Ireland Unified

Yesterday I “completed” another game of Crusader Kings II, this time playing as the Count of Dublin. By “completed” I mean that I made my in-game goal, the unification of Ireland. I still need considerable practice at realm management, however, as Ireland promptly fell apart upon my death. Next time I may play a nation like France and work on that.

Then again, there is so much to Crusader Kings 2 that I could play forever and basically never be done exploring all it has to offer, even without the new expansion The Old Gods (which I will grab when it goes on sale, likely this summer) or the next two years of additional DLC that have recently been announced.

The Simulation Wargame

In theory, the kind of historical simulations pioneered by SPI should feel right at home as computer games. As wargames evolved, there was a trend toward great and greater scope and complexity, culmination in things like Campaign for North Africa, where you kept track of individual fighter pilots and jerrycans of fuel, and wound up a game considered unplayable, even lauaghably so. On the other hand, if you could automate all of that data and as much of the gruntwork of play as possible…

Despite some early attempts at adaptation, however, true historical simulation has never seen much traction in the video game world. There are plenty of games with themes that are military or historical of both… but mostly they’re shooters like, say, Day of Defeat, or vaguely historically themed RTS titles like Company of Heroes that don’t pretend to be authentic and which aren’t simulations or even strategy games, really.

There are exceptions, though, and the biggest one is the line of strategy games from Paradox Interactive. These are the heirs of the SPI line in computer game form, grand strategy simulations where you can play (in most cases) as any nation in the world, at any time in the relevant period, and they can almost, at least superficially, play themselves. They are, unsurprisingly, still pretty challenging to play, especially with an unfriendly interface, massive amounts of information and sketchy tutorials. But they’re not insurmountable.

I’ve been futzing of late with Crusader Kings II, the least military-oriented of the Paradox strategy games (Hearts of Iron being the most.) CK2 runs basically like a dynasty simulator, where a major focus is marrying off your family members is such a way as to build the proper alliances and ensure that your descendants (who you’ll play) are in better positions than you. You can expand your realm by military conquest but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass and seldom as simple as raising an army and marching it on in. And you don’t have unlimited freedom to do it; you need a claim on a neighbor’s province to make war over it, although such a claim can be fabricated.

It is difficult — my first game playing as the Petty King (Duke) of Gwynnedd ended with me dying in prison. But it’s pretty compelling. My second and third games, as Munster and Gwynnedd again, are still ongoing, and I’ve finally started feeling like I’m playing the game rather than letting it play itself.

Changing Categories

With the windup to Origins and all the other stuff I have going on, there’s been very little gaming happening. I haven’t played Neverwinter (or indeed anything else) since before the recent exploit/rollback flap. What I have been doing, here and there, is digging board and war games out of the closet. There’s a decent chance of playing some at Origins.

What strikes me, though, having been doing a great deal of poking around lately, is how board wargaming has managed to survive — by changing. There’s still plenty of the of hex-and-counter stuff getting produced, as it turns out. You just have to be paying attention in the right places. But there’s also stuff like The Napoleonic Wars, which even ten years ago (about when I started to drift away) would have been huffily declared by hardcore wargamers to be “not a wargame.”

Nobody thinks that now. Furthermore, the crop of “card-driven” games starting with We the People seem to have invigorated the hobby. They’re more game and less simulation than the old school stuff, but there’s a ton of them on a wide array of subjects from the Napoleonic Wars (duh) to World War II and the Second Punic War or the Protestant Reformation. (A lot, but not all, of these games are from GMT, and the system itself is tight and relatively simple in the examples I’ve seen.) The common definition of “wargame” has drifted, and while the old stuff is still around, there’s now more in the category that would have often been excluded years ago.

The definition of “MMORPG” is changing in the same way. the old category wasfairly narrow and the current one is much broader. Some folks are still stuck inside the old borders of the category. Which isn’t really profitable for them, although it’s perfectly fine to prefer one particular corner of the field over the rest.

The Wargaming Urge

Wargames were my doorway into gaming. Not this Warhammer crap that passes as such these days, or even the historcal minis, but the old school, counter-and-hexgrid wagames in the style of SPI and Avalon Hill.

This kind of wargame has seen better days. SPI got itself seized by TSR, Avalon Hill sold out to Hasbro, and waves of RPGs, CCGs, EuroGames and video games have all taken their toll. What’s left is a tiny nubbin of what used to be.

But what’s left is not nothing. There are still a few companies turning out cool and even remarkable games. Which maybe aren’t the same kind of games we would have seen ten or twenty years ago, but one could make an argument that the EuroGames trend in particular has had a big impact.

Thinking about this lately has encouraged me to go through my very small stock of remaining war (and related) games. I no longer own anything from SPI, thanks to many years of selloffs and the water damage that claimed my copy of the StarForce Trilogy. A lot of my Avalon Hill stuff is similarly gone. And my GDW titles, except for the science fiction ones that I still have as part of my Traveller collection. Truth be told, I’m not sure where half of this stuff went.

But from Avalon Hill I still own Titan, Advanced Civilization and Republic of Rome, a particular favorite. I still own World in Flames and a bunch of the addons (but I forget which ones, and everything is mixed together.) I still have the first several Panzer Grenadier items from Avalanche, and that’s a damn fine game. West End Games’ Imperium Romanum II will leave my collection only when pried from my cold, dead hands.

And I have a stack of GMT titles, not all of which are even old; they were the one company that I still kept up with a bit as I’ve drifted out of wargaming for the last ten years or so. Those guys are doing some great things even today, especially in eras that have seldom been touched by wargame designers, like the (pictured) Onward Christian Soldiers, an operational-level game about the first three Crusades. Oddly enough I lack of interest in anything they do with World War II or the American Civil War, two of the three traditionally most fertile eras for wargaming, but the third is Napoleonic era, in which is set their impressive-looking (but unplayed by me) The Napoleonic Wars. They also did a couple of really nice and very out of print operational-level Roman Republic games which I have played and adore.

I’m in the middle of an itch to do some of this stuff again. I opened up Onward Christian Soldiers yesterday and finished punching, clipping and organizing it so that it’s finally ready to play. Which I may or may not get the chance to do soon. There’s a local club but I’ve lived here for four years and have yet to make it to a meeting. There’s also Origins in less than a month, a show I’ll be attending and maybe even blogging from. So maybe there’ll be a chance to push some cardboard counters around then.

Neverwinter’s Neverdeath Graveyard

One of these days I will try to clarify exactly what Ardwulf Presents is supposed to be; either quick overviews, feature showcases, or playalongs. But not today.

Here we have a look at Neverwinter’s Neverdeath Graveyard, a zone you’ll hit in the high 20s. Still having fun with the game, although the desire to make videos about it is actually throttling my progress.

The Good Old Stuff in Neverwinter

Neverwinter might turn out to be the surprise MMO hit of 2013. It wasn’t even supposed to be an MMO, until it was pulled back by the newly-purchased Cryptic to be developed into one. I think few were taking it seriously, and yet now it seems to be liked by almost everyone that I’m paying attention to. It is, I think, the full flowering of Cyrptic’s freemium model, without the baggage that comes from having current or former subscribers that you have to be careful not to piss off.

Now, I do have concerns about the game’s staying power. The actual amount of dev-scripted content in the game is actually pretty lean… but there’s lots of repeatable stuff, and the Foundry. And we’re seeing signs that some remarkable stuff will be coming from that. Which brings me to today’s video.

This is a reproduction, using the Foundry, of the classic D&D module The Keep on the Borderlands, adapted within the confines of the engine and suitable for solo play. It’s not how I would personally have tried to do such an adaptation… but that such things are even remotely possible is very exciting. The Forgotten Realms setting along with the possibility of revisting the classic adventure sites of old school D&D might make Neverwinter very alluring indeed.

No video game can capture the openness of tabletop RPGs, of course, and MMOs in particular have been moving mostly in the opposite direction for several years. But there’s still a potent D&D nostalgia that can be tapped, and the brilliance of the Cryptic approach is that they don’t have to pay devs to do it. Said content won’t have the quality control of professionally-developed stuff, either, but enough of it will be good enough. And in principle as assets get added to the game the Foundry should become more and more capable. If we can get this kind of stuff a week into “open beta,” the user generated content we see a year or two from now should be genuinely amazing.

Also, personally, I am enjoying the game. Lots of respectable titles have bored me right out of my chair well before 20 hours in, and I hit that (and level 25 on my Control Wizard) in Neverwinter over the weekend and have no intention of stopping now.

Neverwinter Day 3 Vids

The Neverwinter servers may still be down, but yuou can get more goodies right here! This time around we take a look at the game’s first group dungeon, the Cloak Tower, and have a crack at Foundry content for the first time.