Some time ago, I played Dragon Age: Origins. Back then, I expressedissueswith how it was paced, citing The Fade and The Deep Roads in particular as two segments of bad filler content. Recently, I have revisited the franchise with Dragon Age 2. Despite being in the same series, the two have quite different forms of pacing. Because of their differences, I think that taking a moment to compare the two of them and their structures should be interesting.
With Origins, the plot structure was modular. After the initial tutorial missions, the player is given free reign to take on the four plot branches that compose the middle of the game in any order they choose. Each of these modules has its own plot and locations, separate from the rest aside from one or two instances. At the end of the game, the player’s actions in these individual segments will be reflected back in the form of how each faction thinks of them and how much they are willing to help in the grand finale. The result is a fairly free-form gaming experience, within limits.
This structure allows Origins to give each module its own feel, but there is a drawback to this classic role-playing approach. When these sections can be so thoroughly quarantined from the others, it grants the developers freedom to make each part longer than it should be. In particular, the designers have the leeway to create overly long exploration and dungeon locations. Dragon Age: Origins had this problem in spades. Often, any single area could take several hours to complete, more-so if the player is going for total completion. Players could spend entire game sessions feeling that nothing was accomplished in that time. Obvious padding like The Fade and The Deep Roads, during the Circle Tower and Orzammar scenarios respectively, are chief examples of how this structure permitted Bioware to do this.
On the other hand, Dragon Age 2 manages to skirt that pitfall with its narrative structure, yet introduces new ones all the same. Rather than expand on Origin’s modularity, DA2 takes a different approach. Players spend all of Dragon Age 2 in the city of Kirkwall, watching it develop over the course of years. Each of the game’s three acts details key events of a particular year in Kirkwall’s history through the eyes of Hawke, the game’s customizable, yet constant, protagonist. With a distinct beginning, middle, and end, these acts serve as the way Bioware chosen to divide the story.
What is neat about this structure is that it forces a more focused plot. Since any given act has to feed into its successors, it cannot afford to tarry around with plot points that may never be touched on again in the future. Gradually, they all, by necessity, get woven together as the story progresses. Combined with the obvious signs of a limited development cycle, this focus carried on into the dungeon-crawling as well. While a single area could take hours in Origins, DA2 takes a more succinct approach. Locations will rarely, if ever, take over a half-hour to complete, which gives a much greater sense of accomplishment when checking the quest log after a long session. Individual plot elements and their handling can be debated on, but there is no denying that the plot structure for Dragon Age 2 lends to a faster pacing than its predecessor.
Having said that, pacing is in more than just a game’s narrative structure. Combat also tends to have its own tempo in RPGs like Dragon Age. Origins in particular had a slower, more methodical system. Enemies tended to have a fairly high amount of health, so even fights against small parties could take some time. Unfortunately for Bioware, since skill and equipment setups mattered significantly more than tactical planning mid-battle, conflicts were often decided from the outset.
Rather than go the route of its direct predecessor, Dragon Age 2 takes inspiration from its contemporaries, most notably the likes of Mass Effect 2. As with Origins, equipment and skill setups are important to one’s quality of life when going up against enemies. The difference here is that the moment-to-moment action has become equally as important, with an emphasis on faster combat. It can still be said that the player will steamroll most encounters in the game, but it feels more smooth than than of the previous game in the franchise, largely due to its accelerated pace.
Even if the overall combat’s pace is improved, there is problem that adversely affects it: Foes have a strong tendency to spawn in waves. When playing Dragon Age: Origins, the types and number of enemies in a given location was usually set in stone. Because players could see what they were about to fight, they could better plan their attack. Even if a single target took some time to beat down, it was possible to guess how long it will take to win.
This is not the case in Dragon Age 2. In most engagements, players will clear out a given set of enemies only to find that another group has spawned in, ready to fight to the death. Typically, any one fight will be composed of three waves in total. Though individual foes, and sometimes enemy groups, can be felled quickly, the fact that more will inevitably appear immediately afterwards makes it more difficult to anticipate how long a given encounter will take to complete. As a result, even if a fight is not long, it can be made to feel long thanks to how many mooks participate in a single battle. Even if Dragon Age 2 is better paced than Origins, this misstep starts to agitate after playing for a long time.

In terms of both story and combat, Dragon Age 2 drastically improves on the pacing of the game that came before. Enhancing the original structure by focusing the overall plot line and streamlining the fighting resulted in a much smoother flow. Though certain elements like the ending and obvious, blatant reuse of assets can be rightfully criticized by detractors, Dragon Age 2 is certainly worth defending in how it gives the player a strong feeling of progress.

In this episode, we discuss the puzzle design.

Puzzle design in video games is very difficult to get right. In the ideal world, each individual puzzle room will show you everything you’ll need to know in order to understand how to solve the puzzle. Because every person things has their own way of thinking, it is incredibly difficult to do this without outright telling the player how to solve it.

Lean too far in the direction of making the puzzle abstract, and there is a risk that the player won’t have the first clue in how to solve it. Going too far in the other direction, and make the solution obvious, will make the player feel stupid.

Tomb Raider seems to do a very good job of towing that middle ground. Most people I know didn’t have too much trouble solving these challenges, but they still felt smart for solving them. Again, that’s difficult to get right. Even with Uncharted, Sam felt that the puzzles were a little on the hard side, but not overly so. I, on the other hand, felt like the puzzles were too easy. That’s not saying that Sam’s any more or less intelligent than I am. It means that the puzzles in Uncharted were better suited to the way I think than they were to Sam’s. This difference in people is what makes good puzzle design so hard, and Tomb Raider should be applauded for how it gets that right.

Sam was completely exhausted when we recorded this episode. Because of that, he had to miss out on the podcast. A shame, because we talk about a lot of topics which call for his input.

0:02:30 Viewer Questions
“Have any of you guys played Ori and the Blind Forest?”
Guess what? Sam did. And next week, he may even talk about it. As someone who hasn’t I have to admit it looks really good and I’d love to play it.

Have you guys seen the trailer for Pixels?
I am open to this being a good movie. However, Adam Sandler does not exactly have the best track record. I will be watching how this develops with guarded expectations.

0:12:50 Gaming News
Hideo Kojima will be leaving Konami after Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain
Like I said in the podcast, I would say this is the beginning of the end for Konami. Aside from the YuGiOh card game (and video games), they don’t have much else. With Kojima gone, I have no idea what Konami is going to do with Silent Hills now, since they just let go of the guy who was supposed to make it. It’s not looking good.

PlayStation Vue is Sony’s answer to cable.
And it’s dumb. With far too few channels at far too great a price, I have no idea how Sony plans to make that work. I’m not even sure who the target market is for this service. It’s confusing, to say the least.

0:30:50 Garrett discusses his computer troubles.
Turns out it is an issue with the latest update to the drivers for his graphics card. We’ve all haad issues like this, and it’s good to vent about them when they happen. Also, congrats to Garrett for starting his Twitch channel.

0:39:40 Garrett talks about the rest of his week.

0:44:40 I finished Dragon Age 2.
I wish Sam was here, because it would’ve been a much more interesting conversation than it was. I like Dragon Age 2 is a good game, but it has a lot of flaws. It’s paced so much better than Origins was. At the same time, it’s ending is complete garbage.
Where Chris thinks the game is garbage, and Sam likes it, I’m somewhere in the middle. There will be an article about it soon.

0:57:30 I played Valiant Hearts: The Great War.
It’s a game worth playing, but it bizarre issues with keeping a consistent tone. The puzzles also really wreak the pacing of the game.
While awkward, the game is still good. I’m also working on an article for this game.

1:06:10 Chris talks about playing Punch-Out, featuring Mr. Dream.
And he talk about that for a bit.

1:20:00 Wrapping Up.
Interactive Friction can be found here.
My Resident Evil 5 article is here.

In this episode, we climb the only tower that exists in this entire game. Despite that, I still take a potshot at Ubisoft and their goddamn towers.

We spent a fair amount of time talking about the scene where Lara sits while the pilot of the rescue plane is slaughtered right in front of her. To be clear, not everything we discuss is necessarily a problem. And even if it is, it might not even be a big concern worth addressing with anything more than a passing glance. This is one of those complaints.

Though we occasionally have portions of the game where we have a rough idea of what we want to talk about, the vast majority of our commentary is completely spur of the moment. Because of that, there is absolutely no connection between how often or how long we speak about a specific topic or mechanic and how strong our feelings about it are. We might end up spending whole sections talking about relatively minor complements and complaints. Likewise, we could mention major problems in passing if the conversation doesn’t lend itself to us talking about them.

For example, when I discussed how silly it is for different animal hides to make different bags in Far Cry 3, I do not think that making every animal produce a general hide to make whatever would have improved the game. In fact, it would make the game worse because one could get all the bags at the start. With the pilot issue, it is not a huge problem since he’s a minor, irrelevant character. However, it is worth pointing out just to acknowledge it and move on.

In this episode, we remember Radioshack for a brief moment, further reminding ourselves of its irrelevancy. It’s so irrelevant, that Chrome’s built-in spell check thinks it’s a typo.

For the record, Tomb Raider is the very first game I’ve ever played that used automatic cover. Personally, this game sold me on the mechanic. I’d like to see more games used a feature like this in the future. As somebody who has played many cover-based shooters and action-adventure games in the vein of Uncharted, I think that there could be many uses. In those games, I often find the cover mechanics to be a little sticky. With automatic cover, I could imagine adding a new sense of mobility to a lot of games, as we see in a number of sections in this game.

On that topic, we mention Uncharted a lot in this episode, and the comparisons for this game is unavoidable. In the way that Naughty Dog took much inspiration from the old Tomb Raider games when making Uncharted, Crystal Dynamics took a large amount of inspiration from Uncharted when making the new Tomb Raider reboot. Still, even though they both have the same sense of style, there are enough differences, both big and small, between the two franchises to give them their own flavors.

Lastly, I cannot take credit for “What do they eat?” That’s something I took from Shamus Young after watching a lot of Spoiler Warning, another Let’s Play series that you might enjoy. Generally speaking, it is a good question to ask in order to see how much a writer has fleshed out their world. If the explanations for how people acquire resources stretch credulity, then the odds are that the game world in question wasn’t thought out very well. There are always exceptions to rules like this, but it can be a reasonable barometer.

Apparently, spoopy “horror” games are slowly becoming more and more of an area-of-expertise for me. If you were to ask me about these kinds of games even one year ago, I would only be able to talk about them through second-hand experiences. Now, I have gained a limited amount of experience. Thanks to my co-op partner, I was “convinced” to continue this education by playing Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition. For your mild entertainment, I amused this option. While playing it, I found that in many respects, it felt like it was trapped in the past of its genre. This week, I will discuss why this is the case.
But first, a bit of information about the game. Released in early 2009, Resident Evil 5 came out to high expectations after its predecessor became so popular in the previous generation. Taking place in Somewhere, Africa, the game follows protagonist Chris Redfield and his current partner, Sheva Alomar, as they work together to investigate a mysterious incident on the continent while looking for Chris’s old comrade, Jill Valentine, who was previously assumed dead. The two have to work together to find out what is going on, solving puzzles and fighting zom… infected along the way. The Gold Version, which is what I used for the purpose of this article, was released a year later and included all of the DLC for the game.
The story for RE5 was just a thoughtless overuse of old, established horror cliches. The villain just felt like a cardboard cutout of the villain from every super-hero comic book published before 1980. The game even acknowledges this when Chris mocks him for it during the final boss. One who has even a passing familiarity with fiction involving mutagenic bio-weapons is likely already knowledgeable of the stock excuses for such silly plans, and Resident Evil 5 uses almost all of them. Even on that level, Resident Evil 5 relies too heavily on tropes without distinguishing itself.
Having said that, the gameplay that the story exists to mildly justify is pretty interesting. With the help of either an AI partner or another human being, players use limited resources to either fight or flee from zom… infected. Since each protagonist has only 9 inventory slots, space is limited. This makes it so that even in the event where players find excess resources, they must be careful when choosing what to allocate space to. Though this limited inventory does feel like a holdover from the days when Resident Evil could be considered a survival horror game, it does work to force players to use good aim and tactics to conserve resources.
Unfortunately, the other parts of the gameplay have flaws on their own. Gunplay, as an example, works similarly to Deadly Premonition’s. When aiming at enemies, players must stand still, unable to move. Again, in the context of a survival horror game, this would be an interesting decision. Players would need to be more conscious of the fight or flight dynamics, since standing one’s ground exists entirely in opposition to running away from or through a group of enemies. However, in the more action-oriented environment of Resident Evil 5, it feels somewhat out of place. That said, this lack of movement does make it easier to aim in this game as opposed to other games out there. Despite the added benefit, I feel that the game would have been better served removing this restriction. When later sections turn fighting into an awkward third-person shooter, it demonstrates just how awkward the game really is.
On top of that, there are a couple of other old conventions that just feel either poorly tacked on or silly in context. The less egregious of these two elements are the Quicktime Events, which is saying something. The player who assumes the role of Chris has their own prompts, as does the one who plays Sheva. Sometimes they will have the same prompts, but this is not always the case. Failure to complete any one of the button inputs will result in an automatic instant-death, with the need to retry the event from the beginning. These are, almost without exception, never fun. Honestly, I do not understand why Quicktime Events have gotten very popular, especially when losing results in game over. Since the game came out in 2009, before the practice started to lose favor, I can somewhat understand why they were included. After all, it was still a fairly popular mechanic back in that era. In the modern context, it just does not work, and this is great example of why that is the case.

The other tired trope Resident Evil 5 heavily utilized was frequent instant death. Many of the larger enemies in the game have attacks that will automatically kill either player, no matter how much health they have, and without the possibility of the other player resuscitating them. Fighting these enemies becomes a major annoyance as a result, especially since the irreversible end of either player results in a game over. Certain environmental obstacles also have this effect. One particular example from the middle of the game comes to mind. As games of this ilk are wont to do, Resident Evil 5 includes a light-bending puzzle. With the help of reflective mirrors, the player team is required to point a beam of light towards a trigger mechanism in order to proceed. Unfortunately, the light is also a death ray that will kill either player on touch, resetting the entire puzzle. When this fact can only be discovered by falling victim to it, annoyance and frustration is guaranteed. Like in the above instance, most of the other instant death traps in Resident Evil 5 feel cheap.

Resident Evil 5 is not a bad game. It just does not do anything to really stand out among its contemporaries, even from the period in which the game was published. As a co-op game, it is functional, serving as a good excuse to get together with a friend and have some good time. On the whole, its overuse of old mechanics and stories from the grand list of scary movie/game cliches demonstrates a sheer lack of creativity from the designers.

In this episode, we talk about playing pretty dress-up with video game protagonists.

It is a nice touch that Roth is the one who duel-wields pistols instead of Lara. Roth is the one who taught Lara everything she knows about fighting. He’s the grizzled veteran who’s gone through tough situations before, not Lara. It’s a sign of how tough he is as a fighter. Once Lara eventually gains experience after enduring all of these trials, she’s earned her ability to do the same in the game’s finale.

The other big thing we talk about in the beginning is that unlike Far Cry 3, the game does an excellent job of telling you why our protagonist does not or cannot just stop and leave. In Far Cry 3, there are several points in the game where Jason could resolve all of his problems and leave the island, but instead deliberately chooses not to for completely contrived reasons. In Tomb Raider (2013), Lara is always put in circumstances that not only explain why she has to keep going, but why she can’t hand the reins over to people who might otherwise be more experienced.

Furthermore, because Roth is a Lara’s mentor, and she is born into a family of adventurers, she has enough people in her life that it makes sense for her to naturally pick up skills like basic first aid and combat. Jason Brody might be able to get by with Grant, but the game never explicitly states why he is just so good when he’s never shot a weapon of any kind before.

The rest of our commentary this episode stands on its own. This was a pretty good episode and we made a lot of good commentary on it.

First off, this episode was supposed to be posted yesterday, but both Sam and myself completely forgot to do so. For that, I would like to apologize to you guys who are watching us.

Early on in what can be generously referred to as my game criticism “career,” I wrote this article comparing the collectibles in Tomb Raider to those in Assassin’s Creed 3. As I said in this episode, the collectibles in this game, namely the diaries and the artifacts, really add depth to the world, the side cast, and Lara herself. Whereas in AC3, all of it was frivolous. I feel this is worth pointing out because so many games do so little with collectibles that they are almost entirely pointless.

I said my criticisms regarding Sam in a general sense here, but we’ll go into further detail as the game progresses. For a game that has such a well-written female protagonist, to rely on the damsel-in-distress trope feels strange and tiresome in comparison. Sam’s one of the worst types of damsels, so it comes off as even more irritating.

Like Sam, Whitman feels like another tired trope, that of the incredibly obvious betrayer of the team. His motivation is also one of the worst. Survival isn’t why he betrays us, it’s because he wants to be the one to document all of this. It’s so bad that it’s laughable.

One of the last scenes we see in this episode is the uncomfortable “rape” scene. I can somewhat understand why this scene exists, because it helps to reinforce the kind of opposition Lara will be facing as the game progresses. These men are so deranged that they think nothing of forcing another into a sex act unwillingly. Furthermore, it gives him an excuse to get close enough for Lara to be able to grab the gun in a plausible manner, making her first kill. In the end, it does work, but it still could have probably be handled better.

As we also mention in the episode, the time between our first kill, and the first fight against human beings is on the small side, for good reasons. In the ideal world, the developers would have been able to hold off on giving us pistol ammo. However, I do believe the transition was handled with much more skill than Jason Brody’s was in Far Cry 3.

Though we missed in during our conversation, Lara has a very good line right after her first genuine fight. When climbing up the rope ladder, she is talking with Roth on the radio. He says “[Killing those guys] can’t have been easy.” She responds with, “It’s scary just how easy it was.” That’s really all you need. Even though the transition was somewhat rushed, the acknowledgement that the character is better in violent situations than could or should otherwise be expected helps alleviate that tension.

It’s hard to really say what happened this week, I suppose with Sam and I releasing the previous episode, recording Interactive Friction’s new season, and doing this episode all in the span of about 4 days, we must have lost track of all the conversations that took place on and off the air. As a result, we did end up repeated a lot of what we said in the last show. Since Chris didn’t get the chance to see any of it, I suppose it’s all good. The audio this week wasn’t that good either, so I sincerely apologize for that.

Also, we had no viewer questions this week. If you have a question, comment, or something you’d like to be read on the air in a hilariously bad/inappropriate accent, you may send it to us at thetexturepop@gmail.com.
0:02:00 Gaming News
Battlefield Hardline doesn’t want you to feel bad for killing dudes.
I suppose that I can understand this thought process. AAA gaming tends to, for better or worse, appeal to the most common denominator. Since most people who buy Battlefield: Hardline will be the same types of people who buy other Battlefield or Call of Duty games, EA and Visceral has to assume that they either don’t want to, or won’t, think about the potential repercussions for their in-game actions.
Having said all that, it is extremely disappointing, and very tone deaf, to make this story about a cop without changing and recontextualizing the gameplay to fit that new environment. Combat between cops and criminals is not the same as combat between military forces and terrorists, so there’s no reason whatsoever for them to be so similar. It’s a wasted opportunity.

Valiant Hearts director leaves Ubisoft to go into the indie space.
I find this interesting only because this story is becoming more and more common as the years go on. A lot of the people who have spent years working in the industry are getting sick of the way AAA developers are treating them, so they’re leaving. In light of the many horror stories we hear from AAA, Now that publishers are becoming less and less necessary in the era where any person can just build a website to sell a game, the dynamic is changing in a good way.

0:19:00 Chris played Dragonball: Xenoverse.
I’m actually oddly interested in Dragonball: Xenoverse, but not enough that I’m willing to purchase it for full price. It looks like it would be pretty fun for a Dragonball fan, but otherwise fairly average.

0:37:50 Chris watched the first episode of Powers on PlayStation Plus.
I don’t know much about it, but what Chris said made me interested.

0:46:50 Garrett talks about his week.
But eventually we start talking about movies, specifically…

0:51:35 Garrett watched Lady in the Water
Since movies are notoriously not my strong suite, I’ve not much more to add.

1:06:30 Sam has played more inFamous: Second Son. *MAJOR SPOILERS*
Because we talked about it after finishing our Interactive Friction recording session, it was difficult to remember what Sam said to me only versus what we spoke of on the air last week.
That said, I still think Second Son is an interesting case study to show just how far we’ve evolved from the days of moral choice systems. The game is trapped in the past, with no acknowledgement of how both storytelling and game mechanics have changed.
Given what we’ve said about this game in the past, I believe that Sam’s idea of shorter DLCs focusing on a single character and power set would work much better for the game.

1:25:20 Sam played Killzone: Shadow Fall.
I know very little about Killzone, so there’s not much to add here.

1:32:10 Sam played Korean MMOs with his anime friends.
Honestly, do I NEED to say anymore? He had to “live his anime life.”

1:42:30 I played more Dragon Age 2.
I appreciate the faster-pace in the combat and dungeon-exploration. Compared to Origins, this game is paced significantly better. Having said that, it does have it’s issues. We’ll probably talk more in the next podcast about this very topic, since I did finish it after this recording.

1:52:00 I played a bit of Papo Y Yo.
I just wish I had more to say about it. It’s much the same problem I had with Contrast. It is a good game, but not enough material for discussion.

1:54:30 Wrapping Up.
Garrett recommends Overwolf, which does not sponsor us.
Interactive Friction’s Tomb Raider season has begun.
We also did a bonus episode on Blood Dragon.
My Far Cry 4 article is also worth a read.

Welcome everyone, to the new season of Interactive Friction. After talking about it so much during the Far Cry 3 season, we decided to go into more detail by covered the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider.

I know it’s strange to spend so much time discussing font choices and subtitles, but that something that is so commonly done wrong in games that there are not many examples of well done subtitles. The only reason that is a major pet peeve of mine is that it took me a long time to upgrade from SD to HD when I first got my PS3. Because of the way HD gets downgraded, a lot of text became extremely difficult to read on SD television sets. A lot of that frustration can be easily escaped by just making smarter choices in font and presentation.

We also enables TressFX, and honestly it’s not that great. When Lara is just running around, then it’s okay. However, when she’s more active, it’s far too bounce-y, to the point where it’s distracting and immersion-breaking.

It is also interesting to view this tutorial in contrast to the “parody” tutorial we just went through in the Blood Dragon episode. The game is really good at using these initial gameplay sections to teach you basic mechanics without patronizing you without pointless pop-ups if you have already played it or other games like it before.

One of the throughlines we are going to explore as we advance this series is how similar Far Cry 3 is to Tomb Raider in terms of the overall story arc. However, Tomb Raider handles not only the transition from scared college kid into hardened warrior significantly better than Far Cry 3 does. It is much more believable and Lara earns her character arc much more than Jason Brody does.

For example, in the first episode of Far Cry 3, we had already made a human kill. Though Jason felt bad about it, the game spent almost no time dwelling on it. In that same episode, we were already acquiring weapons and firing them at animals. At this point, the only kill Lara has to her name is a deer, and she’s completely broken up about it. While Jason has already started fighting against people, Lara is still in process of getting her bearings and figuring out how to stay alive, making her feel a lot more like a human being than Jason ever really did. Plus, she has the added benefit the player being able to see her face, giving us a better window into how she feels.

We’ll talk a bit more about what else Tomb Raider does to make the transition from normal person to warrior more believable, but that will happen as we progress through the game’s story.
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