are doing the genre a disservice, as it forces them to include all of them and attempt to make them all to the level of those who really, really like those elements means that they can turn off those gamers who don’t like all the elements and prefer some elements to others. But trying to minimize some of those elements leads to things like ARPGs and debates over whether things are really CRPGs at all, which isn’t good for CRPGs and so not going to help them gain mainstream appeal.
At any rate, the book is a good examination of the history of CRPGs, which makes it a must read for people who like CRPGs and either played those older games or want to know where the newer games came from.
Thoughts on “Dark Ages: Nosferatu”
March 28, 2023So as I’ve said before, what I’m currently reading in the time I have set aside just to read — which is generally while eating or watching curling or baseball — is a collection of White Wolf Vampire the Masquerade novels set in the Dark Ages — yes, that’s the name of the series — that I had picked up from a used bookstore ages ago, tried reading once at lunch but never managed to finish. Sorting through my boxes of old books I came across them and set out to finally finish reading them.
The first book in the series starts with the famous sacking of Constantinople. A leader of the Noserferatu, Malachite, recounts to us that the leaders of the city, especially the Ventrue Michael, had been predicting that this would become a great, golden city represented by Michael’s Dream for the Cainites (vampires, which in this universe are seen as being caused by the curse God put on Caine). Malachite is deeply attached to the Dream, and sets out to see if Michael still lives and so if the Dream still lives. Once he discovers that Michael is dead, he sets out to find one of the others who created the Dream with Michael to see if the Dream can be reborn. He also becomes attached to a human servant of another Cainite from another clan, who is transferred to him so that her mistress, Alexia, can come with him to seek out an oracle of her clan and so that he might ask a question on Alexia’s behalf. After a number of travails, they make it to the oracle they are seeking, only to have it revealed that he had indeed met with the Cainite he sought and was rejected by him because he treated him like an insane old man, and Alexia does not get her answer either. And, even worse, the human he cared for ended up being the sacrifice he needed to make to get the oracle in the first place.
When I was doing my reading of historical works, this siege came up a number of times because of the folly of a Christian Crusade’s only achievement being the sacking and burning of a major Christian city. What was nice about this book is that it really does dive into what that experience would have been like, which is really what I want from a book set in a historical context. Whether it’s entirely historically accurate or not is really beside the point as long as it presents it in a way that makes sense. And the book also doesn’t shy away from representing Christianity itself as being important, especially to the Cainites, despite them seemingly being cursed about this, a fact that will carry on in the next few books. So the historical aspects are well-done.
Malachite himself is an interesting character, with some interesting plot points. He is trying to save a young Cainite child who has the gift of prophecy, as he has fallen into a strange coma and his two siblings have died from that. He is dedicated to the Dream and wants to revive it, and he is impressed by and has an interesting relationship with the human that he ends up sacrificing, which makes the sacrifice scene more poignant. He also has to manage some interesting political realities, not the least of which is with Alexia, whom he needs but doesn’t trust, and who is actually lying to him, but also with some other factions of Cainites that can be more or less friendly to him at times, as well as Alexia’s own clan that aren’t all that happy with her quest. It’s to the book’s credit that it manages to interweave all of these different elements together without making the book feel overstuffed. The book does this by weaving all around the central figure of Malachite as things that he has to deal with and that come about naturally because of what he’s doing and his specific goals. Since he’s sympathetic, we see these as obstacles he must overcome rather than an overly complicated plot that we, the reader, must deal with.
The one issue that I have follows from Malachite being sympathetic, however. The sequence with the Cainite that he was seeking — the Dracon — is a very standard trope where someone who is seeking a teacher or authority figure is tested by them presenting themselves as something humble and then judging them based on how they react to that. This, for example, is what Yoda did to Luke in “The Empire Strikes Back”. But given all the obstacles that Malachite faced and all of his worries, that he’d react badly to someone that he has just met and who seems to be wasting his time when he is pressed for time to at least save the Cainite boy is understandable, especially given that the Dracon doesn’t give him any indication that he is the Dracon or someone of importance. So it doesn’t really seem like Malachite himself has failed and so deserves rejection, but seems more like the Dracon is treating him unfairly. And since we like Malachite and, at least, if we aren’t completely versed in the VTM universe have no reason to think the Dracon particularly wise, that makes us think worse of the Dracon and makes Malachite’s failure there less tragedy and more something to rail at. Contrast this to the sacrifice of the human that he was attached to and that does seem like a tragedy, something that he needed to do to seek the Dream, and that when the information turns out to be something he can’t use it’s the tragedy of a sacrifice that he needed to make but that ultimately did not give him what he wanted.
That being said, it’s a pretty good book. It does what we want the first book in a series to do, as it sets out the world and what we need to know to understand what’s going on, sets up enough plot elements for later books so that we can easily see the connection between them and so they don’t have to spend a lot of time introducing the general plot and can focus only on their specific issues, and is interesting enough in its own right that we feel that the series is likely to be interesting. I liked the book but will comment at the end of the series of 13 books — not all of which I have — whether or not I’d read it, and the series, again.
Tags:horror, White Wolf's Dark Ages
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