Well, I was asked to do a review of Megatraveller II, so here it is.
Enjoy.
Review
MegaTraveller II: Quest for the Ancients
by Paragon Software
Main Scenario written by Marc Miller
This review is organized into these parts:
Outline of MegaTraveller II
Things that would make a better MegaTraveller game
Hints for playing MegaTraveller II
Outline of MegaTraveller II
- ---------------------------
Main Scenario: An Ancient Site on the planet Rhylanor in the Rhylanor
Subsector has been activated and is spilling pink goop over the planet.
Scientists estimate the entire planet will be covered in five years.
A substantial reward is being offered to the parties that come up with a
way to stop the flow of the slime, and your party takes up the challenge.
MegaTraveller II has a character creation system built in that is
fully compatible with the MegaTraveller RPG. It allows for the printing
of characters, as well. No advanced careers are supported. The system
is slightly improved over MegaTraveller I's. It allows for the
creation of Vargr characters as well.
Graphics are excellent and sound cards are fully supported.
I feel that combat has been improved slightly from what MT1
offered. MT1's combat system had the npc's in the party waiting to be
shot at until you could get to them and tell them to attack, run,
change weapons, reload if necessary, etc. (note, MT versions 3.0 and up
had a different combat system because many people complained about this
one. I am not familiar with it.) MT2's combat system has the npc's in
the party react on their own, but there is very little you do to control
it. Basically, if the characters are fired upon, all of them will
switch to a weapon and move in towards the offending party. You can
select whether or not you want a character to attack, but have no
control over characters that do attack. The combat system should have
more tactical aspects to it. It's no fun just to watch the npc's do all
the work.
Trading is horrible, no improvement over MT1. You go to a
starport and look at the lists of what is available. Prices are
non-negotiable. Despite what the manual says, the skill Trading has
nothing to do with it. Out of curiosity I put my Trader skill at 100
and checked buying and selling prices. They were the same as they were
at Trader 3.
Space Flight and Combat are very bad as well. Definately a drop
down from MT1's system of flying using newton's laws of inertia and
acceleration, which I didn't like, but is much better than MT2's. In
MT2 you select your destination at starport from a list of planets
within jump range. Then you get a cute little graphic of a ship
jumping, then you are there. From your destination you can either
land, jump again, or refuel at a gas giant. To refuel you select the
'refuel' bar and you get another cute graphic, this time of a close up
of a gas giant and a guzzling sound.
Space Combat happens purely at random, as do interactions with
other starfarers. They suddenly appear on your screen give you a stupid
little message (like if they are pirates, they will say "Arrh, I am the
meanest pirate in the galaxy, prepare to hand over your goodies!", and
if they are friendly, they will say "Just passing through friend", or
something similar.). Your only option with these people is Combat or
Converse. If you select Converse, and they have something to say, they
will give you about 5 lines of text and you will never hear from them
again. If you select Combat, your ship automatically starts firing at
the other ship, and you just sit back and watch. If you beat the
other ship, you have the option to pirate it, which means you just
take whatever is in it's cargo holds.
The cities all have generic layouts. This I can understand, I
guess, since they wanted to save space, but hey, Ultima 7 is 21
megabytes, why does MT2 have to be limited to 2.6? There are a lot of
buildings, much more than in MT1. The important ones are recognizable,
because they will be color coded or something, depending on the three
representative tech levels of the inhabitants, High, Medium, and Low.
You can leave the cities and explore the planet surface, but this is
hardly a worthy thing to do considering the time it takes to move around
the surface of a planet. Grav Vehicles and ATV's can be rented to speed
the process if you have to, however.
There are 117 planets in the game, comprising 4 subsectors of
space. They are accurately represented, and the manual that comes with
the game gives a good background to the planets, explaining the UWP and
listing them for each planet.
NPC interaction needs to be improved. You recognize NPC's by
the fact that they are green, and everyone else is grey. Talking to
NPC's is slightly difficult, in that you need to first hail them to get
them to stop, then walk up to them and face them, select the face icon,
and finally the talk option. You are rewarded with a small text message
with no further way to communicate with the person, except maybe to
answer a "yes/no" question from him/her. NPC's invariably have silly
names, like Scowl Trowl, Don the Winch, Big Rolf, Mark Spearmynt, Steve
LaTryne, Bingo the Black Marketer, Marilyn Monrope, and Johnny Walker.
Sometimes these names take away from the adventure, in that it's hard to
take Bingo seriously because all you know about him are his name, face
and silly message.
Skill use is not implemented very well either. The only place
you can ever see a skill at work is in combat, and this sucks. Skills
should actually do what they are supposed to and be useful to the game.
Also, sometimes you encounter situations where an npc will put you in a
situation where, if you have a certain skill, usually something obscure
like electronics, he will give you a hint. Otherwise you are bummed.
This is stupid and I had to restart the game with new characters many
times after finding out that a certain skill will be helpful. Also,
character training through the game does not seem to work. What you
have in the begining is what you are stuck with for the rest of the
game.
There are many entertaining subplots you can complete, but they
require careful record taking to keep track of who wants what, which
police agencies are looking for the outlaw you just toasted, etc.
The game must have looked great on paper, what with the numerous
planets and npc's and subplots the players can come across, but somehow
it fails in its delivery. It has great beginning and ending
animations, good main scenario and subplots, but the parser, while
similar to the one in the ultima series, falls flat and makes the game
an endless series of tedium. You go to a planet, talk to all of the
green dudes, write down what they say if it's important, fly to the next
planet courtesy of the poor starflight system, and repeat.
Things that could be done to improve MegaTraveller II
- -----------------------------------------------------
The game should follow the rpg religiously, especially in
matters of trading and spaceflight which can be handled so well by a
computer. Skill usage should especially follow this rule, even though I
can't even imagine how to pull this off. It may just have to be
compatible with just some skills, and with each new version new skills
can be included.
First off, a good, fun, and realistic starflight system is
needed, and it has to have total integration with the space combat
system. Ship boardings would be cool (see Heavy Nova for an
example of this). Sensors, ship computers, a process that you have
to go through to perform a jump, and a way to see exactly how much
damage your ship is taking and what the enemies condition is should
be included as well. Hull points or a similar system would be nice,
but a graph would work as well (I would prefer actual numbers).
The personal combat system needs improvement. It should have
been more of a tactical exercise than just watching all of your
characters fight.
NPC interaction should be better too. I recommend one similar
to what was found in Ultima V.
Same with cities. Cities should be built like they are in
Ultima V, with no 'dead buildings' like you would find in MT2. I am
choosing Ultima V over Ultima VI or VII because they are adequate to the
task and the CAT people aren't super programmers who are going to get
megabucks for their product. Cities should be an icon that you enter
from the rest of the world and expands once you enter it. MT2 does
this now, but the city layouts should be done like they are in Ultima V,
not the generic layout junk that MT2 currently uses. Who cares if the
game is big? Or rather, playability should not be sacrificed to
save space.
Something that I think should very much be included in a
MegaTraveller type game is open ended space exploration, or something
similar. It is fun to simply plan new jumps, jump to a planet, map and
explore it, and continue doing this with other planets, expanding the
size of the universe known to the game. There should be a base galaxy
or sector, and the boundaries should be determined via exploration
on the part of players. The planets and stars along these border zones
should be generated randomly, utilizing the World Builder's handbook or
something similar, and existing code can be utilized.
As I mentioned earlier, skill use needs to be improved. Other
than graphics, this will probably be the hardest part of the game for
our CAT friends to write. Perhaps only some skills should be
utilized at first, with more implemented in later versions?
Vehicle/Starship design import or creation should be a part of
the game. Actually, it would be nice if all of those little utilities
we have floating around courtesy of the CAT people could be incorporated
into the game.
This is to the CAT members mostly. Graphics are not important.
Animation is not needed at all. As long as the players can tell what is
going on, it will be fun. I think a complete text/ascii interface (ie
Zork or Hack) would fail, and some simple graphics are needed, but they
don't have to be very good, just recognizable *representations* of
things. Like what appears in the early Ultimas. The problem with any
graphics at all is that they would limit the game to just one platform,
but I think that they are necessary.
(Hey CAT people, I know you want to write a game like
MegaTraveller, but what I would like to see is sort of a MUD where
the referee and players are all connected and can type to one
another, with popup character sheets and built in dice roller etc.
Maybe it could act as a sort of 'shell' for the rest of the utility
programs out there. It would be sort of a ref's helper type
program, and have the capability to send private messages among the
players and ref. What do you think, is it possible? Of course I
don't know where it would be run. . . )
Lastly, the gaming parser should be fun to play in, even if
you're not working at plot completion. What I mean by this is in the
pen and paper rpg, it is fun to do things like explore and find new
trade routes and try to gain money through investments and business
ventures. A game that does this is StarFlight. StarFlight is very
similar to Megatraveller II. In both you have to save the planet by
exploring other planets and interacting with NPC's. When my
friends and I first started playing it we thought it was impossible to
complete the main scenario, and took the destruction of Arth for granted.
Instead of starting over (as I would have done without hesitation in MT2)
we set out to find a new source of Endurium to fuel our ships to explore
the rest of the galaxy (Sort of like Road Warrior: they were always
looking for gasoline to drive their cars so they could fight each other
over gasoline...). It was never boring, because each planet we
approached could be Old Arth, a source of fuel or have a rare
element that we needed to repair our engines, and there were over
800 planets. Eventually we did complete the plot, but it was not nearly
as much fun as just exploring. There was also a sense of danger playing
StarFlight. We had these measly little ships that G'Nunk warriors could
kill by looking at, so it made us very cautious and we avoided G'Nunk
space for as long as possible. Not once did I feel threatened while
playing MegaTraveller 2. Whenever there was combat it was a simple matter
to back out of it or to avoid it altogether.
StarFlight had poor graphics. MegaTraveller has great graphics.
StarFlight is a hundred times better than MegaTraveller. The parser is
what makes the game fun, not snazzy graphics and sound card support. Not
even a plot by Marc Miller, the original designer of Traveller, could save
MegaTraveller II: The Quest for the Ancients.
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