The Stack

Just a brief note today, corresponding to a brief play session. My time has mostly been spoken for the last few days. This will end soon, but I can’t help but feel like I’m dragging my heels again, like when I was just starting Pool of Radiance — perhaps because I’m no longer rushing to access sequels on schedule. (There is one more game left in the series, Pools of Darkness, but I don’t feel like I have to start that next week, because I have other games from 1991 I can do instead.)

But also, I may be getting tired of the gameplay. I’ve made a lot of comments about the subtle differences between the Gold Box games, and how the user interface incrementally improves, but the fact is, the bulk of my time spent playing the game is still a matter of maneuvering guys around on a battlefield, casting the same few spells, and then going through the ritual of resting up, re-memorizing spells, and identifying any enchanted loot I found. Bosses break this up a little, but they’re a minority of the play time. The one thing that really changes as I advance is that my higher-level characters have more spells and more hit points, and therefore can have more battles between rests.

I vaguely recall a passage in the first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide about how the players should regard monsters as obstacles, not goals. (Presumably this is the rationale for providing XP for treasure.) A lot of CRPGs break this idea, to the point where players spend time wandering around explicitly looking for random encounters. Here, though, I’m really feeling like random encounters are just getting in the way of me doing what I want to do, which is advancing in the plot in a timely fashion. In the previous two games, there were ways to avoid a lot of the random encounters, usually by means of the “Parlay” option. (One dungeon in Curse of the Azure Bonds had random encounters with giant slugs, which could be avoided by simply stepping out of their way.) But that hasn’t even been an option here.

Just outside of the starting area in Secret of the Silver Blades, there’s a district that doesn’t fit inside the usual 16×16 map sector. Places like this started cropping up in Curse of the Azure Bonds, but I didn’t pay much attention to them there, because they were in places obviously disconnected from the plot. I don’t really think this one is connected to the plot either, but the plot here is less of a driving force, at least at the beginning, so I decided to explore it anyway.

I had some suspicion that an area that seems like it doesn’t fit in the usual map grid would turn out to simply have wraparound, or at least somehow fit together jigsaw-style into a neat square. There was at least one dungeon in CotAB that pretended to be long and skinny, but was composed of strips that naturally fit together into a 16×16 block. But that really doesn’t seem to be the case here. So the game engine is capable of supporting larger areas. And yet, the important areas still seem to be limited to the standard size, and I have an inkling why. It has to do with triggered events. In important areas, stepping into particular spots will produce effects ranging from simple descriptive text to monster encounters to plot events. Traps and hidden treasure caches may also be bound to particular map tiles. I’ve seen similar events in the larger areas, but they’re not actually bound to locations: if I go back to an earlier save and explore the same area again, they’ll happen in different spots. So, I hypothesize that the designers implemented special events in terms of a list of coordinate references, and opted to keep those references limited to 16×16 — which, as I pointed out before, fits neatly into a single byte. Whatever model they’re using for the walls is clearly more freeform.

Another thing about the large area here: it smacks of procedural generation. There are a lot of repeated identical rooms and pointless dead ends. I don’t think the game actually generates maps procedurally at runtime, but it could easily have been generated randomly during the authoring stage, either by a computer program or even by rolling dice. There’s even a certain amount of tradition to the latter approach: the first-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide had a section on generating dungeons randomly. (I tried it in a live session once. It didn’t work very well.) But who knows? Maybe the designers just threw in the identical rooms and dead ends to make it labyrhinthine and confusing. But it would be more effective at this if I didn’t have my map coordinates on the screen all the time.

So! Let’s get to it. The silver blades: what is their secret? I don’t know. I don’t even know what the silver blades are yet. The game opens with no mention of them, presumably because they’re secret. Instead, we have (ye gods) a something-evil-in-the-mines opening. Well, fair enough: the series hadn’t tackled this cliché yet.

First impressions: They’ve really devoted some attention to improving the engine this time around. The visual presentation hasn’t changed much (apart from reorganizing the character sheets and adding some new wall textures), but they’ve added support for two major pieces of add-on hardware.

One is the Ad Lib sound card — yes, just the original Ad Lib, not the Soundblaster, which means that we just get FM synthesis, not sampled sound effects. Laugh all you want. The Ad Lib was a tremendous improvement over the previous state of the art, the PC internal speaker. It doesn’t seem to get used much here, though: the only bit that really takes advantage of it is the intro sequence, which has background music. Still, even that little goes a long way toward making the game feel more professional than its predecessors.

The other new hardware is the mouse. This makes a big difference in a fundamentally menu-driven game. But then, the menu system had gone through something of an overhaul anyway, mostly for the better. Vertically-aligned menus are now navigated with the up/down keys instead of the difficult and unexpected home/end of the previous two games. Consequently, I’m having to retrain myself; I keep reaching for the wrong keys here. Of course, using the up/down keys like this means that you can’t scroll through a menu and use the up/down keys for movement within the world at the same time, and accordingly, movement has been separated out into its own mode. I complained about having to manually switch into movement mode in combat in Pool of Radiance, but it’s not so bad in this context, because once you’re in movement mode, you tend to stay in it for a long time. In combat, you had to switch back every round.

So I’m a bit disappointed to see that we’re back to having to manually switch into movement in combat as well, undoing one of CotAB‘s chief improvements to the UI. But you can’t have everything, I suppose.

The final area of Curse of the Azure Bonds does something singularly cruel: it locks you into a final 16×16 map sector until you either die or win the game, sending unlimited numbers of random encounters at you as you explore, while not letting you rest at all — the power of the sole remaining bond compels you to keep on moving. Since your supply of both spells and hit points is limited, it behooves you to find your way to the final chamber, where you confront the demon Tyranthraxus, as efficiently as possible. In other words, the solution is to explore thoroughly, mapping all the while, until you stagger half-dead into the final encounter, and then restore an earlier save and do it right this time. And while you’re at it, take a moment to trek back across the country to that one city that has a magic store and pick up some healing and speed potions for everybody. Speed potions are the key to killing powerful creatures quickly in this game, letting your warrior-types get in extra blows. Sure, the Haste spell does the same thing, and doesn’t cost you money, but money flows like water at this point (it got so I wasn’t even picking up platinum pieces any more), and it’s better to save your precious, unrenewable spell slots for something more directly deadly.

Really, though, the limited amount of spellcasting you can do in the endgame doesn’t matter as much as you might think, because by this point in the game you’ve doubtless picked up a bunch of wands and other spellcasting items, some (all?) of which can even be used by warrior-types. And if you’re at all like me, you’ve hoarded them without using them, so they’re all at full charge. Tyranthraxus has an army defending him, but what with one guy using a Wand of Fireballs, and another guy using a Necklace of Missiles (the missiles being fireballs), and another guy just plain casting Fireball, the defenders don’t last long. The fireballs don’t affect Tyranthraxus, though. He’s basically a fire god, but I don’t think that’s why; I think he just has a high magic resistance. D&D didn’t really do much with intrinsic elemental resistances at this stage in its history. Even the Efreets ¹I suppose I should pluralize it as Efreeti, but I want the plurality to be unambiguous — unlike the AD&D Monster Manual, which left a lot of players thinking that Efreeti was the singular. Curse of the Azure Bonds itself uses the term “Efreetis”. that I encountered earlier could be hurt by my fireballs, and they’re from the Elemental Plane of Fire, for crying out loud.

I don’t think I mentioned the name Tyranthraxus in my writeup of Pool of Radiance, but he’s the end boss there as well, albeit possessing a different body. And he retains some of the same habits, like letting strangers wander his territory unmolested by patrols as long as they mention his name when questioned. It’s different here, though, because until you get rid of the final bond, saying that Tyranthraxus is your master is actually the truth. Also, there’s good reason for those patrols to leave you alone: Tyranthraxus actually wants you to come to his lair, where his master plan would come to fruition, were it not for a last-second NPC-thrown monkey wrench. He turns out to be something of a puppet master in this game, manipulating you into ridding yourself of the first four bonds so that he can have exclusive control over you. That mysterious cloaked figure who I thought was probably Elminster? Not Elminster. Elminster doesn’t show up at all. Perhaps he was only mentioned in the manual to fool the player as I was fooled.

Anyway, that’s another Gold Box game down. By now I’ve pretty much gotten used to the user interface, including the peculiar key combinations required for diagonal movement on my laptop. (I did try an external keypad, but found it even more awkward than the combinations.) But also, the user interface is improved over Pool of Radiance in a number of ways that weren’t obvious at first. Remember how I said that what the game really needs in combat is something more like a rogue-like interface, where you can just move the current character without hitting a key to go into movement mode? CotAB supports something very close to that: there’s still a separate movement mode, but you automatically switch into it from the main action mode when you press a direction key. So, yay incremental improvements! Let’s hope they keep coming.

One bond left. That means I’m into the endgame. There are five villains, but you defeat one in the intro chapter and one is saved for the very end, so the midgame has three. The last one I beat, the cult of Moander, was such a cakewalk that I suspect I’ve been doing the three middle sub-quests in the wrong order (if indeed there is an ordering; possibly they’re all designed to be accessible to new characters, and just became easier as my characters leveled up).

In Moander’s pit, I teamed up with Alias, the protagonist of the novel. I honestly didn’t think she was going to show up in the game, seeing how her function in the novel is taken by the player characters, but I suppose the leaving her out would have made a lie of the box art. Taken directly from the novel, and repeated within the game as its splash screen, it shows the heroine with her 80’s hair and ridiculous peekaboo armor. That armor seems to be her chief defining visual trait: the makers of the game even went so far as to make a special combat-mode sprite for her, with a visible diamond-shaped flash of skin on the chest.

The reasons behind this character design are as obvious as the target demographic it’s intended to appeal to. Selling games through sex appeal is hardly new, and hardly rare. At least the cover art here shows something that’s actually found in the game, which makes it more honest than a lot of games of the same era. But still not especially honest: anyone who bought it with the intention of ogling Alias during gameplay would probably be disappointed in her EGA representation, and also in how little time she sticks around. The idea of making good on the promises of the cover art — of making a young woman in revealing clothing into a constant feature of gameplay — really didn’t take off until Tomb Raider, which was still years away at this point.

The bait-and-switch approach is still alive and well, though, and has reached its pinnacle with Evony, the mediocre web-based kingdom-building game whose infamously irrelevant ads, showing pictures of lingerie models, have far passed the point of being distinguishable from satire. I’ve blocked Evony ads on this site, because I frankly find them embarrassing, but if there’s one good thing they’ve done, it’s exposing the sleaziness of game advertising in general through a kind of reductio ad absurdum. It’s easy to get inured to exploitative imagery, but now, when I look at Alias, I can’t help but see her as a step on the road to Evony.

I said in a previous post that Curse of the Azure Bonds is a sequel to a novel, but was told in reply that it’s more like a re-imagining. And I can easily believe this. But if so, it’s one those peculiar sequel/remake hybrids, like Desperado or Evil Dead 2. I keep running into characters from the original who mention that something similar happened to a friend of theirs a while back.

In fact, the game is full of continuity nods, to the extent that I spend most of my involvement with the plot wondering what the significance of various things is. At one point a war broke out, and I overheard some people looking for “red plumes”, as if I were expected to know what that meant. And, well, okay: red plumes are in fact mentioned at one point in the manual. They’re a mercenary force from the city of Hillsfar. Perhaps I would be familiar with them if I had played Hillsfar, another SSI game in the same campaign setting, released around the same time as Pool of Radiance (but with a different engine). But are they good guys or bad guys? There isn’t much to indicate this in your early encounters with them, and it’s something important to know in a combat-based RPG. At one point, a Red Plume shouted for help stopping some escaping prisoners, and I had to make a snap decision about which side to help. The one thing that helped me there is that the prisoners were said to be “Zhentil spies”, and the Zhentrim are one thing I am familiar with, from their appearance in Pool of Radiance.

In fact, Zhentil Keep and even Phlan are visitable in this game. Phlan is just another city not directly related to the story, but it’s definitely the same Phlan: the dungeon-type area attached to it is an as-yet-untamed district of the city. (What, I missed one?) I suppose that the more of these Forgotten Realms games I play, the more experiences I’ll have to relate to the made-up names. And I suppose this is the appeal of these shared settings.

And it makes me think once again about the potential of games for education. If I’m going to be absorbing facts about a setting, why not make it real-world knowledge that might possibly have practical application? Well, for one thing, no one has exclusive ownership of facts about the world; once you’re a Forgotten Realms fan, you’re locked into buying official Forgotten Realms products, which is a plus for the developers. Also, it’s probably easier: basing a game on facts would require research, whereas using a fictional setting just requires making things up. I mean, okay, there’s some research: breaking continuity with other works in the same setting is, while inevitable, frowned upon and avoided, so there is a certain amount of established material that Forgotten Realms authors would have to learn. But the key words there are “certain amount”. It’s finite, definite, and completely knowable. This is probably part of the appeal of fantasy worlds for the audience as well: it’s not messy and uncertain like our knowledge of reality.

It’s been said that D&D is about fighting evil in its own lair. The stereotypical dungeon has a boss in its deepest depths who’s in charge of some sort of trouble, and who needs killing. You spend your time working your way through the guards and the traps and so forth with the goal of penetrating the inner sanctum. And that’s pretty much how most dungeon-crawl RPGs work, too, not to mention a large portion of videogames in general.

Curse of the Azure Bonds doesn’t work like that. It seems like most of the major confrontations have some kind of shortcut to where the quest boss is — say, a friendly NPC from the novel guides you in or something. Only after the confrontation do things get dangerous. The bulk of your time isn’t spent penetrating the inner sanctum, but trying to get out.

It’s a bit like those scenes I spoke of in Wizardry where you walk through a teleporter or a one-way door and have to hunt for a way back to the stairs, hoping you can make it before everybody dies. Except not quite: in CotAB, it’s possible to rest and heal in the dungeon. I’ve been doing that quite a lot. Monsters often find me as I sleep, but not often enough to make it a net loss. It does frequently violate the fiction, though, when the story at that point involves a chase or a brawl or some other time-limited activity that’s somehow still going on after I’ve had a good night’s rest.

Note that even with the ability to rest and even save the game mid-dungeon, getting out is still an urgent concern. There are a lot of things you can only do in town, such as identifying items, leveling up, and curing some of the nastier status effects, such as being turned to stone. (Mere death I can cure on my own by now.)

Not all of the content in Curse of the Azure Bonds is related to the main quest. Pretty much every town on the map has a dungeon of some sort attached to it, as if the presence of ancient ruins or natural cave systems is some kind of prerequisite for settlement. These little dungeons are like a regularized form of optional side-quest. And it’s kind of strange how that feels.

I am of course comparing it in my mind to Pool of Radiance. PoR was composed mainly of optional quests, but there wasn’t a great distinction drawn between side-quests and the main quest line — if indeed you can even claim that there was a main quest line beyond the general effort to gain enough experience levels to stand a chance of beating the end boss. The whole thing was an undifferentiated soup of missions, and the assignment of those missions was more like suggestions than orders; you could generally collect the reward for doing obviously beneficial things for the colonists, even if they hadn’t been requested yet.

In contrast, CotAB, with its five separate sub-quests, makes it clear when you’re making progress in the plot. Which means that I’m acutely aware that I’m not making progress when I explore a cave just because it’s there. It has to make the distinction clear, because it doesn’t provide a lot of external guidance about where to go or what to do. The closest thing it has to the PoR‘s council clerk is a mysterious cloaked figure who you meet by a historically-important standing stone. He’s probably Elminster. I have only a vague notion of who Elminster is, but he’s mentioned a few times in the docs, so he must show up in some capacity, and this is the closest thing a Gandalf-like adviser I’ve seen so far. But he doesn’t advise very much; he basically just tells you “Seek your next adversary in the northwest” or whatever.

Without Probably-Elminster’s vague advice, there would be no obvious reason to pursue one major sub-quest over another. It seems likely that he puts you through things in optimal order — that is, from lowest-level to highest, matching your characters’ advancement — but I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. For one thing, he’s kind of out-of-the-way. Nothing guides you to him from your starting location, and if I had chosen to go around the north edge of the world map first instead of the south, I wouldn’t have met him until after I had been through the second or third of his advised route, and you’d think the designers would have planned for that. Also, the first place he told me to go seemed a lot harder than the second. But perhaps that’s just because I hadn’t yet got a lot of extra experience points from optional side-quests.

One major change from Pool of Radiance I should mention: the wilderness. Where PoR had an Ultima-style third-person grid outside the cities and dungeons, Curse of the Azure Bonds has a network of set paths, navigated using the same sort of menus that are presented at other major decision points in the game. At each node, you typically have a choice of two or three other places to go to, as well as options to make camp and (where relevant) enter the city or dungeon you’re currently at.

You lose a lot of freedom this way, but possibly just enough — as I said in a previous post, PoR‘s total lack of restrictions on travel made exploration of the wilderness uninteresting. CotAB doesn’t even have exploration of the wilderness in the same sense. It does use the word “wilderness”, but in a different way: when you choose a destination, the travel menu often gives you a choice of moving through the wilderness or following the trail (or, sometimes, going by boat). Your choice here can trigger different special events, but usually seems to just affect how much cover from trees and the like there is in any random encounter along the way. Regardless, there’s no hunting around the map for unknown points of interest; you have to already know where you’re going before you can even try to go there.

It has to be said that the CotAB approach is a lot more like how the world outside of dungeons and other planned set-pieces is handled in live D&D. There, as Starmaker said, the usual philosophy is that “nothing important happens in the wilderness”: you tell the DM where you want to go, and the DM rolls for random encounters, and that’s it.

At some point when I was googling for more information about Curse of the Azure Bonds, I saw a review that praised it for having a stronger story than Pool of Radiance. I’m not sure I agree. The two games have different stories, certainly. PoR‘s is like the RPG equivalent of a police procedural. The player characters are just doing a job. That job brings them in contact with a larger story, but the story is not fundamentally about them. The PC’s are no one in particular, just a group of wandering adventurers attracted by the opportunities in the city of Phlan, like many others.

In CotAB, on the other hand, it’s all about the PCs. You are the Chosen Ones! Characters in the game actually use that term, although it’s somewhat inverted from its usual meaning, because it’s the bad guys who did the choosing. And, well, fair enough: your party is at least level 5 now, and that makes them good choices. I recall reading an analysis of the third-edition D&D rules that came to the surprising conclusion that the most skilled people in the real world — the Albert Einsteins and Michael Jordans and whatnot — are the equivalent of fifth-level D&D characters. Beyond that point, we’re in the realm of pure larger-than-life fantasy. At any rate, while the player characters in PoR were special by the end (being chosen to storm the castle and all), they had to earn that position through hard work within the framework of the story. Your special position in CotAB, on the other hand, is unearned. But that’s okay, because it’s also involuntary. (It’s funny how that works.)

The story in PoR is largely backstory; you generally only show at the end of each plot thread, because you’re the one doing the ending. (This adds to the police-procedural-like tone: much of the story is communicated through discoveries about what happened before.) In CotAB, the story is happening to you, as you play it. This doesn’t mean the story is more interactive, though. Quite the contrary. The premise of the Bonds provides the author with not just an excuse to wrest control of the characters away from the player, but an obligation to do so. And this gets into the most peculiar thing about CotAB‘s story: the premise involves villains with schemes, but you can’t actually do anything to stop them. All you can do when a scheme is executed is to read some noninteractive text describing how the scheme went down: the villain took control of your actions, but it all somehow went wrong anyway, due to circumstances beyond your control. And sure, you get to kill them after the fact, but that’s it.

I’ll say this for the CotAB approach, though: because you’re the center of the plot, the villains aren’t necessarily sitting in their lairs oblivious to your approach, as in PoR. They have reason to seek you out, and occasionally do so when you’re not expecting it.