Sledge on 30/11/2002 at 09:00

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(part 2)


Sound: 6

The ambients in Arx are for the most part great. Most of the sound is very subtle, but very creepy and atmospheric. There was more than a time or two when I was reminded of some of my creepiest moments in Thief. The ambients help set the scene and set up tension at the right moments.

The sound effects were also mostly pretty good and themed appropriately. Little details, for me, seemed to highlight the overall atmosphere. For example, the ground always sounds dirty wherever you walk, making the whole of Arx seem used and dingy.

The voice acting I would say is not that great for a lot of the humans, but is fantastic for the creatures! The goblin and troll voices manage to be mean, funny, and stupid at the same time, which adds a lot of life to them and makes them distinct from their human counterparts.

Despite the quality, however, sound remained a low point for me. The thing that killed the sound was the (lack of) propogation. It was painfully obvious that sound constantly bled through walls and wasn’t blocked properly when it should have been. This hurt both the atmosphere and infringed on some of my stealthy gameplay moments. There were also quite a few moments when ambients were abruptly cut off or started too quickly.

Sound seemed good on the creative end, but needed a little more help on the programming side.

First Person Body Awareness: N/A

I thought I’d give this a separate heading since it’s a fairly new innovation.

The first person body awareness in Arx I mostly like. Being able to see your character’s legs helped in navigation and jumping, which was a big plus. Also, being able to look down and see what leggings you’re wearing is downright cool, and a good way to encourage players to try out new armor.

One of the worst things I noticed though was that the player could never sprint or run. While this made sense in town, since you don’t often see people sprinting around in public for no apparent reason, it was a bit weird in combat. You can never run away from monsters, only walk away briskly!

I also felt a little disappointed you couldn’t see your torso. This meant you didn’t get any feedback for the chest armor that you were wearing. Chest body awareness would have also been a good place to put some damage feedback, but alas, no go.



Meta Game: 8

Character attributes and skills are set up nicely, with a straightforward interface dependent on level-gaining for improvement. All of the skills you can choose from are readily applicable in the game world and each has its use. The meta screen feedback you get is also extremely useful – when you run your mouse over a skill it will tell you exactly how you apply that skill in the simulation.

The auto map they have works very well too. Because some areas are built without any real landmarks (especially some of the caverns in levels 2 and 5), the map can be an invaluable tool in navigating and in finding new areas.

The journal system they have is a nice idea, but unfortunately is pretty useless. Instead of containing information about objectives and where you’re supposed to go next, it instead keeps track of what you’ve already accomplished and denotes vague fictional references that don’t help you in the least. This was a big missed opportunity, especially considering that some of the puzzles in Arx are so difficult.

Gameplay: 8.5

Ok, now this is where things get tricky. At its best, Arx is an awesome first person rpg, with lots of cool emergent scenarios and badass core gameplay. At its worst, Arx is a horribly console-like “solve the scripted puzzle” game, with frustratingly difficult push-button sequences and forced path scenarios.

Core Gameplay

The core gameplay in Arx is hugely fun. You get to explore lots of dark environments, and there is a real feeling of discovery as you journey from place to place. Finding items, gaining experience, and using your skills are all great core gameplay. Arx is really successful in getting the player excited to find new unexplored areas; not only is there the promise of more booty, but there is also the promise of new visuals, new characters, and opportunities to do new things.

Combat is fairly simple, but works well. The “feel” is really cool, enhanced by good blood effects and sound effects. Strategy it’s a pretty straight-forward circle-strafe and hack solution, but for the most part the system is well balanced and the monsters aren’t too horribly difficult… at least until late in the game.

Spell casting is likewise fun, though during combat the specificity with which you have to draw the runes can be a little frustrating (I still to this day get Movis and Taar mixed up). Still, the interface is pretty neat once you get the hang of it, and the ability to bind pre-cast spells to hotkeys makes things a bit more user-friendly.

The stealth system, at its core, is one of the best I’ve seen in a game. It’s simulated (not emulated, as is often the case), and is based on lighting and sneaking, much like Thief. Like Deus Ex, there is one level of partial failure for stealth – a state where the AI investigates, but doesn’t know for sure you’re there. This is very forgiving in the context of the game and allows a competent player to sneak around with a good sense of feedback. However, unfortunately, many of the environments in Arx do not support a stealth solution. This is particularly frustrating in areas of sourceless light… a hindrance to both visuals and gameplay. Some designers just weren’t careful about this aspect of gameplay. Also, another thing which really hurts the stealth model is that it is only used to set up kills and is not treated as a solution in and of itself. This ties into the weakness of the way in which the player gains experience (see below). However, even with this weakness it manages to best the likes of other popular stealth driven games, such as NOLF2 and MGS.

The biggest pitfall of core gameplay ties into the experience system. The largest systemic source of experience you have in Arx is from killing things. This is bad because your means of attaining power and experience often directly conflict with the fiction of the game. For instance, there was a unique fiction sidequest where I obtained a troll amulet. There were cutscenes related to this quest and unique items made for it. It’s obvious this was a Cool Thing the designers wanted me to do. The problem is, it’s to my direct benefit to say screw the amulet and go hack up every troll I see anyway. After I get the amulet, it’s even in my benefit to chop down the troll who gave it to me.

Another important point to note here is that cutscenes will not trigger if certain characters are dead, and there is often only one cutscene per fictional point. Thus, though the game is actually encouraging you to kill as many people as you can (because you get experience for it), if you do so you will miss out on important fiction. This is especially bad because almost none of the information you get from cutscenes is redundant with information you can find elsewhere in the world. (Note: this was one of the most successful things about Thief – important information could be gleaned from the briefing, from conversations, and from texts, so if you weren’t paying attention to one the same info could be found elsewhere).

This also means that stealth is mostly useless unless you’re going to backstab your enemy. Deus Ex solved this problem (mostly) by rewarding the player with experience upon reaching locations beyond enemy patrol points. However, they gave none for killing enemies, thus allowing you to get by a guard any way you wanted and be rewarded equally. I think this is a difficult point to argue because the assassination approach can be relatively valid and has worked in other games. My gut feeling, though, is that the stealth system in Arx is strong enough to stand on its own. It seems good enough where they could have taken even greater advantage of it had they wanted.

Another bad thing about killing people: the faction status of any given AI in Arx is emulated; AIs are linked together by some telepathic connection. It doesn’t matter if you kill a person and stash their body in a dark corner… everyone in the entire area will know you did it anyway. This means you can’t be a stealthy assassin, but pretty much have to have foreknowledge of who an AI’s friends are. This breaks down not only in general instances of attempted assassinations, but also in specific quest-related instances as well. For example, late in the game a ghost wanted me to avenge her death. I knew who her murderer was, but yet when I attacked him (to avenge the ghost), everyone in the whole area started attacking me.

This also means that you have to spend a whole lot of your skill points in either casting or in combat. You never get an opportunity to specialize in exactly the way you want because you’re always worried about fighting increasingly difficult enemies. If you don’t invest in these skills, you’ll quickly find yourself in Deep Trouble as the game moves forward.

Puzzles

Ok, so let’s move beyond core gameplay… what about the specific puzzles and quests? In short, the little puzzles and quests are by far the weakest things about the gameplay.

The one good thing about the individual puzzles is that the designers are mostly pretty good about putting the necessary items you’ll need in the immediate environment. Usually, you don’t have to travel very far in order to get the items you need to solve the puzzle. The biggest problems are that a lot of the scripted puzzles only have one solution (killing everyone in the area notwithstanding) and that it's easy to lose track of important items if you're not careful. In Arx, you have to meticulously pay attention to every little detail in the environment and keep everything that might even remotely be useful.

Further, a lot of the little scripted moments in Arx are just downright frustrating. Why do I have to make the beast in level 8 drown in the lava? I have an entire arsenal full of weapons and runes, and the entire rest of the game has been encouraging me to use them. There just doesn’t seem to be any benefit to having those moments in the game. The base of Arx is about exploration and about character building, like any good action rpg. A lot of the puzzles serve more as distractions and frustrating breaks rather than gameplay enhancers.

The things that I think could improve Arx the most are having less scripted puzzles, more solutions for key problems, and having the fiction react a little more to gameplay styles.

Overall: 8.5

Despite a few frustrating moments in this game I'd say it's a pretty incredible action rpg. There aren't very many studios who can pull off this type of game and this type of setting, but for what it's worth Arkane does a very fine job.

Raf on 1/12/2002 at 13:30

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Thanks for that review Sledge,
It's the kind of review that will really help us making a better game !!! I moslty agree with all your comments and I like the fact that you are able to explain what doesn't work !!
I agree on the stealth that hasn't been used as much as we could have (though there is the possibility to steal Krahoz from the rebels, a bit like in Thief), but we had problems integrating it properly due to the 'all in one' aspect of the game. I totally agree on the experience system which doesn't encourage the players to use stealth: we'll do it differently next time, you're so right about this, Deus Ex had a much better way to handle it ! Another failure you spoted is the fact that factions have telepatic connections when one of their people die : it's true, we're still thinking of a way to avoid this, but so far we haven't found a very good solution, as one of the obvious bad consequences is there are some key characters that we need for custcenes, so if the faction is not aware of their death we have a problem... about scripted puzzles, yes, some are pprobably a bit aout of target or too hard to figure out, we'll work on that too for the next one.
Now to answer some of your questions:
-Regarding the mithril sword before finding the book: you still can apply the koltk powder after the weapon is forged.
-Items won't disappear in the lava :)
-The black beast thing has been either loved or hated, so I guess it's a failure for us somehow... The initial intention was to put the player in a situation where fighting is not the solution, no matter how super strong he is, we wanted him to realise there is stronger than him.

xman on 2/12/2002 at 12:40

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This is a good idea.




This is NOT a good idea because it was precisely the fact that my super-warrior died in one hit that made me understand that combat was useless.




There's a "mini-beast" in Iserbius' hideout. Which means he is stronger than the beast. But I could kill him (as well as the mini-beast ;)) so I'm stronger than him. :D :sly:

Raf on 2/12/2002 at 18:57

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Sledge, your review is far from being hard, it's very helpful and some of your comments are very rewarding too :)



I'm often on this forum, I'm always interested in reading what people think of the game. Thanks for taking the time to post your comments, I'm sure you must be very busy on Thief3, and by the way Thief is one of my all time favourit game, and I'm waiting for T3 like crazy !!!!

Raf on 3/12/2002 at 22:12

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eheh :)
it's fun to play with people feelings ;)