Lugaru – An Interesting Indie Game

I discovered Lugaru by visiting GameDevBlog, something I encourage anyone who is interested in the industry to do.

Lugaru is one of the many games that populate ManifestoGames.com a site dedicated to indie games. It has some incendiary things to say about the industry as well, but I won’t go into it here. I’ll just post an excerpt from their manifesto and then move on.

“An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation. A field that once prized creativity and novelty has become so risk averse that it will fund only franchise titles and licensed drivel; a medium that once spun off whole new genres practically every year has instead become one in which only games that slot into accepted marketing categories can be published.”

In any case, Lugaru is as the title states, an interesting indie game. Now while “interesting” can be used to describe things from intriguing, to a polite fashion of letting people know that something smells like horse manure, I assure you that Lugaru is more of the former then the latter. In fact, Lugaru is quite fun. Even as a demo.

Lugaru’s premise sounds like Watership Down in the sense that the player is trying to liberate his bunny friends. That is, it would if it wasn’t for the fact that we have a bipedal bunny in camo leggings going all Jet Li all over some wolves and traitorous bunnies. So throw some Once Upon a Time in China in there as well.

What makes Lugaru so interesting is its control scheme. Rather then using a series of button combinations that requires fifteen inputs, Lugaru uses a context based system. So while holding shift may make you crouch, holding shift and moving forward will cause you to sneak. Holding shift and clicking will also allow you sweep out the legs of your opponent, thus letting give him a vicious kicking. Hey, war is rough. And I haven’t even mentioned what you can do with weapons =D.

Best moment though? AI is reaching down to pick up the knife a dead comrade dropped. So I tried to do a spin kick to give him some second thoughts. Turns out I wasn’t close enough to hit him, just the body of his friend. Said body goes rising into the air and smashes said knife-grabbing-bunny in the face, sending him flying. Then I picked up the knife and threw it into his chest. Rock on.

The AI is no slouch though. This is not your mindless beat-em-up style game. Two opponents at once is bad news. It behooves the player to try to take out his enemies one at a time if at all possible. Or you could get a vicious beating from two bunnies at once, you choice. So when the AI runs, which it does quite a bit when it starts getting the short end of the stick, it’s a good idea to stop him from doing a runner.

While learning the controls takes some time at first, it really does not take much time to get handy with them. What I really liked about Lugaru was that it was never a dull moment. I always had to pay attention to what my opponent was doing, and where I was fighting to prevent additional enemies from joining in. After playing countless MMOs where all I had to do was press the same buttons in sequence over and over, this was a welcome change.

If I had to make one suggestion after what little I have seen of the game, it would be that the game needs more audio cues. Especially when it comes to fighting. Having the animations go a little slower might help as well. Oftentimes to reverse an attack, I just find myself mashing the shift key to anticipate it. Of course, that could just be a sign of my newbishness =P.

So the question is, would I recommend this game for someone to buy? Personally, I would not buy this game, but that is only because I’m just not looking for a game like this right now. I need me an RPG.

Time to browse some more games at Manifesto!

MMORPG Gameplay Mechanics

The current trend in MMO mechanics frustrates me.

What I mean is that the current way that a character is controlled feels lackluster. The “press-101-hotkeys” is an imperfect system in my mind.

Let me explain. The hotkey system does have its advantages. The most obvious one is that it’s simple. It doesn’t take much time for someone to learn, and its easy enough that a child could use it effectively. This system of control also allows for many different abilities to be created, while allowing the user to place them in their interface as they need in order to access them. This system has worked well for the MMORPG industry for quite sometime.

However, there are downsides:

1) Quite frankly, its a very uninteresting control scheme. It caps off the dexterity skill level at a very low level by default. Few classes in any MMO game require any significant amount of dexterity or muscle memory to achieve max level of play. Systems of magic suffer from this the most in my mind. To fire off a spell in most RPGs simply involves firing and forgetting.
2) The “101-hotkey” system benefits those who have the time to research and learn all the minute details of the game. Rather then getting better over time with play through muscle memory, players can only get better if they sort through and read reams of information on forums after a certain point. While reading tutorials and such is always helpful no matter what game one plays, it reaches an absurd level with an MMO. It certainly does not help that there are no in-game tutorial sequences when a player is given a new ability (though to be honest, many skills are pretty homogeneous across all MMOs).

What would I rather see? I would probably take the combat system of say, Oblivion and fine-tune it to make it deeper. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic had the right idea, but suffered from a lack of implementation. I would focus more on the combination of buttons performing different effects rather then having a different button for each different action. I would raise the dexterity skill level and decrease the importance of following the metagame in order to learn how to play.

Of course, developers chose to make MMOs with this hotkey scheme for a reason. While I don’t know all the arguments for the current system, I think I have a decent grasp on the ideas why it is so prevalent (besides the fact that it works, the game industry is by nature rather Luddite when it comes to new ideas for financial reasons). I just don’t think that the current hotkey regime is the only way to create an interesting gameplay experience.