The Stack

One immediately noticeable change to the capital cities happened during my time away from Azeroth: more of them have their own Fishing and Cooking daily quests. In addition to Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff (the Tauren capital) and apparently the Undercity (Undead capital) now have them, and each of these cities has its own Achievement for doing them. Apparently the the same has happened on the Alliance cities.

I’m close to getting the Fishing one for Thunder Bluff, which is easy for me to go to: despite all my roaming, I still keep it as Oleari’s designated “home base”, the place that I can teleport back to by using my “hearthstone”. It would seem almost traitorous to change that now. I’m less close to the one for Cooking, not because I’ve been doing it less often, but because the random number generator seems to always pick the same one: a quest to grind bowls of corn located in various buildings. Like most of these quests, it’s just a little window dressing on the task of finding the sparkly things to click, but the fact that the bowls are all behind walls gives it a slight hide-and-seek aspect.

The cooking and fishing dailies in Thunder Bluff are basically similar to the ones in Orgrimmar, but I’m finding them a lot quicker to complete. The reason: lack of competition. When the chef in Orgrimmar sent me to collect cactus pears, I’d have to run around the whole city trying to spot a cactus that was ready to be harvested before anyone else noticed it. In Thunder Bluff, I’m generally the only person doing the quests. Well, Thunder Bluff has always been a less crowded place, something of a backwater really, whereas Orgrimmar is the capital of the entire Horde side, the central point that all zeppelin routes converge to, and sometimes crowded enough to seriously interfere with graphics performance. Probably most Horde players set their home base there when they don’t have a compelling reason to do otherwise.

But then, perhaps there’s less competition in Orgrimmar as well, now that the people looking to do cooking and fishing dailies have a choice of three places to do them, and now that the real die-hards have maxed out and cooked everything, and now that the player base is definitely shrinking. Blizzard recently reported a reduction in the number of subscribers for the first time, from 12 million to a mere 11 million, the poor dears. I suppose it’s the beginning of the end.

So, I decided on a whim to leave Outland for a while and do some more questing back in Azeroth. I picked the desert province of Tanaris for no better reason than that I hadn’t been there yet and it was right next to Thousand Needles, the last zone I had completed. By pure coincidence, it turns out that Tanaris contains the entrance to a Burning Crusade dungeon that I was an appropriate level to attempt.

This is unusual. I don’t usually access dungeons through their entrances. The Dungeon Finder makes it unnecessary. I’ve been through all of the dungeons available without expansions, and for many of them, I still have no idea what zone they’re in or what the motivating context is supposed to be. For me, the motivation was usually that I was about to become too high-level to access that dungeon through the Dungeon Finder. Perhaps this is part of why I’ve always found it difficult to get up to speed about what I’m supposed to be doing in them (although mostly that’s just because most of the people in the average pick-up group have done the dungeons before and go running off without bothering to read the quest descriptions).

Here, though, not only did I actually get the context, but the context seemed important, because it was an unusual dungeon. For one thing, it was outdoors. That’s not unprecedented — heck, it’s not even the only open-air dungeon in Tanaris. More importantly, it’s set in the past. The whole thing is set in a modified copy of the Hillsbrad zone, accessible through a magical cave, a special place where stresses on history manifest. There’s a whole order of temporal guardians living down there, willing to give a tour to any adventurers who can help them iron out their enemies’ attempts at altering history. Old Hillsbrad isn’t the only time and place where this battle is being waged, but it’s the only one accessible to me at the moment.

The attempted revision involves an orcish slave named Thrall. At the time of The Burning Crusade, Thrall is leader of the Horde, and the path to that starts here, with his escape. This is therefore one of those moments when a great deal of history hinges on a single action, and is thus vulnerable to meddling.

Now, Thrall isn’t the leader of the Horde any more: as of Cataclysm, he’s been replaced with Garrosh Hellscream. But over in Outland, which hasn’t been revised, Thrall is still in charge. There’s a lot of that sort of thing going on, really. Different places, in a sense, occur at specific points in the ongoing storylines. It used to be that taking the expansions in order would give you events in order, but Cataclysm messed that up by changing the core zones back on the original continents, giving them a new plot set in the aftermath of Wrath of the Lich King. Even within a single zone, time can get messed up, as when you talk to an NPC before you’re instructed to, and then later when you approach him in-sequence he greets you as if for the first time. There’s a whole series of events back in Silverpine Forest involving an Undead NPC named Lord Godfrey: he gets raised as Undead, accompanies you on some quests, and ultimately turns traitor and flees to a dungeon called Shadowfang Keep, where he’s the end boss. I saw the last part of that first. Confusion ensued. What I’m getting at is that there are really time portals all over the place. The only thing unusual about the Cave is that they’re openly acknowledged by NPCs.

Playing as Horde makes helping Thrall a natural thing to do, but apparently the premise and quests are the same regardless of which team you’re on: keeping the timeline sound is an overriding concern for everyone except omnicidal madmen. This must be one of the few points in the game where Alliance players get to see things from the Horde point of view, see the future Horde leader as a proud and honorable ally suffering injustice at the hands of sneering, overbearing humans. Horde players get a taste of how the other half lives, too: they spend the entire mission shape-shifted into humans so they can infiltrate the place, and if you wander off-course enough, you can talk to peaceful human villagers, and listen in on their private conversations.

Come to think of it, this reversal of perspective works well into Burning Crusade‘s overall themes. As I mentioned before, the premise of the expansion involves Horde and Alliance putting aside their differences to deal with a demon invasion. Ironic, then, that I’ve been attacked by Alliance players more often in Outland than anywhere else.

Five days since my last post. I’ve been playing WoW, I just haven’t been posting. I intended to post on Friday evening, but wound up playing a little more instead, and then wound up basically spending all day Saturday exhausting the quests in the Hellfire Peninsula zone to the extent that I was able, then pursuing more quests in Zangarmarsh. When I realized that the 24 hour point from the start of Friday’s session, and therefore my self-imposed posting deadline, was fast approaching, I thought “Yeah, I really should post something soon, or at least stop playing for the day”, but once that deadline was behind me, it seemed less urgent. (It should be noted that the WoW interface contains a real-time clock, so losing track of time is no excuse. However, this also means one less reason to switch back to the desktop and break the trance.)

So clearly, I’m finding this game compelling. (Which, remember, is a quality that’s orthogonal to fun, and not necessarily a good thing in itself.) It’s compelling enough that the moment I start playing, the rest of the day is lost. But this is a little strange, because the usual cited reason that people feel compelled to play WoW is the social component — that is, the same sort of reinforcement as is behind Facebook games, but with the added snare that your guildmates are counting on you to show up at appointed times and do your part in dungeons and raids. But that really doesn’t apply to me. The few people on my WoW friends list last logged on between a month and five months ago. And although I am technically a member of a guild, I was never able to participate in guild activities, due to not having a level 85 character. The only way I ever participated in the guild was via its chat channel, and that’s pretty much dead these days, now that all the old regulars are bored with Cataclysm.

What I have instead is quest addiction. At any given moment in this game, I have at least a half-dozen tasks in front of me that are well-defined and easily completable — such is fantasy. Completing them just leads to more, but, importantly, there’s a hierarchy of completion that keeps it feeling like I’m making progress. Every little NPC encampment has maybe a dozen quests, which I can complete and then feel like I’m done with that encampment. Each zone has several such quest-clusters, and if I complete them all, I can feel like I’m done with that zone, even if they add more quests to it later — and the game will even acknowledge this with an Achievement. Despite everything everyone has said, the entire game seems tantalizingly completable, given time. The other, better things I could be doing with that time doesn’t enter into it while you’re playing. (And remember who it is who’s saying this. When I say “other, better things”, I’m not just talking about working to improve the world; I’m also including all the other videogames I could be playing.)

I suppose what it comes down to is this: the WoW phenomenon is not as simple as many claim. It has more than one avenue into the psyche, more than one way of getting people hooked. If you’re antisocial, it loses one of its big draws, but it can still take advantage of your compulsiveness.

Let me describe one particular quest in the Outland. It’s a quest that I finished today, but only because I was prevented from completing it yesterday due to the inaction of Alliance players.

In the middle of the Hellfire Peninsula, there are three points arbitrarily designated as places of great strategic importance. Apparently they were one of the developers’ first experiments with putting PVP mechanics into the main map, rather than isolating them in Battleground zones. Like the capture points in Battlegrounds, each of these can belong to either Horde or Alliance, or be neutral. If you stand in one that’s owned by the enemy, and there’s no enemy there to oppose you, it gets slowly converted to your side: a gauge in the quest UI shows your progress towards converting it, and flags draped about the walls show the current winner’s colors.

There is a repeatable quest to participate in capturing all three points (not necessarily all at once). Note that there’s one condition that definitively prevents you from accomplishing this: if one or more of the points is already under your side’s control, you cannot capture it. The premise of the quest is that it’s crucial to control those three points, but simply controlling them isn’t enough to earn your reward. You have to take control of them, even if it means letting the enemy capture them first. (It reminds me of certain Catholic doctrines about sin.) I imagine that when Outland was first opened to visitors, and the zone was flooded with level-60 players, ownership of the capture points must have flipped pretty frequently, making their recapture a convincingly urgent concern. But there aren’t a lot of people in the zone these days, so they can get stuck in one state for a good long while.

And that has interesting and presumably unintended consequences for player behavior. During my first sally at this quest, I found an Alliance member capturing one of the points while two Horde guys hovered overhead on their flying mounts. When I made to land, they asked me not to: they were politely waiting their turn, waiting for the Alliance guy to finish capturing it so they could capture it back. There was no combat here, just polite cooperation that allowed both sides to fulfill their needs. In another game, I might regard this as tantamount to cheating, like using a TF2 “Achievement server” ¹Achievement servers are places where people go to collaborate on fulfilling the requirements for TF2 Achievements instead of actually trying to win matches. I think it’s a good thing that they exist, because it keeps that sort of behavior out of the regular servers, but it’s always seemed to me a way to make the game less fun. , but here, it just seemed like a natural and unavoidable consequence of a badly-thought-out mechanic.

In fact, my thoughts on this matter were so firm that I was fairly flabbergasted when I came back the next day and found that someone in the Alliance was actually defending the things. Someone, moreover, powerful enough to kill me in one hit, and therefore probably not getting any Honor points for it. I kept coming back, hoping that he’d get bored of killing me eventually, and eventually it worked. But I was surprised at his persistence. He was probably surprised at mine, too, but at least he presumably understood my motivations, and I don’t understand his. Was he just in a bullying mood, or was he taking the fiction more seriously than I was?

As I think I’ve indicated, I didn’t know the premise of The Burning Crusade before starting it, other than that it involved a world called Outland. Even within the game, information is skimpy. As I’ve observed before, NPCs in the game just kind of assume that you know what they’re talking about, confident perhaps that you can consult a wiki to fill in the gaps. I honestly don’t remember even receiving the quest to go to Outland. It just sort of showed up on my quest list.

It turns out that the portal to Outland is the very same Dark Portal that brought the Orcs to Azeroth back in the backstory of the original Warcraft. The Burning Crusade is not, as I had assumed, some war initiative of the Alliance, but a term for the multiverse-conquering demons that started pouring through the Dark Portal when it reopened. This is a big enough threat to make Horde and Alliance put aside their differences in order to guard the Portal and keep the demons at bay. The encampment circling it, neatly divided into Horde and Alliance by a line running down the middle, gives me a distinct cold war vibe, heavily militarized tension and waiting. This is the sort of truce that forms when the saucers land.

And, true to that image, Outland (or at least the near part of it) looks like an alien planet off a sci-fi paperback: a reddish desert with a sky full of rings and planetoids. Here I can finally use my flying mount. It’s the same sort of lion-headed “wyvern” that you can hire to fly along fixed routes back in Azeroth: a bizarre-looking creature, but it fits in perfectly here, flying past the multiple moons of Outland.

Outland is a small world, with only seven zones, compared to the 30-odd in each of the original continents. But these zones seem to be very dense with quests. Remember that there’s an Achievement for completing a certain number of quests in each zone — a number slightly lower than the number of quests available. For most zones I’ve seen, this number is in the neighborhood of fifty. There’s one zone here for which it’s 120. And what are these quests like? I’m finding them gruelling. The tasks are the typical sort of WoW quest, but in the process of pursuing them, I keep getting attacked along the way by groups of monsters that take so long to kill that some of them actually respawn before I’m done with the fight. I’m avoiding as many fights as I can by flying, but you have to land and do your quest sometime. Also, it doesn’t help that a gnomish paladin kept killing me when I was in the middle of such fights (ironically getting “honor points” for doing so). Once again, I marvel at how the game mechanics are designed to convince us that the opposite team is composed entirely of jerks.

Speaking of which, it seems like this is one place where the perspectives of the two sides must be very different. To the Alliance, Outland is purely and simply the place where monsters come from, whether demons or orcs. To the Horde, it’s the ancestral homeland. The orcs have come here, not just to stop the demons, but to try to uncover their own lost history. So I’m once again glad that I’m playing Horde, because that seems like a more interesting story to me.

My latest session was a short one. I did make it to Outland, but only for a few seconds, experimentally, before returning. The portal to Outland is located in a zone called the Blasted Lands, which I had never visited before, and so I got caught up in the Blasted Lands quest chain. It’s the completist in me: even though I know I’m never actually going to complete this game, I am by nature incapable of passing up a quest. I’ll probably have more to report on actual Burning Crusade content next time, possibly including some kind of answer to the question of who exactly is doing the burning and why.

In the meantime, let’s talk a little about the one recent major change to the game (other than opening up BC) that happened while my attention was elsewhere: WoW becoming nominally “free to play”. “Free to play” is a major buzzphrase in the industry right now. In particular, it seems to be the business model behind nearly every viable modern MMO other than WoW. My thoughts on it in WoW are that they’re doing it wrong, but also that it probably ultimately doesn’t matter that they’re doing it wrong.

How are they doing it wrong? By ignoring everything about the (by now well-established) free-to-play business model other than letting people play for free. The usual approach, as far as I can tell, is to sell things that can be used in the game: special items that can’t be obtained any other way, or extra game time per day if that’s limited, or even just outfits with no gameplay effects. WoW‘s revenue still comes mainly from subscriptions. There doesn’t seem to be any way for a free player to pay Blizzard ¹Anyone can pay real money for in-game gold by buying it from a gold farmer, but that’s not really relevant here, because Blizzard doesn’t profit from such transactions. for advantages in the game while still remaining a free player. The only way Blizzard profits from free players is by turning them into subscribers.

And that’s really been the WoW business model all along. There’s always been a way to play for free. If I recall correctly, they used to offer 30-day free trials, then reduced it to 14 days, and by the time I gave it a whirl, it was down to 10 days. Well, now they’ve bumped the trial period up to infinity days. This is probably a smart move. Playing with a trial account still caps your character level to 20, and my own experience was that I reached that limit well before my 10-day trial ran out. So for the people who are going to play up to the limit and then quit and never think about it again, nothing has really changed. But for people who are tempted to progress further, removing the time limit prolongs the temptation.

To put it another way, the trial accounts are, for all intents and purposes, a form of shareware. Shareware, when it imposes limits on non-registered users at all (as opposed to just begging for voluntary donations), generally works in one of two ways: by limiting the amount of time you can spend in it, or by limiting the content you have access to. WoW trial accounts used to impose both of these restrictions at once, which in retrospect was an odd decision. Now they’ve switched to limiting only the content. But at the same time, they took the opportunity to drum up some media attention by jumping aboard the free-to-play bandwagon, even though it’s still not free-to-play in the same sense as Maple Story or Kingdom of Loathing or Team Fortress 2 (itself a recent convert to the F2P model).

I suppose the big question, then, is whether or not it worked. Was there a big influx of newbies? I don’t know; I haven’t spent time around the newbie zones. It would please me, if not Blizzard, if there were a lot of new players with perpetual trial accounts now. One of my biggest annoyances with the game is that most players seem to be old-timers with level 85 characters that I can’t effectively group with or fight, until and unless I buy two more expansions and spend a lot of time leveling up. Having a large number of under-20’s around would counterbalance this in my mind, and also give me something to look down on.

So, when I paid for a World of Warcraft account, I paid for a six-month subscription, of which I actually used approximately half. This runs out later this month (which means I must have gotten a free month somehow, because I paid in January), and since I’ve already pretty much stopped playing, I figured I’d log in for a last look, maybe play out some Alliance-side starting quests to see what they’re like, and cancel my account. But while I wasn’t paying attention, Blizzard went and folded the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, into the basic WoW account. This means I suddenly have access to a new continent, a couple more character races, and, best of all, the long-anticipated flying mount. So I want to at least try this stuff out before pulling the plug.

First order of business on logging in after three months was to put a bunch of herbs up for auction in the hope of finally affording the long-coveted 36-slot herbalism bag. Yes, bags are pretty much my most prized possessions in this game; a high-capacity bag extends the amount of time you can spend questing before you’re forced to either head back to town or make painful decisions about what loot to ditch. We’ll see how that goes next session, when my auction is over. Second thing was the flying mount, which is a bit of a disappointment so far: when flying mounts were initially introduced, you could only fly them in certain areas, and apparently you still need the later expansions for those restrictions to be lifted. At least it runs fast.

I haven’t actually ventured into the Outland yet: I was in the middle of a quest chain when I hit the level cap and stopped playing back in May, and I wanted to finish that up first. Also, I have to say that this expansion is the content that I’m least curious about in the whole game. For one thing, due to Cataclysm revamping the home territories, Burning Crusade‘s quests and lands are now the oldest part of the game, and therefore bound to be the least well-developed. Also, this is the one expansion that I haven’t really heard anything interesting about, or indeed much of anything at all. But then, that also means it’s all in front of me to be discovered. But I do seriously suspect that this is part of why Blizzard decided to start giving it away with the basic subscription: to get people over the hump of buying content they’re not interested in. You’re required to install the expansions in order, BC before WotLK before Cataclysm, so BC may have been acting as an obstacle. I certainly would have been more easily persuaded to buy more content on hitting level 60 if it had been something with as much buzz as WotLK.

And now that BC isn’t standing in the way, that’s a risk. I might decide, later this month, that WotLK is worth buying. I hope that doesn’t happen. I have other, more interesting games to play. So here’s hoping Burning Crusade is bad enough to put me off WoW forever!

Having left the last post in a bit of a cliffhanger, it’s time for a big spoiler. What’s on the other side of the fake ending? The entire second half of the game, it turns out. There’s a teleporter to another castle. Or not quite another castle, because it’s exactly the same layout, the same furnishings and everything, although palette-swapped a bit in places. There are of course different monsters (including a completely new set of bosses, and also a few of the earlier bosses demoted to grunts) and different treasures (including all the items that were taken away from you in the intro, which are pretty much the best items other than rare random drops). Also, it’s all upside-down. The whole castle.

This inversion doesn’t affect the monsters. It does affect all stationary scenery elements, which includes any flames or bodies of water, as well as the sky and the ground, in those places where you can see outside. It has the effect of making you climb to reach the deepest caverns under the castle. It’s basically a lazy way to double the amount of terrain while still varying it in significant ways: a room with an arched ceiling becomes a room with a curved and sloping floor, a pool that was hard to avoid falling into becomes instead hard to reach.

Actually, water is one of the few things that can be hard to reach at this point. By the time you reach the inverted castle, you’ve necessarily gained the ability to turn into a bat. You can’t go through water in this form, but you can merrily fly over the heads of some of the toughest enemies who would otherwise block your way. In extreme cases, like when there’s an endless stream of flying medusa heads in your way, you can turn into mist, although this uses up mana a lot faster than bat-form. Still, the simple ability to skip combat whenever you feel like it is one of the factors that makes the second half go faster than the first. Another is the fact that you already have all the obstacle-circumvention powerups in the game. Another is that, because the second castle is identical in layout to the first (only upside-down), you already know the map, including the locations of secret passages and how to access them. (This cuts both ways: there was one secret passage that I found in the inverted castle first, because it had been on the ceiling before.)

The only real obstacle, then, is the boss fights, which get pretty tough. There are things on the scale of Shadow of the Colossus here; past a certain point, things that don’t fully fit on a single screen become the norm. And I have to take a moment now to remind myself to be impressed with that, that they could spare the resources, both in terms of system memory and development time. It’s easy to take for granted in the post-FMV age, but I can remember being impressed with lesser efforts at the arcade. And the most impressive part isn’t even just the big things: it’s that this game has a roster of enemies as large and diverse as a Final Fantasy of its era, only where FF was using static images for everything but the player characters, these monsters are fully animated. In some cases, particularly with armored foes, it looks like they might be saving some cels by building creatures out of rigid parts that can be rotated independently, now that they could target hardware with native support for bitmap rotation. But there are a lot of creatures that are just animated as full-body bitmaps, and I could be wrong about the game ever doing anything else.

(One trick I have to mention: there are a couple of types of ghostly sword-wielders that spend most of their time invisible. The swords of these beings are always visible, swinging and swashbuckling freely, but the body only appears in brief flashes. This means they can have an elaborate attack routine with only two or three frames of animation, and the poses you can see are carefully chosen to suggest more than they depict.)

Anyway, the second half goes fast enough that I’ve already finished it. This gives one the opportunity to start over in the role of Richter Belmont. I don’t consider this to be necessary for removing the game from the Stack, but I’ve played in Richter mode enough to be impressed with how different it is. It essentially turns the game back into a traditional Castlevania: there’s no inventory or equipment, no mobility upgrades, no leveling or XP. It’s just you, a sacred whip, and one special weapon at a time. Richter even moves with the blocky, shuffling gait of the original Castlevania on the NES, which looks downright silly after Alucard’s more detailed walk animation, with his hair and cloak all flowing and windswept. To compensate for his inability to turn into a bat, Richter gets a free pass on some things that Alucard needed upgrades for, such as opening enchanted doors. Come to that, Alucard needed upgrades just to use some of the basic features of the UI that Richter gets automatically, like having the amount of damage your blows are doing to the monsters displayed on the screen. That’s a kind of upgrade I’d normally expect only in satire.

One thing tempts me to keep on going with Richter, and that’s the thought that all that upside-down terrain would become more relevant with him. He’d have to navigate it all without flying, without even double-jumping. But I suppose he must have some secret hadouken-like combo that lets him clear the larger gaps in the game, or he’d never be able to reach the topmost tower. But I’ve never been much of a one for secret combos. Heck, I barely used the combos I was explicitly given for casting spells. (I’m told that playing through the game without using spells is a common voluntary conduct challenge for those who have mastered the game, and I came pretty close to doing it unintentionally.) What’s worse is that some of the special powers that Alucard can unlock are combos that the game doesn’t even tell you how to use. No, not even in the docs. For example, one grants you the ability to run fast while in wolf form. I have no idea how to trigger this. I managed it once, but only by accident. Apart from one place where you need to shift into wolf form to pass a narrow gap (because Alucard is apparently too proud to crawl), I basically didn’t use wolf form, except as a result of getting confused about which button does which transformation. Because wolf form is basically useless unless you can do the combos.

One combo I used a great deal: the one for the high-jump power, down-up-X. I didn’t figure this out on my own. I resorted to hints. Perhaps it would be more easily guessable by someone steeped in 1997 console-game lore. It certainly seems like the sort of action that would be used in multiple games. I recall that Half-Life did something similar for its long-jump action. The only other time I used hints was to open the rightmost passage in the clock tower, which is something of a riddle. The room is dominated by a working clock face, and there’s a passage on the left that opens and closes at intervals of a minute, so I thought that the passage on the right must have some similar time-based pattern, and spent some time waiting for it to open when the clock hands were reaching significant-looking points. But the trick turned out to be nothing like that, and I doubt I would have got it on my own.

That closed-off passage by the clock was the last of the obvious obstacles for me. There may well be more secret passages that I haven’t found, hidden behind crumbling walls and the like. I suppose I could do a sweep of the castle with the Faerie familiar equipped if I wanted to find them all: as the one familiar who doesn’t participate in combat, the Faerie helps you in other ways, like pointing out frangible walls and feeding you healing potions when you need them. But, having taken a longer glance at some FAQs and walkthroughs now, it seems like discovering absolutely everything is a goal for those more dedicated than me, people who like to play the same game over and over and master its every detail. The game indulges such players by giving them lots of obscure stuff to discover. The Shield Rod combos, for example. The Shield Rod is a bludgeoning weapon that I used for a while, then abandoned when I got a better weapon. Apparently if you use it at the same time as a shield, pressing the weapon and shield buttons simultaneously, it produces a magical effect determined by the type of shield. This is obscure enough that it would come off as an easter egg if it weren’t so elaborate, another of the game’s extravagances. It’s a short step from exploring this kind of content to discovering glitches and exploiting them to break sequence, get outside the castle walls, and similar activities. And there have been people so in love with the game that they put documents on the internet explaining how to do this.

For my part, I may eventully find enough motivation to finish with Richter, but am unlikely to take things farther than that. Life is too short, and the Stack too large.

Today, I beat Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. In a sense, anyway.

There was a boss fight against former hero Richter Belmont — I had been expecting Dracula, but when you think about it, Richter has already been established to be tougher than Dracula. The fight was kind of anticlimactic, over with disappointingly quickly. This is always a danger with RPG-like leveling systems that allow the player to keep on leveling beyond the point of challenge, but you’d think they could keep a bit of drama by making it a multi-stage boss. (It’s not like the notion was foreign to the designers. Dracula in the intro had two stages.) Victory was followed by an epilogue cutscene, and then the credits scrolled by, and ordinarily I’d consider that to be enough to get a game off the Stack. But, well, there were indications that I wasn’t actually finished with the game.

There were still passages I hadn’t yet found a way to get through, and even an optional miniboss that I hadn’t managed to beat. That in itself didn’t mean very much: there are a lot of blocked passages that just lead to a single room containing a piece of equipment or two, and in a lot of cases, I only found them after they had been rendered obsolete. But in the castle library, you can look at a sort of pokédex of all the monster types you’ve encountered, and something close to half the slots in the list were yet to be filled in. This made it seem like there had to be more than just a handful of isolated bonus rooms. The really convincing thing, though, was that the map showed a couple of small rooms on the opposite side of, and only accessible from, the room where the final boss fight took place. Which made them clearly impossible to get to, because you don’t get to leave that room: win or lose, the game ends there.

And so, jumping back to my last save before winning, I went to fight that one undefeated miniboss, a magician who summons swarms of bats and flying skulls. I had initially found this much harder than the fight against Richter, and I kind of wonder if this was deliberate, a way to encourage people to fight Richter first. But then, maybe not: after a little thought, I realized that there was a specific special weapon, a book that swirls around you in a defensive cloud, that would take down the swarms easily. Special weapons, the ones that use “hearts” for ammo, have the peculiar property that they don’t go into your inventory like most items, and you can only hold one at a time. It’s a weird mechanic for this game, but it’s one that Symphony of the Night inherited from the original Castlevania, which was just a platformer rather than a platformer/RPG(/adventure) hybrid and didn’t have an inventory. Anyway, it worked, and that led to an item that had obvious application to exploring another previously-unexplorable area, which turned out to hold another item that unlocked a different area, and so forth until I had a new way to handle the encounter with Richter, and, through it, access to those impossible rooms on the other side.

One of my vague wouldn’t-it-be-interesting game ideas that I’ll probably never actually implement is the idea of a game with a secret. You’d have a straightforward quest: rescue the princess, say. You could complete this quest by playing the game in the obvious way, and some people would do that and be satisfied. But other people would put together some details and realize that rescuing the princess isn’t what they should actually be doing: the royal family are all secretly alien shapeshifters, perhaps, and the player characters who win the straightforward way will wind up with their brains sucked out of their skulls while the credits are rolling. The people who discover this would have an opportunity to go off the obvious path and wind up playing a larger game, with different goals.

There are a few games that approach this to various degrees, but none I’m aware of quite reach it. Portal does the subversion, but forces the player into it. The Path lets you either pursue your stated goal the simple and direct way or wander the world around first, but doing the former is explicitly unsatisfactory. Gregory Weir’s The Day has two very different stories wrapped up into a single game, but it doesn’t make a secret of the fact.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night may be the closest thing to the concept I’ve seen. I really can imagine someone defeating Richter and putting the game away, satisfied that they’ve finished it. But I can’t, now that I know the fuller story, that Richter isn’t the bad guy after all, and now that I’ve seen what’s on the other side of that room. Which I will describe in my next post. All I’ll say for now is that I’m very glad that I didn’t accept the false ending. Pursuing the game further has replaced anticlimax and disappointment with open-mouthed delight.

I have a vague memory of reading someone’s commentary on golden age Superman comics, in which much was made of a scene where Lex Luthor, in an laboratory under the ocean, suddenly remembers that he saw an enormous sea monster nearby recently and decides to use it to keep the approaching Superman at bay. That, to the commentator, summarized the old-school sensibility perfectly: suddenly pulling things like sea monsters out of nowhere. Mind you, he felt that the more modern approach, of giving the sea monster an elaborate backstory explained in its own miniseries, was even worse.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has a similar sensibility to golden-age comics. You’re exploring Castle Dracula and all of the sudden, apropos of nothing, you find yourself in a boss fight against a hippogriff. Why is there a hippogriff in Castle Dracula? I guess because the designers thought it would be cool. This isn’t a game that explains things particularly. It just throws visuals at you and lets you come to your own conclusions. The freakiest monster by far I’ve seen is essentially a huge floating ball of corpses, too big to fit on the screen all at once, that mainly attacks by shedding a rain of animated corpses down on you. Damage it enough, and you can knock sections off of its hull, revealing a starfish-like tentacle monster at its core. And now that I’ve said that much, you have as much idea as I do of what it was or what it was doing there.

It isn’t even just the creatures that come off as gratuitously inexplicable. It’s the architecture as well, which is more thematic than plausible. This is ostensibly a castle, and the outer sections tend to be surrounded by plausible castle exterior, but it contains a colosseum — not just a combat arena, but something specifically called a colosseum, with, furthermore, decaying posters plastered around its entrance, because apparently even colosseums built into inaccessible castles just kind of grow posters. There’s a section called “clock tower”, which does contain a room-filling clock at one point, but it’s in the middle of some longish rooms completely filled with grandfather clocks, their pendulums swinging in eerie unison. One imagines the architect (either in-game or out-) saying “Of course there are clocks. It’s a clock tower. What else do you expect to find in a clock tower but clocks?”

The thing is, I’m not really complaining. It’s clear that this castle is a magical place. One of the few drops of story we’re given is that the castle only appears once every hundred years. This game is supposed to be set in a break in the pattern when the castle appeared 96 years early, but still, the very nature of the place gives it an excuse to be dreamlike and phantasmagorical. Things that don’t quite make sense just enhance an appropriate sense of otherworldliness. Or so I’m willing to tell myself as I play.