Rise of the Argonauts Preview

Whether you agree with Ed on the whole "the combat mechanics in most RPGs suck ass!" thing, what can't be denied is that it's a rare occasion indeed when you see anything bordering on realistic fighting across the RPG genre. Trading blows with a giant dragon in WoW ad infinitum might be fun, but, when you take a step back, it does look a bit ridiculous. In that sense, Rise of the Argonauts' combat looks nothing like the combat in WoW, or Oblivion, or Mass Effect. In fact, I would say it looks more like the action-oriented combat of God of War, or Devil May Cry.

Tearing up the RPG combat rulebook is, however, just the beginning for Ed's revolution. The genre's failings do not end there. "If you take anybody in any RPG, pick any RPG that exists today, take any human being, including the best RPG player, you put him on a machine, you say play this RPG, you've got two stopwatches, one in each hand, you don't tell him you're doing it, that's the key, and you turn this stopwatch on whenever he's playing the game and you turn this one off and this one on whenever he goes into a menu, you'll find that this stopwatch, the second one, always has more time on it. You will spend more than 50% of your time in menus in all RPGs. You can't find a single one that won't do it. I think that's an enormous mistake. This is part of the reason why RPGs are so inaccessible to the mass market, that they don't want to dive into RPGs. They feel like they have to learn so much and they have to constantly be learning so much to play the game. We've streamlined the hell out of that. We want to give players the option to use those menus but we're going to push them all to the Argo. We're going to make it so that their gameplay experience is not hampered midstream. It's a choice. It's like going to a closet. That's your choice to go to that closet. It's not like every time you do something the closet appears right in front of you and, oh I have to organise the closet now? F$!k! Or even worse, so I'm in the middle of a fight, oh I want to use a power. Oh pause the fight, oh cycle through menus, oh pick the power, oh look I'm back in the fight! Oh I just fired that power and I want to use another one right away! Oh, get back in the menu, oh pick the one that I want, oh confirm the choice. It's super slow. Why am I doing that? Every time I do that it breaks my fiction, it pulls me out."

And breathe. Poor RPGs. Ed's really giving them a kicking. But it's fun watching him do it. His arms are never motionless, he often jumps out of his seat to demonstrate the combat better, sometimes pretending to stab me in the face with a spear. It's as close an interview gets to a white-knuckle roller coaster ride. And we all know why we like them - the terror gets the adrenaline flowing.

The car climbs 100 feet and drops, going from 0 to 80 in two seconds flat. "Dialogue sucks in most RPGs. It's just gates. You button mash through it because you don't even care. It's just you know you have to get through this dialogue to be able to get to the next quest. Why isn't that worthwhile? And why is it that the guy is always standing there waiting for me? Why is it that the guy has nothing better to say to me than what do you want to buy? Why is it that these people aren't people? That they're vending machines and not really people?"

Quite. So, Ed, what are you going to do about it? "Anybody that gets a name in our game gets a character arc, gets something that happens to them. It's good storytelling that that becomes part of the main narrative. They're all throwaway characters anyway, why not use them to help the player move the story along?"

It doesn't end there. In Rise of the Argonauts, Jason will have a conversation wheel with four options to choose from, each one representing one of the game's Gods: Apollo, patron of the shield and healing; Aries, who likes you to go in first ask questions later; Athena, righteous and just; and Hermes, who's the smart one. Instead of having one answer lead to one benefit, another to another and one leading to nothing, each answer will curry favour with the particular God it's associated with, and each will lead to its own benefit. Each God has its own skill tree, for example, currying favour with Apollo will lead to greater healing powers and bonuses to resistance. Hermes leads to improved sword fighting and bullet time combat powers, Aries will make you better with the mace and fighting groups of enemies at once and Athena improves your ability with the spear and one on one fights.

That's enough of me speaking, I'm missing Ed. "The moment I realise that there is a right answer and wrong answer to dialogue I cease caring about the answer. I care more about the reward that I'm going to get for answering the right way than I care about what I'm saying. This was something I felt recently in an RPG that will remain nameless. There was a good guy answer and a bad guy answer and there was this balanced answer in the middle. Well, hey guess what? I like to play balanced characters. I like to seek balance when I play. I was playing through with this balanced character and I was like, why am I not getting any of the good guy rewards or the bad guy rewards? I go to GameFAQS and I read about it and I'm like, holy s$!t! The middle of the road answers, the neutral answers, the balanced monk-like answers don't get any reward. You have to be a good guy or a bad guy to get a reward. It's like, well that's fucked! Why did you give me this choice that isn't really a choice? You're basically saying I'm going to have a harder time playing this game because I'm playing it the way I want to play the game and not the way you want to play it.

"I really think it's a huge shift in gameplay, this concept of rewarding the player equally for his choices, and differently. The concept of having four different Gods and you proceeding down these skill trees based on the choices you're making in dialogue and the choices you're making in combat is something that I think is very novel. When a player says to himself you know what? Whether I punch this guy in the face or I say I'm sorry I'm going to get the same amount of reward but in two different locations. Now he feels like he's got no wrong answer and he still feels like it's a cool choice and now he's back to playing who he wants to play. That's a very significant piece."

And breathe. That "nameless" RPG Ed's talking about is clearly BioWare's sci-fi epic Mass Effect, a game I myself gave 10/10 in our review. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to deduce that it's the subject of many of his problems with the genre. The three-way dialogue, the inventory, the stop and start combat. I'm as sure of it as I am of the sun rising tomorrow, and I'm determined to get him to admit it.

"I think BioWare is an amazing company," begins Ed. "But I think that Mass Effect has the DNA of most RPGs. I think that they made incredible strides with making characters more believable and having you have more interesting character drama, but I think they rely on the, I levelled up and I get to buy +2% to my accuracy and that really doesn't matter because the monster has +4% to his accuracy because he's levelling too. Or even worse the weapons are so out of balance that if I'm using a pistol I can kill stuff better than I can kill it with an assault rifle. Again, Mass Effect was indeed very successful, I think that's largely down to our currently marketing driven game economy, but I think it was an excellent product. Oblivion is another example; I think there are millions of people that really appreciated Oblivion. There's always going to be a market for those types of games out there. I just think there's a future for RPG that isn't just thousands of systems just layered on top of each other. What we're doing is going to broaden RPGs appeal and maybe pull in some action gamers, maybe pull in some people who wouldn't have played an RPG before, hopefully. Because those RPGs also have some legacy negativity, like, oh Jesus, hours to play. Oh Jesus, I got to play for five hours before I feel like I levelled, before I feel like I did anything. That keeps people away, people who don't have the time for that. They get scared of that. What we're doing is saying, hey, you know what, this is the kind of RPG you can jump in for half an hour and feel like you got something done. This is an RPG that forgives you for walking away, not punishes you."