Tuesday 15 January, 2008

Gameplay:
After playing the game some more I found a few things that at first irritated me but then after a bit I saw how they were actually good things that the game had. One of these things was how the combat was done probabilistically so there was a fair amount of luck involved. This was frustrating as I would make a certain plan and it would go all wrong when something unlucky happened (note I never complained when I got lucky). However then I started to play taking the possibility of luck into account (there's some famous quote about how luck doens't matter to a good general but it does to a great general). I started to see how it added another element of strategy to consider as you had to play in such a way as to be flexible and easily adapt to minimize the damage a turn of bad luck would have as well as maximize the benefit a turn of good luck would have.

Another thing that at first I found bad was how easy it was to save and reload the game to try to get good luck. When I finished a level it wasn't very satisfying if I only did it by artificially giving myself good luck by reloading when I got bad luck. However the ability to reload saves is definately essential to the game and with some discipline players who want to avoid reloading the game can do so (you get practice on fighting the moments of weakness when one of your units dies and you want to reload to avoid this result).

Design:
The game provides a huge range of challenges with very well set difficulty levels (you can set it so it's very beatable even with many mistakes done or you can set it so it's very difficult and even a player who normally has no problem beating strategy games on the highest setting is very challenged and is forced to come up with creative ways to win).

Also the game has a great reward system as not only does the player want to win a level to get on to the next level and advance the storyline, but the player also carries on some of the gold they gained in a level to the previous level (as well as a bonus for finishing it early). Also not only do units get stronger through battle (rewarding the player for keeping units alive in order for them to develope into stronger units), but the player can "recall" units that they had at the end of previous levels to help them in future ones, so the player can keep evolving their units throughout the whole campaign as opposed to just a single level.

While Battle for Wesnoth's graphics could be made more state of the art, it would detract from the game's ability to be played on older computers as well as detract from some of the simplicity of the enviroment and mechanics (a game with as much emergent strategy as Wesnoth deserves to have the strategy be the main feature).

(Grader - Nicolas Kent)

Nice work.

I tend to think turn-based strategy games, more than pretty much any other genre are a real place where fancy A.I.'s can shine. From a design standpoint I'm curious how effective the AI is at catching a player off guard. How easy is it to predict the computer's moves? Does the computer do a good job of balancing the use of various units for different purposes? Are there any computer controlled entities that aid you and how effective are these entities? Are they useful or do they get in the way.

Another important aspect of strategy games is the level environments. How are the scales of areas...are things too open and easy to get lost in? Are things too cramped? How linear are the levels, how many choices or side quests are you given along the way?

How is the pacing of the game? Do the levels drag on or are they over too fast? You mentioned the tutorials became tedious. Is the story malleable or very strictly set and how might that effect replay value? How does the difficulty level effect the game? Does it just change hit points and percentages, as you imply at times that it effects the strategy. Does the difficulty level make the enemies "smarter"? How?